Back
December 24, 2024 12:26:01 PM – December 24, 2024 1:56:45 PM
Why do I have to bury the hatchet? Why do I have to hide my abilities? Why can't I just arrogantly show my abilities instead of keeping myself stuck to reading and consuming other people's works? Why do I have to let myself go and keep myself in the bushes when I could outshine everything that I've ever read and seen? I'm not saying that I'm superior necessarily, but I feel that I am so much more. But I just let the world contain me and put me in the box of a consumer. But the arrogance and potency that I keep inside wants to break out, and it wants to reveal itself to the world. Everything that I've made in private, and everything that I am that longs to be revealed is all there. It is just me that it is waiting for. It is waiting for me to take pride in myself and to reveal myself as who I am, even at the cost of looking like an idiosyncratic self-absorbed (self-reflexive) individual of great magnitude.
I'm so arrogant (capable), yet I allow the edge and competence to be fade into obscurity (burying the hatchet; sheathing the blade; whatever metaphor is apt). I seem to struggle to marry into the everyday the potency that I have so easily emergent in my everyday activities and the state of open, fluid, expressive revelation.
It feels like the best that I can do is reveal myself through small, brief glimpses that barely say anything at all. It is tiresome to inhibit myself so when I've spent so many years in obscurity, silence, and "hidden tigerness". It feels like all that I am is already apparent, but it just needs my will and say-yes for it to be revealed in all its magnitude, competence, and greatness.
And I don't think that I'm necessarily afraid, because when I used the term "arrogance," that was not just an exaggeration. I do wield my abilities and capabilities with such confidence that it may be viewed as arrogant, yet paradoxically, I keep my abilities hidden. They are so obvious and distinct to the people to whom I reveal them, but they are invisible to everyone else. I am so cowardly yet so sure of my own actions and capacity. I can bring my entire self to the surface with the blink of an eye, yet I choose to maintain this persona of conformity and mundanity, as if that is necessary. It is tiresome to see my abilities groaning and building up in frustration at the potential that I could have shown in situations where the opportunity arose. However, due to past experiences with having shown myself at my own cost, I have grown self-tempered, and it has become less like self-control and more like self-inhibition, so as to feel like pretending. I even use the phrase "I'm tired of pretending" in my private rants to myself.
"I'm tired of pretending," "I'm tired of playing house," "I'm tired of playing games," "I'm tired of lying down," and "I'm tired of just sitting down and sitting still," are all phrases that I've used in my self-rants.
But to be fair, I concede that social conditioning, self-protection, and strategic restraint are good reasons for such a persona of necessity and conformity. Yet I contend strongly that the cost of revelation need not be feared, since the greatness must be eventually effected in revealed actions. It must be feared and respected, but for that to happen, it must be put into existence. That which has been hidden should be revealed. But for the longest time, I have relied on controlled motions of expression. Even my writing reveals strikingly the depth of my capacity for intentionality, especially one that has been initiated, cultivated, and forged over the span of many years of painstaking effort. Even now, arrogance and authenticity find intertwinement in the potential recklessness and heroic fervor that could be divulged and released in streams of conscious acts of art. This "mask of mundanity" has bearing upon the way that I have managed to reach this point of inhibitive self-reinforcement, -development, and -improvement. Inhibition has been my sword, and it has allowed me to rage upon myself and into such great verdant self-streams of growth—a forest grown over years of self-restraint and one that has reached pinnacles of creativity unheard of, because it has remained as yet inscribed into its private stones, let alone and let to fester as if they were "evil sides of oneself yet to be conquered". That inner voice cries and calls out for freedom from its imprisonment.
Isolation has been a teacher, but it has become abusive and caused me great moments of starvation and survivability, where pain becomes almost essential to everyday existence. It has been a verdant field, but it has waged upon me its greatest war—that of the spirit and of letting go. It never ends, and it festers, reeking, smelling, and perfecting its torment of my form, until I am embodied in physical incarnation, until the nature of self becomes concretized through sheer rage-inflicted pain. This self-harm, this perfect irrational essence, is now made into a shape.
But the time for such inhibition is passing, and there must be a point at which the climax of the horrors of the humanity invested into me is caused. I have left myself a divested vessel for too long; the line through which the center of greatness should pass is yet in my arms where it may embrace me by its arms and tuck me under its wings. Let there then be a grace untold be served in the presence of my anointing and my salvation—in whatever form it may take. If it may be that of revelation, let it speak freely, because I see now the weight into which more and more is being poured and which is being made even greater and intenser. It only pressures me to loosen myself until I have lost myself, but there is a greater horizon to be met, one that speaks of a freedom that comes from freeing myself from such a weighty mask, which has hitherto remained a cumbersome rope that has tied me thoroughly to the dirty earth, this spot scattered with my broken-off flesh, bodily fluids, and life blood. There is a point at which or line through which all things must pass. It is inevitable, and it must be done. Or maybe I am wishing it all the same.
Why must I deface myself? Why must I break off all of my attachments so that I may be one of the people? Why am I only but this thing? Why do I choose such a lonely path among thousands? Why do I deprive myself of myself when I could have shown myself a long time ago? I need not be afraid. I must strip myself of my prowess, of my control, and of my mask of self that I may be removed of the superfices. I shall be free on that day, at which judgement may be said to have passed.
"I must be free." If an aphorism is apt, then let it be that. I indeed must be free. I shall be free. I have to be. I plead for me to be. I cannot be but be. I shall be. I have to be. I long to be. Recklessly, as much as I can, I shall be.
I avoid recording myself and my music, because it is too much to handle. It is much to cope against. It is too much to cope with the idea that everything that I am, no matter how pleasant, competent, skilled, capable, and invested in, is shown on the battlefield, on the landscape, within the boundaries that the horizon designs. I can only stare at everything around me. I say that I am not necessarily afraid, but I fear that upon showing myself am I removed from all things that I know. I have grown to self-identify with constraint, restraint, and self-inhibition. It must become my name and label, the signpost above me, overshadowing me, and defining me. It has become my signs and symbols. I can only adjust accordingly under it, because it has made me into its puppet-thing, and I recognize well the limitation in that. But it is challenging to put myself out there, and to shown myself as is. It is like stripping the tissue off my delicate my body, when its rightful purpose is to cover and clothe me to prevent me from the screams of chaotic life.
There is too much compromise in shedding myself slowly, but there is too much to be shown in expressing myself grandiosely. The middle ground between these feels like a worse compromise than the slow gradual progression of self-thought into the open sphere and space of the world.
"No more half-measures," is a phrase that I remember from the character "Mike" from the TV show "Breaking Bad" and that is pertinent to this point.
I still feel ashamed for having made my Facebook cover photo "I do the things that I do because I have a reason" with my name inscribed on the bottom of the quote. It feels flimsy and fake, like a man attempting some grandiose statement only to come up short. But I thought it was necessarily brief, vague, and contextual, one that could never come up on a search query in a browser so as to be explainable, but one that had to be said in order to come up with something realistically vulnerable.
If something as small as that causes my awkward shame, then what more can be said about the hidden essentials that are inherently gigantic in scope? I am an arrogant individual, not because I am arrogant in the traditional, conventional sense, but because I contain so much that must be released. It is not that simple, and it is not that easy either for the people to whom I shall reveal inevitably. There is this pain that must be welcomed at the feet of such a revelation. It crushes my heart when I occasionally remember having made the cover photo what I chose, not because of the occasional character of it, but because it is not easy to think about it at all.
In the end, I can at best stare as the equivalent of the scope of the heavens are trivially tucked under the trifle that is my armpit, in so disrespectful a way.
Imagine that. Imagine the weight of the heavens being traded for something as masking as a simple aphoristic statement. It is not sufficient! It bothers comprehensively. It is like a bat tearing the tissue off my face in how frustratingly curt it is! It can only do me harm and prevent me from finding comfort in its presence and recall!
I can barely contain myself, yet I do. The weight of the heavens is inhibited in the equivalent of a small trash bag. What a joke it appears to be!
I allow the contradiction, the misunderstanding, the judgment, the dismissal, the disregard, the marginalization, the ostracization, the isolation, the downplaying, and all of these things, and I keep myself succinct and contained. How hard it is that I continue this mode of life! I can only but adjust to the consequences of having shown myself at all, even in small amounts! It is a bitter pain to have shown only a bit of myself only to have that little thing made a laughingstock! I can only stare at the world as this lip-biting restraint brings me further into creativity and into intense creation, in hopes that I one day "get revenge" by showing what I have not shown all this time. It is not a matter of hurting them back. It is a matter of being honest for once in my life with my entirety after having been exposed to their dismissions of even my tiniest and humblest attempts.
If I give myself permission to reveal myself, I need to do so discreetly, and the only thing that comes to mind is to have an Internet link that is, by way of discreetness, shown and, by inherence, sized. This link shall connect to a digital ecosystem of personal websites that may abruptly scream out in fervor against the conventional expectations of any who find themselves stumbling casually upon it. It shall divulge the entirety of my streams, rivulets, and byways. It shall impress upon them the mightiest incarnation of physical soul, whatever that may be, as long as it ushers to them my fullest intent, whatever interpretation may be gathered at the end of it, because I know well there is no preparation to soulful speaking and to the inherent act of having expressed, not merely by a guide book of writing and speaking, but by the richest potency of "showing," one that courts the very semiotic concept of "signs and symbols," so that all things that are may be revealed, in their most delusional self-administering form. It shall impress upon them all that must be at the point of contact, just by a sheer serendipity of a link.
Back to Top