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Shameful

When I thoroughly review the facts of my life, I can’t overlook the messes I’ve made which have created the foundation of my regrets and lead to the poor self-esteem that I have today. Whether I had been motivated by ego, shortsightedness, carelessness or entitlement which had become the cause of my own grief, it doesn’t seem to matter in the end. Everything hurts, but not all pain is the same. Some things are much worse and much darker than others. When I take an honest look back at some of my worst mistakes, I often feel like a drunk driver who had just peaked over his shoulders to notice the carnage he had left behind. Too many bodies to count, too much destruction to calculate, too much insight I would rather avoid unless I might be high or drunk enough to finally face myself in the fearless manner that any reasonable person ought to. I might as well have been driving on an icy patch near a cliff halfway up a mountain, at least then I could guarantee that I was the only victim of my own poor judgment.

The truth is I am morally weak, evasive of consequences, scared like a little child and unwilling to handle the results of my own decisions and past mistakes. I both hope and pray for a narrow escape like Indiana Jones grabbing his hat, while also wanting to face the worst judgment imaginable for my indiscretions. The truth is I should either be dead or serving many years in prison right now, but here I am, managing to live a life that is much more upstanding than it used to be. Someone once said that “The crime is the punishment itself”. I used to wonder what that meant and nearly dismissed the idea entirely, but now I understand; what it means is that for those who feel the moral weight of their actions, their conscience punishes them more than any external consequences ever could. They feel it and that is the punishment!

If you have any conscience whatsoever, you realize very early on that when you damage other people, you indirectly harm yourself. Most of the time I may not think much about my past, but when left with enough time for my mind to wander, it can’t seem to help but criticize me or assign blame to someone else. I’m fortunate enough to know from talking to my Sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous that we are not our thoughts, they are random and we are able to let them pass through without giving them credibility or validating them. On the other hand, I do see a benefit to exploring ideas and weighing their validity. Imagine how much worse off you would be if the thought that you could be wrong about something was never analyzed. I believe our thinking does serve a purpose and in order for us to acknowledge our own failures and set them right, we have to be able to feed the parts of our own minds that are willing to investigate that possibility in the first place. Like Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

No amount of drugs, alcohol or acting out on sex addiction could ever drown out the nagging voice inside of me once it got going. In fact, all of these vices have a way of forcing me to be more honest with myself than I would normally like to be. Besides the elevated moods and buzzes that these substances used to offer me, I both adored and despised how confrontational my own mind could be while I was on or doing them! I found that I could rationally pick apart everything, seeing the finer details that made up the whole picture of anything that I tried to analyze. It just came so effortlessly to me like even my drunk or high self was saying “How did you not realize that sooner you fucking idiot?”.

Everything that didn’t seem to make sense before suddenly had overwhelming clarity to it and it might only take me twenty minutes of humble and fearless truth seeking to determine my own faults and failures. I could also see other angles as well, like what I should have done instead, whether my fears had any validity to them or not, whether I should do this or that instead. It almost feels useles to have these kinds of insights, only when I’m in the midst of creating the very chaos that I’m trying to solve. I enjoy thinking, I enjoy thinking about thinking (meta cognition) and “trimming the fat” in order to get to the heart of the matter. I want to know the truth even if it makes me uncomfortable. I always wanted to know more about why things happen the way that they did when people interacted with each other and understanding my own decisions and what motivates me to make them.

Do I care about truth as much as I think I should? Do I actually want to do the right thing or not? When I do the right thing, is it for the right reasons? Does it matter if I’m doing the right thing for the right reasons? How often am I making choices that I can live with? When I’m not in alignment with my own values, why is that? How does misalignment happen in the first place? How do I fix it when it does happen? So many questions. I want to be more deliberate with my decisions and that’s a skill that I’m trying to develop better. I find that I’m more satisfied with myself when I’m not getting high or drunk or having promiscuous sex with strangers, but I’m less excited and find life more boring. It’s a tradeoff. In a way I’m grateful for the pain, because it reminds me what I don’t want to be like. By contrast, I get a sharper idea of who I want to be by clearly defining what the opposite of that person looks like. I feel strange admitting gratitude for my deepest regrets, but without them I’d be a monster.