No More Free Bullets for You

 

(Clumsy metaphor incoming...)

I close my eyes and I go way back to when I was no older than 5 years old. I stand in the midst of my babysitter's destroyed sunflower patch, which I kicked the shit out of because I thought they were weeds.

I close my eyes again and I'm walking to my friend's house after school. His younger brother is a few yards ahead of us, yelling and carrying on. I call his name and then launch a glass juice bottle at him. The bottle hits in front of him and shatters, a shard catching him in the arm and slicing him pretty badly.

I close my eyes again and I'm in high school, at a basketball game. Everyone around me is yelling insults at the opposing team. I get carried away and start screaming. "U.G.L.Y. YOU AIN'T GOT NO ALIBI. YOU'RE UGLY!! YOU'RE UGLY!!" The gym quiets just in time for me to yell "YOU'RE MOTHERFUCKIN' UGLY!!"

There have been many times in the intervening years when I've felt pretty sorry for myself. I'd feel like I grew up in a town full of prejudiced assholes and their stupidity and willing blindness resulted in suffering. My suffering. How can a brother get a fucking fair shake when you can be blackballed by everyone around you for having hair the wrong length or wearing black clothes? It's hard to be the weird kid in a homogenous, church-centric town.

However, over the past year or so, really ever since I wrote my series about why I quit the L.D.S. Church, things have been surfacing. Memories like the ones I listed above. It turns out that while I still believe members of a church that preaches tolerance and seeing the good in your fellow man ought to treat everyone in their world with decency and not talk shit, I gave everyone around so many reasons to believe I was a twisted, broken, corrupt soul.

You might say that so many of my wounds were self-inflicted. You might say that I was hit again and again by friendly fire. Cuz it turns out I gave my detractors a holy fuck ton of metaphorical ammunition.

*****

Life is hard. Vexingly so. Life is hard enough if you don't provide the people around you with material they can hurt you with. You do the math and all you're really beating the shit out of yourself. And what good does it do to punch yourself in the face repeatedly?

It's a sad fact of life that most people are so self-interested, they're willing to do anything to almost anyone in order to raise themselves just slightly above their fellow humans. We all want to feel important and respected. And sometimes we're a little too eager to step on our fellow being in order to get that feeling of importance and respect.

I'm not different. I have walked all over people I felt were beneath me. It wasn't until I really started trying to understand my hurt that I began to see that I not only bear ultimate responsibility for my own pain, but that I've also hurt way too many people around me. Family members. Friends. Coworkers. No one has escaped my wrath.

*****

Deflecting projectiles looks really fucking cool in Star Wars but in real life, deflecting the metaphorical bullets others launch at you gets pretty chaotic. 

That's the thing about bullets. If you're not careful, you could wind up wounding yourself. If you're not careful, you could wound someone who doesn't deserve it, who isn't involved in whatever situation is hurting you. It's surprising how rarely the stray bullets you're trying to redirect manage to strike the people you'd like them to. 

I don't want to hurt anyone anymore. It's never made me feel better about myself. It's never gotten me any closer to where I want to be. In fact, I usually just end up hating myself even more than I would have if I just let the assholes around me hurt me. I'd be better off if I just let all the bullets I've given to others find their marks.

There's really only one solution and it's pretty damn simple, too. Just stop giving people bullets. Stop acting out, stop getting in other people's faces, stop bringing all of the wrong kinds of attention to myself. I'm not an angry teenager anymore. I'm an old man. I might be bitter but I'm also supposed to be dignified and wise. 

The best part is that I don't need to become an oppressed, closeted version of myself. I need to stop dumbing myself down and hiding the best parts of myself. I need to stop steering into the skid and overemphasizing my flaws. I've spent my whole life acting like a dickweed to keep myself from getting hurt. Guess what that got me? Pain, loneliness and a lifetime of underachievement. 

The bottom line is that I'm a pretty badass motherfucker. I'm just starting to see it. I'm just started to understand what I'm capable of and how much I've held myself back just because of fear. I HAVE GOT TO figure out how to let that shit go. No more living in the past. No more holding myself back because the path behind me has a bunch of fucking weird turns in it. And, for fuck sake, no more giving people free bullets with which to wound me. To quote someone much wiser than myself: "I told ya. You should've killed me last year!"

P.S.: I hate guns, so I dunno why the hell I went with the bullet metaphor. Maybe I should've gone with toxic bubbles...