My first post on this platform was on the 22nd of September, 2004.
It was an innocent and exuberant avalanche of graffiti photos from a then recent trip to Sydney, entitled "Like, OMG! Did someone say GRAFFITI?!"
Over the subsequent years I posted about every topic that entered my at times vacuous head, and to read those posts now makes me cringe with embarrassment, which I like to hope signifies growth of some sort.
But something good I perceive from all of this is that it allows me an overview of how different things are. Not necessarily how far I've come, but... different.
In 2004 I was, I think it fair to say, pretty high on life. A shiny new relationship, I was playing guitar for people I had previously only heard on the radio (it's a box with a kind of Spotify in it, except someone else chooses the playlist for you, and you can't skip ads), I was in good physical health, and even though I was lonely all the time, it wasn't for lack of attention.
I got an email this morning from this site, the first in 6 years, advising me that my last post (in early 2017) had been hidden behind an age restriction warning. I honestly have no idea why. It's nowhere near as spicy as some of my past efforts, but it is pretty honest about mental health and the struggles I was having. So I thought I should have a look here again, and see what's going on.
Good grief, I used to live on here! I remember days where I'd spend hours and hours writing and re-writing a post, for the 50 or so daily readers I had at the height of my bloggy power. We used to chat in the comments, and after a while a lot of us met irl and had sex and fell out and I've never seen or heard of any of them since.
No topic was off limits, and that unfiltered honesty, that gonzo determination, that complete and naked idiocy landed me paid writing work with Monster Children, which I promptly detonated because I was, as we used to say at the time, a "hot mess".
This blog got archived by the National Archives, so survivors of some future nuclear dick measuring contest can see what self-obsessed narcissists thought back in the early 2000's, so that's nice.
But it's been 19 years since I first put finger to clacky mechanical keyboard, and I've got something to say about it.
Firstly, I'm not "back". At least I hope I'm not. No one reads this thing any more, so in essence it's like writing out my thoughts, wrapping them around a rock and dropping it into the Mariana Trench (which is easily in my top 5 trenches). I'm approaching this as a consequence-free environment. Cross your fingers.
Those of us who survived the Friendster/MySpaceV1/Facebook/MySpacev2 and now Twitter and Instagram years know a dead platform when we see one.
Second, I know that it's really hip nowadays to view everything as a cry for help. This is not that. One of the milestone epiphanies I had in my relationship career with women, was when I realised quite often they just want to talk about their problems, 'have a bitch' if you will, and that my input was not only unnecessary, but actively unwelcome. So view this post that way. I'm not pleading for rescue, I just want to type out my experience. I just want to vent.
The last time I posted here, I had just started out making guitars again. You can see them here, and watch them being made here.
I was so optimistic. I thought "Here we go!" and "This is it!", and other silly thoughts that people with no idea love to think. In no time at all I had customers all over the planet of Earth, and made some guitars, and pushed the design envelope, and streamlined the manufacturing process, and educated a whole new generation of luthiers, and got critically exhausted.
And then I gave it all up. I'd invested tens of thousands of hard earned dollars into Temple Guitars, and in the end I sold everything for cents on the dollar.
But I have snatched victory from the jaws of that defeat, because it finally taught me a lesson about myself that I had heretofore neglected to discern. The whole enterprise was purely performative.
I worked my absolute ass off for years to become a world-class guitar builder, for one reason- attention. Sure, I love guitars. They've been a huge part of my life since I was 13 years old. But the expense, effort, and attention it takes to make them necessitates a stronger person than I, or at least, a markedly less stressed out and perpetually exhausted one. I made guitars for the same reason I used to be in bands, or why I started making choppers, or had a store full of shiny bikes- to say "LOOK AT MEEEE!" and "I exist!" and "Please be impressed by my misdirected efforts to make you think I'm worth a damn". It's ok to just play my guitar, I don't have to make them for everyone else.
Side note- I've been dead now more times than I can remember.
Every year or two, sometimes more, I lose control and any fondness for life I manage to hold onto suddenly drops out the floor like bombs from a plane. I wake up in an ambulance or the hospital a day or two later, intubated and delirious, wondering where I was when complete strangers touched my genitals to insert a catheter. My chest usually hurts from the broken ribs I got when being resuscitated, but I don't remember any of it. The way I've been discovered in some of these situations reads like fantasy. I shouldn't have been found, but I was. And I type this to you today.
I'm ashamed to admit this has happened a couple of times since I last posted. But again, each time I learn something. I can't promise I won't do it again. The psychiatrists and psychologists treating me are all convinced I will, and one of these days, it will be forever. I don't have control in those situations, so I guess we will all find out together.
This fluid relationship between my being alive, and my being dead brings insight I would otherwise lack. So I'm grateful, in a strange and broken manner of speaking. My body has been absolutely hammered by all of this self abuse. I've lost 50% of my eyesight and am dealing with massive organ and nerve damage from overdoses. It all adds up, I guess.
But being in those situations puts you at the front of the line for psychiatric services, so you can skip the 11 month wait, and avoid the $800 per session costs. And by doing this, I finally received the diagnosis that made everything up to now make sense. I've talked about diagnoses and the weight they can lift off your shoulders before, but this was a whole new thing.
I have complex PTSD, Dysthymia, Chronic Depression, Anxiety, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder, and ADHD, with "persistent high levels of suicidal ideation that will not be mitigated by forced hospitalisation". I'm mentally disabled, by definition.
Fun, right?
Of course each issue doesn't exist in a vacuum- they all cross over and affect each other in exciting and confidence-shattering ways. I stay for weeks at a time in my apartment, and only leave to occasionally help out a band as a tech, go to the doctor, or buy food. I have one friend, and boy am I thankful for him. I have no social life, and I'm glad, because being around people fills me with absolute dread. I just can't do it any more. Goblin mode, as the kids say.
Again though- insights.
I realise just how much of my life I have wasted running around doing things in the hope people would be my lover or my friend, as opposed to doing things I wanted to do, that didn't necessitate an audience. I don't need more friends, and I never want to have a lover again. After 12 years of being single, I have peacefully realised that I'm asexual. And that I always was. If you knew me, that may sound crazy, but I was just following the path I thought I was expected to follow; not living purely from my own desires.
There is so much pressure on young men to have sex, to date the hottest girls, to be a stud. It's ridiculous. I wish I saw through it when I was young and stupid, but I didn't. I ate up my indoctrination and begged for more. And it was only through turning my back on dating and focusing on becoming a better person, did I realise the only reason I pursued relationships was because I thought it was expected of me. Yes, sex feels good. Yes, my equipment works fine. But my heart just cannot connect to the experience, to the extent that the last few times I had sex, it felt AWFUL. The more I realised who I really am, and what I want, my whole body felt completely numb, and I only stayed to satisfy the person I was with, just for politeness sake. I felt disgusting afterward. Absolutely disgusting. I hoped the next time would be different, but it wasn't. It was worse. After the fourth time I knew I had to set up boundaries, and stop sleeping with people just to make them happy. Knowing now that I can just be, be a person without having to fuck anyone else is so freeing. The expectations of others are like infra red light- I just don't see them, I can live my life without them. And the space that opens up just defies description. I'm so thankful I found out.
Again, performative.
Getting back to mental health though. Having (what I hope to be) a full diagnosis meant I could finally see the reasons for why I am the way that I am. And that allowed me to connect with the hidden communities of people who are just like me. And through those communities, I saw a world full of people in goblin mode, invisible from the nightlife and glossy social media posts we get crammed down our throats. They were damaged, but they still found humour in their realities, still found community with each other, and still kept living when living hurt incredibly.
Suddenly all of these things that isolated me weren't unusual. There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people that all relate to my experience, who see the world through the same lens I do. That blows my mind- I thought I was alone out here my whole life.
Even though I won't meet these people, I'm so glad to know they're out there. That helped me a lot.
But still life's realities keep piling up. My lease ends in October, and because the cost of living has risen so dramatically here in Australia, even though I have a solid rental history for the past 13 years since I lived in Dubai, I'm going to be homeless by then. I have no idea what I'm going to do, because prices aren't coming down again, and the disability pension doesn't look like it's going up. At least I have 6 months to try and come up with a plan.
I have to say, that's not how I pictured things when I was younger. I had this idiotic expectation that if I just kept trying, I'd keep going up and up endlessly. Whereas the reality is, I was at my highest point, the day I started this blog.
There's your arc, right there.
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