On Who I Used to Be

It amuses me and quite frankly leaves an etch of disbelief when I look back at who I used to be.

From ages 12 to 19 this could well summarize my existence: Depression, purposeless, chaos, inability to deal with the physical world, alienation of self, and later on intense suicidal thoughts.

The world and my world didn't align and make inherent sense to me. I was deeply philosophical, introverted, and withdrawn. I suffered from extreme social phobia. I was numb to my parents attempts to help me, and to any attempt at being a part of my life; positive or negative.

Age 12 through 14-15 I cried nightly, and I never knew why. I would cry myself to sleep, every night, and not even know why I felt so much pain. I went from being one of the top students in my grade to being useless at academia and sports alike: I took no interest, and threats and shoutings and talks had not the slightest effect on me. Luckily, the school that I was at only started requiring examinations to be passed to proceed to the next grade after grade 8, and so I kept moving up with everyone else: without doing anything whatsoever.

I started spontaneously writing poetry as a form of self expression one day, the words just flew forth from my fingertips and required little to no revision. They showcase my internal state at the time very effectively. These poems were written at different times over a 4-5 year period starting age 12.

Freedom Showers
Let loose from the depths of hell was I,
Far and safe from the evil eye.
For no sin of mine was I chained,
Oh my!I have no words to explain,
Just how much this pained.
Alone with flames and raging fire,
I would stand for hours together ,
perspire.
Now my body and soul shall rest and heal,
And try to leave behind my past ordeal.
The gods have been kind,But still,
Sometimes life just blows up my mind.
Horrors of my past,Dark shadows they cast.
Chills still run down my spine,
With fear and anger they do twine.
Nightmare land that was,
But I suppose,It was all for a cause.
This is the aftermath of a painful death,
Memories,
That send my soul gasping for breath...

Flaming Wrath

Uncontrollable desire to fight and yell,
Rage concentrated from the depths of hell.
Anger more terrific than livewire,
I kick,kill,scream,never tire.

Something has set thy mind ablaze.
Confusion,devastation,thoughts a daze.
Grab and rip at all thy see,
Before thy unleash flames from thyself,
Thou escape,flee.

None can stop me from destruction,
Soul snatches happiness,
Complete vacuum,suction.

All brightness,glee ne'er to survive,
Black hole am I,
Finished is all,
Earth, Beneath, and Sky.

Chained and Restless

When the body lies motionless,
All else races free.
When mind experiences no happiness,
All else go crazy with glee.
When physical structure lays immobile,
Spiritual ones display unbelievable energy.
When the mind goes totally senile,
Soul dances for all eternity.

When one craves for the freedom to prance,
Sorry,
One's wish cannot be granted.
When one pleads for just one more chance,
Sorry,
One's fate has been firmly planted.

This state is one of helplessness,
One of being so totally subdued,
This sad state of restlessness,
Is I am sure, to be continued.

Captive of Nothing

Imprisoned within the flaming doors of Hell am I,
Cursing with remorse at emptyness.
On the floors of free imprisonment I lie,
My afterlife an absolute mess.

Offered to me was the sweet nectar,
Of holiness afar.
Existence of beauty after death,
Nothing pungent,nothing sour.

Instead I chose to sit within these bars of my own prison.
To turn with agony a deadly crimson.
To weep blood uncontrolled,
To sit beside nothingness,yet within cold.

I still grieve within this cage,
Weeping at my chosen plight.
Gazing longingly,
Hopefully,
At the rays of freedom's light.

Gazing at the star studded night,
I plea for mercy
Will my life be alright?

I weep in frustration and rage
Scream and bite at empty space
And bang on an invisible cage;
Nothing but a traumatized hopeless-case.

Pain and agony have left me mad.
I froth around,
Drop to the ground;
Something disgusting and sad.

I holler again and trample the earth.
I experience intolerable pain and silently request Him for a rebirth.

Grade 9 brought about a voluntary change of school. Here I could not deal with the academia either and developed a tough-guy image to keep people at bay due to my fear of them. Let it be known that acting tough and aggressive is a definite sign of feeling inferior on the inside. My father helped me painstakingly with my academic work, helping me to just barely scrape by. The same story was observed through till grade 11. Here I got sick of organized academia altogether and opted to homeschool my last year. I became further withdrawn due to lack of social contact, and little actual schooling ever occured at home.

Somehow managing to scrape by everything and procure half decent SAT scores, I applied to university in the united states. The only school I was accepted to was Rutgers in New Jersey. Here the new world of being away from my parents and living on my own and fending for myself spurred my insanity further. It kept accumulating over the year. This year intensely suicidal thoughts started occuring. Life ends in death, what was the point of living given that there is so much misery in life?

It started peaking and climaxing towards the end of the school year. I became socially phobic to the extent that when my roommate would throw a house party in our apartment, my first impulse would be to hide under my bed, and eventually Id settle for acting like I was asleep while cursing my existence with every breath. I started muttering and cursing at strangers while walking through college: my hatred for what I saw around me and what humanity was could just not be contained anymore. Here is some poetry that very well conveys my inner state of existence at the time for this is when I wrote them:

Dark Side

Beyond in the Shadows
Lies a nature unexplored.

A transient cold
White hot and infernal
a dimension available
Solely to the bold.

Pain is not pain
When not conceived as pain
Its essence is twistable
Programmable;
A haven for the insane.

Tethered to a chain we both spasm
You writhe in anguish,
While I orgasm.

“He who makes a beast of himself
Gets rid of the pain of being a man”
No greater sense
No deeper chasm
Than looking to water
reflective in the night
and seeing not yourself
But a demon in the sprite.

Insanity a polarity,
Just one face of the coin.
Neither side for the better or for worse
Two poles never to conjoin.

How understand you
The hallowed tranquility
Of flames on the flesh.
or the cold romance
Of the skin and a mesh.

I declare
My serenity the sum
of your fear and your spite.
And that my creed be the anti-dictum
Of the heralders of your Light.


That the awe of this blackness
you dare not illuminate
Is so mine alone.
Mine
By blood and by bone.

Leave me be now ye shackles alive
To my own devices to meaning derive.
Speak not in my ears to your religions drive,
To my own nirvana now let me arrive.

Eight Horse Vacuum

Swaying on the edge of
Two savage hyperboles

One a ghost pathway,
Brilliant and alone
The other a betrayal of my Self
If it I choose to roam.

This treason of the ego
May bring kith and kin,
A smile on my face,
But not serenity within.

It will render me the pleasures of the flesh;
Luciferous charm I do possess.
Hidden, yes
Brewing placidly
in lethal excess.

To surge volcanically
When its passion pressed
Violent shuddering
In salacious zest.
Oh!
Beckons it does
Fingers through my hair
and skins in convergence
Vulnerable and bare.

Lest I trade
My sovereignty for
the chemical romance of a second in spare.
I banish these thoughts
for all love is
but a love affair

Outlasted only
by solitude in flight
A lonely walk
In the embrace of the night
The spirit of One in bold ignite.

Pining for a connexion with souls not your own
Is but a trait of survival
A trait outgrown
My time it is to attend the highest peak
Maslow's final tier:
A path of pain and a path alone

Prometheus Again

Strange stardust
Coursing through my veins
Delirium blackhole infinite
of cotton are these chains.

Not transcendental
Or holy or malign
just dry sliced truth
There is nothing divine.

These chemic cosmicites
play centrifuges in the blood
Splitting the magic from the mundane and
the gold from the flood.

Binary blatancy
The lone cold fact
Dead dust will we be
Not spirits abstract.

Alive but once
Just once and just once

Owe nothing to the scowling hags
or the brass tops and tyrannists
with their bloodshot black flags.

A bullet in my head
A syringe in my vein
“No”, “Not right”
My life, my right
Ill do it and ill do it again.

I am an artist.
An artist I say.
Indulge me, you bastards.
Indulge in my way.

Suicidal thoughts started approaching alarming frequency. Often my entire day would be spent between alternating thoughts of suicide and pornography, more misanthropy, more angst.

Finally it all came down to it one day. I awoke out of a dreamless sleep, and without thinking a single thought, as if by divine hand beyond my understanding or explanation, I marched into the kitchen, picked up a sharp knife, and went into the bathroom and locked it. My roommates were out over thanksgiving break. This was it, I was going to do it, there was no convincing at the last minute that had to be done, no coaxing, no thinking - its just what was going to be done.

Then it hit me, the knife seconds away from slitting my own throat in the bathtub - All my fears and thoughts about life as useless due to the inevitability of death were ultimately in one way or the other due to the fear of death, and due to living my existence with my attention focused on death - which can never be understood by the living. If all my fears were ultimately from the fear of not existing, dying, and here I am about to kill myself, how about facing all my fears just as I am facing the knife right now? They cant be worse than this knife: I am about to do to myself exactly what all my fears are ultimately due to! And instead of dwelling upon that which cannot be known, why not forget about it and dwell upon every precious second of existence on this side of death?

That second forth something new awoke in me, a new courage, a new attitude that shouted from the soul as it stood arms stretched on the top of the mountain "I am here, I exist, I will die, I fear not the inevitable anymore, give me your best shot, Ill face my fears and do what makes me happy - I AM"

A new, phenomenal existence began to rapidly unravel since then, and continues to do so even more rapidly today. This unravelling is what this blog is about.