Anita

I’m having fun getting back into writing these again. Part of me wants to dig up all the notebooks I’ve kept over the past 4 years possibly to share online but another part of me wants to have another one of my bonfire “cleansing rituals” and burn them. It all seems raw at the time but when I look back at it, it’s like it was written by a different person or it just brings up all the bad feelings from that time.

This one is called The Experiment.

nobody can ever know
what went into this
so mad
so arrogant
to assume
that we can create life
in our own image
control life
playing god
and creating monsters
and it’s funny
how it always ends up
being a freak
being an abomination
when they get it all from you
byproducts
of everybody elses worst parts
a walking contradiction of sorts
you’re not human
you’re grotesque
you’re hellspawn
you’re unholy
you’re ungodly
it’s always it
and not them
they stapled it together
but they don’t want
to accept responsibility
it’s all on it
and not on them
they created the monster
they thought
they could control life
but
you don’t control a monster
a mutant
an entirely alien life form
spiraling out of control
on a roaring rampage

Anita

Writing that stream of consciousness poem reminded me of a book I read when I was 18 – “The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter. I had to study it in my English Lit class and I loved it – the writer took fairy tales but subverted the roles and twisted them. I wonder if you have ever read it?

What if the protagonists of fairy tales and well-known children’s stories were the villains instead and we were wrong about them all along?

Joe

Anita

As you may have gathered from all of my posts here on TinyBuddha, I do have a strong inclination to perceive things in extreme black and white terms. There is no grey area in between as far as I’m concerned, people are either nice people or they are arseholes. Yes, maybe that is why the coworker behaved the way he did. Yes, those are his attitudes and beliefs regarding masculinity and liking sports. Yes, there is a strong generation gap and a strong contrast in beliefs and attitudes. While I strongly disagree with his views because I found that comment really insulting and blatantly sexist, he is still entitled to that opinion. I don’t regard myself as being “a normal blokey bloke”. I don’t do “normal bloke” things like watching football or playing sports or going nightclubbing. The other coworkers had those kinds of interests, but they didn’t seem to have a problem that I prefer reading, painting, that I used to have green hair or that I’m a volunteer librarian.

The other co-workers did invite me out to go for beer with them – it made me feel nervous about going because I had nothing in common with them and I kept wondering if they were just going to be like the person in my dream. For the first time in 7 years or so I felt like Carrie again, nervous that “they’re all gonna laugh at you”. The plans fell through in the end so we didn’t go but I just kept thinking “What if they just told me the whole thing was off and then just decided to sneak and go out without me because they really don’t like me?”

I’m strongly inclined to stick up for myself. I don’t suffer fools anymore. It’s a strong reaction from all the self-reflection over the past two years of me posting on this forum. Learning a lot about self-respect. Unlearning a lot of what I was taught about “just ignoring it”, being polite to everybody and putting myself last. Some people you just can’t win with logic or politeness, they will just persist with their passive aggressiveness until you have to be brutally honest with them and tell them to back off. I’m under no obligation to please everybody and I am not responsible to how they react, but I know that if I take a dislike to a person, I don’t want to know that person and I need to make them stay away from me. The brutal honesty approach may make things extremely awkward and uncomfortable for those present but it works, I have to go for the shock factor sometimes.

Joe

Anita

Back when I was working last winter, I had this really obnoxious coworker who was old enough to be my dad. He must have latched on to me because I was different from the other warehouse workers – he made snide comments about how I was quiet most of the time (because I was there to do a job, not make small talk – duh), he was constantly making passive aggressive “jokes” to me, undermining everything I was doing when he wasn’t behaving the same way to anybody else and I saw a lot of the same behaviour in him from the person I dreamt about. On one occasion he asked me what football team I support, to which I replied: “I hate football.” He started being really obnoxious, saying “Really?!? You don’t like football?!? What do you like, cooking?” He was obviously one of those prehistoric imbeciles who was somehow implying that because I don’t like sports, I’m not “masculine” enough. He just kept on with his passive aggressive criticisms and I got so sick of his behavior I snapped, and I demanded to know what his problem was in front of everybody, and that he had been nitpicking at everything I was doing. He blatantly denied everything and that I had an attitude problem. He stayed away from me after that incident which was the desired effect. On a plus side, I have an attitude problem! Damn right!

Another time before Christmas, I was meeting up with an old friend for a night out, and I was looking forward to it. There was another friend of hers but I took an instant dislike to him because he was loud, cocky and extremely vulgar. He admitted that he liked to partake in cocaine and he was already halfway through a bottle of vodka so my initial reaction was that I needed to stay away from him and not leave my drinks anywhere near him. Sadly, he kept drawing attention to me, more cliched comments on how “I am too quiet and I need to cheer up, bla bla bla…” We are on the way to the nightclub, and I am cracking – I keep telling myself, “Anymore of his stupidity and I am going to explode…” He came up to me from behind and thought it was funny to grab me from behind. I DO NOT LIKE BEING TOUCHED INAPPROPRIATELY BY ANYBODY. I don’t do it to other people because I respect boundaries, and I expect to be treated with the same courtesy. He thought I would be in on the joke, he tried putting his arm around me in a jokey friendly manner and telling me to cheer up. I went absolutely ballistic, shaking him off and I literally roared in his face “DON’T F*****G TOUCH ME!!!!” He looked absolutely horrified, as did everybody. Instead of apologising, he told me to chill out. That just made me even angrier and I was just shouting and warning him away. Again, he avoided me all evening and it did the trick because I despise people like that.

These are some of my brutal honesty revenges, Anita. They always come across as being more vicious and aggressive than I intend, and I can make things extremely awkward for everybody present. But in some twisted kind of way, I enjoy it and I find it extremely satisfying. Knowing that I stick up for myself now and I’m not prepared to be a wallflower. That doesn’t mean I should become a bully and constantly harass people because that’s not okay. Some people, I just need to be really sharp with them so that they stay away. When they don’t come near me anymore, job done.

I was obsessed with “Carrie” during my last year at school, and the year after I left. I just really loved the idea of getting even and using my mind to enact some kind of extreme vengeance on people who had hurt me, or using telekinesis to repel people. I have a sharp temper when people I don’t even know push my buttons, and I realise that because I don’t immediately respond to their crap, they think they’ve got me cornered and they don’t expect me to stand up for myself or retaliate. When I do, it’s shock horror and that is what repels them away.

Nothing major is happening in my life at the moment – well it kind of is, I’m going back to university in September to do my masters. I’m really happy at the moment and I’m looking forward to going back to study. That dream just hit a nerve and irritated me. There’s just something really pleasuring and almost sadomasochistic about itching a scab until it falls off and bleeds. Sometimes it just feels really good to hate people. Some psychologists suggest that people who don’t have vengeful thoughts could be psychopaths.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Joe.

Mark

Thankyou, that means a lot! I haven’t really been writing as much as I’d like but I’m just feeling super inspired all of a sudden to write.

Joe

@greenshade

The list of principles sounds like a great idea. I guess this whole issue does effect me because it’s almost as if the last conversation we had is on a repeat loop in my head.

It’s interesting how you bring up the idea of an intention being compassionate self-defense, I don’t regard this as being compassionate. Maybe it’s just me being proud. I have my pride and it got wounded (like it has many times before), but this all coming from him deeply wounded me, especially the fact I couldn’t get a word in to explain myself. Maybe I just want to have the last word to get even, like some form of revenge. I’ve spent the past year teaching myself self-respect and bringing myself up after a few setbacks and failures. Maybe I do have a problem dealing with criticism and maybe there were some valid points to Bill’s criticisms but there is also relentlessly criticizing somebody just for the sake of it. I don’t need to be around people who constantly bring up my flaws or constantly telling me “I should do this, I should do that, why don’ I do this, why don’t I do that…”

As for the affecting my work thing, perhaps this has only made me even more determined than ever to go after my goals, and I would feel more inclined to slay them if I didn’t feel like Bill was scrutinizing me all the time. Like I said, my success is not what his version of success is. I dance to the beat of my own drum.

Thankyou for your last response, it has helped me a lot 🙂

@VJ

Thankyou for sharing this with me, and thankyou for reminding me that I still need to read this book. I purchased A New Earth last month and I haven’t gotten round to reading it yet.

@anita

How’s it going?

I feel like this is something I should do but I don’t know how to go about doing it. Every time I’ve emailed or WhatsApped him messages, he just replies very briefly so I just get the impression he really isn’t interested in what I have to say and he’s just going to dismiss it. I remember sending him a message on WhatsApp but it took me a while to type something like “I’m good, how are you?” because the keypad on my old phone was broken, and he just sent me another smart aleck remark saying “Are you writing me an essay or something?”

I did suggest meeting up with him a few times but he always seems to be busy when he comes back to his hometown every weekend, but every other time it seems like he feels that the whole group should meet up together instead and that just used to make me feel uncomfortable because I don’t want to go for any more of these get-togethers, but I didn’t want to say that out of politeness. Now I realize that I am not responsible for the way other people react.

I kind of feel ridiculous about this whole thing – the last time I met up with this person face to face was two years ago. We have only spoken on the phone or sent messages since – we haven’t seen each other and I haven’t seen any of the other people from the group since but I felt like they had this hold over me. I don’t know how to go about doing this.