Weight Training Treading Water

STOP.

STOP RIGHT HERE.

DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER!

At least… don’t read any further if you don’t wish to think lesser of me. I’m not sure that I can handle you thinking lesser of me. But this time, my writing, this writing, is not just for me. This is also for you. And if you know who you are, I am so sorry for my actions and the pain I may have caused you. You likely already think lesser of me anyways. 

I’ll begin by saying that I have been going through quite the period of self-analysis. It feels like it’s been one unique moment to the next filled with self-discovery, self-reflection, and self-introspection. The inciting incident that spurred me down this path of self-analysis is the realization that I not so long ago came to. It’s the realization that I had truly lost myself. 

I believe that the way this happened is that I lost myself due to many things: due to my surroundings, due to my environment, due to the cacophony of the world, due to the voices of my respected peers, and most of all due to the voice of my father, both my actual father and that of father society. Or rather, and more exactly, I should say that I feel I lost myself due to the amount of weight and respect I decided to imbue onto these other’s opinions when compared to my own. 

To many it seemed that I had lost myself due to alcohol. Which in a way is partially true, but I didn’t for one moment fully believe it. I knew that there was something else, something deeper, something that I feel drove me towards alcohol in the first place. I know now that I believe I was already lost well before I became an alcoholic. But it’s because that I was already lost, that I believe I was so susceptible to becoming one. I believe that if you are already lost, as I was, that’s when the use of alcohol as a means of escape, a means to further lose yourself, becomes truly daingerous. 

I feel that I lost myself in alcohol in order to get away from myself. To escape ME. to get away from who I had become. To get away from the person who was no longer his own person but a person who felt he was but a marionette of the world. A marionette for others to control. A performer to dance a jig whenever and wherever the world demanded. A proxy person.

This new model for an understanding of my past self and my past actions has been a truly liberating one. I have felt alive again in such a way that it can only be described in almost surreal terms, as if a phoenix reborn from it’s own ashes. I’ve also found that along with this rejuvenation I have a newfound perspective of my own experiences that were previously veiled unto me. The understanding I know now is that it was always possible for me to know myself in these terms, if only I had taken the time to truly search inside. To truly grapple with myself, my doppelganger, my social-self-reflection, and derive from it the meaning of my existence, the meaning of me. 

At least, this is how it has felt to me. 

So now I am here, on the other side of all of these experiences and I have been able to afford myself some time to truly ponder myself and all of the events that have transpired in my life to lead me here. It’s been a journey of enlightenment and understanding. A journey that I feel I have most been able to truly enjoy due to the many years of depression and bouts of suicidal ideations I endured. A journey I would never wish upon any other. A journey of self-doubt, self-destruction, and self-shame. The journey of how one truly loses oneself.

It’s because of how close I came to ridding myself of this world that I am writing this to you right now. I have been prompted to reach out to those who have been important figures in my life, prompted to let them know just how much they have meant to me during my experience here. As now that I recognize and understand my own mortality, how fragile it is, that I know it would fill me with great remorse if I hadn’t been able to let these figures in my life know just how much they have all meant to me.

Which brings me to you. I feel I owe you an apology and I don’t even know where to begin. What I do know is that by sharing this with you, and sharing it with others, I have no idea how you or anyone else is going to feel about me. And it scares me. It completely and truly terrifies me. But I am writing this to you anyhow, because I do know and believe in at least this one thing; through all of my collected experiences, if you don’t face your fears, face your true insecurities, then they will in turn, one day, someday, eventually, truly, rule over you. 

I firmly believe that living a life ruled by personal fear and insecurities is no way for any one person to live. It’s in my opinion that a life like that, a life like my previous life, is not a life of liberty and freedoms, but a life of fear, self-doubt and self-questioning. It’s the life of a shadow of a being, a shade, a proxy person. A life I have no desire to live again.

So here it goes, it’s time to face my fears. Who are you? You were an innocent unknowing person and I was a little older and had just entered that strange phase of life, the transition between childhood and adulthood. That confusing part of life where we begin to reach sexual maturity, puberty. For me this was in the fifth grade. 

I did not know at first what it was that I was doing only that it felt right and that my body, my being, urged me to. It was a new experience for me and you seemed, by my esteem, to be innocently enjoying it as well. It was my first experience with encountering human sexuality with another and I don’t even know if you realized what feelings I was experiencing in my body. I actually doubt that you did at the time, but perhaps later, when you too entered your own phase of sexual maturation, it dawned on you what had transpired between us. 

And NO to clarify we did not have sex proper, nothing even close to it. Now that I’m much older I know that what I did with you would be described as intimate rubbing or petting. All of which was upon the top of our clothes. We did not even kiss or anything like that. To me it wasn’t a form of love making but simply reacting to new and unexperienced physical feelings which were stemming inside from a part of myself that I had no idea existed before. As innocent as it may have been, I was experiencing arousal from another for the first time, and along with it the release that shortly and quickly came after.

This experience was not only new to me, but it also felt amazing. I had never before experienced anything like it ever anywhere else. The amount of dopamine it provided seemed extreme compared to other positive feelings I had experienced elsewhere. I wanted more. 

So the ugly truth that I have lived with, the ugly lie that I have kept buried inside, the deep sense of grief and shame that I have had to constantly ignore is that at such a very young age, a confusing age, the age of sexual maturation, I discovered the natural physical wonders of the male release. And I discovered this feeling with you as a means to assist in providing me with that feeling. Also, as far as I could tell, I was the only one benefiting from the extreme pleasure of this feeling. As a result, the release that I was feeling such joy from, felt one sided. This one sidedness led me to feel like a thief in a candy store, for it did not seem to me like there could possibly be a fair exchange taking place between us at all. I felt like I was receiving a great reward, and that you had not even the faintest idea that you were giving me any reward at all. 

This imbalance in exchange, along with guilt from my religious upbringing, led me to feel shame in myself. A shame I’ve carried with me my entire life. A shame I’ve desperately tried to hide from, to blank out of my memory, to scatter to the winds of a long time past. 

It gets darker though. Darker in that once I recognized feeling this imbalance in exchanges, I could not but help myself from wishing to participate in this exciting dopamine fueled exchange again. I convinced myself that you didn’t seem to mind, in fact you seemed to warm up to me. So the truth of it is, as ugly as my past possibly gets, is that in this actuality you are not alone. It’s that there were three of you over the span of a couple of years or so. And I feel I owe each of you an apology for my actions. 

I’m sorry for seeking out one sided pleasure for my benefit and using you unknowingly as a means to achieve that pleasure. I don’t really know how you felt then and I don’t know how you feel about it now. I don’t even know if you know that it happened, and if you do know, I don’t know for sure that if in some way my actions contributed to some greater pain in your life. However, my feelings tell me that you do know, and my feelings tell me that my actions have indeed caused you suffering. For this I am so sorry. For this I cannot see how there can be any recompense. 

I feel that all I can offer now is this apology, a very late apology, as it’s been little more than two and a half decades later. I know that this is very weak and it’s very, very late, but it’s all I can see for myself to do. Also, I know that apologies are meaningless without some sort of action, without some actual change in behavior and follow through on my words. So I want you to know that my pubescent behaviors did not continue into adulthood and you can rest assured that they never will. My behaviors towards you back then, my shame-ridden actions of the past, were that of an untrained child still learning the world around him. 

Also, just so you know, and so that we’re on the same page I would like to share with you that there was actually a fourth person. A fourth person whom I failed to mention above who was also involved in this cycle. That person is me. Years before I ever met you, I too played the role of the unknowing innocent, as someone else who was a few years older than me derived the same sense of pleasure that I found from you, from me. So I played the part in the continuing of this cycle. It had been done unto me, and in turn I did it unto you. 

I don’t expect any forgiveness, nor do I expect any understanding, indeed I feel like I can’t expect anything at all. Instead I have hope. I just hope to shine some light on this issue in the only way I can; by sincerely telling you that I am sorry and even though I don’t expect it, I hope that you can somewhere, someday in your heart find some forgiveness for me. I hope you can recognize the sincerity of this message to you even though we haven’t seen each other in such a very long time. And finally, I hope that it’s clear, that I truly feel that my actions towards you were that of an untrained child. 

So that’s it, that’s what’s been burning a hole in the back of my psyche for nearly as long as I can remember. Childhood guilt that I believe I felt naturally and that my religious upbringings deeply cemented into my then child-like mind. And now that I am finally here once again, now that I have finally found myself from within my own darkness, now that I feel like I have an opportunity to start anew, I am making efforts to tie up any of the loose ends from my past life that I can. And these past pubescent behaviors of mine towards you have always weighed down on my conscience the heaviest. They weigh more than anything else that I have ever considered myself to have ever been a part of, as to where I was treating others as I myself would not have wish to have been treated. I was only thinking of myself, and not putting myself into your own shoes.

I do not wish to carry with me these heavy burdens any longer… And I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to truly rid myself of them. What I do know is that while carrying them with me in hiding it’s too hard to even tread water, let alone to actually try to make some semblance of progress on my new lease on life. Hopefully by sharing this with you it gives you some sense of reprieve. I don’t know that it will, but I have a hope, and that’s all I can hope for. I have to believe in hope. 

I truly hope you are well. 

-jamesdainger