The Duality Of Me
Positive Reinforcement vs. The Stupid Bitch Who Will Never Succeed
When I was 8 years old, my grandma was going to college for a psychology major. It was one of the rare instances in her life where she wasn’t governed by a man, and the only people living with her was my sister and myself. She learned a lot for the short period of time that her life was directed by her head and not so much the clouds of false love she shrouded herself in by the men who used her.
My grandmother never saw a real difference between adult and child until bedtime came, or the moments when she felt age difference was the proper leg to stand on when telling me what to do. “You listen because I’m the adult!”
So…she was learning about limitations and how if you don’t set any, then their probably won’t be any…so go and be and do whatever those special and unique things are that make you who you are. Fly, touch the sun and see what happens.
From an early age, I was picked as the golden child. The kid who, “if anyone is going to make it in this family, it’s going to be you.” I heard that a lot from various family members and their friends. Strangers sometimes too. My life has been very strange for as long as I can remember.
My mother instilled in me from my earliest memories to “never say can’t, because can’t never did nothing” and “you can be anything you want to be in this world if you want it badly enough.” Turns out, if you want to be a little shit that breaks her favorite things or gets out of line, you can also find yourself with a bruised ass or thumped head pretty quick.
The words rarely matched the actions, and often if the words did match the actions, it was anything but positive. The first time I ever heard the word ‘Cunt’, it was my grandmother screaming at my sister and I, along with us being little bitches, and some other choice phrases. I think I was 10 or 11, which would have put my sister at 4 or 5. Sometimes, the star you were born under takes full affect, and you lose all control of anything that could be considered rational behaviors. I know, because I’ve been there myself many times. Ration and logic mean nothing to the outrage of an angry child.
From my perceptions, the things that have happened to me have been the direct effect of an angry child that never adopted all the right tools to heal. Not just my grandmother, all of them. That’s the same person that is screaming at cars who drive too slow or whatever stupid shit I do when shit isn’t lining up the way I want it to. The degrees vary depending on the circumstance.
I’m going to stray off topic a bit here, to answer a question I’ve been asked a lot recently. “Why do you sell crafts/art of pornographic nature, while collecting donations to help victims of rape, incest, and sexual abuse? Isn’t that kind of like a mixed message?”
No, it’s not. Selling products made from porn is not the same as advocating rape, incest, and abuse. At some point, we should all self-evaluate what sex really is, and what it’s been portrayed to be. Sex is not dirty, it’s not wrong, and it’s not bad. It’s a natural part of being a human being, which is also an animal. Don’t let your attachment to your thumbs sway you from thinking any differently about that.
To put it simply: rape is wrong, sex is not.
Rape is not really about sex. Rape is power, or more so a violent way of flaunting the fact that you have power over someone else. I find the way we treat our fellow man way more offensive then porn. Granted…are some of those girls doing it for drugs? Yes. Are some of them doing it because they were abused? Yes. Are some of them doing it because they love their bodies, self expression, and sexual freedom? Yes. Thing is there’s a lot of folks with the same backgrounds as our little porno princess who chose a path of flipping burgers or some corporate endeavor to achieve the almighty dollar, so reason has little to do with profession, and more to do with what you’re willing to do for a buck vs. what you love doing for a buck.
At this point, you could argue that most of the people in porn have been abused in some way more so than the other occupations of our day, but the argument would be severely flawed. 1/3 of the population of our country alone suffers from abuse of some kind. And in Africa, rape is so bad they now have created condoms with teeth that women insert into their vaginas that can only be removed from the shredded penis by going to a doctor. I have a feeling the numbers for rape might be slightly higher in Africa than the US.
What’s my point? Rape, incest, & sexual abuse has no more to do with porn than anything else. How you feel about yourself as a person and how you allow others to treat you as you live through your day to day lives says a lot more than if you took some cock for cash.
Now back to what I was saying before…
So where was I? The duality of me…
I am the product of what happens when you tell a child they have no real limitations, but beat them down with your actions and sometimes your hand. My mom said she didn’t believe herself capable of achieving her goals, because she was told her whole life that she would never amount to anything and to not waste her time on dreaming…so she thrived in D&D, because there her imagination could not be limited, and in the real world she told me what she could only believe for herself within’ the confines of the game. I was her secret rebellion, and I think the same went for my grandmother. For the small period when her life was her own, and her eyes were their bluest, she made it very clear to me how important it was to break the cycle. She didn’t know how, she had no ideas on how to find a path, only that it was the path I needed to travel, and so away I went.
It is very confusing inside of my head. There’s a part of me that wants nothing more than to tear down the world around me and destroy everything I see in sight. There’s another part of me that wants nothing to do with that way of thinking and has been trying for years to drag the other side along and dwell in the beauty of life, hoping to find a way to thrive in it.
Change is fucking hard. How do you live with yourself when you see a beautiful face that you want to fall in love with at the same time you’re trying to figure out how best to tan the hide and preserve it’s beauty? How do you contain the desires that creep in when the scent of a woman’s hair fills you with so much rage that all you see is her becoming a beautiful corpse as she’s running out of tears? The world is never going to feel your pain, because it’s too busy processing it’s own.
There’s a joke in there somewhere, I’m sure…
ha.
ha.
I am not a monster. The potential is there, sure…but deep down, there’s a fighting spirit inside of me that has never let me be completely consumed by the dark side no matter how closely I’ve teetered on that line. And for that, I thank my mother and my grandmother. For that, I love them…because despite their fucked up childhoods and shitty upbringing, they somehow managed to plant a seed of hope within’ me at a very small age…and that seed is growing.
I recently met a wonderful woman while working the 2 Bit Punk Rock Swap Meet last weekend, who told me how she had worked a show down in Texas to help raise funds for The Disappearing Women of Juárez. To say the least, we had a very in depth and passionate conversation about the things that matter most to us and I am grateful for finding another friend who has broken the veil of silence.
Idunno, in all of this, I am an experiment. I’m just as unsure of what’s going to happen next as those of you who watch my progress and my pitfalls. I am the first of my kind in this link, and no one has really shown me how to do much of anything, because they never knew how themselves. I’ve learned and grown through chasing down my own experiences as I’ve partied with and fought my demons. Not that there haven’t been a multitude of folks I’ve learned from, because we all take something away with us from every single person we encounter, but the classroom is my life. I think in that respect, we are all one.
Live. Follow your heart. Do what you feel is right and fuck what anyone else has to say. Live as if that is all there is, because that really is all there is. Anything else is a distraction from the truth of discovering who you really are.