I often wonder why I live as if I am in fear of the other. It appears nearly anytime I communicate with somebody else, there's an intrinsic feeling of uneasiness: is my perceived and conditioned view of lack very clear to notice? Am I bothering the busy lives of with my manufactured parasitic-like presence? Why must I feel as if I am a plague to others, to consistently worry that even a fucking "hello" is something that will be warranted with hostility and hatred? People tell me I am fine and that I'm of no bother to them, but I seldom believe it. I always feel it's cushion wording, much like how people lie to terminally ill people. "It's all okay, you'll be out of here soon," failing to realize "out of here" is not what is implied at all, creating a disconnect between the one saying the words and the one receiving them. I feel this way very often when people assure me or praise me.

Guarding myself needlessly is almost second nature. Throughout my entire life, I've had numerous sour experiences that perhaps have shaped my fear of the other, of feeling almost intrinsically "unpure" around others. Such experiences come back to me in my darkest moments to help confirm the narrative that I am the most awful of awful people, even if I have no intention of ever doing hard to others. The first comes to mind when I was around 10 years old: I was almost abducted. My naive trust in the "other" could have likely resulted in me being put in a van and abused. Granted, I was smart even at my age to not trust strangers with the usual "help me find my lost dog" spiel, but I often think back to this moment and wonder about a great deal of things. What if I trusted that person? What would my life be like? How close was I really to being given an entirely different, potentially abusive and possibly fatal life? Would the people around me truly feel sorrow if this were to happen? While that experience really is of one man, his vices and manipulative games to take advantage of those possibly ignorant around him, that is surely a poor example to use of feeling "unpure" and as if I am intrinsically less than. That is all true, but unfortunately not the only time this were an issue or something I fall back on in my dark moments.

A more profound experience I had was when I was in 8th grade, which for where I lived, was senior year in junior high school. This was shortly after the Iraq War, and I got in a lot of trouble for remarks I gave about the war. While we were looking at political comics in class about searching for WMDs, I gave a remark something along the lines of "Why don't we just blow everybody up? There won't be no more wars." At the time, I didn't know this was the concept mutually assured destruction, and while I still hold the same views -- violence begets violence, so our goal is to turn those bubbles of division and dualism into bridges of unity and nonduality -- the school was not happy with these remarks. Amidst this, prior to a class trip, I was told to see the dean of my schools 'group' for the students were put in one of three groups. I thought this was about my absence the prior week due to illness, but it was about the remarks, and the school looked as if it had zero tolerance on this issue. Upon entering the dean's office, there was a security guard, and I was told to take off my shoes, empty my pockets, and to have my bookbag looked through. As this was going on, and as someone who never had confrontations with ascribed authority before, this became very stressful. They took that remark and looked for just about anything they could get on me to paint me as a bad person, or outright lie. They took a broken calculator cover and claimed I had a concealed weapon. They claimed they had me on tape running on tables in an art class and sniffing wite-out, for which I never did the former and they only assumed the latter because I foolishly thought putting a white outline on paper would create a better contrast. Eventually as this went on, my mother was called to the school, we were escorted by security out of the building, and I was brought to a hospital for mental evaluation. I was asked rather comical questions of "do you hear voices?" or if I wanted to hurt anybody, which of course I didn't. Upon the examiner learning the starting cause of all of this, he was outraged and came to me defence by comically telling the officers still with us that we "might as well drop McDonald's on them" or something to that nature in reference to the Iraq situation. While I was moved that the man stood beyond his task and stood up for accountability, that was just one man versus the six or so from the school that dealt with me that day. I can even have compassion for why they chose to take those measures: this was a post-Columbine climate, so they wanted to make sure they didn't have any seeds of violence looming in this schools. What I fail to have compassion for was the principal, for he was the only one who apologized for the accusations, seemingly only apologizing out of a status quo, and he also told me to "not talk about this with anyone." As a 13 year old, that was clearly not going to happen, especially considering that my dean went to my fellow classmates to ask about me. Once word got out, my close friends laughed and found it pretty funny because they knew I was more like Tom Green and less like some hateful, hurtful person, but word spread fast about what happened. People who knew of me but didn't know me saw me as the "crazy kid" and I was often made fun of and bullied to a degree on this issue, and for a young teenager, the issue of your image of self in a school setting is seen as critical. This affected me deeply, as I lost trust in the schooling system, and even begged my mother, on the verge of tears, to not attend graduation. I didn't want to be around people who saw me as some vile person, who made fun of me, and I hated the experience. I just wanted to be home and away from others, and it was perhaps in this experience that my feelings of "lack" really started.

My schooling from this point forward up until college was just withdrawal. As I was around the same people in highschool, I couldn't handle the labels and mockery, so I started cutting class and going to the local park, where I would just walk around for hours on end. The school I was in also didn't help me too much: I'm unsure on how high school classes worked for many people, but for my school it was a system similar to college: not every student entered and left the school at the same time. For me, despite living two physical blocks away from the school, I was given classes at 10 AM and out at 5 PM, which, again for a teenager, usually meant that after 5, you were home doing homework. This helped alienate me from the few friends I did have that knew me and that I spent time with, but more importantly, I asked for earlier times to be at the school because I was so close and absolutely hated being up at 6 AM and having nothing to do for a number of hours. I still deal with this "early bird" problem but that's something I can accept. I couldn't accept their aversion, their unwillingness to even entertain this, so I just bailed from classes and eventually stopped going altogether. I would just go the local park and spend my time there. Of course, I eventually did finish high school in my "senior" year by wanting to get something out of it, so I got my GED and was considered the "markee" student because this was one of the few times I applied myself and didn't let anything anyone said or thought of me get in the way. I even declined a job offer at a Manhattan bank, which the school offers their best students, because I wanted to "prove to the school I wasn't a loser and didn't want to mess this up." While I may still occasionally feel like I am nothing but a loser, I did apply myself in this case, and that all worked out.

After this, I essentially took a year being a recluse. I had no friends in my life, had no obligations, so I simply played video games as a form of escapism. During this time however, I did meet a woman who I grew to have feelings with, and it was what one would expect. This was all fine until a family revelation occurred: one of my siblings was molested by my uncle, who, occasionally slept in my room, but never with me. As I dealt with the stress of this experience, this is when the woman kind of "turned heel," if I can use a pro-wrestling term (this means she became a bad guy!) in that she used this stress as a weapon on me, to berate me, to humiliate me. The most hurtful of her words, and ones that still harm me even to this day, were along the lines of "You're just an undesirable. You're not even worth being easy bait for your uncle." What stings most is that feeling of identifying myself as an undesirable: why would anybody want me, after what I've been through? With my lack of talents or skills? With my clear arena of lacks and differentiations from so many others? The reason these words sting most, some 11 years after this experience, is I've never felt them challenged or defeated. They've always been a ghost that has haunted me, far beyond the domains of lovers but even in terms of just simply engaging with people. I have fear simply looking into the eyes of others, for my feelings of lack are so clear; can others simply see that by looking at me?

To hijack the term from the late Billy Mays, "but wait, there's more!" I've had a similar experience with a man as well, and while he didn't call me intrinsically unworthy, he sure did things that made me feel like I was. I was in college at the time and I would hang out with this person for hours over Skype, sometimes over 16 hours just talking and shooting the shit. I was getting feelings for him, and he for me at the time, and I remember expressing my feelings and crying about it. Not crying out of love, or even happiness, but from fear. The feeling of unworthiness made me feel guilt for having feelings in this way, that this was a problem because *I* was a problem. At the time, he assured me this wasn't the case, but those claims apparently had a half-life of a few weeks, for he chose to be in a relationship with someone else. This was fine, as I understood his reasons. What wasn't fine was he took this as an opportunity to berate me, to tell me all of the things he would do with her just to upset me, to make fun of the fact I would be upset, and that I was "bad best friend because you're not fun to be around anymore." I actually handled much of this quite well, even if what I did was once again seclude myself from others, but the dagger that came to strike me involved him and his mother, for he used her to tell me that he committed suicide, which of course he didn't do and I found this out later. At the time, I blamed myself for his death: he *was* right that I was a bad friend, because I couldn't help him, I couldn't save him. This was a very miserable period of my life, for I once again got into the habit of cutting classes and going for mindless walks. A few months after this, I found out he didn't kill himself but instead used this as an excuse so he could vanish into a rehab clinic, for he grew addicted to cocaine with the relationship he had with his girlfriend.

After *all* of this, which is about four years ago, I moved from the city to where I live now, and this was perhaps the greatest force of change in my life, even if I can't get the city boy blood out of my system. I became more aware of studying the self, and saw that many of my problems came from that: I identified with an image, a narrative, and it has and still has power over me in my life. I took the time from moving to listen to the words of Alan Watts, who is perhaps the greatest source of change in my life, for if I did not come across him, there would be a very likely chance I'd have killed myself by this point. His words on ego, on society, on purpose, on the "games" we play of what "I" really am, are quite potent and significant decades after his death, and it's his works that inspired me to study the mind, to have more compassion for people, even those who have faulted me, for we're really only our conditions and conditions, and to be a source to deal with the suffering in the lives of others. Most suffering is not of the world, but of mind: one quick look at a first-world country like America and you can see it in moments. And yet, despite this, this ghost of misery remains within me. I can feel at peace and less hijacked by these stories of shame and of filth when I am by myself, but when around others, it's gone. It's like the paradox of free will: it doesn't exist, and yet we feel caught in a view as if it does, and what I mean by this example is I can understand suffering and the "unity of things" in an honest way, but the second I leave my room, it's as if it has to go away for the usual games, shams, and illusions I and others have bought into. I have noticed this fear creeping more in my life as I aim to do more with others, do more for others, and to simply speak to others, and these feelings of innate inadequacy, lack, and even filthiness just hijack the screen of my consciousness. I attempt to numb it via soda consumption as me means of self-harm, for I am allergic to it, it leaves no visible scars -- I feel at times I am a human shaped scar -- and it blurs my vision, which is often the only way I can look at others and not feel that narrative of lack kick in: if I can't make out one's eyes clearly, which I find to be the most beautiful part of the human body, then I can't see them stare into the abyss of myself. I can't even take a picture of myself without my skin feeling like it's crawling, that I have to focus on something else to even *take* the picture, and this, among many other happenings, have helped me see I have a very dark view of myself, even if that is an image. It has as much potency as you give it, much like buying a scene unfolding on a TV: the TV isn't giving you emotion, it's your mind and the image on it that is.

The mind thinks in images, and for me, my mind consistently seems to create images of divisions, conflicts, lack, and inadequacies in me. Many times I can see past it, but many times it embodies me, and life becomes hell. I do feel the latter wins more than the former, and I eventually wonder is this is a losing battle. I can in the same breath wish well to all beings but exclude myself, to wish for a world based on reason but disqualifies me, to desire people to be happy but find a way to make that "but" an exclusion of me. It helps little that based on my experiences and interests I have few, if any, like-minded people who can grasp me or these issues, and for this reason, that likely compounds the feeling of loneliness in a world that is never lonely, feelings of lack in a space where nothing is lacking, to feel as if you are a mistake in a world where there are no blemishes to find, even with better eyes than my own.

Amidst all of this rambling, I am reminded of the quote from Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose words seem to ring quite deeply with me and this matter, and I wish to share them to whomever may read this.

"Ignorance is the utter lack of self-knowing. Most of us are superficial, shallow, have so much sorrow and ignorance as part of our lot. Again, this is not an exaggeration, not an assumption, but an actual fact of our daily existence. We are ignorant of ourselves and therein lies great sorrow. That ignorance breeds every form of superstition, it perpetuates fear, engenders hope and despair and all the inventions and theories of a clever mind. So ignorance not only breeds sorrow, but brings about great confusion in ourselves."