I think that I've realized a few things recently. Not in a big way, but in a way nonetheless.
First off, I think that it's my belief that I am not allowed to harm other people that is holding me back. I kept attacking the "I hurt people" belief from the angle of convincing myself that I don't. But now I've realized that I may have to attack it from the angle of convincing myself that it is alright to hurt people (by hurt I don't mean rape and pillage, I mean more like inconvenience with my own ambitions). Why must I always consider other people? To hell with them, I'm doing what I want and I'm going to do it whether or not they're in the way. That's the feeling that I'm having lately; that I want to do what I want without having to consider the repercussions for other people as more important than doing it. It's just such a difficult belief to adjust, because who would think to attack a belief that says "do no harm"? I can see why it took me so long to realize that this is what needs to be adjusted, because it flips my ideas of right and wrong on their heads. For example, with my roommate situation my focus used to be on not screwing my roommate over by not being able to pay my part of the rent. But now my focus would be more along the lines of not even considering him or the rent or anybody else and doing what I want regardless. Nobody is going to tell me that this is the right way to think, nobody is going to agree with me on it if I express it to anyone, and yet I'm convinced that this is the way I'm going to have to think in order to be happy with my life.
I've also realized that doing nothing is also a positive action. I'm never actually doing nothing, I'm always doing something, but I became so focused on what I was not doing that I failed to realize that I'm actively shaping my destiny. I got so caught up in what I wasn't doing but was expected to do that I couldn't even consider doing what I wanted. So I'm doing more what I want, and thinking less about what I don't want but am expected to do anyways.
Does any of this make me feel any better or more at peace? I don't think so. But I'm finally feeling energy to live again. I have things that I want, and things that I can do to get them. It's not even so much that I want things, but it feels so good to be able to want them, to be able to take action in an effort to achieve something. I feel angry, I feel stressed, I know it's not going to last and I'm going to crash eventually, but I don't care. I want to do something, to take action, and to have desires to make it worth it. I'm alive. Love me or hate me, but I am.
Maybe I'm the one that hates myself for it. Maybe that is why I'm stressed and angry, because I hate myself for wanting things. There is a dichotomy of feeling that I'm not in touch with, and that is why I have so much trouble with doing things. Maybe I haven't accepted myself as a person with wants and needs of his own, and so I need to feel angry in order to be able to overcome that self-loathing.
Oh, and as long as this is going to be a long post, I may as well add some more. It's one more example of things that I wouldn't have expected to be the problem. The person I'm most angry at from my childhood is my mother. I think that it is precisely because I love her so much that I hate her so much. She married my step-father when I was pretty young, probably between kindergarten and second grade. He was a terrible influence on me and made the majority of my life so far miserable, but I'm not really angry at him for that. I'm angry at my mother for making me live with him. He's a bad person, that's ok. I know that, I've accepted it, he can't help it and he certainly had no obligation to love or care for me being as I'm not his kid. But my mother, in seeing all this, still put me in this situation. I couldn't do anything about it, not at the age I was. What's worse, in the beginning before she had realized the extent to which he was a negative influence, she tried to make me feel as if I should feel bad for not liking him. I remember fairly distinctly an incident where we were in a car, with her driving and me and my sister in the back seat. We were driving home, and I asked "Is ____ at home?" This was early on in the marriage, but I already disliked/was afraid of him, so I was asking as a means of figuring out whether or not I had to be prepared to deal with him when we arrived. I don't remember her exact response, but it was something snippy designed to make me feel bad for not liking my new step-father. I don't know how I felt then, but I know that a part of me is very very angry with her for putting me in that situation where I had to live with somebody that hated me so much. Oh, I didn't mention this, but in addition to everything else, my step-father and I are exact complete absolute opposites as far as personality is concerned. The same with my half-brother, his son. Our interests and thought-patterns do not converge at all. So that just added to the list of things that he disliked about me and made me suffer for. All because my mother didn't have the courage to remove me from that toxic man. Since I love her, I'd subverted all that hatred of her over this until only very recently. Even now, I don't really feel it, I just know that it is there and it is very big. So I'm going to call her soon and confront her on this, because I need to get past this.
That's what's going on in my life.
