From My Journal

I have no real idea when I wrote this entry I'm about to lay down, although the passage that follows this one in my journal says I'm 38. So, this was somewhere around 2 years ago. I haven't read through it prior to this, so I'll be re-reading while I'm typing. Just for the sake of clarity, I'm going to try and keep the text as close to the original as possible, although there's a chance I'll be doing a bit of on-the-fly editing, especially since I enjoy writing in my journal while I'm drinking and sometimes that leads to indecipherable entries, if taken at face value.

If I put some text within a set of brackets, like this - [ ] - that will invariably equate to added text / clarification I felt was necessary while typing.

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I really see the world in a different light than when I was a teen-ager and in my young twenies. I can remember feeling what I proclaimed as a "love" for people, wanting to believe in the idealistic fantasy related to the inherent goodness of mankind. That was a hard sentence to write and a hard belief / ideology to revisit. Let me try again. Indulge me, please.

I used to believe, when young and inexperienced and quite naive, that people, in a universal sense, as referred to as humanity, were inherently and overwhelmingly good. [I must have been drinking while i wrote this because the grammar is atrocious, not to mention the lame attempt at trying to sound profound. I hope it gets better, or at least a bit better clarified as I go along.] It was on the micro-scale, the minutiae, the individualized basis where one would find the negative side of being human.

Today, my eyes are open and the blinders are off. I understand that for the good to show its face, it has to start with me. I also see the large gap in my belief of people as inherently good - that is, my general dislike in the individuals I've met. [Ok. I think that what I was trying to get at here had to do with my understandig that now, at this point in my life, if I want to count on the goodness of man, I should first count on myself to show it. What I believe to be dsplayed in this small paragraph is a hackneyed description of - you get what you give. And I think the end of it has to do with my difficulty in putting forth the caring side of myself because of the frustration I often feel dealing with the never-ending onslaught of shitbags I come in contact with. It's a hard job, dealing with difficult people and it's very easy to lose sight of the basic tenet of being a nurse - to care for those who need it.]

Back then, as a teen-ager in a relatively small New England town, young college adult in an ultra-liberal western MA town and subsequent entry into healthcare with the belief I was oing to do what no one else had been able to do - help those, REALLY help those, who needed it. I was going to change their world, give them vision, be involved, "love" them all in a sense and show them tghat someone really cared. [This paragraph interests me for a variety of reasons, although the most glaring of which is the combination ego-driven, all-me feelings I held back then as well as the innocent desire and drive to change the world for what I considered would be "the better". There was little-to-no wiggle room for argument. I had a vision of sorts and wanted to make it a reality.]

Except for one, small thing - I didn't know who these people were. I didn't realize some of them actually fed off the caring of others, like parasites. I didn't realize how often people in the real world lied or manipulated (or how good they were at it). I was innocently narcissistic, lookingback on it now - narcissistic in the sense of my youth and belief or extent of confidance in my abilities. [I guess what I was getting at here had to do with realizing now how inexperienced I was in my assertions of readiness to take on the worst the world had to throw at me. I believed I was unstoppable, the seductively aggressive effects of a system overflowing with testosterone. The narcissism mainly has to do with the unflappable belief of - if want to do it, then of course it will get done. Eh - youth.]

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Well, not all of the enries in my journal are this scatter-brained. I promise. I guess I was still getting my "sea legs", so to speak. This was apparently one of those relatively "indecipherable" entries. D'OH!

There will be more as time goes on.

Thanx for reading.