The Darkness

If I'm ever asked in a job interview or an interview in general what I have learned through all these years, I might reply with "well, I've become comfortable in the darkness." I'm almost positive that the reply will be followed with a "huh?" or an "ok, can you explain?" I don't think I'd actually say the word darkness, I'd probably use a more correct term "myself," but I'm sure folks might ask me to elaborate, or not.

I'm gonna elaborate anyway. Ever since I can remember, I have always asked myself and believed that there is always more. Yet, I always found the simplest answers to be the most complete. That never stopped me from trying to quantify and understand the detail of whatever it was I was thinking about. Since I love to learn about practically anything, I question many things that may go unnoticed in daily life. Things like how do we keep breathing throughout our lifetimes and why, what is light and how can we understand it, did existence come about or has it always existed, how amazing that trees transport nutrients to all its parts just like our bodies yet have no heart or brain, how do identities tied to nationalities impact how we treat others and the types of things we are morally okay with, just how complex can sexual identity be and why are we still so focused on gender roles defined mostly by generations before us?

Of course these questions have no one size fits all kind of answer. Everything is connected, is part of a broader picture, and for all our attempts to make ourselves seem like the most important multicellular beings to ever exist, we still fall short in trying to explain our importance.

I used to think that I had to choose between being incredibly brilliant and crazy, or being incredibly dull and routine oriented. Neither end of the spectrum ever satisfied me. I also realized that thinking I had to be either or was a social pressure that was imposed on me, willing or not, and never really sat right with me. It's why despite the life time of people telling me I'm their favorite student, I'm the funniest person they've ever met, I'm so beautiful, I should never stop doing things and I should change the world (in ways the people telling me this saw fit), and that I was the best student many of my teachers have ever had, I never let any of this get to my head. I can thank a mother who always knew how to put me in my place to keep my ego from ever getting too big. She knew what I was capable of, so she always pushed me, straight A's were expected, not praised.

See, for me, being the best whatever never really seemed that hard. Once I had mastered the certain skill set, I was always off to explore and learn more. I would decide that the knowledge I had acquired was enough for the moment and had to be applied to living my life, I was always aware that I could be whatever the hell I wanted to be, but what?

It's been fairly recent since I realized that I'll never really be one thing professionally. Something I always hated about college was how mundane becoming an "expert" in certain fields could become. It was like if you majored and specialized in this that or the other, you weren't allowed to dabble into other disciplines, or at least you were expected to do poorly or not like other disciplines as much because they were not part of your "specialty." I think my biggest critique of education in most places around the world is the mental dependence that education should be used mainly for job preparation. I often wonder how many chemical engineers or doctors chose those routes because of the potential to make money. And when you come from a society where money is a crucial part of life, I wonder how many of those people actually believe that they could only be good at what they went to school for. I also wonder this for art majors, how many of them would have made amazing doctors or scientists? I don't think that when viewed broadly, our education systems make sense any more in our modern world. They haven't exactly been designed to make people think. On the contrary, they've been designed to produce specialists and niche workers, which perpetuates segmented societies. I guess that's why I never fell into this trap, and why despite me being a humanities major, I was acing astrophysics. The stars to me are an art form, so naturally, trying to understand stars through astrophysics was something I was incredibly interested in and quite good at.

This is how I think. It's taken me a while to get better at describing my emotions and thoughts to others. The more capable I become at expressing myself through language, the more I realize that most people I meet will probably not think like me. To most folks, thinking up to a point is enough, and the rest is just too much or not that important. I have had to learn over the years how to find a space within to relax and gather my thoughts in order to keep moving forward in my life. No easy task.

One of the reasons I was always so quiet as a child, and even can be rather reserved as an adult, was because I always felt like others would not understand my thoughts. And even if they did, they would not understand the gravity of importance my thoughts had to me, and they would brush it off as something that would pass with time or become less severe. The opposite happened however. There was a part of my life where I seemed like the calm and level headed one, the guy that people loved because he always knew how to lighten up a room or make people laugh. While inside I was frustrated, suffocating even, because to me all these social interactions seemed mundane, even unimportant, because I always felt like there had to be more to life than just praise from others or being the funny guy. It seemed at times that the more serious I was about something, the funnier other people found it to be. That's part of the reason I continued to question and was curious about everything, because even though the teacher's loved me and thought I was fantastically brilliant, I never believed them, I was just doing what I felt was right, and why should I be treated any different because of that? Couple this with liking men in very conservative Catholic surroundings, and this made for a potent mix of depression and self-denial that took a huge toll on the way I would view the world for quite some time.

I had(have) a very wise young mother growing up, and without her, I would not have been nearly as successful as I am today. I am also pretty sure that without her, I would not be typing this out right now, as I would most have likely killed myself by then. This is not to shock anyone, as it's a very taboo topic that most people do not want to talk about because of the gravity of the issue, but suicide flowed in my thoughts constantly growing up and well into adulthood, until about less than a year ago to be quite frank. I always wonder what professors would have said if after they had told me I was the best student they had ever had, I had said, "then why did I feel like killing myself at times?" That would have thrown a wrench in the cogs.

I knew though, because my mother knew how to push it out of me, that these dark emotions were something I would need to face. I had seen too many people in my life give in to things I did not want to go through to understand that in order for me to ever have a sliver of a chance at being happy, I would have to take my own journey. So I did. At the ripe age of 16, I got a scholarship to study in Japan, and I started to explore myself. Fast forward a few years to my present time on JET and I am now quite proud of the life I've made for myself. As my Mom told me later, she didn't think I was going to make it. She thought I was going to die young, never told me that of course, but waited until she knew I loved myself enough to want to live to congratulate me. This was quite a proud moment for me actually. It outdid all the professor/teacher/friend/lover/boss praise that has been so common in my life. I no longer thought about killing myself because I myself wanted to see what I could make out of this life. That was a good starting point.

Having these experiences has taught me a lot about the darkness within us all. It has taught me how to use that intuitive nature that is as ancient as the stars and how to live with it. I have better learned how to create the things I want in my life, consciously. I know where the dark thoughts can stem from, but rather than run from them like we've been told we should, I engage them, I process them, and I use them to create life instead of death. I've been down that road, and as a very angry child growing up, I learned that our thoughts are not private, and they can be a potent force in the external world even if never expressed in words.

There's parts of my thoughts I still cannot explain clearly in everyday language. This is when I take to art or to cooking, humming, or dancing. Something creative to process whatever mix of emotions I am experiencing at the time. There are thoughts where I have very strong urges to talk to someone out of the blue as it were, and when I do I realize why. I have had many many people come to me when they have felt completely alone and hopeless. I was the only person that would come to their mind. This is why folks have confided in me things they have never told anyone, things they don't even like to talk about in their own minds. Maybe it's because I am so open with my own emotions that people trust me, rightly so, or maybe I just have a way with folks. I don't know, but I'll always listen and give my two cents if you genuinely want my view.

I also have thoughts that make me believe in my own potential and give me hope for the future. My dreams are one potent example of that. I often dream of my family or friends on the other side of the world. Sometimes these dreams are so vivid that it feels like I'm actually there. Sometimes, I ask the people in my dreams what they were doing at the time I was dreaming, and I discover that they were doing the exact same things I was dreaming about in real time despite distance. And I don't mean like they were driving a car or broad things like that, I mean like the sky suddenly cleared out and the sun shined as my friend got into the river, I dreamed about what flavor ice cream each of my siblings got without even knowing they had gone out for ice cream, or even that a friend I have never dreamed about had been crying. These are not your run of the mill stock dreams, no, there is something more powerful and intuitive there, and I am now less scared, and more curious in exploring just what sort of functions my dreams play in my life. This is why I like neuroscience and biology, to me these fields have so much unexplored areas that make them so exciting to me, even if more than a few people think I'm just some crazy guy. I wonder what my professor's would say to those people ha ha. One current thing I am curious about and trying to better describe in words is my ability to feel color in thoughts. It might have something to do with the wavelength and intensity of the brain waves emitted when folks are thinking certain things, but I'm still exploring this idea, regardless of how unbelievable it may sound.

Like a bird that has lived in captivity its whole life, I feel like I've been set free. My dreams are way more creative and passionate now. I've changed the powerful thoughts I used to have about destruction to become powerful ideas for innovative changes in my life. I'm less keen on trying to explain things in black and white terms, and I realize that every single detail in everything has meaning and an impact on every single other thing, whether we know it or not. We can either work to understand the interconnected, intricate, and delicate nature of things to enrich our lives, or we can keep pretending that everything is compartmentalized and exists separate from everything else and continue on this robotic path of self termination we have become so good at in the past hundreds of years. The choice is ours, and its one we have to make collectively.

I'm still not sure where my life will take me, but I know that I have a more complete awareness of my thoughts. I am no longer scared of them, and they no longer overwhelm me. They still have an incredible potential to overwhelm other people though, which is why I am developing and creating my own ways of self expression, and which is why I need a good amount of constant alone time to regroup my thoughts. If I don't give them that space and time to breathe and rest, there is potential for them to mix too much with the thoughts of others, and it can get messy quite quick. Despite my confidence and perseverance and passion, I am a very vulnerable being, one who picks up on the thoughts of others incredibly quick. I've had to learn to find balance in every situation. I love being social, especially when I know I am being useful and adding something to the lives of others, but I also need me time. I no longer feel guilty or anxious when I must physically step away from groups for a while to spend time with a tree or look up into the sky. I function way better when I am able to take care of myself well.

You can't be my friend and only have the parts of me that you want to have. That's more of an acquaintance kind of thing, and I've never been one for casual acquaintances. If you really want to get to know me, you have to take all the passive with the direct, all the light with the dark, all the jovial with the serious, all the tears with the joy, all the love with the anger, all the boredom with the passion. I'll usually try and do the same for you. There is one thing that seems to bond me with people quite well though, and that is passion. Deep convictions and self awareness, and a knowing of who you are in space. I tend to float towards those types of folks and they me. When this happens, we begin to share our darkness, and things you usually only read about in fairy tales begin to happen. Those are my favorite kind of people to meet. There's a lot more of them than you'd expect, after all we're pretty much all made from the same stuff, making us more alike than we've been led to believe.