I posted this on a different forum (that is, at another website) but I'm too much of a newbie to post URLs. So I must copy/paste.
I wrote this 9 days ago and was quite distraught when I did, to say the least. I'm mellow now and am on the road to recovery, but the concerns are still at the forefront of my current existence.
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Faith is easy when you have no choice...
...but it's like being under an iron fist when you find yourself wishing that you did.
What does that mean? I've seen too much to disbelieve. It would be like trying to convince myself the earth is flat. And I've tried! And over and over again, I have found myself wishing that I could. If I walked away, I could have a life of liberty, pursuing happiness out there in the wide, wide world. But I can't. I've tried. And I can't.
If you want to believe, then being incapable of doubt is a place of luxury. I have distant memories as to what that's like. But if you don't feel like believing anymore, if you desire to go off and live your own life, leaving it all behind... the term 'cognitive dissonance' doesn't even begin to describe it. Take the word 'torn' and all that it signifies in this context, and magnify it dozens of times over.
It's like being backed into a corner... all the time.
So with all that said, allow me to tell my story.
I am a 28 year old man. I currently reside in Las Vegas, Nevada (yes, people actually do live here) and hope to someday return to my native home of California. It's been pretty rough living here, but things weren't so great before I came, either.
My brother and I were raised more-or-less agnostic. The existence and general goodness (as opposed to badness) of God were halfheartedly acknowledged on sporadic occasion, but that made about as much difference as the fact that Beatrix is the Queen of Holland. My parents are good people, though.
I was saved at the age of 15 while in the throes of severe mental illness. Today the only diagnosis that still stands - or that has any discernible consequences - is Asperger's Syndrome, which is a mild form of autism. God healed me of what the shrinks understood to be "childhood schizophrenia" just before I turned seventeen.
Well, I think by the time I was 25 or so, things really started to suck for me in a lot of ways. There are many horrible nightmare experiences that would make elite special operations troopers run screaming into the night in their terror that I have been subjected to over and over again throughout my life... things that most of you in here would refuse to believe... things that Hollywood couldn't come up with. But that's not what's chapping my hide... because a man can get used to just about anything. But there's one thing I just can't get used to, and that has caused me to become the way that I am: woman trouble.
As a teenager I never dated anybody in the youth group I was inducted into because I was too far behind the curve to learn or use the necessary social skills. Well, that, and there weren't very many date-able girls. That youth group (back in my home area of Los Angeles) was a rare phenomenon... maybe 10% of the kids there were church kids, and attendance on a normal Wednesday could be as high as 200 (and it was an otherwise small church). Many of us were drug addicts, gang members, street kids, you-name-it. And as such, even if I'd of had the skills, there were very few girls I could have dated. Kids were always going in and out of there... you'd see some people once and never again, and then twenty more would show up out of nowhere and stay for a bit. It could be very chaotic. And of those that were saved, many were struggling (to put it gently). I knew even then that it would be unwise to date most of them. I had my share of crushes that went nowhere, of course.
Well, I almost dated one girl when I was 18 and she was 15. She all but asked me out, but I chickened out. She would have been my first girlfriend. Still, I went on to form a very deep attachment that I would pay for dearly. Well, she was on-and-off hard drugs (roller coaster ride), starting to develop symptoms of schizophrenia (her mother had it), always seemed to be inches from being turned out onto the street, and at one point she attempted suicide. Her relationship with God also seemed to change with the wind. And you know... I think all the things that happened to her hurt me more than they hurt her. That took a lot out of me.
Second time out it was an internet thing. I met her through a Christian chatroom. By day three of intensive chatting, she was claiming to be madly in love with me. Well, here's the irony. For the first and only time in my life, after what seemed like a lifetime of heartache and desperation, I finally caved in one night and said "God, if I don't ever end up with anybody, if you don't have nobody for me... I guess I'll be alright with You." And suddenly, unexpectedly, I was at peace. I was content. It didn't seem natural. I expected only more misery and disappointment, and could only hope that the desire would diminish and wither over time.
Literally, the very next day, this girl that I'd been talking to for all of three days, who lived up in northern California, professed her undying love. Together with the fact that she looked real hot in her picture, and my figuring that it couldn't possibly be a coincidence made me go "woohoo!!! After all these years, God is finally rewarding me with a woman!!! How 'bout dat!?"
If I wouldn't have been suppressing my instincts and better judgment, I would have realized that it was more along the lines of a terrible test. This chick turned out to be nuts. She told me she had AIDS and had but a few years to live. I freaked out and ran like my backside was on fire, but then three days later I came back and said something along the lines of "you don't deserve to be abandoned because of that... and maybe I'll end up being the one who holds your hand on your death bed." A kind heart, a rigid and towering sense of ethics (common in people with Asperger's Syndrome), and a lifetime of crushing desperation will do that to you.
Well, shortly after I went up to stay at her house for a week, it hit the fan. She embezzled a bunch of money and disappeared, and when they found her she was shacked up with some girl, having gone back to lesbianism. Then I found out that she lied about having AIDS just to mess with me, as well as having lied about just about everything else. This all went down during the week of 9/11. So while I was having my heart stomped on by a steel-plated knightly riding boot, I also had to deal with the fact that the 21st century had just begun with a bang and that World War III could very well be just around the corner, with me as one of its billion or so combatants due to the biggest draft since 1942. Not fun.
Even after all that, I offered to take her back. She thought about it a bit and said no, with her mother as the intermediary. I got the picture and took off... an amazing amount of damage done.
Two long lonely years later I dated again. The next one was the least screwed up... on the surface. She was the middle child and oldest daughter of the senior pastor at the church I was going to. Well, once I started dating her, I left my old church (had been looking for a reason for a while) to attend hers, which was three freeways away in another part of the city. (That's L.A. for you.) It lasted about a month. Things were going great the first half of that month... I was flying high as a kite, and it felt like I was finally gonna get a break.
Then it got weird. The communication shut down, and the more distant she got, the more frantic and desperate I got. Obsession (another Asperger's trait) overtook me to the point that I was nearly barfing, day-in and day-out. After three days of cloistering myself away from all human contact and sleeping 14 hours a day (I normally sleep 6) I reached the breaking point and decided to end it. So I fired up the computer to type up a letter, and lo and behold, she had beaten me to the punch via e-mail.
It never got to the point where we were boyfriend/girlfriend (according to her), but if it would have, we would have been each others' firsts. I think she tried to date some guy when she was in high school but it was similarly underdeveloped. I was about 23 or 24 at the time; it was the year 2003. I recently heard that she's dated a whole lot of nobody ever since, and is retreating ever further inward into her own little world, and it doesn't surprise me. I've got issues... she's got issues... issues, issues, issues.
There was one sentence in that e-mail... if she would've left it out, I would've been juuuuuuuust fine. It said "but maybe we'll get back together in the future." So in my mind, the word "over" was superseded by the word "hiatus." I figured... all I had to do was play my cards right, and I'd get her back. She strung me along for the next year or so, because I was still at that church and still saw her at least once a week, oftentimes more. Well, it's not so much that she strung me along... it's that she couldn't bring herself to tell me the truth. (The truth is, she didn't mean those words at all, and just kinda threw that half-baked clause in to soften the impact.) All she could do was treat me with ever more nastiness and bitterness, hoping that I would eventually get the picture.
Well, stupid and stubborn me... desperate and clingy... it only made me try harder. Which made her amp it up even more. Things were getting very ugly and I would daresay that it (and a large interconnected plethora of related events, dynamics, etc.) nearly caused our young adults group (and possibly by extension, the entire church; it was a very twisted web that was being woven) to go down like the Titanic. That was the worst two years of my life, because after she told me the truth, very bad things (heck, worse things) continued to happen, which was why it wasn't just one year of madness but two. (A two-fer-one special!) I can't even begin to go into detail as to all that went down, and you can already tell I don't hold much of anything back. It was the worst experience of my entire life, and it dragged on for two whole years.
In the span of that two years, I expended everything I had to keep our group and that church from blowing apart. That church would have died much, much sooner than it did if it weren't for me, my brother, and another guy who was capable (whether he wanted to be or not) of seeing what was going on. I think I'm pretty good at what I do... under normal circumstances. My brother and I made for quite a team, and the other guy could be useful whenever his heart was in it. But throw matters of the heart into the mix, emotions and whatnot... well, that job (as abstractly and vaguely as I can put it, it entails the defending of the fortress) already takes enough of a toll on anybody 'lucky' enough to get collared with it. So... to make an already beyond harrowing situation much, much worse....
Parts of me got all crooked, and rife with painfully glaring, dissonant contradiction. I came to hate her with a flaming passion, and even more so her psycho uber-manipulative best friend who was trying to ruin my life, her life, and the lives of others. It must have been what daytime television is like in the 5th or 6th circle of hell. The experience broke me. Almost literally, parts were falling off. I had to go into behavioral cognitive therapy because, literally, I was experiencing cognitive malfunction. It worked to a satisfactory degree, I can say. But you know the one thing that helped the most in moving past all that as much as I could? Moving to Vegas, baby! And getting away from those people. That was in August of 2005. I've been here in Sin City ever since.
And then one year later I was on the pathway to becoming a raging drunk, avoiding church and associating it with only pain and disappointment, and feeling more lonely and desperate and bitter than ever. An all too familiar situation here in Sodom on the Sand. But still, I could not slip away... I'd seen too much, knew too much, had been shown too much....
I tried dating this foxy 40 year old woman (a "cougar", as such a creature is often referred to as). Came real close to losing my virginity. All I had to do was clean my apartment up a bit and buy condoms, and boy howdy was I debating it... and while I was debating it, she was practically demanding it. But then she started saying all this stuff about me being husband #3 and the father of kid #2, so I switched to level 3 emergency alert status and initiated Operation Cut-and-Run.
There was this other time where I almost lost my virginity to a heavily tattooed and notoriously psychotic girl in the bathroom of the bar across the street from my pad... were it not for the bartender intervening and causing the romantic moment to evaporate. That's also the place where I met the older woman.
The last time I went to that bar (last Thursday) I was solicited by a high-dollar escort (I had fun annoying her with my imperviousness to her charms) after narrowly averting a hostile challenge from an ex-convict who was twice my size. Man, I hate that place. I used to be a regular but then I realized how much the place sucks, even compared to all the other open-24-hours lowlife-filled video poker-featuring Vegas neighborhood dives. I was there last Thursday because I felt I needed a few whiskeys to help temporarily deal with the situation that is going to cap off this excessively long introductory post of mine.
So now for the finale... the event in a series of events that leads me to this here website.
I wrote this 9 days ago and was quite distraught when I did, to say the least. I'm mellow now and am on the road to recovery, but the concerns are still at the forefront of my current existence.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Faith is easy when you have no choice...
...but it's like being under an iron fist when you find yourself wishing that you did.
What does that mean? I've seen too much to disbelieve. It would be like trying to convince myself the earth is flat. And I've tried! And over and over again, I have found myself wishing that I could. If I walked away, I could have a life of liberty, pursuing happiness out there in the wide, wide world. But I can't. I've tried. And I can't.
If you want to believe, then being incapable of doubt is a place of luxury. I have distant memories as to what that's like. But if you don't feel like believing anymore, if you desire to go off and live your own life, leaving it all behind... the term 'cognitive dissonance' doesn't even begin to describe it. Take the word 'torn' and all that it signifies in this context, and magnify it dozens of times over.
It's like being backed into a corner... all the time.
So with all that said, allow me to tell my story.
I am a 28 year old man. I currently reside in Las Vegas, Nevada (yes, people actually do live here) and hope to someday return to my native home of California. It's been pretty rough living here, but things weren't so great before I came, either.
My brother and I were raised more-or-less agnostic. The existence and general goodness (as opposed to badness) of God were halfheartedly acknowledged on sporadic occasion, but that made about as much difference as the fact that Beatrix is the Queen of Holland. My parents are good people, though.
I was saved at the age of 15 while in the throes of severe mental illness. Today the only diagnosis that still stands - or that has any discernible consequences - is Asperger's Syndrome, which is a mild form of autism. God healed me of what the shrinks understood to be "childhood schizophrenia" just before I turned seventeen.
Well, I think by the time I was 25 or so, things really started to suck for me in a lot of ways. There are many horrible nightmare experiences that would make elite special operations troopers run screaming into the night in their terror that I have been subjected to over and over again throughout my life... things that most of you in here would refuse to believe... things that Hollywood couldn't come up with. But that's not what's chapping my hide... because a man can get used to just about anything. But there's one thing I just can't get used to, and that has caused me to become the way that I am: woman trouble.
As a teenager I never dated anybody in the youth group I was inducted into because I was too far behind the curve to learn or use the necessary social skills. Well, that, and there weren't very many date-able girls. That youth group (back in my home area of Los Angeles) was a rare phenomenon... maybe 10% of the kids there were church kids, and attendance on a normal Wednesday could be as high as 200 (and it was an otherwise small church). Many of us were drug addicts, gang members, street kids, you-name-it. And as such, even if I'd of had the skills, there were very few girls I could have dated. Kids were always going in and out of there... you'd see some people once and never again, and then twenty more would show up out of nowhere and stay for a bit. It could be very chaotic. And of those that were saved, many were struggling (to put it gently). I knew even then that it would be unwise to date most of them. I had my share of crushes that went nowhere, of course.
Well, I almost dated one girl when I was 18 and she was 15. She all but asked me out, but I chickened out. She would have been my first girlfriend. Still, I went on to form a very deep attachment that I would pay for dearly. Well, she was on-and-off hard drugs (roller coaster ride), starting to develop symptoms of schizophrenia (her mother had it), always seemed to be inches from being turned out onto the street, and at one point she attempted suicide. Her relationship with God also seemed to change with the wind. And you know... I think all the things that happened to her hurt me more than they hurt her. That took a lot out of me.
Second time out it was an internet thing. I met her through a Christian chatroom. By day three of intensive chatting, she was claiming to be madly in love with me. Well, here's the irony. For the first and only time in my life, after what seemed like a lifetime of heartache and desperation, I finally caved in one night and said "God, if I don't ever end up with anybody, if you don't have nobody for me... I guess I'll be alright with You." And suddenly, unexpectedly, I was at peace. I was content. It didn't seem natural. I expected only more misery and disappointment, and could only hope that the desire would diminish and wither over time.
Literally, the very next day, this girl that I'd been talking to for all of three days, who lived up in northern California, professed her undying love. Together with the fact that she looked real hot in her picture, and my figuring that it couldn't possibly be a coincidence made me go "woohoo!!! After all these years, God is finally rewarding me with a woman!!! How 'bout dat!?"
If I wouldn't have been suppressing my instincts and better judgment, I would have realized that it was more along the lines of a terrible test. This chick turned out to be nuts. She told me she had AIDS and had but a few years to live. I freaked out and ran like my backside was on fire, but then three days later I came back and said something along the lines of "you don't deserve to be abandoned because of that... and maybe I'll end up being the one who holds your hand on your death bed." A kind heart, a rigid and towering sense of ethics (common in people with Asperger's Syndrome), and a lifetime of crushing desperation will do that to you.
Well, shortly after I went up to stay at her house for a week, it hit the fan. She embezzled a bunch of money and disappeared, and when they found her she was shacked up with some girl, having gone back to lesbianism. Then I found out that she lied about having AIDS just to mess with me, as well as having lied about just about everything else. This all went down during the week of 9/11. So while I was having my heart stomped on by a steel-plated knightly riding boot, I also had to deal with the fact that the 21st century had just begun with a bang and that World War III could very well be just around the corner, with me as one of its billion or so combatants due to the biggest draft since 1942. Not fun.
Even after all that, I offered to take her back. She thought about it a bit and said no, with her mother as the intermediary. I got the picture and took off... an amazing amount of damage done.
Two long lonely years later I dated again. The next one was the least screwed up... on the surface. She was the middle child and oldest daughter of the senior pastor at the church I was going to. Well, once I started dating her, I left my old church (had been looking for a reason for a while) to attend hers, which was three freeways away in another part of the city. (That's L.A. for you.) It lasted about a month. Things were going great the first half of that month... I was flying high as a kite, and it felt like I was finally gonna get a break.
Then it got weird. The communication shut down, and the more distant she got, the more frantic and desperate I got. Obsession (another Asperger's trait) overtook me to the point that I was nearly barfing, day-in and day-out. After three days of cloistering myself away from all human contact and sleeping 14 hours a day (I normally sleep 6) I reached the breaking point and decided to end it. So I fired up the computer to type up a letter, and lo and behold, she had beaten me to the punch via e-mail.
It never got to the point where we were boyfriend/girlfriend (according to her), but if it would have, we would have been each others' firsts. I think she tried to date some guy when she was in high school but it was similarly underdeveloped. I was about 23 or 24 at the time; it was the year 2003. I recently heard that she's dated a whole lot of nobody ever since, and is retreating ever further inward into her own little world, and it doesn't surprise me. I've got issues... she's got issues... issues, issues, issues.
There was one sentence in that e-mail... if she would've left it out, I would've been juuuuuuuust fine. It said "but maybe we'll get back together in the future." So in my mind, the word "over" was superseded by the word "hiatus." I figured... all I had to do was play my cards right, and I'd get her back. She strung me along for the next year or so, because I was still at that church and still saw her at least once a week, oftentimes more. Well, it's not so much that she strung me along... it's that she couldn't bring herself to tell me the truth. (The truth is, she didn't mean those words at all, and just kinda threw that half-baked clause in to soften the impact.) All she could do was treat me with ever more nastiness and bitterness, hoping that I would eventually get the picture.
Well, stupid and stubborn me... desperate and clingy... it only made me try harder. Which made her amp it up even more. Things were getting very ugly and I would daresay that it (and a large interconnected plethora of related events, dynamics, etc.) nearly caused our young adults group (and possibly by extension, the entire church; it was a very twisted web that was being woven) to go down like the Titanic. That was the worst two years of my life, because after she told me the truth, very bad things (heck, worse things) continued to happen, which was why it wasn't just one year of madness but two. (A two-fer-one special!) I can't even begin to go into detail as to all that went down, and you can already tell I don't hold much of anything back. It was the worst experience of my entire life, and it dragged on for two whole years.
In the span of that two years, I expended everything I had to keep our group and that church from blowing apart. That church would have died much, much sooner than it did if it weren't for me, my brother, and another guy who was capable (whether he wanted to be or not) of seeing what was going on. I think I'm pretty good at what I do... under normal circumstances. My brother and I made for quite a team, and the other guy could be useful whenever his heart was in it. But throw matters of the heart into the mix, emotions and whatnot... well, that job (as abstractly and vaguely as I can put it, it entails the defending of the fortress) already takes enough of a toll on anybody 'lucky' enough to get collared with it. So... to make an already beyond harrowing situation much, much worse....
Parts of me got all crooked, and rife with painfully glaring, dissonant contradiction. I came to hate her with a flaming passion, and even more so her psycho uber-manipulative best friend who was trying to ruin my life, her life, and the lives of others. It must have been what daytime television is like in the 5th or 6th circle of hell. The experience broke me. Almost literally, parts were falling off. I had to go into behavioral cognitive therapy because, literally, I was experiencing cognitive malfunction. It worked to a satisfactory degree, I can say. But you know the one thing that helped the most in moving past all that as much as I could? Moving to Vegas, baby! And getting away from those people. That was in August of 2005. I've been here in Sin City ever since.
And then one year later I was on the pathway to becoming a raging drunk, avoiding church and associating it with only pain and disappointment, and feeling more lonely and desperate and bitter than ever. An all too familiar situation here in Sodom on the Sand. But still, I could not slip away... I'd seen too much, knew too much, had been shown too much....
I tried dating this foxy 40 year old woman (a "cougar", as such a creature is often referred to as). Came real close to losing my virginity. All I had to do was clean my apartment up a bit and buy condoms, and boy howdy was I debating it... and while I was debating it, she was practically demanding it. But then she started saying all this stuff about me being husband #3 and the father of kid #2, so I switched to level 3 emergency alert status and initiated Operation Cut-and-Run.
There was this other time where I almost lost my virginity to a heavily tattooed and notoriously psychotic girl in the bathroom of the bar across the street from my pad... were it not for the bartender intervening and causing the romantic moment to evaporate. That's also the place where I met the older woman.
The last time I went to that bar (last Thursday) I was solicited by a high-dollar escort (I had fun annoying her with my imperviousness to her charms) after narrowly averting a hostile challenge from an ex-convict who was twice my size. Man, I hate that place. I used to be a regular but then I realized how much the place sucks, even compared to all the other open-24-hours lowlife-filled video poker-featuring Vegas neighborhood dives. I was there last Thursday because I felt I needed a few whiskeys to help temporarily deal with the situation that is going to cap off this excessively long introductory post of mine.
So now for the finale... the event in a series of events that leads me to this here website.
And we suffered. And we stewed in resentment. And we grew bitter, even hateful.
It's so hard. It really is. I really hope I can make it. 
