Few things make me want to say “fuck it” more than explicit reminders of how horrifying what I’ve done is to the rest of society. Of course on some level I know how awful it was. But most of the time I don’t actually feel that. It’s so mixed up with conflicting positive feelings that it doesn’t really connect.
But every now and then I get a stark summary of how the rest of the world actually views people like me. And I don’t want to live in that world. I refuse to exist in that reality. I can’t see any meaning to being that person or living that life. Possibly I’m too proud, too arrogant to humble myself that much. To be the lowest of the low in everyone’s eyes, grateful for any scrap of charity, for the rest of my days. I refuse to bow and scrape. To validate the society that helped to make me into this person in the first place. To some extent, society makes its own monsters. There were always going to be people like me. I just happened to be one of them, in the wrong circumstances at the worst possible time.
Maybe I would’ve lived a better life if it had all come out back then, and I’d been forced to fully reckon with what I’d done. Perhaps I’d be someone totally different by now, living a more fulfilled life. But I can’t imagine ever being able to tolerate that kind of shame. It makes my skin crawl just thinking of it. For the whole world to know… I feel like I’d have to off myself just to escape that.
So I inevitably retreat back into denial. I sink back into the positive feelings. Because nothing that feels so good could ever be that bad, surely.
Ultimately it’s all meaningless. It’s all ego. I’m just another ape with delusions of grandeur, pretending his life story is important. I’ll continue hiding from myself and the world until I grow old/ill and die. Or until I can’t anymore. At which point I’ll kill myself, or I’ll finally have to face the music, whichever terrifies me less.
3 comments
possibly inappropriate humor, but it reminds me of the running gag in some of the old Monty Python episodes, where they’d catch the criminal and the criminal would say “It’s a fair cop, but society’s to blame”
where as there’s me, who depending on how many and who you hurt…… I can almost entirely assure there’s worse than you out there. not that I expect that to help.
I read about this guy who dropped out of society, lived in caves, hunted wildlife, never had to deal with people again (apart from the journalist who tracked him down, but that’s incidental). Maybe that?
OH I recently found out about a place called the Nahanni River Valley in Canada which is so remote that almost no one lives there, but there’s also a mystery; a few prospectors who tried to live there turned up dead without heads. Now that seems like a good place to disappear; worst case no one would bother you, slightly less worse case you solve the mystery, or become one of it’s subjects
I’m a morbid SOB, no doubt
entirely different sketch, but figured you deserved a chuckle, https://youtu.be/d0BuKYiwhVQ?si=oahg_jskuYDq7AZh
There’s certainly “worse” than me out there, going by numbers. I have no way of knowing what impact my actions have had on others, but there’s definitely far more direct and effective ways I could’ve hurt people, if that’d been my goal.
The problem is that “horrifying” is kind of a binary category. Once you’re in it and you’ve crossed certain lines, in the eyes of society you’re essentially the same as the worst monster imaginable. You’re all “beyond the pale”. I guess traditionally the wilderness would be the place for people like me.
I suppose if I did go full hermit I could probably avoid reminders of that more effectively. Maybe I’d be happier. Probably I’d go fully insane with absolutely no human contact. I don’t much fancy doing without central heating or modern healthcare though. And I can’t really justify cutting contact with my family.