All Apologies...

“I wish I was like you
Easily amused
Find my nest of salt
Everything is my fault
I'll take all the blame
Aqua sea foam shame
Sunburn with freezer burn
Choking on the ashes of her enemy”

Nirvana - All Apologies

We are the people we are because of our life experiences.  Each experience shapes us.  It drives us.  It sets us into motion.  Life is nothing more than a series of chain reactions.  I am a man who is dancing with demons.  I am not talking about the Dean and Sammy way with the rock salt, the special tattoos, and a few exorcisms.  No, the demons I continue to dance with are not from any other hell but my own private hell.  They also can’t just be warded off because they are with me, they are me, and they are always in my head!

I am the asshole.  When I say that, I really mean it.  I have talked on here for months about not wanting to be the monster at the end of the book.  However, what happens when you were a monster mid-way through it.  What happens when you were a monster in your adolescents?  What if you were a monster as recent as a year ago?  Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. 

If writing is my gift, then my wicked tongue is my curse.  If I thought I was a natural born hazer in college, I was wrong, I was a natural born hazer my entire life.  I am not trying to be clever when I refer to myself as a Mental Terrorist.  I would find the right string to pull and I would pull it until the whole fucking thing unraveled.   

Sometimes you should be careful.  Sometimes you should actually stop and think before you plunge head first into the rabbit whole.  I always wanted to know why I hated myself.  Perhaps this is why?  Perhaps the more I scrap away and try to remember, the more I don’t want to. 

The cruelty is gone.  The bully is gone.  However, some of his tendencies remain.  The black dread remains.   Moods wings remain.  Instead of making fun and verbal assaults silence is my weapon.  Grumpiness is my weapon.  The simple ability to have a friend one day and remove them the next, the fact that I am used to doing it, is a sign that perhaps we aren’t that far gone. 

I know why I have a lot of these feelings.  I do.  That is my cross and I will bare it.   The list of insecurities I feel is long and genuine.  I could stay here stuck in this moment and persecute myself for how I have acted.  I could stay in the prison of my mind.  More importantly I can stay in the one I have made out of my body.  The one that can’t do what normal people due because I am simply too far gone from normal and I know I made myself that way.  The disfigurement to my body and mind are my own doing. 

Look at me.  Really look at me and tell me I am wrong.  460 pounds and I still make the same mistakes over and over again.  Tell me my exile isn’t in my own mind.  Tell me that I don’t feel like a freak because of what I have turned myself into.  Tell me that you take the kid who saw the monster and bully he was and then add on to it depression and anxiety and tell me that I have not boxed myself in.  Tell me that I haven’t hidden myself form the world and from a good life?  I have alienated people and made enemies and all because I really don’t like the kid I used to be and the man I have become. 

So what is there left?  What else can I do?  I can say I am sorry.  I am sorry to those people I bullied verbally growing up.  I am so sorry.  I was insecure and broken.  I was unhappy and angry.  I hated myself so I took it out on you.  Much like the person I am today is a mirror refraction of the person I once was, that person I was then is also just a glimpse, something caught out of the corner of an eye.  However, he was very real.  So, all I can do is say I am sorry.

I own who I was.  I own what I did.  It is mine to own.  Every day for the rest of my life I will try to atone for sins of that bully.  Like anything in life you have to learn to live with your mistakes.  Most of all you have to learn from them.  I think I have learned a lot form my mistakes.  I also know saying sorry isn’t good enough.  It doesn’t change the past.  Nothing can, and I refuse to live in that past. I refuse to stay in it and punish myself anymore for it.  I just can’t do it anymore.  The man is not the boy.  The past is not the present. 

The apology, and all apologies that I owe, is real though.  It is genuine and from my heart.  Whether I wanted to say it, needed to say, or had to I am not sure, but I am sorry.  I am sorry and while I will continue to dance with these demons, I also know it is pushing me to be the man I am meant to be.  Pushing to the life I want and need to live.    

I have learned a lot about myself in the last 9 months.  Even more in the last 96 hours, I am always glad to learn more about me.  I have to know it. I have to understand how we fell so far so that we can climb even higher than I ever was before.  My heart is good.  It is of gold.  My life is an open book for the entire world to read.  I want to be the best Billy b I can be.  To do that I have to know where I was and who I was.  I of all people love a good redemption story.  I know that there is hope for me yet J  I will stand and be true.  And the Tower is closer…