Not to mention I just purchased VIP tickets for a meet-and-greet with Nightwish before their next show in New York, with Delain (also awesome) opening for them my god this is gonna be a great year!
No no no don't worry, I'm not suddenly gonna start dropping happy bombs on you all just because these cool things are happening. Have you forgotten what kind of blog you're reading? Because we're about to delve into some serious, serious shit.
Let me start with myself as an example for this topic. Yeah, that concert kicked ass, and meeting my favorite band of all time which also features my favorite singer of all time will probably be the best night of my life, but that's not gonna just make me suddenly drop all of my bitterness and cynicism and end my recurring depression (actually diagnosed this time, don't you fret). You know why? Because that's not the person my own personal world has formed me into. I'm like a golem of loneliness and neglect. However, I have a good side as well, and people tend to like that good side. More importantly though, my closest friends can tolerate and understand when my less good side shows its only-slightly-less-handsome face. So as long as I have those people around me I don't have to worry about keeping old bitter pants locked in the cellar and can let him out when I need to without judgment.
So why don't more people realize this? I'm not saying to allow your worst side to take over, I'm just saying there's a way to let it out for a breath or two while still keeping your better self in control. Repressing is probably the worst exercise anyone can practice because, to use a metaphor, you're going to have to change the garbage bag sometime. Pick up your phone and call or text a close friend and just let yourself be a sad, angry and pathetic piece of shit, just for a bit. Because the longer you hold that part of you in, the faker your outward appearance starts to appear. Cracks show, and your friends are the first to see them.
Let's take another example, a TV example. In season 4 of The Walking Dead Philip Blake (aka The Governor) had just had another one of his murderous blackouts and ended up annihilating his entire group, and the ones who survived wisely abandoned him in the middle of the night. Philip puts on a sad face and grows an even sadder beard and wanders the countryside for a while before he meets a family with a little girl who makes his heart grow ten sizes bigger. He changes his name to Brian and sets about becoming a new man. It seems to work for a while and we all thought the Governor had changed after all.
Psych, his return to evil surprised no one. They join a larger group and Brian begins to murder his way to the position of leader in order to better protect his new surrogate family before organizing a strike to take the good guys' prison fortress. Brian's efforts to protect his loved ones might seem genuine in the beginning, but him rediscovering his taste for murder also reignites his buried hatred for the show's heroes, and in the end the prison attack is more about personal vengeance than to help others. This is evident when Brian witnesses the death of his surrogate daughter and utters the chilling line "Kill 'em all" before launching a full on siege of the prison. You see, Philip couldn't just become Brian, he only repressed the man that Philip was. Brian was a lie, a well-intentioned lie, but false nonetheless.
Now I'm not saying the Governor shouldn't have even tried to change, I'm saying he went about it the wrong way. He tried to ignore Philip, but like most people when they know they're being ignored, Philip continued to egg him on internally. The crazy, murderous and power-hungry man inside him was waiting to come back out, and the minute that Brian had a moment of uncertainty, Philip struck hard. With a golf club. You can't just forget the worst part of yourself, you have to acknowledge that it's there and accept that it may always be there, and only then can you control it. If Philip had approached his new friends with "Hi my name is Philip, I killed a bunch of innocent people but I wanna be good now," who knows what would've happened? For the show's sake though, I'm glad everything happened how it did because that was fucking awesome.
Another case of buried identity comes from another favorite television show, Boardwalk Empire. Nelson Van Alden (played by Michael Shannon) began the series as an agent working for the Bureau of Prohibition and a deeply religious man. By the end of season 1 he was a murderer, and at the second season's end he was on the run for said murder and shooting another agent to escape. He changes his name to George Mueller, marries his illegitimate daughter's nanny, and relocates to Cicero, NY, where to make ends meet he resorts to selling vodka, the very crime he formerly worked to stop. Through various bumbling happenstances Van Alden winds up in the employ of Al Capone himself and about as far from his former self as one can possibly get. While at times hilarious, seeing the meek and impotent clown the once stern detective had become was quite tragic. Van Alden hated every day of his new life with an antagonistic wife at home, children who simply annoyed him, and a boss who he despised and wished to shoot in the back. He suppressed his frustration and his values, though, in order to survive in his new environment. Hell, for three seasons us viewers even began referring to him as "Mueller," almost forgetting his real name. This all came to a head in a recent episode though where, when caught in the act of trying to inform on Capone and with no conceivable way out, Mueller attacks his boss and grabs him around the throat, exclaiming his birth name and swearing heavenly justice upon the crime boss before a bullet to the head silences him forever.
Van Alden turned to crime in order to keep himself alive, but in the end it was his inner calling to stop crime that lead to his death. Because that's who he was, what he was good at. Frankly he made a terrible gangster, but when he revealed his real name and who he was to Capone he was back on top, however momentarily.
So there you have it. Repress those negative feelings too well and they will come exploding out of you at exactly the wrong moment. Both of those characters got shot in the head, and so will you if you don't cut that shit out. If you need an example of this done right, look no further than the character Susannah Dean in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. Susannah started out the series with dual personalities; sweet and kind Odetta Holmes and crude and nasty Detta Walker. The character Eddie falls in love with Odetta, however, Detta comes out and nearly kills him and ruins his and Roland's entire quest to find the Tower. In a last ditch effort to stop her, Roland the gunslinger, possessing another man in another world, tricks Detta into looking through the doorway portal just as Roland is looking at an alternate version of Odetta. When Detta lays eyes upon her other self, it has an effect where the two personalities merge, the newly formed person attaining the strongest traits of both of them. The new and improved "Susannah" (donning the middle name of both personalities) is now kind and caring while also brave and vicious in battle. Sounds like a pretty great end result, doesn't it? Well that can be you if you just stop ignoring what's there inside you and find a way to work with it and not so much against it.
Again, I'm not saying to let yourself be a dick, but acknowledge that there's a dick inside you (phrasing?) that needs to breathe once in a while. Let the asshole vent for a little at a time and it'll be willing to go back into hiding for a while and let you get on with your life. If you're friends and loved ones can't bear to see you like that once in a while, well, jesus, what a bunch of assholes. Get new friends. I'll be your friend. Do you like symphonic metal music?
Whoops I'm out of time. So I hope you all learned something today and hope you keep coming back for more.
Have a good 'n,
Tyler
P.S. I'll have an announcement soon enough, stay tuned.
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ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing!