Overcome Toxicity

The first toxic friendship I can remember occurred when I was in my early teens.  Through the peer pressure of a fearless kid named Randy, I followed his example through many underhanded adventures.  One time we threw eggs at a kid's house and ran like hell.  I liked the kid whose house we bombarded, yet I still persisted in overcoming my personal opinion and pelted the front door with a couple of eggs.  Why did I do it?  Ironically it was because Randy had a vendetta against Will, the kid whose house we egged.  He thought Will was too smart and a show off, though in reality he was just a soft-spoken kid who liked to read.  We also stole beer from our parents, snuck out of the house late at night, spent weekends on Dauphin Island without a word to anyone, stole wood from the neighboring subdivision as it was being constructed, made fun of everyone, skipped school, and performed many acts of mumbo jumbo with toilet paper and eggs.  Most of these activities, I would have never considered had I not been influenced by the encouragement of Randy.  We all do things while growing up that appall us later in life, but most kids manage to behave within some level-headed boundaries.  Randy knew no boundaries, and had I not moved away before my junior year of high school, I may have ended up in junvenile detention with him.

Through the years, I  moved around and met many people.  Most I got along with and enjoyed learning about.  The few I met where I felt no promise of friendship, we simply parted ways and didn't associate anymore.  Occassionally I butted heads with others over whether lamb shanks should be braised or if the Vols had a chance against the Crimson Tide.  Opinionated disagreements usually ended up diffused and at the end of the night  we sat around like old chums, sharing beers and stories from the kitchen line.  We solved our problems by accepting each other's individuality and differences of opinion.  It was simple and effective.  Toxicity was the last thing we wanted in our environment.

I had not even considered the idea of toxic friendships until recently when a friend shared an article with me.  It was one of those "how to clean up your life" type articles, and it made sense.  One of the signs of a toxic relationship is when you lose a sense of confidence when you associate with someone you think is close to you.  Usually it is accentuated by criticism they claim is to help you become a better person.  Another sign is when you acheive something, they are quick to point out how self-centered you must be to revel in your accomplishment.  They accuse you of narcissism, mental illness, lack of empathy, closed-mindedness, or ineptitude.  All of this under the premise that they value your friendship and want to work through issues.  You endure it because you have invested time and energy into the relationship and quite possibly have even developed a level of pseudo-trust to where their words affect your emotional state.  You never consider any of it as a projection of their insecurities.  It all seems like it really is your fault and you must change or else you'll never be successful.  Another sign of toxicity in "friendship" is when you are expected to put someone else's priorities over your own.  If you don't take time out of your busy day to interject your sympathy and indentification into their personal struggles, you are branded as an egotistical child who will never understand the real world because you lack humility, compassion, insight, and depth of character.

I have never claimed to be some transcendent creature forged from the realm of enlightenment, but I do recognize my capacity to love and I work on developing awareness of how I could change to be better at communicating, better at listening, and better at indentifying with others.  I am aware of how I have messed up in life and when my decisions have been selfish and misguided.  I accept responsibility for my actions and I make honest efforts to ensure I am more careful.  Regardless of my shortcomings, a true friend would be more inclined to clue me in to how I am messing up in life by telling me how I have disappointed them, instead of waging a character attack.  A true friend would step up, question my motives, and point out how my actions are self-defeating, instead of attempting to defeat me through criticism and disdain.  Even if a friend only gets in touch once in a while and it comes from a sincere place, it is far more valuable than being bombed by myopic vilification.

The articles all say that it's best to remove those elements from your life if you want to clean house and feel peace of mind.  There are people in our lives who support us and feel a sense of vicarious pride in our achievements.  They nurture us, build us, and do their best to share our burdens.  I choose to focus on those aspects of my life and say goodbye to the voices that always bring me down.  Though I haven't met many Randys in my life, I am able to see the few that I have set me back in egregiously destructive ways.  The next time a voice in your life tells you how worthless you are for whatever reason, kindly snuff it out and focus on where you intend to be.  Don't give too much life to it or it will reverberate in your head every time you must make a clear decision. Even if all those things really are wrong with you,  they can be fixed.  Odds are you are just fine, but fix it all anyway to the point where that voice  has no fuel and grows quiet as it sinks into the deep dark mist of the past.  Disconnect yourself from such toxicity.  You'll feel lighter in your spirit, and then you can spend time with the people who really do care.

Techno-dreams and the Fear of Falling

I remember when I was five-years-old my dad gave me a slide rule.  I was still in the phase of enjoying pursuits like fingerpainting and playing "pretend like" but when I look back on that gesture, I become aware of how necessary it must have seemed for me to learn how to use the device to engage the world with a firm commitment to aviation, finance, or engineering.  It was 1974 and the slide rule was on its way out because the electronic calculator had taken over.  Maybe because I was only sparsely mediocre in mathematics or maybe because I was still caught up in Aesop's Fables, I never developed an interest in the slide rule.  Thank god the world devised electronic calculators.  Now I had another instrument to fascinate me while I neglected to learn its true uses.  It was too much fun punching out 7734 and turning it upside down to reveal "HELL" on the display.

Now, those days are far behind me.  I've forgotten how to use a calculator except for the simplest of tasks.  I've learned how to use a computer well enough to get around in word processing programs or virtual worlds.  I have a deep appreciation for the freedom of mobility that cars grant to us, but I also maintain this deep-seeded fear of the devastation that collisions can cause.  I have always been fascinated by technology yet secretly suspect of the REAL influence it has over consciousness and the way it seems to outpace my comprehension of the world around me.

No longer do we use technology only as a tool to perform a task.  It has become integrated with the center of our existence.  I fly around Second Life without a remote sensation of flying, yet when I stand on a high surface in the virtual environment, I get a bit queazy to my stomach.  The feeling is real and yet I am sitting on a chair, looking at a computer screen.  I feel as if I may fall, and even if i do, I'll just bounce off the ground, dust off my shoulders, and fly away.  Still, the fear of the process of falling is visceral and sharp.  This is what technology does to me.  It tantalizes me with the joy and beauty of freedom and quickness.  Then it sends me into a dramatic tailspin, down, down, down, through the depths of my mind.  I experience the same feelings when I dream.

When we turn away from technology it is like we awaken from a dream.  What we considered the real world during our engagement has slipped away and has been replaced by the other reality.  Only the reality is not the objective reality of things and ideas, it is a reality of introversion and denial.  While engaged with technology, as with dreaming, our minds focus on the images of now.  We are not really worried about how we look or what people will think.  We use the tools to fixate on tasks, we dream images regardless of whether people will find out.  When we wake up from either state of engagement, we are confronted with our notions of reality and become self-critical, competitive and flooded.

Psychological speculation has always intrigued me and I've been sucked into a lot of it from Freud to Jung, Perl to Skinner, Lacan to Zizek.  Each time I read anything psychological, I start looking at my mind as the construct shaped by what others have defined.  I enjoy it.  I like to wake up into my dreams, fully unaware of where I'm going.  The same when I wake up into Second Life and teleport to a poetry reading or art exhibit.  I like how books have shaped my perception of reality, and how the voices of thinkers have influenced me to see the world around me as both fantasy and form.  I imagine I'll continue to redefine my neuroses and contemplate my ego-involvement with the fabricated universe.  We all agree that the ground upon which we stand is REAL as we look to the sky and see forever, God, azure, stars, or ourselves.  All the while, the ground waits to swallow up our bodies, and we only feel that reality when we are unaware of feeling at all.