Unmasking The Fantasy
Finding Clarity and Connection in a World of Make-Believe
When I left Corrections, I didn’t care about what came next. I just needed a bridge. I knew I needed autonomy—anything to get me out of hell. Little did I realize then, there would be many complex levels.
Have you ever experienced a rebound relationship? That space where you don’t want to go single cold-turkey, but you also don’t want to be in a relationship—so you get involved with someone short-term, transitional, just to find yourself again?
Women tend to accept each other by talking about their partners, children, and other consistent characters in their lives. Conversations often revolve around judgments and gossip, with an unspoken expectation to align opinions. To participate in relationships with modern women, there’s often a pressure to share and agree on the same views.
Men have a tendency to project their ideas farther into the future when they are dissatisfied with the present iteration of what they signed up for, hopeful that it’s just a temporarily manageable condition. Men tend to tolerate much more than they ever get credit for, and they’re generally fine with it. To a point.
True masculinity has been conditioned out of our children over the past 30 years, and that is more than a little part of our bigger problems.
Looking back now, a decade after putting in my resignation, it’s all been nothing but a dream. It’s all over for me and cannot be returned to. The world I used to exist in isn’t there anymore.
I hate that. I want to go back and fix things. But I can’t. It’s too late. It’s all fantasy, it’s all fiction, it’s all make-believe.
Think about it. What is make-believe if not the acting out of ideas from our minds? It’s how we teach children to create, or rather, how we allow them to learn—for a while at least. The acting out of one’s ideas is innate. It’s our mode of expression. Stifled, one’s expressions become dark. More distressed. More intense.
Today I look around, both in the physical environments I occupy as well as within the virtual environments I keep tabs on, and it concerns me how blissfully—and often not so blissfully—unaware people are of the realities they’re existing in.
People don’t want to be stupid nor feel impotent, yet through the very consumption they’re accustomed to that is exactly what’s happening. Feeding on thoughts and products that fuel their continuation, in equivalent degrees of evolution. It’s a slow process that is rarely recognizable to anyone within the pod. Remember pods? This dynamic accelerates the rate of change.
So now what? What comes next? After a decade of experimentation, revisiting memories, and miracles. Clearly getting hit with the gravity of disillusionment.
I have no idea how or when I’ll learn the next things, but I know what I like and I know what I don’t like so far. I don’t know how or where or when or even if any of it will ever manifest, and at this point I am still loath to care. Open to everything, yet more discerning. The muse, ever stronger in presence.
Hindsight is the gift of reflection and the curse.
Who, what, when, where, why, and how? I don’t care. I don’t know. It’s the people I want and will always wish for, regardless of what baggage and backlash they’ve gathered along the way. They are the truth of my love. Of my life. Of my existence. I want them back—all of them. Not perfect, not fixed, just real. Back with their baggage, their mess, their humanity. This is the proof of my love. Of my life. Of my existence.