English is a funny language. Not all synonyms are entirely interchangeable—they’re not all created equal. Some similar words have different connotations. The meaning of a word might change depending on context. Other words create implications via subtext. There is quite a lot of nuance involved when it comes to wordplay. That’s why I love it so much. A complex language for a complex person. 

Being complex, isn’t always a bad thing, however. Oftentimes, complexity is conflated with high maintenance. Not the same thing, although they might overlap. You can be complex in your personality, but simplistic in your goal setting. You might be easy to please but have varied interests that don’t seem to fit together. But that’s just it. Each person is a unique puzzle with differing pieces. There may be some similarities, but no two people are identical. Most people are complex in some areas, but simplistic in others. Not often will you find someone who is completely one or the other. As with most things, making it black and white oversimplifies things. Personally, I don’t like being told things in absolutes. Doing so makes it easy to think in terms of us vs them. I’ve taken enough sociology classes to know that that’s a dangerous place to be in.

When you think in terms of us vs them you have a tendency to make “them” the Other. There’s an in-group and an out-group. Good vs evil. Heroes vs villains. Again, that’s not how life works. Almost everyone thinks that what they’re doing is right. Everyone will find a way to justify their behavior, even if they know what they’re doing is “wrong.” What really defines right or wrong anyway? Everyone’s moral compass is different. So, what purpose does this really serve? You’ve created a sense of belonging at the expense of alienating others. In this system of constant in and out, there are outcasts everywhere we look. Are we not all humans? Should we not all strive for the same goal—making the world a better place?

Being an outcast is nothing new to me. I never really seemed to fit in anywhere. I’ve felt that way my whole life. Some things were within my control, some things were not. For a while it pained me, I was in a constant struggle between trying to find acceptance and trying to maintain my individuality. At times, I tried so hard to conform, not realizing that conformity isn’t in my DNA. It’s something I can keep trying to do, but now I know that it will never make me happy. Unfortunately, it took me quite a while to finally understand that. I maintained the war inside my mind, not knowing that I didn’t have to. I was free to be me in all my glory, if only I would let myself. But as I’ve said before, fear held me back. It prevented me from embracing every aspect. It forced me to suppress certain interests and qualities just so I would have a cleaner image. This cleaner image wasn’t real though, it was just a facade—not a very good one. It only served as a hindrance on my road to self-discovery.

Worse than lying to others, I was lying to myself. I was trying to convince myself that I was something that I was not. Trying to mold myself into a shape that fit neatly inside a cookie cutter, paring off parts of me that made me who I was. However, clean-cut was never meant for me. Conformity wasn’t the solution. Fitting inside a cookie cutter was not what I was called to do. I have varied interests and hobbies, it’s always been that way. I’m passionate about fantasy and sci-fi, but I’m also passionate about watching football. I appreciate literary art, but I also appreciate seeing people beat the shit out of each other in MMA. I love building Lego sets, but I also love killing things in RPGs. I like what I like, and that makes me who I am. I have gentler interests and I have more violent ones—they can co-exist. Without that duality, I am not the same person. If only I had been more accepting of that as a teenager. 

In High School, I hovered between the nerd crowd, the potheads, and the loners, not connecting entirely with any of them. It turns out I am in fact all three, but I never would’ve known it. I focused way too much of my energy on trying to suppress certain parts of myself that I didn’t want others to see, instead of loving me for me. I tried to hide who I was instead of trying to understand who I was. In trying to remove the parts of me that I didn’t like, I unintentionally actuated a cycle of self-loathing. Attempting to sheer off slivers of the cornerstone of my personality only led to inevitable disappointment, which caused me to spiral deeper into self-contempt. In all honesty, that’s probably why I suffered for so long. If you don’t love yourself, it shows through in the way you talk and the way you act. It’s not as well-concealed as you think it is.

Of course, it’s hard to see that when you lack self-awareness. It’s hard to do anything really if you have an unrealistic outlook on life. Unfortunately, that was me for a long time. My constant wallowing and self-pity blinded me to what was going on around me. I was incredibly self-absorbed but also incapable of improving my situation because I was stubborn and didn’t have a coping mechanism in place for dealing with adversity. If your primary instinct is to run or to hide from hardship, you’re in for a lifetime of pain. Emotional trauma that isn’t dealt with head-on isn’t going to heal on its own. Each new bit of pain that you repress is only going to make things worse. It’s easy to ignore your trauma or to suppress it, but it’s only a temporary fix, no better than a band-aid.

I learned that the hard way. For twenty-seven years I pushed the pain and adversity deep into the recesses of my mind. Each negative experience was tucked away, never to be thought about or dealt with, it hurt too much, but I was only delaying the inevitable—a nervous breakdown was imminent. Aside from failure, emotional pain was what scared me the most. This fear proved to be crippling, preventing me from moving forward with my life. I didn’t know it, but I was stuck dwelling on the past. Until I drilled down to the root, until I dealt with the things I was ignoring, I would not find healing and circumstances would not improve. I was stuck in a holding pattern, wanting better but seeking to achieve it in all the wrong ways. I naively thought I could set myself up for a bright future without addressing the past. Life doesn’t work that way. That will become clear to you in short order.

After a tough breakup my junior year of college, things began to spiral. All the issues that I had tried to ignore the previous seven years had stacked and were coming to a head. But instead of addressing them directly, I returned to the well-oiled machine of running, hiding, and ignoring. This time, however, I added a fourth item to the mix: numbness. I tried to numb my emotions with anything I could find: cigarettes, weed, alcohol. This was the physical anesthesia, but it was accompanied by psychological anesthesia as well. I dampened my expectations—bad times were bound to happen to me, and the good times wouldn’t last. The walls that were starting to come down during college, I built back up, higher than ever. I had a few friends that I leaned on for my support system, but I’d be damned if I let anyone new through—not before I’d had a chance to vet them first. I was living a hedonistic lifestyle without the hedonism, because pleasure no longer existed to me. Thus began my cycle of despair. Thus began my descent into nihilism.

Surprisingly, my attempt at numbness worked, and it was more effective than I had anticipated. So much so that for five and a half years I forgot what it felt like to be human. Each day was the same as the last. Stuck at a dead end job. Living a dead end life. I wasn’t happy, but I also wasn’t angry. I was in a perpetual state of melancholy. Low energy and unfeeling. A robot going through the motions, running through a preset program. Go to work, come home, get heavily medicated, go to sleep, eat only if I feel like it. The one thing I found solace in was that despite my aversion to emotional pain, I was still capable of feeling physical pain. I didn’t self-harm, but that was only because I’d found someone else to do it for me.

I’d known since Junior High that I was going to get tattoos later in life. It just took me a while before I finally got my first one. But once I did, it was an addiction that I had no intention of controlling. And it was probably better that way. Without this outlet, I probably would’ve been even worse off. For that half decade, tattoos were the only thing that kept me sane. The only thing that made my life feel real. The only thing that I could actually feel. Sure I got high every day, and sure socializing gave me a bit of a rush, but nothing beat the burst of adrenaline I got from a tattoo session. The physical pain of a needle reminded me that I was still capable of feeling. It reminded me that I was still human despite the nothingness that my life had become.

Numbing myself had seemed harmless at the time, but so too did running and hiding and ignoring. That’s how it all starts though isn’t it? The path to self-destruction doesn’t start out at that magnitude. You let the little things slide and they start to add up. Before you know it, several minor issues have become a monstrous one. That’s when life becomes overwhelming. That’s when you feel like you’ve lost control. That’s when the gears start spinning, but the wheels stop turning. Unfortunately, my story is not unique. Many young adults have been through the same shit. Ideally, you want to tackle your issues one by one, nip them in the bud before they have a chance to snowball. But oftentimes we don’t have all the tools we need to fix our problems and we don’t have the awareness to know when things need changing. Even if we do, we might not know what to pivot to or how to pivot when we find that things aren’t working.

But not all hope is lost. You’ve reached a dark day, but there is always a way out. It might appear to you in the form of a permanent, long-term catchall solution that brings about an end to your suffering. More likely, however, you will come across a temporary fix or several. There’s nothing wrong with that. Broken people need to find healing some way, some how. What matters is not how quickly you are able to heal, but rather how thoroughly. It might take you several tries to find the path of healing, but that’s okay. Once you acknowledge that things could be better, you’ve taken the first step.

Still, words mean little if there is no action to follow. It didn’t take me long to realize that living wasn’t fun for me anymore. I knew that as early as 2006, but I chalked it up to teenage angst. I believed that in time, my depression would go away on its own. How innocent. How naive. How misguided. It wasn’t until 2015 that I decided that I wanted more from life. I wanted to find meaning, to do something fulfilling, to be happy for the first time in a long time. Once again, there wasn’t any meaningful action to follow. I was too afraid, too nervous, gave up too easily. 

And yet, unbeknownst to me I had stumbled onto the right path. Everything happens for a reason. My adversity made me stronger. Everything I went through made me into the man I am today. The devil tried to bring me down, but he only made me better. The numbness hindered me more than it helped me, but it was necessary. Without it, I wouldn’t have gained a deeper appreciation for the little things in life. I wouldn’t have learned to cherish my emotions. I wouldn’t have learned how to feel again if I hadn’t forgotten how to in the first place.

The tattoos weren’t a landmark on my path to healing, but they led me to it. The physical pain couldn’t replicate my psychological pain, but it helped me to feel something. There aren’t many stories or meanings behind my ink, but they mean something to me. The physical scars masked my psychological ones. They didn’t bring meaning to my life, they didn’t make me feel better about myself, they didn’t buy me happiness. But what they did do was remind me of my humanity. Remind me that I’m not a program. Remind me that I am in control. My tattoos tell the story of a broken kid. Someone who had lost his way. Someone who had lost all hope. My tattoos didn’t change who I was, but they helped me to find what I was looking for. The numbness slowed the damage, but it wasn’t able to heal. The pain showed me that, at the very least I was real. And in that moment it was enough.