Into the Void Chapter 5

Just the other day I drank a few too many and went into a little depressive rant inside my head about everything that had transpired throughout my life. Even after taking ownership of everything I had ever done or said, for some reason I didn’t feel better at all. It’s was those god damn memories of my past loves; they just won’t let me be free. Plus, I remembered how I infused my mind with a hateful emotion for each and every transgression.

A while back I had come across some articles about psychology that redacted about how we can create our own fears and emotion induced memories. This was something related to the Pavlov’s Conditioning Theory. In a way, you can even create fake memories about imaginary stuff that never happened, as long as you believed them to be true. I forgot who came up with that idea, but I do remember that the study concluded that people could create instant fake memories if given enough fake stimuli to support it. This might not make any sense now as how it relates to my past, but it will eventually.

Getting to the meaty part of the situation, I must say that when life went bad, I kind of did tell myself that I would never do certain things of such likes. I am talking simple stuff like never truly opening up to anyone, being antisocial and other mentals like that. I was thinking at the time that maybe such a way of thought would be a good thing, but little did I know that it would eventually create bigger problems for me. It’s not natural for people to be too safeguarded; by doing so you limit yourself on experiencing the possible greatness of friendships, the joy of loving, and the pain of being hurt. Out of all the things I learned, what I truly realized is that even though I already knew what my problems were, the answer arrived later in my life, which was about knowing that winning and losing are not exclusive of each other. I came across this idea while listening to one of Alan Watts’s lectures.

The idea went over and over in my head until it made sense. In order for someone to win another person has to lose. No one can be winning all the time; something is usually lost in this game of life. Another thing, and this has been the talk of literature for a really long time; it’s the notion that in order for someone to know they are happy they had to have experienced some sort of pain. Anyway, going back to my initial story, it seems that I got too carried away and somehow kept making the same mistakes. I must admit that at one point in time I actually felt like I was going insane. I kept doing the same things without making any changes, and the results were always the same.

I kept choosing the same kind of women, whom in time would end up just breaking my heart. I am not trying to be a martyr here, so no sympathy is needed for me. I’m not gonna go on and say that I was totally the victim all the time. In retrospect, I realize that I repeated the same mistakes, and that’s probably one of the things that created my situation. At times I can catch myself before I go into these weird depressive episodes, but I can’t prevent them from hitting me all the time. When that happens, all these memories flood my eyes and I am forever trapped in my past. I know what I must do, yet it seems so difficult to execute the changes needed to change my life. If I’m the master of my life, why is it so hard to control it? Is trying to control it the problem? It might be.

Two weeks ago my friend invited me to talk and have a few beers at her house. We reminisced about fond memories, of how we met and became friends afterwards. Even she seems to be in the same predicament as me. Once the chat of the fond memories the bad ones came in, and then the present and talks about depression. As she led me to know, she’s going through a depression cycle she can’t seem to fully shake out of. I wasn’t trying to be mean, but she said some things that triggered me and I told her the truth that I saw. It was sort of a mental awakening, letting her know that she needed to snap out of it and change the way she saw herself. You see, I noticed a pattern in the things she was telling me, and I immediately knew she was doing the same things as me.

She is very into the occult, clairvoyance and all that kind of supernatural stuff. I am not going to lie, I like that stuff as well. I find it very intriguing; it’s just like watching a horror or supernatural movie. It keeps my imagination going for hours on end. But even so I know that getting too hooked up on that stuff is not good, and I’m not saying because people think it’s all a lie or make belief; I’m saying this because I feel that if someone overdoes something he/she risks losing their mind. And I say this because at times I have felt that I was in a fantasy where I had no control of anything, and everything was a mere illusion like the Matrix. There is even a theory about us living in a simulation… could be true or it could just be what it is, a theory.

Man, I tend to lose myself with these wild ideas. My friend said that when she was young she had visited a witch who read her future. According to her, she remembered that she clearly told her that if she left her native country and moved to the US, she would experience a lot of hardships. When we were having out conversation she told me that and her eyes got watery. I could see that she truly believed that and placed all her anger at that very thing. I told her that it was impossible for such a thing to even be true.

How can you blame something that happened in the past about a future that never truly happened? It just didn’t make sense and I told her that. I told her that she needed to stop making excuses and make the best of what she has now, and to make better choices and improvements on how she handles herself. The later part was due to her telling me that she had gotten terminated from her employment because the ladies at the office didn’t like her since the very beginning of her even getting hired there.

Maybe the problem is you. Did you ever think about that? I told her that, and it even made me feel bad because I didn’t want to piss her off or make her feel bad. But she didn’t react badly towards it; it almost seemed as if she had never seen it from that perspective. After a while of being fired from many jobs and blaming it on others, we tends to realize that the problem might be ourselves. I’ve known this because I tend to be very self-conscious about how I behave at work. It is possible that she might just have really bad luck, but the probability of that being true is relatively small. That and her telling me that she had a really bad upbringing, which might be totally true, but saying that it was because she was born white with green eyes… yeah GTFOH! What really threw me off was her saying that she remembered everything vividly since she was two. I told her that it would be really impossible since it’s already been proven that at such young age your memory is still under development. And even if it had the slightest possibility of being true, to remember with such vividness is really hard to pull off. I called bullshit on that.

That was when I once again came upon what I already knew, the difference being that I was calling someone out on it. Just like her I used to think that I had a really bad childhood. And now I question which of those memories are true and which ones are totally fabricated. It’s hard to say… So the best thing I could do was just accept the past and let it stay where it belongs, in the past.

Into the Void Chapter 4: Pt. 2

At the beginning of being unemployed, time seemed to slow down way too much, but now everything seems to have been speeding up drastically. I usually get good sleep, but lately I’ve been sleeping more than ever. Just the other day I slept for thirteen hours. I would have slept more but my head was already boppin’. I guess your brain can only handle so much. What sucks about this new change of time is that even though we get that extra hour of sunshine, the day gets darker quicker and my mind tends to do the same. I find myself unable to function correctly once the sun goes down—and living so far away from civilization, due to the lack of tv channels and internet access, I can’t find anything to do.
It’s not bad living out there, outside of the city. Most of the time out here, you get a really good night’s sleep because there isn’t much noise taking place. I started to hate the neighbor ever since he added a fog light to the electrical post. Ever since then I haven’t been able to enjoy my star gazing like I used to. One of the beauties of living away from civilization is no having that much light pollution. I used to lie on the ground and just look up at the stars for hours while I listened to music.

Times have changed, now a day everything seems to be so complicated. Just having friendships now a day seems to require some sort of training or certification, just to get the point across. Communication has become more difficult to use now that there is an overabundance of social apps and other types that are supposed to facilitate how people communication. Maybe I am too old school, even though I am borderline almost a millennial. They call us the Gen-Exers; something like that.

There have been times that I’ve asked myself if I might have been the problem. What if I have lost touch with reality and I lost my way of how communication goes? What now? I doubt that is the case, but just in case I have taken some actions towards improving it. I started to connect with old friends and even changed the way I acted with my family. Now that my parents are older, I have to enjoy the rest of their time here on earth before they decide they have had enough and depart. It’s the small little things that improve our quality of life. I really think this is the case.

I haven’t been as depressed as before—but still get that feeling of gloom once in a while. It even made me think that I might be bipolar. I joke about that, I know I am not, but that just feels weird. Having an overly active mind does not help at all. Most of the time my mind is just thinking and thinking so much that I don’t enjoy the little things. I started to take better care of myself by eating healthy and meditating… been getting so much energy now. I guess I will have to find a way to burn that energy off. What if I wrote a journal?

Now that I’ve been meditating more and becoming more self-aware, I have been having some really wild dreams. Just yesterday I dreamt that I was a cyborg fighting evil runaway battle bots. Also, just last week I dreamt that as I was cleaning my room, dusting it off and re-arranging the furniture, the world was experiencing catastrophe. I heard loud booms in the distance. I went outside and saw the city consumed by a hellish red fire that rose all the way to the clouds. I could see meteors falling from the sky, generating massive explosions. Pretty wild huh?

Into the Void Chapter 4: Pt. 1

Recently I’ve been on a downward spiral ever since I got laid off my last job. Even though I am receiving unemployment benefits I feel like I am losing my mind. I went from working seventy two hours a week to working none. I’ve tried to make the best of it, tried using my free time to teach myself how to code and get back to writing, but it has been extremely difficult. For some unknown reason I blank out when about to write, even though my mind is raging with so many ideas and thoughts.

I started trying to make EDM track using Ableton Live and a keyboard that I bought at Guitar Center. At first it was like meditating, but even that became a nuisance with time. I would lie on the floor and mess with plugins and all kinds of things. I made a few tracks using samples that I had bought years ago. But as time would tell I stopped doing all that completely. When I stopped doing all of that I started watching lectures from Carl Jung and Alan Watts. I would put on my studio headset and just let them rip… always listening to what kind of message would come through. But even that with time fell apart.

I kept going back to the past, kept reliving old memories of when I used to be happy with a loved one. Unfortunately before I went to work in the oil fields, I made the attempt to rekindle what I once had with my last ex. They say they are exes for a reason, but I have known this woman for almost fifteen years, and we’ve been through ups and downs and times where neither one of us was ready for a commitment. So I told her that I was getting old and that I didn’t want to keep looking around, I knew I wanted to be with her and I didn’t mind that she had two kids already from other men. That didn’t bother me at all, as a matter of fact that would have been great because I have no children of my own and probably can’t have any.

She agreed and while I was away everything looked promising. I got stuck out there working three weeks straight and little by little I started noticing certain behavioral patterns. I never told her anything about them, but I noticed that she would only text when at work and when she got home she would completely shut off. That struck a chord; I wasn’t going to assume anything but I wasn’t going to not think of it. My mind immediately told me that was a sign that she was either seeing someone else or she had someone else. Later time would reveal the latter. I’m guessing she had gotten back with her baby’s daddy in an attempt to reconcile differences and the fact that they had a kid together. That really broke me inside for a long time. It took me months before I simply accepted the fact that it was over and her putting me in a third party situation was an all-time low. Not only that but she had the audacity to put him on the phone and create an unnecessary situational conflict.

Time passed on by and I worked as hard as  I could, out there in the cold loading hydrochloric acid into tankers and all other kinds of hard labor. Pay was good, and the hours were excellent. Once I accepted my reality the idea of her began to slowly fade. It wasn’t until a year later, I’m assuming her little charade didn’t go as planned, and she decided to contact me once again. This time she posted something on my Facebook profile. Like a sucker I replied and accepted her offer to have lunch on two occasions. Can’t really beat an old horse, because I immediately remember how she played me and I cut her out. She told me that she just wanted to say hi and other non-sense. You might think it was trivial of me of how I acted, but I told her that I was dead to her. She should accept that things would never EVER be the same.

And up to date I haven’t been the same. Those old ass memories just brought more pain than feelings of happiness. Life has a tricky way of trying to piss you off. And now I found myself being unable to do anything as if my life had come to a complete stop. I mustered enough will to get out of the house more, to go visit friends and family. And that has been really comforting. The only thing bothering me now is trying to get a job that pays well and will allow me to realize my sub-dreams. I have these small goals that I want to accomplish, and the only way I can is to get back on the horse and make that moolah. The only thing that sucks about my small city is that pay is not that great. Maybe I should go back to the oilfield, even though it slowed down a lot lately. Or maybe… guess I’ll just have to take it a day at a time and find what makes me tick.