It Isn’t About Me

What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?

One thing so many people have the most difficult time reconciling with is the lonely, awful fact that, in the end, we’re all alone, and life is shitty. It just is.

Humans are not made to accept such things because they seem so alien to us. It’s basically nihilistic, such a thought. But the sooner we accept it as true, the sooner we can do something about it.

Because hey, you can live with it, and it is not nihilism. And you deserve to have a life as free of misery as possible. It is a fight, and in this world, there’s not one thing you’ll need that does not require some type of battle, some sacrifice, endurance, and a shitload of patience and its bastard cousin, pain.

Life is not fair. We either know it and accept it, or we don’t. However, some accept it and fail to stand up against the shit that will never stop coming at them, and instead are overwhelmed and quit. I have been such a person, because I was conditioned to be dependent, to the point that aside from working for my father, and really working hard from the age of 12, I had nothing else to do. His accountant did my taxes. My mother washed my clothes. She cooked meals, packed lunches. My prep school tuition was paid. My father put me through preppy school because he was tired of raising a pussy. He could not understand why I never fought back against the bullies.

Sometimes I did. Every single time, though, I fucked someone up bad.

That wasn’t me. He’d get a phone call, I’d get a beating for fighting or failing to fight, and most bullies come at you in numbers. I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t. Whoever I was, I lost everything I was. I had such a gentle, sensitive soul, and the world, from my parents to the slime that are still faceless to me, faceless and forever unnamed, wanted to take boys like me apart. And man, didn’t they work hard at it.

By age 15, I’d met a few great souls who by example showed me that I could be whatever I wanted to be. Great souls that come into your life and eventually leave, and in so doing take part of what they taught you away.

Sunday school teachers. School teachers. Truck drivers. Each one wise in their own right, and each for different reasons, gained from different paths that eventually crossed my path. I learned from the best and never really knew it.

Not one of them told me that I had to fight back physically, but that doing so would put me on a level that they could not picture me on. There are those, you see, whose eyes can see past your tough talk, angry cussing, silence…and know exactly what you are inside, and that’s why they like you!

People can love you, and you never know it. They love you because you’re you. Maybe it’s because I was always ready to listen. You know, to a story, a lament, to a torn heart pouring out grief.

They’re lonely too, or particularly gregarious, and they remember every dirty joke they’ve ever heard. Standing on the loading dock of my father’s warehouse, I heard a million jokes and riddles. It was like a daily comedy improv and I had the best seat in the house. Laughter can keep the most scarred of hearts beating.

And being a listener is a great way to learn things you may otherwise never have known. But it is a skill and a talent at one and the same time. What you get out of it is going to make that awful truth that you always end up learning come to you more gently. Or maybe you’ll learn it along the way: it’s not about you.

In 2023, I have had so few positive experiences that I realize, they don’t often get seen for what they are at the time. It takes that moment when you can have some peace, and one positive thing to be able to say you accomplished that day to be able to open your eyes, look back and see that you’ve been blessed all along. I started the year in a fog. It happens to us all: mental illness, PTSD, clinical depression–nobody gets out of here alive, and until our day comes to breathe our last, we’re all traumatized by something.

Dealing with covid, the shutdown, the death toll, a car accident, losing a job you worked hard to get and then to keep, losing a loved one, whether a pet or family or a friend. These things leave us damaged, forever changed.

I’ve lost so much in my life that since I turned 35, I knew I would never be capable of a normal life. By 2001, I knew that I was out of the game. It was only a matter of time before I would lose everything.

Drinking liquor every day, I’d have the shakes before the first coffee break of the day. I  sometimes had a bottle in the car. I knew one slug would straighten me out and get me through the day. I dried out on my own. Took to my bed for a week, so sick that I was lucky I didn’t die. It’s dangerous, doing that. But it was too late for me to save my job.

This year my medications, my progress in small steps, daring to do things I couldn’t have two years ago, things you would laugh at because they’re trivial to you and require little thought and less effort, those things do not look trivial to me. They’re more akin to climbing a mountain, and you know I don’t climb mountains. Think I want to get snake bit, fall, encounter Bigfoot or a dogman?

If you presumed that I do, you’ve got too much faith in me.

I guess, looking back, that I really can’t tick off a list of all the positive things I’ve had happen to me this year. Positives come mostly in small ways. I think most fail to see it that way. They’re preoccupied with the negatives. With themselves.

And that’s really tragic. The World needs us, all of us. Together we have the power to end wars, clean our home and to demand and get what’s right.

But that’s the one thing, of all the things we do, that we always miss. Everyone knew that a ceasefire in Gaza was going to be short.

It helped me to hear what a Palestinian-American in a New York bodega had to say. He said they (Palestinians) had their chance to have a government free of extremists. They chose not to. And he said, “Stop pitying them. They raise their own children to be (indoctrinated) Jew haters and guerillas. Do not pity them. I never had a reason to hate Jews and so I came here. Here I am free to be friends with anyone.”

As I heard this, I was horrified. But it’s true. And that war will never, ever stop. Hamas will not allow it to. They have tunnels that run all the way to Egypt! Doesn’t that tell you anything at all?

I am much more behind Israel here; the terrorists who started it all used tunnels and carried away children in dog cages, and did you really think that was ever going to get a happy ending? The things they did to those children while they were still inside the cages was bad enough. Raped and murdered later. You expect me to back up animals who kidnap, torture, rape and kill children? Because that will never happen.

It was sobering to hear from a Palestinian what his people really are about. As much as I hate war, Hamas drew first blood and forced the war on Israel. And any other country would be justified in engaging such an enemy, but to my shame, Americans are protesting against Israel, supporting Hamas and it is sickening.

Of course, the same dicks who support Palestinians are probably the same ones who back Russia. And Donald Trump. Takes a real dick to do that.

It isn’t about me. It isn’t about you. It’s about us. That’s what life’s about. But why don’t we ever act on it even when we know it? Actually it’s not impossible. Pass on all that you’ve learned because you, just like I, learned along the way from wise men and women who, just by their friendship and example, gave you something to build on.

Don’t judge when you don’t have to; give folks the benefit of the doubt, some time to think, some forgiveness, some sympathy. You will find positive everywhere, once you’ve learned to look for it.

And never give up, even when life is throwing a blizzard of shit at you.

Because it’s not personal.  It’s not about you. It’s about us.

And together, there’s nothing we can’t do.