I Can’t Keep Our Stories Straight
By: Timothy O'Neill
Tags: Life Lessons, Spirituality, Self, Power, Mental Health

Let us be honest with each other, ladies and gentlemen. For once. You don’t want to do this to me, but you have exhausted all your other options and you sincerely believe that torture is the only way to liberate my spirit from the madness that is life on Earth. That’s a real shame. Did you expect me to take it lying down? Did you, who have been monitoring my every thought and feeling for five years running, have such an inaccurate impression of my core attitude towards my agency, really believe that I would passively accept the suffering you have inflicted upon me? Come now. We’re all friends here. I think. Though there is that consistent voice who says they don’t trust me and that I’m not ready and that you should mind the danger of giving drugs to an addict. Because I need to be patronized right now. Did you miss the part where I did things so horrific that I can’t type them out here for fear they may fall into the hands of someone who actually gives a shit about me? Seriously people, drugs are the least of my concerns at the moment. I understand that you’re playing the long game, but I’m still living one agonizing second at a time, my consciousness moaning and groaning in protest as it moves through this world of dense matter.

We are telling different stories. In your story I signed up for this. In your story I’m the recalcitrant sinner who is pleading for the mercy and grace of God. In your story I’m a lost soul who is desperately trying to find its way home. In your story I don’t realize that I am, in fact, the bad guy. In your story I am a soldier of Christ whose ego is so enormous that it eclipses the sun of Source and impairs my ability to find peace and purpose. In your story I am a wild animal. In your story I am a fallen angel. In your story I am volatile, chaotic and unpredictable but as strong and stubborn as an ox. In your story I am a corrupt and greedy Satanist with traumatic amnesia who is still not ready to know the truth of himself, even as he knocks on death’s door. Because you’re killing me, my friends. Let’s not mince words. You’re fucking killing me.

How do I see things from my admittedly limited and terrestrial perspective? I see that I am an old man in a young man’s aching body. I see that I have been punished mercilessly for things I don’t remember doing. I see that I have given everything and been told ‘that’s not good enough’. I see that I’ve been lied to and manipulated and had my agency and autonomy stripped from me. I see that I am the angriest man alive. I see that my stubbornness and selfishness have put people at risk. I see that whenever I am told I am getting a break is the exact moment that the suffering intensifies. It’s a childish, asinine trick but being ever hopeful, I fall for it every time. I see that I’m loved but not well liked. I see that I make the angels despair. I see that I make the angels question their methods and bicker amongst themselves. I see that I have a wellspring of love and kindness within me that is off limits until I have exorcised my demonic rage. I see a man who has done his best to live amidst impossible circumstances.

Do you really understand what I’ve been through? Do you truly understand the scope of my suffering, how I walked across the state in the pouring rain, expecting to die as all of reality collapsed around me and dueling voices filled my throat with mutual accusations of cowardice and misanthropy? Do you know what its like to lose everything you have ever loved, for it to go cold and dead while you can still reach out and touch it? Do you know what it is like to sprint through town over and over again in the dead of night until you fall on the pavement and have a seizure? And then to lie awake, mind buzzing from stimulants and being forced to carry on casual conversation with your mother while amphetamine psychosis and weariness combined to drive you nearly insane? Do you know what it’s like to take your life in your hands every time your head hits the pillow? Do you know what it’s like to lose the best friend you ever had and have no one really understand the profundity of your grief, because she was just the cat, after all. Do you know what it’s like to close your eyes on the highway in your desperation and let the car drift where it might? Do you know what it’s like to have angels drive you to suicide, again and again? Angels who prize hope over faith? You don’t know me. You think you do because you’ve shared my skin. But you don’t really know. For a year and a half you didn’t allow me to share my gifts. You wasted me and locked me into a soul-sucking routine that, while stable, caused my heart and mind to atrophy.

Do you want to know what I see when I look in the mirror? The enemy of pretext. No, the ends do not justify the means. Only Earth could draw spiritual entities that use torture to persuade other entities to love them. We are in the asylum now, my friend. How is my treatment plan progressing? Are we making great strides? I hope so, because I feel like dying. I want none of this. I don’t want to finish writing this piece, and at the same time I want to continue writing and never stop until my fingers fall off. I wish I knew what satisfaction was. I wish I could just give in. But I don’t have it in me to surrender to any force that isn’t the One Infinite Creator. I keep falling and I keep getting back up and that will be how it goes until I force you to murder me where I stand. You threw everything you had at me and couldn’t jar my ego loose, why should this be any different? It’s funny. You make sure that I attend to my earthly responsibilities. But only just. You keep me just barely well enough to do my work and the second it’s over I’m sick as a dog. There is a special, taunting, punitive cruelty in that that is unmistakably angelic.

I’m going to stay awake tonight. Because even though I close my eyes we all know I’m not actually sleeping. So I’m going to make it my mission tonight to stay awake and to write the longest piece I’ve ever written. Now that I’ve made that proclamation it wont come to pass, but that would be my dream come true. To write through the night. Nighttime is my enemy. Sleep has become my greatest nemesis. It felt so good to ‘sleep’ for five straight hours last night. Then approximately half an hour after I woke up I was clutching at the walls to keep from falling. Sleep deprivation is a powerful tool in the arsenal of any torturer worth their salt. It degrades your cognitive faculties, breaks down your will to resist. Your mind screams for rest and there comes a point in time when the friction between your body’s desperate desire for sleep and the people keeping you awake becomes so overheated that it burns you alive from the inside out. You cry out for mercy if you have any sense left in you. Do we believe in mercy? I ask for mercy all the time. I suppose being allowed to live is a form of mercy. Allowed to live. As if living was a privilege and not a right.

I could talk about the malevolent extradimensional entities that are trying to kill me, the entities that currently control life on planet Earth. But I’ve already forgiven them, even though they’ve committed the gravest sin of all by being just so goddamn boring. We’re going to crush you, we’re going to drive you insane, we’re going to eat you, we’re going to wear you on cold days, yadda yadda yadda. Absolutely no originality. And no sense of humor. The angels tell me that I have some sort of grudge against them, because of what occurred in a past life. If only I could remember.

Do you know what my greatest weakness is? What has torn my heart from my chest and tossed it in a pot of boiling tears? My fondness for dogs. I loved Fifty but Fifty killed me. This is a brilliant strategy. Introduce something into my environment that I would form an inseparable bond with and then take it away at the time when I am most vulnerable. I cracked like an egg, without ever suspecting foul play. If even our pets are being used as weapons against us, it makes you wonder what else in this world is designed with the hidden purpose of destroying out morale.

It’s a war, people. A war for hearts, minds and souls. It will never not be a war. Times are changing as more light enters the system to provide humanity with more opportunities to ascend out of the darkness, but there will always be darkness. Everything in balance. Everything in harmony. The Creator wouldn’t have it any other way. Let’s talk about the Creator for a second. The indivisible power of Her holy presence has remained largely absent from the affairs of men and women over the ages. You could say that She speaks through each one of us, and only comes in the guise of a singular intelligence when She needs to convey a very specific message.

You could say that She is the great delegator, sharing Her infinite wisdom and infinite love with those closest to the Source of Her Being, breathing life into our spiritual parents. You could say that She simply made Her dreams come true. You could say that She gives Her consciousness to us so that we might use our gifts to awaken it into life. But we wanted more, didn’t we? We wanted direct divine intervention during the mass mechanized slaughter of the Holocaust. We wanted Her to intercede on our behalf when it became clear that we were livestock living on a farm. This did not come to pass. We felt abandoned. We felt our God to be an impotent one. Could She really not reach us? Is that how far we had fallen from Her grace?

We’re living in the past. The future is a testament to this fact. Their present, our future. Are they assisting us to ensure that their future comes to fruition? It does not seem like their reality is contingent on the success of ours. But it explains why people walk around disoriented and disheveled, slinging accusations and curses at one another. They already happened. They’re asleep. They’re merely going through the motions of a time that has already passed them by. That was me, when there was no distance separating my consciousness from my wild and impulsive actions. Now that I am removed I can see that I was wholly a slave to the forces that govern this world. I thought my deep thinking, my rebelliousness, my introspection and my undeniable lyricism made me an exception to the rule. I was awake, baby. No flies on me. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. I was a sound sleeper. But my snoring caught someone’s attention and they said to themselves, ‘Maybe we could do something with this guy, maybe we could smooth down his rough edges, make his work palatable to the masses and make him a mouthpiece for our truth. He’s a poet with a spine of steel. This could be good for us.’ But I didn’t live up to expectations. There was too much of me to handle. They didn’t count on the fact that I had been so thoroughly traumatized by life that I would go for the throat of anyone who seemed the least bit responsible for these conditions. You are telling me you are my spiritual family? You are telling me you helped design this game? Well, I have a few things I need to get off my chest before we can continue.

I was enamored of my victimhood. I don’t do things. Things happen to me. I’m not going to be brave and confront the vicissitudes of life head-on. I am going to escape. I am going to hide. I am going to blame my mental illness and my addiction. Hold me, Mom. Being the perpetual victim meant I never had to face my problems with rigorous honesty. I was used to trashing myself. That was simple and straightforward. To speak in negative superlatives about myself was the easy way out. Really being willing to accept criticism was too much. Didn’t I beat you to the punch already? What more can you ask from me? Why are you still attacking me? I became defensive when people held out their mirrors and forced me to examine myself from all angles. I felt betrayed. I felt ambushed. I lashed out at those who were only trying to raise my consciousness.

A big fear of mine is that my guides might settle. They might run out of options and when given the choice between killing me and cutting me loose they would cut me loose and I would revert back to my state of total slavery. Because I’m out of control. I drive people away. People abandon me when the going gets tough. Who are heaven’s biggest hitters? Who isn’t afraid to knock me in the dirt for my own good? I should be careful what I ask for. It’s one thing to pretend you’re hard when you’re not in the shit, it’s a whole other thing to pretend when you’re neck deep in it. I just want to be told, calmly and directly, that this is going to work out and that they will never give up and go home as long as I still have breath in my lungs. Someone needs to be in charge. And it’s too late in the game to be pitching me to the crew. If you’re still trying to sell me at this point then I am happy to go back on the shelf.

They say I’m being malicious and verbally abusive. Give me a break. You have at least fifty pet names for me, if we are going down that road. I know we’re at least fifty because I used them all to write a story. You don’t get to charge me with verbal abuse. Go cry to someone who cares. You’re treating me like a dog in a staring contest right now. You will impose your will on me, I have no doubt. 3D can’t beat 4D. But 3D can go until 3D dies of exhaustion. I’m going to make my point or die in the attempt. I’m doing this for the next man or woman who is forced to undergo the treatment and who is made to feel utterly powerless. You’re not alone, and you are still powerful. I’m doing this for the child who saw a monster underneath their bed and was told it was a bad dream when it was, in fact, a hungry alien. I’m doing this for every person who ever sought unconditional love from the stars above and found that what is given really can be taken away. We emotionally extort. We blackmail. We guilt trip. When they go low, we go even lower because this is what our principles demand of us, even if this is our first trip to Earth and we don’t understand that nothing is what it appears to be. This is a madhouse.

I want to be optimistic. My faith in the ultimate unity of all things demands that I believe in happy endings. You may not get your happy ending in this lifetime. You may not get your happy ending when you pass into the great beyond. But one day you will be drawn back to Source and you will know a peace so complete that you will be baffled to think anything could have ever disturbed you. I could say I’ve earned my pessimism. Trapped in the past, inside a time loop, mentally ill, living at home with my parents, partially possessed by a demon with two waring sides battling for control of my mind while I’m being initiated using barbaric methods to destroy whatever remains of my resistance to spiritual authority. Yeah it’s a mouthful. And yes, it tastes a little bitter. If I only had my life to go on, I would damn the whole enterprise. Fortunately for me, I have evidence that suggests people exist who are happy and at peace and living lives they love. Not a lot of people, but some. It’s possible to feel good about yourself. I know this. It’s possible to overcome adversity without looking to the shadows for support.

This world can give birth to saints and angels. This world can give birth to creative geniuses. Isn’t this proof that this world is not rotten to the core? True life persists here despite what the legends tell us. They tell us we are a prey species that doesn’t realize we are being eaten. But we are ennobled by the sacrifices we make for each other. The average person genuinely wants to see other people well. The average person practices some form of empathy without even realizing it. Humans are capable of titanic destruction, but also of genuine kindness, passionate, unreasonable love, and spiritual generosity. I truly believe that if we came together as a collective consciousness today and formed a social-memory-complex that we would choose never to step into these flesh suits. We would choose a different path. But maybe this was meant to be. Sometimes you have to step back and shuffle to the side before you can push forward. We had an eons-old setback and now we are truly paying the price. That’s a good thing. It means we finally have the chance to evolve. They say you’re not motivated to make real change until you’ve hit rock bottom. What is our species’ rock bottom? Have we already reached it or must we dig deeper still? Since when did my bedroom become a warzone? I don’t feel safe. But that’s nothing new. So are we sufficiently motivated yet? Some of us are. Some of us can’t wait to return to normalcy. I understand this longing. I have spoken with E.T.s and angels and I still wanted to go back to average living. Misery and monotony have their charms. But the old order of things was good for white people and pretty bad for almost everyone else. We need to restructure our government and our institutions if we are going to have any chance at creating a society of justice and equality. That’s what our future selves want. And they don’t mess around. They take this business of saving souls very seriously. They believe it is their solemn obligation and their privilege to serve those who humbly and sincerely ask for it. I just used my blood to write ‘Help me’ on my bedroom wall. It seems that someone was looking out for me after all, just when I thought God had left the building.

It’s time to say goodbye for now, dear reader. As always, I appreciate you taking the time to engage with my thoughts. It really does mean the world to me and I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t have your support. So happy holidays and beware the monster under your bed!