A Boy who was Obsessed with the Apocalypse

Healing healing, all I do is healing. I may be misinterpreted by my parents here, butbeing misunderstood by them is nothing new.

They believe it's wrong for me to dwell on the past, but I don't think they realize that I've done absolutely no dwelling on the past for the entirety of the past 15-20 years, I've just kept going and going and letting go of all the things that didn't serve me. Most people look at old photos or reminisce or keep the same taste in music. I have kept changing and evolving.

In a sense you could say I was running from the things I don't like but it wasn't such a bad thing at the time, it was in order to give myself space to recreate myself.

I managed to do it, to recreate myself from the ground up and to become happy with who I am, something I could never ever say before.

Now that I am sturdy and strong enough to look at my past without the same kind of emotional reaction, I feel it's something I MUST do in order to clean up some of the old mold in my soul. There are ticks, automatic responses that still pull at me, in fact, while I was recreating myself from the ground up, the soil was still polluted with old garbage.

My parents disagree with my idea that there was garbage polluting the foundations of my personality, and so this is something we still can't talk about easily, mostly because they take it as a personal attack. They sacrificed far too much of themselves, more than they could afford and more than they needed to and to hear that that may have actually hurt me is very difficult for them and brings up some of their own baggage which they haven't completely worked on.

That's ok, I have my path and they have theirs and I don't NEED to tell them all this, in fact, I'd rather not, but I sometimes fall into the trap of my mother trying to get me to say how I REALLY feel even though she doesn't want to hear it.

When I talk about how my extremely sensitive demeanor made school feel like torture, they think I'm exaggerating and that I'm only remembering the bad stuff. I'm not. I remember being happy, ecstatic at times. I remember feeling safe. I remember having a good life...but I also remember how insecurity painted every single moment, and I didn't realize it until I learned to stop fearing death and failure and shame and obscurity.

If you are wearing green glasses, the whole world looks green. You can still distinguish between an apple and a banana, but they are all tinted green, and my youth was painted with deeply seated insecurity, and I was actually knee deep in green paint at that. It was a great childhood by most measures, but if I want to become who I want to become, if I want to be empowered, I need to be able to dismantle any piece of my past which is still tugging at me and influences how my software and hardware function.

And so I make an effort to dig into my past and to release any kinds of emotional response to any memories, at least any that aren't consistent with how I want to react to the world.

I feel an immense amount of frustration when I see political corruption and how people look down on each other or dismiss people unfairly. I hate laws that make peoples like more diffiuclt instead of helping them and taxes and war.

You may think the response is a natural one, but it doesn't have to be so destabilizing and it still is at times. I find myself unable to work on what I want to work on after getting pulled into a political debate or dealing with difficult people. This is not a healthy response.

I wish to be triggerless.

And so I dig, to find out what is being triggered and how to dismantle the disruptive mechanisms. I can keep the same ideals. I can still work to end corruption and arrogance and I can still work towards bringing people together and breaking the more destructive tendencies of humanity but I don't need to feel like shit about it.

I was what you could call an activist for much of my life, or at least I had the temperament of one, but I've been working to think more in terms of what I can create than what needs to be destroyed.

As I dig though, I find all kinds of interesting things. As Luffy from the live action version of One Piece said, "I didn't become a pirate, I was always a pirate!" and I guess I've always been a "pirate" too. I've always been an explorer, someone who tries to look past what I'm being told and find my own truth, and to create my own life, without basing it on anyone else's idea of success.

I've always had certain inclinations about where society was heading and I even warned my parents that things wouldn't be able to continue like they had been during the economic boom of the 90's I remember in the year 2000, as a 14 year old, I was already warning of some kind of a collapse.

I even found music that seemed to agree with my assesments, and funny enough, I only realized how much the lyrics were in line with my way of thinking after getting into the melodies and the live shows.

This week I've been revisiting some music I used to love and trying to dig out some of the old frustrations in order to develop a more light-hearted stance on the issues, but I'm a little shocked at how obsessed I was with the apocalypse.

I remember this phase of my life very clearly, but I didn't realize just how present this idea was in my life, from Final Fantasy 7 and Xenosaga to the lyrics of RX BAndits and Coheed and Cambria (I had a thing for prog-emo, yeah, I know you didn't know that was a thing, but it is, even if no one really uses that label for it).

Check these out and tell me if you see some parallells (i still love these songs even if I have outgrown them)

Lyrics from Rx Bandit's "VCG3":

2000, another shattered vision: the human race
Our self-destruct button has been pressed
Are we acting on morals
A malfunction of minds lacking decisive control
Are filled with a tv sense of life
Of life

We can live with no regrets
This ride's not over yet
Stand together, if not we fall
Stand together, if not we fall
How can we change the paradigm of social caste
When the victims are the same ones who slave for the corporations
This episode's resolving and we can change it
A revolution's calling and I'd like to think that I'm not alone
Are we all alone in this

lyrics from Coheed and Cambria's "No World for Tomorrow"

Bye-bye, world
Or will our hope still hold on?
Boy, you're never going to see
The things that'll come of these (days)

(Raise your hands high!) Young brothers and sisters
There's a world's worth of work and a need for you
Oh, change is coming, feel these doors now closing in
Is there no world for tomorrow, if we wait for today?

I actually hadn't heard this particular song by Coheed and Cambria until now because it was released in 2007 and I had already entered a new stage and had different taste in music but this was a very common theme in their lyrics, the end of the world.

Apollo Sunshine's "666 and the Coming of the New World Government"

I'm ill at ease with what we're calling liberty
Democracy implies the right to buy the same things
Everywhere around the world
Our forces setting up economies
The shame will come and even change

The enemy is turning into everything
And what we'll see is the kind of fall you only read about like Roman history
With our own violence and our own misery
The shame has come and soon the change

Even in university when I got into modern psychedelic music, a lot of it had the same theme of societal collapse and calling for a change.

Just to add one that people might know, TOOL was a much bigger band than the others listed above, and check out these lyrics:

Some say the end is near
Some say we'll see Armageddon soon
Certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from
This bullshit three ring circus sideshow

I don't judge these songs as negative, on the contrary, they
let me know that I wasn't alone in thinking these things, and gave me an outlet for my frustration. I can only feel that they were a positive thing in my life at the time, when I truly did not see any glimmer of hope for my future or the future of humanity.

BUT

That doesn't mean I have to hold on to the old frustration. I can find power in these lyrics, because I've lived in that dark reality where everything is destined for destruction and I came out of it. I now live in the moment and can think pragmatically about the choices I have rather than living in despair. I feel empowered because I recognize the influence I have on the world EVEN WHEN I FAIL AT MY GOALS. We all influence the people around us whether we want to or not.

Even if we only impact 5 people, those 5 people will impact 50 people and 50 people can impact 100's or 1000’s of people. Sometimes a single idea that comes off our tongue will reverberate throughout an entire country, and we will likey never realize the impact we've had.

I now realize that the desire I had to directly control my impact on the world was the same energy that created this world headed towards apocalypse. That potential reality was in line with the desire for control and a feeling of desperation to have more power and a bigger influence.

There is so much that is out of my hands, but I can control 100% where my focus is and what I create, what I offer others. And so I am listening to these songs with great appreciation for how they helped empower me to realize that I wasn't alone and that I wanted to change something.

I may have dreamed of apocalypse for a time because it felt like the only possible end to suffering, a kind of ultimate catharsis. Now that I realize that I can seek other kinds of catharsis, much more fun and enjoyable than the end of days.

Whether or not I am able to achieve anything is out of my hands, but I can learn to live life in complete alignment with my values and what I want to create, rather than frustration and a desire for destruction.

---

Novels/music/merch/social media/patreon:

https://linktr.ee/selfhelp4trolls

Untangled Knots podcast:
Japanese Upbringing Explained (interview my Japanese student)

Join us in the Deep shitdiscord channel to talk about deep shit, art and cultute differences

Confessions of the Damaged 1.1-1.3 on Amazon