It was like one of those reel to reel players. It just played on a continuous loop the same thing day after day
He resigned himself to getting a crappy job to pay his bills. He couldn't stop telling himself that he'd never be successful. Never rising above mediocrity.
The thing is it would never be like it never happened. The whole universe could pass away and it would never wipe away what happened. And he had to live with that every day of his life. He was still working on making his writing not sound so clumsy. He'd finally found that word to describe how he felt about it. At one time he'd attempted to read the dictionary from A-Z. He might have made it to avocado.
He simply couldn't deal with a life where someone that you loved showed complete indifference. Throughout all recorded history people have tried to find the meaning of life. One of the top contenders almost always mentioned was love. If that didn't exist for the individual what truly was the point. No matter what he tried to find to explain it away it always remained. Preachers, teachers, nor prophets had he found the answer. It truly was all vanity but that was the only thing that really seemed to matter.
He was so tired of being a loser. What would the 70 year old version of himself tell him if he could? He's made a list of things he didn't like about himself. He couldn't grow a beard. His jawline wasn't defined enough. He could never get rid of that last 20 or so pounds of fat. He couldn't count the times he had felt revulsion when looking at himself in the mirror. He wasn't hung like a horse.
Maybe the first thing he would tell his is he would have to work his way through the suck. If he was going to be good at anything he would probably suck at it really hard at first. But he could keep practicing and the suck would get less and less. He'd probably tell him too that he would have to learn to be able to deal with the suck of other people. Other people could be really, really shitty. And they wouldn't give a fuck about being shitty. Some of them would actually enjoy it.
When you work at a church as he had, you are constantly told you need a savior. You can't do it yourself they tell you. That might be fine and dandy but over time it simply reinforces learned helplessness. The more you try and fail the more the pattern is solidified. You begin to believe that you can't do it yourself. If you could that would remove the whole point of the church. If you could actually be independent and take care of yourself a lot of institutions in society would crumble.
He was lucky if there was an hour a day that he didn't feel like a failure. there was no way he could take credit for any of his success but it was damn clear that he wouldn't get off not taking responsibility for his failures. Any success he had didn't belong to him it belonged to God. At least that's the script in his head told him. And there were plenty of people to reinforce all those scripts.
Maybe now people would understand this is what he dealt with on a daily basis. All this advice to just change the way you think was useless. He’d been trying to think differently his whole life. To improve himself.
The only reason he had begun writing is because he felt so rejected and discarded. He was afraid he was past his prime and wasn't employable in any meaningful way. He figured there wasn't any way he was going to be the million dollar man so he might as well write even if it was a failure. He had two written rejections for job applications and some didn't even bother to write back.
The whole reason he'd left his hometown was because he wanted to be better. He didn't want to be mediocre. But even though he had left town he couldn't leave behind his self image. He’d been used to rejection and feeling small.
He was now trying to find all those things hidden away in his mind. He'd done the math of all the years he'd been alive. Down to the second. Approximately
1,436,486,400 seconds
23,941,440 minutes
399,024 hours
16,626 days
2375 weeks
He did the calculation because he wanted to find some kind of meaning in the time. How often do you really sit down and think about it? What had he done during that time? Of all that time how much could he actually remember? Which one of those ticks of the clock had changed his life the most? How many of them were almost exactly the same? He was also trying to find out how to make the time that followed have some impact.
"Most of the men who've expressed a genuine anger with me aren't angry with women, but rather they’re angry with themselves for having been blind to the Game that they’d been a part of for so long in their blue-pill ignorance. They’re angry that they hadn't figured it out sooner."
He was angry. Not only because of the programming. He was also angry at his genetics and whatever had made him a sniveling wreck. He'd tried to man-up and that only intensified the feeling. It was an infinite loop. Real Men didn't need to man up. They just had something innate that he didn't have. All his efforts just kept reinforcing the cycle over and over.
"It’s easy for women and blue-pill men to discourage a Man from red-pill self-improvement by convincing him he’ll turn into an angry Jerk who no woman would want to get with, but the truth is that learning Game isn't the positively life altering revelation it is because it begins from a root anger. It’s successful because Men have a motivation to move past the anger or despondency that comes from a better understanding of the hows and whys of the feminine. They want a better life for themselves and the women they engage with. Whether that means upping a guy’s notch count or finding a woman worthy of his attentions and provisioning for monogamy, Men realize that their betterment with women and themselves doesn't begin with anger, or hate, or crazy."
At this point my mindset is truly crippling. If you’ve read any of my writing you can probably tell how everything just loops back to the same problem. The way I act is affected by the way I think and the way I think affects how I act. They reinforce each other in this whirlpool of my life.
““Women go from being chased to having to do the chasing . . . then what?”
Then things return to normal.”
Funny how that fundamental thought just occurred to me recently. Even though it works. I’ve had women tell me that I didn’t seem to know anything about women because I wasn’t buying them drink or I was making them chase me. At first it seemed womanly because I had put myself in their place and even though I was clumsy at it and it was coming from a place of anger and hurt I was making them do the chasing. I don’t know if this is normal but I would get angry and pissed asking myself “why aren’t’ these women talking to me?” to me it was obvious that I didn’t have what the other guys had so of course the women weren’t going to chase me. The problem with that was I’d have a lot of resentment and when I would talk to them and get the cold shoulder it would just make me shut down even more. And now I’m at a point in my life where I keep telling myself it’s too late. Just like the song Glory Days
“Glory days well they'll pass you by
Glory days in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days.”
It feels embarrassing to admit all this stuff after all these years. I keep trying to change but fear that I am damaged at such a fundamental level that everything I do is just swallowed up by my dysfunction.
And I don’t know what the average man’s notch count is but I have a feeling if you looked at it mine wasn’t that bad. Not that it’s an indicator of anything save for the fact that I actually did have the ability to get laid. I’m even having regular sex with a woman now but these nagging feelings of whatever you want to call it still plague me. I think back to those days and think what did I do then that is repeatable? And I don’t know about you but it was either feast or famine. When I was good I was good and when I wasn’t it was like a black hole.
The thing is he knew he could improve himself. Even if he just looked at himself in the past he knew he wasn’t beyond hope. He just couldn’t get over this mental hurdle. He’d seen a psychologist and the psychologist tried to tell him what he was. Of course the psychologist could only go by what he had told him but it was an incomplete picture. How do you summarize over four decades of existence? He tried to get him to get out and do things but it was the cart before the horse. If the fundamental problem wasn’t solved all the action in the world wasn’t going to help. He wasn’t even sure of that either. He’d tried some of the doctor’s suggestions but he couldn’t catch any traction.
I almost fucked a chick at a funeral once. I used to work at a church and they had funerals there on occasion. This was during a post breakup period where I was intensely angry all the time. So angry that I felt someone had poured concrete into my chest cavity and turned everything inside to stone. I don’t even know if angry is a good enough word for it. I was outside having a smoke near the chapel where they held the funerals. It was a couple hours before the funeral and there was a woman outside waiting. I didn’t know her but I notice her pretty much right away because her tits were practically hanging out of her blouse. She was wearing a low cut top that was teal and purple as far as I remember. Like I said her tits were showing and they looked really good to me. I’m standing by myself smoking and she comes over and stands next to me. I don’t even think she was smoking. For some reason I was particularly tuned into people’s behavior. Who knows it may have all been in my head but this is my feeling. I could tell she wanted me to talk to her. I didn’t say anything for a minute or two because remember I was at one of the angriest moments of my life. After the couple minutes I went ahead and said hello. Another thing I suppose the anger was helpful because also at this point I did not care about making people uncomfortable so I could have stood there in awkward silence and not said a word.
So I said hello and I think I asked why she was there and what her name was. I think she said robin. I think she said something about having a bad day because of the funeral and I think I replied with “yeah those seem to be going around” referring to bad days. Hindsight 20/20 and all that but we spoke a little more and she asked why I was there or something. I said I worked there. I don’t think she said anything after that.
Now the reason I’ve told all these details is because as soon as she walked up to me and I said hello I knew I could have probably taken her inside to a broom closet and fucked her. I could see the way her neck and chest were flushed when a woman gets excited. I’m sure the stress of the funeral added to her emotional state but there I was at work, at a church, talking to a woman at a funeral, knowing I could have taken her and she would have gone willingly.
I was also under extreme pressure at the time. My job was going to shit. I hated working there and every day was like a knife in my chest. I had this opportunity to fuck this chick and I’m at work and she’s attending a funeral. Now looking back you might say why didn’t you just get her number or something? I knew I had to leave this job but I wasn’t ready to yet because of financial issues. So I basically had to let go a sure thing so that I couldn’t be accused of doing anything inappropriate and losing my job before I was ready. And believe me I don’t know if any of you have ever been in this spot but this was on of those what might be called Jerry McGuire moments. I wasn’t trying to make any kind of noble gesture I was just so fed up with everything that I could have fucked this girl at my job and just thrown everything in the trash.
I did eventually leave that job and yes it was a missed opportunity. I didn’t pass it up for any noble cause. I would have fucked that girl and not felt bad about it one bit. Somehow I managed to get thru that day but I do have regrets about it. I probably could have left the job sooner. I probably could have done some things differently. Only thing I can do now is use that experience for good.
Now I’m afraid that forty plus years of repressed anger has drained my energy to do anything useful. I can’t seem to get my batteries recharged. All the standard advice I can’t seem to do. Work out, eat right, rest. There comes a point when a battery is used up and nothing you do can make it useful again. That’s where I am…
Everyone probably has blind spots and can be used. It’s the blind spots that make us angry.
“It ended after not too long but it was very cathartic for me. It established clearly that I had SMV, even though I did not know of the idea, outside of my marriage and that boosted my self esteem immeasurably. It made me realize that by collapsing myself into my marriage and not “looking at data” outside my marriage I was short changing myself greatly. I was no prize at that point, but all of a sudden I knew I warranted a lot more attention then I had been getting at home. Sure enough my confidence went up and it had positive effects at home, sadly, short lived. It did give me a great sense of agency as well. I thought to myself I do not simply have to accept the situation I am in, I have choices, they may be hard, but I am not without options.”
