I am just curious

Curiosity is a strange creature. Selective as can be, it chooses some and ignores others completely. I am a very curious person. The question is: how curious can a person get without getting into trouble? In most cases, I believe that curiosity can get a seemingly normal person into great trouble. For many years I chose to keep many of my deepest thoughts secret. All the things I wanted to do, but never dared to do, kept accumulating in my mind.

Like many people, I saw my curiosity as something incompatible with the everyday experience. So I kept it quiet. I made sure to look seemingly normal. On the inside I was going out of control. All the experiences that my mind could come up with were soon to be within my grasp. All I needed to do was find creative ways to manifest my minds needs without other people noticing.

Every now and then I would open my little Pandora's Box and liked what I saw. The problem is that after you take the first look it virtually impossible to stop. It started with small things, but little by little it escalated into a truly life changing experience. Trying new things, new experiences, and new sensations became an addiction. Sometimes I might have felt extremely deviant. Sometimes things were not exactly what I expected. The one thing that has always been consistent is that with every single curios experiment my thirst for more has only increased.

I've become addicted to my curiosity. It doesn't scare me as much as it used to. I'm just not sure how normal you seem when it becomes obvious that you live your life one curiosity at a time. How normal can someone be when they lose the need to blend in with the crowd?

I have issues with control

Most people out there are somewhat content with their lives. I have issues with control. Actually, I have an issue with other people having control of my life. I prefer to live and let live, though apparently that is not always possible. Every singly social relationship that we establish has some sort of exchange of power. I hate it when others try to have power over me. I also hate co-dependence. That is probably the worst kind of exchange. In co-dependence, we consciously choose to give someone else the power to control us in exchange for the power to control them. It very stupid, but everybody does it at least once in their life. Some poor souls live that way forever.

I was once asked to describe myself during a Psychology course in College. My answer was "free spirited". The professor said: "Really, you have no attachments, no responsibilities?" I said: "Well, maybe I do have those, but I feel that I am meant to be a free spirit." In a calm and sincere voice he said: "That's a very difficult thing to achieve, but I understand perfectly".

From that day on my life changed. I started looking at myself, not the way I thought I was or the way I wanted to be, but how I really was. I thought I knew myself and in one moment, one very simple question, I saw what I truly was. I was not even close to my ideal; I was on the wrong path. Everything that I was doing in my life, all my choices and decisions were taking me farther and farther away from that image of myself that I treasured so much. I was not liberating myself, becoming a "free spirit"… I was chaining myself to the conventions of social norms and structures, trying to be normal, trying to be functional according to someone else's definition of the term. I had to change, but how? It would take years…

I hurt the ones around me

I allow others to close to me. Maybe too close. I have tried to get away from people, but for one reason or another I find myself surrounded by great people. This should be a good thing, but I am a dangerous soul. At first glance, I am visually appealing. I am well mannered, well spoken, intelligently intriguing, and respectful. Once people notice, something inside them draws them to me. Slowly, my company becomes a necessity. I might give subtle hints that there is a lot more to me than what they see. Innocently, they start to come closer. Little do they know that they have only seen the tip of an iceberg.

The problem I seem to have is that all the features that make me so attractive slowly become painful. As people notice that my needs are greater than what they can give, frustration begins to appear on their beautiful faces. When all the love they can give me is never enough to satisfy me, sadness arrives. When after giving and giving they find that they don't receive the same attention, desperation consumes them.

It is not my intention to hurt the ones that get close to me. I just don't want to hurt myself trying to give them the type of happiness that they think I am able to give them. I have tried to convince myself that it doesn't have to be this way. I don't have to hurt anyone… Maybe they hurt themselves by getting close to me.

Waiting, just waiting…

We are always waiting for something. I've gone through most of my years waiting for something big to happen. Maybe I'm not supposed to wait. Maybe I should make it happen. Am I just waiting for the right moment? I'm not quite sure what it is that I am waiting for.

I'm always waiting for my life to somehow change. Maybe I want things to get better, but when they do I feel that it's not enough. Nothing is ever enough. My mind wants great things, things too great to just wait for them to happen. I'm just having a hard time figuring out exactly how to get there. Every journey has its price and sometimes the price is a lot higher than we expect.

If I decide to go on my trip through life the way I am meant to, I know that I will probably lose many of the comforts that I have managed to accumulate in my seemingly normal path. I haven't decided if I'm willing to pay that price yet. It has taken me many years to reach this point and changing everything to chase the unknown is simply scary.

I'm waiting for the fear to leave me. I'm waiting for my life to change. I'm waiting, just waiting…

I have anger toward my father

I can't say too many bad things about my life growing up. My brothers and I had a roof over our heads, we were never hungry, and both of our parents were present. My mother was always a gentle and happy person. She did anything for her kids. My father, on the other hand, had issues. He struggled with anxiety and depression for most of his life. The effects of his mental illness marked me and my brothers deeply. From a very early age we were indirectly forced to cope with my father's instability.

I remember being afraid of him when I was very young. He used to stay in his room, dark and gloomy. Anything we did that resembled joy and playfulness could potentially anger or disturb him. I'm sure he had moments of short lived happiness, but I really can't remember any. Growing up we grew accustomed to his illness, but that didn't make things any easier. We had inadvertently fallen into his world. I was the eldest, and for reasons beyond my own comprehension, turned out to be the most affected.

Strangely, I inherited some of my father's symptoms. While I see myself as a total opposite, I'm probably the person most like my father. I have worked really hard not to be like him, so over the years I have taken my own depressive personality and shaped into something very unlike him.

I developed anger toward my father. I feel that his failed attempts to understand life have crossed over into my own. My search for meaning has often driven me to try to understand my father's madness. He would stay up late at night (and still does) reading book after book, taking disorganized notes on infinite notebooks, writing distorted versions of a reality that only exists in his own mind, and talking about his shit like if it made any sense.

Even after years of moving away from him, I still receive a phone call every now and then. I have to listen to my father talk about his childhood (the same stories over and over again). He asks me for advice. I try really hard to help him objectively. But deep down, I know he will only take two or three words that made sense to him and add them to his distorted discourse as he sees fit.

I have secretly read his notes. I have seen my name on several pages. I don't understand what he is trying to find and don't think he'll ever find anything. He is getting old and is alone in the world. All he has are his books, his notes, and his severely distorted memory of what his life has been. Maybe I'm not really angry… maybe now I just feel sorry for the guy.

What can I do?

My son was sick today. He had to stay home. It used to be that I was the one to stay home with him on sick days. Now, with me being so far away, that possibility is impossible. So to my great surprise, he tells me his mom let him stay with her "boyfriend" until she got back from work. This left me with a strange feeling. I do not even know the guy, but he was babysitting my son.

I knew this type of thing would occur eventually. It was only a matter of time. There is a big difference between thinking something may be and actually hearing it. There is really no difference between my girlfriend and this guy. I just have a problem with the fact that my son is with someone that I haven't even met.

The first cigarette

I wasn't always a smoker. Many of my friends began the habit sometime during High School. I was that kid that told them it wasn't right. The night of my Senior Prom I spent a small chunk of time in a conversation that I really don't remember. The other party, an intriguing young lady that seemed free spirited and sure of herself, held a cigarette between her thin fingers as if it was second nature. For the first time, I felt that smoking could actually be sexy. I never saw that girl again. I have long forgotten her face and her voice.

Several months passed and my second encounter with the conflicting ideas of danger and beauty invaded me. She was the one. Hard as I tried, I did not have the will to get her out of my mind. I spent countless hours with her and yet, never told her how I felt. Curiosity was burning inside her, and I would do anything for an extra moment by her side. "It's just one cigarette", I thought. She lit first and the sight of her lips touching the tip of the cigarette sent a rush of excitement all over me. As I began to inhale smoke for the first time, the feelings of euphoria and pleasure became overwhelming. "Was I hooked on smoking or was it all because of her?"

Her mother did not like me

I knew something had to be wrong from the first day I met that lady. I mean; moms were usually almost as in love with me as their daughters were. I was a good guy. I had a good future ahead of me. I had the tall, dark, and handsome thing going for me (which I still do, by the way). For most moms, I was a pretty good catch. But this lady had something on her mind. Something about her didn't quite add up.

She believed nobody was good enough for her daughter. Looking back on this fact… I should have done something about this as soon as I noticed it. But being the "seemingly normal" nice guy I was, I tried hard to be liked. This was obviously a stupid choice. The more I tried, the less it worked. I felt like a complete idiot trying day after day to be on this lady's good side and every single effort resulted in failure.

She made the mistake of telling someone that I was just a student with no job, and I'm sure she fell for the classic stereotypes of the long hair and the earrings. She saw danger. She saw the musician. She only saw part of me. Unfortunately for her, as fate would have it, the comments reached me. I was judged by my appearance and by the moment I was living. If she knew the impact that this had caused me… she might have acted differently.

It took years for her to finally like me (a little). That fact that her grandson had a great dad made her respect me for the first time. I believe now that the stupid one was her. She never showed admiration for any of my many other good qualities before. She was so selfish! Only when she saw me as a self-sacrificing father figure to her grandson did she see me as a decent person.

My life changed at 22

I was a student. I had it all planned out. My plan was to not have a plan. I figured I would stay in college for as long as I could. I was protected from the regular world as long as I lived in the brilliantly sheltered student life. After my studies, I had the chance to keep the sheltered alter-reality lifestyle of a University professor if I wanted… and that sounded very nice. It was all clear… I knew what I wanted and was on my way there. Until that one day.

My life changed the day I was woken by a small piece of plastic with a bar on it. I had achieved something I was not exactly ready to achieve. I was going to be a father. Believe me; I felt my world had turned upside down. Was I ready for this?

I felt the need to do so many things. The first thing we thought… "We have to get married… I mean that's the right thing to do, right?" So that's what we did. I was going to get married and I was going to have a child. I was jumping head first into the unknown world of the average Joe. I was changing my plan. My life had just changed in an instant and I was only 22.

Frustrations

I am usually aware of the reasons behind most of my choices, but some of them have had consequences that last much longer than I expected. For years, I tried to make two worlds coexist. On one hand, I did what I thought I wanted. On the other, I did what I thought I was supposed to. Thinking about it now, I really should've chosen one or the other. My mistake was to force these to coexist.

I am an artist. While this is perfectly acceptable, it is not always normal. Regular jobs are too boring and restricted. Artistic jobs are not always economically manageable. So what to do? My answer was to have a normal life, with the normal job and all the other normal things. That didn't really work out the way I expected. Depressed nights took a toll on me. Wasted days on worthless work frustrated me. I tired body and a tormented mind became hard to live with.

I had a recording studio. It was cool. I worked from home, I worked my own hours, and I had fun doing it. Money? I had very little. My studio became my personal little world, just outside the harsh reality of the rest of my life. I managed to pay my bills on time and that was responsible enough. I was married at that time and I'm sure my ex-wife tried hard to understand my needs. She made great sacrifices to support my needs and in return I made the sacrifice of trying to be as normal as possible for her. On the outside, it seemed to work out. On the inside, I was going crazy.

In short, this arrangement slowly took its toll on me, my marriage, and my family. After a while, it became practically intolerable. I had to leave something behind. I was not aware, at the time, of the monster I had created. For each one of these lives to exist, the other had to be present. I had a studio because I had a home. Once I had to leave the home, my studio became I pile of expensive equipment in a corner of my parents house. In one decision I had managed to lose both. I sometimes wonder why I created such a codependence and the answer is usually very difficult to explain.

My life was turned upside down once again, yet I felt relief. I would have to start everything all over again and I did not really care. Was I tired of playing seemingly normal? Would I manage to be myself for the first time?

This should be a start

Like in a truly remarkable film, recollection of my life's story may appear to start somewhere in the middle of something, moving along from that point on, and filling in the blanks with an absurd series of flashbacks and fantasies. That just seems to be how my mind works.

I don't really know what to call the beginning, but it all had to start at some point. Thinking too far back results in a blur, and in reality, sometimes my memory is not actually clear cut. I'm likely to distort some or most of my reality for the comfort of (at least) tolerable circumstances. The truth is I think I like it when life hurts, when fantasy becomes reality, or when things don't really seen to make sense. I don't know what point in time I should call the beginning, but it's been quite a long time since then.

My passions began to develop early in life, although I'm sure I went through many years not knowing this. At a young age I liked certain things that others disregarded. Later, I developed a very introverted nature. This, I'm sure has been in part a blessing and a curse. During my adolescence creativity came and went without warning, and melancholy became a usual entity in my life. Many different emotions would flood my mind uncontrollably, and not knowing how to handle them would result in unnecessary choices and too much wasted time. My mind was becoming a beautifully twisted mess. Controlling this mess would prove harder than it seemed, yet by leaving a space for the uncontrollable and contradictory ideas seemed a logical way to cope. My life was coming together and I was starting to become what I am now.