I grew up in my own struggle, forever searching for who I was. In the end I found out out that who I was was dependant on who I was around. Never able to really be me….Who ever that is.
Who Am I? – Oppressed, Suppressed, and Deppressed.
Firstly, let me explain what this blog is, will be, all about. This is my personal hypothesis that might help my life, my marriage, and children. I say hypothesis because this is just an idea that if I blog my life might become less oppressed, suppressed, and depressed.
Having said the above you may be wondering in curiosity more of what this is so let me go around the world before we come to that answer.
As a young child I was drawn in to the dark. The thought of having the world to myself, alone, peaceful. In the dark, when the sun slept, the noise mute, nobody to judge. I’m sure there was a psychological reasoning why I had found peace at the midnight hours in an empty playground at 7 years old while the rest of the world was sleeping. I’m sure reading this and my blogs you will sure get some ideas and theories yourself.
As my age grew into the double digits my longing for peace became more of a struggle because of society saying I needed to sleep at night and go to school during the day. I had no balance. I didn’t agree, didn’t want to agree, follow, what society said was right and wrong.
With the struggle for dark quiet peace I was being kicked and punched from all sides to smarten up and to do what I was told. I was, at the age of 12, taken into foster care along with my sister because of the chaos my home was in. One lady, in the child family services, I remember, said to me “It’s very rare for a child at your age to have shut off all your emotion and feelings”. I guess the world just got too much for me.
By the age of 14 I was involved in gangs, in and out of jail, and doing whatever drugs I could get my hands on. My mother told me who’s side she was on when she had let me starve, homelessly, on Christmas Eve. I remember watching my family through the Livingroom window all gathered around a big turkey while I was using the neighbors wireless phone asking my mom for food and a warm place to sleep. I found someone’s backyard shed to sleep in that Christmas Eve and realized they were no longer my family and to move on. I focused on getting feed and places to sleep even if it meant getting deeper into the darker side of things. I had to learn to adapt, survive. I had to learn to play the world to get my needs met. Had to learn how to read people so that I could use that to survive. I had to learn how to talk, what words to use, to play my prey before I got what I needed.
In all this need for survival I considered the violent drug infested streets to be my real parents. They guided me on how to be, how to act, how to survive, and how to be save. One wrong word can get a knife in your side. My Core Beliefs come mostly from though streets. I have changed some of them, which I will explain later and why.
As I grew older the more jail time I did. In the beginning you tell yourself “I’m not coming back”, but that is said with pure ignorance. As time grows, so does the pain and suffering and with that comes the search for change. The need for change.
I have enrolled myself in every class I could get into while incarcerated. Some for the knowledge, others to just pass time. I did learn a lot about why I did some of the things I’ve done and the triggers that have put some things in motion. I ended up having the knowledge, but the lack of practice in doing these better behaviours.
It wasn’t until 13.5 years of incarceration later that, by chance, I picked up The Gospel of Buddha by Paul Carus in the Penitentiary library. I was back in on a parole violation for my armed robbery charges. I had 6 months to go this time.
I read that book, got hooked, made it my mission to brainwash myself into Buddhism. I grabbed every book they had at that library on Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. It was a small library and I read the books more than once, some five or six times. I tried not to associate myself with anyone while I focused on my Buddhist mind training. The only time I left my cell was for meals. Even my laundry I was doing in my cell sink, there was a laundry machine, but I was more serious on my mental health and getting my mind as pure as possible without having to go out into the poisoned prison population for a second longer than I had too.
I believe I had reached a state of enlightenment far beyond what many have by the time my six months were over. I had witnessed an out of body experience during my daily/nightly meditations and my every physical motion was like in comfort of cloud 9. I had a constant smile on my face which was unnatural for me. My thoughts were not diluted with hate and revenge, but compassion for everyone the same. It truly was heaven.
Even heaven didn’t last. I flew to Thailand in hopes to renounce the world as a monk with nothing. No distractions, no attachments, just peace. Almost as if I’m looking for that empty playground at 3a.m., still searching.
As life would have it I was pulled, distracted, from my mission by a beautiful new life experience. A young lady whom I married. We have four beautiful children all growing up to be their own and with each having something more special than the other.
We have been married, going on 12 years now and I believe I have made the most changes to my own personality to better suit our marriage and her happiness. The last 2 years has been like a down hill spiral that has been getting worse and worse.
I strongly believe I am giving up hope. Hope that she will see me for who I am instead of seeing me for who I’m not. By this I mean I am constantly being falsely accused of things that most people would think obscure such as having a second wife live in our basement and having a child with her, Always have recording devices and cameras going to collect evidence against her so that we can send her to jail, at one point it went as far as me and our four children were planning her death and she didn’t want to sleep because she knew she wouldn’t wake up.
She has turned the positive vow “til death do us part” into a negative, thinking it means I’m planning her death. A simple Marvel poster I bought at Canadian Tire that had the title “Part of the journey is the end” was turned against me because she thought it was me giving hints about our end and her death.
It is very oppressing when the one that should be loving you the rest of your life is seeing you as an untrustworthy evil enemy. If I say “I love you” in the middle of passionate sex she will respond with “you don’t have act. You can be honest with me.” which then kills the whole intimacy I thought we had and the passion is gone. My positivity is somehow saw and changed into something negative. I don’t understand how she does it or why. I have been giving up trying to get her to see me, to see she is surrounded by a husband and children who love her and would never wish harm upon her. I think we are both in the same boat. I don’t understand where she is at and she doesn’t understand me. We are both feeling suppressed. I can only work on me and hopefully it will help us, our marriage, our children.
This is my emotional outlet. My emotional vent. My journal. My diary. My hope to get freed from this trapped bottle of unheard emotions. Maybe if I can vent here, be heard by someone, I can feel some type of release from this depression.
It might not be daily writing, but I will try knowing that writing daily is said to improve personal awareness and positive change to our life.
My Oppressed & Suppressed Life 