# The Story: Of the Greatest Person that Ever Lived

## Mars Malo

#### Produced by calibre 0.6.34
The Story:

Of the Greatest Person that Ever Lived

Mars S Malo

Copyright 2012 Mars S Malo

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - September 6, 1993

Chapter 2 - August 30, 1994

Chapter 3 - January 11, 1996

Chapter 4 - December 22, 1996

Chapter 5 - April 4, 1997

Chapter 6 - March 5, 1998

Chapter 7 - May 19, 1999

Chapter 8 - May 24, 2000

Chapter 9 - September 18, 2000

Chapter 10 - March 20, 2004

Chapter 11 - April 14, 2006

Chapter 12 - September 4, 2006

Chapter 13 - September 17, 2006

Chapter 14 - December 17, 2006

Chapter 15 - January 9, 2007

Chapter 16 - March 26, 2007

Chapter 17 - April 7, 2007

Chapter 18 - July 23, 2007

Chapter 19 - September 24, 2007

Chapter 20 - September 28, 2007

Chapter 21 - October 27, 2007

Chapter 22 - February 14, 2008

Chapter 23 - March 15, 2008

Chapter 24 - June 8, 2008

Chapter 25 - September 10, 2008

Chapter 26 - September 11, 2008

Chapter 27 - September 20, 2008

Chapter 28 - October 13, 2008

Chapter 29 - October 14, 2008

Chapter 30 - October 26, 2008

Chapter 31 - February 17, 2009

Chapter 32 - March 16, 2009

Chapter 33 - March 17, 2009

Chapter 34 - October 21, 2010

Chapter 35 - December 25, 2010

Chapter 36 - January 20, 2011

Chapter 37 - January 21, 2011

Chapter 38 - August 30, 2011

Chapter 39 - August 31, 2011

Chapter 40 - September 19, 2011

Chapter 41 - March 15, 2012

Chapter 42 - March 19, 2012

Afterward

Update

### Chapter 1

**September 6, 1993**

This is my frist kindergarten diary. Today I went to play bike ridng and hide and sek and it was lots of fun. No one got hort thes time.

### Chapter 2

**August 30, 1994**

In my first day as a 1st grader we met my teacher misses stringfiller. I think shes going to be mean but I hope not. But now Im at home and eatn a box of fruit loop cerel I took from brekfast cause a new kid did'nt want to eat his. I rember when I was new and befor I had been to school my mom left me ther and I had cry. The moms of the other kids tuched my hair even if I pulld away and said they wanted curls like min and they would'nt stop starin. I thaht my mom was goin to give me away to them.

I wont do my homework today becuse I dont have no home wooork!

### Chapter 3

**January 11, 1996**

Today I learned that the most pretty girl in my class gets money and presents for good grades. She showed me some of the new markers her dad bought her because of her straight A's. I've seen them at the store before but my parents wouldn't get them because they cost too much. They're the new kind that smell like different flavers and she also got the ones that you can write secret mesages with and change colors when you use the clear magic wand marker. I get really good grades too but bad conduct so I think that's why I'm not allowed to get money or presents from my family.

### Chapter 4

**December 22, 1996**

I know Santa isn't real but the kid I just meet at church studies thought he was and started screming at me when I kept on telling him he wasn't except for maybe there was a guy who his story comes from in the past. He almost fought me but I stayed away on the wall and didn't try to seem tough aganst him like I do at school cause even though he's not bigger than me he has a bigger group then me. I always thought everybody just played around on chrismas time because it's fun to imagine how if he was real what that could be like but some kids really do think he is real. I know he's just a story and that my mom and dad get me those presents and put them under the tree. But I never get any good presents. I even cried a little and scremed last year when I had opened all my presents and I didn't get one toy only all cloths. My brother gets the best presents just because he's the youngest brother and even more then we get because his godparents come to visit every year since he was first born and give him presents and a card with money on chrismas. It makes me want to beat him up and take them from him but not cause I don't like him any. It's just a feeling I get and sometimes I do hit him but I also feel bad that I never can stop fighting. My older cousin says that's just the way it is with family. And he says the youngest gets treated better until parents have another younger one. And that it's also better to act good around granparents and unts and uncles, cause for some reason he doesn't know he says they also treat granchilds and nieces and nephews better than there own children too. He says my mom and dad always give him cool toys and money on birthdays and all he has to do is when he sees them shake there hand and tell them how they are so they can talk and feel like giving him stuff. This chrismas when we open presents I won't cry like last year. I learned my lesson. I already know I'm not the favorite with none of my family and so when I grow up I can get all my stuff that I want myself and not share with no one because they never got me what I wanted.

### Chapter 5

**April 4, 1997**

My friends during lunch at the zoo field trip today laughed at me and said I was dumb because I only ate my sandwich with letuce and mayonaise. My mom always made it like that for me but they said I forgot the other meat stuff. At least the teacher didn't laugh at me and said it looked delicous and maybe I was a vegetarran. My other friend said it means I only eat vegtables and it made my teacher happy so I didn't tell him that I also eat hotdogs at home when I'm really hungry after I play outside.

At home after we climbed the fence to pick the berry things from the tree in the back yard and throwing them at each other my parents sent us inside cause the dog was barking too much. I think he wanted to go with us inside. We sat by the window and saw the dog trying to run in the air and then wining and breathing heavy. I don't know why they didn't cut the rope if my dad was out there with him watching. My mom said we could get a new one but if they can't be inside with us where its safe to be I don't want another.

### Chapter 6

**March 5, 1998**

Today was crap. The gym teacher made me go to the principal's office cause I got caught shocking a 3rd grader with my camera taser I made. It was just a joke and the kid didn't even have tears when he cried! I tried it myself and it doesn't hurt that much. I just get in trouble all the time and not everyone else because I don't ever tell on others.

Next, the principal said he wasn't going to suspend me this time since I wasn't fighting and didn't hurt anyone real bad but then he did suspend me because when I told him what had happened I called the kid a stupid bitch ass for telling on me. I think now I'm gonna start making up my own cuss words so they won't know what I'm saying.

Finally, at home my mom said she talked with one of the teachers from school who told her about another kind of school they send kids who can't behave. She said she would send me there if I couldn't stop fighting and getting in trouble all the time.

### Chapter 7

**May 19, 1999**

I should kick his ass. We could have been millionaires. I can draw almost as good as him but everyone knows he draws better than even the new art teacher we have. He told Jesse that he's been picked to make comic strips for the newspaper during the summer. And get paid for it! Jesse didn't even say anything like always but I told the new teacher for him that he just sometimes gets scared of strangers.

If he could get paid we wouldn't have to cut grass and ask for money anymore but he just keeps shaking his head when I ask him why he doesn't want to. He wouldn't even have to do much. All he has to do is draw whatever they told him to and they would write the comics and do all the other hard work. We could buy new scooters like the neighbor kids, and lots of new games, and better yo-yos that sleep on their own, so we could do more tricks. He's supposed to be like my best friend but he didn't want to just do it so we could have the money and have fun buying stuff. I got mad and told him that I might not be his friend anymore and then he would have no friends if he didn't do it. It isn't even real work. He just has to draw and I know he really likes drawing. It would be so easy for him. Like my cousin who works at the pizza joint. He loves pizza and now he's making money making pizza he can eat whenever he wants. He brings me some sometimes and I don't even like him! I won't really stop being his friend cause then he wouldn't have no one that could make the other kids stop making fun of him every time he mumbles when he tries to talk but I think he's still stupid if he doesn't do it. I won't even get to see him this year when we're not in school anymore cause he said he'd rather spend the summer with his grampa camping and fishing. You can't make money doing stuff like that. If they asked me I would have been like, "Hell yeah and do I get free lunch too?" Man, he should do it. All our dreams would come true.

### Chapter 8

**May 24, 2000**

A student in my class died yesterday. We found out this morning when we were in our first period class. A few of the students were crying or really, really quiet. Some of us, including me, noticed he wasn't in class but didn't think too much of it or relate it to those who were crying.

Our teacher made an announcement that he collapsed out on the field yesterday afternoon during soccer practice.

I didn't know him very well. I didn't cry. I just thought about how I knew him.

He played with us, out on the same field we were just told he died on. We were usually on the same team and although he was never known for his skills, he was a funny dude who would make us laugh. In fact, my first thought when hearing about him dying was, "That bastard! We never even traded those fucking holographic Pokémon cards he wanted!"

He was someone who didn't feel the need to fight for attention and who was okay with quiet moments instead of always talking about rumors or what everyone else was doing. I think that's why we got along even though we never called each other best friends or even friends. Even if we didn't speak to one another every day, he was always friendly to me and smiled whenever he would catch me doing something stupid instead of insulting me like others. We were just classmates and teammates and even if we would often lose while playing soccer, he did make our team better and he definitely made my days in class brighter.

And that's how I'll always remember him.

### Chapter 9

**September 18, 2000**

I don't know why but people keep thinking of me as more than I think I really am. My homeroom teacher told me to stay with her when the bell rang. I thought I was in trouble but then she said if I wanted, I could go get lunch and come back and eat in the classroom and play board games or use the computer. I just nodded my head then when she wasn't looking anymore after I turned the corner at the doorway, I ran to the cafeteria to get in line. I'm lucky Brandon was still in line and hadn't gotten his tray because he let me cut. He let me cut, then I let him cut so he stays in the same spot and gets lunch first. That's "Chinese Cut", which is a little something I invented back when I was in the 3rd grade.

When I got my tray, I told my friends I was going to eat in class today and on the way there, I saw another one of my friends who I've known for years. We don't have the same classes anymore. He said he was probably going to move away and go to another school so he just wanted to tell me that he always looked up to me because I never gave into peer pressure or got into doing drugs like others. I wanted to say something back but didn't know what. I just don't think about doing things I don't understand so it's not really hard for me not to do what everyone else is doing, and I don't think people who try drugs are bad people so he shouldn't feel bad for that. He said he had to go, patted me on the back, and then took off fast. I think he was running from one of the school monitors again and probably going to skip.

When I was back in the classroom and took my seat, the teacher got up and then sat next to me. Now I thought I was really in trouble but she just asked me if I was the oldest. I nodded my head and she said she could tell because of how quiet I am. She says she's had kids in her class before who were the same way. That we come from a culture where the older brother is respected and everyone else follows as an example. I didn't tell her that I wasn't that good of a kid and that I stay quiet in class so that I don't get in trouble or get into fights like I used to when I was in elementary school. I think I'm still the same way I was, only now I can hide it.

I didn't want to behave different in front of her, so I took out my folder to do some homework instead of playing with everyone else. That way, I would have more time at home to play outside before it got dark. When the bell rang again, I started to put up my things and she saw in my backpack a book that I've carried with me since I was in the 1st grade at my first school. It's a book my teacher there made for me and all the other kids. We gave her a picture of us and she used our first and last names and she had the books made so we were the main character in the story. It's our own adventure story where we fly and ride dinosaurs and are in other cool situations. She asked if she could borrow it for the weekend because she liked the idea and wanted to see if she could do the same for our class. I handed it to her and left as the bell rang to end lunch.

### Chapter 10

**March 20, 2004**

This is starting to be the best year ever. We setup the volleyball net again today at around 4:30 and invited friends and relatives over to play. People always pick me at the beginning when we're choosing teams because they know I'm one of the best. I think I might be the best but we've all never really competed one-on-one against each other. My team wins almost every time, unless we get stuck with a bunch of my little cousins but even then I make up for it and kickass. If I could see better in the dark, they would have no chance when the sun would start to set.

After volleyball, most everyone left or went out to eat. I'm okay with just some chips and snacks that we have inside but since my brothers and friends all stayed, we were all able put our money together and order some pizza. We played all our new N64 games, that we bought at the flea market, while we waited for the pizza to arrive. I was kicking so much ass but then we stopped for a while to eat. We could have laughed and played longer if my parents didn't start yelling and complaining yet again about having people over. We decided to stop when we finished the last game we were on. It'd be so much better if someday, I could go on playing for as long as we wanted. Maybe when they're away on vacation, we'll stay behind and play long hours without interruption.

### Chapter 11

**April 14, 2006**

Saw someone I hadn't seen since middle school today. I didn't realize it was him at first.

I was walking home from the bus stop, when he threw his head back as he spotted me walking along and said, "'Sup kid." Just to be friendly, I replied back saying the same, "'Sup".

Then I heard in his voice a familiar but much more masculine sound as he spoke my name and said, "Long time, little see. Where you been at? Still making them grades and headed to Yale and shit I bet. Ready to take over the world like it ain't no thang **huh**."

It was all in the way he would always say "huh." The rest of his way of speaking was new, but that phrase and the way that he said it was still with him. I knew who this was. "Holy shit and what the fuck is up; it's so good to see you!," is what rushed through my mind but I only spoke the first part.

We talked, joked, laughed, and recalled memories for a while. He said it was good seeing me and then asked if others that we went to school with were still around, "You still talk to so-and-so?." "Damn, for real. Tell that bitch I said what's up and they need to get at me." Then the topic moved on to bigger things.

He's not in school anymore, or living at home, and he shot himself in the foot with a handgun a few months back. Also has a baby on the way. All I could say was that I was still in school and doing the same. He nodded his head and said I still seem the same. I can't say the same about him and that makes me a little sad. I think it might be because I wasn't expecting him to ever seriously take on this new façade he's seems to have grown into.

I remember we would always talk that way mockingly with one another. We would hear others who talked like they were from "the hood" and we would use their words in conversation and laugh about it. We knew those kids and they weren't from "the hood." They were our neighbors who liked to pretend they were tougher than one another and slap-box but then settle down when we would all get together to play "store" with our toys and fake currency, play duck, duck goose, and wall ball or group together as teams to play pool on our crap pool table without even following the proper rules, and run around playing red rover, and freeze tag. And now years later, I see him speaking before me like a false version of someone else with the small hints of the same guy that I once knew and he tells me that he _shot_ _himself_ **!** Hahaha. It makes me laugh 'cause him carrying a gun is so ridiculous from how I used to know him...but he _would_ be the kind of guy to shoot himself in the foot by accident.

I guess you grow up with your time and you either learn to enjoy the idiocy of it all through its satire and your own ridiculous mockery and parody of it or you gradually and unintentionally become involved in the romanticizing of the idiocy yourself...BE ABOOOOOOUT IT Boooooi!!!!!

He invited me over to where he was staying for a few days near the old elementary school. He wants to play some N64 like the good ol' days. At least that's still the same. I still have some of the games he let me borrow and never had the chance to return. I'll tell him about it later when I go over to see him.

He can pretend to be and talk like a gangster all he wants, 'cause I'll always know how nervous and cool of a kid he really was growing up – No pretense required.

### Chapter 12

**September 4, 2006**

I come home from an intense game of wall ball at the old elementary school and find the wimpy college kid I met last week and his mom at the front porch today. They've recently moved into the house next door. I'm wondering what the hell they want. As I'm walking toward the door, I tell them my parents aren't home. The lady keeps her distance but leans her head directly toward my eyes and asks if I remember her because she certainly remembers me.

It doesn't take me very long to realize who she is. "I might," I say wondering what she wants with me now

Of course I remember her. She worked as the English substitute at my old middle school for a few months during my last year there. She tried to force me to read some book I had no interest in. We were in the library and she made it clear to the class that it wasn't for a grade but that we'd get some "pleasure" out of it, to which I responded loudly, "That's nasty." She called my name immediately and pulled me over to the side and asked me why I was being so rude. I don't know what it is about her but I couldn't help but feel like making fun of her and that ridiculous upright, I'm-a-perfect-teacher-so-do-what-I-say personality. I told her, making sure that I was loud enough for the rest of the class to hear, that I was sorry for my giant ejaculations during her lecture on receiving pleasure. She wrote me up and sent me to the office and I would have been suspended if the new and youngest principal of the school that we'd ever had hadn't arrived with a sense of humor. He looked at the infraction and read what I had done, let out an unexpected giggle and said, "You really did tell your English teacher that you would gladly ease the tension in her ass if you hadn't decided to turn gay the moment she opened her mouth?" "She's just the substitute. And Yep." He couldn't contain himself and said that he couldn't believe I was the same kid who was awarded Student of the Month the week before, had perfect attendance, and was one of the schools top students. While trying to hold himself together and stop from laughing, he picked up the office phone, dropped it on the desk in front of me and told me to call someone to come get me and to enjoy the rest of my day out of school. It wasn't even lunch time yet and I walked out of the school that day feeling like a Badass.

Ms. Kathy tells me that she just wanted to stop by and, " _like a friendly neighbor SHOULD",_ introduce herself and her son since we hadn't made an effort to welcome them ourselves. I tell her that that's cool and that I've never experienced any other neighbor introduce themselves so forcefully before. I can tell this makes her upset. She still makes me want to destroy her frustrated scowl. In an effort to not be so antagonizing, since she is going to be living next door now, I look at her son and ask,"I got a 360, you want to go play some Gears and Halo?" He looks confused and then says, "I'm sorry but is that a video game of some kind? I'm not familiar with that kind of senseless entertainment and I'm sure it would give my parents no pleasure to know that I would voluntarily allow myself to that vapid engagement when I could be improving on my studies." What. The. Fudge. I thought I would only ever see the kind of kid that spoke that way on TV! Because I didn't know how else to respond in a more agreeable manner, I felt I'd at least try out what my mom would constantly say to me while standing and listening to those boring lectures in church, "You must have patience." So I tried it and said, "Okay, what about playing outside. Do you play anything for fun? You could come with us tomorrow and play kickball at the school nearby. We're also doing a water balloon fight after and could use some more people to join us." He scoffed and said, "No. I won't even humor such ideas. I am an English Major. Those things would be a distraction to my future career path." The shit was wrong with this dude? I couldn't help but laugh as I replied, "Dude, you know what humor is? Cause, what's hilarious is that your ease of arrogance and disregard for basic human empathy is both painful and embarrassing to everyone here but you!" But as much as I wanted to dislike him, I don't think it's his fault how he's been conditioned to respond to anything fun outside of academics. Ms. Kathy's encouragement of his stuck-up responses with her head nods and saying that she loves her "perfect son" makes me want shove him down to the ground and tell him that he doesn't have to be afraid of her and seek her approval, and that he can break free from her by screaming, "What, you want PERFECT!? Bitch I'm better than perfect! I'm REAL!"

Ms. Kathy asked if I had any hopes for the future myself. I told her that outside from living as I wanted and having fun while doing it, not so much. She asked what school I was now attending and what I decided for my major. I told her that I decided not to attend college. Then she said something that immediately changed any effort that I was putting forth to tolerate her. She responded, "Oh, well don't you worry. I can teach you to become a more literate individual. And that will help you in becoming a valuable member of society who will have something dignified to contribute." I shook my head and told her that she could continue talking down to people and thinking of me as being ignorant and in need of help or anything else that might give her pleasure but that I would not continue to force myself to act friendly to anyone who believes that being personally educated in life and living for oneself has anything to do with mindlessly following authority and pursing intellectual superiority.

Shakespeare and Doestoyevsky don't mean dickens if I don't understand them.

And I don't give a Faulkner if your major is in English literature.

### Chapter 13

**September 17, 2006**

It's Sunday...about eight o'clock in the afternoon and today was one of those dumb days that gets me all thinking about stuff.

Earlier, I was out in the backyard playing with my brothers and cousin. We were out there doing what any group of energetic guys do when they get together on a lazy weekend. We were together playing made up games with plenty of mayhem and breaking whatever was around us - tree branches and wooden boards mostly.

When we had to stop because we almost seriously injured the youngest one, we talked about pointless nonsense that we all find hilarious. Sometimes, I think that the embarrassing stories that we have of one another aren't the best things to bring up just because we see a chance to get back at one another for something that we didn't like or felt made fun of for. We should probably stick to making references to tv shows, movies, or all those words we say when we're around one another that have developed into our own ridiculous way of speaking that only we, or anyone who becomes familiar with us, understands.

While everyone else continued talking nonsense, joking, and laughing with and at one another, one my brothers got up to feed the pregnant rabbit. He's usually the only one who cares to do so. I think it makes him happy. I don't know what happened to the others we had. My parents probably made them dinner and fed them to us without telling us again.

Not too long after he got up to feed them, we heard him gasp. I thought, "Oh, she had the babies," but then he screams, "NOOO!" We got up and hurried to where they were and then saw my brother walk out of the shed cringing, and shivering, holding a face of disgust and in his eyes, tears started forming as he said to us, "They're bleeding. I think she's eating them." We just looked at each other thinking, "WHAT?"

"I gotta get them out," he muttered. We all poked our heads inside the shed, then back out. My brother shook his head, tried to speak but then began throwing up. After a while of us thinking and saying "What the fuck", we checked the shed again but this time my brother kneeled down and used a flashlight so we had a better view.

The mood quickly changed as he looked up at us with a big smile and said with relief, "I think she's just cleaning them." My cousin yelled out, "Stuuuupid bunnies!"

I think we all felt this affected us in a deeper way but none of us talked about it really. We just continued awkwardly laughing. I don't think I would even be able to clearly explain what I felt. I don't think I understand it well enough for me to be able to express those kinds of feelings or thoughts to another person. It's such a vulnerable state to be in, and I think they might feel the same way and not want to expose that side of themselves to anyone. I know I sense the deeper meaning of what happened but I just can't put it all into words.

I sometimes think about how things would be if I said more. I know we're related...I mean, _we all are_. We are all related to one another as people that come from the same ancestors if you follow our lineage as far as is possible. But we're more related biologically because of our parents and I think that's supposed to mean something. It's supposed to mean a lot, says everyone I've ever known. But I don't feel it. We're close because of our genes but how close are we because of how much we share about our experiences. How close are we with one another as people?

If I did say more, how would I even do it? Do I say everything, and end up annoying them as much as I sometimes annoy myself with the endless thoughts that I can't even make sense of for myself? Do I share just what I think will make them not think of me in any negative way? Or can we just talk about anything and have that be okay?

How would that even work? Maybe there are some things they wouldn't want to ever know about me or anyone else. Do I just say what will make them happy? I don't think I would like that...I guess because it wouldn't make me feel right about myself...then could I just say that? Do I even want to talk about my _"feelings"_ ; _o_ r my lack of feelings about certain things? Would I even be able to communicate any of it in a sensible manner if I can't even explain it to myself, and would an explanation even be necessary?

I feel kinda stupid philosophizing, but I guess this part at least somewhat makes sense to me right now: If I want to effectively share my life with others to form something more, I first need to know "thyself." I need to know what I want and how I want to go about it. I guess all that stuff that I've been reading about the importance of your own relationship to yourself is true. So before anything else, I need to think about my relationship to myself. That is important - My relationship to myself is now important to me.

And I don't know how things can become more meaningful with others. We're different people, with different lives, making different decisions for ourselves and so I think in order to make it work, we both have to really want it. I think about how when we play together, we need to have rules and boundaries and an understanding that we all share to make things go right and so we know how to do our best to avoid seriously hurting ourselves. Maybe when the time comes that we start doing something similar for our relationship and we start making decisions together, we can develop and enjoy something more than just a fun, nonsensical life with each other. But for now, I have to think about my own life and where I want it to be headed.

### Chapter 14

**December 17, 2006**

My mom just told me she'd had enough. That she couldn't take it anymore and it's because of me that she feels this way. I wasn't going stand there and agree, no matter how much she sobbed or told me that she loved me. I said nothing and she screamed that her only two options to end this pain are to swallow an entire bottle of pills and end her life or to leave and prostitute herself because she wouldn't be good at anything else. I shake my head even now, for how she feels about herself.

If I could talk to someone and express honestly what I feel from this, they might think of me as a terrible son and I'd be okay with that because I never agreed to belong to anyone in the first place. I don't feel sorry for her or feel the need to comfort her. I didn't tell her everything was going to be okay because I don't know that. I can't know the future. I can't know _our_ future.

I actually feel annoyed and upset and not because she told me all these terrible things, or because of how she feels, and definitely not because I believe that I'm the one to blame. Although it's hard for me not to feel sad knowing that the woman who gave birth to me, and who I'm supposed to have so much admiration for, had literally fell to her knees and begged me to make things better _for her_ , I feel, at the same time, that kind of behavior to be ridiculous.

If she...or anyone for that matter wants me to show any kind of affection, I'm not going to do it purely out of my own or another person's instinct for comfort. I don't want to be that way. I don't want to become another person's emotional convenience. I don't want my relationships to become like Edith's and little Valerie's relationship. Edith can go ahead and give hugs and comfort to her little sister every time that she feels afraid of doing something on her own, but I'm not going to be **that** person. I want others to know that my contact means something. That if I am to pat them on the back, extend my hand for a handshake, hug them, or show any kind of affection, that I will do that because they have earned it and because I genuinely feel an undeniable respect, admiration, or thoughtful desire to share my affection. I don't want it to be an automatic thing that I do and I don't want to nurture any emotional dependency. I want to know and I want them to know that when I extend my arms and move in to hug them, I'm doing it, not because I want them to see me as a person who will allow them easy way out when they are afraid, I'm doing it because they were afraid and because they found the courage to do something that was really difficult to do. And the physical response and emotion that I will want to share, I'll know was not without meaning and a genuine admiration or affection, that I cannot or will not want to deny. As of right now, I have no one in my life that I have ever experienced that with and that saddens me deeply.

But more than sad, I am also feeling so frustrated about how much everyone around me really believes that I or anyone else is responsible for their happiness. I don't want to go back to allowing myself to be controlled by anger, but it's so hard right now. In those moments, when I'm being told I have to change to make others happy with their own lives, I just want to scream out, _"FUCK THAT, and FUCK YOU if you believe that I should be responsible for another's life of happiness that's been neglected."_ I know if I say that, it'll just escalate things further and cause more anger and make me more annoyed.

Right now I have to remind myself that I'm not going to be the kind of person in life who feels I must take it out on others if I ever feel my life has been wasted. I'm going to be better. Especially with those less psychologically or emotionally developed, who will be even more ignorant and confused about life in the same way that I was as a kid growing up in this family and in the same way that I admit that I still am.

Maybe someday I'll look back at this entry and feel proud that I've fulfilled myself throughout my life or at least blamed no one else if I couldn't stay happy.

### Chapter 15

**January 9, 2007**

"The more I know, the less I feel  
The more I know, the less I feel  
So how then, can I describe  
The way I feel inside  
If I don't understand  
All that I call my life"

Same day today like it was yesterday. And as much as I know I love it this way, I can't help but feel like it'd be much more if the people I once called friends were still around to enjoy our time together - the way it was before.

I have so much time to myself, to enjoy my solitude, to think about and learn about the vastness all around me and of my human mind, yet I still feel my life is a bit lacking. I guess, as much as I would prefer not to feel it necessary to live among others, I can't escape the reality that I am a social creature and that I do at times feel great enjoyment in the company of others. Especially of those who aren't critical of me for how much more others believe that I should do or those who do not criticize me because of my lack of ambition to do anything greater in my life. I may not be growing material things around me, attaining more, and becoming more "respected" for that, but I do feel that I'm starting to grow somewhat in my understanding of myself and what kind of life I want to live.

The biggest benefit to spending so much time alone, while everyone else I know is busy and distracted working morning to late afternoon jobs, is that I have the opportunity to look back through this journal and watch myself grow up and see the different ways that I've expressed myself over the years.

I kind of remember when my kindergarten teacher assigned me and the rest of her students to start this journal project....I remember, but not too well. It became so much of a habit to write every day, that it wasn't until about the 4th or 5th grade that I started questioning why I continued doing this if it didn't really matter anymore. I wasn't getting a grade and most of what I wrote was about fighting, throwing stink bombs in the halls, lighting fireworks, bullying kids and convincing them to do things they didn't want to - which made me feel cool and superior - and doing all other kinds of things that I would get away with at school but that also caused me to occasionally get into trouble with teachers, the principal, and my parents. Without even knowing it, I was creating a personal record of all the things that would probably anger or upset others if they were to find out how involved I was in the behaviors, influence, and troubles of others in elementary school. And this might seem terrible, but I don't regret any of it. Even though I might feel somewhat responsible and not okay that I didn't understand what I was doing at the time, I don't blame myself or think any less of myself because of it and even now I still feel pleasure from being "bad."

I've thought about no longer writing. I've felt that I should stop and get rid of it so that no one would ever find all this and learn these things they might not like about me. But I couldn't deny how cool it was to have a way to look back at myself and laugh about what I had done and written about, and even learn now that I'm not ashamed of any of it (though I don't want others to believe that it's my intention to consciously harm others or that I hope for cruelty onto others). Yeah, there are some things that I did and wrote about that I still don't really have answers for the reasons behind my actions at the time, but that's okay because now that I have so much less distractions in my life, I can have time for myself and some of that nifty "self-examination" that...actually hasn't been as awful as I thought it would be. I don't want to get rid of my past writings because of that and now I've also found another reason to want to continue writing.

Lately I've been having some really intense and vivid dreams. The reason I think, is because I've started meditating and taking 15 minute naps each day. It's really hard to make sense of the thoughts and ideas that go on in my mind during those sessions so I'm going to start writing down anything that I happen to remember from my dreams in the morning and whatever ideas or thoughts are still racing through my mind after I nap and meditate. Maybe doing that will help me find some structure to my crazy.

Reading back what I wrote this morning was really difficult for me to make sense of in my mind. I mean, I could see the words and read them all individually but I found it hard to read flowing from one word to the next and grasp any meaning from it. I could see the pieces, but not how they were supposed to fit and work together. In the dream, it felt so big and important but then looking back at it, my mind told me nothing. After about 4 hours, I started relating the way that I can remember feeling in the dream to my development in awareness and emotions throughout the years from what I have been reading from my journal and then suddenly but slowly the words came together and it now means something to me.

I read it and I feel a significance in myself to not only learning more knowledge but to also remember not to neglect any feeling that I may have or want and to accept the importance of going through emotional experiences to learn about myself. It also means to me, that I now understand the kind of persons that I want around me when I do experience a sense of wanting company or others in my life. Being personally happy and alone - the that way I am - is better than being surrounded by many people but still feeling emotionally depressed, confused, and lonely. If I want company, I want them to acknowledge that only they can make sense of the meaning in their lives and that they depend on themselves, and not on me, to be happy.

I have all these fragments of how I want to feel about my life but don't know exactly how to get there from here. It feels like my life is a story that lacks any foreseeable, definite, single intended purpose so it just goes on and on and the only important idea I've come to realize is that it's about the same person throughout - It's about me. Huh...Like that book I remember lending to my 7th grade teacher...which she never returned. Why didn't she ever give it back? I think I would miss it more if I had actually written it myself. The only writing I contributed to that book was my printed name under my class picture that was taped to the last page of the book. I guess because we were all told to sign our own copy, we were supposed to feel that we had earned something and that we should feel proud of the book, but as a 1st grader I only cared about having it with me at all times so that I could it show off to others and feeling cool. It was never really all that meaningful to me. So, I guess this can be different and might end up actually being something that I might want to continue holding on to, so that later on I'll still have all these passages, and I'll have written more that I'll be able to look back on again and see even more of my progress.

I may not remember the exact moment that I was assigned to start this project or even the day that I wrote my first entry, but I do remember that on the last day of kindergarten, my teacher said to us that we should keep writing even if school was over because our lives are important. At the time, I just did it because that's what we do as kids. We do what we're told is best for us. And what's best for me today is to realize more each and every day just how important my life really is to me. And if I have any aspiration in life, it's to live it well and live it meaningfully.

Thank you Ms. Walker for helping me understand.

"The best way to be proud of a story you make is to actually live it, and live it freely without force, and allow it to someday become something more meaningful you will always keep and that you will also want to share with others."

### Chapter 16

**March 26, 2007**

"I woke up again today.  
Tomorrow I hope to do the same."

_Note to self_ : You should get someone ELSE to write and interpret these dreams and thoughts for you. Someone who can sit next to you, and as your eyes are closed, write them down and have them tell you what they mean. But then they might ask more annoying questions and nope, we don't want that. Maybe someday we will create the technology to record dreams and then life will be so much easier to make sense of.

_Note to the part of me that just made that note_ : No more complaining and whining. Just take a healthy break from writing and analyzing, go relax and have some fun. You can continue this when you're feeling motivated again.

### Chapter 17

**April 7, 2007**

"How long does a life span?"

I woke up again today.

It almost didn't happen.

2 hours before I was lying alone, warm in bed, I was in a car with some friends on the way back from some late-night-early-morning club that they dragged me to, last minute. It wasn't raining anymore but the road was still reflective and wet. I was in the passenger seat, Robert, who was driving, was quiet and tired, and Ana who was in the back was beyond tired but not so quiet. She was asleep and now snoring louder than any guy I had ever heard snore. I was thinking about how much I also wanted to be in bed so that I could rest too. Then as we turned with the car, we all felt a sudden pull that prevented all of us from being in any kind of wakeful quiet mode. The car was sliding sideways and as much as Robert tried, there wasn't going to be an immediate stop. The reality is that in life, there are certain things that we do not control and cannot avoid.

When the car did stop just inches away from the guard rail, I think we all thought about that same thing we will all be unable to prevent – though it came out expressed a bit differently from each of us. Robert laughed nervously as he said for the first time that I had ever known him, "This really scared me. We're lucky it's so early and no other cars are on the road." Ana shot up from the backseat and said, "I just had a dream we we're ALL GONNA DIE!" And I smiled, and I laughed, and I thought, "Yeah, we're _all still going to die_." And then I stopped smiling and I thought even more.

I'm glad that I am still able to continue thinking.

We didn't really talk much else about that sudden and terrifying experience. And I don't think they're going to want to talk much more about it either. It's only something that's probably going to be brought up when we're out socializing and have nothing more significant to talk about. They will say,

"Hey, remember that one night we went out and this crazy thing happened on our way back...

It was crazy."

### Chapter 18

**July 23, 2007**

"As an electron seems to follow all other electrons present before it to establish its place, it makes sense that within us, composed and reacting on this same basic but far more complex structure, there would exist a primal and emotional equivalent to look to our surroundings and toward others to follow, in order to understand our place in all of existence. We may hope to be able to escape this phenomenon by learning more and more about it but even when intellectualized, the feeling does not cease to be expressed. As much as we may know or discover about the exact measures of what we are and the solid functions of our existence, and no longer rely on romanticized myths of our past, we still need a story to follow. We need some sense of structure for us to point to and say,

'There...

that one's me.'"

Well, that was awkward.

I wonder how common it is for other people to think and talk to themselves. I don't think I'm the only one who has ever talked to themselves. I thought I was whispering but I guess I don't know how to whisper since he said I was pretty loud. It was a little embarrassing but I bet he's done it before too. Walking in on me while I was going over and thinking out loud about what I had just dreamt was probably why I shook and quickly became quiet when my brother walked in. I don't know how he might react if he found out about some of the things that I've been dreaming about. I should be more careful, and just do this more quietly.

Usually, there's only a little bit that I remember and so I don't have many ideas or thoughts to write about that get inspired from the dreams but today I've written more than usual. I stopped wondering how that can even be possible - to write more and feel like I know more but then not be able to explain it or really understand what I've written. It just happens in my mind and I'm not the one consciously creating it. At least, I don't think so.

I remember years ago, I would mindlessly get up and start my day, but this way I think is so much better. Waking up each morning and making an effort to notice my busy mind and remain my body still has its rewards. When I'm in a state between being fully awake and in a dream, I don't want to move because I think that makes the lucidity go away. Sometimes I don't have to worry about that because there are times when I physically cannot move, even though I am awake and aware of my body. It can be quiet terrifying. In fact, the first time it happened I thought I was dying. But I've learned to calm myself and not fight to escape whenever it occurs now because what I might experience in these states of altered consciousness, I don't want to go away without taking in as much as I can when it happens.

And even though I can't hear it, sometimes it can be so annoying. It irritates me how much I want what is in there even though much of it I don't understand. In fact, most times after I get things written down, very little of it makes any sense to me and so most of my day is consumed by thoughts of other thoughts that I cannot comprehend and that I do not feel I've actively created myself. That's when I start arguing and thinking out loud to myself in frustration. It's like there is someone else in my mind or a different part of me when I dream that is able to understand the things that are going on in my mind but when I wake up most all of the actual understanding is gone. And even though it has been especially distracting on certain days, it is so much fun when I do actually make sense of some of what I've written, and I get hit with this immediate wave of relief and positive emotion about myself and my life alone.

I know I'm not insane because if I was, I don't think I would be able to recognize how little sense the combination of words and the sentences make when I start writing with no intention or idea of what I'm trying to do. I just write what I sense from the vague images or scenarios I remember and don't question it until later when I have time to dedicate to making some actual sense of it instead of it just remaining a stream of nonsense.

When my eyes are closed and I'm there, I know I get it! I get it! I feel an...I don't know...grand sense of everything. If not everything - since that may just be a feeling - at least a sense of so much more that I can't properly explain as soon as I get up to go on about the rest of my stupid day.

I may not be insane, but I think I am a little crazy. Maybe more than a little. I'm not afraid to acknowledge this side of myself, and accept it, and explore it further because I just think of it as a powerful emotional, psychological, and imaginative ability. I know there are others my age, who have told me that sometimes they might feel like screaming or jumping around and laughing for no apparent reason in front of company but also that they don't think that they should act on those burst of excited emotions because other people relate those behaviors to being childish. And they also tell me that they feel really uncomfortable asking questions or talking about things that have happened to them that are not typically talked about or considered way too weird to mention because if they did bring it up, they would be accused of having something wrong with them, said to be disturbed, and in need of therapy. I tell them that I'm okay if they want to call me crazy because I do sometimes scream, jump and hop around, or laugh my ass off from feeling intense excitement when learning or discovering something new. Even just the thought of finding something real that I have never considered or understood before, makes my entire body shift with jittery emotion and laughter. I had that experience once at a friend's party and the people there kept laughing and asking me what I was on. I guess a natural high is considered socially unacceptable by my peers but I don't need an alcoholic excuse for my excited behavior.

My parents also think it's childish for me to be this way and say that I need to learn to grow up. They still want me to do something other than spend so much time alone in my room but I'm okay like this. I enjoy writing what's in my mind, thinking about it, and having things be this way for me. They might not find this useful but I think it can be.

"If only we had someone else with us to learn from, place above us, and teach us how to be better...but that's not the way it works. We fill in the Heroes ourselves. The only way that they can exist is through our minds. And so what they really are is an expression of us. They are who we hope to be.

And we create their story; We create Our story.

This is the story of the greatest person that ever lived."

### Chapter 19

**September 24, 2007**

"The most profound form of communication manifests (clearly revealed through understanding) in the absence of either words or sound; it is expressed in its most fundamental form: a presence of exchange incapable of being perceived as either insincere or forced – for we hold no direct control of it, but only in being. Tacit - understood without being openly expressed; implied. ("Language, an annoying modern day necessity".) An emotional bond that requires no spoken communication because it is so devastatingly intimate and experienced so positively, so wonderfully, and so overwhelmingly by....whomever has equally grown to understand, remember, embrace, and cherish of life's most important connections."

I actually recalled a lot this time! I woke up this morning from one of the most surreal feeling dreams that I've had and I think I got something out of it. It felt like I was in a movie. Not like my usual paranoid feeling of imagining myself being filmed or observed at every moment and trying to idiotically look like a badass just in case someone happened to actually be watching (which I should probably stop doing, but it's hard when my mind is constantly wondering, "But what if..."), but it was like I was a real life character living out the most incredible story ever.

I heard a silent voice call my name...or what I believed in the dream was my name and had always been my name.

"Turn to me."

I turned to face to where I was being called and could see myself in the 3rd person looking so awesome doing it. I felt so powerful and confident; feeling like I was the most important person, not exactly in a movie, but in what I believed was my real life. I experienced that shot of the hero looking back with that empowering look and stance after having saved the world.

I felt the voice was speaking to me when I looked out still confused as to who or what was speaking, "Know now that you were born without a name, were given a name, but this that they call you now is not your name."

Things started becoming extremely surreal after this point. I felt like I was in between being a character that I was living out in the dream and being my actual self but participating in the ongoing story that was supposed to be played out as though it was a dream.

I wondered if I was becoming delusional to which the silent voice answered, "No, this is a dream. The grandest of illusions that you will experience. One that is very real and truly felt, where you break, for a bit of time, away from ordinary concept of time into the extraordinary definite reality of infinity \- away from the physical and instead the realm of the result of your physicality. Here, where for a moment, dreams are alive, anything is possible, loved ones don't have to die, and where - if you care to work for it - you can learn to be all you'll ever hope to be."

I told the voice that if it was all a dream, then it would be able to tell me who I was. I commanded that it speak my name. It responded that the name was not as important as holding an understanding and in order to begin to retain an understanding of anything and everything, I must first know what and who I want to be. I remember I was still feeling confused and like it was asking something of me so I replied to it, "well...I'm...uhm....I know I'm an animal. I am a human ape. Moments ago, I thought I was born an ordinary man called Orlan Marsters, who became known as The Great Orlan Marsters to the many that I have helped in this marvelous life. But now you come and inform me that this is all a fiction and that it is wrong."

It laughed at my stumbling observations.

"Silly. Nothing is ever wrong. And all names and words are fiction. And if you can remember all of this, this time, you will wake up and you will know that you know that. And when you do, you need to figure out your own fiction to be called and don't worry, even if you cannot completely live up to the image at every moment, know that at least at every moment you will be setting up the information within, of a potential to express a grander being and a better life. A name may not define who we are in the present moment, but they do define who we strive to be."

Now wake up refreshed, cause now you must consider how you want to be and where you want to go from here..."

Man, it was so damn exciting but what a drop in elation minutes after waking up and thinking about my actual name and who I have been or have ever wanted to be, like the voice was telling me to consider. In comparison to Orlan Marsters from the dream, my name sounds so empty...or at least, not as big. At least I've retained, or at least constructed, what seems to be something useful from the dream even if it might not actually be as accurate as I might want to believe it is - it has been almost a half-hour after waking up. This is actually making me think more deeply and ask myself some serious questions. And it's all fiction anyway right, so why not use the fiction that can best help me?

"Magnificent is to view the grand and its parts, and eventually gather for ourselves an understanding of great intellectual and emotional depth about how what we can know is not a judgment of right or wrong but an awareness that it is all wisdom, defined as the neutral awareness of actions and consequence and information as possibility. And the information expressing self, is the parts of everything that we are, have been, can hope to be, or will ever be."

### Chapter 20

**September 28, 2007**

What determines an "actual" name anyway? I've been known by many throughout my life. I remember when I first entered school and my parents shocked my little mind when they told me that the name that they and everyone else that I knew had been calling me up until that point was not, in fact, _MY NAME!_ What the fudge-sicles, mom and dad? You guys made me go through an identity crisis at the age of 5! Had I found out at the age of 3 or 4, entering pre-k, it might not have mattered since I might not have remembered, but I didn't begin school until I was 5 and was placed right into kindergarten. I'll never forget how lost, confused, and abandoned I felt being left in a unfamiliar room full of strangers (and with a different name!), instead of in the warm, familiar comfort of the play room at home where my mom would reach over to scratch my head, hug, and kiss me before telling me to finish playing so I could eat and have a juice pouch.

I adjusted to that "new" name pretty well and fast enough that it didn't become a problem with my friends and my teacher but at home, I would still be called at times by the original name I knew myself as (and even today, a few of my relatives still call me by that name). In elementary school, I was given yet another name. And one that developed much more naturally and that I felt myself take on without conflict. And that's probably the name that I like more than the others because of all the great memories that I have associated to it. It's what I was called by the friends that I knew throughout my school years and for as long as I knew them after that. I don't have a name people call me that makes me feel as great as it felt being called by the name I had in my dream but if I could make it happen, my new name would be a name that would inspire those same strong emotions in me again.

When I introduce myself, I use my nickname because it's what I prefer to be called but I also use my birth name and jokingly refer to it as my slave name. I didn't have a choice in what name I would be called when I was born, so because the decision was made for me without my consent, I call it my slave name. I think about how important it even is, what I'm called. I know that what I'm called doesn't determine who I am. My history and the actions that I take at any point determine who I am in the moment. All the different names, I do associate to different parts of myself. Different personalities, states of being, and sometimes emotional triggers and behaviors that have developed from past feelings, experiences, habits, or personal events. And I don't really care what others call me, since that decision is for them to make, but I do know that the people who call me by my preferred name are the ones that I'm more happy to talk with than those who decide not to acknowledge and respect how I want to be addressed. And that's important to me, I guess, because I also think that the name I decide for myself has a big impact on my actions. I know that the name doesn't define me but names and what we call things and people, and how we say them, are representations of something we want to see and how we want to see them.

My mom and dad both use the name they decided for me at birth. But they say it differently than one another when talking to me. My mom says it kindly, as though I was a small child or pet, when she wants to show me affection. My dad says it much more sternly and as though he is secretly trying to make it sound more masculine. And they both change the way that they say it when they're upset with me or when they are trying to convince me of something that they want me to agree to. They make fun and don't understand when friends call me by any other name, but they don't have to like it. I understand that they call me by the name that for them represents their first born, what they want for me, and what they are feeling about me when they speak to me. And because I have the power to do the same for myself, and because I know that I can have a much better understanding of my life, I want the name that I use for myself to represent my decision to be my own way, I want it to be something that I can comfortably identify with, and I also want it to be a reminder of something more that I really hope to someday be.

So whatever name others may have for me is fine, because I know now that the name I'll use for who and what I want to strive to be. And I like this thought...and I like this feeling.

I like who I've decided I want to be.

### Chapter 21

**October 27, 2007**

"Specific events don't matter as much as how they were experienced and felt. Very few will be able to benefit from the mundane details of what becomes a memory. We do not enjoy becoming overwhelmed and exhausted, we just need something to believe. So be Honest to how things felt because that's what this is about. It's about how things truly felt and how much that creates for us. What actually occurred doesn't change and the opinions of what may have occurred, in the course of human time, language, and interpretation, will change from its original form and so will not really matter."

My cousin mentioned a dream he had recently. He said that he had woken up feeling like someone was at the foot of his bed and wanted to hurt him. I told him about the time I felt something similar when I first started taking an interest in my dreams and exploring what I could get out of them. I told him that what I remembered was, not only feeling but also seeing these small people with big heads coming up to the side of the bed and just staring at me with their big dark almond-shaped eyes. I felt a trembling terror that I had never experienced before, even if I wasn't really trembling - which I realized when I tried to get away but wasn't able to because my body was almost entirely paralyzed. I tried to scream as hard as I could but no air or sound came out of my mouth. That's when I started to feel like all that exertion was what was causing me to have trouble breathing. On my chest, I felt a heavy pressure, as though there was something twice my weight placed on top of me. My eyes were the only things that I could move. I told him that I think it might be the same kind of experience reported by people who have claimed to have been abducted from their beds by aliens. This freaked him out. I wasn't saying that that's what I believed happened to him or me. I was just saying that those experiences might be more common than many people realize and that the reason we don't hear more about them is because of the fear people might have if they go on to reveal what they experienced and are then thought of as demented or laughed at. It happened twice to me within a week and the second time I had prepared myself by saying that I would remember that it wasn't really happening and that I should just stare back and do everything in my power to not let the fear take over me. I did my best to loop in my mind that I was only dreaming and tried to imagine the terrifying midget alien dude as comically as possible. And since then, I haven't had that happen to me again.

Other things came up like stories that we had all heard from relatives when we were younger about angels, demons, and creatures or people that are thought of to be evil. Most were not stories they had experienced themselves. They were either stories that they were also told of when they were growing up or stories that they had recently heard from a friend of a friend. Only one of the stories involved someone we actually knew. His story was of a lady in a white dress that flew in through the window and then struck his knee with a hammer, which he said happened at night while he was in bed having trouble sleeping. While sharing all these stories with one another, I don't really go as far as to believe that they actually happened. I can't say that I fully understand what's happening, but I don't really think it's happening outside of our overly stressed or tired minds. Even my own terrifying experiences only happen when I'm asleep, when I'm having trouble falling asleep, or when I'm so tired or thinking too much about some worry, anxiety, or struggle that I have before sleeping. None of the supernatural horror happens while I'm just out and about, fully awake, happy and enjoying my day. And even though I tried to point that out to my cousin, he just replied, "Yeah, but anything is possible so you never know." I'm willing to remain open to possibilities (I'm not sure about EVERYTHING literally being possible) but I don't see why I myself would want to continue spreading those stories to others in a way that they then begin to believe that I'm supporting something I don't really believe. I think it's fun to consider stuff like that and fun to talk about but I just don't feel okay believing anything that I have no way of proving or that I cannot consistently rely on.

I asked him why he thinks he believes it really could have been aliens or spirits and he said that it would make sense to believe since he's heard about these kinds of experiences from so many people and family members before so "how could it not be true?". It seems that maybe what people believe isn't really determined by thinking things through and testing or verifying them but it works more like a popularity contest of different beliefs or like social trends in your family throughout the years where some of them just survive for far longer periods of time than others. And so you grow up and still have those same beliefs or you want to have those same beliefs because of how long they have been with you. You might feel that the amount of time you've believed something means it has to be true. It might be likely that what the people around us believe the most is likely to determine what we will also come to believe. Maybe the influence of the larger number of believers overpowers our own ability to decide for ourselves a lot of the time.

I remember in elementary, I was far more inclined to believe in UFOs and sinister extraterrestrials because we would watch a lot of conspiracy and spooky documentaries on TV. Some of them were broadcast in different languages, and with subtitles, which would make them even creepier. I have memories of family sleepovers where we would watch news reports about strange happenings and unsolved mysteries before bed. It helped with the fear that I had, knowing my brothers, cousins, and I all slept in the same room but it also meant that we would sometimes try to scare each other into thinking we weren't safe by saying that we had seen something we thought was coming for us. And we could really convince each other when the majority of us would say it was true.

Now that I'm thinking about it, these fascinations with aliens even carried on throughout other points of my life, away from any crowd or outside pressure to believe. In middle school, I would have thoughts of being an alien myself and the possibility of just not being aware of it all these years. Maybe I thought those things because I wanted to believe I was special in some way because so many things started changing for me then. Even just a few years ago in high school, I would imagine what I would do if I were ever to be abducted by aliens from another world. I would be outside in the streets and consider, "What if it really did happen? Would I try to get away or would I just hope that they weren't really all that terrible and sinister and would let me travel peacefully with them?"

There are also a lot of other points in my life that I remember playing with ideas that might not be so easily possible but that were really fun to wonder about and consider. I remember in the 2nd or 3rd grade I would have dreams about me, my brothers, and friends being ninjas or a group of heroes. We would all share our fun dreams with each other when we would get together and then spend the day re-enacting them over and over. Then we would re-tell exaggerated versions of the dream stories to other friends or new friends we had made, until eventually we came to the belief that maybe it was really possible that we had all experienced the exact same dream. We had other fun beliefs similar to that. There were the funny looks that we would sometimes end up giving each other in certain situations, that we recognized as signals that we both knew what the other was thinking. And we really did feel and think a certain amount of what the other was experiencing but that's probably because we spent so much time together doing the same kinds of things and had become so alike that we even developed similar reaction and thoughts to the same situations but I don't believe that we were literally reading each other's minds. And being involved in growing up together without that big of an age gap, meant that we were likely at times to dream about the same kind of things or scenarios but there is no actual indication or way to prove that we were actually together in the same dream.

It is fun to imagine fantastic things and to know that I am able to also really, really scare myself with my thoughts but I also like knowing that what I decide to believe isn't dependent on the popularity of a belief or what I might want to believe was real, as exciting or cool as it might be, and that instead I can take control of what I believe and make my beliefs the kind that are based on something more that lead me to a better understanding of my life and how things actually are. I can be open and at least consider - but not entirely believe - all possibilities, and I really enjoy wondering about what could be because that gives me a lot to think about and hope for, and is something that I will always continue doing, but being a person with an imagination that allows me to consider and wonder doesn't mean that I want to decide to automatically accept any current or future belief without first having an actual reason to believe. There was a point in my life when I thought very little about where my beliefs came from or how they developed. Now that I know that I can have some control over these ideas that govern how I perceive the world and my own existence, I am going to decide to continue to enjoy the ridiculousness of my imagination, but I have no reason to want to take it further and actually support the foolishness that I may want to believe in but that I cannot clearly substantiate.

### Chapter 22

**February 14, 2008**

I woke up today to find myself alone – ah, sweet morning solitude, nothing is more preferred. Just me, my mind, and a big empty space where I can freely feel excited to explore reality and my childhood interests. I remember there was a time when my parents would say that I should never be anywhere alone, and that I needed someone to look after me if they ever went out, but now I'm not even informed when they will disappear. I had a few hours of fun before I got a phone call and had to stop my temporary solitary life. My mom sent me to go pick up my little brother. Even though I really dislike being distracted from my time alone, today I'm really glad I was because of what happened when I went to my brother's school.

I got there and I didn't want to be stopped by anyone there who might recognize me – relatives or other. I just wanted to find my brother and be on our way. My mom said she usually picks him up by the big tree up front so that's where I waited. And as I stood there, I remembered he once came home with a black eye and when I asked him about what happened he said, "Nothing." Thinking he got into a fight and didn't want to say anything for fear of getting into trouble, I told him that I wouldn't say anything to our parents if it was from a fight that he got into. I found out later, that the black eye wasn't from a fight but from running into a low hanging branch from that big tree.

I waited for about 10 minutes and saw a bunch of little kids but not my brother. I walked around to other places that I thought I might find him. I stopped by the monkey bars and wanted to go play but then I saw a girl who I knew back in high school. She was there to pick up her kid. I didn't want to end up having her talk to me and delay the trip further so I turned around and walked in the opposite direction before she could see my face. After a few more minutes, I decided to walk inside the school and look around. I walked in, and a little girl sniffing a 64 pack of crayons bumped into my leg and said, "Oh, Sorry." She looked back behind her, dropped the box of crayons and started to run. I saw that another kid was running our way. I bent down to pick up the box and noticed that it had on it a red gift bow and an orange sticky note with some blue writing that I couldn't make out. I held it out in front of me for the kid running my way, thinking that the little girl that had just ran out probably stole the box of crayons from this kid. I asked if it belonged to him. The kid said, "Thanks. No it was for Rosaline. And I'm a girl. I made it for her but she never takes anything that I give to her."

I hadn't noticed but my brother had been standing next to me for a while. He started laughing and said as I turned to see him, "Man, you're dumb. Terry's a girl even though she doesn't look like it." I didn't make a big deal out of my assumption that the kid with the boyish haircut and unisex school uniform was actually a girl.

I did wonder so I asked Terry why she did it if the other girl doesn't seem to "LIKE" her back. She looked up and said to me, "Because of the happy I feel when I think about her and it makes me do things like this and I like how I feel when I do it because I know it's for me only."

I nodded my head and smiled too.

My brother and I headed home.

Now that I'm back in my room, I don't even feel the need to continue seeking my sense of accomplishment for the day. Seeing that little girl's care for how she genuinely feels about another person regardless of the lack of affection returned is enough to satisfy me emotionally for the day.

### Chapter 23

**March 15, 2008**

The flea markets just don't feel as big as they used to. Maybe it would be different if I shrunk a few feet to experience again what it was like when I was 6, seeing all the different stands for the first time.

I remember I would run 2 groups of families ahead of my parents and flow in and out of an endless maze of toys, wooden furniture, TVs and radios, used clothing, candy, and snacks. I didn't have my own money (and still don't really) but I always wanted the nachos before we would head back home. Just plain tortilla chips smothered in hot yellow nacho cheese. I would wait a few minutes before I would eat them so that some of the chips would begin to get soggy and slimy. They were my favorite up until the day I accidentally ate one of my baby teeth without realizing it.

All the chips were gone, I had finished licking the paper bowl of all the remaining cheesy goodness, I walked over to the trash can near the entrance, the wind blew against my face and I started to feel a new sensation. It was a breezy naked break inside of my mouth which made me freeze in place next to the smelly trash can. I flicked my tongue into my new hole and made a face of disgust as I suddenly realized that the piece of chip that I had in my mouth, which was extra thick and solid and that I swallowed, was probably not a chip at all. Not only was I now missing a part of what was once me, with no idea exactly when I had lost it and ate it, but this natural wound made me feel so exposed and self-conscious. I thought about what my brothers and friends would say. And worse - _what if my parents wanted to take more pictures of me smiling!?_ I didn't want to look different from everyone else.

That memory feels more embarrassing than truly terrifying. I remember earlier, at the age of 4, I discovered a fear of my own mortality when, after blowing out the candles and cutting the first piece of cake at my one and only birthday party, I was handed a clear plastic cup of candy by my mom. It was decorated with the scariest, happiest, creepiest, teary eyed, big eye-lashed, and most malformed clown I had ever seen. Most of the cup was the white face of the demon and its oversized smile. Above the face, there was a yellow triangular hat that stuck out about an inch and a half from the top of the cup. On the sides of the hat, and in the same top position, the clown's oversized white hands waved out to me. The feet were angled upward toward the hands and placed near the center of the cup. I don't know why it made me think of my own...not death or dying, but of me no longer existing after coming to the realization that I was and I am alive. I considered if my life would quickly pass from this point forward, with no time to wonder or enjoy what else there might be to live for. I thought of that moment in my mind as a single photograph of myself and everyone around me enjoying the party – enjoying life – and then flashed to my non-existence and feeling an emptiness and dread that there might never be anything more in between. It was similar to the feeling of losing a tooth and feeling that emptiness but instead of thoughts of embarrassment from what others might think or say, I felt my own overwhelming fear of a life without much personal aspirations or undertakings and therefore missing a meaningfulness that would move with me throughout the years. I wouldn't have been able to explain that at the time but thinking about it now, that's the way I remember experiencing that moment. I stared at everything differently from that point on, constantly thinking, "How important am I? What am I here for along with everyone else?," and, " _Was that stupid crushed up clown crying or laughing at me!?_ "

Usually, after the flea market, my brothers and I would nag our parents to take us to McDonald's where I remember visiting another clown that didn't quite have the same affect on me but that did provide me a meal, a toy, and most importantly - Happiness that I could buy to momentarily distract me from what I was discovering were the inherent frailties of life.

### Chapter 24

**June 8, 2008**

All this work isn't really worthwhile anymore. I know I don't have much to compare it to since, aside from mowing lawns, washing cars, and re-selling candy and other cheap products from dollar stores to make some quick cash when I was younger, this is the first real job I've ever had.

When I was asked if I could help out, I decided I would take on the responsibilities because it didn't seem like something that would really change my life. It's my family's business and we work from home so I don't have to drive anywhere to perform my duties and I felt I could still enjoy my life as it was, only now with some money of my own to spend. And I was prepared to have less time to read, think and write, play games, and learn new things but I didn't expect the blame, threats, and treatment through this new position where a lack of money at any point means you're not working hard enough, failing, or less important than the money itself.

I mean, I'm working and helping out and doing what I can and even doing more with the things that have helped me better understand myself and the world that I live in but still they look at me and say that it's not good enough. If I ever came to believe that my worth as a person should be determined by whether or not I was able to monetize myself in the work that I can do to help myself and other people's lives, then I would no longer be the kind of person I want to be. I don't want to ever live with a belief that success and human achievement should be placed above a life enjoyed and lived well - happily, and meaningfully.

It's becoming more of an obligation to continue now because as much as I dislike admitting it, I decided it would be okay to start working to help them simply because they are my family - as if that should mean everything. But it's not everything. These blood bonds hold no meaning just in themselves. And I shouldn't be under the impression that things will be great when we're together just because _I feel it should_ and because I might have thoughts of them as more than they truthfully are. I've neglected to have an actual personal reason to want to help. I gave no further thought to a reason above just a purely emotional response to want to put in the effort. I felt glad in the moment and could even see myself starting to feel proud for helping but I no longer feel the same way.

If I'm proud of anything, it's of the effort that I've made and nothing else. To say that I am proud of my parents for the way that they have treated me in blaming me for things I cannot control when bills couldn't be paid on time or for believing that the decline of their physical health and the start of their overall suffering and misery is a result of my life would be false, as I actually feel a bit ashamed knowing that I'm supposed to continue seeing them and calling these people, not just _a_ family, but _my_ family.

I feel the warm heavy weight, weigh down on me and stop my movement.

I feel a terrible feeling in admitting shame in all this that I cannot control but I also know it's not a terrible thing to feel because the feeling is real and mine and I will take on the responsibility to respond to it as best I can. As disheartening as it may be for me, I don't think that it has been intentional how they have come to be this way.

I don't blame them.

Through the discouragements, the desire to punish, and the shameful way that the people who helped give life to me now treat me, I feel as though life itself is communicating to me now more than ever. Life speaks to me in faint images of the kind of family that I have always felt that I should have been a part of instead of the family I had no voice to say. "I want to be born from them". It tells me that I can never have another mother; that I can never have another father; that I can never have another group of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, or grandparents to be able to hold in high regard and know that they too belong to my same heritage. I can never know another group of people with a tradition, history, and lineage that I am a direct result from and share so close a genetic relationship with. I can never have another line of humanity that I could say, in the loudest of ways, that I am proud to literally descend from. Life presents me with a mental photo album filled with the family and all the powerful feelings and prideful memories that I have always intimately hoped for but have never had.

It is not an easy thing to admit that I envy those who do not have to dream of a different family or a different life because they have had the support, the encouragement, and the kindness of a family who has been there to help them be who they want to be - not just in words but through actions with meaning.

I know life is not a fairy tale or a dream but it's both amazing and a wonderful thing to feel those small moments in our interactions when it does feel that way (or at least, I can imagine how it can feel that way).

This is life. Deeply personal, powerful, and my own. And like all other life, it can be experienced only once.

I can't restart life but I can refresh my course of action to make myself better instead of continuing to feel sorry for how things are right now. I will continue hoping and reminding myself that I have to work hard for this but never to allow myself to believe that the value of a person is determined by how much money they can generate. I will work to have in my life someday a family I will be proud of and feel proud to decide to be a part of and know intimately, we weren't born silently into it.....we earned our relationship together.

"You don't ever have to feel terrible or ashamed for what you feel...even if what you feel isn't very pretty or positive at all."

### Chapter 25

**September 10, 2008**

I can't remember the last time I've felt this way. My back, my neck, and my shoulders feel so tense and my body is so exhausted. It doesn't feel like I'm really in control of this and I think I want to stop, but how? I don't know if I even can. They're just dreams. I don't think I can stop dreaming. I just want to sometimes not remember experiencing them every single night or every single nap that I take and I want to be able to carry on throughout the day without those flash of memories and the voice going over and over all of the vague dialogue that I do not really want to know.

It wouldn't be a problem if these dreams that I'm now having had more clarity and made sense to me but I lately, I just feel so overwhelmed and filled with anxiety when I forget all the small details that my mind later during the day starts to convince me were really significant. I think most of my dreams have just become really insignificant and mundane but my mind is looking for a deeper meaning that just isn't there. When before I would enjoy hours trying to understand these new insights about myself and my behavior or beliefs, now I only recall waking up in the dream - just as I actually did wake up a few minutes ago \- and then I go about my daily routine in the dream and don't really get much done, just like I feel I won't do much the rest of today because of this stupid silent voice in my head that just won't quiet itself in my mind. So much of my time, I've been dedicating to trying to make sense of all that I can but now this has gone beyond just a momentary annoyance and has become an unwanted frustration to live with.

I've found that music helps distract the sounds in my mind but that is no longer enough.

I wanna rest. I don't want to continue something that is now making me feel so miserable.

### Chapter 26

**September 11, 2008**

This week, I have felt the worst that I have in years. Mostly, it's physical (although I can't deny it's influencing some negative thoughts that I'd rather not have). I feel so stressed out and tense. I don't even know exactly about what. I've learned it helps if I lay in the bathtub for an hour or more and relax by doing some breathing exercises but then the feeling of immediacy and of imminent consequences returns if I don't do something with this raw information that goes round and round in my mind. I can't really enjoy things like I used to. I think I've been training myself to experience this so much and so easily that when I recall even the smallest portion of a dream, I instinctively respond with the need to make sense of it when I know intellectually that I really don't NEED IT and it probably doesn't mean anything that's really going to help me. It's like I'm trying to create a deeper relationship between myself and the rain that's pouring outside my window. As if I have some actual personal power to determine the rain when really, it's just rain, and it's a natural occurrence and it'll happen, whether or not I want to believe there is any meaning in that.

I'm going to stop writing out dreams and the fragments of information that I retain after naps for a while. I'm only going to write down things if I can easily comprehend it and if it is relevant to my waking life. I'll make an effort to have a bit of pointless fun, watch some cartoons like I did when I was younger, and go outside for a walk or climb some trees...well, as soon as it stops raining. For now, I'll put this journal away, open the front door and stand in front of the doorway so I can listen to the rain without feeling the need to try and force it to be anything that it isn't.

### Chapter 27

**September 20, 2008**

I'm glad that everyone's away and I'm alone right now so that I can get this down in silence and without interruption.

This is the type of thing that always makes me feel so terrible about the way I am, even though in my mind I know I'm not. Having a parent that screams when it isn't necessary and when no one is in any real urgent danger, simply because they want to feel respected, does far more harm than anything else. It would be better if we could sit down and have a discussion about the way things have been and what we would like with one another and how best to go about that together but when they see the dialogue as a matter of questioning their authority, any effort to want to resolve disputes and the difficulties in the relationship is instead considered a threat to their belief of what is right or wrong and how things should be and so things end up being nothing more than a shouting match they want to win. I'm glad that I no longer allow myself to become so upset that I let out my anger or frustration by becoming violent with people. I still feel my aggression but I do not let it escalate into physical retaliation. When it does become too much and my rational thoughts become violent forceful imagery and destructive primal intentions, I move myself out of the situation and go run or go somewhere where I can scream and yell and not worry about damaging anything or anyone without reason. When I calm down and can think clearly, I can work on changing my emotional response as best I can by learning what I personally attribute it to.

Even though I accept responsibility for the actions that I take and I work hard to learn to improve or change how I respond, I don't like how this inescapable circumstance makes me feel. These people came together and from them I was born and I will never be able to break free from knowing that. If my life was different with them, then I wouldn't feel like wanting to get away from this understanding but because I don't like how things are between us, I can't help but want to be able to change things so that I can continue onward in my life without the psychological weight of my parents' negative influence following me and having to carry around this heavy heart from knowing how devastatingly I truly dislike who it is I come from. I don't like that I have to go through this every time my mom or dad find something about the way that I live that they dislike or disagree with and feel the need to yell at me for, try and stop me, and make me feel so wrong about myself. I want to be able to stop allowing what they think or say to continue to affect me but I haven't been able to. Even when I'm away from them, their words and blame remain with me in my inner dialogue and I begin to tear up and want so badly not to feel so overwhelmed and tormented with this mental misery that I cannot get away from. My dad can continue trying to stop me by saying that the reason he works so hard is so that I can have a better life than he did and so I must submit to doing things for him like he has done for me. But just because I'm his son and I was born into the man's life doesn't mean I owe him anything. And I don't feel that to be a cruel thing to say or believe. If I ever had kids myself, I hope that I wouldn't immediately form the belief that everything that I would provide for them, I would do because I would then expect them to work or live their lives for me. If they were to help me in anyway, I wouldn't want it to be as a favor or as something in return. I'd much rather that they decide for themselves that they want to help me or anyone else for their own personal reasons and because they have learned to value having me or that person in their life.

When I questioned him about his real reason for wanting me to obey and follow everything that he says and because I physically got in his way so that he could not go outside of the room and leave me with his usual statement that it's because he wants a better life for me, I could feel him heating up and trying to hold back from raising his arms to me. It didn't help that I told him that I would only step away if he made me move or if he stopped holding back and would admit what he hadn't said. He lifted his arms, clenched his fists, and as he forcefully dropped them back down into his sides he screamed, "BECAUSE I ONLY KNOW WHAT I KNOW AND YOU'RE GOING TO BE JUST LIKE ME, THE WAY I BECAME EVERYTHING I HATED ABOUT MY FATHER!" And as that truth exploded and left a resounding silence between us, I could see that up until that moment, he had probably not ever allowed himself to express such brutal, open honesty and allowed himself to admit and feel the devastating shame he has for the relationship he now has, but never wanted in this way, with me.

No matter how different we might want to believe we are from them, the reality is that we have to be 100 percent a part of what makes up our biological parents. But that doesn't mean we must be exactly the same in the way that they lived their life.

We may have the power to begin the creation of new life but we are not gods that determine what any life, outside of our own, ought to be. For me these are more than just words: I will never want and I hope to never punish a child or another person for my own sense of personal failure.

I love to learn and as great a thing that I have decided that I want for my life from this point forward, I am aware that wanting isn't the same as having or doing. There is a lot more that I need to work on with myself so that I can live the way I hope to. There is more that I need to understand and so I must do the only thing that has ever helped me in understanding my troubles in the past. I need to ask questions and gather as much as I can from what's available to me, and from those that are available to help me, so that I can continue my life without the silly resentment of something that I had no control over. I don't want to feel or believe that I need to feel any anger for being born into a family that I do not think highly of. And just because they've helped in the process of creating my life, I do not want to continue to feel an inherent sense of even _needing_ a mother or a father to look up to and feel proud of in order to feel happy about myself. I also no longer want to feel ashamed that I have in the past looked at them falsely to make myself feel better and I want to learn to feel that it's OKAY that I cannot completely get rid of these inborn feelings of wondering where it is I personally come from, and so I also want to feel that it is OKAY that I might always yearn to believe that my elders are better than they really are and that it's OKAY that I might want to believe that my history with them has been a lot better than it ever really has been. Others might have a very different and much more positive view of their parents, family, and personal history but I am not them. I would love to truly feel the same as they do but I don't and I do not have to.

I am the way I am, but I am not helpless. I can, I do, and I will help myself because no one else is going to do that for me.

### Chapter 28

**October 13, 2008**

"The heaviest words are the ones we say or discover from others have been the emptiest."

The smell of cool autumn colors and woody trees filled the air. The dogs behind the fence barked as the leaves made a crunchiness underneath my feet. The gate wasn't opened this windy afternoon, so they couldn't chase me like they would years before. 5 years maybe that it's been since they've last chased me and since I last visited the old house. I didn't understand as I was entering middle school, why my parents decided we needed to move into a bigger house. Now that I've had time to be with only myself and my imagination and have learned to enjoy the solitude, I can say that a place for myself to think alone is something I'll always want to continue to have available to me, but back then my brothers and I had no problems sharing a room. We made the best of the extra company. We had a lot of fun staying up late when the lights were turned off and we were supposed to be asleep. We couldn't really do much in the dark except quietly act like morons but that was always fun. Especially when we would all rush to jump back into bed and under the covers when we would hear our parents get up to come check on us. It was great waking up and having other people to play with. Legos, forts, and pillow fights were less playful and more about reeking destruction and unintentionally finding the best ways to harm each other. But it was all fun when we could do that together.

I noticed that the houses across the street were getting bigger. Not so much wider as they are growing higher. Extra floors to make room for a bigger family and other relatives, I want to believe, but I know one of the houses is occupied by only my little brothers friend and his father. Maybe it's more of a competition the owners are having with one another to see who can do more and look more impressive to everyone watching the simultaneous constructions. My parents have also been discussing adding an extra room to the back of the house instead of moving again but their reasoning seems to be less about providing privacy and more about being able to say we have one extra room in the house.

When the sun started to go down, I headed back. As I walked down the sidewalk, I started thinking about an old high school project that my English class was assigned along with the mandatory dedication paper full of lies that I handed in. I was supposed to choose someone that I was close to and dedicate my work to them. It felt forced and I didn't want to do it. I finished the project weeks before it was due but the paper, I started and finished only the day before. I made the dedication to my brother and gave some typical and false reasons for choosing him. I never did tell him because I didn't think it was important. I still don't, and think it's not the best idea to tell others that it is mandatory to have intimate relationships or that it is necessary to force an explanation out of someone about their personal relationships with others. But that was an assignment. This is life and I cannot lie about how I experience it. I do think about the significance that my relationship with my brothers and others has on me today.

As I was walking, I thought about the bond that I felt at times being around them and others who I might have assumed were like brothers to me. That spark of excitement we sometimes get with those who, overtime, we know we stood side by side, but who - I'm beginning to realize - maybe we were never truly with. I cannot ever know how another truly feels about an experience that I assume was shared. There are the events that happened and at the time, physically, we were there together but personally, I cannot know if they felt and thought the same as I did. I thought about all of the games that we played, even when we were told we've been at it too much, and about all of the outdoor childhood adventures we had, running around the neighborhood talking on walkie talkies, pretending to have super powers and trading them with each other, wrestling on beds and imitating our favorite characters, and just talking nonsense all those years.

I thought about how we gradually stopped including each other in our activities as we got older.

I want to say that the reason for them being there with me at the time was never because I had to actively include them. I want to believe that it was because they wanted to be there. That it was because it mattered to them, not so much what we did, but that we could find ways to make things fun when we were in a situation where we were told we were supposed to behave and be on our best behavior. Because we wanted to do what we enjoyed doing regardless if we were being told that those activities were for children and that we had to grow up. I want to believe that we all did things together, because we all still had the simple urge to want to play. I want to believe that we didn't have to force it and we cared to be a part of that experience and understood that. But the fact that's hitting me now is that I don't really know if any of that is true.

I feel a heavy heart considering the reasons that things have changed and feel worse knowing, that as children, we don't really have reasons for why we choose to do things or why things matter, and that my reasons for loving my memories and rationalizing my decisions as a child are probably not the same and maybe not even important to those who I felt were with me at the time. I would like to think that the easiest way to find out how they truly experienced what I did would be to ask them, but I know that the person that they are today is not the same person that they were so many years ago. Hell, many of us don't even get to consciously decide the kind of person we wanted to be at those adolescent ages.

After visiting the old house, I'm beginning to realize that what I may want to believe were shared personal moments are just my own assumptions. They are empty illusions of emotional depth that happen overtime between people, without effort. This is making me question all my memories and if the events were truly everything I remember them to be. What do I do if I'm remembering my own lies? Who am I then and what should I care about instead? It might sound silly, but this is making me question and fear the nature of reality and truth itself. I can never know for certain, what is real.

"Truth is just a feeling of what may not really be, no matter how real it feels."

### Chapter 29

**October 14, 2008**

"It's not about how things outside and around us really were but how an experience contained inside was truly felt and, even more now, still vibrates and continues to grow in fondness.

So even if all other things end lacking in much significance, know that the greatest thing you will come to do, is creating You."

I'm beginning to feel less and less fearful and overwhelmed. Even though this realization on perspective...or discovery of life as I experience it – and which is the only way that I have to understand and assume is the way we all fundamentally experience existing - has been one of the most devastating, emotionally painful, and personally overwhelming things that I have ever been through, my fear doesn't have to continue because with the realization that my emotional and personal reality is not the same intimate experience as anyone else's, I have also had an even more powerful realization.

It doesn't matter what anyone else experiences.....

I don't believe that my thoughts, opinions, feelings, or even any of my cherished beliefs change the reality outside of my own mind and experience, but what we each experience and feel about life is undeniable and is not invalidated because of the difference in the personal experience that others have had. And if no one else can say that they understand it this way as well, I at least feel it and know it to be real.

And I can say this with the most emotional and psychological certainty because this morning I had the most amazing, warm, powerful, overwhelming, hysterically happy, and saddest experience of my life. Without caring that this might sound like an exaggeration to others, this was the most horrifying and beautiful and equally transformative experience of my life - and it happened somewhere where all things can exist in bold ways, the most vibrant ways, and where things can feel far more real than our ordinary everyday outer reality. It happened in a place between my dreams and my waking conscious mind. It happened significantly, where significance is made. It happened with my brain.

I was awoken today by the light of the sun streaming in through the window beside my bed, after the curtain that I had put up with only a few strips of tape weeks ago came falling down to lay on top of my legs. I can't say that I immediately sat up and felt more alive, hopeful, and also sad but joyful than I ever have before, and I can't say that it was immediate that I had this wonderful, grand, radiating feeling in my body and mind. Those things did happen, but if they were immediate or not I cannot say because my eyes were closed and my senses were too overwhelmingly altered for me to be able to say that I knew exactly what I was physically doing while I was experiencing the horror of the suspension of self and the beauty of being in my ultimate fantasy - that is all fantasies at once – which has led to what I like to think of as "ego death".

It began with a deep pressure in the front of my skull and chest from where I felt I was being pushed down to fall outside of my body while simultaneously I could feel my pelvis being raised and my lower body beginning to float up into the air. I spiraled out frightfully and saw below me my own body. And when I say I "saw", I mean that I sensed and could actually view my body somehow - or at least the mental representation of my physical body \- even though I knew that the body that I felt I was leaving behind, probably had its eyes closed. I tried to guide my formless self back down, but as I approached and thought that I was about to enter back into my body, I felt a sudden and rapid decline. Whatever kind of "vision" I had before disappeared, and I felt myself become engulfed with a drowning sensation into darkened nothingness. This was the moment that I experienced the most fucking terrifying feeling I have ever known.

I struggled to maintain my sense of importance but everything that I knew and that I might have thought that I understood about what makes me _me_ , I felt violently collapsing. Everything that I could have said that I believed and that I valued before, no longer held any meaning and only existed. And I was a part of that empty existence and it was then that I should have begun physically fearing for my life but I couldn't because I no longer felt like a living person. And although I was mentally panicking as I considered that this might be it and that I wasn't going to come back, I didn't feel dead. Death and simultaneously ceasing to exist would have been a much more welcomed state but this was an overwhelming, horrifyingly dreadful, devastating, hopeless, and endless psychological terror where death was no escape. I wasn't crying or screaming or making any kind of sound but it was excruciatingly loud. It was the voice again and this time it was speaking words that I understood and that made me feel a tremendous amount of agony and regret about the life that I felt torn away from. This was worse than an uncontrollable nightmare that I could not make sense of. This I could instantly follow and felt an undeniable relevance to. I was feeling the life of the most important person that I would ever be, being pulled out and left to quietly fall aimlessly into an endless pit of nothingness to experience a lonely existence of everlasting meaninglessness and insignificance.

"Did someone say you could get out? NO, because from here there is no escape. Opportunity for more is OVER."

I felt that I would now have to live out the rest of my existence with the awareness of unfulfilled hopes and of having missed such a great opportunity to live the life that I wanted and have in it the people I really, really wanted to try with and have live with me. I felt entirely worthless and I believed that I would have to endure this basic self-recognition and unimportance alone, in a state of constant harrowing dread for how I failed to live and go after what I wanted, when I had the chance.

Through the fall I could not see a thing around me, but somehow I was able to re-experience streams and streams of memories that I felt were once meaningful to me. And the voice, remembering with me, was commentating reasons of insignificance throughout each of my memories. It was revealing to me that because of my limited ability to experience existence as a whole, I would never be able to understand things as completely as I might want to - that there is no complete truth except existence and that I would never be able to achieve what I ultimately wanted. And being made aware of these ideas was severely horrifying to me.

The most devastating memory was of me sitting in my room, studying. What I was reading, I couldn't recall exactly, but it was something that I felt I wanted to learn and understand once I had the time to dedicate to that and many other things that I wanted to study after high school and away from any kind of traditional schooling. The voice would repeat that all the work that I had been doing was pointless; that there would never be enough effort from me ever to get to point where I could say that I had finally finished; and that all the times that I had compared myself to others was laughable because all endeavors are fundamentally pointless and insignificant when we all end. That's when I realized what it was really trying to tell me - something that I hadn't fully realized at that point as an undefined state of consciousness.

As the voices' inflicting commentary continued throughout my memory of sitting alone with the belief that my reason for the non-stop reading and studying was to understand more, and the trail of other related memories that were triggered, I came to the powerful realization that I had never had to confront before. And it hit me hard. All of the constant exposure to seeing others talk about their ambitions influenced me to start comparing myself to them, and had also led me, not really to want to study to just understand things - like I had believed - but to want to study and understand in order to make myself feel better about lacking the ambition that I had grown up to believe that I needed to have in order to be accepted and be just like everyone else. I wasn't behaving like it was enough for me to want to understand and explore the things that I had a genuine interest in and natural love for. I wanted to learn how I could love what everyone else loved so that I would feel accepted by my peers. I wanted their validation. I wanted something that I wasn't even aware that I was looking for. I wanted to seek to understand for external reasons that were not my own.

That's when I felt the pit of my stomach, in a heavy way rather than a void feeling, instantly fall through a separate infinity of wretched, spinning, self-disgust. Even now, I still recall how awful that realization made me feel. I never thought that I would ever live this way again once I had moved away from the mental clutches of public education. I was reading and spending so much of my time trying to understand but I wasn't really learning. I was mindlessly consuming information just like I was told to do in school, but now this was self-inflicted and it made me feel sick. I wasn't doing it because I really enjoyed it. I was doing it because I had come to believe that I was supposed to enjoy it. I was doing it because I came to believe that I needed to love in the same things as everyone else.

And all of that made me think back and consider certain aspects and ideas that I regularly encountered as I was growing up. In school, I would often hear others talk about their ambitions and aspirations in life. The way they described the feeling, the sensation, the satisfaction and joy that they derived from whatever it was they were involved in was really fascinating to me. I knew that I enjoyed learning but those feelings that they displayed never seemed to be expressed in me to the same degree that they described experiencing themselves. I remember feeling so down about myself when admitting to teachers or friends that I had no aspirations or greater goals for myself after I finished school. In elementary school, I just followed what every other boy said when asked what they wanted to be or do when they grew up. Even though I didn't enjoy lying, I didn't want to go against the popular response so I said, "police officer or maybe firefighter," and by the end of the day, we were a room full of police officers, firefighter, and all the girls made a childish social commitment to becoming either teachers or nurses. In middle school, I stopped pretending an interest in higher goals and settled for "Get into high school" when we were asked to write down our long-term goal in homeroom period. In high school, "Get into high school" didn't become "Get accepted to college". I just refused to make any written or verbal commitments to long-term goals that I had no real interest in. I know it would have been less bothersome to others if I had just pretended when questioned, but pretending is such a demanding thing and disgusting feeling for me to want to participate in.

Throughout most of my time in school, and even after, I would recall those experiences of feeling left out on something that seemed so big. I didn't understand how they could feel so much from something in life. Back then, I wasn't able to admit that what I wanted was what they had and I seemed not to feel, but now I'm able to realize that my experiences growing up had lead me to become envious. And more than envy, I had become obsessed to want to find those feelings for myself in every subject and every work throughout history that I saw others have an intense interest in and powerful response to.

In school we are told what to learn and are taught that the reasons for learning are essentially for points of comparison, and it's probably natural to arrive at comparing ourselves to others without the teachings from a school system, but that doesn't mean that it is helpful to nurture the idea that our self-worth depends on how we measure up against everyone else. The idea that my grades or rank were more important than time for my own inherent interests, curiosities, self-exploration, and what I felt I wanted to learn was really difficult for me to accept and the reason that I didn't want to continue with the school system and enter college after high school. I felt that I could continue my education with the resources that we have available to us in our modern society. I didn't expect the influence of an education that I recognized that I disagreed with to so severely affect me when I was away from what I considered an institutional problem and what I didn't want to continue to be a part of. I know now that just because we recognize what we do not want to follow and move away from those things, that doesn't mean we automatically stop being vulnerable to the influence and consequences of the ideas that we have constantly been exposed to on a daily basis. Regardless of whether an education comes from academia, parents, peers or the environment that we happened to grow up in, it works that same way and I need to do more to change what I've been taught. And I can't rely on just a simple recognition of the problem to be enough to make things better, and I'm not going to pretend that a lot of my unhelpful and destructive, ingrained beliefs and behavior are so easily resolved. Being aware of the ideas that I disagreed with growing up isn't enough to get beyond the influence of my life's education because it isn't just a mental thing. I know now that it is also a subtle but evident emotional and psychological affect that we carry with us throughout our lives. And we can't blame anyone else for the way that we become because we can't change how or what others taught to us then, and we're not responsible for the people who have fed us the information. We can't change the misguided education of the past. We can only do what we can for ourselves, so that we at least are able to go beyond simple recognition and accept our responsibility to actively seek to improve or change our own beliefs so that they help us and so that we no longer have to feel disgusted in ourselves for what we unknowingly allowed to happen to us.

After that powerful self-realization, and still unable to see a thing, I considered in a flash how what I was seeking for myself at the time, and yet not fully aware of, had become dangerously unhealthy. I remembered, and physically inspired as I was remembering, the mental stress and body aches that I started to develop at the time from constantly putting everything that I could into learning without breaks or time for anything else that I know that I easily enjoy and helps me relax (and even as I write this, I feel the fatigue of taking in so much in such a short amount of time). I would tell myself that I worked to learn and understand but subconsciously what I really wanted was to love and enjoy the same things that I saw others take in, that made them feel how I didn't. I developed to be forceful with myself. I was trying to feel about the things that really didn't matter or mean anything to me, which was psychologically, emotionally, and physically unnecessary. I remembered that even back then I had a vague sense of feeling haunted in my dreams by scenarios that were metaphorically telling me of all that I would never be able to understand and feel intensely for, and I just didn't want to admit that possibility then because I didn't want to feel like my efforts were ultimately useless.

Upon that memory, I gave in and admitted complete powerlessness to the grander circumstances of being and existing. I and everything that I have ever done, in the end, are utterly insignificant. And after this point, was when my consciousness was forever transformed.

Rapidly, I felt a drastic change. I felt myself swiftly collapse into a single endless point of being, and everything that I had been bombarded with suddenly disappeared and things became un-alarmingly quiet. No longer was there any voice, no longer any words in my mind, and there was no fear, and no more negative memories and a need for panic. What a peaceful but unconsciously inconsequential way to exist. This didn't last long, and now thinking back on it, that isn't a way for me to want to continue to remain because of how non-constitutional and lifeless I should have realized I felt, but couldn't in that state because I lacked any ability to feel, experience, or even know simple awareness. And it didn't feel meaningless or terrifying for the same reason. There was no such thing as anything and I might say that I had been dead or experienced a sense of it but I don't really know. Now that I can think back on it fully-conscious, I would better describe it as an infinite undoing of feeling and being.

When I "came back" to my awareness, I slowly began to see in front of me things becoming less black. I felt once more that I was moving backwards but this time away from an endless void. In a few seconds, I could make out the bed that I slept in and then felt really confused to see my own body lying on top of it. But I was glad that I knew it was down there, where I remembered being when I fell asleep the night before, and that it meant I probably wasn't dead or lacking life. I continued upward, lifting up through the ceiling of my room, then out of the roof of the house, and then past the height of highest tree out in the yard, where I could see the whole of the only neighborhood that I have known and that I have rarely been away from throughout my life. But I didn't feel like I was leaving, it was just my view that was expanding. And soon, I began to see so much more than I had ever before considered in such a deeply profound way. The neighborhood soon became the city, and above the cool misty clouds, the city without visible boundaries became the state. The state grew in view to become the country and once I recognized the country's form as part of the continents and the continents as a part of the earth, and saw the distant gleaming of the stars in the universe from the corner of my view, I felt the booming pounding of my heart responding emphatically to what I was witnessing up above the earth like one of the many satellites floating around with me. I was seeing where it is I come from. Everything below me and everything above me and everything that reaches beyond what I cannot even describe, nor have words for, is essential to my existence. Everything that I do or have done and that has happened to me causes movements throughout space and time. I affect everything around me and everything around me influences me. The thoughts that I have affect the people around me and what they think influences me. I'm related to it all, and it is all related to me. We are all from the same thing. And not just us, the people, but us as objects.

I recognized how over the course of, not only our existence, but over the course of everything that has ever happened, has been necessary for us to one day be able to create these satellites out of the dirt below our feet. And we are the same, because we are the result of what came before us - the stars that had to become destroyed for their dust and gas to become the dirt and the water, and the rocks and the earth, and the simple life that gradually become a variety of far more complex and distinct life that includes our distant primitive ancestors, our grandparents, and parents, and our present friends, our neighbors, and everyone that we have ever known or can ever know, that exist today or will come to exist in the future. I realized that even if we rarely behave like it, we are the greatest family that can ever be known (And it's a sad thing to consider how many people don't recognize this).

After that, I felt a full and heavy but wonderful emotion come over me because I knew then that unlike the inanimate satellite next to me, I could grasp of this mutual existence in that extraordinarily marvelous and beautiful way that any satellite, or any other pure object with a lack of self-awareness and a higher consciousness, would never be able to comprehend. It will never feel and think the way that I do because unlike it, the dirt, the rocks, the earth, the stars, and the universe as a whole, I exist self-evidently as life. I exist as life...and my life is one with a mind to understand and a body to protect and care for. Satellites and life will one day cease to be, and for a satellite, that means nothing – or for it, that can't mean anything. But for me, as I am alive, it means I do appreciate with much more significance now the things in my life that I love, the people that I care for and want to continue to try with, and everything that means so much to me, especially myself - because all of it is a part of me and however small a part of me it may be, I do care. And in the same way that I may be just a small part of all of existence that doesn't mean that I should therefore cease to care about myself. Everything that I have done for myself and that I will continue to do much more of now, will always mean so much to me.

Though an object like a satellite might never come to exist and be powerless and without a purpose without our directed interference, we can do something objects without a mind cannot. We can recognize the circumstances of our existence and realize that even though in the end, and in the grander view, we are small and may be without significance, we can still decide that while we are alive and with a working consciousness, what we still want and what we still care for is to function and to live and allow ourselves to give our life meaning and self-importance. I realize that the physical body is connected with everything - from the smallest unnoticed movements inside and all around, to my observable and relevant middle experience, and further to the largest of cosmic interactions – and in my mind, I can decide to view that as something either deeply meaningful and amazing or simply mundane and necessary. I could believe that everything that has happened has been for me but I have no evidence to support that idea. Stars have exploded, and from that destruction the consequence is the solid structure that I know as my body, but my sense of identity is created from, not how much I do not know of everything that's come before me or what exists billions of light years all around me, but from the actual personal experience of knowledge and psychological understanding that I have come to over the years. So just because I might become aware of the uncontrollable destruction surrounding us or feel that things all around me in life are falling apart, that doesn't mean that my sense of self-importance also has to come undone. Instead, what I can decide to have it mean to myself, is a personal opportunity to improve my surroundings, to work on myself, to better my life, to accept what cannot be changed, and to remember and strengthen my understanding of what I care about most in life. I understand now, more than ever, that we are what we decide to create and that we are, how we treat and care for what really matters to us, and that loss isn't such a bad thing because as hopeless and devastating as things might seem, destruction can also be a grand opportunity for creation, for meaning, and to reinforce the idea and the beautiful belief that _we still matter_.

I then felt myself pulling back together down from outer space and into the body, that laid on the bed, in the room that I enjoy being alone in. The first thing that I remember feeling was the subtle movement of air particles all over the naked skin of my arms and legs, and then what it feels like to take in a breathe and exhale. I noticed my body radiating and the great pounding of my heart, my pelvis bounced up into the air, and I couldn't open my eyes because of a heavy pressure that I felt between my eyebrows. I knew that I must have finally awakened from my experience because my thoughts were no longer so extreme, surreal, and fantastical and I could feel the very logical and stable feedback between my physical body and my environment (my bed). I remember noticing my toes clenching and my back arching and having these wild spasms and a draining feeling down my legs and all over my body. When my face started to relax a bit, a huuuge smile formed on my face so big that I felt unbelievably goofy, but rather than force myself to my ordinarily stoic expression, I allowed myself to feel it fully because I knew that this meant to me that I hadn't gone anywhere and disappeared from life and that I was actually fully alive and well. My eyes opened and I wept. Streams of tears ran down the sides of my tense cheeks. This feeling was joy and deep gratitude. I was feeling my body whole again. I was feeling myself again. I was experiencing life. I could think fully with what I could recognize as my own mind again and thought, "I'm not gone, I'm right here. And I love my stupid, little life."

I clenched my eyes for just a brief moment to wipe the pouring tears from my eyes and immediately imagined every laugh that I had ever had, every unexpected smile that I had ever shown, every joyous occasion and every intimate celebration that I have ever been a part of, every burst of excitement that I've screamed from, and I thought about every triumph of fear that I have experienced in my life, and every rare but beautiful moment that I have glimpsed, and I imagined them all bound together as tightly as they could be, to be placed fully inside my heart. I imagined the affects that it would have on me if that emotional mass were to be set off to explode through my heart, and then I actually felt bursts of waves shoot through my veins, that enlivened my body and took my mind on the greatest and most glorious emotional and personal trip that reminded me and reassured me of everything that I have in myself to live for, that has always been with me all the way through, and that I hope to never forget or stop loving.

I felt crazed to feel alive. The right word would be Hysterical. I mean really, really wild - crying, shaking, and laughing all at the same time. I was laughing at how obvious it all now seemed to me. My face wanted to explode from the joy that I felt. I knew that I meant everything to me, wrapped my arms around myself to say thank you, and gave myself a kiss on the skin of my arm. I was breathing heavily and seeing the light from outside the window with my blurry watery vision and I felt so stupid and wonderful at the same time. I wanted to scream savagely to no one in the room, "No, you will never know me like I know myself! Not one of you validates me and decides for me. In my life, I carry with me my best friends, our memories, our joys, our laughter, and the best times when we would do nothing at all because I create this all in meeee! Cause it's my love, my love, my love. And I'll die happy knowing that I did what I pleased and that I never have to lose any of the love in my life - my love that's in me."

It was then that I fully recognized that no matter what, as long as I am alive and with an able mind, I will carry with me every little moment in my life and every image of a person that has ever affected my emotions and me as a person in the most positive, intense, and powerful ways. And that it doesn't matter whether or not others remember feeling the same way that I did from our time together, because what matters more is knowing and remembering that at one time we were a part of each other's lives and that that time has meant a great deal to me. No one else but me decides what anything means to me and what I will always continue to love, hold close to me, and all that I will celebrate - even if just privately (especially if alone) - without force or to please anyone else, in my limited time as a part of all this: As a part of the very small portion of existence, that from destruction is now able to experience itself and create for itself a powerful, meaningful, and thoughtful life that is about more than just the objects that we have come from.

When my body and I started to settle down, and while I was still smiling and wiping tears from my soaked face, I closed my eyes once again and became conscious to my mind wide awake, composing from my varied emotions the kind of imagery we experience when we are dreaming. The images played out a smooth, fluid story that made me feel calm, at ease with myself, and deeply comforted. It incorporated so many people from my life that no longer keep in contact with me, but that I have continued to think about and wonder about all these years later.

I felt shocked at how much I never knew that I could feel on my own. I was recalling, with pleasant joy and numerous other ecstatic and powerfully happy emotions, everything and every memory of a person throughout my life that has ever meant anything to me, coming together to form a make believe story and what I know now to be my ultimate fantasy.

Each person with me was as I most fondly remember them. We were all a piece of the same story, not able to exist alone. And I was the one bringing them all back. We were deciding to live together in a way that I had never before been able to witness and feel a part of. I thought about how incredible it was that this was all me; that it was all in me; that what I was feeling was myself.

Through my imagination, I could see myself moving up a steep dirt road somewhere in the country, gathering every person that's contributed a positive memory or feeling in me since I became aware of my own existence. One by one they agreed to join me, the anticipation of more for our lives building slowly, steadily, and amicably. It was a long upward walk but we motivated each other to keep going because we wanted to help each other and knew that at the top of the hill was a mansion for us all to share, where we would also have all the time and the support from each other to dedicate ourselves to what pleased us most. For a few trips it started raining which made the climb so much more difficult. It was slippery, we became muddy and wet, but each person that climbed with me, smiled eagerly and pressed on because, like me, they could feel the powerful and intense shivers of hope and excitement of what I had discovered that we could all be a part of and feel safe with, through compassion, understanding, and a self-willingness to want to learn to be better and extend help to one another rather than to practice self-righteousness, superiority, separatism, and authoritarianism.

There were many people represented from my waking reality that walked with me but there was also one that I don't think I've ever met. It was a girl and her I didn't have to tell of the walk up to the mansion and what was there waiting for us. She already knew because she was there at the mansion from the beginning, helping me introduce to everyone that came up, the kind of life that we could all have together.

I was standing on the balcony of the mansion when I first noticed her down below, sitting alone and having dessert. The moment I saw her, I felt so anxious to know who she was and then when I heard her voice from where I stood, my thoughts retarded and all I could do was try not to fall over the rail because my body suddenly felt compelled to feel dangerously closer to her.

I admired her from a distance as she took small bites of her cake and spoke to herself which wasn't strange at all (and I'm not being sarcastic). She licked just one of her fingers, her hand moved away from her face and then the muscles in her face tensed to the most delightful smile that I have ever seen. Her eyes closed and she spoke, "Sometimes I wish to stop breathing just to feel how serious I am about living, so that no one else loves through me but science...what is it that makes one into chocolate?"

She opened her eyes, and then she giggled, and I wanted so bad to become her for just that instant to feel the same joy she was experiencing in her awareness that her words would sound like complete nonsense to anyone who wasn't her, because they wouldn't understand she really meant. Only she would know what she meant to say. And then I realized that she was the product of my life experience and of my joys, and of my way of thinking, and so then of ME. And that I _was_ in fact experiencing the same feeling she was having. She was a representation of every quality, characteristic, and strength of character of all the girls and women that I have known and felt even the smallest of attraction for throughout my life.

She was a representation of my fantasy girl.

My reaction to all of her parts was immediate. When she turned to smile, I could not break my gaze away from her happy face. When she opened her eyes, I had an achy heart, seeing the lively eyes of this face that I knew I could not help but love. Her hair and lips, both calmed and excited me and the sound of her giggles flooded my heart into a chaotic mess. Physically, she was ideal for me. And more than that, I knew we were there, along with everyone else who would join us, to help one another fulfill each other's lives.

She was my love personified. A love essential, and pure, and truly with me, that had for so many years been waiting for me to recognize and nurture it, and a love that I knew that I was going to enjoy a wonderfully fantastical sense of togetherness with from that moment on.

The place that I imagined where we could live, was a place where she and I and all the people that I have ever known throughout my life gladly welcome each other, worked together, stayed together, cared for one another as people who thoughtfully wanted to help each other become who we each wanted to be, and all showed support for whoever more we wanted to be with or include in our life (or also supported the decision to live alone), without the expectations of monetary exchange and without ever feeling the need to evaluate and treat one another as less than a person with full autonomy and without the need to punish anyone for our liberty to live a self-guided life with different ideas, beliefs, and influences. It was a place where we all recognized ourselves and accepted each other as different people consciously unified by the desire to want the best for one another. We were a warm people with a self-driven willingness to want to provide help when we could and when it was asked of us.

It felt like a kind of heaven; a deeply comforting, imaginative but very real, wonderful hope, and beautiful fantasy of people coming together to help one another live freely with one another, that I want to always know that I can continue to dwell on and use to improve my waking life.

And then, once that mental and emotional fantasy ended, I was left to reflect on my past behavior with others. I wanted to think about the past cooperation and kindness that I had shown others, but instead, even though I knew I shouldn't feel that way and blame myself, I was filled with great, terrible remorse from the reality that there was far more violent and anger fueled treatment toward my friends and classmates growing up than there was signs of genuine kindness. I began to feel a deep disagreeable distaste for having believed I was justified in my actions. I thought about all the people that I had been so purely selfish with and started experiencing these sudden moments of disgust all throughout my body as it dawned on me how misguided I had been all my life. I had unknowingly learned to treat myself so unkindly and that had carried through to the way that I had treated others...and for many years, I was okay with my behavior. I had not yet developed a comprehensive and practical understanding of a way of living with others that I can now see I can develop for myself.

For so long I had lived with such an infantile concept of compassion - to want to physically force things upon others and believe that I was helping them when they had not even asked for my involvement. How lacking I was of - what I can now grasp should be the most basic awareness and acceptance that any person should extend to all others: A regard for a person's liberty to live as they feel and consider best for themselves, no matter what that might be. How immature and assuming I was about a life that was not my own, when others refused to do what I knew would most convenience and benefit me - as if others deciding not to do more in their own lives somehow meant I personally lost something I arrogantly felt I deserved just because I knew them and they were around me. I understand now that the best we should do is hope for what another might do and what we would want for them and how we can help them if they asked (rather than to feel the need to control or "fix" another person's life because we are unsatisfied with our own).

So much has happened in me within these past few hours. I've yet to even get dressed to start the day and already, I feel so accomplished.

I feel extremely grateful and appreciate so much my mind and myself for this experience and the personal growth that I feel it is. I feel that same warmth that I felt earlier, continue to build stronger and in intensity the more that I reinforce the idea that, as far as I know, this was really all just me. It might be sad that no one else was here to know exactly what I have just been through but the point is that that is completely okay because regardless, I know that it happened. If I ever decide to share this with others, I know how funny and exaggerated these wonderful claims would be to them, but their opinions would not change what I recall feeling. Before today, I know that I too would have made an argument over this kind of experience and I would have said that it was probably a result of either this, or that, or any number of rational possibilities but right now an explanation doesn't really matter to me as much as the reality that it has happened, that it has happened to me, that I love it, and that I will never forget this.

Visiting the old house, which I will always remember as the place where I and the people who were there at the same time as me began growing up, has caused this powerful and wonderful awakening in me. It has challenged my most cherished beliefs and made me fear more than I ever have about an aimless existence. But my living existence isn't void. I am here, thoughtfully, and that is proof that it can be more if I decide to make it more. I've learned that the only person that I can mostly say that I've ever truly been with personally, and the only one who I can depend on to always know and understand about the way that I feel and for me to know and understand what they feel, and who I can have the most intimate, most powerful, and most intense relationship possible with, is myself. Anyone else, who is not me, though they might have been a part of this life, does not determine the meaning in my life or the importance of my life. And these new ideas, and the expansion of understanding or consciousness about myself and reality, does not change what has been my life, how I have experienced it, and what I still continue to feel and know has strong personal value to me. New information does not change the meaning that has been in my life. I know that it might be a paralyzing feeling to consider that the things that we once believed, are now different than how we once believed they were and that how things actually happen or function are also different than how we might have thought before, but learning more does not take away what things can still mean to us. Thinking about it now, I did feel that initial sense of fear from the possible loss that these new realizations might have created in me but those disturbing feelings didn't last very long because I've actually had with me a way to understand that there really wasn't any actual threat to the worth of my past experiences that I have learned a great deal from.

I remember the day that I first learned that professional wrestlers didn't really strike each other to create the sound of impact to their opponent. I became aware through my own observations that they were actually stomping or hitting themselves on their chest or knee with the opposite hand to help create the illusion of a strike. Rather than experience a moment where the significance of my past wrestling memories started to feel like lies and my sense of order started collapsing backward through an emotional domino effect, my reaction was an initial feeling of shock followed quickly by an emphatic and excited, "OOOH!" Wrestling had become a way for me to start to understand the intense emotions that I was developing in my teenage years. Slowly it started to become the only stable thing in my life that I had developed and been able to maintain a personal relationship with. Regardless of any of my personal difficulties at the time, I still had wrestling to look forward to. At the moment that I learned about that one small but important illusion that went into the creation of what I had felt for so many years was one of the few things that could rely on to help me feel better about my daily life when everything else seemed so lacking, instead of feeling betrayed and it resulting in my sense of self spiraling out of control, the realization was a positive one in that at that point so many things started falling into place in my mind. Things that I had wondered about so many times before when I would watch a match suddenly started to make sense. So many times before I would think about how they made their strikes sound loud enough for the cameras to pick up when other fighters on television hardly made any distinct audible noise when they hit each other. Before that moment, I never had any reason to critically examine what I saw but when I finally discovered that one extra piece of information, I became eager to want to learn more.

Overtime, I did learn more and more about how the wrestlers worked together to create an entertaining and physical match by using their bodies, psychology, and playing with the crowds expectations and slowly building anticipation. Instead of feeling deceived I became strangely fascinated and began to seek to learn more, and the more I learned, the stronger appreciation and admiration I developed for how they worked together, in and out of the ring, and the more respect I gained for the care that I learned and saw them display to not to want to injure one another, while still creating the illusion of a malevolent feud and unadulterated aggression. Even with as much as I learned about the varying aspects that go into putting on a wrestling show and its matches, I would find that many of the emotional expressions in the shows to still feel very real, and that's because, as I've recently learned, many times it is real. From interviews with wrestlers that I have watched over the past few weeks, I've learned that some of the greatest rivalries in wrestling history were more than fiction. Some of the best stories and the best matches became so great and have become legendary because a lot of the conflict depicted though them stemmed from genuine personal battles, inner conflicts, and animosity. For many wrestlers, the ring offers an opportunity for them to express themselves and to work through very real personal challenges. I think that any team effort to help one another through the sometimes psychologically difficult realities of living can be really transformative and therapeutic and so I am in quiet awe every time that I consider that for the greatest performers that I have watched over the years, the ring became a shared playground for them to work through their naivety and immaturity, self-hatred, strained relationships, loss, identity issues, conflict of values, and other very real personal struggles in a false and sometimes beautiful artistic brutality. And that idea that rather than to succumb to our innate desire to stop thinking and to destroy out of anger, we can instead realize that we could use the intensity of our emotional, personal, and physical energy to the creation of something that is extravagant and bold but also, when combined with something of ourselves that is intimate and genuine and that then becomes spectacular and personally moving, has always inspired within me a deeply powerful and beautiful feeling...that...that also, I'm just realizing, has greatly influenced and been incorporated into the surreal experience that I have just had today.

I know some people who when they first learned about the inner workings of wrestling, stopped watching because they felt it took away the magic, and to this day don't like to admit that they were taken in by something that they now know is performance. I don't see wrestling as being any different than any TV show, movie, theater act, or any other form of entertainment when it comes to storytelling (In fact, I much prefer the wrestling style of in-ring-story telling, because though the winner is predetermined, the matches themselves are live performances that are largely improvised and I love to anticipate what I might see every time that my favorite wrestlers get into the ring). Though the mystery of how it works became less and less as I learned more about how it is created, that didn't make my past experience watching wrestling meaningless. I still consider it completely romantic and I recognize that the new mystery for me now is the excitement and wonderment of how things might develop in a cooperative, imaginative, and genuine world of storytelling where, by working together, anything can be possible.

And taking away the mystery isn't the same thing as taking away the magic, because magic is not about what we don't know; it's about an understanding of how things actually work and then being able to attach your own emotions and person to something and creating a beautiful experience from that. When I learned of all those things that have to come together to create the experience in front of a massive crowd, rather than take away from any of the meaning that I might have developed when I wasn't aware, things started to mean even more because I started to learn to enjoy and appreciated wrestling as more than just a match, or an entertaining show. I started to recognize in the entire experience something that started to affect my life in many personal ways. The most memorable moments in wrestling were not defined for me only because of the moves, the physical feats, or because of the mayhem that I saw on screen. The greatest experiences have become cemented as lasting memories that have forever inspired me, because those moments not only capture the extraordinary spectacle of art and performance and the displays of grand physical power that tell a story about the characters in the ring, but those same moments also encapsulate a hidden story of the personal struggles, courageousness, and sometimes admirable greatness about the person outside of the ring.

Although when I was younger, I knew far less about the stories of the people behind the characters, as soon as I realized that professional wrestling wasn't as "real" as I thought it was and that there was more involved in it behind-the-scenes, I started wondering how much else I didn't know. And not just about wrestling. I started considering that the amount of everything else that I didn't know was probably much larger than what I actually did know (and even then I started casually wondering if what I thought I knew was actually as true as I thought that it was). Wrestling's unique form of storytelling blurred the boundaries between "real-life" and entertainment and for the first time in my life that made me start seriously asking myself questions of a deeper and more uncomfortable mystery like, "How am I ever going be able to tell the exact differences between what happens in and out of the ring - which is really the difference between what goes on in and out of my mind?" Wrestling purposefully began playing with my mental perception of reality and challenged me to question what it actually was that I really knew. And that eventually lead me to begin to understand that questions of whether events and stories are "real" or not, matter far less than the genuine emotion and the personal histories we develop as people. A person in plain view expressing themselves at center stage, makes us believe that what they are saying and what they are doing is real because in moments, from a personal point of view, their behavior, their feelings, the struggles that they've made it through, the relief of frustration it gives them to let it all out, and the emotional experience that they trigger within us as they share and pull us into their personal story and reality, is a relationship of influence between people that can never be faked.

Through watching the show, I also learned that being in a state of uncertainty of what to believe can be an uncomfortable and difficult thing to experience, but it can also be a really powerful and helpful thing because it forces us to consider more seriously what the most important relationships and parts of our life are. And in realizing what those things are and removing the mystery of how our actions affect them, we can then take the best elements of what we've learned throughout our life and put them together to create the experiences that we will know we worked hard to build up and so will be able to call Special. Watching wrestling did a lot for me. I really don't like using metaphors and analogies but I'll use one this once and state that wrestling was the thing that planted the seeds for my current expansion of self-examination and my examination of reality itself. Some people might immediately think "fake" and want to debate the legitimacy of wrestling when you bring it up in conversation but for me there is no doubt of how much wrestling has helped me. Being a part of wrestling, as both a fan of the technical aspect and also as a proud spectator of the emotional and magical live performances reminds me of what cannot be faked. Through the twists and turns of a match and the story being told, wrestling reminds me of the undeniable reality of my emotions, the reality of how much things can really grow to mean to me, and the reality of the great power and the great frailty of belief itself. It taught me that I could feel remarkable about myself and my life through the use of my imagination and what I could put together for myself. Wrestling has taught me that I can self-manage my emotional perception, my desires and anger, what I believe, and that I can therefore enjoy the responsibility of creating - and feeling - my very own magic (my own meaning).

Taken on their own, the individual aspects don't mean as much but experienced together with deliberate intention and combined with the artistic presentation of a battle of ideas and values, represented through characters, words, and scenarios, we become witness to the creation of a story that slowly starts to pull us in, and we become emotionally and personally invested. When I first started watching wrestling, I only knew that the stories affected me on some level. Now that I'm aware of so much more about how the overall wrestling show experience develops, and now that I can see how those same ideas that I was exposed to back then became integrated into my earlier waking experience, the stronger I feel because I'm realizing that what I was actually beginning to learn at the time wasn't just about wrestling. It was about all of life and the fascinating process of how things come to mean anything.

Meaning is created at times without our awareness – and that understanding can be terrifying when we realize that it is something that we haven't always had in our control - but when we make a personal decision to consciously create for ourselves, through self-willingness, courage, and dedication, the kind of experience and the kind of life we want to build for ourselves, that is beautiful thing to experience for ourselves and to witness of others. That broadened depth of understanding that started with my exposure to the wrestling world helped me deal with the instinctive fear that I had in the beginning about the personal threat that I felt when I became aware of more about the underlying functions of what I care about - that others might not feel the same about - and what has overtime made me who I am. Had I not had anything in my life to compare this questioning of beliefs and importance to, I might have been more psychologically devastated and remained terrified in confusion. But thanks to my early and continued history with wrestling, I am grateful that because of it, I have been able to more easily accept, understand, embrace, and love this personal awakening.

I know that nothing external has really changed after all of this. The only change is the shift of perception of what has already been and will continue to be. I can see things a bit differently and it may cause me to question the validity of how things really were or continue to be but as I've learned in the past, through my exposure to wrestling, that doesn't change what I took away from my experiences at the time and how they've informed my life and made things better for me. I make things mean whatever I decide that I want them to continue to mean, and I now know that I can also build new meaning from the many experiences that I will have throughout the rest of my life.

The most difficult thing throughout this has been the discovery of my unconscious approval seeking and need for acceptance and belonging. But that has also been the most positive impactful realization that I've had which has led to my greatest shift in perception of how I want to be. I didn't decide to behave in those ways and I don't enjoy knowing that I have but I do accept how I have been and know that now, I do not have to continue remaining the same way. I do not have follow and be like those who have had greater pursuits in life that I have never genuinely felt the need for in my own life. I now know how I will live out the rest of my life. And that is without making myself feel wrong or bad for the way that I have always been. I will no longer continue to believe or behave with the idea that ambition and higher-aspiration are a necessity for living a valued life.

I don't live to compare myself to others. Maybe others feel the need to fulfill something more in their lives, but for me, all the love in my life has always been nurtured through the less ambitious. I'm more than okay knowing that a great deal of my lessons in life have resulted because I've become personally invested and mirrored the emotional experience of characters from television shows, films, wrestling, and video games. And I'm _proud_ to know that the personal work and my growth as a person has been because I've made a deliberate effort to take what I have discovered for myself through my examination of the conscious and unconscious creations of my mind and imagination, the grand ideas and stories that have developed from my dreams, and applied them to my waking life. I don't require much else to maintain my satisfaction in life. Living to know myself, enjoying what I already love, and desiring to continuingly improve myself in the ways that I can, with effort but without force, makes me feel accomplished.

What matters to me is not what others want of me, for me, or what they might want me to love. What matters is what I already feel for, what has helped create joy in my life, and even my lack of traditional ambition I accept, appreciate, and no longer feel any shame for. I don't need to feed my ego by claiming what I do not know or behaving in any way to seek validation or the acceptance of others by trying to fit in and be like them - we already have a relatable form, an experience of being, and a mutual place that we know we have all essentially come from, which is with and in this existence. I've learned that what will continue to keep me happy and excited about my life is living honestly with myself and with a conscious humble understanding that I will never know it all and that instead of feeling obligated to more, it is better to maintain a thoughtful focus to what's most relevant in my life and to everyday have something meaningful or plain fun to look forward to and be excited about. I've learned that I do lack a total, perfect recall of past memories, which I have decided will nonetheless continue to hold a grand and meaningful significance in my life, and I've learned that I should always strive to be strong and display the courage to remain open to new ideas and information despite the reality of the fear of potential loss because understanding things more comprehensively can expand my consciousness and improve the way that I look at our mutual existence and how I behave toward myself and toward others in life.

When I saw darkness and I felt myself falling endlessly, I was fearful because I was unsure if I would ever regain control of myself but I was also afraid of how painfully broken I might remain feeling inside if my mind and body returned to their previous conscious state but without all the structured memories of happiness and the moments of personal significance that I felt might be forever left behind. At that point, I was afraid of the possibility of losing the love that I know that I carry with me. I didn't want to have the way that I felt about days gone by to be ripped away from me. I didn't want the way that I experienced the way things were for me then, to no longer be. I didn't want to betray myself and allow the pain just because I was starting to recognize that those who I might want to believe would understand, actually remember the experiences that I recall differently and might not feel the same way that I do about our past and all those moments that I cherish.

Right as I felt the most helpless, my eyes opened and I found myself holding my body and incredibly sure that I needed to never forget again to hold onto the most important things that there are for me, no matter if another person might find it worthless. I felt my life whole and exploded with feelings of vibrant inner-love and recognized that what more I might want in life starts with me and then expands to everything beyond me. I accepted what I have reflected in me that makes me who I am now, and I recognized that I am responsible for my person, for who I want to be, and for how I want to live onward. The idea of feeling empty then, felt incredibly and stupidly hilarious to me because every person, every laugh, every smile, every instance of happiness, every movement of joy, and every breath of life that I have ever said I missed when I had locked myself in my room to be alone, and every memory that has ever come to represent to me my joy, my sadness, my hopes, my meaning, my love, I could understand was still in me and more active than ever.

Everything that I had before, the way that I remembered it being and the way that I remembered it feeling, I was again. And the fear that I had before about loss, vanished because I knew that that idea no longer had to exist for me. I grasped that there is no real danger to my memories and what they all mean to me because regardless of what else happens outside of me, inside of me, I hold the meaning of my life that no one can ever rip away from me. I can be loyal to all the genuine experiences in me. This is mine. Mine alone, like the walk that I took back to the place that has helped me realize what very real and meaningful value there is in living, experiencing, and in remembering that feeling of how great things used to be and still are in memory.

I feel a strong and powerful urge to thank myself.

"Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. Super seriously and sincerely - thank you for all the help that you have given me and for always being there with me, every step of the way, no matter what. Remember always, that no one can live and love your life better than you can, as much as you can, and as grand as you can. For as long as we can feel this life and this desired responsibility of the creation of our self and every bit of experience we can relate to, we will never lose what we have had and everything that we carry within us to help with what more we hope to create."

I will never lose this love,

I will never lose this hope,

I will never lose this meaning,

That has become so grand in me.

"Join me, all who want to walk with me on this cosmic movement as we explore, before our end, the richness and variety of every form of life, forms of living, the capacity for human experience and understanding, the beauty of personal creation and learning, and of hopes, of dreams, and of existence's grand possibilities.

Join me as you do what you love and I live as I love and we are able to build from this present before us, something that is equally insignificant to all others as it is distinctly glorious and beautiful to us, the creators of a meaningful life."

"Both personal and general histories attribute our individuality, which function to distinguish us among our communities. At the same time our history is exactly that: Ours. 'Ours' in a sense far greater than most realize and which should affect anyone, not only to recognize, but also to appreciate (be aware of the significance or magnitude of) and become imbued (filled, inspired or influenced thoroughly) with an eagerness to know more. We, Homosapiens, are of the same species; every species, human or other, of the same branching ancestry; every one of these – organisms, animals, creatures, life in general - basic and further complex, interconnected as the diverse product and a development of the natural world we live with; essentially motivated to act by the natural forces and processes of existence, all in pursuit of the same basic resource: energy for sustainability (further are cause benefits or gains, competition, and cooperation). Even at the greatest scale we are united – formed of the same elemental composition as the early aspects of the expanding universe as well as its current constitution – and act, similarly, as a result of our energy demands. Everything there is exists unfixed and impermanent but all as a varied state of the same existence (infinite correspondence, positive and negative unified, continual force disturbances or movement shifts), in a physical form, or as a result of a physical act of situational interactions and environmental pressures (cause and effect – natural processes; action and consequence – conscious operations). A part of an 'incapably concerned' whole – cannot requiring admittance, recognition, confirmation, justification or approval as true in existence but of which we should require of ourselves: to understand the matters of existence using our acquired senses, abilities of perception (imagination being possibly the exception in limitation), and constructed 'tools' of direct and indirect observation – fluctuating towards stability (or a balance of power) though not ever inactive and not functioning, never as more and never as less, but always preserved in its most basic aspects, resulting collectively in its infinite and nonstable existence (not 'time') as a naturally modifying (but fundamentally uniform), exchanging, and transferable process. Every quality, characteristic, or modification builds distinction. There are prevalent distinctions among our collective existence, and there exists a capacity to acquire, incorporate, or build such attributes or characteristics, but we are not different. All we are, and all there is, will always remain...effect and consequence of the same. (Acknowledge both personally confined and ubiquitous history as an account of enlightenment.)"

### Chapter 30

**October 26, 2008**

These past months that I've dedicated to writing out and analyzing the messages from my dreams and meditation is helping me understand the possible reasons that people over the course of human history have so readily associated dreams with the spiritual or supernatural. While in my dreams, I have to accept what happens as reality, and at times I have been able to become aware that I am only dreaming but that awareness is usually very brief and I then go back to acting out or being witness to the story that's composed by my brain. Some of the dreams that I have had have been very intimate, revealing, and at times experiences that have been very difficult for me to stop from becoming manufactured memories that never actually happened in my waking state. I've realized that regardless if I accept a dream scenario not to be real, it is still very difficult to wake up from an intensely exciting or horrifying dream and not be affected because in that state between a dream and waking consciousness, whatever I experienced I will still continue to feel and remember, and so while it may not be an actual event, it is very much a real experience. I have to be careful with the emotionally compelling idea that dream scenarios are actually clairvoyant experiences about our waking life. When the same scenarios of our dreams happen to play out in our waking state, many of us might be naturally driven to begin believing powerful but unsubstantiated things about ourselves, life, and about existence. We might begin making rationalizations based on subjective experiences alone, which is something that I do not want to participate in because then that would leave me vulnerable to believing many other things that can be, not only unreliable, but also psychologically damaging or potentially harmful to my well-being - as I've learned from others who today find it difficult or embarrassing to admit what they have believed in the past and one particular lady who I no longer see around but who may still be seeking fulfillment through her incredible delusions.

One of the dreams that I've had, played out almost the exact same scenario that happened after I had awakened. I dreamt of my mom telling me to grab a glass, fill it up with water from the filter, and then drink it. She said it all as if this was my first time grabbing a drink of water or as if she believed that I was so incompetent that I would not be able to find a way to get water into my system on my own. It annoyed me so much. And then, later that day, that same scenario ended up happening when I entered the kitchen. My mom looked at me, told me to grab a glass, fill it up with water, and drink it. It was so eerie. It was just a small coincidence and I didn't suddenly begin to believe that I had discovered the power to see the future - although I did consider, "Buuuuuuut what if?" - but I know a few people who have claimed to have literally possessed that power.

I know of more than one woman who have shared a personal story about how they had dreamt that they were pregnant before they found out and I have known a few people who developed an illness and later claimed that they knew what was wrong with them before they were diagnosed. For people like that, a small coincidence is probably all they need to verify a belief in the supernatural. What's worse if that for some, the coincidences would be enough for them to be convinced to use their money to be deceived and emotionally tortured. Jacob, a family friend, is one of those people who came to believe his dream diagnosis. He decided after that, that it would benefit him to start spending most of his income on a psychic who convinced him that she could reveal all of his future ailments and everything that he would need to do and buy in order to ease the pain, cure the illness, but never told him how to stop his illnesses from occurring in the first place because according to the psychic, "destiny is inevitable." The only destiny that I know and can be sure of is all of our inevitable return to inexistence. And that I don't need a psychic to reveal to me. One of the women who dreamt of being pregnant before actually finding out, unfortunately had a miscarriage and soon started having dreams of the child that was never born. She told us at a family gathering that she would even have conversations with the child, who was growing more and more every time the woman would dream of her. She wanted desperately to learn how to control the "visitations" so that she could see her baby more often. She told us that because of that, she was going to start seeing a therapist but we later found out that the therapist wasn't intended to help her deal with the loss of the child. The therapist she hired was actually a new age therapist who had promised to teach her how she could communicate with her dead child. I don't know what happened to that woman since our family and most everyone else that also knew her, lost contact with her over the months after she started seeing the therapist. I don't think either she or Jacob had made the best decisions for their lives, health, and sanity even if they might have believed that that's what they were doing in the beginning.

Aside from ego death, I've only had a few dreams that I would consider personally transformative and extraordinarily vivid and beautiful. And I think that that rareness helps in creating a kind of personal validation and making it that much easier for someone to convince themselves that the dreams that they've been having have some special outer significance. I feel like I could easily believe it too. I feel like I want to believe it. I want to believe that I might have some ability to do something cool and fantastical like that, but choosing to believe something doesn't make it real outside of the belief itself. I don't like to think of myself as deluded. Other people are at their own liberty to decide to believe in whatever they please but if anyone is to ask me why I don't believe in something that they believe in, I can't give them a reason as to why I DON'T believe. I'm the one that needs to be convinced to believe. What I can reply with when asked, is if they are aware and can help me understand the reasons that make _them_ believe. It's their life and I'm not going to dedicate my time to making them believe one thing over any other. It matters more that they at least know the actual reasons for their own beliefs, no matter how insensible they might be to me.

I'm not stating that what others might claim that they've experienced, never was experienced. I'm not denying what could have been their very real response to their specific emotional and psychological experience but I just don't want to allow myself to be so easily convinced of anything just because I have no other explanation for what I may think that I saw or what others may have said happened. Maybe people like Jacob, the woman, or others who have had these kinds of similar experiences don't even care about an objective explanation. If these kinds of experiences happen in the body and we come to believe in them because of the ingrained beliefs in our mind, then it would not be surprising to find that trying to rationally convince someone of anything other than what they emotionally experienced would turn out to be very ineffective. What is being experienced as we dream is probably just an emotional response from our worries or concerns that we are able to sense about ourselves, while our body is resting and our brain has no actual visible input. Maybe our minds just create everything as best as it can from the limited input it has available to it as we sleep, and maybe we only rationalize the experiences in our dreams after waking up because of our desire to want to make sense of the things that are affecting us in our waking life. And so it's possible that all dreams, including the one that I had about my mom and the glass of water, was a story that I came up with, without realizing it, in order to fill in a sequence of events that I needed to see and believe in to function properly. We probably use our history and our past experiences to give a picture to our dreams and so that might explain the reason that in my past terrifying, paralyzed encounters while dreaming, my mind incorporated a small grey alien being instead of a demon, a monster, or a lady in a white dress. Thinking that that's how it might work gives me a better sense of my reality and although that might not be exactly how things really function, and although it might make me feel a bit uneasy that I may never know how all of this or anything else works entirely, I do know that the more that I learn and the more that I become aware of, the better off I'll be in recognizing what ideas or concepts work best and which beliefs I will want to decide to consciously incorporate into my life.

And all of this also makes me think about the fact, that in the same way, we probably also have a need to rationalize the story of our own life. I have said in the past that, _"it's all fiction, so why not use the fiction that can best help me?"_ So I'm left wondering about how to make sense of these different and very real "fictitious", or mind-reflected, experiences of existing. I need a way to determine which fictions can help me and which might limit or harm me. And also, first I have to structure this story in my mind by prefacing that I do believe that I exist because of this experience of feeling that I'm existing in some way at this very moment. So knowing that I exist, and because we need something to believe anyway, and accepting all those personal beliefs to be fictional experiences – meaning that we can only experience and relate to things from inside our self or our minds - this really comes down to how _much_ we believe in something that might help us. And so I need to compare beliefs based on two different categories.

Delusions and Illusions.

I could decide to believe something so much that I would become deluded - meaning that when a contradiction between reality and my belief were to be presented to me, I wouldn't know or be able to see it and so my experience would therefore be limited from further consideration and exploration. Or I could decide to believe something enough and understand it as an illusion. An illusion being, anything temporarily or conditionally entertained, or believed _enough_ that it stimulates a great emotional and personal response that empowers and enhances life rather than terrorizes and debilitates - The illusion of being a structured being with a structured, logical life story. I'd much rather enjoy this illusion that is life than allow myself to become enslaved to any delusion that will hold me to prefer the continual acceptance of personal ideas that might possibly be inaccurate to reality, and that if I or anyone seriously ever attempted to rid of, would probably leave my mental and emotional senses so devastated that I would become psychologically terrified, hurt, and unstable.

I think extraordinary things can happen if we as people can decide that rather than to allow ourselves to become mentally arrested by the compelling realm of supernatural beliefs that are based purely on speculation (beliefs which result more intensely after deep loss or terrifying fear) and rather than limit ourselves to a set of unwavering beliefs about what we may want to be the one and only hard reality, we can instead decide to enjoy and learn from our capacity for grand imagination, fantastical hopes and dreams, and this sometimes difficult to grasp or make sense of but nevertheless, helpful fiction that is our life.

"Manifest unattainable and nonexistent pursuits through dreams, creativity, and imagination. These are some of grandest abilities of the mind – which itself arises from electrochemical processes of information gathering and processing: complex pattern discrimination; imitation and event comparison and association (experience); and behavioral or characteristic attribution, prediction, and anticipation. They are products of our natural progression inseparable, though distinct, from reality as they are a consequence of it – It is the distinction between the external physical reality that exists even in the absence a conscious mind (of which there are 2 distinctions: the basic and standard reality; the assumed fundamental physical reality that is the strictest and most complete in truth - that we, as well as every other material thing, exist, self-evidently, and must do so in accordance to the natural 'rules or principles (laws that determine consequence)' we discover \- and the current objective physical reality believed and supported by proof, respectively) and the possible realities constructed of and for our own value or benefit (also of 2 distinctions: the perceptual and ideal realities; the subjective personal realities of interpretation experience and the conceptual realities of perfection, respectively). With these aptitudes we are able (beyond expression of self and personal amusement) to simulate an existence beyond the ordinarily physical, possible, or permissible; able to experience and learn from that which cannot otherwise be experienced without probable and genuine danger; able to practice all relevant matters and concerns – and explore the unknown, unrevealed, or whatever makes us wonder; and through which we are able to make sense of ourselves and our world and discover possibility: that is wisdom. I circumvent many innate human concerns in this way. A realization and conscious use of these abilities, ideas or thoughts, that would be reasonably, but hastily, regarded as 'delusions' of the mind, become useful 'illusions' by the mind; beneficial, life-enhancing powers resulting of the efforts towards improving on our understanding and mastery of mind and emotion; improving efficiency and ability through constant practice of what influences and involves neural organization, connectivity, and communications. Illusions are used by a mind aware in purpose while Delusions are continually held not in full consciousness, are deeply emotionally contingent, and are therefore, when we finally become disillusioned of them or even consider the thought of possible falsehood, devastatingly affective to our mental and emotional sense and stability. Take ideas and beliefs and attempt to destroy them in mind, all the while recognizing that the existence of something is independent of, not only of how we feel about the 'idea' itself, but also how we feel about the existence of the subject of the idea as well. Look then at the physical reality for discovering hard truth. Look beyond what's personally perceived. From this discover and keep with you Whatever benefits are realized; shattered beliefs can still idly persist and represent personal abstract forms of worth and admiration but they also reveal a wisdom we might otherwise be without. (Delusions that become pleasant and useful Illusions.)"

### Chapter 31

**February 17, 2009**

"Wake up to this certainty: this sense of emotional horror. A sinking feeling of something lost. Really close; dead again - but this time it's you that dies. And you die awake. Now life must be lived out the remainder of its short existence having missed such a great opportunity to do what was most wanted. Life becomes felt worthless. Everything to this point, that once felt fully enjoyed, now seemed so much more insignificant and unsatifisfying. These things cannot make felt, how it would, if this person were held close, the way imagined. Life now...it feels something to endure alone, in a state of constant dread - as though one was falling into an endless pit of nothing. Or worse – Consistent Unfulfillment. Deeper and deeper. Terrified, and at the same time, not regretting what had not been done because it has also taught of this place, which assures me that I am still alive and that I no longer want to inhabit anywhere which does not move me."

Tears are saltier than I remember. No, I'm not crying. I'm sobbing like a little girl! I feel ridiculous but I can't help it.

I would never have expected to feel this way about someone who I've known for such a short amount of time and have never even meet in person. And I guess it's not even them really, but only what they choose to share with me online - how much I've accumulated to believe about the kind of person she is over these last 8 months.

I think I wanted more. I don't think I've ever seriously considered my life with another person before. Yeah, I have found girls pretty and cute and even felt funny and jittery inside when they would talk to me, but for so long I have felt that a future life without them would not be any less meaningful than the life that I live without them now. Thinking back, most of the girls that I've felt something for has probably been because they were another new pretty girl that...well, that was _new_. When I would actually spend time with them alone, I didn't enjoy it because of how difficult it was to be myself around them. I enjoyed the fun and laughing at our stupid ways of flirting, but the time that I spent speaking honestly with them about myself was really difficult because of the reactions that they would have in learning more about me. And I didn't like that. I still don't and maybe that's why this has become much more meaningful to me than any of the other interactions that I've had with girls in the past.

She....was different...or...I felt different because...or the situation created the difference......we communicated at a distance and that made me feel safe. Or maybe it was more than that which contributed to this experience but, with her, I felt she took a real interest in, not only how I feel or don't feel, but how I live and experience life overall. Usually people want to tell me how I should feel and how I should see things and if I don't fit what they expected, then they say something is wrong with me and, to them, I become a stubborn emotionless non-person.

The way I feel, after the way we were together, isn't the way described in stupid love songs when the lyrics say something like, "I will give all myself to you and be all that you want me to be". What I feel is not a delusional, destructive dance of emotions. It is much more personally intimate and wonderful than that.

She still hasn't replied to my last message and I'll probably just end up writing her an e-mail about the way that I'm feeling, what I'm thinking, and I guess what I'm realizing that I actually did hope for but that I wasn't fully aware that I actually wanted. I'm not going to expect anything more (but I do, I do, I do _hope_ for it). I just feel that I need to share this with her, the same way that I would share the other parts of me that would help me, when we were...I don't know, a part of each other's lives? Yeah. I can say that I felt that way:

She was a part of my life. And I loved that.

I'm not going to regret not taking the opportunity to express what this has made me feel.

### Chapter 32

**March 16, 2009**

"No one else will ever understand how we Experience Our love. We can never truly share Our love with anyone.We can only share Of our love and About our love and our experiences. You do not have to experience the sharp pain of denying immense love and happiness to yourself by attributing it's continuation to others. And the love and happiness of others are not yours to believe you must feel burdened for. Jump up and feel the thrill that makes you feel you can fly, because you certainly love the way you do, like no one else can."

I guess that's it. It happened. And that's the last time it will ever happen. It's over.

She finally replied today that she could no longer continue with me. She didn't give me an explanation, even after I made sure to reassure her that I'd be okay no matter what it might be. She just thanked me for everything and said that I should never forget how much I helped her, through my own experiences, understand so much about herself and how happy being with me made her feel.

And I'm so glad for that but I also would have loved to know her reason for ending it.

We were always okay sharing anything about ourselves with one another before. She said that I was the one person that she could be her entire self with, without the fear of judgment or of feeling shamed. And now there is something that I cannot know and I don't like it. I never want for anyone to ever feel like they can't be as honest with me as they can be with themselves about their situation and personal history because, whereas before whenever I thought about the idea of two people coming together as one, I pictured people's silly concepts of physical or sexual acts that stimulate momentary feelings of superficial significance called spirituality and I laughed at the idea, now I think about living persons sharing all that they feel is important and personally significant about themselves with others, in a non-judgmental, accepting, and caring atmosphere that provides a safe place that allows for them to recognize how they actually see themselves, allows them to work to better understand what has happened to them and what they are currently going through, and allows the opportunity needed for them to learn from their past experiences so that they can make better, conscious decisions about how they want to be. I'm beginning to understand that there is very little else that can make us feel so intimately related to another life than getting over the fear of another person's imperfect personal or private life and learning about who they actually are, or have been, as completely as we can - without ourselves actually being them - and developing an intellectual, emotional, and personal desire to be someone in life that feels and shows a care for, not only them as a physical body, but also for all that they want to have and experience in life, outside of their solitary selves.

Right now, I sit here and I don't feel an emotional pain like the kind that some people have described feeling after the end of their relationship. What I'm feeling, is an overwhelming wonderful throbbing and shaking in my chest. I know that, regardless of anything else, I've helped someone in life feel their own sense of happiness. And I was happy before her but this feeling that I'm having, is more than happiness. I think I'm proud of this. I feel my own pride in helping others. Wow.....

But at the same time, I do feel the loss. I don't think that I felt the burning sickness that would make me want to vomit, but I was close. When I read she would no longer be able to continue, I did experience the sinking in the pit of my stomach, like I did that day that our parents let our sick dog hang from the rope on the tree outside of our window and I realized that I would never play with him again. And now I'm crying again. Crying like a stupid, stupid me.

Because we never agreed or assumed that we would belong to one another, I cannot feel hurt or betrayed no matter what I assume she did or is involved in that prevents her from continuing to hear from me. Maybe if I had thought less about this and only continued to react to the fear of living a hopeless, lonely life, I would have become obsessed and began to live that hopeless life but I actually hope she's living wonderfully, even if without me.

And I'm realizing that the kind of relationship that I thought I had with her, I can't immediately expect to have with others who will want to become a part of my life. I now recognize that in a lot of my past involvement with others, I had limited myself to living with an addiction to the temporary and empty emotional rewards that others were socially available to offer to me. I wasn't living a life of deliberate personal effort where emotional pleasures and meaningful relationships are something to be earned instead of something believed that we are born to deserve.

What I'm now left with is a deeper and stronger relationship that I have developed with myself, and she was there for that, but an ongoing relationship between us was never expressed as a mutual desire. I hope that the intimacy that I've developed with myself throughout all of this I can also someday develop with others...but I also want it to last. And it isn't just going to happen on its own. I have to work to create that relationship with them. It has to be done together if it's going to last. But I can only do what I can from my side to communicate what I want and hope that they will do the same, and only then can we be together, in whatever way that we want to work to be.

I imagine the way she might smile and how she might have sounded when she laughed at my idiotic ramblings when I had nothing more interesting, serious, or relevant to message back. My life without her will still be happy and I'll continue the same, except that I'll have a few more fantastic memories accompanied by a variety of love songs and many, many delicious salty tears you could maybe put on a hundred tacos for flavor. I might even message back and forth with her in my dreams...or maybe even SEE HER! I think now, I'm excited but still teary eyed.

As I'm holding Fluffy tail in my left hand, I'm remembering her joking threats that she would send it to me if I didn't shut up with my constant teasing her about it every night before we said good night. I laughed at how ridiculous I once thought that it was for people to sleep with and keep stuffed animals and now here I am holding Fluffy tail. As soon as I started tearing up, running over to grab fluffy tail was my immediate reaction. It's so silly but I'm realizing that for once in my life, I have something that comforts me. And that I'm okay feeling comforted by, because unlike people who just feel obligated and impulsed to make you feel better and tell you things that they cannot know like, "everything will be okay", and, "things will get better", Fluffy tail doesn't say anything. Fluffy tail can't say anything. And it doesn't have to say anything because in holding it and keeping it, I accept responsibility for the way that I will feel, and I understand what it will continue to mean to me knowing that I still have this piece of the experience that I had with her in my life and I'll always be able to feel so much comfort in that.

I guess it had to take this long for me to understand my own comfort, since the last time I can remember crying and needing it before almost a month ago, may have been about 14 years past, when I was in the 2rd grade and the teacher put me up against a cold cemented corner for not being able to stay quiet and continuously trying to talk to a group of girls while she was reading to the class. (That's funny.)

This whole thing will likely always continue to make me feel deeply sad and want to cry. Partly because it feels like she's gone but also - and I write this with a big quivering smile on my face - because I'm so glad that in my life I had the chance to know her, laugh with her, share with her, and feel so, so much with her and because this sense of loss is helping me learn and understand so much about my capacity to feel a love that's so much more than I thought I could ever or would ever have with me.

Being with her, in whatever way that we could say we were together, has forced me to consider and question things about myself that I never really had to when it was just me. What I've learned from all of this is that if I ever want to have something like this again (and more) with another person then I'm going to need to be better from now on, not less.

My time with her and the time that I know I now have to be away from her, has forced me to consider what it means to truly care for another human person. I want the best for her, even if that means (as much as it sucks) that I no longer get to ever hear from her again. I want to help a person in my life with what they believe is best for them, even if that means that that life, is not with me. This is a personally wonderful feeling to feel but it also one of the saddest things that I have ever experienced. I can no longer have her continue as a part of my life but I will always hope we can be together someday, again.

It is marvelous to feel it inside me - this, my own meaningful flow of human experience.

People might tell me that I need to let these feelings go, but screw that.

I created this and I'll never let this go,

"Goodbye you that cannot continue with me,

Hello to you what I feel and will always stay here, safe with me."

"Love immensely, not forcefully. Love aggressively, not violently. Love meaningfully and not to destroy, and you will have created something Beautiful."

### Chapter 33

**March 17, 2009**

"It's time to get up again. And I hope I move to, not where the things that I want to get are easy and convenient, but out to where my personal maturity matters and to where I will grow to learn to comprehend and maintain for myself what I do not yet understand."

Wooooo!

Finally finished reading and that was much easier to get through and a lot more enjoyable than I expected it to be. I think the last time that I can remember reading a fiction book for fun was _Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?_. And that was way back in 1st grade when I was able to memorize entire children books just by looking at the pictures on the pages. All the other kids were jealous of my reading speed, but I wasn't actually reading the words. The class from the other school that I transferred from had already read the book. My "reading" was actually just all mental recall from memorizing the words and pattern of the story when I was in the other class. I didn't know what I was actually repeating. It's too bad that I can no longer recall things as easily as I did then but that's okay because now I get to enjoy actually understanding the things that I read and that I want to learn.

I can't believe how much I really, really enjoyed reading this book. I guess I really enjoyed the story because I can really relate to the idea of growing up while trying to maintain yourself and who you want to be against the pressures of your environment and everyone around you. The ending is the only thing that I think could have been better...but maybe that's just because I just didn't want it to end and I wanted to know more about what happened next.

Tomorrow all the cousins will be visiting, so I think we're going to take out the volleyball net and then play some games, just like old times. I wonder if I still have the skills. Maybe I do, maybe I don't...doesn't matter, it's gonna be fuuuuun.

### Chapter 34

**October 21, 2010**

I just finished watching a segment from a TV special that I found online featuring a guy named Jesse. I wasn't sure if it was the same Jesse until I heard the announcer say what elementary school he attended.

Jesse, my best friend from the 5th grade...how good it was to see your face again.

How sad it was, the story of your life.

The program was titled _Growing up as child prodigies_. It featured him as one of 5 former child prodigies who hadn't been able to make it big. His segment centered on the musical talent that his parents discovered that he had when he sat down one day to play his grandfather's old piano. They discovered that he had the effortless ability to play like he had had years of classical training. He could play the music that was in his mind on the spot, without rehearsal or practice, and at the same time he could sing random but structured flowing lyrics with an extraordinary voice, that he did not normally possess. They mentioned that when he was younger, he was a very quiet kid that would occasionally speak with a mumbled voice with only those he trusted. But that when he sings, his voice is transformed into a powerful, intelligent, and clear melody of words that allows him to express himself to the rhythm of the music. They also mentioned that his favorite thing to do was not music, but drawing and painting. The announcer said that he had become so good at drawing over the years that he was able to replicate, with great accuracy, anything from memory and that he could create amazing, elaborate paintings without the use of references. They displayed his collection of paintings and stated that his last piece of artwork was never finished because his parents decided to put everything else that he was doing on hold, so that he would be able to have more time to focus on overcoming his social difficulties to pursue a career in musical performance. When asked by the interviewer if they felt like they were taking advantage of their son's talents by trying to push him into becoming famous, his mom said that they didn't know until he was diagnosed in high school that the abilities were because of his Autism, but that that shouldn't mean that he should stop trying to be his best by sharing his musical talent with all of the world. And his dad said that eventually going on tour would allow him the opportunity to finally be able to feel a sense of giving back to the world while earning a viable living for himself, "He can do this. It's not like this is very difficult for him. He says himself that the music and words just come to him but he hasn't yet developed a way to excel when it's time to perform in front an audience. Unlike other people in the world who struggle, he has the talent and if you have the talent then you shouldn't allow anyone to hold you back from everything you and your family deserve."

Those words from his parents sounded terribly familiar. When we were in class, I wanted to do what Jesse could do. I was envious of the skills that my best friend had, that I didn't. Unlike the other kids, I never tried to destroy his work and I never felt the urge to take away what he could do well. I was envious, not jealous. But I did do what his parents seemed to be doing to him. I remember getting upset that he didn't want to draw comics for the newspaper. I thought that me trying to show him how much better off he'd be making money from his talent was a helpful thing but really, I was thinking purely about my selfish interest in being his friend and what the money could get for me. If I had instead encouraged what he enjoyed, regardless of whether or not he had a talent for it or how well he did in it, then that would have been so much better for our relationship, even as kids.

While watching the program and learning of his autism, I was forced to think back and consider just how much I didn't consider, or could even care back then, that his behavior was so unlike most of the other kids in our class. I was aware that he was different from everyone that I had met but to me that difference was seeing him as the kid who wouldn't ever argue with me, so I didn't mind letting him stick around with me during school when he had no one else to hang out with. During lunch all he ever wanted was his mashed potatoes, pudding, or apple sauce because he could play with them and draw things in them before eating them. The other kids would make fun of him for throwing everything else away. They didn't make fun of him as much when he started sitting next to me for company - and he didn't mind, and I was really happy, to have his left overs. I got so used to his presence during school that eventually our friendship extended outside of school when I started inviting him to come out and play with me in the afternoon. One day, after school was over and we rushed home to watch Pokémon, I stared at him sitting next to me and realized that I had found a friend who I could hang out with without ever feeling like I wanted to harm him, which was a big deal for me because, for the first time ever, I began to feel like I might not be such a trouble maker and bully like my teachers and the parents of other kids would say I was. I do remember threatening Jesse that if he refused to take the summer job drawing comics, I might not continue my friendship with him and I don't like that I did that but I am glad to know, that even his refusal to something that I wanted, didn't lead to me physically harming anyone.

After I finished watching his segment, I immediately tried to look up more information on him online in case I would decide to get in touch with him again but the only thing that I found was a local, almost two year old article about the collapse of an elaborate stage setup that killed a gifted 21 year old pianist named Jesse "The Talent" Cormack.

When we were kids, I remember thinking more about his future life than my own and believing that if his ability came so easy to him and that if he could make money doing it, then that would mean that the rest of his life would automatically be just as easy compared to the life I would end up having or compared to the life of most other kids who would have to work so much harder to be just as skilled as he was.

When he went to visit his grandpa for the summer and I never heard from him again, the only thing that I had left to remember him by was his name, the fun we had together, and his little diary sketch book, that he gave me on the last day of school, which he suggested that on the top of every left page I could practice by trying to match the drawings that he made on the top of every right page: "You can make it too if you try."

I tried and tried and after every new attempt to imitate what he could effortlessly do, I got better but I knew I was never going to be as good as Jesse because I'm not Jesse. And whatever I might have wanted for Jesse to do with his life, it would never happen because those were really _my_ wants and Jesse wasn't me and therefore could never live my life for me. I am my life and everything that I want for my life and I cannot ever decide the best for another's life. The best that I can do is learn to be better for myself with the help of the memories and the way of living from those that have had a lasting influence on me and have affected how I want to live out the rest of my life.

After I accepted that Jesse was not going to show up and continue to be my best friend passed elementary school, I decided that I would model my behavior after him because I wanted to start my first year in middle school well and stay out of trouble. I didn't know if it would actually work to borrow the qualities that I admired about another person and apply them to improve my own life but after my first year was over, I knew that I wasn't different than I was before...but I was better.

It worked, and I have myself and Jesse to thank for that.

Thinking back, I don't remember Jesse having a problem with his being so quiet, in keeping to himself, and I think he was happy being talkative around only those few that he felt he could trust. My memory of him was one of us and the way we were....we were good together. And although he may never know now, it was because he once lived and because of how he lived that I can say, he helped me learn to be a better friend and a better person to everyone I meet.

Thank you, Jesse Cormack.

I am grateful for what your life has meant to me,

I am proud to have known you,

and I am proud to have had _You_ ,

call me your _Friend_.

"As I perform the mundane, menial, and insignificant there is a Process going on inside of my head that accumulates and makes sense of far greater knowledge than what I am consciously aware of. I do not directly control all else that comes from this or know how exactly it works. I only know that it does work because as I remember to reinforce only my breath to relax, and feel my face and body become heavy and free of tension – from above at my crown, down to the point between my eyes, and further to my chin, out to behind both my ears, and cascading down to the heels of my feet - and I look up and out, directly at nothing in particular, everything around me, from the wide exterior expanse to the smaller separate sequential parts, begins to fade and I feel my collective begin to vanish. I divide and this is when I become acutely responsive to the inner workings from which ideas and concepts quietly clatter and align, and I am suddenly able to experience a story unfold. I feel my past, I know my present, and I see my hopes and future. Pieces flow together without discernible effort, and I know it feels amazing, and indeed, to witness, is remarkable, but without personal effort, it is not extraordinary. Extraordinary is seeing what exists and investing our personal self in it toward building what was once nothing more than an image of our mind, now made more than just a feeling. Something that we can finally touch which reassures us that we have some control in our life and that strengthens our belief that we have the capacity to, and that we are powerful enough, not to change the world, not to make OTHER things better, and not for anyone else but ourselves, but that we can attain and fulfill the meaning in our lives by exerting ourselves to its creation and improving with it. We are the ones that command the reality that we are real, that we are people of worth, and that our own life can have extraordinary meaning - no special abilities required."

### Chapter 35

**December 25, 2010**

It's at times like these that I'm really glad that I have a way to let out my frustrations and anger. Writing my daily entries has helped me so much. It may seem strange to others if they knew, but I'm more thankful for this journal than any other person that I have ever met. Sometimes it's really difficult for others to take in what I have to say. In my mind, I make sense and feel unrestrained to what I can consider and express, but sometimes people hear my thoughts and ideas and to them I become strange, unwelcomed, or an enemy. I do not make myself an enemy or intend to disrespect or offend. I just don't believe that there is anything that should be off limits simply because it challenges us personally.

And tonight I experienced something that has challenged me deeply.

The sun will be up in a few hours but I want to get my thoughts, my feelings, and what happened today out before I sleep. I just got back from seeing Bruce. At the moment, I feel happy and relieved that I made it. But I also feel upset that no one else made it out to see him. I understand that it was Christmas Eve and so they want to be with their families but I'm sure that they're able to see their families almost any other day out of the year. Bruce is alone. There is no one else for him and they know that from the last conversation that we all had with him, when he said that he wanted to let us know how much he loved the note that we made and what we did for him which gave him so much hope. He told us how deeply it affected him, that he cried that night, and that the world would be a better place if there were more people like us – which I question now if these are really the kind of people that would make the world a better place, but I consider more if these are the kind of people I want to continue having in my life.

We found out that the man's mom died the night that we all ran into Bruce again on the streets. That was the reason he decided to write a note back to us about what happiness means to him:

### "Happiness To Me Is Being Yourself No Matter What And Bringing Joy To Someone Else's Life."

He let us know, months before December, how much he would appreciate to see us all again on Christmas Eve so that he could talk with us one more time, but at the last minute, every one of them tells me that they can't make it but that I should "say hi" on their behalf, when they could have easily taken, at most, a single hour out of their day, and only 5 minutes that he asked to talk with us, to say hi themselves and then be back with their families. It wasn't like he was asking for gifts, or asking us to stay with him the night, or anything that would require strenuous effort. He was simply asking if we could honor a simple request of being present with him on a day that held great significance to him so that he could share something more that has helped him continue to live happily and gratefully, even if he himself lives without a family or a place to call a home.

After 3 hours of trying, I finally found a ride downtown with a friend from high school that I haven't really spent much time with since we graduated. We used to game together every week along with a bunch of other guys. Still to this day, those are some of the best and fun memories that I have. I contacted him and asked if he was busy with family. He said that he wasn't and that he would gladly help out and pick me up. On the way there, I told him a bit about Bruce. How he is the cool, happy homeless man who wears a backpack everywhere he goes. We met him downtown when he overheard that we were looking for a place to use the bathroom so he pointed us to a place nearby that we could go to and said to just be careful and not get into any "sword fights" by the urinals. I told him about the note of happiness that he wrote to us and how compassionate and wonderful of a man he is. I even mentioned how I've told Bruce before that his backpack reminds me of the guys and me in high school - how we would all come together, every week, carrying our own TVs, and wear our backpacks packed, not with school work or our problems, but with everything we needed to create a ridiculous but wonderful experience that still, and will forever, mean so much to me because that's how we all met...it was our common bond at the time and for me, it was the beginning of something great and deeply personal that very few ever do understand.

We were supposed to meet him around 10 p.m. and it was now almost 2. I said that we should pass by where Bruce asked us to meet him but there was no one there. I decided that we should stop and that I would get out and go look around on foot, and told Orlando that he didn't have to come with me because it was so cold out. He replied, "Nah man, that's cool. That's why I wear the jacket. I'll join you and we'll go look for him." I was surprised that he really wanted to meet Bruce. So we both headed out to look for him in the freezing cold. I didn't expect it to be as cold as it was when Orlando picked me up, and even when I stepped out and noticed that it was freezing, I was thinking more about finally making my way downtown to find Bruce that I didn't decide to go back inside and grab a jacket to wear. The only thing that I wore was my white t-shirt and some jeans but at least I had on two pairs of socks to keep my feet really warm and pockets to keep my hands from becoming to frigid. We checked his usual spots but found no one. After about 15 minutes, things weren't looking any better. Not one person anywhere. We start walking back to the car and I start yelling out his name, joking that he always shows up when we call his name. Sure enough, we saw a man wearing a long jacket, multiple scarfs, and a beanie walking down the middle of the parking lot. I yelled out, "ARE YOU BRUUUCE!?" He pulled one hand out of his pocket, raised it up to wave, and said, "HEEEY! Yeah, I'm Bruce. Good to see you again my friend."

He gave me a big hug.

I told Bruce how glad I was that I was still able to find him. He asked if he had met my new friend. I introduced Orlando and said that he had helped me with a ride so that I could be there to see him. Bruce introduced himself and gave Orlando a big hug that he probably wasn't expecting or prepared for, but he hugged back and said, "Oh-okay." When he asked about everyone else, I said that they were all with family and Bruce's head tilted down to look toward the ground. I said that it took a while, and far longer than I wanted it to, but that I was finally able to get there. He expressed how he had almost given up hope that we would show up or that we would even remember but that he appreciates my effort and is greatly thankful that I came through with the help of a friend. He told us how unfortunate it was that the others couldn't make it, then smacked his lips as he asked us to pass along this message to everyone,"Welp, Let them all know that...Thank you. Bruce with the backpack is still around. I'm doing much better because of what you all kind people did for me. And I have a short story I want to share with you about what love and compassion mean to me." He began his story:

"During the cold, cold winter there were 2 sets of birds from different families, each living together near a different cherry tree.

On each side, there is one bird up in the cherry tree, and another on the ground with a broken wing, starving.

The bird below the first cherry tree starts to chirp hoping for something more than attention. The bird above says, 'It's okay. I love _you_!'

The bird below the second cherry tree chirps as well and the bird above says, 'I'll try.'

The bird below the first tree chirps again and the bird above says, 'It's okay. Remember, _I love you_!'

The bird below the second tree chirps once more and the bird above repeats, 'I'm trying.'

The bird below the first tree chirps one last time before it can no longer continue chirping. The bird above says, 'It's okay because I _loved_ you.'

The bird below the second tree no longer needs to continue chirping, because the bird above that cherry tree begins to push a few of the cherries onto the ground and says, 'See? I can learn to care for you over time when I hear you chirp to let me know you want me to.'"

Bruce smacks his lips again and says, "Now...that is compassion to me."

"Love is a verb. It is not what we say, it's what We Do."

I told Bruce that I'd pass along his story and that I hoped that I've helped him in some way with the little bit of stuff that I brought out to give to him, like the bird in the second cherry tree helped the bird that couldn't fly to help itself.

Now after having done all that, I have to challenge myself about the reasons that I truly went and how I feel about the situation of any man who seems to live a life that to others might see as less than their own.

In my life, there has never been another person who I could look up to and feel secure to talk with about my troubles or about what I find important, but I've always wanted to have that. As silly as it may sound for me to even admit this to myself, I do feel this innate want to know someone who would be able to see me, see what I do, see how I am, and who would be able to look over all the things that I did in life and be there to help me. Not someone who would want money, or control, or would want something in return. Definitely not someone who would want to make anyone feel guilty, or would be there to shame or judge but someone who would genuinely want to help me and who I would also want to help in whatever way that I could.

I didn't show up to see Bruce because I wanted to feel good about myself in being able say that I gave the change in pocket to a homeless man and helped change his situation (He didn't ask for us to help him out of the state that he's in and we don't know how he feels about the way that he is currently living). I didn't show up because I wanted to make him feel important for a night. I didn't show up because I intended to become a part of the man's long-term life. I have no fantasy to want to change the world because the world isn't telling me to help it change. I showed up for a far greater personal reason than any of that.

I did it because I know that if I ever want to meet or be with the kind of person that I can rely on, look up to, and who honors what they say they will do, I need to be able to do the same myself by doing all that I can to fulfill the actions that I tell others that I will set out to do.

The idea that another person could so honestly and intimately feel driven to help me or anyone else possible inspires such a sharp and wonderful feeling in my heart that makes me want to fall to my knees and cry. I've always felt a hope that someday I might actually meet someone like this but never in any realistic way. But if I can learn to be that same kind of person, then the possibility of meeting someone else who would also be able to help fulfill this part of my life, would be much higher and not sound so completely delusional. And even if I never do have that kind of relationship with another person, I will pursue that kind of life for myself and will always love the hope that I have for making my life with other people far greater, beneficial, and healthier than the standard give and take relationship that I have seen all around me my entire life.

I can't say that I know what else Bruce wants in his life, but what we all did know is that he wanted us to be there with him for a few minutes so that he would be able to share with us what he has gained from the life that he has lived, what he believes is important, and what he continues to value. I don't have very much else to offer anyone other than the same thing that Bruce had for us this night – an opportunity to get to know someone and the life that they have which might develop into something more, and if not mutually, then at least it can be something greater that we might carry with us and feel thankful for.

In meeting Bruce and through my effort to go see him again, I have realized that I do intend to live my life in a way that if any person - homeless or not – asks me for help and if I can provide for them something that personally takes nothing away from me, and if they are showing a serious effort to first help themselves, then I'll gladly say that I can and that I will do everything in my power to make sure that I do my part to help. This is what I can carry with me and feel thankful for from this experience.

This is what's going to help me learn to be more compassionate.

This is what's going to help me learn to show that I genuinely care for others, when I hear them chirp to let me know they want me to.

### Chapter 36

**January 20, 2011**

This isn't coming to me as easy as it usually does. I think it's because this time, it isn't coming from me. If it was something I was naturally motivated to do, then it would happen as though it was the easiest thing in the world for me. No unnecessary critical thinking but all personal enjoyment and self-satisfaction. This feeling reminds me of how I felt in school when we would be assigned to write a paper on something that we enjoyed, but we could only pick from a list that was given to us. And if you didn't find anything on the list that you enjoyed, you were told to, "just pick what you think you'd like best." Maybe in their mind, it's like saying, "You have to make the best out of your situations," but if the teacher wanted the central motivation for writing to come from our natural enjoyment of a thing then limiting the choices to a predefined list was dubious.

I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to write this story for Lester in only 3 weeks if I don't even feel motivated and instead just obligated because of our history in each other's lives from such an early age. I can't find an actual reason to want to do this other than because of how important he says it is to him but I don't think that's enough for me. He admits that he doesn't even know the personal reason of why this is so important to him. If I can't find a reason to want to write this for _him_ , then I have to find a reason to want to write this for _myself,_ and do I even want to do that!?

Fuck.

"Moving. We have to be moving. We are functioning to move and in this way stay alert and creative. We can create before us varying ways to keep going. If we do not move, what we are doing, is allowing our own undoing - other forces will pressure an end to our pleasure of being."

### Chapter 37

**January 21, 2011**

This is pathetic.

There are times when I'm alone and everything just comes to me. Where I could just sit here and write. But right now, I find myself with nothing but the thought going over and over in my mind that I should figure out what to write and start already.

Nothing inspires me. My brain is using all this energy trying to find something worth writing about and how to even begin but that is all wasted energy because the things worth writing about aren't determined by the brain. What's worth writing comes from the way we're feeling. And what exactly am I feeling now? How do I describe this lack of feeling...I'm just not enjoying this.

And I know that creative works cannot only be derived from the enjoyment of an experience we may want to express but they can also come from our pain, our suffering, and our misery but really how much physical or psychological suffering is this putting me through? Not very much. This is more a case of the smaller everyday troubles and discontentment that others might find banal, unremarkable, or insignificant.

I know this because I've mentioned my struggle to find the motivation to write to a few people and they've simply laughed and have said that there are more important things in the world to worry about right now. Yeah, a lot of great help they were. I know I'm not the only person in the world, and I'm not saying that I have the worst or most difficult life, but I don't reveal the things that I'm genuinely feeling in order to compare myself to others. I know that there might be, or more than likely, there probably **are** starving kids in Africa, but I'm not them. I'm not involved in their difficulties, and I don't have the power to solve the distant problems of others that I don't understand well enough to even want to begin making myself feel responsible for. This is what I'm going through now, and maybe later, the things in life that are on my mind the most will change and grow but at the moment, writing this stupid story is what I struggle with. And I can say and admit that this is on my mind more than I want it to be but I'm not going to pretend that it's any other way than how it really is. It might seem silly or laugh worthy to them what concerns or stresses me but that doesn't invalidate the way that I'm feeling. It doesn't matter how others might think about the little things that are involved in what brings us down because that doesn't change the reality that when we live something, we also feel it.

This is difficult for me. And it's not that I want it to be easy, I just need a reason to feel better about the time it's going to take to do this. I want to feel the simple fun and enjoyment of my life like I did before I decided that I would do this, but I don't, and I just want to get this done. There is so much more that naturally excites and motivates me. Things that I don't have to think too hard over and that I just know and feel that I love to do. I don't have to think about what to put together or what I need to go out and do to feel inspired or motivated, I just naturally let it out of my mind and make it more than a thought or a dream. That's what I want this to be like, but it's not. I love feeling myself do what relaxes me most. And doing things for others isn't one of them. Not when it feels lacking in meaning for me.

I know that I'm thinking way too much about this but I need to figure out a better reason to continue and get through this. I know that what we're involved in and going through at any time affects us personally and can be the hindrance of being able to create, but it can also be an experience we have to pull from to create naturally instead of forcefully. So what do I have to pull from except for the terrible, frightening nightmares that I've been having? I don't know how great of a story it might make but I don't have anything else that makes me really want to write. I feel stuck both if don't do anything or if I go ahead and write and form a story from these horrid dreams. I want to save my energy for something better but if I don't do anything, I'll feel like I didn't even try.

And I have to try, even if I stay stuck. I'll write...

"You wake up violently in your bed with tears clouding your vision, and you're afraid to move as you effortlessly recall what you have just dreamt.

A thunderous sound was felt and the stadium ceiling cracked. It crumbled briefly before exploding inward and crushed anything and anyone that was in its way. And then with a path made wide enough to enter, down they came - Giant mechanical beings that paralyzed all still standing, who moments before were loudly and enthusiastically praying for the 'higher beings' to fall from the sky. Their functionless naked legs hung off the ground. Their long mechanical tentacle arms glided over to the closest lifeless bodies, which the behemoths shoved up their underside so that they could continue to operate. They came to test our advancement as a people by using our minds to simulate a wide spectrum of contrasting and conflicting ways of being and living. They were to examine how we would respond to the differences. Those who failed the test by holding onto easy reactions of violence, cruelty, and personal offense were wiped of any memory of the event or the beings, dropped at the nearest surrounding isolated area, given a temporary two minute loss of all senses, and programmed to crawl the land until they found someone to help them. They moved quickly from one failed person to the next. Anyone who passed the test was given the option to leave to a better and greater world or they could decide to stay and be wiped clean of any knowledge or recollection of what happened and would continue to live as a part of their own kind, who would continue to thoughtlessly treat one another like things to be disparaged and controlled or harassed and destroyed simply for being one way instead of another.

And they didn't want the fearless; they accepted only those who cared to show the courage to challenge their most cherished beliefs and valued concepts of their personal reality.

All around, you witnessed the shells of people reacting to experiencing the variety of human life's distinctions.

Men became girls being opened to excitement and feeling their first time being sexually penetrated and at the same time terrified that they might become pregnant and remain left lonely. Women became a boy attending a neighborhood pool party in the midst of his puberty, and felt his indiscriminate and raging lust and rapid desperate rationalization that maybe he could only get away with it and satisfy all of his bodily perversions if he did it quietly and quick enough that no would see. Heterosexuals were re-born attracted to the same gender and made to feel like monsters by their own families. Homosexuals struggled with the desire to live a healthy, loving life while contemplating suicide from the guilt and shame of growing up in their new body and mind that became a pedophile as a consequence of being molested at a younger age. Transgenders experienced the mind of a member of an incestuous family that had been isolated from all other external social contact for most of their lives. The prostitutes became addicted rapist, monogamists lived as polyamorists, christians became satanists, muslims: athiest, agnostics: dying pregnant tribal women, racists: their most hated oppressed ethnicity, and the rich became poor disabled children.

When it was your turn, you didn't scream like the others before you had but you did begin to panic as your vision went black. You felt the clasping pressure on top of your head send a burst of energy down the back of your spine that moved in heavy waves around and into your heart.

You wondered what it would be that you were about to experience and then heard a voice speak to you, 'You're thinking now aren't you? About what this will mean? About whether you will succumb to your fears and your prejudice like the others, once you live in differing variation? Will you be a boy? Maybe a girl? Or maybe a man or a woman more confused than children? What about something in between. Will you fear a life of ambiguity where you happen to be born with the hormones that form genitalia that do not conform to your minds gender? Will you come out of this still immature or will you have experienced a growth within yourself to create a level of maturity in which biology, sexuality, gender, preference, and circumstance no longer weigh over the importance of learning to care for life that has already been born. Regardless of how you will be formed to experience what may disturb you, this will be you, no longer being thoughtless.'

For the duration of a single heartbeat, but what felt like eternity, you were raw consciousness, void of a name, place, memory, family, or form. You then became a new solid, living being that you could make sense of and you went through the experience of your previous self's opposites and endured devastating cruelty, vicious judgment, hatred, harassment, emotional and psychological self-torture, and in the beginning you were repulsed by the rapid incoming of alien information. It disturbed you and created irrational fears that made you want it to end as soon as possible and get away but as you experienced having lived half-way through your new life, you started to develop powerful personal empathy and understanding for your new person. In less than 30 seconds you became and lived as another individual might have for what felt like 90 years. You began to recognize the mental conflict between the beliefs you had before and the way in which you learned to live happily with this different way of being. But as the simulated experience neared its end, you began to feel less and less alarmed and became completely accepting of life as it's always been. You felt a shocking, freeing calm come over you as once again your vision began to fade.

Your mind felt light, dark but bright, and infinitely expansive. And as the darkness settled and you sensed that your new life had expired, you realized that all of the hardship, all of the judgment, all of the prejudice, all of the torment, the experiences of loss, and all of the misery that is a part of life is enough to make you no longer feel that you need to contribute to anyone else's belief that they are a bad individual. You learned the incredibly important lesson that no life needs to end feeling shame or that their life has been meaningless.

Your eyes opened to the same world that you knew before but what was different, was that in that present moment you could feel an overwhelmingly deep sense of a positive relationship to every person and every living thing that has ever been or will ever be. You were unsure of who exactly it was that your consciousness had come back to be. And it didn't matter. You were now a being full of compassion for yourself and everything alive. You had a euphoric smile, and brilliant teary eyes, and felt that nothing could ever bring you down from how wonderful it felt to be alive and to know that through cooperation between everything that is, reality allows grand possibility for all.

But your test was not over.

A luminescent frame was lowered in front of you. You looked into it and saw your mother. You saw your father. The moment you saw them together, you wanted to hug them, you wanted to give them both a kiss. You wanted to thank them for being your parents and laugh with them about the wonderful memories that they gave you. You wanted them to hold you and to tell you that you've made them incredibly happy just by being you but before you could initiate any of your affections and show your gratitude, your mom stepped back away from you, pointed her finger, and shouted, 'You're the one that used me and fell out of my body to destroy my youth.' Your dad moved forward, looked down on you and said, 'What made you think you were ever worth my love?' And then they turned to face each other, their bodies came together, shook, and then morphed into you - bloody and fully bare. You stood witnessing yourself naked and felt terribly exposed. You felt a sharp anxiety that you might be thought of as unclean by others watching. You quickly wiped your body to try and remove the blood from yourself but realized that the figure in this cosmic mirror was not yours to control. Your actions couldn't change it. It looked back at you with your same eyes and a satisfied menacing smirk. It shook its head, let out a strong and painful laugh, and said to you with immense disgust and contempt, 'Playing with the fucking gays, child molesters, and incestuous atheist whores, are you!? You dirty miserable disappointment. You fucking worthless, meaningless abomination and disgusting vile mistake. You're gonna rot alone in life for what you've done and everything that you didn't do. You should have never been born and deserve to die by your own filthy hands, you overgrown infected seed,' and your once gleaming face and proud body suddenly crumbled as you desperately let out a horrifying, chilling shriek of terror that is typically only heard after the unexpected loss of loved ones.

Through the vicious scolding, you felt your heart burst and your insides collapse. It was like a nuclear blast was set off in the part of your heart that stores and remembers your most intimate and powerful feelings and the violent explosion left behind a black hole that sucked out the rest of your insides. The figure in the frame turned away and then disappeared. You were left with an emotionally ruptured heart, a massive internal emptiness, and felt like everything that you had once loved had either disappeared or had abandoned you. You then felt an overbearing invisible weight, pressure you down to your knees. The massive psychological distress made you burst into the excruciating tears of a helpless infant feeling devastatingly confused about where to seek comfort. You felt yourself wasting away in a prison of shame, painful loneliness, and insignificance. As your body grew weaker, your head dipped down into the puddle of sweat, tears, and urine that had come out of your body during the caustic condemnation. You noticed a rusted blade was left in front of you, and you considered how only your blood was missing from the mix.

The voice spoke to you once more,

' _Close your eyes and think toward your home. See how beautiful, you've failed to make it?'_

The End."

### Chapter 38

**August 30, 2011**

_  
_"From how we live our lives or the memories and tales of how life has been lived comes Inspiration, which is the emotional fuel of intense excitement that's triggered by new relatable combinations of ideas about life's possibilities (but that remain at a distance). Once those opportunities become present and we see them as attainable, we can become personally Motivated. We can discover a personal and not just emotional reason to decide to carry on with what we feel, and even if it scares us, we will move with courage to make it more than just a feeling. We will move to create and to show it meaningfully for ourselves, and with the hope that others can relate and also feel greatness about themselves knowing the reality of our own existence and our power to become all that we want to be while we're here, Alive and Able."

It's pretty, pretty super cool to see what happens when someone is allowed the time to just live and create from that. Seven and a half months may seem like a long time for such a short story but nothing that we do and enjoy and makes us feel satisfied in the end, is ever a waste of time.

I agree that what I first wrote was a far more different thing than what I initially expected to hand over to Lester. What I wrote was the result of what I was feeling at the time. I had to let out all that negativity and frustration before I would be able to write something, not only better, but also more meaningful for me.

That original story just didn't build to anything more for me. It was a way for me to release my emotional concerns but that was all. It was a story developed from the terrible nightmares that I was having. The nightmares in themselves were just information about what I was worried about, and alone they don't have any deeper meaning, unless I give them meaning. Yes, the original story was inspired by something that I was really going through at the time and inspiration is that feeling of love (or in my case, lack of love) that presents a reason to want more, but that kind of love is not enough. I've learned that above inspiration, you also have to understand your personal reasons for something (your motivation) and not care about the fear of ever losing what you might have, and then you have to take the actual steps to do what you want to do or to move to where you want to be in your life.

When I was younger and I played sports with friends or was in athletic school competitions, I remember that I would motivate myself to push through to make it or to win by imagining that if I didn't, the world would somehow blow up and that it would all be my fault. That sense of fear, even if imagined, made me more aggressive, and worked well enough as motivation, but it also lead to many injuries. Once, I sprained my ankle really bad during a game of football because I was more concerned with getting a hard hit on someone that had tackled me earlier, than I was concerned about playing the game properly. Another time I physically exhausted myself to the extent that my vision blackened to a small point and I passed out in the middle of gym class. But the worst was the injury, not to myself, but to a friend during a game of dodgeball. I remember getting really upset that he was distracting my teammates with insults which caused them to get out a lot faster than usual. I had it in my mind that he deserved everything that I had, so I kept my eye on him, waited until he made a full stop, was distracted, and then launched the smallest and toughest ball that we had, as hard as I could. He fell to the ground holding his face, the gym teachers rushed to him, and I stood there not saying a word and felt really upset at myself for the reasoning that I had for doing what I had just done. He was taken to the nurse and then sent home with a broken nose. I'm glad that no one questioned me for the behavior and that most everyone just considered it accident and part of the game because if they had asked me why I did that, I would have looked like such an idiot for honestly telling them that the reason was because I felt that if I hadn't we might have lost and then that would have meant THE END OF THE WORLD. That was the last time that I used fear and the need to win as a motivation for myself. Now I find it much better to strive to be the best that I am able to, without harming myself or others. I can do enough that I feel I've positively contributed the effort for myself instead of feeling the stress, fear, and violent aggression from thinking that anything less that everything, winning, or perfection would mean the end of the world.

Inspiration can come from many external places, but motivation is better when it's my own. And I have to be my own motivator and tell myself that I can do it if I put in the effort, and that I should keep going if I'm not harming anyone, and that I can BREATHE and be okay knowing that I do this because this is the kind of person I want to be (and not because of an extremely negative idea or a crazed belief of fear that if I don't do something, it will mean disastrous loss or that I would be losing something of myself).

I rushed my story because I didn't want Lester to be upset or feel let down because I didn't have it done on time. I acted on feelings of fear and possible loss, not anything more positive and capable of growing more meaningful. And only upon realizing this, was I able to begin to write for myself again, and also for self-discovered reasons.

As I read over the first story, I can see how it didn't building toward something greater that I could have to look back on as a reminder of how to help myself understand what is significant to me, what experiences have or should inform my life, or how it was that I learned to understand what I want of my life and how I want that life to be. Then I look at the new story and this one does help remind me of the importance of my own life and all the events, memories, and experiences that I had to pull from in order to put it together. It was so much more enjoyable to write, and important for me to write because I realized that if I had the opportunity to create something that might help others, in an environment and under the conditions best suited for my creativity - without external management, unwelcomed distractions, or being pressured to meet others expectations and a deadline - then I could easily incorporate the work into my daily life. I could write what I felt and allow the story to eventually take form without as much personal struggle and without the whole thing feeling like an extraneous thing. If it could be something that I really had a reason to want to do myself, regardless of whether or not it began through someone asking me to do it for them, then that would make me feel okay about the time and effort required to make it happen. It's a really fun, uplifting, and a significant feeling enjoying something rather than only focusing so damn much on getting it done and over with. I finally found meaning in this, and it might sound really self-absorbed, but I'm very thankful to myself for that.

And I want to make sure that I emphasis this as a new reminder: As lacking of a stronger meaning that it ended with, and as equally lacking of any personal motivation that I had in writing it, I'm glad for the emotional outlet of the first story. Everything doesn't NEED to be deeply or personally meaningful. Alone, the first story might not be much but if I look back and read the two, together they are far more and have a much bigger meaning to me than they each would have alone.

The first was so rushed, that I didn't remember to give it a title but that's okay because that helped me understand that rushing and focusing too much on any one, single objective makes us blind to so much more and leads us to overlook the other things that are also important to our work and our lives. Sometimes we can create something that comes inspired so easily and it may turn out great but we just wouldn't find the same amount of an appreciation, personal value, or take as much pride for the work without the struggle in effort. Though our best motivation will come from our most difficult emotional and psychological experiences surrounding what it is that we love, our greatest creations will be what results from our honest attempt to decide in what way to think about what we are doing and in deciding _how_ to use the information, abilities, and power that we've learned or acquired over the years.

I hope that my writing has helped Lestor, and anyone else who reads my work, learn to think about the personal reasons that influence them to ask for anything, and I hope that moving forward they will seek to fulfill life's meaning for themselves before asking others to do it for them.

"'Just one more day...  
Just one more day.  
Can't I stay for,  
Just one more day?'

### Hoping for Just One More Day

**Do not panic. You** _are_ **hearing voices in your mind.**

We are the collective, collaborative mind of Consciousness Communications Network Orbital (CoCoNO) from the year 53,470. You have been chosen this day to receive the following documentation with the hope that it helps you live a better existence.

**The year is 5243. Teleportation of our consciousness into the past has been around for over 192 years. Following the Free Mind Rights Movement of 5069 the Global Government has made Non-interfering Consciousness Travel (NiCT) available to everyone on Earth beginning on the day of their 16** th **birthday, with an enforced limitation of once every 5 years after and a random consciousness selection to prevent the development of personal attachments for the traveler. Remote travel can be scheduled for any night during sleep within the 5 year period, with full recall upon awaking. Unused NiCT sessions do not carry over the 5 year available period. Each journey into the past to experience a day in the life of a person happens without their knowledge, consent, or awareness of the viewer. The experience is OPTIONAL and not mandatory.**

And the same is true for following information, so please decide now in your mind if you want to continue...

\-------------------------

February 12, 5243

10:45 P.M.

Hello Erol,

Please nod your head if you hereby agree to continue with your NiCT Experience.

Thank you,

We shall now begin and wait for your body to relax and sleep.  
 _  
Waiting for sleep......._  
 _NREM sleep state reached......._  
 _Initiating outgoing signal......._  
 _Accessing pool......._  
 _Random stream found......._  
 _Connection established......._  
 _Retrieving output......_

-November 21, 2011

-9:16 A.M.

-You're an ordinary 99.99 year old man, one day away from your next birthday, walking down the sidewalk of an ordinary street, hearing ordinary sounds move past you, when you suddenly stop and feel the infinite space between yourself and your body. You remember the saddest death that was your first pet, how there was nothing that you could do to stop it, and for the 5th time in your life, you experience the frailty of all life, but this time stronger than it has ever felt. Your breath stops, your view is spinning, you can no longer hold yourself up, and your vision blurs as you sense the creeping doom of your mortality and you begin to panic and consider dreadfully of how many minutes more your heart - which its weight, you can now hear working heavily - will continue beating, 'Oh, Dear life of mine, I don't want you gone. I don't want to die...'.

-You don't know how long you have, but you know that you too will have to die. Life is as certain as death. But before you collapse under the weight of this empty, meaningless fact and occurrence of existence, that scares you like nothing else ever has before, you realize that all that makes you has always been around and will continue to be even when you are no longer here to experience being together in your current form. And somehow that makes you feel okay and even a bit happy to know that you can think this way.

-You are no longer consciously moving or thinking and for the first time ever, you are experiencing what it feels like to look at yourself from the outside of your own structure. You recognize that you are no better than the dirt, the grass, and the trees that have been around for exceptionally longer than, not only your own life, but far, far longer than all of humanity has ever been. And that at some point, far back when you were not capable of remembering, your body was the land and the water, and further back, it was the stars that you once talked to and wondered about when you were a child and you had no one else who you could confide your little troubles with and who you could share with, all of your silly kid accomplishments.

-When your mind finally finds itself back inside its body, that lays physically helpless on the ground, you feel the huge rush of your life as it was years ago sweeping over you and it greets you with a wave of all of the things that you never stopped loving and all of the people that you never stopped caring for. You gasp with overwhelming awe and begin to sob as memories that you had long forgotten start to come back, and the joy and excitement from them begin to flow over and into you, endlessly filling you up, 'Where have you beeeeeen!? Oh, how I've missed you so long.'

-You recall an old dream from your late teenage years, about a girl that you never really met but who you would constantly fantasize about - that she might one day come into your life.

**

** {Innocence breaks

'She is playing her role in my dream. Opening the door for me to walk through alone, to where I know I'll miss her. And as she calls my name to step across, and away from her, my blood races and my heart begins pounding heavily and rapidly forward against my chest to be closer to hers. I see her face and my mind becomes crazed and I am fully shocked at these feelings of intense irrational amazement, stupid wonder, youthful happiness, extreme excitement, the deep fondness and sadness that I have yet to know with her, and the strong intimate longing to be with her in every innocent way possible and not. I imagine a fantastic impossible reality. I imagine us fulfilling each other in all the ways that a person can, and will ever hope for, as we begin to move together, then come together and never want again to be separated from the other or feel less than the burst of intoxication that we experience when pull each other closer - because when we do release, that moment we let go, is a moment that destroys what then can no longer be enjoyed. And all of this that I hope for, fear, and feel, floods me in just that brief moment that I sense her presence by my side.'}

-You smile and wonder why you never shared that lovely dream with the most important people in your life. You consider them, and even though you feel your vision spinning and fading and your energy decline and you're thinking that you're not likely to make it through this time, you still wonder where they all might be at this very moment instead of with you, helping you up.

-As you feel the remainder of the only life that you have left to live, you ask yourself where you are with your life, where you were in the past, and are then filled with an emotional awareness of how much more passionate, powerfully proud, compassionate, and overwhelmingly wonderful you could have felt about yourself, your life, and all of the others who you have wanted to care to be with. Unable to move anywhere else, you smile and take great comfort knowing that at last you have found your personal guide and emotional direction of where it is you want to continue going, regardless of what happens next. You acknowledge and accept life for what it is - how aimless and meaningless it will continue to be with or without you, but you allow yourself, while you are still alive and able to, to be filled with all the emotion and all the experience possible through how your imagination interprets reality and how you can decide to view your existence and your awareness of yourself and everything around you as a spectacular and beautiful creation that no one else will ever be able to invest in, bring together, and give significance to in quite the same personal way that you have lived to do.

-And with your last breaths, instead of screaming and shouting and suffering by blaming yourself for what you had not done, you thank yourself.

-And you do it seriously and sincerely - whispered just loud enough so that only you can hear yourself, even though there is not a single other person nearby that would be able to hear you speak.

-'Thank you. Thank you so much for All the help that you have Given me and for Always being there With Me, every step of the way, No Matter What. We made it this far and we are proud...and if it's at all possible and if you wake up again from what and who you once were at this point, remind yourself at an earlier age that the effort that you put into life is something that No One Else can do for You and that You really are Worth Everything.

_You_ that is every part of me...

_You_ that is with me always...

_You_ , My Dearest love.

My love in me,  
My love that I have lived with,  
My love that I will die with, _

Oh my love, How I've loved us together._

You're my Best Friend and I.....' _

...disconnected_

-The End"

### Chapter 39

**August 31, 2011**

I remember at the beginning of this, I felt that I was wasting so much energy struggling to find a personal reason to write and I was so unsatisfied that I couldn't come up with anything overly meaningful to write about from a life - my life - which isn't so grand or really all that extraordinarily difficult to live with. I remember thinking that if that's where stories come from - living through experiences - then how a story develops will inevitably be either a reflection of a person's struggle or the pressures to form anything meaningful, the pure relaxed joy to work to have something that we love take on a physical form to be shared with others, a mix of both, or anything in between. Experience has to bleed into our work, so I told myself that I should be okay with whichever form that my initial story turned out to reflect. And I also remember thinking that when we go through things, even if we might not understand what's happening at the time, we do know how those things are affecting us in the moment, and so I was able to have that to write about and let things build from there. And yet, all of that still left me unsatisfied because what I didn't realize at the time was that I had a subconscious desire to have my work, that could be evaluated by others, be as good as it ever could be - which I now know that to want such perfection is ridiculous because life and existence is always moving onward and always changing, so my experience of it and my ability to reflect on it and make something from it moment by moment will always be a few steps behind. Things were becoming more and more complex, difficult to follow and make sense of but now that I've completed the stories, I realize that it was also from those same feelings of lacking satisfaction and the process of struggling to create or to make sense of anything meaningful out of life - regardless of whether it came from the ordinary or an extreme hardship - that helped create for me the personal satisfaction that I wanted and helped build the meaning in my life that I am now thankful for. Working through life's struggle and accepting the reality of the lack of intrinsic meaning are necessary components to being able to understand how to live a more worthwhile, satisfying, and meaningful life.

So I can now live better, with one more reminder that everything that we do, even if we don't enjoy it and as much as we might struggle to make logical sense of it, never has to be a waste of energy or waste of time if we can find a way to make ourselves feel satisfied with the overall experience and feel grateful for whatever way in which we may happen to benefit from it in the end.

And in the end, I've learned to be grateful of myself for being able to consider greatly my ability to express and create something meaningful...or anything at all, from my personal experience of life. Whether it is our dreams, our struggles in life, or even our fears and our nightmares, expressing them all is a healthy and useful process necessary to finding the stronger meaning and importance in our lives. And that I will never forget.

### Chapter 40

**September 19, 2011**

After these last few days of interviews, I can no longer believe that the unkind treatment from parent to child is a rare occurrence. It is prevalent amongst most every one of the friends and the strangers that I've briefly talked to about the issue. Even more pervasive is the justification that how discouraging a parent is, how much they shame a child, or how violent they are with them is a measure of how much they love their children - " _I do it because I love you._ "

I thought for the longest time that maybe it was just something specifically personal with me that made me feel so ill-treated and devalued in my relationship with my parents. But this feeling isn't reserved to just me.

The dysfunctional relationship that exists between many parents and the life of person that they've helped to create is a tragic reality. There are a few people that I have met with and talked with more personally about their relationship to the children in their life and I think that I can learn a lot from their experiences. One group is a family that I have known for some time as I was growing up and the others are a few friends that I knew in high school, who have either now had a child or who haven't had any children but are currently in a relationship with someone who has had children, and they have decided to help in raising the child.

Hector was the first that accepted to speak with me about his relationship with his 1 year old son Manuel. He shared with me how he is constantly being pushed to feel that he has to work to be better - that it's expected of him to do more and to do all that he can to make his son's life better than his own. And that if he isn't doing that, people call him a bad father or if he is doing everything that he can but admits that he honestly doesn't enjoy "the sacrifice", he is looked at in the same way – as a bad and ungrateful father. He says that it's not that he doesn't want to be better and to help his son. It's that he hates knowing that he never made a real decision to become a father and now that it's happened he feels an overwhelming and sometimes unbearable emotional obligation to live as someone he doesn't even know how to be. "I didn't grow up in my life always making the best decisions. Even now, I do some things I know I shouldn't. I wasn't raised being taught how to take care or help anyone. You know what man? I grew up being taught only how I'd be punished for the things my parents didn't like me doing. And now that's all I know. I learned how to punish the people closest to me. It's like I can't help but love with abuse and I don't know how to break that." He says that for him to admit to himself the reality that the birth of his son was unplanned and unwanted and that he wasn't ready, makes him feel a great amount of personal shame. "My girl got pregnant and I wasn't ready for that. It's not easy saying to anyone that it was an accident. I have an older friend who tells me that no birth is an accident, only a pregnancy. Birth we just let happen but that we also have time to decide to stop it. But I just can't tell a girl to do that because that's not how I was raised and people would think I'm being weak and wrong for that. I have my son now and he's growing bigger and bigger every day and still I do secretly feel weak sometimes, even though I know I shouldn't be like that. It makes me feel like a bad dude when people look at me with my son and tell me all the things that I'm doing wrong. I remember yelling back at this lady once, when by mistake I almost left Manuel in the car when I was about to head into the store to get his mom some new lip gloss she sent me out for. There was just so much going on in my mind at the time and it's always been a habit for me to just go and do my own thing without needing to think about anyone else's safety or anything like that, so I didn't even remember my kid was in the back seat. I thought about his mom and what stupid kind of things she has me do like that. I mean you have a son and you're worried about how other people are gonna think of you if your lips don't look good? And the stupid shit I do myself! It's not like I wanted to leave him in there on purpose. It made me so angry for anyone to think so bad of me so when she started screaming at me that I should just go and leave the kid in the car and wait for social services to take my son, I yelled back that it would be easier if I did and that if she thought she could raise him better, she should take him into her family. I won't ever forget the look on her face when I said that to her. I would much rather my son be with someone else who could help him grow up and live a good life because even though it makes me angry how people see me, they're not wrong that I'm not ready to be the best father for him. I have to be an honest man even if I might be ashamed to admit this but if someone else can make his life better than me then that's what I want because I know I don't know how to do it myself. That's just the way it is."

John had a different story. He's been with Joy for about two years now. He told me that at first he didn't know how to be and was a bit scared when she would bring her son Daniel around. He didn't know what his role would be and didn't like thinking of himself as taking Daniel's biological father's place. After talking with Joy about his feelings and thoughts, she told him that his role isn't to be a substitute and that he doesn't have to be anything that he doesn't want to be with her and that it should be his decision if he wants to be a father figure in the Daniel's life. He admitted how much better he feels now after taking the time to make a personal decision to be responsible for the life of another and that he's glad that he did not do what so many of his friends who have been in the same situation have done, which was to force themselves into a role just because of the pressure of what is expected of them by other people in their lives. He's learned to be with Daniel the way he always wanted for someone to be with him when he was younger. "I always wanted my parents to be supportive and encourage whatever it was I wanted to do instead of harshly criticizing and saying no or that I should do something else instead because I wasn't very good at what I often times wanted to do - and I don't think that there's anything wrong with disagreeing with someone or in criticizing the work, but what I don't understand, that many parents do, is why they must feel it is okay to criticize the _actual_ _effort_ that a child wants to dedicate to their dreams. I don't plan to be that kind of person in Daniels' life. Growing up, I always wanted to know that someone in the world accepted me just the way I was and wanted to help me with what I wanted to get out of life. I always wanted to know that in the world there was someone else to explore with and to rely on in difficult times, and in Daniel's life, that's the relationship that we will share." Thinking of that life that he has always wanted to share with someone as he was growing up gave him the self-motivation he needed to be able to feel proud to accept himself in fulfilling such an important role in Daniel's life. He said that he is so happy and excited for everything that he will get to experience as a father. "I often ask myself what ten-year-old me would think of the way I've turned out to be. I wonder if that kid back then would feel proud or ashamed of the way things have turned out. Have I been good to myself? There are definitely some things that I've done that would displease him, so I'm hesitant to emphatically say, 'Yes, he would be happy about the kind of life we've had.' I know what I dislike about my past and those negative feelings about it only matter so much because I can't change the way things were or the way things happened. But I am confident that when I ask myself that question again, 5 years from now, my answer will be 'Yes, I have been good to myself and am proud of the life I now maintain and enjoy with my family - Joy and Daniel."

I wanted to speak with Irene and her sister Rachel individually because I remember when the subject of children and parenthood came up at Irene's daughter's birthday party last month, the conversation escalated quickly to loud disagreements that ended with Lilly crying during the rest of the party because her aunt Rachel and her cousins didn't stay for cake. Irene responded to my e-mails and, without hesitation, wanted to get together to talk in person. I'm still trying to get a hold of Rachel but she hasn't yet answered back.

Irene was glad that I wanted her to share her experience with me. It's well known in the family and among friends who have known Irene for so many years that she is not capable of bearing children. It's not something that she hides or is ashamed of. She told me that to her it doesn't matter that her body is infertile. It was a devastating thing for her and Will to discover when the doctor delivered the news of her scarred uterus, that would be unable to conceive, but she says that though it might not be such a great thing to hear, she is glad of the good things that have come from her bodies inability to make life. Her experience in dealing with this limitation has forced her to really question her initial feelings and desire for wanting to "have children." She says that she now feels so much differently about the very beginnings of a life, life itself, her relationship to herself, and to her body. She has learned that, for her, it's no longer a matter of wanting to give birth. It's about the decision to be a parent regardless of reproductive limitations. She expressed how much she doesn't like that it is common and accepted for people - including herself before her experience - to value babies as property, even before birth. "I really dislike the consideration of children as things to own and who should be controlled for our own sake. I don't care to want to feel better about myself because a baby came from my body and I could therefore say it was 'mine.' I would never want to treat Lilly like anything other than the person she will want to become." Irene sees herself as a mother and wants those that she cares for to know that she wants to help them continue to live their own life, and wants to encourage and support all that they want for themselves, even if her body did not physically help in making their life. She believes strongly in treating and raising Lilly as more than just a child, "We as parents are not just raising the children that we birth or the children in our lives. How we raise children is going to affect everyone that they'll interact with and everyone that they will meet in life and it will also have a considerable amount of influence in the way that they themselves will come to treat the children that they might one day help to raise over the course of their life." She expressed how cruel she finds it that the rest of her family thinks more highly of her sister Rachel than of her or their brother Shane simply because Rachel was able to add biological children to their family and they weren't. "It's hard to know that what parents sometimes want more than anything is to hear from us, 'I'm going to have a baby and give you grandchildren,' than to want for us to first grow and learn to make ourselves responsible, caring decision makers about our own life. I don't enjoy the comparison they constantly make about me and Rachel. And I don't agree with them that a person can only really love a child in a family if they have given birth to the child." Though she is hurt by the contempt from her family, she says that what she finds far more appalling and difficult a thing to talk about is her family's adherence of wanting nothing to do with Shane because, as they see it, he will never be able to have a "real" family with another man, "They say to him that any acceptable family can only exist if a couple is able to make a baby with one another."

Irene feels that her new understanding about herself and the ideas that she's developed over the years has helped her live a much happier, thoughtful, and rewarding life. "I know a lot of couples and families whose greatest troubles, in the relationship that they have with themselves and with each other, stem from their collection of senseless and unhelpful ideas about what constitutes a proper family. I know that at one time, I also felt afraid to question those standards and ideas about parenthood but it's important to challenge them because a lot of resentment can build up when we feel that we cannot make real decisions about our families or when we know that we have not made real decisions about our lives and the life that becomes from us. I used to just accept and never question my biologically driven feelings but now when I hear others say, 'I want to have a baby,' it's hard for me not to think, 'oh, what a terribly awful and thoughtless thing to say and feel.' That's what I really think and what I really feel, and I don't want to tell others how to be or what to do - I'm just really glad that for me and Will, things have been different and extremely wonderful ever since we made the decision to accept Lily into our family and become a part of each of our lives."

When I spoke to Will, he told me about the moment that he found out what she wanted, "It was a few months after we were told the news from the doctor. I was busy making a cheese pie, some steamed broccoli, and fried chicken for us to have to eat while we caught up on some of our favorite tv shows later that night. I walked into the living room where I saw her lying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling and smiling. I saw that she had her journal on her chest, and I thought the smile might have been because she probably read another one of her old entries that made her really happy. Instead of asking about the big smile on her face, like I normally would whenever I find her in that happy state, I asked if she might want anything else. She turned her head to me and I could see the tears forming in her eyes as she responded, 'Yeah...I know what I want. I was out of my mind before. I don't want to have a baby. I want to be a loving parent.' And even though I didn't know what to say at the time, that was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard her say. I knew that I also wanted that for her, so I went over with her on the floor, hugged her, and I let her know that we would do everything that we could to find a way."

When I asked about how things were for her when she was growing up, Irene shared that when she was a little girl, her mom would tell her that success for a woman was different than success for a man. "Mother would tell all of us that success for a man meant finding a good woman and being a hard worker so that he would be able to have the means to support a family but that success for a woman in life is providing the family by having children. She would say that having children is important because it means you are blessed - and the more blessed you are, the more children you will have." Irene joked that Rachel, with her 12 children, has now become the most stressed, angry, and unhappy but also the most blessed person that the family has ever known. She is aware of the usual reaction that many people have to the beliefs that she holds. She says that reason for the reactions, is because what she speaks about contradict so much of what has been taught in our culture about what it means to be a woman or a "real man". She doesn't agree with the popular belief that having children automatically instills a higher level of maturity and a better understanding of life to an individual or of a couple. She feels strongly in the belief that it matters far more, for any person to decide that they actually want to become a parent and that they want to invest themselves personally in being someone that a child can positively look up to and be treated kindly by, than it is important to only selfishly and emotionally be driven to enjoy an superficial sense of pride from the natural ability of starting a pregnancy or from the emotionally filled but personally empty process of giving birth. "A person's body reproducing another life doesn't make the person better than how they were before and it also doesn't automatically make them a better parent than anyone else can work to be. You're a parent because you decide to be one and not because others would think better of you for adding more children to a family."

Lilly was adopted and became a part of Irene and Will's family at the age of two, so Irene was never able to hold Lilly in her arms when she was a newborn. Irene told me that even though she didn't have the chance to hold Lilly in her arms when she was at an earlier age and size, that still, it feels wonderful to be able to be a part of a child's life as they grow up and to be able to see them experience and learn so much of the world for the first time at any age. She feels proud of herself and proud to be in Lilly's life and wants for her brother Shane to experience the same kind of life he wants for himself, so she's extending her support, and working with him and his partner in their effort to adopt a child into their family.

Talking to them all about this makes me wonder if that's where it all starts. Is that how we get all of our unhealthy ways of treating ourselves and the people that we meet as we carry forward throughout life? Does it come from the way that biological parents inherently are (or become) and from the things that they come to believe about their own life and about the life that their bodies have helped to create? Is that the inevitably force of cause and effect, translated into human action, that carries back to before any of us were even born?

I admit that these questions really bring up so many intense emotions in me. But I know that beyond the anger and the deeply held beliefs about how I want to live for myself and not be the way that my parents have been, there are also some helpful realities that I have to consider. One major thing that I take away from their experiences is that the destroyer of motivation and enjoyment of life - obligation - isn't usually something that we actively decide to follow, especially as it relates to reproducing children or being born into a family that we do not agree with. I know that because this topic is such a personally affecting part of our life, it is a difficult thing to question or evaluate sensibly, but I think this is big and important to think about. Obligation rarely is something that we decide we want to live with. And so this burden, I think is a consequence of the natural prerequisite from which each of us has come to live and exist. Each and every one of us is here as a result of the people that we call parents. Throughout our lives we might wonder and ask about the actual reasons that have led to our birth, and many times we might be left with an unclear answer from the very people who came together to produce the body that we live with and who have influenced so much of the beliefs that we carry within us. These unanswered questions - that we might have hoped were answered with an honest intentional, happy motivation which produced us - leaves us to question more - we ask, "But why, why, why. Why was I born?", and become frustrated that no one really seems to know. And that might lead to severe anger and destruction because we are unsure of our place in the kind of world that we want to live in and because we also remain unclear about our place within our own families, but though we might experience a struggle between our own personal, individual desires and our inborn sense of obligation, and the internal environment of the beliefs that have been passed down to us, we must realize and accept that we cannot do anything to change how things were before us and that if we want to make things better, we can only do it by behaving for the future, which means recognizing and accepting the responsibility that we have to ourselves to make sure that the birth of another human being and the influence that we will have on them will be something that we really want to commit to, for reasons beyond the impersonal hormonal drive. And, so that we can prevent the vicious path toward thoughtlessness, all of the abuse excused as protectiveness, and the ongoing unintended cruelty toward ourselves and the many that we meet throughout our lives **,** we need to be sure that we understand our personal reasons for being in their lives, in the best ways that extend beyond ourselves - which is not for the paternal and maternal belief of the need to value children as personal property or because of the belief that we should treat and nurture children in any way that neglects them and is only for what we believe is better for ourselves. It is important that we question if we are allowing our bodies to make life purely out of biological urges, if it is because of cultural or external expectations or obligations, if it is because of the lack of personal self-fulfillment and empowerment, or if it is honestly because we have grown to learn to value more – beyond reproduction - actually becoming a caring person and parent who wants to extend the care that they have for themselves to helping another life grow to be the person that they will want to be and to help them live out and fulfill the life they will want to have.

I know that this is all an extremely, personally difficult thing to discuss with any parents or child because we all want to feel a pride in ourselves of being good and being the best that we can for each other as a family, but at the same time, we also know – even if it isn't easy to admit - the reality of our fear, our lack of understanding, our sense of "preparedness" or uncertainty of how we should be together, and the likelihood of our perceived failure to ourselves when we lack any actual personal motivation in either our own life, a life that is not our own, or both. And admitting any displeasure of the hardship of feeling like an obligated parent or an obligated child has so much shame related to it, that many of us allow ourselves to believe that it is better to withhold our real feelings instead of speaking out with a confidence and security that what we simply want is to help ourselves and others find better ways of dealing with these important issues. Whether it's a child feeling controlled by their parents or a parent feeling controlled to be a better parent for the child, no one wants to feel like a helpless, mistreated slave. We can say that we want to be better children for our parents or that we want to be better parents for our children, but we can get rid of those heavy, looming, and unhelpful expectations if we instead say that we can all just decide to first be better individuals for ourselves, and know that from that, we can learn how to extend the same compassion, the same kindness, and the same understanding that we've developed for ourselves, to each other.

I wonder how it was for my parents - whether my mom felt guilty or ashamed when she knew that she was carrying me and whether she felt that she would _have to_ be my mother. I wonder whether my dad felt emotionally obligated to stay with my mom and help raise me only because it was expected of him. I wonder if they were resentful of me and blamed me, even as a child, for taking away their sense of freedom of the richness of human experience and if they blamed me for the stagnation of their own personal maturity. I wonder if they believed that it was necessary for them to make me the most important thing in their life. If it was up to me, I would not want to become the most important thing in their lives (I would want to learn from them that they are the most important part of their life and that I should grow to become the most important person in _my_ life). I would not want them to give up the other parts of themselves and the life that they loved just because I was born. I wonder what they would have been like if they had not had me - if they had first become a family together and then decided to be a mother and a father. I imagine the parents they would have been to someone else - the kind of wonderful, proud, and happy parents they would try to be before also giving in to become the obligated parents everyone else thought they should be. I would rather want to know that my mother felt unquestionably happy and hopeful to know that she would be a mom, and that she would accept how I was with open arms instead of feeling shameful and seeking to hide from the fearful future of a life with an unplanned child, and I would rather know that my father held his chest out and felt the pride of being a responsible man instead of an obligated man weighed down by the birth of a child that he never intended to encourage.

But I'm here and there is no changing the past, so instead of continuing to wonder about the mom and the dad that I never knew, I can say to myself that I will decide to lift my head up high, feel the pride, and allow myself to be the best that I once hoped that another would be for me, and maybe one day, I'll share this life with someone else who will want me to help them - instead of force them - to learn to understand how they too can be, not like me, but still a great and caring person to themselves.

"You were created. But not by any intention to be as you know yourself to be, and so you owe your life to no one. Learn to live beyond any and all obligations, no matter your age or situation. Commit to something reliable and real, not only in how you truly feel but also in what you understand, as the thinking person that you are, that helps you live a life of greater appreciation for yourself and all that you want to do or continue to be. We don't deserve a meaningful life but we can create a meaningful one through how we live. Remember that How we do things and the Kind of people that we will do things with, will matter more in our life than exactly What we do and Where, or Who, we may happen to have come from."

### Chapter 41

**March 15, 2012**

I know that I don't write as much as I used to but I feel that I need to write again, so that I can remind my future self, of these events that have started to affect my view of a lot of things and of a lot these people that are around me.

This isn't difficult for me to express, and I know that if I were to discuss these things with others they might find it offensive, rude, or disrespectful because for a lot of people, this is important.

I know this has been especially difficult for Rosy. I don't remember her ever showing how much she cared before the accident. She's around much more often now. She's not as upbeat and funny as she used to be but her positivity is still going strong. While everyone else accepted that he would no longer make it out of the coma, Rosy continued telling everyone that she wouldn't give up and that maybe Ethan just needed more time. Others say that she must have really cared about Ethan. Rosy tells them that he appears in her dreams and that they talk about him being in a better place. But she has also said that the dreams are more often nightmares, where she questions him about why he had to die. She says that every day she is waiting for a sign of forgiveness for not being there for him all of those years and that she's beginning to be filled with a dreadful feeling that she's supposed to die next. She responds with the same thing every time that someone tells her not to do anything drastic to harm herself, " _That is up to Ethan. Only he and the lord will know when it's my time_."

I hope that she gets better. She still visits the grave, every morning and afternoon after work hoping he might somehow communicate with her. Others might want to believe, that that kind of positive outlook is important but I think that once positivity becomes a strict psychological break from reality where we feel that we can actually talk with those that have died or those who don't exist outside ourselves, then that is no longer a healthy state to be in. It's okay to recognize and to be reminded of our mortality but to live with an obsession or in constant fear of the inevitable and allow it to consume and determine our life is not a path of happiness. And I understand the attraction. In our dreams, the people who we remember fondly and cherished while alive, or while they were a part of our lives, don't have to remain gone.

Everything doesn't happen for a reason. Everything happens for reasons - many reasons that we might be responsible for (and that, only _we_ can work through ourselves), but there are also reasons that we are helpless to stop or control. Everyone is dying, and we cannot stop it. And we will all die for the reason that everything exists in a degenerating state. Even our experience of living can only be because of the degeneration and decomposition of the past. We do not have the power to decide our birth and we also have no power to remove ourselves from the finality of death. And so we need to recognize, and to accept for our own sanity, that we should not continue seeing ourselves as the victims of death and we need to understand that we will never be able to truly go on with our life if we continue trying to live out the lives of the dead because there is no such thing as the dead - only those who have died. There is no helping death, and the past lives of those who have died are not ours to take on, so we can only accept the life that _is_ our own and work to heal so we can be better.

Like Rosy, I question too but unlike her and many others who accompany the practice of questioning with attributing the outcome to mystical beliefs, I will not make a declaration of responsibility to things that I cannot prove. I will not make a submission of my personal responsibly in my life and its consequences for the easy comforts of my imagination. It may be that we as people grow to believe in greater and grander things that cannot be proven when we've yet to learn how to derive satisfaction with our own existence and appreciate ourselves for the things that we can do and how we live, so fabricating a sense of importance that's dependent on the belief of an imaginary higher authority makes us feel comforted when we think someone else is looking out for our well-being (even after death) and that there is an actual guide, reason, or purpose for the vast uncontrollable nature of reality and our inevitable death, but for me personally, everything that I've done for my life and everything that I have struggled to understand, and the place that I've been able to get to with myself, is because I decided that I had no reason to want to continue to believe anything purely for comfort.

Yes, I believe that our existence is about ordinary things, objects, the material that we have come to be able to touch and which we cannot break away from and Yes, I believe that we are simply a more complex reflection of that in a much more distinct and larger form, but I also acknowledge that our existence in life can be much more than just that. If we must remain with an internal sense to look outward for guidance then what we can do is follow, not a higher authority, not any person, not one static belief, but the grandness of our imagination and from it the idea that we can always continue to look up to, maybe not an exact depiction of reality, but at least an honest image we can feel and experience, learn from, be empowered by and which informs the best decisions we can make for the life that we want to have, and that represents the better person we strive to be. The biggest thought that I have ever had is considering being able to go back in time to witness something that is inherently without purpose, develop into self-awareness and allow its life to further develop the ability for wonderment, amazement, fascination, and deep, deep personal meaningfulness to itself. To be able to imagine the view before me and experience that first moment of a conscious being contemplating and give meaning to the very same concept and reality of this sense of life that, at this moment, I am using to think out and write out these words is powerfully significant and more than enough for me to feel satisfied about the lack of complete understanding over the origin of all life, enough for me to feel satisfied about my own existence, and enough for me to know that I do not have to allow my life to become overly consumed with the exact things that came before me or with the question of what will happen to "ME" after I am gone.

When a person dies, they die, and anything after, I cannot or do not know. Only they were responsible for the way that they lived. And the consequences resulting from their death - both our involvement and personal attachments - are our responsibility to deal with. I truly want to do all that I can reasonably do to find out the reasons that contributed to the death and not neglect my actual feelings because, though many people might believe or claim more than we can actually know, I'd much rather seek to understand as much as I can so that I can help myself deal with my own sense of loss instead of giving in to what I might want to believe simply because of guilt or because a certain belief comforts me.

My cousin Ethan is no more. I've accepted that.

And now, the same for Ricky.

I hadn't seen him for almost 5 years but he was there at the funeral. I remember when we used to be what might be considered best friends, but I've had a lot of "best friends" over the years, and what that's taught me is that even if I might want it to be, I can't expect and there's no guarantee that things will always be the same way. I had hoped that he might have been starting to realize the same thing and hoped that he was beginning to feel better about Ethan no longer being with us.

They might not admit it themselves but Ethan and Ricky we're more like best friends, than Ricky and I ever were. They related a lot, not in the great personal sense, but they were friendly rivals, always competing to outdo each other in everything and I think that intense way of interacting with each other for so many years eventually developed into a relationship of strong admiration and respect that neither one of them ever wanted to openly admit.

It wasn't a surprise how much guilt Ricky felt for the accident. It didn't help that others around him felt the need to blame him for Ethan's death because Ricky was the one with the idea to skip school so they could both ride alongside each other, in separate trucks, and drive out of state and back before the day was over. And it wasn't a surprise that Ricky didn't fight or yell back to those who blamed him. He wasn't the kind to blame others even when they would point the finger at him. What was surprising - even if it made sense that he would do it and how he would come to do it- was that he, without warning, ended his life by recreating the same impact as the accident. They would both always do the most reckless and sometimes funniest things - and that might not be the most positive way to remember them, but that's just the way they both lived.

Earlier today before we all found out, he came to talk with me about the way that he was feeling. He didn't mention anything about suicide or seeking to get rid of what he was feeling. He had been through this once before, years ago, when he was 6 and was left in the bathroom to look after his baby sister for a few minutes. She drowned in the tub while he was away buying two 25-cent cherry popsicles from the ice cream truck out in front of their house. He told me that he was angry because he couldn't do anything to make everyone else feel better about him. "I fucking hate that I can't change all the shit that happened because of me and fucking learn to change myself to be better." I told him that I'm probably not the first to say this to him, but he isn't the one to blame and it isn't his fault that people die.

Right before he left, he said that I was the first person that he had talked to about how he was feeling. And I wouldn't be surprised if I was also the last because after he said that, he also thanked me and said how much it meant to him that I was able to make him feel okay about himself before his night was over, and then he shook my hand, which...he never shakes anyone's hand. And then, he was dead an hour later.

What is the guarantee of life? Death is not the worse that could happen. Living in misery...suffering, feeling guilt, and regret for not having done more. Those are worse.

In difficult times, in moments of feeling despair, in not knowing what to do, I can explore what I can do. I cannot undo the past and change the things around me but I can accept the situation and learn from it to move to a better place and make my life, with those that I care to, better.

I want to sit and think but walking helps me think more clearly. Most of the today, I've spent walking around and considering all these various but related thoughts more than ever, because this is not about me or any single other person. This is important because it's about life itself and all of us living and aspiring to be better people while we're here: Alive, aware.

Able.

### Chapter 42

**March 19, 2012**

I didn't go to Ethan's funeral because I didn't know what he wanted, but I did attend Ricky's. I remembered a conversation Ricky and I once had in middle school.

We were sitting at the bottom of the stair case, where we would sometimes go to take a break from running from the school monitors. We both thought it was funny that our class was having a graduation for middle school - or that we would have a graduation for any year of school. While everyone else was at some bigger place where graduation was being held, for us on that day, there was no feeling of being held in place by others and there was no need to feel the rush to get away. Me and him, we were.....We just were.

He told me not to laugh, but that sometimes he does consider the more important things in life when we're not causing trouble. I remember him saying that he knows that we might not know much else about each other, other than the chaos and fun times we've had together, but he wants me to know that he also won't be attending prom or our high school graduation, or even going to college. And that he can't see himself ever getting married or having kids. "None of that means _shit_ to people like me and you. All I care about is that when I go, you know I lived my life how I pleased, the best I could, always as me and it's going to be my decision and no one else's how it'll be when it's over. I want you to be there, so at least I known one person knew this guy the way I want to be remembered. And I don't expect you to cry like every fucked up person there who will say it's for me when the only reason they really show them tears is because they feel they've lived shit lives. But don't think I don't want you to cry. I want you to cry. And you better feel like crying, if you ever make it to all the places I was never able to."

Standing alongside everyone that I barely knew, I looked down at that pit not made for him - because really, he was gone and no one attends their own funeral - and I wanted it to be more than I saw. We all want it to be more than we see. We want it to mean more and continue, long after. But as much as we tell ourselves that someday we'll have the chance for that again to make things better, we are stricken with a deep sadness that this relationship can no longer be more and what lies before us, is just a body.

The way that I feel, the emotions that I go through, the thoughts that go round and round, and the hope that I have, is not for what's ended. It is all for me so that I can help myself improve and attain the relationships with life that I will earn and not just expect to deserve without the effort to grow them.

It's from these devastations and the sense of great loss that I have benefited the most and the reason that I feel more alive now than ever.

It's sad to know that it's done. It's sad to know that they're gone. It's sad to know that they'll never grow old but at least they lived enough to know that they were born.

Ethan, Ricky, my future non-existence - that while I'm alive I apply a name:

We once lived.

And for a while, we were all alive,

together.  
_

"_And all these tears that I shed are not for the dead,  
but for me and the life I've been taught from the lives of the gone,  
I can have, if I work hard to be able to one day be great,  
and celebrate much more than I had before,  
before I go back into land and cease to be more."

### AFTERWORD

**June 24, 2012**

Some months ago, I was invited to a friend's book release party. While taking a break from socializing with the various groups there, I made my way over to table that was running low on the foods that I really wanted to eat. There I met Mr. Goldson. As I was about to grab the remaining cheese and crackers from the white porcelain plate, his arm reached over to shake my hand. Mr. Goldson excused himself for not having introduced himself earlier when we were both outside on the patio and Danielle was telling us all how great it was for all of us to come out and join her in the celebration. He then apologized for being so abrupt and said that he didn't want to keep me from enjoying the dining. I told him that he was okay and that it was okay if we were both were less formal. He agreed and we then got into a conversation about writing when he brought up that Danielle had mentioned to him that I have done some "independent" writing. I told him that my work was more personal writing than independent. After a good 20 minutes into our conversation, he was pulled away from the table and me by Danielle, but before the party was over, he gave me his card and told me that he would love to see my work, so a week later, I met with him at a local Starbucks and let him read a few of my journal entries and some of the writings that have been inspired by those events. I asked him if his reason for looking at my work was purely financially driven and after about an hour long discussion, he explained that he was just a fan of personal stories and believes that there is a lot of value in sharing those kinds of stories with as many people as possible. We ended that meeting with the agreement that I would think about his request for at least a week. Then a week later, he called me and asked if I had made a decision. I told him that since I already had most of the work completed, and if this was going to help others in some way, then we could work together to get it done. He asked me to put together what I considered some of my best journal entries and to provide them to him as soon as I could so that he would then be able to show the collection to his publishing partners to see if they would give the okay to release it as a book. And so I am assuming that what you have just read is my personally selected, previously private record of what I have consented to be published and released.

After reading my final draft, Mr. Goldson invited me out to dinner where he said that what I had put together could still use some work to engage a broader demographic. He also suggested some of the entries be altered or removed, or that I could go back and find some more uplifting or happier entries to add so that the book be longer, less somber, and that I should also improve the ending. I considered that the reason that he was suggesting that I should go back and change things was probably because of whoever it is that he answers to and their concern for how they want to portray and sell the story, but I can't go back and edit or improve my past and I won't change my work simply to appease or appeal to a wider audience (or any audience for that matter).

He also wrote me an e-mail several days ago to inform me that it would at least help to make my writing just a bit longer in order to give me the "creative opportunity" to setup for a sequel but I'm happy to share this work as it is without the need to tease out something that I can never guarantee that I will be able to fulfill. I let him know that this is the best that I can do for now without taking the enjoyment out of the time that I have to write for myself. I prefer to never feel obligated to continue my work simply for the entertainment of others. This is so much more than that for me. If I am to do more for others, I also need to have a personal and significant reason to want to do it for myself. He replied that he was only trying to get more out of me because he knows that my work has the potential to be better than most of the other books that he is involved in bringing to the public. I admire his willingness to look for different ways of convincing me to strive for more but I am the way that I am and I don't seek out to be better than anyone else - and if I did strive for more, I would only measure my efforts in the moment, instead of setting myself up for disappointment if I am unable to do more than I could at the time or when I get to a point that I am no longer able to physically do better than I could in my past. I feel satisfied with what I have presented. I am glad that I can now return to enjoy the many other things that I am excited to have the time to continue, the many new things that I am eager to begin, and the experiences that I have not yet had but that when I do experience, or after I experience them, I will almost certainly learn so much from.

But before I go, I want to thank you, the reader, for the time that you have invested in my work. I hope that it has been of some benefit and enjoyment to you, and now I'll leave you and Mr. Goldson with my final thoughts:

Over the years that I have lived, what I have learned again, and again, and continue learning the most is that when things in our life eventually come to an end and leave us wanting more, there is nothing better and there is nothing greater than accepting the personal power we have to continuing to create the story of what we want in life and setting out to fulfilling it ourselves.

That effort and work required to improve our life, though it can be hard and though at times it can be scary, is something that no one else can do for us. So if you are wondering what happens next and if you are questioning what you should believe, know that what comes next is completely yours and believe just these few simple things:

Believe that you exist; believe that if you strive you _will_ better yourself; and believe that you and the story you will live, really are worth everything.

### This is Your Story:

### The Story of the Greatest Person that Ever Lived

### UPDATE

**December 9, 2012**

After the release of the original publication of _The Story_ , I had found myself become surrounded publicly by a great number of fans and personally by many new close relationships. A majority of them have each in their own way shared with me that they think very highly of me after reading my work and now regularly look to me for advice. Although I am glad that the work has been helpful and that it has had a positive overall response, I have habitually told those who sought out my advice that I cannot decide for them the decisions that they will make. I can only speak about and share my own experiences in similar matters. And I have also let them know that I hope that instead of thinking of me as a guidance or as an example to follow, that I hope that they can instead understand to respect the work and admire, not only my personal effort for the person that I have learned to be, but to also recognize the capacity that we all have for helping ourselves and our capacity for learning to develop a genuine desire to contribute to the lives and well-being of others \- as this has now become a relevant matter in my own life.

Even as I share that with everyone who comes to me, I recognize that I cannot stop anyone who meets me, or anyone who has read the work that I have created, from personally placing me in their lives as a positive example to emulate or stop them from viewing me as a trusted voice in the areas of self-examination and personal growth. In the past, I may have felt differently...yes, I would have definitely felt differently about this. Years ago, I would not have been able to recognize a reason for further attention and any desire to make use of the power of influence that I now seem to carry. I would have suggested and pushed that anyone that wanted anything should go out and do it themselves. And although I still think that that is a great way to show that you really want something in life, you don't always have to do it alone - even you might start alone, there can always be extra help. Before, I might have said that it was too time consuming, that I felt it was overbearing, and that it was personally extraneous for me to do more with others, but honestly, the reason that I didn't jump into doing more with others was because I was afraid. I was afraid of what might happen to me and what would happen to the enjoyment of my time, and of my everyday life, if I allowed myself to develop too many intimate relationships with others. But now, I feel that I've grown a lot and know enough about myself and about what really matters in establishing solid and meaningful relationships, in order for me to be able to maintain myself and my happiness while growing closer with the people who want and will have me be a part of their life. And so recently this position that I seem to hold in the lives of so many people who have shown to me that they really want my involvement in their lives, has become a proud place that I find myself in.

I have remained deliberately thoughtful of everyone that I have become involved with and that I have had the opportunity to share some part of my life with, and so I have grown to feel an earnest and welcomed sense of responsibility, not only to myself, but also to them as they have become a sincerely valued part of my life. I have learned to allow myself to listen when others talk to me about what they care about instead of assuming that they only want something from me. And although I still remain cautious to the kind of people that I surround myself with and allow into my personal life, I now recognize that the opportunities for establishing greater relationships of all kinds is something that really matters to me. I've been able to see the very positive influence, not only from my work, but more importantly from my personal involvement in their lives which has affected a great sense of personal pride in me to want to continue helping anyone that is willing to show that they want to empower themselves. And someday I hope to be able get to the point where I can personally see those same people that I have helped, begin to inspire and empower others through the enjoyment of their own work, the experience that they can share, and from the extraordinary personal effort of helping someone outside of themselves. And the only way that they can learn to help other people, for greater reasons than purely the selfish, is for me to remember to never be too afraid to listen and for me to do my best, with the power of influence that I hold, to help teach them, and all others around me, how to become that way through my own behaviors.

And so, when I have the time to dedicate to the lives of others, each and every day that I interact with them, I ask myself these simple questions:

"What am I teaching everyone? What are the beliefs that I have supported and what are the lessons that I've taught today?

And will my lessons tomorrow be any different?"
