Forgoing Life’s Opportunities

Perhaps, no more than the difference between a well lived life and one that is hard and unhappy is in the ability to take the opportunities that come along.  Is it really so hard to do this?, for are opportunities in life, afterall, not aplenty?   If it is possible to do this well, and if one’s eyes are attuned to what is out there, then can there not be a seamless simplicity to living life well?
I should state clearly that I am not saying, that this kind of well lived life will not have it’s challenges and hardships – most certainly not – because, indeed, the dilemmas and feelings these provoke\insight may be part and parcel of a higher way.  The more things we do and try, and the more people we know, together with the more situations we find ourselves in are all liable to bring about increased responsibilities we have to assume, and in this there will be more tests we must directly face.  This, though, in itself is a richness, precisely because the more pained one’s heart is at the injustices of the world, in many key regards, the more involved and connected one is to the world.  Our way of reacting to, and accepting, the events of life is what matters.  Life is so much simpler when we recognise that which we can affect and that which we can’t.   What one can change, one will change if one’s focus and energy is right.   Who is to say how undeveloped the potential within is in this regard?  If we could harness such focus to it’s utmost, then perhaps we would be in possession of a superpower.
Speaking of focus, I apologise if mine is a little off here, as I may have just gone off down a minor alleyway, but such wandering was not in vain as this tangent of thought has been to set in place the basis of that which I want to lay down.
What, then, of the opportunities that may exist to the person who is on the street?  The more limited we are by our position in life, the fewer opportunities that there are liable to be before us.  The successful businessman has more appointments, projects and investment opportunities than he knows what to do with.  When my life has been at its hardest and lowest ebb, life was a reflection of how I felt inside –  it was bitterly frustrating, and I felt trapped and unable to escape beyond an enraging set of constraints that defined my world.  In this place, because I could not really see how change was possible, let alone believe in it (or myself) , then I saw life itself as limited.  Opportunities if they were there were not taken.  Many, many opportunities were either disregard, not appreciated nor never even seen.  The better things have become within myself, the more opportunities I have seen in life.
One of the reasons why I did not used to see opportunities is because a part of me was resisting them.  Change was scary.  I was scared of hurt, of being ripped apart and destroyed inside as old hidden pain was reopened and came gushing out.  When a lot is hidden within the psyche, the world can seem fraught with the unexpected, the threatening and the dangerous.  Like this, without fully knowing quite why (for so much within was repressed), I was wary of life.  There was a constant impulse to flee.  I wanted to be alone with only myself, at least it was somehow safer that way.  I must have missed out on so many opportunities since I had become accustomed to acting out of fear.  There must, I am quite sure, have been so many serendipitous occurrences that came my way, but which I never took, and that now are long forgotten.   If we don’t take opportunities it can very easily seem that we are unfortunate, life is not fair, because life does not seem to provide us with the opportunities that seem to come the way of others all the time.  This may be right, but one may very well be mistaken, and alas it can fuel resentments that never need to be fuelled.
The person on the street can be particuarly susceptible to shunning the help of others. In the first, immediate place, this may come from the stigma they carry with them about being a homeless person.   Because, so often, homeless people are judged negatively,  with a whole range of prejudices attached to this state, such that when these projections are in the air, one picks up on them.  These wear one down, and there are times, in my experience, when the homeless person’s sense of self can be so degraded that they can feel sub human.  If one feels like this then there is liable to be a dose of hostility when another person tries to get close.  Through this, alone, opportunities and connections may be shunned.
Receiving help for so many additional reasons can be extremely hard in this life.  The person on the street may feel this worse than many others in life because by being in this position there is a backlogged history: things have happened, there may be a lot of pain locked up inside.  Sometimes those who get close and try to help can be seen as a threat for they are potentially impeding upon one’s most closely guarded and ruptured emotional space.  It may be felt that they are digging at places that you are not comfortable in going to yourself.   There is the risk that they will make you face up to the, hitherto, unfaceable within.  Better then, it can seem, to resist this at all costs.  Being alone is safe.
The pain is yours and only yours.  There is insulation in creating a fort.  You are the fort, it was built by you, it is you, and you must forever guard it.  I met one person once who had formed a deeply limiting  belief that was theirs.   It was clung to, and was done subconsciously onwards for so many years.  They believed:  “I would always be alone in life…….I would never know love”.  This was their narrative.  It became imbued within.   Without realising it it was the core of his identity.  It was an ingrained unconscious belief.  The belief, these very words, were uttered in one traumatic moment, when as a child, he was stood alone, cut off, isolated, from life around him.  The occasion was a holiday, a grand festive occasion, the other children all had their families with them, a picture book scene, and there this person was alone with no one, no family, no friends, he felt abandoned and it hurt more than he could then possibly express.  This moment encapsulated for him what he had long felt.  Suddenly the poingnacy of the moment underlined his world he had long on some level felt.
There was nothing he could do.  He could – and a part of him so strongly wanted to –  have fallen apart.  A nervous wreck, shot to pieces……the pain, the tears, the agonising screams from his tender heart, if given expression to then, would have risked meaning nothing to anyone else…….He was alone, no one could understand what he felt, he was a child, he could not understand it all himself.   If he gave into the emotion he would have looked like a crazy person to the world.  If the pain had seized him then, if he let it, it would have been too much, once started the crying may not have stopped; the tears, the shrieks, the hurt would have totally overwhelmed him.  To have done this, then, he would, as he said,  have felt himself to have been despicable for being so weak.  It would have been humiliating………The world could not know his awful vulnerability.
As a child he did not have the comprehension to explain what he felt…..this in itself was isolation.   Therefore for him to have been this in life, to have been in this place, abandoned, it must, he thought, have been him that was the problem……. There must have been something wrong with him inside.   By giving expression to all this hurt it would have risked turning him into a pitiful blubbering wreck, and if the world were to have witnessed this, then horror of horrors, all the world may have known his secret humiliating shame.  The world may have judged him as he judged himself: which was harshly, with an unceasing shame filled disgust…..and he judged himself so because this must have been the explanation for why he found himself in this place.
This belief “I will always be alone…..I will never know love “, was uttered definitively, in a moment, when all range of sensations, memories and laments were going on within him.  It was a defining narrative from henceforth on he lived by.  It was a shield for him.  A way of explaining away all the right he had at feeling the pain, the anger and the hurt of it all.  It gave everything an explanation, and so it stopped him from going to pieces in the moment.   This was a belief to live by.  It hardened him up inside.  This could be his impregnable defence, with it he could shut out and repudiate all those niggling, raw,tender hopes he felt within.  He could obliterate the shame and the naked fear of it all, and stand alone.  To be above and disconnected from such lame hopes was a type of need for him.  The belief he utterted was supposed to be a way of keeping him strong and shutting out those terrifying, senseless, but most natural of emotions, that for him could never be met and would never be satisfied.   Within this was agony.  But better it seemed for him to deny his tender hopes and needs by quashing them than to endure their perpetual yearning.  No space for sentimentality, no space for vulnerability…….he was alone.  This aloneness, as I say, was his shield.  It was his; his protection that he could not give up because it was his world.  Anyone who tried to get close was seen as a threat.   And so he spent a long time in his life, from then on onwards, forever fleeing when the opportunity for intimacy came knocking.
For this person for a long time this belief was not consciously in his mind, but it had burrowed itself very deeply subconsciously within.  It was his tacit belief system for interpreting life.  He could be close to no one for a very long time, since if he were, it would risk invalidating this, his, most deepest of ingrained beliefs.  The belief defined him, to be without it would have been like losing his sense of self…….and that was too terrifying to contemplate.   To be oblivious, as he was, to the extent of his captivity was highly tormenting:  He was continually in conflict with the part of himself that really did want connection, but he would flee and deny himself these needs since it would otherwise have meant giving up his belief.  And to have been without it, in the deepest psychological sense, would have entailed being stripped bare.  This was too greater risk, his vulnerability would have been too much.   For him vulnerability was especially hurtful as it was so intertwined with abandonment.  Too much pain in this place lay below the surface, it thus seemed safer for him always to flee.   Turning help down and fleeing from others became his habit in life.
Thus, for this person, the belief that was meant to protect him in fact over time dug him into a dark and solitary place.  It perpetrated the very pain of abandonment and aloneness he was trying to escape.   Additionally, and no less perniciously it repressed substantial pain further within, this hidden hurt crippled him and led him to the street.
This all illustrates for me, how through the beliefs we hold, and our sense of the world and their intertwined narratives that form, we can be a prisoner to our most awful and hidden fears.  These can effect us going forward in life, as they make us act out in ways that lead onto help being turned down.  The gifts that come our way in life may go unacknowledged if the fundamental joys of life, in our past, were lacking or were warped in angst.  To want to be alone can, therefore, too easily be a habit, and if one’s life is lived like this one may very well avoid many an opportunity since one’s fears are just too great.
In avoiding pain, though, all it leads onto is deep and very dark repression.  Repression is brutal.   It is obscuring and limiting, and it is mightily confusing since so much of what needs to be known remains unknown.   One’s sense of reality is, thus, so misshapen that one will struggle to make sense of what one feels, when one’s fears are unacknowledged and repressed within.  Consequently, someone who comes close can instinctively be perceived as a threat.  One would almost rather be alone so they can protect themselves, this need is very probably misguided, but it can have it’s logic, when one may need, at times one’s own space to realise and come to terms with one’s own things.
So much of the help that comes along in life comes through other people.   Sometimes it can just seem easier to turn it down,  because the other person may have questions for you that you cannot answer.  They may want to know and to understand things which you do not know yourself.  You may in heart want closeness, but when such closeness touches upon one’s deepest and most obscure insecurities, then when someone gets close you may be reduced into incoherence that quickly turns to evasiveness as you struggle with all those raw nerves that have been struck.  From there no end of hidden shame may flare up as you perceive yourself –  being what you had so feared – of being broken and messed up within.   Therefore, closeness to others can, if there is a lot of repression within, ultimately be a barrier to one in life since it starkly risks underlining, to such a fragile person, how disconnected they are from life.  This is unfair, and it is made, so often, worse by how one judges oneself.
No one can feel another’s pain.  When you cannot understand your own pain, closeness can be terrorising.  Someone else may want to know and help, but if you are lost inside, then that connection a part of you really begins to hope for may not be achieved, because expressing what is within well and with coherence is a long and arduous process.  If you fail in this then that initial connection risks being severed.  The result is one’s pain of abandonment is incited afresh, and simultaneously you gleam how lost and cut off you are in life……which only reinforces the toxidity of one’s long held internal beliefs.
The fear is that, compared to the person who is there for you, you yourself feel yourself to be inadequate and lacking in all sense of direction when someone well balanced comes close.  This hurts, it effects one’s pride, and so the impulse to flee can all too naturally flare up.  The result, is that you are left feeling, in freshly pained ways, an outsider because that stable, solid, world of good people seems evermore unreachable than ever.
These are some of the reasons why the homeless person may resist help.  Within, this is not what many a person may want, but when fear and pain are so fraught within, knee jerkly hostile or evasive actions may just be safer to enact.  To flee from help and to shun opportunities are actions that may, very well, not reflect the fragile heart within.

On the street people are often at their most vulnerable.  It is when we are at our most vulnerable that taking opportunities can be the hardest thing to do.  When in the most difficult places one is afflicted by no end of pressures and strains.  Life, here, is a battle, and one may very well be very lost inside while fighting it, such that it can seem safer to only rely on oneself and fight it alone.  In a sense this is valid if one’s intimate past had been riddled with pain, however, this is not, very necessarily, a reflection of what one needs and, really, wants at heart.  The opportunities that come our way in life are so important, we must believe in them like we believe in ourselves.

Street Life: The Terror of Getting Stuck in One’s Head

One of the very hardest things of all in life is to be stuck in one’s head.  In this post I want to explore the risks and the consequences of this for those who live on the street.

First I say a little more about exactly why I see this as a terrible thing.  To be excessively in one’s head is to be in an ego centred bubble; disjointed and unorganised thoughts hold sway, and fixed, limiting, narratives become pervasivly entrenched.  The effect of this is to breed in one’s mind a fragmented and hostile impression of reality, which creates a sense that anything and everything in life is overwhelming: nothing is simple.  To be in one’s head, is thus, to live one’s life being ruled by one’s fears.  One’s picture of life becomes increasingly negative when the actions we take are lived in real time through our heads.  To be in one’s head one cannot respond to the world as it is, one’s hunches and one’s senses are too disconnected.   Our head, therefore, when stuck in prevents us from being at one with the world.

The world of our head is small.  It is repetitive, parochial and self absorbed when we are stuck living over our life in our thoughts.  When dwelling upon the frustrations of our life and mulling over all the things from our past that could, should, have been different, then one is stuck in an imprisoning place.  This is a place that limits one’s involvement and engagement with the opportunities of real life in the here and the now.  To be stuck and not to be able to get out of the head is profoundly frustrating, but then, in turn, the more it is railed at, and blindly fought against the more imprisoned one becomes.  This is not life, and within, in my experience,  it is known; it is gleaned in the feeling that life is passing one by.  There is a greater world out there, it is vast- in it so much is unknown, and there, waiting to be discovered – but it will remain forever unrealized, unless one interacts with it through one’s experiences, which themselves are based upon self aware actions.  We need to be in the real world to understand life.  Life has to be lived not through our heads, but through our actions, comprehension can only be gained through learning from every experience we live, both good and bad.  Hence, the more we live in the real world, the more we come to understand of ourselves.   In my experience of life, I know I have made my life hard when I have been in my head.   I have enacted out unsavoury scenarios, almost out of default, as I harmfully sleepwalked my way into some dark places.  If I had been connected with life in a fuller way, I would have heeded and felt the warning signs, and the urgency of these would, I should think, have been felt……..and through this feeling I would have been propelled by a reasoned impulse for action to prevent harm to myself.  I would have been unimpeded going after what I wanted and what I deserved- when in my head this was not remotely possible.

Something I have tried, to eventually learn to do, in my life, while trying to pass through and overcome crisis, is with awareness, to live life through my actions.  In trying to recognise and see objectively my fears, rather than then letting them rule my head, I have endeavoured to embrace them in real life.  Our fears can teach us a lot.  They may bring to the fore much pain within, but to know this and feel it directly, is, ultimately, immeasurably more worthwhile than for it to remain hidden obscurely inside.  I got to a point where I had to change this in my life.  Homelessness has been for me a means to do this, since it contained within it so many long held emotional fears.  In interacting with, and feeling, these fears with awareness, they have taught me a lot.  Homelessness was, of course, an extreme point to go to in terms of realising this, but all I can say, for myself, is that it was better late than never.  It was the extreme urgency of the situation that led me to doing this, I had to, and so I did.

However, homelessness poses so many dangers that one needs a good deal of luck to ride through it’s most arduous phases.  The toughest times of homelessness are points of real chaos, and in this horrible position one is at the mercy of some highly dangerous forces.  Through this I can understand why it can tragically do many a person in.  Its greatest danger is, perhaps, the scope it holds to imprison one inside themselves, in the very darkest and most virulent parts of one’s head.

Let me explain what I mean by this, in regards to how street life contains huge risks to one’s mental health, by trapping one inside one’s head.  It is very easy on the street to get lost in one’s head.  And, I mean utterly and completely lost.  To be in this position is to be disconnected from life.  And from there one’s most dark and negative subconscious forces may ravage one into destituted self ruin; one’s grievances and crushed hopes are too many.

Why is it so easy to get lost in one’s head?  On the street there is a lot of time.  Too much time.  Too many blank hours in the day with nothing to do.  Time can be venomous here.  It has too much unchecked, potential, power.  This can make it tyranous, and it is one’s mind that takes the brunt of this.  With too much time on one’s hands, and with nothing to do, one has the propensity to fall very far into one’s head.  If this becomes a habit then the dangers grow.  Especially so when the environment that the time is passed in is one which is challenging, and at times hellish.  The environment we live in affects us, and if this environment is bad it only leads on, eventually, to feelings of frustration at the world, and at oneself.   The environment of the street is hard: in it is a sense of abandonment, squalor, insecurity and danger,  it is not a calm, tranquil nor hospitable place.   To be stuck in this place has the propensity to make almost anyone very depressed.

To avoid the pitfalls of one’s head is, therefore, essential.   One needs some structure and focus.  One needs something to put one’s energy into.  For me writing and reading have helped me.  However, and this is where the terrible challenge is, there are many days, and so many a long lost hour when I have been incapacitated, horrendously stuck as I have been in my head.  This has taken me to many a very dark place, and the negativity of some of my thoughts has depressed me.  These periods could have sucked me under into an underworld of permanent chaos, from where I could have been lost forever.  Many a person on the street can go this way.

As I have alluded to being busy is important.   So why not try harder and do things?  The problem with this is that there are times when due to the nature of street life one is so totally depleted of energy that, even with the best will in the world, one has no energy to focus one’s mind on anything constructive.

Often I am very short on sleep, the longer this goes on the harder things become, until a tipping point is reached when I am all out deprived of energy.  Try to focus on anything intellectual when you are shattered, and you will know how hard it is.  Sleep deprived no action is natural, there is not an ounce of concentration to give to anything, and if you are prevented from sleep or the normal distractions that you can switch off to in a secure place,then lapsing into your head is unavoidable.  Long hours with no escape from this are poisonous, it is a form of hypercharged solitary confinement.  Combine this with the perils of winter, when you are perpetually frozen, when your bones ache, and your blood flow feels as if it is a cold running tap of icy water, then here is another horrid hindrance to having any kind of focus.  There are so many other little worries that deplete one’s energy, such as hunger, or fear of security.  When these little factors are added together one is drained of all focus.  There is no escape from one’s head.  To be there in this state is a torture.  A true torture.

The worst thing of all is that without space and security, as tired as one often is , one is forced during the long hours of day when a city is awake, to stay up oneself.  One cannot easily sleep and rest when one needs it most.  An accumulating weight of tiredness hangs over many a homeless person.  When shattered one’s brain function is limited.   Coordination is poor, one cannot think clearly and comprehension is limited.  Factor in any one of several other hardships that combine to wear one down and one is in a very dangerous place, as one simply does not have the energy to do anything of constructive note.  And so when one cannot do anything through lack of energy all one has left to one, is to inadequately try to deal with this onerous time.  In this situation there is no escaping one’s head.  Time ticks slowly on.  One is left waiting for time to pass with nothing to do.  There is a lot of boredom to being on the street.  Boredom is one of life’s most predictable causes of why a person goes into bad places.  When one is tired and is forced, through the nature of street life’s environment, to stay awake then invariably one is going to be faced with much boredom.

To be trapped in a situation like this in which one is shattered, run down, and board, one is going to find life very grinding.  Irritability is an all too natural by product of this place.  What a frustrating situation this is.  Life feels, in this moment, overwhelmingly negative, and therefore one’s thoughts reflect this.  To be in one’s head in this moment is going to give a dangerous pervasive exposure to that which is most negative within.  In such a moment, our head is the last place one should be…..but one has no choice because this is the reality for so many of those who are stuck on the street.

If this is the place one is in for hour after hour, day after day, when a permanent state of exhaustion has set in then the backdrop of one’s head and ones most negative and frustrated thoughts can become a constant narrative to one’s life.  One is in grave danger, because one can so easily fall into a permanently terrible internal place.  The most negative thoughts we have are self perpetuating, the more we feed them the worse and more encroaching they become.  They are fed by negativity.  And, since the conditions of living on the street are so negative in so many ways, then one’s most negative thoughts are being unreasonably nourished.    The more time you have stuck in your head, the more wide reaching and virulent will be the negative thoughts.  There is no escaping them when one is too tired to do anything else.  This internal darkness has a worryingly free power to reign.

To snap out of this the homeless person requires rest and relaxation.  Life is a vicious circle when this cannot be found.  The game of trying to stay strong and positive is rigged when one is outside and perpetually done in.  It is mightily difficult.  Sadly, it turns many a person insane.  Is it really their fault, though, when this is the external lie of the land for the homeless person?

What to do to break these tortuously long passages of time with only your head for company?  Alcohol or drugs.  These can be the only escape.  They get you trough the moment, an escape from the terrible piling vestiges of one’s head.  In many ways, I can see how, this is a natural choice.  It has a some rational merit, since the non stop undeflected exposure to our head, in the most negative of hours, is distressing and mentally very unhealthy.  To be stuck there, inside your head, for hours on end is one of the worst places of all to be in in life when under certain intolerable conditions.  Drink or drugs are a means to break away from this state, and can one really be judged illy for looking to escape this through drugs?

However drugs and alcohol are of course themselves highly dangerous.  They are certainly not a magical solution to one’s life problems.  Indeed they can perpetuate this tragic cycle.  Since the next day one will be hungover and tired, and then trying to focus on anything constructive will be even harder than before…..and so more time trapped in your head lies ahead.  And so one returns to drink or drugs to escape what they tried to escape the day before and the day before that.  I have avoided these things (though cigerrettes at times have been an invaluable companion), but at times there was the temptation.  I am lucky in that I do not have a natural liking for such things, and so the avoidance of these is far naturally easier for me.

The fact remains, in my perspective, that for the homeless person drink or drugs can be a rational choice if it means that they  might save you short term (and the short term in this perilous environment of survival is all that can matte), from the worst effects of too much time in your head.  One needs distractions.  And if one is so depleted of energy that one does not have the focus for constructive actions then all that there can seem left to do is to drink.  This may not be the best long term choice to make in one’s life, but the short term dangers from the effects of an excessive imprisonment in one’s head can quite possibly, at times, be more virulent than anything else. To be stuck, exhausted, cold and hungry, in your head with your most negative thoughts is a hell.  Any means of escaping this may well have to be latched onto.

I have had luck to because for the odd night here or there I was able to stay somewhere, I could sleep, and therefore I was able to battle through the worst threats of this state.  I did not need to resort to intoxication.   I was able to keep my long term health in mind, and so I have, just about, been able (so far) to withstand the greatest dangers that come from all this.  But for others it is not so easy.  When having too much time before you in which to get lost in your head, a tipping point will come from where you are overcome by all that internal darkness, and when this happens it is too late……..this life of homelessness will never change.  If constructive ways to prevent this danger can be found, then the lives of so many people who have just arrived to the street could be saved.

A poem: Secure Wihout Plans

Freedom to plan,

The need to know,
Secure in the knowledge of what will come next,
The plans we, thus, hold can be enacted out.

 
If only it always worked out,
Life would be easy,
Our plans would be perfect,
How free we would be!?

 
Free to have what we always want,
When everything conforms with our plans,
The ruler of our world,
What unbounded power to behold!

 
To live, one predictable plan after another,
Everything taken care of,
When you always get what you want ;

Is this life?

 
To think, to reflect, to learn is effort.
Faultless planning holds no errors,
No mistakes ever,
When nothing challenges the authority of our plans.

 
To plan perfectly is to live an unblemished life,
We are the ruler of our world,
No need for our authority to ever be challenged,
So free are we!

 
What can go wrong?
Hubris, arrogance, unawareness, boredom,
Like this how can we ever know our potential?
Our freedom will have failed: cruel world!

 
Freedom not to plan,
Is liberation,

Observing how we have chosen to react to the unexpected is the preparation for how to live with awareness in life,

Life’s unplanned journey is ours to live!

A Lack Of Privacy

One of the things about being on the street that is most terribly hard is the lack of space. This is a niggling problem whose implications build and build into one humongously difficult pressure. A lack of space means a lack of privacy. It is the problem of finding a place to be alone. To not have a place to escape to, to be on one’s own is harrowing. This deprivation is a prevalent malevolence, it is as bad as it is because it should not be something that should be so hard to find, but it really is so, and when one is deprived of alone time for a long time the effect it has on the senses are truly quite dangerous. It is one of the factors in this life that makes me feel most low.

In a city there are always other people around. A homeless person who is stuck on the street, lingering there, with nowhere else to go is exposed. Involuntarily you are always on display. The eyes of others are always potentially on you. Yes, most people may not notice you, but that is not the point, it is the possibility that everyone and anyone in any moment is able to watch, judge or see you, there is no getting away from this, it is inescapable.

Maybe this should not matter, but it really does. Human man needs privacy, it is a fundamental psychological need. We are our own creature with our own individual conscience, and so for that we require time alone. We need freedom from the pressures and the noise of an indeterminate multitude of things. One could say that the pressure of always being on view on the street, potential, or otherwise, is like a CCTV camera being installed in one’s bedroom.

In a city street life is frenetic. Workers, businessman rushing against the clock; groups of tourists engulfing space; shoppers distractedly going back and forth; children laughing, shouting creating noise. Something is always happening, it is like an unendingly fast flowing river. For the person on the street who cannot get away from this, it is as if they are caught up by default in this river, engulfed, unwillingly, by the unceaseless flow of people. Thousands upon thousands of people passing by, it is a blur, and there is no silence to be had in this moving swirl. It is grinding and it is disorientating, there is a need, at times, for solid, silent, higher ground. The problem for the homeless person is that such space is beyond their reach.

That is what is so hard about being on the street, the lack of space one gets to have by oneself. The street is one vast open space. In the aggregate when alone outside in it, it is structureless. There are no walls no boundaries to it. This effects, in my experience, one’s sense of space and perspective. When everything is too open, with too much going on, one’s mind reflects this unorganised freneticism. The environment we are exposed to impacts upon us. Most of the people who are out and about in the city are busy and preoccupied, and often stressed. When they want quiet and space to relax in they will find a familiar shelter in which to go, and this usually is the home. Whereas for the person on the street there is a constant interaction with a busy, fast moving environment. Too much of something is excessive, and this is not good for one’s health or one’s balance. And because of the nature of how most people are when out and about in a city, in not being at their most calm and relaxed, this feeds through to the person stuck on the street. It is a bombardment to the senses to be exposed excessively to such overcharged intensity. It is very hard to feel balanced when one’s surroundings are a constant blur of sight and sound.

One particularly pernicious effect of this is that with such a volume of people around there are invariably many people engaging in that familiar human foible of passing judgements on others. The person who is on the street is particularly vulnerable in this regard. Prejudices exist, and we are affected by the prejudices of others which are projected onto us. Some of this, the homeless person, may consciously feel, but it may be too, that the vast bulk of is subconsciously sensed. Most of the judgements we pass on to those on the street are regrettably negative. To the person who is there and stuck on the street, in any given and prolonged interlude of time they are likely to be subjected to many a hostile, disgusted, contemptuous or fearful glance. Ideally in life we should be unaffectedly independent of strangers judgements, but really this is not so straightforward: the judgements of others will affect us when taken to an excessive degree. This really wears one down. One can be independent of it for a time, but if like many a homeless person, you are on the street for hours on end, feeling dishevelled and run down, then such judgements before long will wear one down. This, I do not think, cannot fail but to effect one’s mental health, especially when one is marooned outside on the street day after day.

But there are quiet places in a city away from the crowds? Yes, there are. But, the crucial point is that in a city there is never someone else far away. You can be alone, and then suddenly someone appears, and your bubble of space is infiltrated. It is the threat of this which is constant, and the threat of it is worse than anything else. It almost becomes a fear the longer you have gone prior to it without privacy. It is not nice when all one’s actions are on potential display. This can be the most simple of things such as eating food. The homeless person does not want the possibility of being watched by the world as they tuck into their basic, and often cobbled, together dinner, that itself is a shaming sign of poverty upon which one may be judged. When performing such activities outside one feels particularly homeless. It is, therefore, unnerving and frustrating when the eyes of others are always around, and there to potentially witness you in your wearied state.

Sometimes, as I have often done, I go looking for quiet. Many a time it has happened when I thought, finally I have found a solitary spot. I feel relieved, and I feel suddenly calmer……and then out of nowhere someone appears. This person means no harm, they are an ordinary person, but the fact is that it to me feels like a terrible invasion, it is like someone walking in unannounced into one’s own private room. This invasion feels cruel, it does not seem right, and it is unfair. The homeless person in the city lacks this fundamental security of their own private, uninhibited slice of peace and quiet.

In ordinary life peace, quiet, privacy is something we can take for granted. Try to be without this, though, and one will be surprised at just how challenging and frustrating the implications of this are. It really does needle, and maybe it does so to the extent that it does because privacy is something so simple and taken for granted, that when one finds oneself is deprived of this, and worse still, with no idea of how to refined it in the immediate moment, then the world somehow feels particularly wrong and unrecognisable.

Because of all these little drip by drip factors added together, and which build up and up as an uninterrupted stretch of time outside lengthens, then this is why I say that for the homeless person a lack of their own space and privacy is an horrendous ordeal. Remove an ordinary person’s right of space and privacy, and subject them to the prying, and often, judgemental eyes of others and then I would wager that even a calm person would before long find themselves highly irritable and pretty bloody angry. This is, just, one of the realities of what it is like for those who live on the street.

To Flee: To Be Free?

We are our own best friend, life is good when we do this job well.  To care for, to cherish, value and want what is best for ourselves, from the purest depths of our heart is the foundation upon which everything in our lives as independent, mature, adults should be set.  If we are not adequately in charge of ourselves then the world will seem skewered: The life we live is a reflection of how we feel inside.
Why do I say all this?  I say it because I want to analyse how this core and noble notion can become terribly warped and misaligned as it ends up, in itself, being the force that drives many a person to the street.  How does it do so?  It does so, in my experience, from the perspective of wanting to be free, to be on one’s own and beholden to no one; but in fact what can easily transpire is that the impulse for detachment increases as one slips into a position where one comes by default to be wedded to the nomadic way of living on the street.
This outcome stems from a contradiction.  No one really wants to be in such an end position and yet the route leading to this place is subconsciously sought.  In wanting control of one’s life, one may deep down be only doing this to avoid the pain of emotional hurt.  No one can be allowed to get close, life is safer on one’s own.  If such a person has been wounded by the ordinary structures of intimate, emotional life then the abandonment and emotional pain that is trying to be avoided ends up being enacted and recreated by the events that one brings about in their latent desire for freedom and emotional autonomy.  It is the why, the intentions, underpinning our proclaimed conscious actions that really determine where we find ourselves in life.  If subconscious fears are the driver behind, even, our most seemingly empowered and constructive actions, then the pain contained within that subconscious fear will afflict itself upon one in life in a new and freshly warped way……and thus that empowered independent action one thought one was making is instead the cause of a harsh, recriminating feeling of deflating belittlement, which itself was the inverse of that original conscious decision that came with the goal of being the author of one’s journey.
When one assumes the role of being one’s own best friend in the most firm and responsible way, then one is in control of one’s life.  One does not control the world, that is fine, one is at ease with this for they recognise and are secure in what they can affect.  Everything else they are able to accept since fear plays no part in the subconscious intentions of one’s freely uninhibited actions.  From such a place one is fully worthy of being one’s own best friend.
And whatsmore, the more one prioritises oneself as one’s best friend the immeasurably and insurmountably more that one has to give to others.  The more secure we are the more open our heart, and the more we care for, and have to share with others, the more love all round that one has to give.  Being one’s own best friend, therefore, is about being in control and responsible for ourselves, and if the intentions in this wish are pure then what flourishes on from here is a greater connection to life and to others.  Such a person is no island, on the contrary, there is an unbounded closeness to others that is bourne out of love.  For this person the independent, autonomous, being they seek to realise comes from a place of being open to anything and everyone in life.
To be one’s best friend comes from feeling fundamentally good within.  One has to be comfortable with oneself, which means one can handle, and furthermore, embrace being alone.  Everything springs from our own foundations we nurture within.  If we know how to be serene when stood alone and with only oneself in the world, then one has the grounding to reach out to others and embrace the deepest of human relationships.
Certain people who end up on the street do so because they want to be there.  There is something more wholesomely secure and safer with being in this place.  Alone in this place, in certain key regards, no one or nothing can get at you when your ties to society have been shed.  To go to the street in such a way, I propose from experience, can happen because from an overriding part of oneself within, there is the desire to be one’s own boss and answerable to no one.  One wants to be that person who is in control of their life.  Noble sentiments perhaps, but the undercurrent to what is propelling this is dark.  The subconscious intentions behind the wish come from ghastly fears, from past abandonment, betrayal and harm whose emotional pain is suppressed within the psyche.
To live in normal life and to function in the world comes through the positions we hold and the roles we play.  Through this we have responsibilities.  Bills have to be paid and jobs have to be held down.  Structures in civilised life are held together through a web of networks and relationships which are threaded tighter by a wide assortment of transactions and interactions whose facilitation is interwoven further by all range of emotional and personal linkages.  Much of the fabric is tacit, it goes unsaid since these are the familiar, normal and secure subconscious practices.  To feel at ease within the bosom of this webs netting one needs an adequate degree of emotional tranquillity within.  Society’s functioning is based upon trust.  If we do not have faith in people and in their particular actions then in everything we do we have to be on guard and excessively conscious of our every step.  Such a kind of hyper vigilance is exhausting because nothing is certain when there is danger potentially lurking around every corner.  If this on some level is what someone feels when a part of society in their everyday life, then to live in this place may be just too emotionally onerous.  The sore wounds we fear being reopened keep on being painfully scratched at the more we try to deny them.
Of course for these pressures to impose themselves to such excessive degree then there must be some substantial locked away pain within.  If the result is that one would sooner go to the street than to partake in societal life then the place this decision comes from is one of flight and fear.  The decision to have done this may have been wrapped in the apparent decisive resolution of wanting to be in control of oneself and one’s life, when in fact really it did not come from such a place of strength, and alas the acts intentions are in fact flimsy.  This is not a life lived in which one is one’s own best friend.
To get away from life.  To take off is freedom.  One can feel safer this way.  One is beholden to no one.  No need to justify anything to anyone.  Immunity from the wearisome judgements of others; no tip toeing, no answering to anyone.  Nor are there those same unnerving doubts of your place in things, no crippling insidious fears of not being worthy of position and your standing in life.  No agonising horrors of everything being lost as you are left alone and abandoned.  Better to leave the this ship yourself than to be chucked overboard in a sudden, unexpected instant by someone or something in society that abandons you in a swift, terrorising moment into the ocean.  If this sensation happened again and again as a child then this provides your basis for what the world is like.  You may never shed the sense that its repetition is imminent.  Why risk this?  Why be made to feel powerless in life’s fundamental key passages as you remain beholden to this fear?  And why live in fear of what acquaintances, and worse still your apparent friends may do to you in the aftermath of a close intimate moment?  Why wait around, hanging around, trying to live when being thrown overboard is surely inevitable?  Why live on in normal societal life when such a sea of doubts subsume your mind?  Why ever risk this?  Take off and be on your own.  It is safer this way.  When there is no one to crush you there is not the temptation to futilely hope that the impossible, unimaginable things you crave can work out.
To be thus in such a place where to stay and to remain on the street  is a solace then some basic fundamental notions of security and trust must be askew within.  If the notion of home and of family is beset with trauma and pain then one can be in perpetual fear of recreating familiar perilous grounds in their life afresh.
When our most integral emotions which underpins everything that is most intimate and personal in our interactions and relationships have been stabbed away at, where notions of gratitude, worth, trust, love come warped with senses of emptiness, abandonment, despondency and the crushing of one’s sense of self worth and one’s hopes, then the consequence is that life can be a minefield.  If one’s most core emotional needs have been made crooked, then the glow of societal life and connection with others is meretricious to such a person.  Best it can seem, therefore, not to get ensnarled in this place.  It is not worth it.  Better to make it on one’s own however perilous that path might be.  Accept the hard life of a wandering around nomad sleeping outside:  The suffering may be great, but this suffering is yours – it is yours to own.  You can wallow in it because this place, this life, is yours, no one can take it from you, no one can throw you overboard because you are here of yourself.
That desire to be free of such doubts is a desire for freedom itself.  When one’s emotional well being in the intimate, stable, settled connections of ordinary life is to some great degree dependent on others then one can almost feel a prisoner in normal life.  An inner angst that pervades every semblence of stability in life is to have a great weight chanined to one’s inner being within.  One is in every step, one small stumble away from falling over and being crushed by this intolerable weight.  Perhaps, for such a person, after a while, it is best to let go and to cut oneself loose from normal life.  Yes, it can seem that it is.  If you have never known a stable home, nor had trusting, enduring, relationships with those you should love, then why live struggaling to know this unimaginable realm?, if you have never had it, then you will never know it, it is just the way it is.  Here comes the justification in taking off.  Don’t be dissappointed again by others, it is more secure to rely only on yourself.
But to follow through by fleeing in such a way may in a broader sense sit uncomfortably within.  If one is blindly giving into one’s fears by fleeing the intimacy of normal life, then one may carry with them the knowldge that one’s bid for all out autonomy is at it’s heart an action of enduring cowardice.  If this was behind the action in taking off, then one may be burdened by an, ultimately, more onerous weight of one’s own weakness.  In my experience, flight has, at times, been an instinctive kneejerk responce.  It’s impulse would roam around  tyrannyously -even in normal times – within the subconscious.  Hence, in this instict to flee then there is pain that is trying to be avoided when the prospect of establishing secure, well cultivated, relationships arises.  The pain and the fear this induces can override even the strongest of desires in one’s purest of intentions which one had nobly wished to fufill.   For instance, one may want love, one’s heart longs for this most fundamental of life fulfilments, but one ends up forever sabotaging one’s chances by retreating when the moment gets close.  If love is associated with abuse, because those whom one automatically loved when one was a child were perpetrators of harm, then the sensations one feels onwards in life are likely to be highly conflicted.  Consequently one’s fears, and one’s submerged, gnawing, pain will insert their muddled influence upon one’s most pure and essential needs.  To live like this is maddening.  One is forever refusing oneself what one’s nature is screaming out for from within.  To be so fragmented, and to feel so perpetually conflicted, is incredibly wearisome.  It is as if one is living through an endless, senseless, battle which only happens because of one’s own blind impulsion implores one to fight, even though no part of this person’s heart desires this insidious engagement.  Most crushing is that the more one goes out and tries to fulfil one’s needs, the more violent one’s internal battle becomes; so horribly conflicting it is that one is overwhelmed, and thus the signalled emergency for retreat is enacted in a flash.  The only way it can seem that there is to break with this cycle is to all out flee; in this one does not, at least, have to engage in this terrible battle.  Best to break off with normal life, the pain that comes in the ordinary relationships of life is just too much.  In normal life one cannot escape these, they are rubbed in one’s face at every turn.  One wants this too, but one’s fears are too great; and if one cannot possibly shed them then one will never feel at one in ordinary life.  Fresh hopes can keep on springing up, but then the associated pain that is intertwined with such hopes keeps coming rumbling back, this hurt is enough to invalidate all such hopes.  Therefore an insurmountable obstacle exists, it is as if one is living their life forever on the outside looking in on the world.  One is never there, one can never properly connect.  Best it can seem to leave this forever, no clinging to normal life just to be a perpetual and isolated outsider.  Instead be your own boss, go out on your own.  In this world no other person can hurt you, you can only hurt yourself.  And that, in my experinece, is a price such a person is willing to pay, for nothing else is worse than someone else crushing one’s fragile emotional pride, that is a stab too much because within that one’s world comes crushing in, for those feelings one had had were also one’ hopes.  To live with one’s tenderest hopes of love, of connection, of fulfilment being broken is not endurable even for the strongest will.  Such a world is warped and wicked and it will send one insane if these fears have no hope of being overcome.
If the choice is to live in ordinary life, with the sense that one is forever perilously perched on the edge, where one is always one false slip away from doing something wrong that will bring a sudden hellish end to those first, longed for, trappings of sweet security, and what instead comes about is a rejection from those one had thought, for one giddy moment, one could trust, then the end of the world stab of abandonment has happened again.  To be expecting this, and to never be able to shake off it’s encroaching sense is the worst thing of all.  One is forever seeing dark, obscure, threatening shadows in the purest heartwarming light.  Living normally then is a paradox because the more outwardly secure one’s surroundings seem, the more poisonous one feels about it all inside.  To lumber around in life with such a hidden, unexpressed pain is a burden.  And it is one one feels that one has to hide because one cannot express the teaming nonsensical demons of doubt and anexity that are there within, when for all those in the ordinary world any such rationalisation is beyond all comprehension.  To have such fears is to feel desitiute.  By taking off and being attached to no one or nothing, then there is no home, no relationship, that one ever again has to lose.  To have such a freedom is an allure that comes with the nomadic way of life.
By being one’s own boss, then one is not directly in the clutches of another person.  To be beholden to someone else in an intimate way, gives the other the power to effect your own destiny, simply because they have an emotional hold over you that grips at your heart.  This grip one feels is not real, it comes from one’s own psychological world, but this grip is an emotional torture of pain and uncertainity since one’s heart can in any, imminent, intense, moment be squashed to a life ending pulp.  The pain, the threat, is not literal, but inner emotional pain can be as damaging, or more so, than any genuine inflicted physical pain.
To be alone, puts one in connection with oneself.  The greater this connection the better the friend one can be to oneself.  But if one is fleeing, and blindly running from one’s unrealised, and worst, fears, then the aloneness one has created is not a healthily established connection with oneself.  To be one’s own best friend and to take off into the world must come from a place of love.  If one is fleeing from fear then on one’s journey onwards one will be carrying a heavy baggage of frustration and pain; this is exhausting, and it will wear one down.  This inner baggage perpetuates hurt, which will erode one’s self worth.  The person who lacks self worth cannot know self love, and when this is the case one will never be one’s own best friend since one will never be secure in oneself.

Let It Be, Let Worthlessness Come

When one does not know who one is then how can one’s life not but be made difficult?  I say this because unless one has a clear sense of self, then it seems to me, that one is inextricably hindered in one’s search for the core things that one wants in life.  One needs a decent grasp of who one is to know what one wants.  To be unsure of this, in any fundamental way, is to be unclear of what to go for in life.  With an inner world that is set upon fragmented foundations then how is one to exhibit any measured cohesion?  The short answer, from my own sense of life, is I do not believe one can.  And to follow on from here, it appears to me, that a feeling of disoreintation will be an inevitable by-product of it all, since such a life is prone to lack any sense of direction when the guiding compass of a secure sense of self is absent.  How maddening, how senseless life very rapidly feels when one is traipsing one’s way through it lost in the dark.
“Know thyself, and to thine known self be true”, the immortal words of Polynus in Hamlet.  Is there any saying that better encapsulates the essence of life?  In not knowing ourselves how are we to honour the supremest virtue that is truth?  To know oneself is to know one’s strengths and one’s weaknessess, to shy away from aspects of ourselves within we find uncomfortable is to decieve ourself because through this one is denying one’s own vulnerabilities.  In being like this one cannot see oneself fully, and so one does not have a full picture of oneself; if this is how we are within then it will be reflected in our sense of life.  Without knowing ourself fully there is no hope, no chance, to know the truth of life to the fullest of ou potential.  I want to focus on the more extreme cases of what a lack of self means, because I want to try to analyse how this can be a means of prespitating why some go to the street and give up on ordinary life.  For the individual who does not have the foggiest of what is true within themselves, then for them knowing how to, and actually trying, to live truthfully is as perplexing as it is unlikely.  Indeed, from my own perspective (and this may be something I write directly about in relation to myself another time soon), if one is not living life in one’s own way aspiring to achieve this, and is instead residing on an obscure, boggy, foggy, plain of obliviousness and inauthenticity then to gleam what is true and real is mightily hard – it is like trying to see the rising sun of a Kyoto dawn in real time from the remotest reaches of the Alps on a darkened night.  The more disconnected one is from such light, then one’s actions, one’s words, one’s way of relating to situations and to others will mirror what one feels within: What we enact and what we say is liable to prove to be false when one’s inner narratives and comprehension do not reflect the true picture of life especially when we taint what we see by the distortions within our subconscious heads.  To be like this is to get ensnarled in deception, and whenever this happens however will we see truth, and let alone speak it?  Alas, when in such a perpetual muddle there is no known self to be authoritatively true to.
Life itself can do a good job in tying us up in a disjointed jumbled erractically rolling ball of confusion.  When the deception from others are imparted onto the innocent and naive, then before they, the child  that they are or were, has a mature comprehension of the apparatus of life, their mind already, to some extent, has been loosely bound together in a tangled maze of distortion.  One persons deceptions and lies roll over into the lives of others.  Distortions spill over affecting the lives of those closest to us; we feed off the reality that others create for us.  Knowing ourselves can be hard – maybe impossible – because of the sins of our forebearers.
If the deceptions we have lived under in formulative years have been particularly virulent there is a real danger of an insidious swirling closet of darkness blindly, fearfully, encasing the wild beast of our being.  From here, henceforth onwards, one is trapped by the confines of all range of constraining fear induced deceptions that distort the world one sees.  How one’s head can spin with this maddeningly dour  clump of doubts and anxieties whose dampening noxious mist has the metaphoric, and in some ways literal effect, of being fed into one’s minds eyes drop by drop, deception by deception – these are the eyes of consciousness one uses to try to navigate one’s way, independently, through the world.  If one has been hurt, decieved and lied to badly then, invariably,  when one tries to go on independently, one is starkly exposed to many an unforseen ravaging turn.  Deceptions accumulate, their pressure builds and builds which creates a terrible overhanging hold.  When in this place we are beholden to other’s deceptions, and the life we live is unjustly limited.  However, perhaps, our true, untainted, self within, beneath all the debris of this hazy rubble is screaming no: No this cannot be, I have to be free.  We have to be something, we have to realise our sense of self – whether we consciously know this or not: it is us, it is human man, it is what we do.  No circumstances, no upbringing should forever define us.  But how to do this when the world concocted for such a person is irrepraochably distorted?
For the person who goes to the street what of them?  Why become homeless?  What part of the person desires it in relation to all this?  And what darkened motivations lie behind this?  Many a person who ends up homeless does so because of mental health issues which are themselves caused from back in time, most prominently, from broken homes and from troubled and abusive families.  The vast bulk of our emotional troubles get back to ouur earliest years.  When life has affected one in this way, then the harm, the trauma of it all  will invariably have shaken one up badly inside.  This persons sense of worth, and their sense of self, may have  been shattered.  Whatever can such a person do when this has happened to them in life?  It is depressingly difficult because when deceptions and abuse have been one’s world through all those long forumlatiive years then the world is warped.  Truth and what it is are lost in the darkness of the past’s smouldering deceit.  When one is subjected to torrents of manipulation, abuse and harm, deception is one’s light of day.  If this has been one’s environment, its pernicious darkness cannot but affect one’s sense of self.
With an ill defined sense of self then what is one to do but to latch onto something?  Uncertainty in life is one of the hardest things of all to live with.  When nothing is certain there is no solid ground underfoot.  To lack this is to be in a perpetual psychological freefall.  One has to find something underfoot.  It could be anything, there has to be something, but to take such a leap in search of something solid is liable to be bourne from anexity and fear, and alas it may very well be tragically ill concieved.  Foundations are not created out of thin air, in a healthy selfwe carry on building upon what is already there.   What propelled this rah dash for certainity like with anything in life started and came from within.  One needs some sense of self to feel real; one needs this to be able to relate to life.  One wants to make something of one’s life, one has to realise something, something, anything because this is what a sense of self is all about.  Hopes are intrinsic, we have to have dreams, but realising these can be all but senseless when one has falsely imbued a sense that those key connections in life, which underpins everything, are crooked.  Trying, though not really knowing what – let alone how – it is to be true to one’s sense of self, may very well lead onto the sense of place, and the sense of belonging and fulfilment one yearns for becoming a proposition to unknowingly frightful to be realised.  When one has no, ordinary, discernible notion of how to achieve this, one is liable to be done in by the undertainty of it all.  Why aspire for anything constructive when it’s only associated with a suffocating and blindingly nortious sense of nebulousness?  Worse still hurt seems forever lurking and ready to recreate itself.  If this goes on and on then one’s sense of self is continually being rupturted afresh, it is as if the ground is being lifted from under one’s feet.
What is one to do then?  What sense of self, if any, can one try to find?  Why not then go for the reductive?  This at least has the comfort of being gleamed: To make onself worthless can be that way.  Yes, make yourself totally worthless until you are nothing, from where undertainity vanishes to nothing.  When you are worthless you hope for and you deserve nothing.  Your place is the gutter.  In rags and ruins, drunkenly deranged,the inticement towards such a place has a morbid call.  To bring this about is to see change.  Something however sordid it may be is at least being enacted.  Here there is nowhere further to fall, and nothing therefore to trip up on in trying to go onwards.  There is that final potential closure of certainty there in the firm thud of worthlessness induced rock bottom.  Who you are, and your place, is finally, irrevocably fixed.  The light of life slowly fritters out.   To watch it’s glow gradually diminish is perhaps one simple and certain comfort ahead.  To drink in the final dregs of life, worthless yet still with one’s sense of self pity intact, is a way of finally feeling some kind of clinching embrace.
If it is, thus, to be the case that that sense of a clearly defined self, that you yearn for, comes to be seen as obtainable, you can, and may well, in that last instant make yourself into a living manisfecstation of worthlessness.  You are fully something if you feel yourself to be completly worthless.  The prospect – the allure – of doing this contains the final means of making youself into something, even if paradoxically that something comes to mean nothing.  To do this is to give up on life.  It is wrong, but also it can somehow be tantalising, a form of sweet trusting surrender: like a baby in a parents arms, you return to bliss.  The bliss here has no conscious, self aware weight, for to be oblivious to the nature of the world carries no weight of constraining, false, despondent hopes.  To get here, into this helpless and peaceable place gives a sense of what the enforcement of worthlessness may bring.  Of course it’s impulse is impure and wickedly wrong, but in spite of this it can entail an end to the horrendous struggle that comes in having hopes that can never seemingly be realised.  When one has grown up under the influence of manevloent, deceiving forces one’s sense of how to go constructively forth in life may be so skewered that one has no sense of where to begin, and/or of how to go anywhere.  To want to, but to not know how, as demonic forces within the subconscious flare up and impose themselves over the mind, even when one is trying one’s best, is another impaling stab to the heart that one cannot keep on taking.  When one’s inner world is twisted so, wherever has one to go in life?, since that frightful, disorientating uncertainty is always around.  A clear sense of self recedes ever further back into the mist.  One wants things, or one thinks one does, but then one is crippled by unfathomable contradictions that abound within.  These contradictions distort, they throw one off course, they reduce one’s half felt, half sensed aspirations into an unobtainable ridiculousness.  One is dizzied to destitution over the hurt that flares up whenever one begins, just for a moment, to believe in what one wants.

In accepting oneself as worthless one can end one’s futile struggle for light and eplace it with the certainity certainty of the devil you know.  The devil of pointlessness, that tells you with conviction that you are worthless.  This certainty, when everything else in life seems laced with uncertain hurt, can be a relief.  You have a place.  Your negative voice within becomes wholly you; it leaves no room for doubt, it gives you certainity.  It is a release and it is closure.  To do yourself in by submitting yourself into abject deprivation carries within it’s midst a lulling, calming, sleep.  And perhaps as one surrenders oneself into the throws of deprivating worthlessness,  one may finally see the light of life in a true sense as one sleepwalks one’s way into true material nothingness.

Rock Bottom

In becoming homeless I had a faint sense that I was chasing after some self destructive extreme.  In the time prior to it I was riddled with hurt; traumas defined me and did me in, my life was so limited.  I felt down and depressed, my existence was one of frustrated, stifled drudgery.  A heavy pain filled haze was set, a fog of doubts clouded my vision and was dragging me down.  I was stuck in a stagnant hole of hollowed out embitterdeness.  Nothing within myself felt firm, I was so disconnected from myself that it seemed as if all my force was spent – I had no power left within to bring about change.  And worse still, even when I had wanted to change things so directionless was I that I could find nothing redeeming within, there was nothing I could believe in – the future was not even a foreign land, it was an alien world beyond space and time.

With nothing tangible on which to go on, any hopes I had were so vague that they amounted to nothing.  I was so stuck, life was so dreadfully sour.  I felt I needed, and a dark part of me wanted, something extreme that I could inflict upon myself.  Even if this extreme was to fall into a self destructive place so be it, indeed I almost wished it, and what better place to enact this out than in the chaos of allowing myself to fall onto the street.
Before homelessness happened I sleepwalked on in life for a long time.  I had a job and I worked, but I was so disconnected from it that it was a source of further frustration.  This life felt so belittling. A meek, drab existence it was an affront to what I felt I should be.  I only, I thought, appeared to be going through the motions of work and life so that I could subsist with a roof over my head and food to eat.  Eking out such an existence in a life of subsistence only made me feel all the worse about myself within.
Something had to give….and it did.
In whatever state of life we are in, fantasy is the one thing that cannot quite die.  While we have consciousness, there is, even in the darkest of moments, a tomorrow or a next minute in time (of course the choice of what to do with this may revolve around the fantasy of ending one’s life).  As tormenting and as meaningless as life may seem, our fantasies and imagined scenarios continue on to be played out in the mind as long as our heart continues to beat.
The scenario for me, in these times, was all out self destruction.  Since I felt so chocked by life, a part of me was raging at my own lack of fight and passion.  I just did not seem to feel, and I did not seem to care.  I could not tolerate that.  This led me to habour huge resentment against myself.  Is this not, you may ask, a contradiction?, because if there was such a visceral dislike towards myself then in that was there not feeling?  Yes, it was feeling of a kind, but it was hollow feeling because it was not pure, I did not feel it in the heart.  Therefore I could not use it  to constructively act as pure heart felt feeling does when it propels one on in life.  My own embitterted feeling was all in the head.  My minds thoughts and narratives took me nowhere except further down and lost within my head.  My life was based around my heads repetitive bleak thoughts that cut dead constructive action.
For me self destruction was the one scenario that contained grounds for exploration.  It was a way to break the stagnancy of my terribly depressing inertia in life.  If I pursued self destruction I could go somewhere.  This place may only have been downwards towards a dark chasm, but at least if I fell into this place, within my freefall things in my life would finally be happening. In it there may even have been this long lost, disconnected feeling of intensity I craved.
So, I wanted to obliterate myself.  Because I did not care for myself  I was impervious, to the pain I potentially risked inflicting upon myself; and furthermore there was a masochistic desire anyway for pain itself because within it was punishment and hurt, and  possibly, or not, a potential means of cajoling myself into doing something different.  I thought it was a way of releasing all my suppressed frustration as I imagined solace in the smouldering catastrophe of obliteration.  Something alluringly and devouringly cathartic lay within it’s broad fuzzy notion.
I thus set about on ripping up  everything  How would it be if I could get to rock bottom?  Abstractly that was where I wanted to go.  To be there, where I could fall no further would be that place where, finally, I thought, I would realise the tragedy of all that had happened in my life.  Finally…..in all this places terrible black, crushing, intensity would be the moment that all that pain, locked so agonisingly within – repressed and hidden – could no longer be held back; in the place of, this, rock bottom it would all come gushing out with the fullness of a lifetime’s held back force…….Or so went the fantasy.
In being there and in falling apart there would be nowhere further in which to fall. In being in, and knowing such a place, this journey would be done, and then maybe life would be different. Maybe life would be done, or maybe there would be a rebirth.  The chance for a fresh beginning after a catastrophic storm: because if in rock bottom is where the most intense pain lies, then things from then on after would surely seem, and be, different.  Accordingly if I were to know this then perhaps I would have earned the right to feel the joy of life in all it’s glory:  No light without darkness.  The bleaker the darkness, the richer, the more special the light.
What contradiction again: does this not prove that in my heart of hearts I really did care about life?  Yes again it surely does, because within truly I must have believed in the feeling and the mystery of life, for these were notions I was trying to seek out.  The danger though of course was that I was not in control.  A part of my heart nevertheless did have the noble sensation of wanting to know life.  The more that we care for someone or something, the more we want to know and to understand them.   I wanted intensity because I believed in it like I believed in the depth of life.   Within my lost heart this was something I wanted from life, I wanted the feeling that came with a joyously full life.
The only way to reach that crescendo of intensity I longed for was, I thought, through agony brought about by devastating self annihilation.  Conditioned as I was, then, by my bleak, fatalistic melancholy I could not see any other way.  To submerge myself into chaos was a price, all to  nonchalantly, I was prepared to pay.  I was up for it because I was out of all constructive ideas.  Lacking confidence and conviction I wanted the easy and artificial injection of ruin to create the changes I didn’t know how to make on my own.  A way of facing, but also, really, escaping my problems.  As a logical approach it makes no sense, but I was desperate.  There was so much locked away emotionally that I had that yearning for a day of reckoning, where an imagined rock bottom held the hint of some wistful interwined longing to find myself
Within this impulse of obliteration there were other, far more, macabre forces in play, which came from the darkness of my suppressed psyche.  Unspent emotion, and many unexpressed feelings and repressed pain had built up into a homungous deluge of inner frustration.  I was trapped with this inside myself.  I, myself, was the object immediately on hand upon whom I could take out all my rancour.  Living with so much locked way repression hurt.  I was blinded by a mist that only seemed to tie me in knots; lost within it’s midst nothing was clear – life was frightfully fearful, which sucked from me the belief I needed to navigate my way through this obscure and crippling place.  Confused so, everything I did in life seemed invariably inadequate.  I blamed myself, and turned embittered and vengeful at my, supposed, pathetic weakness.  I wanted, in the end, to self destruct, to destroy myself, because in executing this I could use my will power to enact something.  In a life starved of expression self destruction became my only outlet of expression.
The more I engaged this and gave into this darkness the more hate I had to use against myself.  And consequently in such a self destructing downward spiral the worse and worse I felt inside, so that it became easier and more enticing to commit further acts of self harming destruction.  To turn myself into nothing, to break my spirit was a path I was deliriously intent on following.  When one feels powerless in life one will do oneself all ends of potential harm  just to prove what is fundamentally necessary: that you are a living, breathing human being who has free will.  The autonomy we have within is the only true connection we have to ourselves.
Off I went on my crazed quest, blind and furiously searching for that point of rock bottom.  But did this place exist?  Is there really such a precise point?, or is trying to attain something so defined just as unrealistic as trying to nail earthly perfection?  This place of course, I am quite sure does not literally exist.  How can it possibly do so.  To chase after it one will only continue on chasing since the despair experienced will never be enough.  Because for it to be proper despair it has to be a despair so great that it is more than one can handle in life.  And if one reaches this point, the only end result will be tragedy: And then one will not know this because one will be dead.
At points in time I thought: Yes! at last I am there.  Except… I was not.  I was too self conscious.  I was like the protagonist in a drama, I had one eye open to monitor that which I was feeling, and whether or not this feeling was conducive to what I expected rock bottom to be – ‘Was I in despair?’ ‘Did it hurt enough?’   I wanted to be there, I tried to will it and convince myself that – yes- this was it’s point.  I needed to believe that this conformed to it.  I was trying to force the unforcable.
This was all about my ego and it’s expectations.  When life did not correspond to my expectations I was disappointed.  Whenever I was there it was not really rock bottom because it was not what I imagined.  These places I went into could not, I surmised, have been heart wrenching enough since the expression of all my locked away pain and emotion was not coming in the right way, of itself.  There was many a time when I imagined I was on the precipice of this:  I thought that one second more and all my hurt would come flooding out.  But it did not.  This could not therefore have been rock bottom.  It was not sufficient.  I would, thus, have to continue on in my self destructive search.  It’s appetite was stupidly and naively insasious.
Each time I failed to find it I soon, a short time later, veered back into a familiar downcast flat and worthless state.  The disappointment and frustration of this was more ammunition to destructively beat myself with.  While one is living self destruction knows no limits, it will never be satisfied.  Trying to entertain it and work with it is a ruinous waste of time.
When in this phase I was in some very low and bad places.  There was of course their own kind of intensity to them, although as I say it was never, quite, sufficiently gratifying enough.  In the vitriolic hate I held against myself I had a connection to passion -of a sort – albeit a terribly retarded passion.  I would come out of one heightened crescendo of self harming affliction and then life itself would go on as it had done before.  What had just gone before, in a burst of abuse, very rapidly after left me unsatisfied and depressed with life in the same well worn way all over again.  I must still have (I thought) a long way to go to, that, proper point of rock bottom.  Hence I would soon go looking again for that ‘real’ point of rock bottom.
Never ever was it enough.  All those emotions and all that pain that was bottled up never became unbottled whenever in or near the clutches of that crushing place.  No of course it never did.  Why?, because in hurting myself and in having no regard for myself I only contributed further to a feeling of self loathing induced nothingness.  If as a person one drives oneself to a point of utter unworthiness then such a person will, in their own mind, have less right than ever  to feel that real pure internal emotion they seek from within.  It will not come when one is medalling with their own psyche and trying through nefarious sub conscious means to be their own undoing.  On the contrary, real emotion is organic, it comes from being at one with life, and in loving oneself.  I wanted the paradoxical of a life affirming despair.  No person can create such a thing, it is impossible.
In this darkened passage of time I did not have the slightest inner transformation.  In fact all that was bottled up only became more bottled up while under the harmful spell of  self destruction.  The outcome was only to worsen the regard I had for myself.  My own internal world only became more confused and embittered, and so it was that the world I lived in mirrored this.  Consequently I got more lost in my head and more disconnected from life.
What a silly downward cycle this was.  It was not the way to realise the intensity and the magical depth of life.  It was the antithesis of self discovery.  I was futilely chasing shadows that could never be caught – what a ruinous life this was for the pyche.  In the end it would only have led to ultimate self obliteration (which of course was what I never truly wanted).  Such a nebulous and dark fixation only disconnected me from living.  And this only perpetrated my original dissatisfaction that had put me on this path in the first place.  All it did was pour oil on my flaming wounds.
When in the clutches of darkness one cannot affect things in any remotely adequate way.  If one is intent on self destruction then one is in a very dark place.  And when in a dark place, dark thoughts are fed, the darkness only deepens.  One cannot raise oneself from the darkness by engaging with the darkness of self harm.  Before long that despair one had wanted will turn out to be the despair that one cannot handle, and in this real despair there is no room for sentimental life feelings, just as there is not the space for transformation.

In blackened obscurity nothing true and authentic can be understood or felt.  Self destruction is the last way to get out of this place.  It only reinforces one’s worst indulgences.  Things are made worse and never better.  To find the light and love life again, one’s actions have to reflect the connection to the light of oneself within.  The pain that we want to feel, and which we all in our own way have within, will only come if it needs to come, and it will only do so when one is trying one’s best to honour oneself.  Rock bottom is never a place we should be, and least of all is it ever a place that should be deliberately sought.

Self Destruction: An Immature Power

Within us all is an impulse for self destruction: No one’s life is one uninterrupted, eternally, joyous bed of sweetness, the light of life does not always shine bright in it’s full penetrating power in our own individualised imperfect worlds.  On the contrary, there are stretches of darkness in which in a mood that is sour ours actions veer into the petty, the vindictive or the downright masochistically embittered.  There should be no need to taint the world with our own induced negativity….but we do… we let ourselves down, and we fall short of what we believe – what we know we can be – if we do everything from a place of courage and love with the fullness of our heart.  Because we have a sense, from occasions in time, of this place, and of how, when here, it feels to be imbued with full blooded strength,  conviction and harnessed passion, and of how the effect this has on us is elevating – as we taste and know what that real and true potential within is – it thus can be the source of a corresponding state of terrible, ensnarling frustration when the connection to this state is muzzled.  To be disconnected from this is dispiriting; nothing is easy, life is heavy.  To be in such a sub optimal state when a place that is so much more than this is known can be profoundly distressing, especially so when one doesn’t know how they can ever return to it.  If we could react to this with  measured mature equanimity then we would save ourselves the exacerbation of our frustrations, and in the achievement  of this comes a  further furnishing towards the inner serenity that is needed to calmly pass over life’s severer bumpy undulations.  Yes, such inner peace and peace of mind is ours to seek and to realise in life.   Except it is not so easy, when such calm acceptance is only cultivated with seasoned discipline which can take limetimes to learn.  Many of us therefore in our reactions to life’s fluctuating emotional tribulations are really little better than children – of the child we once were and still are (however much one may try to deny it).  Like children who suddenly find themselves lost from their parents, the terrible sense of abandonment and horror causes an unfurling panic stricken set of emotions in response to an unexpected happening from life.  Through an inadequate comprehension of life we give undue prominence to fleeting emotions, and the more we entertain our unbalanced responses to these emotions the greater the intertwining terror that ensues.  So much in life  is uncertain, the confusion this causes can leave us feeling stripped bare and defenceless as we lie in fear of what will happen next, too often, in many a life, it can seem to be one thing after another.
Little children that we are we all at heart crave security, and we want to be immune to the uncertainties of the world.  In this is the ego driven yearning to control everything.  In the complex world that we live, very often, if not always, events do not conform to how we expect them to be.  This can cause us to go beserk.  And because we have pride why should it not?, since the humiliation of being scared, lost and in a state of confused powerlessness is incredibly hard to accept.  ‘No’ the screaming impulsive child wails, ‘this has to be fought for it is not fair that I should be made to feel so small.’  But the more we react and blindly fight the more confused and lost we become.  Such actions, of course, are totally inadequate, their inadequacy can be observed from afar in how things are made worse.  The consequence of it all is to be stuck in a hole that seems to be from now on in forever deepening.
 Of course this is not the case, like the clouds in the sky temporary emotional states pass, and indeed before long things may feel for a time better again, but the danger is that if we remain like children lost and unaware, then we will find ourselves repeating things again and again.  And the more we find ourselves in familiar, frustrating places ,the more angry we are liable to be at ourselves and at life.  To reductivly repeat in such a way only lessens one’s sense of their position and of their standing in life as one clunckily catches on to the extent of one’s own inadequacy.
There are many moments in time when one forgets they are lost which is all well and superficially good.  Except, such a simple comfort is false when inside this old well worn childish fear still lurks – and which only grows worse sub consciously the more oblivious one is to it’s essence.  With limited comprehension of life, and awareness of ourselves, then the life we live will be on some level forever dangerous and threateningly obscure.  The more like this one is, then the further away from being at peace with the world one will be.  To be unsettled within is to come to find the environment of life we live in, more often than not, mirrors our internal distress.
This confusion is all the more maddening because we just know that life really need not be hard, and more than that it is beautiful and simple (we may deny this, but scenes of the natural world and of nature remind us of this all the time).  The simplicity of so much of life around us only excabbates the sense of our own inadequacies.  Slapped in the face by our own failings, the hurt, the intensity of the stings reverberating slap can cause one to blindly lash out; when such impulsive reactions are but a habit then self destruction’s shadow has us in it’s clutches.  If we don’t know what to do, or don’t have the discipline to change this existence of ours, in which our fears, at times too often, dominate us then of course we will be unhappy because we just cannot shake of the notion that we are letting ourselves down.  That is weakness and that is not good.  But, damn it, there one goes again because the more one rails against this and dwells upon the shame and guilt of one’s own shortcomings, the harder this indulgent habit is to break.  Our doubts and our wallowed over inadequacies come to define us as our mental structures are constructed through our warped notions of, and our fears about, life.  One becomes one’s own self pity, as one becomes that perpetually screaming child, lost and alone in a jungle.
If we become accustomed to, and frustrated by, living our life in inadequate ways then the change we want and need to make is made  more difficult.  When fighting ourselves life is a million times harder.  Patterns of behaviour form, the more these set in the longer and harder is the required sustained effort to adapt our behaviour; and the harder this becomes the harder it is to ever really bother trying.  The disappointment at this, at being entrapped by our weak, child like emotional outlook grates.  Therefore rather than the futility of trying and seemingly failing to make that sustained progress that one would like to see in one’s life, one gets disillusioned because it appears that one will forever fall short.  The disappointment at this is a cause of a great deal of distress – and so it is that one seemingly needs to take out the hurt and frustration of this: self destructive acts are a very good means of doing this.
In life hope can be the most crushing thing of all.  If one hopes for something in life, and if it’s path to fulfilment or realisation is vague and slippery then to keep on and on trying can be too much for the nerves.  In hope there is just too much uncertainty.  There too is fear of watching lost dreams turn to nothing.  To watch this materialise is crushing.  Yet to keep on hoping is tantalising, though in time it may well prove to be unendingly onerous.  This is why self destructive acts can be relieving because they are a means of obliterating hopes tormenting rays of ungraspable light.  In trying to realise dreams lots and lots of hard incremental work is required; a lot of effort for gradual miniscule gain, that is but a drop in the ocean of the ultimate achievement we seek.  To achieve anything of worth in life hard work is required, lots and lots of bloody hard work.   To a child riddled with fears and doubts this can be too much for their fragile emotional nerves; so much to do – too much –  it is too far to go, the place, the state you want is too distant.  Therefore why not instead rip things up and thus remove all doubt, the act may be destructive but let it be because within it – for a sweet moment in time – there is an immense cathartic release as one’s inner frustrations are aired and given expression to.  To hell with all the effort of feeling small and struggling tentatively along through life as one tries to uphold one’s futile dreams.
It is for this that self destruction has an enticing allure.  As children we dream of being the best in the world at those things we enjoy doing.  The glory, the adulation, the triumph of achieving this excites us and ignites yet more fresh fantasies and dreams.  Accordingly as a child we think, maybe even expect, on some level that we can achieve perfection in what we do.  If you want to be the best in what you do then why can you not be perfect at it?  The world is simple when you are at the centre of it, and so why ever not should you not be able to command perfection?  Being the perfect football player, or the perfect painter comes with being the best in the world.  Of course life teaches us that such notions are unreal, but can we ever or should we ever completely stop believing when such hopes are the source of wide eyed idealism and the fragrant flavour of our foremost dreams?  In growing up the child learns the world does not revolve around them.  What follows on from here should be a realisation that achievement, glory, success are not ends in themselves, but are rather means of self flowering expression, which itself is the source of self realisation.
Perfection does not exist, and rather than being despondent about this it is the journey and the quest of doing what we do well to the best of our ability that should come to mean so much more than those nebulous, immature childish notions of perfection.  With hard work our potential expands, new possibilities open up as we discover more of life in this process.  Rather than dying, the dreams we have modify themselves; through greater wisdom of life we can see the subtlety and depth of what dreams are and what they mean, which in turn germinates fresh, richer forms of inspiration.  To do justice to life is to do, first and foremostly, justice to ourselves.  But to lose this childish dream of perfection and of ultimate glory may never completely be possible, we are just not wise enough to let go, and perhaps too we are unwilling to  have to face up to dealing with such a rupture.  Impulsively the hope of perfection continues on, it conditions our approach to living and taking on challenges.  While there is ego there is the urge to put ourselves at the centre of things, and there is the desire to control all. This naturally effects our responses to events and in the judgements we make of ourselves in all that we have done and in all that we still have to do.  The more we live our life under perfections childish, best in the world, yoke, the more, as fallible persons, we will feel the pounding thump of forever falling short.  If this is the case then the offshoots of this on our life – in our functioning as mature emotionally intelligent adults – is liable to be highly hazardous.  Disillusionment and thus then self destruction from here can all too easily and tragically arise.  With the inevitable failure that comes in directionlessly trying to pursue what is vague and abstractly impossible why not, instead, go for the sure fire and instant result of demolition?  The latter is realisable; yes self destruction is harmful, but within it there is an outlet  for one’s efforts, because smashing up things produces tangible and quick results.  To make malign things happen can be profoundly more pacifying than to be meekly captive to our own recurring inadequacies that come when it seems our best efforts take us nowhere.
The deflating disappointment that comes in the gradual vanquishing of one’s hopes risks being an agonisingly slow running torture.  Why not, therefore, get it over and done with and self destruct?!  The anger at ourselves and at life for feeding us  all our childish, naive and inane illusions is a vast material of frustrated aggrieved pain which we have to use against ourselves.  We deserve to be punished like the dumb children we are, but that we want to deny and will never accept.
In constructive actions perfection does not exist.  It is not possible, our abilities are not unlimited – to the immature person this imperfection is an affront to them.  Rationally it may be known that perfection is not literally true, but emotionally it just cannot quite be, the immature child within cannot accept this and is unwilling to comprehend it.  One blames the world and one blames oneself; the indulgment of this is a wallowing comfort that is a refuge in which to escape life’s harder realities.  But this is not good, and one knows it.  Frustration builds.   An outlet for all this frustration is what this person does to themselves.  To fall short, to not be strong, to not be mature, or not to be perfect is damn annoying.  Life can keep on reminding us of this, as we compare ourselves to others who seem to have it all.  Self destruction is a way of gloriously achieving something……finally.   In it is expression and release.  Here is one final form of inverted perfection.  Ripping things up is a skill that requires will.  It is wrong, but the inpulse can be bloody strong, and so one goes for it.  In bringing about the reaction required for destruction a burst of self aggrandisment springs forth as one has a sense of creating the moment for the force of one’s emotion to explode.  Self destruction is taken on to obliterate the hardship, the pain and the tragedy of our life.   In the futile fulfilment of our dreams one can, at times, well up into despondency at the oppressive nature of life.  Whereas in the destruction of oneself one is momentarily God like, as one, with free reign wields, their great axe of destruction.  Self destruction can be tantalising because it is a constant guaranteed way of quickly achieving something – of going somewhere- when all else in life is just too much.  It´s release of emotion can give rise to a lifetime of bottled up expression.  For all this it is why I say that the latent impulse for self destruction lies within us.

Nothing Need Get In Our Way

The demons within block me in life,
I cannot get past them,
They are there, always there.
But they are my demons,
They are mine to control,
I permit them or otherwise to rule my life:
To let them be is to not handle life
And what would life be without our demons to slay?
The demons do not block me – I block myself
The path is clear when I am myself
And when my head is held high.
No demons are greater than the potential within.
To walk straight, to walk through whatever is thrown at us is the great power that is ours and comes with life.

Going To Sleep On The Street

Adrift, alone, wailing inside: Why will no one come to me?! Because I am on the street, to be abandoned by the world is all I know. Ah the familiar certainties of life! – eating away at me. I am being devoured, but what a feast the innermost pain provides – I am but a carcass of despair.

Let it be, because these familiar sensations, bite by bite are taking me from life. Lost and soon dead to the world, ah the home sweet home of being abandoned by life. Ember by ember I watch the light go out on life.

There is a sweetness within the brutality, like the heath of a fire in a warm, snug home. The inner fabric of my being is being torn thread by thread to shreds; a lullaby in the desolate silence of the street hushes me to sleep.