So I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that my posts have been getting progressively longer. Don’t think that I haven’t noticed that as well. I have. But I assure you that it is entirely unintentional. I apologize. I’m not setting out to write 5000+ word essays, it just happens; when it reaches that length, I know that my post has veered off in ways that I hadn’t intended it to. But I usually let it, because there were important things that needed to be said. A post isn’t done until it’s done. Unfortunately, I am a wordy person. That’s unlikely to change. I hope you don’t mind. That being said, I’ll try to keep this post shorter, but I make no promises.

So my dad emailed me the other week. My mom had told him the news. I didn’t open it right away because I didn’t know how it would go. As I’ve said, I know my dad better now, but I still don’t feel like I really know him. Not wholly at least. He’s still an enigma in a number of ways. It’s hard for me to read him. When I have trouble reading someone’s reaction, I typically get somewhat nervous. I hold off on reading the email or text. I start overthinking. I work up a little bit of anxiety. My brain sort of gets locked up. I don’t do well in these types of situations in short. I’m not entirely sure what the root cause of it is. Maybe I try to overhype something or I overemphasize its importance or I psyche myself out. Whatever the case may be, this has been the way I respond to certain situations for a while now. It’s not a good habit to keep of course. But I’ve gotten noticeably better about it over the years. It comes with maturity.

In the past I would get sweaty palms and/or my heart would start beating incredibly fast. I’m naturally a sweaty person so I’m already prone to breaking out in excessive moisture as it is, but situations like this only exacerbated it. Whatever the case, that was my usual bodily response to situations that I couldn’t read. But the nervousness in my brain didn’t necessarily align with that. The thing is, I felt like my body was more nervous than my brain was. I didn’t think nervously, I only acted nervously. I’m sure there’s a link between my physical response and my mental response, but I don’t know the science behind it. So I’m not going to try to explain it. This type of reaction usually manifested itself in two scenarios: one where I was trying to talk to a girl, and one where I was trying to do a class presentation. So you may be wondering how my dad fits into either situation, I’ll get to that, just be patient. 

I was notoriously (and probably still am) bad at reading signs of interest. I never knew when people were flirting with me. It did seem to happen to me more often than I realized (in college and afterwards), so take that for what it’s worth. I never had a problem figuring out when someone was showing interest in a friend, but when it came to myself I was virtually blind. I either didn’t see what was happening at all (I would be told about it later by a friend who had observed the situation) or I belatedly realized what was happening on my own. Outwardly I used to laugh about it, joking that I had “cockblocked myself yet again,” but inwardly I used to lament, “missing another prime opportunity.” I thought about these situations quite often. After the fact, I was always able to think of better things I could’ve said or done. But never in the moment. I always told myself, “next time you’ll do better,” but that never ended up happening. When next time came along, I ended up with the same results. That’s neither here nor there though. These things happened for a reason. They weren’t meant to be. Simple as that. So I don’t regret it too much anymore. If I had developed better skills, “had better game” as it were, would better results have come of these situations? It’s possible; one can wonder.

We’ve been over this quite often, but I’ll say it again in case it hasn’t sunk in: I didn’t have much self-confidence growing up. It was a direct result of my shyness and anxiety amongst other things. My excessive shyness eventually resulted in me having inadequate people skills. It’s an interesting chicken & egg discussion whether my lack of confidence led to poor people skills or vice versa. Either way my deficiencies in both areas were entirely detrimental to my development as an adolescent. I didn’t grow into a regular boy with regular wants and needs. I grew into a creep. That’s right, you’re seeing it in print here, for the first time. I was a creep. I’ll admit that freely. While I don’t regret the end result of the aforementioned random situations, I do regret the times when I jumped into or created messy situations of my own free will. There were many in high school, and some in college (& beyond). If I had been able to read the signs better would I have been less desperate as an adolescent? Would I have been able to forestall messy situations from worsening or avoid them completely in the first place? Would I have realized that messaging someone out of the blue is creepy? I’m not sure, but I’d like to think so. If I had known who was interested beforehand I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have taken (as many) random shots in the dark.

And boy were there a lot of random shots. I don’t listen to the radio anymore, but I remember The Breakfast Club used to have a segment during their show called Shoot Your Shot. Usually they were cutesy little love stories with a pleasant, feel-good ending. But every so often there were shots from way out in left field that were quite cringey. Grown ass men calling up strangers on the radio! Weird men telling women that they liked them when the fact of the matter was they had never had a real conversation with them. If you get a “hello, who’s this?” you know you’ve most likely screwed up. You either read the situation incorrectly, or you doggedly pursued someone that was out of your league. Most people aren’t thinking about you as often as you think they are. Why would someone use their brain space to think about a random stranger on the street? That doesn’t normally happen. I know all of this now, but did I know it then? Was I really so different from those long shots? In some instances, I might’ve been even worse. I never understood why things never worked out—let’s be honest, it was mostly my fault—but I wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb. At least not when it came to love, relationships, and the like. I knew jack shit about it. But it seems like sometimes I liked to pretend that I knew. Why else would I pull up from full court and expect a basket? I was a love dope—addicted to the idea of it, but also completely uneducated in every aspect. I was a bozo.

When I messaged a girl on Facebook or something I would get so nervous that I would flip my phone over, silence it, and put it somewhere that was out of reach. Back in the AIM days, I’d do something similar. I would shoot a message, then nervously chat with someone else, while I anxiously awaited a reply. I tensed up, my anxiety spiked. My lack of self-confidence on top of that only proved to do more harm than good. But the thing is I was expecting the unexpected. Which is all fine & good, provided that what you expect is logical and realistic. That wasn’t me. My vision was corrupted by delusion. I was messaging people that I had no business messaging in the first place! That should’ve been a red flag for me. That should’ve been the demarcation. Except red flags didn’t really have a place in my worldview back then. They didn’t exist. The word “boundary” didn’t hold any meaning for me at that time. I crossed lines that shouldn’t have been crossed. But I was so self-absorbed that I didn’t even see them, no matter how obvious they were.

I never asked myself the following question sequence, and I really should have. Have I talked to this person in real life? No? Don’t message her. Yes, but it wasn’t an in-depth conversation? Don’t message her. Yes, but it was entirely school related? Don’t message her. Are you friends? No? Are you even acquaintances? Barely? Don’t message her. But I didn’t know better. My people skills were incredibly stunted back then. It wasn’t entirely my fault. In a way, I wasn’t raised right. Yes, I hold myself responsible for my actions. After all, nobody told me to do the things that I did; I made those choices on my own. But I wasn’t taught certain things as a child—nobody had told me what not to do—and it affected who I became as a young adult. There was one large problem area of my life that had not been set up well for success.

Naturally, my mental makeup in childhood was a hindrance to me in a few ways. I was a shy kid. Incredibly shy. So much so that it impeded my ability to learn in kindergarten. I didn’t talk, I didn’t raise my hand, I didn’t participate, I didn’t make friends. People thought I was special needs or that I didn’t know English. The truth was that I was raised bilingual from a young age (that unfortunately is no longer the case, and has not been for a long time). And I was and am incredibly smart. But at the tender age of five I was already afraid of saying the wrong answer. Anxiety had already planted its seed in me. It had already taken root. I remember vividly an instance when I raised my hand and didn’t get called on. The kid who did get called on ended up giving an answer that was different from mine. Whether my answer was the wrong one, his was, both or neither I don’t remember. What I do remember is focusing intently on the possibility of my answer being wrong. After that, I stopped raising my hand. I didn’t want to risk it. My fear of looking dumb was incredibly high. 

And that stayed with me for a long time. So not only was I shy, and had poor confidence, and poor people skills, but I was also extremely risk averse. In most areas of my life, but not all. I made a lot of conservative decisions growing up because it was safer that way. Safer to keep everything guarded and locked up tight. Safer not to make close friends because opening up and being vulnerable was scary. Safer not to commit to things in case they didn’t work out. And I stuck to that gameplan. For more than a decade I stuck to that gameplan. Despite all this, I did have an easier time making friends back then than I do now. Not to say that I can’t make friends or hold a conversation, but I don’t make friends because I don’t go out. And when I do, I don’t take initiative in starting conversations with new people. I’m much more of a reactive conversationalist than a proactive one. It’s an interesting contrast: young me (poor people skills, but a relatively easy time making friends) vs. old me (better people skills but spend much less time socializing). After my disastrous kindergarten year, I started to open up a bit. I didn’t start raising my hand or anything like that, but I started to talk when spoken to, and I made some friends. I still wasn’t great at it, but it was at least adequate enough where when we moved to Massachusetts when I was in 2nd grade, I came out of it fine. But then puberty hit, and things changed yet again.

That’s when things started to get rocky, although I didn’t exactly know it at the time. Puberty is a confusing time for everybody involved, let’s get that straight. It’s not just a time of transition for the kids. There’s also a period of adjustment for parents and teachers, and any adult influence in a kid’s life for that matter. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on. Kids start changing overnight. Parents and teachers don’t know which direction a kid may turn. They may think they know, but they can’t predict the future. Parents can prepare themselves for this as much as they want/can, but not everything will go according to expectation. I understand that may be scary and daunting for a parent. Puberty is when a parent starts to cede control of their kid. They start to make their own choices, and are no longer molded in your image. They are no longer the miniature version of you. They change. It is what it is. It’s something that needs to be worked through. Although the kid is changing and finding their way in the world, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain tools that a parent can’t still provide their kid.

My parents provided me with many tools to help me progress through life, and I’m grateful for that. But there was one thing that was missed, and I believe know that it became a large obstacle for me to navigate through for at least 15 years. My parents never talked to me about love, sex, or relationships. Never. You can only imagine how detrimental that was for me when I was trying to find my way in the world. Love is a difficult enough concept to grasp for those who have been educated about it. It’s already a case of trial & error as is. Young adolescents or people who are new to the dating scene will often ask, “how do you know if it’s real?” Or “how do you know what love is/feels like?” I don’t think there’s an exact answer. Even someone who’s in love, who’s married, or in a long-term relationship can’t quite explain the feeling. But just because the concept isn’t fully understood, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t talk about it. The talk is something that needs to happen. Without having the talk I was utterly lost. 

Before you can even start talking about the L word though, you need to have a basic understanding of dating and relationships. But even before that, you need to know about the hormonal changes that come with puberty, and about human anatomy. They teach you that in school. It’s called sex ed. Problem is, I wasn’t exposed to sex ed. Every year between 5th grade and 8th grade, my parents had taken me out of the class. That’s fine, every parent has a right to do that. In fact, it’s quite common in the Chinese Christian community. But withdrawing from it comes with the expectation that the parents have an alternative curriculum in mind. In this scenario, the parent is supposed to teach the child about sex. That didn’t happen for me. My dad tried to read me a book once for about 30 minutes. As expected, it was an extremely awkward encounter, and we never talked about it ever again. The entirety of my sex education was thus composed of a combination of porn and one quarters-worth of health class that I took in 9th grade. By that point it was already too late. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube as they say. That one quarter of correct information/education couldn’t undo the damage that had already been caused by four years of setting false expectations. I had already embarked on a path of self-destruction.

You know that lyric that goes, “looking for love in all the wrong places?” That seems to be a common theme for many young adolescents at some point or another. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s easier to figure out what you like by eliminating all the things you don’t like. Dating really is just a microcosm of life in general. You’re finding your way in both things through trial and error mostly, with the help of other people’s experiences and prior knowledge. There’s no one right answer. It varies. It means different things to different people. As such it requires taking a leap and seeing what works. But it doesn’t give you an excuse to be reckless. 

And let me tell you, boy was I reckless. I was reckless with my words and with other people’s emotions. When other parties come into play, the consequences of your recklessness increase exponentially. It’s not just about you anymore, you’re affecting other people now (most likely negatively). Actions and words have dire repercussions. As a young, horny uneducated kid none of this came into consideration. I didn’t think of the emotions and feelings of other people because they never crossed my mind. I wasn’t sympathetic or empathetic. I was focused on myself. Everything was about me, and what served me. I was a narcissist. One that hated himself, but a narcissist nonetheless. In fairness, I didn’t know any better. I wasn’t taught this stuff. You’d think that growing up with two sisters would’ve helped matters. Prevented me from becoming stunted in the sphere of romance. Made me a “bring him home to meet the parents” type of a boy, but it didn’t in the slightest. We didn’t have that type of relationship back then; we mostly kept to ourselves. I was too self-centered and inward focused to take advice from anyone else, let alone my sisters. It would’ve taken some sort of miracle for me to change my ways. I didn’t know how to treat women with respect. I didn’t know how to not stare. I had a hard time distinguishing between a girl being nice to me and a girl being interested in me. 

There’s a difference. A huge difference. It’s not as subtle as some pubescent boys seem to think, self included. It’s quite overt and obvious. But if my sole source of sex education stemmed from porn, you can see how I had a huge problem. You can see how I was unable to read into the nuance. I was set up to fail, disaster had always been imminent, lying just beyond the horizon. Subsequently, I made a ruin of a number of friendships that I had, and I also made complete strangers entirely uncomfortable. But I didn’t know. I lacked self-awareness. I didn’t know how girls were supposed to be treated. I didn’t know what was creepy and what wasn’t. It was all a mystery to me. And unfortunately I attempted to solve the mystery in all the wrong ways. In a nonsensical manner that burned bridges. I mean I learned from it. But not for another ten years at the very least. It can be argued that I didn’t learn until 2018. If you want to claim that, I won’t dispute it. Either way, it was a long ass time before I had any semblance of knowing what to do.

What it really comes down to is this: the most important thing is that there’s mutual interest. This comes before anything even gets started. Is the person you’re interested in also interested in you? If the answer is yes, you can talk. There’s a reasonable starting point from there. The degree of interest may not be reciprocated, but that’s something to think about later. If the answer is maybe, then it might be worth looking into. You need to gather more information. If the answer is no, you move on. If you’ve been told no more than once don’t circle back! It’s done. It’s not happening! The problem for young boys is that we are sometimes so lost and self-absorbed, lacking so much self-awareness that we can’t even answer the simple question of is there mutual interest. We talk ourselves into believing that there is, but we don’t actually stop to think about it. We see a girl that we think is cute, and we go for it without thinking through the ramifications. Every choice that you make has ramifications, good or bad. But we’re oftentimes too stubborn or ignorant to acknowledge them. And that’s the pinnacle of folly. Quite a number of awkward, messy, or uncomfortable situations could’ve been prevented. If we had just thought through the details beforehand. If we had just faced the facts. Some of those facts are particularly damning. If we had just laid out the situation and reviewed the particulars, a whole lot of embarrassment could’ve been avoided. Of course, one party doesn’t even have a say in the matter.

That’s really the worst part. What we did affected someone else, and they had no control over the situation whatsoever. This whole messy, awkward, disturbing turn of events didn’t have to happen. It could’ve been prevented, but our little pervy, misogynistic mindset got in the way. I feel bad for the intended recipients of these “elaborate” displays of courtship. It’s frankly embarrassing. I sincerely apologize to all women on behalf of the creeps and former creeps that used to terrorize your lives. The little boys who caused you discomfort, unease, and pain. None of you ever deserved that. You didn’t deserve those wandering eyes, or those weird messages, or those creepy phone calls, or those strange comments/conversations. We males as a gender are dastardly and crude. We’re disgusting. God gave us a brain, but we don’t use it very often. Instead we opt to think with our smaller member primarily, and our heart secondarily. Neither gives you what you deserve. You deserve better, you deserve more from us. We have let you down spectacularly. 

If there’s one thing I regret from my younger days it’s this. There’s quite a number of women I’ve made uncomfortable in my life. You know who you are. I’m sorry for wasting your time. I’m sorry for being the crude person that I was. I’m sorry for being so damn creepy. I’m sorry for causing you discomfort, either with my eyes or with my words. I didn’t know any better, but that’s no excuse. Creepy behavior is creepy behavior, and there’s no justification for it. For that I’m sorry. Honestly looking back on it, I feel a delayed sense of embarrassment both for the person affected and for myself. I don’t think I was capable of feeling such embarrassment back then since I lacked self-awareness. But for the recipient of these gestures, I feel for you. Nobody wants to be hit on by a socially awkward and weird kid—regardless of gender, regardless of sexual orientation. You would just rather… not. I’ve been on the receiving end of this on occasion, and I can say that it is without a doubt an unsettling feeling. An unwanted gesture is an unwanted gesture. An uncomfortable feeling is an uncomfortable feeling. No one can change that. No one should be subjected to this type of stuff because a horny little boy didn’t know how to use his brain or know how to show interest properly. I know that I’ve learned from past experiences, and I’d like to believe that I killed that little boy in me a long time ago. That little weirdo shouldn’t exist anymore, he can’t exist. I’m trying to do better. It doesn’t require much if we’re being honest. Stop being a fucking weirdo, simple as that. Everyone craves attention sometimes, but not in this way. People are out here looking for romance, they’re not trying to sidestep creeps along the way.

Sorry to say, to the desperate boys out there, most girls want to be left alone. Don’t hit on them randomly in the gym, in class, or on the street. If you want to get to know someone, get to know them. For real. If you want her phone number, get it from her directly! Don’t get it through a third party. That my friend, is creepy/stalkerish/sociopathic behavior. It’s not okay. Talk to them like they’re real human beings, not objects. Don’t talk to them like they’re some prize to be won. Don’t talk to them like you think you’re doing them a favor. You’re not God’s gift to the world, hate to break it to you. If you hit them up first, you’re the one using up their time. Don’t be weird about it. There’s a few right ways to do it, but there’s many many more wrong ways. Take it from me. For 15+ years I went about things the wrong way. My methods weren’t all the same, they did change, but not for the better. I didn’t know what I was doing. 

Love, dating, and relationships were all a big mystery to me. The unsolvable puzzle that promised something incredible but failed to deliver. Some way, some how I lucked myself into a relationship in 2011/2012. Against all odds, I had duped someone into liking me and staying with me. But I wasn’t ready for it, and it showed. After our honeymoon phase our relationship steadily deteriorated. Whose fault was it? I’d say 85% mine. We weren’t right for each other first off. But I also hadn’t progressed far enough along as a functional human being. I wasn’t in a place where dating should’ve been anywhere on my mind, but it was all that was on it. I naively thought it was possible to love someone else while hating myself. I thought I could take care of someone else when I couldn’t even take care of myself. How’s that even remotely possible when you only think of your own wants and needs, and not those of others? I thought it was possible to be healthy enough to be in a relationship while neglecting all trauma and adversity in my life. I thought locking up the negativity, storing it away, and ignoring it would automatically make me mentally healthier. I thought that pretending that everything was okay would make things okay. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was nothing but a farce. I pretended that I was some sophisticated human being when I wasn’t. I was broken beyond repair. In the years after the breakup I blamed it for breaking me, but I was already broken before that. Long before that. But I needed someone or something to blame, because I wasn’t willing to hold myself accountable. I didn’t think about my mental health much back then, but if I had I probably would’ve deluded myself into thinking I was in a better place than I was. I was nowhere near healthy, and all of these misconceptions only made it worse. They left me rife with drama and inner turmoil.

I was a drama queen. It’s still there, although I’m better at controlling it for the most part. I’ll be honest, sometimes the inner queen does peek through nowadays. As much as things change and improve, you can’t quite take the drama out of a queen. It just doesn’t happen. What can I say? I’m a Leo. It’s in my nature. But understand this, for a long time I either refused to accept it or I didn’t see it. The drama swirled around me but it didn’t occur to me that I was its wellspring. I was the root. I caused the drama. It was only there because I created it. I birthed it. I was the sun and the drama revolved around me. It took me a long time to realize that. I used to wonder quietly why I always found myself involved with this type of bullshit. It didn’t occur to me that drama didn’t follow me, but rather I left it trailing in my wake.

Somehow that fact went way over my head. It wasn’t that I was close to drama or that drama followed me around. That wasn’t it at all. Instead I created it willfully, and let it swirl around me. Either oblivious of who it affected or unconcerned or both. I was reckless and it didn’t matter to me. I was lost in my own world. I was stuck in a story where I was the main character and no one else around me even mattered. They were all side characters that came and went in my life. This arrogant disregard for other beings led to my downfall. Not directly—it took a roundabout way—but eventually it led me to my darkest day. My darkest day only happened because I had set myself up to fail year after year after year. I was stringing along from disappointment to disappointment. And as much as I liked to believe that my life was out of my control, that I was just being railroaded along, that wasn’t really the issue nor was it the case. The issue was that I had established a false sense of identity. I had given myself false hope. I had fed myself lies for more than a decade. I had consistently created inaccurate assumptions about what a relationship was supposed to look like. This caused me to create unrealistic expectations of what would happen in certain dynamics. 

Whether it was me pursuing girls I shouldn’t have pursued, or it was reacting in a way that wasn’t warranted, or it was coming on too strong, things always found a way to fall apart. Not because fate despised me or that life was unfair (as I had thought), but because the situation had always been set up to fail from the start. Set up to fail through my error, through my ignorance, through my arrogance. But most importantly through my inability to set realistic expectations. There had always only been one likely outcome. The results always turned out the same because the process had remained the same. The same shoddy, unsatisfactory, mediocre process. I didn’t learn from my mistakes then. I just kept making the same ones over and over again, but with different people. If that’s not the definition of reckless then I don’t know what is. I played with people’s emotions because they weren’t tangible to me. Thinking of others wasn’t a concept that I grasped. It wasn’t my MO, it wasn’t in my DNA. If I didn’t spend much time thinking of other people in general, the likelihood of thinking about their emotions in specific was non-existent. I don’t know what’s worse: doing the same thing over and over again because you don’t have the wherewithal to learn from your blunders; being too stubborn to change your approach; or being so negligent that you just pick up and discard romantic interests targets victims as they come into your line of sight. I was guilty of all three because I just wasn’t as knowledgable as I thought myself to be.

I used to have a tagline on an old blog that said, “I’m a realist, not a dreamer.” But that statement couldn’t have been further from the truth. My presuppositions weren’t realistic. I foolishly just assumed that anyone would want to date me. That I was some sort of a catch. A broken person looking for someone to make him complete. How ludicrous! That’s not healthy. If you are broken, the missing pieces aren’t going to be found in a romantic connection. The missing pieces can only be found within your self. If you get into a relationship thinking that you can fix a broken person, you’re only going to be met with disappointment. That’s the biggest mistake that my ex made. She thought that she could fix me. She thought that it was her responsibility to try to, but it wasn’t. I had brought extra baggage into the relationship and it wasn’t fair to her and it wasn’t fair to us. It was a tough obstacle to overcome, and ultimately we tried and failed. But she had set herself up for failure with false expectations of her own. I was beyond repair at that point. What neither of us knew at the time was that things could and would get worse for me. I was nowhere near my darkest day. I was still six years away from finding true healing. I came into the relationship broken, I left broken, and would remain broken.

I was happily lost in my delusions though. I was blinded to the truth, and I was happily ignorant that way. It may not have been at the forefront of my mind, but thinking that I was a catch had definitely settled in comfortably, somewhere in my headspace. Somewhere unnoticeable but still prominent enough where it would greatly affect my mindset. Like I said, my sense of self was misguided and fallacious at best or deeply flawed and unfounded at worst. Warped, skewed, schizophrenic. Whatever you want to call it, it was wrong. I’ll admit that a lot of the adversity I faced in my life was as a result of my delusional thinking (both directly and indirectly). All of this should’ve been evident enough for me. The facts were laid out that way, but I refused to look at them. Finally being in a relationship after looking for so long wasn’t the turning point in my life that I thought it was. It was more of a fluke. Just a blip on my radar. A reprieve from the disorder that my love life consisted of. It was a small oasis in the desert of my soul. The years after my breakup were just as desperate and hopeless as the years prior. The workmanship was still shoddy, the process still piss-poor. 

I hadn’t worked on myself. I hadn’t improved my outlook. I had hidden my pain. I had medicated to numb the feeling. I hadn’t dealt with the breakup properly. I wasn’t capable of it. I was a runner. I always had been. I ran from my hardships, I ran from feelings of guilt, I ran from my pain. I didn’t want to deal with it because I didn’t know how. And I didn’t know how because I didn’t want to be hurt. I didn’t want to be hurt because I had foolishly thought that being a Christian meant that I would always have an incredibly blessed life. Some sort of utopia with no hardship, with no pain, with no suffering. That’s not realistic whatsoever. Living that way is just hoping for a pipe dream. It’s never going to happen. As I said last post, evil exists in the world. Negativity, pain, and hardship are as true to this world as heroism, positivity, and pleasantry. You can’t have the good without the bad. Adversity makes you stronger. It molds you into something better. It makes you a better version of yourself. Not accepting that tough times will come is living in denial. Denial of who you are and who you may become. The greatest version of you is still out there, waiting for you to reach out and grasp its hand. Waiting for you to embrace it. 

Embrace it you must. The good, the bad, and the ugly. You will learn from other’s experiences and you will learn from your own adversity. You have to deny your old nature in order to embrace your new. In denying who you were you must come to an understanding with it. Reflect and think on what needs to be changed. For me my duality of nature had been narcissist vs. anti-narcissist. My inflated ego prevented me from accepting advice and realizing that I needed to find an alternate method. But my low self-esteem and sense of self-worth made me feel like the world was out to get me when things inevitably went wrong. Both sides of that coin prevented me from seeing how life really is. Both sides kept me blinded to reality. My reality was not true reality. I lived a life of delusion. And I needed to break down both walls. None of the methods I was using served me in a way that was beneficial. I didn’t know better because I didn’t allow myself to be taught better. My arrogance sheltered me from the consequences of real life. It was nice in the short-term—I didn’t have to deal with grief or sorrow right away—but it stunted my growth in the long-term. Deal with your issues head-on. You’ll be better for it. That being said, I should probably email my dad back. Delaying so would only be reverting to old ways. Delaying would only be running away, and I don’t run away anymore.