This is something difficult for me. I was never known to be openly emotional. It was something that always was found in my work, but never was there something to go read like this. Past coworkers would usually just say I am a guarded individual, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have them. It is just strange for me to show them in such a fashion.
Those who had guessed Shattered Reflections was based on someone would be correct. It is based on the experiences of my life, and one of the reasons I have not come out to be so honest with it is more about trying to remember everything and feeling that I failed. I wouldn’t to put a partial product and I had taken enough shots to the head over the years that having it in as fiction would at least cover for anything I may have missed.
Lately my health has been declining and it has been doing so slowly over a period of about a year. Now it has gotten to the point where my hands and arms will go numb for hours, and while they find things on every test they just cannot put everything together. I used to be fairly active despite my size, and it showed when I wanted to do something that people would think impossible. I can’t even walk without swaying, bumping in to the walls, and falling in to things. It makes me so mad on top of my usual plate of angry feelings. Every day seems to take something more from me making it for the first time in years all I can do is try without any major plan except ‘survive’.
I wanted the world to be a better place. People to be happy from a company with the resources to really make some changes in the processes that so many people seem lost doing in day to day jobs. It was someone’s last wish to make this world a better place. Knowing that every day my health is getting worse despite my efforts, and that her dream may not come to fruition really hurts. I define myself on what I do, what could be learned, and how to do it in the most effective fashion. Changes have been made because of my knowledge base in more then a half dozen different businesses from training of employees, to specials in restaurants, and calculations in quality management.
All of that does not mean a whole lot to me though. The job was to make the world a little better. Without her a lot of things just don’t bring a whole lot of happiness. I can put the mask on though, and sometimes fool myself to be someone else for a moment. When I get back to reality though it is the same reflection of someone who has no real meaning within himself to live. My family life is in shambles, and I feel like I cannot even be friendly at times to the only people in my extended family without money because I am so out of place in their social circles it just has to be grating to them. My brother is stuck living with my mother who will most likely lose their car again because she has a relationship with money like most bars of soap have a relationship with a tight grip. My father has found out after his own tragedy that I had been stewing in the pool of depression for most of my life while he just got used to the temperature, and he already wants to not exist anymore.
I have nothing to contribute to my friends so I try to stay out of their lives for the most part because I don;t want them to be weighed down with my problems. I may say one or two, but those are small and my list is long. What can I do when there are no successes with someone who is defined by them. I have been feeling worse and worse over the past few year especially. It seems like every effort is worthless. Every try just another small failure to mock me in a world stacked with them.
So I sit in my room trying to wring a couple pieces of mirth out of a world that just seems to be so much wasted potential, and all of this just weighs on you until you just get tired. Tired of everything. Tired of every problem, of every dunce blasting their mouth off without thinking, of every time you tried to not be in the previous group and failed, trying to grow to have a spirited debate only for people to cut me short despite not learning the previous immeasurable number of times. Tired of not having money to go hang out with my uncle so I don’t have to look like the charity case to him or his friends. I guess is what I really want is just to be respected. It struck me I never really felt respected in my life at least not as a real person. If anything the identity at my job or the person someone would go drinking with or the person who yaps a lot on a blog would be, but it never felt like it was just me.
I’m the mad scientist, the bloody brawler, the crying boy, the cagey thief, the android, the try hard, the tactician, the gamer, the competitor, the budding young entrepreneur, the hired help in school, the teen from the wrong side of town, the despicable destroyer, the villain, the evil, the good, the strange, the bizarre one, the man who will fight, the man who will step in, the person who made the promise, the angel in some rare occasion and each of those things just does not feel like me. Like it was a fragmented mask that somehow got the respect or the accolades while I remain back at square one just wanting something to know that I can get that respect at least. Maybe, it was because of that I never really felt like I belonged? Who knows.
I don’t really have a nice turn of phrase to end this, but I said I would do something to at least get some emotional thing on paper on this blog. I held to my word.
BigTAnderson in Portland 