Masks, Filters and Learning to Change

Everybody’s got something that they’re dealing with inside on a daily basis, some life-long bugaboo that has to be managed somehow. You may have the skills to handle it or you may be woefully ill-equipped to deal. Either way, that something (or somethings) gets managed or it ends up managing you, which can lead to lots of avoidable crap, like slapping the shit out of a presenter at The Oscars.

Yeah, you’re already tired of hearing about it, and so am I.

My one big takeaway from all this kerfuffle is that, once again, everybody’s struggling with something inside. For Will Smith, that struggle involves the influence of an abusive father, a common issue that we share. Although in my situation it was me who was getting abused in an effort to strike out at my mother, who wasn’t having any of that and kicked him to the curb. We were both free of his abuse until I acted out so badly in middle school that she sent me to live with him. For good reason, I was terrified of my dad. He ruled with an iron hand, you displeased him at your peril and he dished out discipline with dark fury. There were even times when he took me to visit my mother on the weekends and I’d ask her, “does daddy love me?” He mostly seemed annoyed that I even existed, and it hurt her to see that I didn’t even feel loved by him.

It took some time to truly see the man, and it was after I graduated from high school when some space had opened up between us. No longer required to be the disciplinarian, he softened into something else. Both of my parents had it rough raising a child with ADD (before the H) and neither knew quite how to handle it. I was always raising a ruckus and acting out in class, ending up in fights, getting sent to the office, and eventually, wearing out my welcome and getting kicked out of school, an action that was rendered many times until I ran out of schools in the district and was sent to live with dad.

Dad died of pancreatic cancer when I was 25; my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time and died two years later. I moved from Los Angeles, California to Kissimmee, Florida and made an attempt to start fresh, but I quickly got bogged down with the ever-percolating craziness in my head. Without any active advocacy on my behalf, I was left to spin my wheels for years and, boy, did I spin ‘em.

It was a dark time, that whole period. I don’t even want to reflect on any of that now. So glad to have survived it and doubly glad that I didn’t kill anyone.

All told, it was 11 years of fumbling around in the dark before I stabilized, and that’s when I met Jae. It was the beginning of the turnaround in my life and once I had kinda gotten my shit together, I went in to have my head checked. Turns out that ADD doesn’t go away like doctors in the 70s thought. No, I definitely still had it, and it was the ADHD brand that I had, which is twice as much fun as the original! I also now had a big whopping case of Borderline Personality Disorder as well as PTSD from being attacked with a beer bottle by a racist when I first arrived in Florida. I tried the meds and the meds made it all worse. So I self-medicated with whatever I could find, usually alcohol and weed. The latter worked, and continues to work, great. The former, not so much.

There were times during those dark years when I literally felt lost, adrift at sea, forever lost to tides beyond my control. I no longer had any sort of hold on my own course, no hand to any wheel, yet I clung to music as a life preserver and knew that it was the only thing I truly understood. Music was the one true goal and it served as the line that I could hold in order to get through the frequent storms. In every day, music was the lighthouse.

Spirit is the lighthouse keeper.

Twenty years later and I’m still editing the code but the program is running much better. Turns out if you dramatically reduce the nicotine and alcohol content of the code, there’s more cellular viscosity for other functions and, besides, the neuro-divergent network runs significantly better on cannabis.

Everybody’s dealing with something. Some folks are better at dealing with stuff than others. Others can deal just fine, they’re just terribly slow about it. I try to keep that in mind whenever I see another individual in the wild, just trying to get along the best way they know how. Without clear insight into their struggles, I can’t possibly know what they’re going through at any give moment. But I can do my best to react, respond accordingly, judge not and harm none. With the way we’ve all suddenly been let out of our cages here recently, we could certainly do our best and be good to one another.

If you wanna make the world a better place

take a look at yourself and then make a change