I have not come here to preach or teach anyone how to live. I’m not here to say that I know anything more than anyone else. However, my aim is to create a thought or at least some kind of understanding.
And it will come. What I mean is that a time will come and life will change.
All will be revealed, in a sense, and this is the best way to say it.
I believe in this. I believe in the different stages of enlightenment.
So please be advised, awareness takes time and so will the different moments in life which reveal the secrets to the tricks we find.
A time will come and our eyes will open to cure ourselves from our temporary or emotional blindness that we encounter.
A spark will come and light will shine and our mind will come to a moment of realization when we say, “I get it now!”
Life happens and as the proof unfolds, yes, time will allow us to see what we have missed.
The red flags and the warning signs will all become apparent.
We’ve talked about this before and yes, it’s all true.
How many times have you sat at tables with people that you knew for a long time, and almost suddenly, you look at them like strangers?
How many times have you thought about the places you go or the people you go with and next, you wondered what it would be like to break away? What would it be like to step away from the so-called pack of wolves or go someplace else?
I used to do this . . .
Break away, I mean.
I used to ask myself these questions too.
I never told anyone about this – at least not at the time.
I was too involved in the direction of the pack.
I never wanted to swim upstream, so-to-speak, or have to struggle and be alone.
But sometimes, I found a spark of bravery.
I used to leave or slip away. I’d venture off and go somewhere else.
I was young. I was in the City.
And there was so much to see.
There are millions of people of all kinds, all types, all lifestyles and all brands of different citizens. And everyone was alive too.
Do you know what I mean?
People . . .
They were everywhere.
There was this new thing to me and like a strange sort of jazz or cool mystery, I wanted to see more. I wanted to hear more.
There was life here. There was nothing supposed or fake nor was there any pretense or the need to impress or act like I was cool or tough.
I didn’t have to compare my scars or prove myself, as if to be tested by some common or immoral fashion that took place between us crazy kids when we’d have to play games like “chicken” to show the size of our balls.
No, all I saw were people who were alive and going about their life in their own way. Everyone was fee to live in their own section of time, which was beautiful to me.
I saw artists who were unafraid to share their art.
This was huge.
I say huge because I would never dare or tell anyone about my poetry.
I never dared to call myself an artist or share about my love for the written word and art, like the paintings on a wall in the museum from the 1700’s.
They had none of our technology yet there were artists back then who had twice our talents.
I never had the so-called supportive crowd of friends. No, not me.
Sarcasm was the first language in my groups.
Fist fights happened and no one knew why.
Everything was about your pose and your posture.
Sure, there were rules of the crowd as in, if I had to jump then so did you.
Ride or die was a law.
So was the rule that says you never rat on your friends.
However, and like I said, time has a way of reveling truth to us.
Also, time has a way of reveling the people who say, “you never rat on your friends,” yet when the lights turned too bright and the heat was on them, they pointed fingers like a stool pigeon, just so they could fly.
Here are some things that I wish someone would have told me when I was younger:
Don’t be afraid to go off on an adventure alone.
Don’t be afraid to try something new.
Don’t be afraid to walk off or walk away.
It’s okay.
I think there’s a big fear which nobody talks about.
The fear of missing out.
This is the carrot that dangles before the emotion of that insecure horse in our minds.
The idea of missing out . . .
Or the next day, like when we were in school, you’d hear about the night or the party you missed, as if this was the greatest event in the world, which it wasn’t.
No, this is the imagination (trust me).
No one ever told me about this.
But I wish someone did.
And here’s another bit of honesty –
I’m not sure if I would have understood any of this.
I’m not too sure if I would have known how to listen to this.
“What do you mean walk away?”
“As in, be alone?”
I’m not sure that I would have been brave or comfortable enough to listen to these suggestions.
I’m not sure if this would have been safe for me or that I was strong enough to stand up and walk away from the crowd and be alone. I don’t know that I would have been brave enough to do this because, let’s face it, the crowd means everything when you’re a kid.
Who you are is important. And this is still true.
Our identity and how we identify means so much.
However, our identity can be lost or confused. So we try to find this in the crowds or with the people we speak with or the things we do.
I spent most of my life trying to find out who I am.
I never knew the answer was as simple as this: I’m just me.
But when you’re a kid . . .
Who you hang out with, where you sit in the school cafeteria and where you are in the social food-chain can mean so much to a kid who wants to be invited or included.
I used to try and include myself in everything –
The reason behind this is because one of my biggest fears was to be either faceless or unknown.
I always wanted to be in the middle or to be part of the scene.
I never wanted to be disregarded.
So, I always involved myself.
I’d always look to be included which, to me, allowed me to rid myself of the lonely worries, at least for the moment. This freed me from the fears of not having some place to be.
However, and at the same time, as long as I included and involved myself, I never knew the compliment of what it means to be invited.
Believe me when I tell you, the mind picks up on these things.
I mentioned that by including myself at least I had someplace to go on Friday nights.
At the same time, I never had the feeling of being wanted or important to the crowd.
I never realized how this downplays or degrades my value either. Thus, eventually and certainly habitually, I never realized that this became my assumption of my self-worth.
There is a translation – and trust me when I say that the mind is smarter than we think.
Hence, this is why I was lonely in the crowd.
I knew that I didn’t belong there.
I just didn’t want to be alone.
There was an underlying sense of rejection and I knew it.
There were thoughts too, wondering if anyone would even care if I wasn’t around or if anyone would notice that I left.
At the same time, there were different crowds from my past who did include me yet I found them to be tiresome.
I was tired of the people. I was tired of going to the same places.
I was tired of the act and the pose and the bullshit postures.
I was tired of pretending to be someone else – all the time.
I can remember talking about going somewhere different yet I never dared.
Instead, I stuck with my comfort zone.
I didn’t want to disturb the scene or more to the point, I was too emotionally lazy to break away and swim upstream.
But I could have.
No one ever encouraged me to venture off.
No one ever told me hey, you see those people in your life?
No one ever pointed them out, as if to identify all the things that I did not want to be around anymore.
No one ever told me that life is short and time moves fast.
This will all be over in a blink of an eye. So be careful not to miss the real stuff.
No one ever told me that a day would come when we would eventually go our own way.
No one told me that people split up or drift apart.
Also –
No one ever told me that the crowd is far less important than I think.
Then again, even if someone did tell me this, I wonder if I would have been brave enough to listen.
I wonder if being socially vacant or empty was too frightening for me.
Maybe that’s why I wouldn’t have listened.
If being that “unknown” or “unwanted” or to be seen as an “unnoticed” person was so threatening that I would have been comfortable enough to stand up and walk away.
If this was somehow reinforced and encouraged, I wonder what would have become of me, if I found my bravery at an earlier age and rather than engage with the crowd, I decided to stand up and walk away from subpar treatment?
I wonder . . .
I wonder what my younger life would have been like if I removed myself from the bullshit.
I wonder who I’d be now if I stopped this a long time ago.
What would have happened to me if I walked away from the back-and-forth banter and the sarcastic battles that took place when I was young?
I wonder how impactful these things are.
To be honest, I know the answer to this.
I know what a habit is and I know that habits become automatic.
Habits happen without the mind’s input.
They’re trained and automatic actions.
I know that accepting poor treatment or inappropriate behavior can become second nature.
This is can become a habit too.
I know that we can become used to poor treatment or unhappy things and that somehow, we can assume that this is where we fit in the crowd – hence, this is just the pecking order.
This is just how things are . . .
This is life.
Maybe this is true.
Maybe we could learn to stand up and walk away.
What would that look like to us?
I remember breaking away.
Have you ever done this?
I was fine to be a stranger and fine to walk off on my own.
I was fine not be confined to the controls of outside opinions.
I was free to come to my own judgments or understandings.
I was free to like what I liked or think what I thought.
There was no reason for me to defend myself. There was no reason for me to look at myself as faulty or “wrong” because my opinions were free to be my own. I didn’t have to be influenced by anyone else nor did I have to give in to what I considered promotional or commercialized beauty.
I used to rehearse my goodbyes.
Did you ever do this?
Did you ever practice that speech?
What happened when it was time to pull this off?
Did you go through with it?
Did you put on that fake smile and act “as if” and did you do nothing else but accept more of the same?
I remember reading something about Jim Carroll
or maybe this was an interview.
However, at the risk of paraphrasing and being off the mark; I remember Carroll talking about walking somewhere downtown by where the poet Frank O’Hara lived.
He was inspired. . .
And so was I.
One night, I was on 14th Street.
I was on the Westside and the City was on fire.
Every type of person you could think of was out on the street.
Everyone was either looking good or crazy.
I saw a woman walking a man down to a place called Hogs and Heifer’s with a leash around his neck.
I saw the transvestite hookers and the out-of-towners, and the tourists, and the younger crowds, and the bridge and tunnel kids who get their name because they take either the bridge or the tunnel to get to the City.
It was summer. I was dressed in one of my usual outfits.
All black, to be exact.
I say one of usual outfits because I had a trusty few that I felt good about
(even if I only thought that I looked okay).
The night was hot and the city was alive.
I pulled out one of my smokes from a flip-top pack of cigarettes.
I was on 9th at the intersection and looking around.
I thought about the poets.
I thought about Carroll and O’Hara.
I thought about Burroughs.
I thought about Kerouac and his bravery to go “on the road” and tell his tales in a stream of consciousness prose – I thought about how he wrote like an unstoppable plethora of descriptions with words that made the written scene come off the page and appear magical.
I was not wrong or faulty here.
I was not unwanted or unincluded.
I was alone in the most perfect sense.
If anything, I was happily uninvolved and unattached and free to look and see and touch or taste the world as it was presented to me.
The City has changed since then.
I have changed too but still, I know the confused kid is still inside of me. At times, I have to speak with him.
I have to let him know not to worry.
We’ll go out and explore soon enough.
Try not to be impatient.
I don’t have that need to be out on the scene anymore; at least, not like I used to.
As for the crowd, well – my crowd has dwindled down to one.
It’s funny too because I used to worry about other people’s opinions of me – and I still run into this struggle sometimes. However, and with regards to my past or my past life and my past-life friends, the people who I tried to impress the most are people who I haven’t seen in decades.
I hardly even think about them now.
Funny, right?
I suppose I can recall the night when I knew everything was about to be different.
This was a younger and earlier moment of realization.
I can remember being in the wedding party of my longest boyhood friend.
There was a party after the wedding that ran until sunrise.
I left and remember realizing that the crew was about to break up, so-to-speak, and in that moment, I recognized that nothing was ever going to be the same again.
I drove to the beach in my tuxedo.
I stood in the sands after the sun came up.
I knew that certain goodbyes were inevitable but
I just never realized that this could open us up to a brand-new hello.
(Know what I mean?)
I wish someone told me it’s okay kid.
Go off. Walk on.
Try new things.
Your life does not end just because things change.
I wished someone encouraged me.
Don’t be afraid to walk alone.
Even if you are alone, trust me, I’ll be right by your side, which means that (and as the song goes) you’ll never walk alone.
By the way, neither will you . . .
I’ll always be here
if you need me, that is.
If not, then keep me as a memory
just please . . .
put it close to your heart.
The Written Addiction 