Finding my own truth! The continuing journey....

I have discovered traits about myself that disturb me. I have predatory instincts. I have found them useful in my work of driving the school bus and driving in general. My predatory instincts  have a positive use and I recognize that.  I am on more than 100% which is needed when driving.  It is a very effective tool, but being at more than 100% is exhausting over time. Driving the school bus is exhausting work and it is brutal! There are those that will tell you it is like driving a car, but it is not true for me.   Not understanding the pull of these instincts in the past caused me to hurt others and myself. Wow, what a revelation this is for me! These instincts seem to be connected to the hunter/gatherer self that is rooted deep in my being where the patterns of my behavior live.

I  have established myself as a loner for decades, isolating myself from trying to understand my feelings and that has contributed to my lack of understanding of who I am and what I am about.   My predatory instincts and my other feelings have caused me to make choices in my life that were not healthy or sustaining to my deep rooted spiritual connections. I have spent about 3 decades on and off attempting to recoup my spiritual path and have been fairly successful in doing so. Why on earth would all this be important to me? Because I have continued to struggle with my self acceptance over the last 5 decades, once I became self aware. It is important to me to understand the feelings that have propelled me to this point in time. This relates to that peeling of the onion that is described by some in 12 step programs and other self help situations. Mine has been a mighty large onion!

Let me point out I am beyond the blaming of my upbringing; finally!  I spent a lot of time blaming everyone else for my unhappiness in the past.  I am expressing my understanding of my feelings that have contributed greatly for the person I am continuing to evolve into. When I was growing up and tried to express how I felt to adults whether my parents or educators I was mostly not actively listened to.  Meaningful conversations about my feelings seldom came about. I heard more of don't worry about these feelings, they will pass or you can't be having these feelings;  you are imagining these things these feelings, they don't exist in my world, so how they possibly be real. This is what I continued to hear from others who were supposed to be listening.  

Almost all that I was told growing up left an indelible mark on me, a mark that has caused me much confusion and chaos about my own feelings. I grew up on the outside and instead of growing up on the inside and developing healthy choices I learned to insulate myself from others and instead become a bad example. My half hearted resistance that was caused by my lack of communication skills soon became full blown resistance and all I could do was be rebellious and disruptive! I was taught to do this by people who really didn't take the time to try and understand, but instead channeled me into all the negative categories.   All this why, because at that point in time, there wasn't the awareness that we have available today.  I stopped asking questions because I was made to feel bad for asking them. I felt bad because the answers I got were so negative. No one could seem to satisfy my need for answers because they apparently didn't understand the question and didn't know how to tease out more understanding. I have had to relearn to ask questions. It has been difficult and I can't always remember in the moment to ask a question I might have. Sometimes the question I should ask will come out as distant into the future as 2 weeks and I will have a moment of clarity, but the question is so far distant from the conversation, it is irrelevant.

Of course, I have a strong pull to a nomadic lifestyle which as I think of it matches my predatory instincts more closely than a fixed lifestyle where roots are established and built on. I believe that some past life experiences are rooted in whatever it is that tugs strongly on forming who we are. My feelings have never been fully understood by me and I wasn't helped to understand them in the past by my teachers. It was probably my parents responsibility to help me understand who I was and who I would be, but I never felt as though I had any guidance along those lines. It is only now in the future, when neither of my parents is around that I can see I was being taught some very good values that I have incorporated into my life.

My predatory instincts are still there and what I have discovered is discouraging to me, yet pushing me to investigate and understand who I am. In the understanding of my feelings, expressing them and exposing them to others here as well as myself a new freedom is emerging for me.  I have discovered I build unhealthy expectations about what is going to satisfy my predatory feelings. I pursue women who are unavailable to me, either geographically or emotionally. I don't follow the societal practices of communication because I haven't spent enough time or learning in my earlier years how to do those things. Instead, I have pursued them in the physical sense because of the adrenalin that excited me. I was confused about my feelings and confused about what love is. I would use the word love because I knew that it was powerful and would invoke strong feelings in the women, would cause them to feel strongly about me. (is this a sexual inventory? I don't think so, it is much deeper than that) Of course, I had little understanding of consequences, little understanding of what love is. I am now getting understanding that was delayed for so many decades when I should have gotten it.

I now understand and have some what is that emotion? I feel some regret for the two women that I new whom I loved and could not pursue because I didn't understand at the time. Too, impulsive I was and to drunk most of the time. Only as I  out that fog and stupor of addiction did I become to realize I had been in love and loved and let them both slip away!

Building a good foundation when developing through childhood and into adolescents and then adulthood is very important and I went from childhood to adulthood without developing that foundation. Because of that, I have had to wade back through my earlier feelings and actions that hurt people along the way, but most of all harmed myself. I harmed myself, because I was told I would amount to nothing. I set about proving them right. The weight of my guilt for actions that harmed me and others was huge and colored my actions so thoroughly up through my 20's and into my early 30's that I couldn't tolerate the negativeness of it any more. I slowly got a picture that change was necessary and I needed to stop the feeling of being the martyr.

"Existence, nothing but existence"

What is a sentient being, what is a question, what is life, what am I. I must be, suddenly! The sound, what is sound? What is what? Can an inanimate entity have feelings. Imagine, what? We are not forever, but it may seem so for a span of time.

It may seem we are a being, why? We are here now unless we are not. What is and what isn't in my reality. What is reality?