The O'Raven Chronicles!: My Anger Issues;

As of late it has been brought to my attention several times that I have anger issues as if I didn’t know this. Who among us doesn’t have a few at least? So as a cathartic therapy for myself I want to talk some of my issues. First off….I have a lot to be angry about. This isn’t an entitlement thing, or a wound-ology thing; it’s just a fact. I grew up differently than a lot of people. I had to parents who were both selfish in their own ways. My sperm donor as I like to call him was an abusive asshole. He was abusive to various degrees in every way that someone can be abusive. He also set a bad example of what a man is supposed to be. Besides being abusive he would constantly loose his job for years at a time while my mother had to work and support everyone. My mother well, she was selfish in a different kind of a way. She wanted me to be everything that I am not. She wanted me to be the way she thinks a man should be. I wanted nothing to do with the concept of manhood in her limited way of thinking. Somewhere deep down I know she knew that I was gay from a very young age. She did her best to squash every dream I ever had. She tried to change everything about who and what I am; everything that makes me…me. she tried to make me into someone I not only didn’t want to be, but someone I hated. I had gifts they didn’t want me to talk about. I had interests that were probably in their own way declarative of my sexual orientation. The truth is, despite what she likes to think even now, my mother hates me and everything about me. At least that is my truth, the truth the way I see it.

(Me and my Gran-ma)

I am thankful that I had two very kind and loving grandparents who raised me as best they could from the age of twelve or thirteen on. In a some ways however as blessed and thankful as I am to have had them and still have them; they became my crutch in life. They made me so dependent on them for everything that I never really learned to fend for myself. Emotionally and mentality, and to a huge degree even spiritually however I was left to raise myself. I was put through the wretched behavior of several private religious schools who liked to inform me constantly that I was worthless and was destined for hell. As if I didn’t get that message enough from my parents. Then I was taken out of private school, and thrust into the public school system. This is a fresh kind of hell I could never have imagined. This was real and true torture in every sense of the word. I will not bore anyone with all the details of what I went through at the hands of the kids or at the hands of the public school system. There aren’t enough blogs on the planet to tell my whole story of that. At one point in my life all I wanted to do was to die. I wanted to not be here anymore. I knew there was something better waiting for me on the other side. I arrogantly thought that I should be able to go there when I wanted…instead of when I was called. I learned better…thankfully! Really what I wanted was to feel loved....to feel like I mattered to anyone; to feel that I was worth it. My whole family was always full of endless drama and fighting. So what I really wanted besides love, was peace. I just wanted an end to all the war. I left school….the years of my life rolled by. I grew up in a world that has grown darker with each passing day. People are killing the planet. World leaders are more interested in who is right, than what is right. Our technology has becoming far more prevalent than our humanity. The art of communication; story telling, art, music, letter writing, and land line telephones….is all but gone. Now it is replaced by internet, cell phones, and twitter. Media outlets are controlled by the worlds governments and do nothing but lie and give editorials instead of facts. Commentary of someone’s perspective of the truth rather than the actual truth. This is not to say that there are not good things in the world. To be sure…I see at least one thing everyday that proves God’s existence, and proves that God is Love!

Sometimes it is so hard to get past the hate in the world. Right now, my truth is that the hate stems from five major sources; The Republican party, The Democratic party, Evil fundamentalist Preachers, Stupid Cowardly Atheists (the ones who bully people), and fundamentalist Islam. These five sources spread hate like a never ending disease on the earth. Who am I most angry at in all of this? The preachers! The men and women who go around and I God’s name spread fear, and hate, and ignorance, and intolerance, and evil. I am most anger at these people because out of all the others…they should know better! They should know that telling people to hate each other and to want to deny equality and rights to each other…is not only wrong, but far beyond evil. It is in fact a whole new level of evil the world has only touched lightly upon in the rest of human history. Now I can feel people out there reading this, going “Oh no…history is filled with hate and violence, and slavery”…and while that is true; never before has it been as easy and swift to spread hate as it is now with our inhuman technology. Recently an acquaintance got irritated at a statement I made that must have seemed plain stupid to him. I said… “When Land line phones go, that is when I will want to end it all”. To most people it would sound stupid. This is because they think I am merely talking about wanting to stop progress. What they fail to see in their limited view of the world is that to me land-lines are a tangible symbol, a real life metaphor that you can see, and hear, and touch that talks about happier times…at least some of the few happy times in my life, before the world went completely insane with this lust for power, hate, control, and this total wicked obsession with technology.

You might think this an ironic statement since you are reading this on the internet, on a computer. I promise the irony isn’t lost on me. Don’t misunderstand, it isn’t that I hate all technology. Quite the contrary in fact. What I hate is technology and so called progress at the cost of our humanity, and at the cost of getting rid of that which is good in the world. Now I go online every day and see endless news stories about hate, and all the negative things in the world. I see evil cowards like Richard Dawkins who tell people that God is a delusion, because he is too afraid of what it means if there is a God, and what that says about his own stupidity. It is not enough for people like him to tell people there is no God. They have to go on crusades to re-write history and travel the world trying to convert people to believing in nothing which is a huge part of the worlds problems. We have a planet full of people who either don’t believe in anything anymore, or who don’t know what they believe, or who don’t know how to express what they believe with love and respect for their fellow human beings! It is the greatest kind of cowardice to try and make other people not believe in something just because you have nothing to believe in inside of yourself! Then we have the two party American system who want to control everything we say and do. The democrats want big brother to decide everything for us…to force us to live the way they think we should live. They want to turn this place into a socialist communist dictatorship that even tells us what we can feed our children. They want to tell us that we don’t have the rights we were given at the founding of this nation. They want to take away our right to free speech and our right to bare arms, and our right to practice religion and spirituality as we so choose to. Then there are the republicans who are even worse because they want to do the one thing that our founding fathers would have hated even more; they want to try and use religion to control us. They want to turn this place into a theocracy. Never mind that extremist Islam, Extremist Roman Catholicism, and the extremists in the church of England should have taught us the absolute perils of doing this! Just look at history and also the current reality of the middle east and then try and tell me with a straight face that theocracies work well for humans. Human beings find new ways everyday to try and proclaim themselves gods over each other and control each others lives….and yet…joke of all jokes; I am not supposed to ever be angry. I am so sorry…not….but really…how am I supposed to not be angry?

Don’t get me wrong. Anger is not all I feel! I feel grateful despite all that. I feel truly blessed! I have people in my life who I love….and who I know love me in return! I have real family and real friends now. Also …again…I get up every day and see at least one truly good thing about the world! One truly beautiful thing that tells me how real God is….and how Loving and Awesome God is! Something that tells me, that I am surrounded by Love, and that God is all around me. I see something that tells me that we are all worthy even in our unworthiness. Something that tells me about the goodness in the world…and how deep that goodness truly goes. So I hang on to that one good thing each day, and I marvel at it, and I weep at its absolute beauty and miraculous-ness. I practice saying to God how thankful I am….even for all that is not good because the bad things teach me about the things that are good! So yes…I am angry…I would have to be dead or insane not to be, in my own opinion! I am also thankful for every minute I get of this life that I once wanted and tried to throw away, and now cling to with a desperate kind of hope and appreciation! I love being alive! I love seeing all the goodness in the world, though it gets a little harder each day. The harder it gets…the more I know…the harder I have to try. Because Life is a gift…not a right, but a privilege. A precious gift that should be treasured inside a thankful heart. So this is my resolution; I promise to try and be less angry. I also know that I will often fail at this; so I forgive myself ahead of time along with all the people in the world and all their negativity. It is all learned behavior, that can be unlearned. I also give myself permission to feel however it is I am going to feel…even angry, if that is what I feel! I give myself permission to stand up and be honest about my anger, and my gratitude…and anything else I feel. Now all of you reading this…forgive yourselves, forgive each other, remember to acknowledge and thank God, and give yourselves permission to feel…whatever it is you are going to feel. Feel it and let it go. Then find love, and feel thankful for it, find life; and feel thankful for that too! Blessed be!

Me again at different stages...