If you ever want to really get into a deep understanding of yourself, I would encourage you to write your obituary...actually write two. When I wrote my first one, it was outstanding, phenomenal, probably my greatest work on just how amazing and incredible I was...seriously. I wrote it with what I believed things would be said about me by the many people who showed up at my funeral to pay their respects. They would say things like how I was always willing to help, how selfless I was, how much I cared about others, respected and valued people, carried myself with integrity and honor...and that was just the beginning. I saw myself as this amazing person, through the eyes of all the people whom had the privilege of being around me (yes, that's sarcasm). The problem is that it was all a lie. Sure, that's how I wanted people to see me, how I wanted to see myself.
From the time I was a child, I had this idea, this feeling, that if anyone looked at me they would be able to look into my soul and see all the dirty, disgusting, fucked up things that resided there. I felt that I had to "do better," "try harder," "give more," in order to get affection from my parents...ya, that never came. I learned the world was a dangerous place and there is no one who is in your corner, no one to help you, no one to give you a safe place...no one cares about you. I think this point was driven home when I was nine years old, that's when my father broke down our door and my brother and I watched as he stood over her with a phone cord around her neck...she was begging him not to kill her in front of us. Something inside me died that night. Oh, I found out years (about 35 years) later that him bouncing my mother and us kids off the wall happened pretty much every other night. True story: I have blocked out most of my childhood, but one memory I have is when I was five; it was really dark and I was watching the pretty blue and red lights dance around the walls in our living room, and hearing someone tell my mom that they couldn't arrest my father because he had to be on the property when the police arrived...so, she needed to shoot him and if he landed on the porch, to drag his body in the house and they wouldn't press charges.
I don't remember really giving a shit what people thought about me, but I do remember setting my worth, my value as "just do a little more," "try a little harder," "give a little more." The irony with that, is when I went to bed at night, I always felt as though I could have done a little more, tried a little harder, and given a little more that day. It was an impossible situation to reconcile, so I did what any normal, whatever age it was I started, person would do...I developed narcissistic traits (yep, I know, that acknowledgment alone won't be in the book, "How to win friends and influence people). I won't make you vomit with all the gross details, suffice it to say I was a real piece of work. I lied, stole, manipulated, used, gaslit...name it, I did it, and I even had myself convinced I had things like honor and integrity, I actually thought of myself as some upstanding person. There was a time when I stood in the firestation, watching a news story about how the state was stripping the inmates of their tv's, weights, and other "comfort" things, and I thought to myself, "Good, those pieces of shit, those worthless dregs of society don't even deserve to breathe. Let them rot in their own choices...fucking garbage."
Imagine two weeks after making that statement, you find yourself in a cell. Yep, that was me. Two weeks later I found myself looking around at the grey concrete walls and thinking to myself, "Jesus, what the fuck did you do?" That's right, Bishop is a felon. In fact, I spent nine years in prison for trying to take someone's life. No, they didn't deserve it and it wasn't in self defense. I pled guilty to 15 years, although I was facing a total of three life sentences. It took me three years after I was sentenced to reach acceptance for my actions and two years after that, to admit what kind of fucking monster I was and what I am capable of doing. Why so long? Well, I had to work through all the lies, manipulations, and deceptions I had convinced myself were true. When that cell door closed that first night, I vowed to myself that as fucked up as I was, I would try to become something better than I was in that moment.
So, I began my journey of self-discovery. I devoured books on logic, philosophy, psychology, ethics, critical thinking, self-development (I hated those), and really started wrestling with my demons...and I wrote my first obituary. After I wrote that obituary, I realized I needed to write another one. The first one took me about 15 minutes to write, the second took me about three weeks. I vowed in the second to write from the perspective of other people again, but this time as if they had intimate knowledge of my dark places, secrets, and my internal self. In the second, very few people showed up to my funeral, they used words like, "cold, user, manipulator, liar, thief, alcoholic, narcissist, sociopath, selfish," and others to describe me. Don't mistake me, I did not want to write that second obituary, but if I was going to be honest with myself, then I had to. Afterwords, I began developing a set of values, or principles, that I would be able to live by...a code that I felt encompassed the things I truly held as the highest standard for me. I had a lot of training in martial arts, and felt drawn to the discipline and virtues of Bushido.
I was determined to be reborn, from the inside, and to become someone I could be proud of. Ideas such as honor, integrity, discipline, truth, honesty, benevolence, responsibility, justice...became not just words, but the very foundation in which I would navigate this world. I have swam in the abyss, faced a lot of my demons, and have had many "Dark night(s) of the soul." I have my scars, and believe that the person I used to be has made me into the person I am. I don't say any of this for sympathy, pity, or anything else...I don't want it or need it. See, it's not the things that happened to me that I wrestle with, I refuse to be a victim, it's the things I've done, the decisions I've made that have affected and hurt other people. Somehow I still hold, or did hold, to the idea if I just, "tried a little harder," "gave a little more," "do a little better," or "cared a little more," that it would make a difference. Some days, some moments, I can actually look myself in the mirror and convince myself that I'm not who I used to be, that I'm not him anymore. The idea of trying harder, caring more, doing better, etc...that was my anchor. Those things kept me going, gave me courage and hope. What do you do then your anchor disappears, when you become untethered to that foundation? Most people would say I think to much,or that I feel too much...but, for me, I have to make sense of things, not solve things...but resolve them, for me.
I look back on my life and see nothing but a trail of fucked up choices and mistakes, bad decisions and wrong turns. I've always struggled with feeling and thinking I'm not good enough for anything, or worthy enough. Those little whispers, the little questions in the back of my mind, "Are you good enough for this?" have become voices that drown out everything else and remind me how damaged I am. I think It's my time to leave The Cage, this time for good. Things just don't make sense to me anymore, maybe sometimes the demons win. Maybe, just maybe I'm too fucked up, too damaged...maybe I am too far gone. Anyway, after a couple of days I'll close these things out, and delete my account. Thank you for allowing me to share this space and my thoughts and ideas. My apologies for the length of the post.