Just troll and down vote now. You won't care to read this, I promise. (reddit disclaimer)
I'm so fucking sick of being lied to. It's so loud. It's an endless cacophonous barrage that beats its way into my head despite every effort to fight. Or worse, I don't fight and try to avoid, or maybe play along, and the insidious fear and anxiety burrows into the pit of my chest.
It feels like "everything." Logically, I can pull back and know some things or people remain consistent. They are the clear exceptions to the rule. I do not believe culturally we have a grasp on what it means to be truthful. I don't mean the truth as you see it. I don't mean some throwaway comment about opinions being like assholes. We don't understand the transcendent value of striving, fighting, and sacrificing for what is true and real.
I know this because I struggled to not put "truth" and "real" in quotes like just now. Because I know what I mean by them. I get the feeling previous eras had fairly strong conceptions of them. Talking at the jaded fuck tards in a shit hole forum has me sensing their desperate desire to pounce. Their insecure "wisdom" meant to perpetuate compounded lies about their capacity for perception or clinical diagnosis. My capitulation to addressing the non-existent impersonal and presumed "hive mind" in jaded fuck tard shit hole forums.
It's easy to shit on people when they present as whiny cliches that compose the various relationship and life advice subs here. "I just don't believe in myself." "My upbringing was terrible." "I'm super stoked about my spouse, but should we be fighting this much?" "My suicide ideation has reached critical mass." "It's just, I'm not that old, but I feel..." "Mostly it's that I'm out of shape and unmotivated." "My friends left, my girl left, I'm in recovery." "The one book I've read this year really opened my eyes."
I find cliches useful only insofar as they promote genuine and nuanced change. You can't blame your brain for phrasing things like you've grown up to hear them. But cliches aren't the answer. We'll all talk ourselves into someone else's all-too-familiar corner. How'd you get there? Can it change or inform for the better? Do you really care, or are you just pretending; have you been told you should care and found yourself here by accident?
I reflexively shit on cliche people and stories because I don't truly identify with them. I'm confident in my looks, even if I could stand to be more active. I don't try to lie and hide my faults behind the mirage of happy and healthy relationships. The last girl I was with we were together for 5 or so years. It might have been day 2 that I voiced constantly why it was going to be her to leave and all the reasons that would start to add up in her head.
I don't root for failure, but I genuinely attempt to be honest. I try to acknowledge the oncoming train and actively prepare for fallout. My life tends to not arbitrarily and unexpectedly blow up that way. It still hurts when things go bad, but it's the loneliest place on the planet being Cassandra.
It's hard enough to point outside of your relationships and start noting what's wrong. It's even harder to feel intimately every failing and foreboding point of your day to day. The first time, that you're aware, that your partner lies to you in years. The laundry list of things they say are wrong with you or they don't want. A list strikingly similar to character flaws and strategically negotiated characteristics you've had since day one. Did they not know what they wanted? Were they lying all along?
I'm willing to believe people are dumb first. I think it takes time to figure anything out about yourself, let alone many things about yourself. But what we do control is what makes me feel like death. We do control our approach. We don't have to lie. You can feel as sad as you've ever been and come to it honestly even if you feel you deserve to feel as bad as you do trying to lie.
But relationships will always be a clusterfuck. How about at large? Again, we can defer to cliches to write off people that don't try. I do. Unfortunately, I try. I experiment and say yes. I invest. I engage in conversations with people I would instantly judge and write off. I explore entertainment or other topics in the same fashion. I hate Arrow, and I hate it after watching every episode of it. It's real. I can provide truthful examples of its brand of stupid without lazily proclaiming the folly of The CW or kitsch superheroes.
Media gets to lie. The most popular gets that way why? For the same reason we're flirty with fascism. Repeat something often enough, you get comfortable. You get persuaded, even against your will. I never wanted the name Trump to pass my lips. It's hard to imagine being a functioning human being if I hadn't adopted a position on him today. Lazy, cynical, and ham-fisted attempts at "entertainment" or "journalism" become our standards for conversation and beguile our capacity for evaluating information.
We learn to accept it. We learn to breathe the deception. Personal public relations departments take up office space in our heads to spin the filth of our circumstances clean. We're not struggling, we're fighting. We're not sick, we're poised for revolution. We're not dying, we just can't be bothered to care.
Honesty, for me, I practically worship. I'm so "meh" or "even" that by the time I feel sad, especially sober, it's a glorious invitation for me to mine personal truths and find words for why I'm tearing up. It's a privilege to be moved to create. It's a privilege to abuse your perspective in service to try and understand or connect. Honest feeling leading to honest reflection, if only back at yourself, when the ones you wish could see it aren't able or are unwilling.
I hurt for my craft. Every area of human engagement requires some kind of street cred. If your hands aren't burnt and cut up, you're probably not a real cook. If you haven't broken a bone, what are you doing at the X-games? If you're a stark-raving mad doctor of anything who experiences borderline PTSD upon reflecting on grad-school, you owe it to yourself to insist people use the proper title.
My sacrifice is different, because it always seems to manifest in relationships. I always have to be prepared to lose the friend even if I don't want to. I'm not allowed to believe I can't see where something is going. I have to eviscerate my privacy and notions of "taboo personal thoughts" or a different, and worse, machinery kicks in. I have to really think and work with suicide. I have to really play with and tempt certain kinds of fate, or I'll never find the truth. You certainly don't have it. The collective wisdom I employ to manage train wrecks still leaves the trains crashing.
I don't like looking angry or "crazy." I don't like being picked apart by people with no capacity or respect for what I try to create. From writing to my relationships, it's all meant to strive for truths you can rely on. It's never and not for some naive or perpetual "happiness." I'm not hoping we polish and politicize our avoidance mechanisms. I don't want the "implied" demeanor and level of conversation. I'm so fucking sick of being lied to.
I'm so sick of it, I find myself empathizing with my bat shit mother. I've taken more slaps to the face over lies as a child than anything else. She vehemently hated when we lied. If she felt as broken and insane as it's making me, maybe I understand why she'd fuck us up. We were persistent and easy enough targets. Certainly I currently feel like a number of people could stand to be slapped.
I want more people to sound like me. I want them to start any and every discussion with "now, I could be perfectly upside down on this issue." "My feelings are super compelling and probably shit right now, perhaps we should talk later." "I respect and acknowledge your perspective and see your point, can you offer it with regard to my next question?" "I will talk to you as long as it takes for us to find common ground." In today's world, the first one to scream, throw up their arms, or accuse the other side of something wrong "wins." Take the last quoted approach, say in "debating" with a fundamentalist. Someone who re-asserts the same lines over and over isn't willing to talk, but their lips will keep moving. They can't be honest, but they certainly feel like they're saying something.
It's the liar that perpetuates the self-fulfilling feedback. You can rely on nothing if not for things to fail. With a simple adoption of that idea, you've set things in motion. To distinguish how and why something or someone fails as opposed to categorically dismissing them as inherent failures deserves the widest distinction. I could take my Cassandra plight and refuse intimacy, scorn women, and levy endless blame on my ex. Because, of course, pick your favorite cliche about humanity in general or women specifically or condescendingly "kids" perpetually.
Instead, I can talk about the moments it sinks in how bad I feel. I can identify the strategies and ideas I think should permeate every relationship, intimate or otherwise, and pick out when those stopped functioning. When the lies come out. When the conversation stops. When the positive characteristics and good habits get ignored so the looming monster can be made to look all the more necessary to be killed.
And I don't think it will get better. I don't think I'll meet many more if any people who don't fall right in line with a kind of failure I'm pressed to call even spoiled and bratty. I took my racing heart and bout of kicking my bed over a culmination of frustrating forces, and turned them into a boring procedural explanation. I allowed myself to be human, and then attempted to approach my actions as an adult.
My life feels stagnant. My life constantly has parts of it breaking down and away. Much, if not nearly all of it, is predicated on lies. I try to respect and explain how I feel concurrent to the fact of my friends' recent and terrible hardships. The false comparisons and pissing matches would be the liar's game. As long as I can't find honest assessments and self-reflection, per my mother's instruction, I'll just continue to beat it out of me. I'll have to rely on my torrential television and foreboding literature. I'm losing my ability to cope with engaging people much further.
