growing up in the 80s and 90s, an abusive past, evolving awareness (Page 1 of 2)

This forum has been meaning a lot to me lately, and helping me find some perspective on things I have been dealing with. What began as a short post turned into this really long journal entry about my experiences growing up as a kid in America in the 80s and 90s (I'm 26 this year) and my unfolding awakening to awareness of the larger issues at play in this world. I've decided to post the full thing hear as I feel like it may resonate with some of you who have experienced that same thing. And maybe you can write about your responses to it and that could be nice to. Anyway thanks for your patience.
[I edited this post on 9/27 to put the formatting back in and break it up a little so it would be easier to look at]

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I am very frustrated from reading all the conflicting information on the internet. I feel as though I am too confused by everything and it is frustrating to me.
My back hurts all the time, I cannot seem to make it stop hurting. I stretch and do yoga but it does not make the pain go away basically at all. I constantly feel as though I am sitting in uncomfortable chairs. I feel extremely sad.

Throughout school I was alienated and picked on regularly. I have never had a social life that felt rewarding. Kids in my age group always seemed a year or two of development behind me (I recall thinking this starting around age 10) and most social experiences were centered around shared media experiences; watching TV or a movie, playing video games, reading comics, absorbing corporate media. At the same time, I was eating a very Standard American Diet, including school cafeteria food, with lots of meat and cheese. (Only at age 25 did I discover that I am allergic to dairy/lactose. When I finally went vegan, I lost nearly 30lbs, having spent years and years of daily excercise regimes etc but still eating dairy, and not losing a pound!) In fourth grade, I began being picked on and teased for being "different", I was into books and lots of "alternative" interests. I didn't understand references to popular tv shows and movies that kids constantly made, and many of the jokes I would try to make were more intellectual, having come from some obscure british comic or Shakespeare play. I became the "weird kid" in class. That summer I became horribly sick and had to have exploratory surgery, where it was found that I had a toxic case of appendicitis. The large scar that ran from below my ribs to the top of my waist had to be sealed with surgical staples. The scar was so tender that I could hardly do any physical excercise, anything that involved stretching. I began putting on weight and spending increasing amounts of time playing videogames. I also experienced a lot of back pain as a child and only last year was diagnosed with a mild scoliosis in the middle of my spine, which I have apparently had since a kid.

In middle school I experienced relentless emotional abuse and teasing from my peers, to the point that I developed compulsive nervous tics, such as being obsessed that my hair was "perfect" by encasing it in tons of hair spray. I also began listening to heavy metal and wearing all black, mainly black tshirts with metallica and megadeth logos and horror film imagery. Middle school is a blur of daily abuse, there are many gaps in my memory, but I do not necessarily suspect anything repressed that I cannot remember.. I think it was just so horribly bleak and boring that there is really very little to remember. It all felt like an endlessly repeating day of psychological abuse. By the time I was in 9th grade, beginning highschool, I weighed almost 230lbs. The daily teasing pretty much dried up in 10th grade, at which point I was dressing in all black military fatigues and long trench coat, combat boots and t-shirts for industrial groups like Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Inside I felt like a gentle, caring person who felt love for the beauty of the world, but the superficial pettiness of children in my age group was utterly confusing to me and I felt incapable of expressing myself properly. Even as a child I had always been very accepting of others, encouraging, and very open and trusting. Public school was a complete rape to my emotions and any sense of self-esteem was torn to shreds, year after year. I am sure from the outside I must have looked like a hulking, sad-sack chubby goth kid. At the time, I was the only person in my school who dressed this way (mid 90s), and I thought I had thought of it myself from reading William Gibson Neuromancer and Shadowrun and watching old industrial music videos. Little did I know that within a year or two the whole style would be commodified and packaged for sale at local malls across the country by Hot Topic et al. By the time I graduated, there were FOUR other kids all wearing long black trench coats etc. This was a year before the Columbine murders which brought the concept of the "trench coat mafia" to the forefront of national awareness. Nowadays I see kids as young as 5th grade rocking this gothic, S&M bondage-inspired fashion, and its all for sale at the mall even in podunk rural towns.

What else happenened in my childhood? I was circumcised, which has caused me many problems that are more embarassing than I want to get into here. Believe me, it does seriously effect a man, only now that I am learning about it can I begin to see so many personal issues I experienced that seem to be the result of circumcision. I have appreciated other people posting about it on here. I also received every vaccine that was given to the public, all through the 80s and 90s. According to researchers of mind control like Fritz Springmeier, the 70s and 80s were a period when the pediatric profession was becoming heavily infiltrated by programmed multiples, along with pretty much all the other "leading" professions (dentistry, education, law). I was a very young child growing up in the middle of that. If I was subjected to any sort of "programming" or traumatic abuse, I have zero memories of it. I am aware of the research many have made, and its implications.

By the time I graduated highschool, I was so alienated from my peers, that I spent much of my time on the computer, researching all the obscure bands and films and authors that I obsessed over. I was very good with computers, so I went to the local university for a degree in Information Technology (IT). I would never have chosen to go to school, because I was utterly sick of school, but with no friends to connect with in other towns, no financial power of my own, and crippling dysfunctional lack of self esteem, I could only imagine staying in my home town for school. So I went to college, experienced the same alienation mainly, with a few exceptions, and also was introduced to pot and psychedelics. I began smoking pot weekly in my sophomore year, and like many people on here, it was among my first experiences of actually feeling calm, feeling perspective on my constantly screaming emotional pain, seeing that change was possible, seeing that I was NOT who I had defined myself as: a fat depressed broken kid. I started reading tons of books by John Lilly, Tim Leary, Terence McKenna, all those big names. I thought that psychedelics were fascinating, but only got to experience a couple times under very mediocre circumstances and never really got into them experientially, just read about them. All the people who I made friends with who used drugs were all burned out kids trying to escape and "party". I remember a kid bragging to me that when he took acid, he could drink a 24 pack of beer and "not even feel it". That was the vibe overall, insane excess. These were not introspective people. I was. I smoked pot and sat alone in my room, and drew, and journaled, or worked on music. Even now, I see a lot of people on NR with a very critical attitude towards marijuana, and I still feel like the verdict is out for me, because there are SO many positive things about it and I really feel that turning into a "burnout" or getting all paranoid, or just going into a mental fog and never doing anything, is a personal CHOICE, it is not something marijuana forces you to become! Perhaps it is because I always knew that drugs could NOT be an escape, in any sense. They always wear off, they are never permanent, and you have to deal with your REAL LIFE at some point whether high or not. But to experience a different state of consciousness, in which I was NOT being compulsively critical of myself, terrified of the seeming irrationality of people around me, was a HUGE change for me.

In my junior year, I went to Japan on an exchange program, and stopping smoking pot entirely for a year, but experimented with drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes for the first time. I found that both made me feel either gross or had no effect, so I was quick to drop them when I returned. I was happy to be back in a country where it was possible to smoke pot, to be honest. When I came back to the US in my senior year, I was disgusted with America. It was a disgust that had always been there, having been so alienated in school. This was before I had any insight into the global conspiracy or anything of that nature. School always felt like a waste of time for me in every way. I felt that I was being forced to do all these same things that my parents had done, that the generations above me had done. I looked around and I thought "this leads nowhere, I don't want to be the kind of people that all these adults are. They are so out of it, they are cold and uncaring, they just care about having a 'good job' and enough money to keep indulging all their disgusting habits." I returned to America for my final year of school and was still unable to make any decent social connections or meet any friends. I became increasingly despairing, feeling that I was "doing all the right things" and getting no results for my efforts. I had enough perspective to think "it can't JUST be me, I can't be THAT bad a person" but I couldn't figure out why no one would be my friend, return my phone calls, invite me along with the rest of the group, show interest in even ONE of the millions of obscure topics I was interested in. I began going to therapy, which was idiotic and was mostly an old guy just sitting there quietly listening to me complain about the emotional frustrations of the week, letting me vent until the time ran out, and then saying "well lets continue this next week". I was still overweight although I had been working diligently to slim down, but in the standard american way of trying to excercise more and eat a little less of the same usual shit I was always eating. I really wanted my therapist to prescribe something stimulating for me, like Adderal, but instead I was put on Effexor. During this time period, I became friends with a kid who was also on a lot of prescription medications, and smoked pot compulsively. We began hanging out together and smoking constantly. I feel that Effexor really allowed me to smoke like a champion, I was smoking multiple joints a day, sometimes one after the other, and I don't think I was getting very high from it. It was almost as though Effexor was adding to my craving for pot, and at the same time preventing me from enjoying it. I have heard this from others on Effexor. I was also having nightmares every night, which I never assumed was due to the Effexor until I stopped and they went away. During this time, the heavy pot use again helped me see things in a different perspective, but I got very strongly hooked on it, smoked compulsively, and was still deeply depressed and confused. A few months later it turned out that my friend had been secretly abusing valium (plus some other things as well I think) and was shocked to come over one afternoon for a smoke and find him collapsed in a puddle of beer on his bedroom floor. A week later his roommates called the police after he stumbled out into the street half-dressed and begin talking with the parked cars. It is pathetic sounding now, but he was one of the only friends I really felt close to in the four years at school. That is how alienated I have felt from my peers of my age group. Only people on the extreme fringe seem to understand my perspective on the hollowness of modern life in America. Of course most of you folks on NR are completely on the same page and I realize that perhaps there are quite a lot of people who share this viewpoint, but at that point I was still very clueless about metaphysical studies, which I had only encountered from the "psychedelic exploration" perspective of McKenna et al. After being on Effexor for six months, I felt that I was mainly becoming MORE depressed, and that my depression was based on very tangible problems in my life, not just some imagined attitude of free-floating depression. So I decided on my own to kick Effexor, and spent a week going down from the minimum dose which I was on to taking nothing. The day I took nothing, I began to experience a horrible withdrawal. I got what seemed like the flu, but combined with these awful almost mini-seizures in my eyes. Whenever I would move my eyes to the left or right, as opposed to looking straight ahead, an electrical jolt would shudder through my brain. It was very disturbing, and I worried that I had permanently damaged my brain somehow. I pretty much just stayed in bed and lay very low, trying not to move my eyes. Smoking pot helped significantly at this point, and I felt as though I actually was breaking through a lot of the compulsive anxiety and negative thought patterns I had been stuck in for so many years. My smoking was contemplative and creatively stimulating, rather than mindless or indulgent, that was my perspective anyway. I felt guilty for just sitting around "being stoned" so I would always work on finding something creative to work on, usually composing music or doing some writing. I began rediscovering my creative abilities, and began developing some self-respect and feeling of accomplishment for a finished project.

At the same time I was feeling these realizations more clearly, the dot-com bust was happening, and all of the entry level jobs in Information Management were disappearing, suddenly the bar was raised to "three-to-five years of experience required". So all of us new IT graduates found that the promises of high paying computer jobs had disappeared in a puff of smoke. I had initially applied to an English Teaching company to go back and teach in Japan, and was genuinely shocked when I was rejected, I had so totally assumed that I was a shoe-in and that I would be going back to Japan after I graduated. But I received a NO and suddenly had to scramble. I spent four+ months job hunting and finding nothing, and finally moved with my parents to their new apartment, and took up a job in a garden supply store (plus the pot ran out again). The regular payrate was $7 an hour, but I was paid an extra dollar an hour because I had a degree, so they could tell I was a trustworthy employee. I felt a horror inside me that my degree, four years of studying, had added up to be worthless. It is four years later now, and I am finally working my FIRST entry-level IT job as of two months ago, at a tiny local community college, so I was right to feel despairing about the difficulty of finding work in my field. After living with my parents for several months, not having made any social or professional connections, I began looking into places to move. After a few roadtrips, I attended a Deep Listening workshop by Pauline Oliveros, a famous electronic music composer from the 1960s on (and on of the ONLY famous female electronic musicians). I didn't mention earlier that reading books by Terence Mckenna and others had gotten me interested in metaphysical studies and meditation, it makes sense I suppose that they would, but those authors writing about "psychedelic experiences" were my first major introduction to metaphysical thought. I was recommended to go to a Reiki practitioner in my senior year, which was a new experience for me. Using a pendulum she dowsed my chakras and told me that my abdomen was very injured, and that my solar plexus chakra was completely closed up, not moving at all. I was surprised that she detected this, as I had not mentioned my childhood abdominal surgery. She also found that my throat chakra seemed as though it was "broken" on one side. Oh, I actually remember that I first went to her when I was still on Effexor, and she told me that energetically it seemed like I had a big metal diving bell on my head, she couldn't move the energies there at all! She said she experienced this regularly with people on anti-depressants. When I came back after kicking the Effexor, she said it was much more clear. She also sold me a small pack of crystals, one for each chakra, that I could hold and meditate on. She also taught me grounding techniques for meditation, visualizations like that. It was my first exposure to these healing modalities, besides reading a number of Zen and Taoist books. Anyway, at the Deep Listening workshop, I learned about Mills college, where Pauline Oliveros had studied and taught, and decided that I would try my hand at the academic creative arts field. My thinking was, I went to school expecting a degree that would get me a decent job, but that was obviously not a possibility. So I may as well focus on something I love, such as music, and try and find some personally fulfilling success, even if there is not much financial potential to it. It also allowed to me to move to the opposite side of the country from where I'd grown up, and experience the "big city" of San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland.

Mills College was a very brief, chaotic time in retrospect. I was feeling much more self-assured and had developed some calm and perspective from working on meditation a lot. A masters degree program is quite a different social environment than a regular college where most of the kids are age 18-23. At Mills I met a lot of professional artists already established in their field, many people involved with galleries and applying for grants and that sort of thing. To be honest I was very turned off by most of the art I encountered, if nothing else because everything seemed so derivative of things I had seen done in the 80s and earlier. The only "new" art I was seeing was stuff involving hot new technology and electronics, and most of the music I was hearing was oriented towards "non-idiomatic improvisation" which is an intellectual way for Fred Frith to speak about dicking around on your guitar by rattling chains across the pickups. I became very cynical about "noise", the direction music and culture and art had gone, all noise. Nothing harmonious, nothing healing-oriented, like a bunch of shared nightmares pasted up on walls with a screeching sound installation to set the tone. Many of my classmates (and at least a COUPLE of the professors), I later was told through rumor, were cocaine users and were having parties every weekend to which I was not invited. At the time, I was so busy with my own work that I did not get especially bothered by the usual social alienation. At least I could work on my own music.

And then, having read Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open The Head, and communicating on the internet forum set up for it, I began learning about some more esoteric authors... I remember hearing a lot about Steiner, Pinchbeck was really fascinated by Theosophy and Anthroposophy. But he HATED David Icke, and anyone who posted a suggestion of checking out his stuff would receive a flame from Pinchbeck on what utter crap Icke was. Well, I had never heard of him, so let's go see what all the fuss is about! I downloaded an E-book of The Biggest Secret, and learned about a lot of topics I had never seen pulled together into one place before. Rather than dismiss all the very far out things he was saying, I began looking for all the books he would reference at the end of each chapter, and started reading those. I read and read and read, for hours a day, devouring whole websites full of information, hundreds of pages in a day sometimes. I read Fritz Springmeier and his work in particular made a very strong impression on me. What can I say about these experiences? My life became extremely different. My paradigm shifted. But it was a constant shift, every day felt like something new was coming in, something showing that one thing I had just read was actually DISINFO, but another thing I had just read was probably TRUE, wait a minute, here's something else that calls both into question! I endeavored to read all that I could, but I know that I got into a lot of red herrings. I especially got into a lot of New Age healing modalities, because I had always felt a strong need to heal all the pain inside myself, and suddenly here seemed to be this whole self-empowered movement of healers working to help humanity "wake up" and all that!

So I got really into reading channeled material along with the conspiracy material I was reading, and really became fascinated in the Seth material, and the Pleiadians, and Ra, as well as some stuff on the internet such as Messages From Matthew and the Handbook For the New Paradigm. But I also read material like Leading Edge's Matrix V, which was very critical of much of the deception of the New Age (while trading it for its own very strange worldview based on Robert Monroe etc), as well as Springmeier warning against the deceptions of pretty much anything not-Christian while advising that all Christian movements had been infiltrated and were no good either. But everyone seemed to have their own little uptight view on what was TRUTH and what was DISINFO, and I could not determine it clearly based on what one person would say about someone else, so I continued reading all of it, trusting my own intuition and all that.

I went through a long period of "TRYING" a lot of different modalities, but not really seeing them work for myself or my fiance (who I met at Mills), and feeling not just a little despair about it after a while. We both felt empowered to read Louise Hayes say You Can Heal Your Life by changing your thoughts from negative ones to positive, uplifting affirmations. We felt like we were on a path of spiritual awakening, I mean just look at all these far out channeled books coming to us, all this new information streaming in every day, "why is this information showing up in my life now?" that kind of thing. Surely something is up! Well we decided we wanted to speak our truth, to express what we had learned about the world, and look for like-minded people who we could work on doing something really radical and "new paradigm" with. Well, it did not go well. Everyone we met that we ever tried to talk about anything political or out-of-the-box really did not understand us. We were called "space cadets" and "paranoid" several times. I wrote my masters thesis on The Use of Sound For Control, Healing and Empowerment, and about 15 people came to my performance, several of the attendees being my professors and faculty. Next to no interest from my peers. I had expected that doing a music degree would mean that it would be mainly up to me to find creative motivation and do my own work, but to experience almost NO OUTSIDE INTEREST in my work really left me confused as to what to do with it. I wanted to organize community sound healing groups and such, but found zero interest locally. I was able to find some small Reiki groups in Berkeley, but they would be groups of about five people, all twice my age, and most often discussing some dogmatic system like Melchizedek's Merkaba Flower of Life which I had learned through my own studies seemed to be a major disinfo group. But try telling that to a serious "New Age" person!

We began to find that in spite of our affirmations to be attracted to like minded people, to endeavor to work for the highest good of all beings, we were experiencing more and more alienation. Combined with being unable to again find any employment above minimum wage, and certainly nothing related to our creative pursuits, we suddenly realized that we were not "creating the reality" that we desired at all! If anything, the awareness had alienated us even further from all the thoughtless city dwellers whose most introspective political musings added up to "so who should I vote for?"

I write about this now, and whole months are compressed into a sentence. There was so much despair and frustration, so much job hunting that led nowhere, so many awful jobs and abusive bosses. And this was all happening while we were trying to "affirm" our way into a better position, not knowing what concrete steps to take at all in the insane city around us, only feeling peace during our meditations but never in our day to day interactions with the world. And we did NOT attract abundance. Even though we read Sanaya Roman and Amorah QuanYin and so many others just telling us to connect with our higher selves, ALLOW ourselves to experience abundance, all that crap. We were horrified and furious at our inability to "believe" enough to make those concepts work. My fiance fell into a terrible depression thinking that she was a Minion, just like Matrix V talks about, because she was unable to have any experience of her "higher self". She was abused by her mother throughout her childhood, including having her hands burnt by hot irons and spanking with leather belts. Obviously we were attracted to each other because of our abusive pasts. And together we decided we wanted to empower and heal ourselves. Coming from the hell of our lives, we had found each other and had begun to perceive what seemed like the larger truth of our world and even our spiritual reality. And then our lives plunged back to hell, and we became poor and unemployed, and briefly homeless. Everyday we would wake up depressed and sad, and we would meditate together and express our love together and work each other up to get up and face one more day, try one more time, just go in to work one more day or keep looking etc. We affirmed that we were more than our emotions, that we would trust the path we were on and that our intent was to connect with like-minded beings with whom we could work to serve the highest purposes of all. This was our pattern day by day, and day by day we were abused at work and living in ghetto housing surrounded by violence. I cannot even list all the different healing modalities that we attempted, the ritual work, the cleansing work, drawing, journaling, New Age modalities like crystals and reiki healing, sound healing techniques, EFT, orgonite towerbusters. We became despairing and cynical as month by month we observed no improvements in our lives, still dealing with constant depression and very low-energy, insomnia, food allergies.

After a year in the city, being unable to save any money from month to month, we finally decided to sell everything we owned on Ebay and over a three month period we paid our rent and saved as much as we could from selling all our old collections of media and clothes. We had realized by this point (early '06) that above all we wanted to get involved with a community that was oriented towards self-sustainability, renewable energy, eco-housing, eco-farming, all that progressive stuff. We couldn't meet anyone actively involved, but we found inexpensive housing in northern california, way out in the rural areas around Mt Shasta, so we moved.

Moving to Mt Shasta was the finishing blow to any remaining enchantment we had with the New Age movement. All the deception and big-money-business of it became stark and clear in the New Age shopping centre that is Mt Shasta. The owner of a local crystal shop, when I asked if they were hiring, dowsed me with a pair of copper rods, noted a negative reaction, and immediately told me they didn't need any help at that time. Asking about sound healing, I met a number of people working with tuning forks, but none of them could explain to me why or how anything they did worked. It was so vague and uninformed, I realized all of these people were working entirely by dogma with no clear understand of what they were doing at all. At this time I had begun reading Amitakh Stanford's material which is extremely critical of the New Age, and I began to perceive that things are even MORE complicated than I had thought previously, even after reading Matrix V!

At this point in my studies, and it is VERY hard to summarize one's conclusions on any of this stuff, it is making more sense to me that this world truly is some sort of "false" reality, perhaps created by darkness, perhaps distorted by darkness from an original point of "purity". The duality that seems to make up our reality seems to be a fake duality between the "false light" and "darkness". I also saw Druid post about how Steiner talked about the duality of Lucifer and Ahriman, sort of a positive vs negative, but in the end BOTH polarities are unnatural and dangerous to our beings. In contrast, there is a "balance" beyond this duality, there seems to be a "true" creation. Amitakh calls it the "True Light" as opposed to the "false light" that is the Light of so many New Age paradigms. I have discovered that the Light spoken of in the New Age paradigms seems to be the light of Lucifer, or Darkness. A heirarchical control system. This leads to a tremendous amount of confusion as to what any of us should or even CAN do in this situation. I still see many people on here discussing New Age paradigms, especially healing modalities, as though they are really working for them and I am genuinely confused. I was very much open to them working for me, but experientially my day-to-day life-in-the-world has become increasingly difficult and uncomfortable, in spite of the peace I feel in the true core of my being.

So after many months of unemployment, we have jobs again now. I tried to set up a sound healing business but found no local interest (rich Mt Shasta healers with their $3,000 singing bowl collections have it covered), so I made a website at www.truesoundhealing.com which has been generating some responses but by no means do I expect to make any money with it. I really want to move to another country, or place where people are actively pursuing self-sufficiency. It is not my intent to spend my time daydreaming and fantasizing about some far off goal in the future, when the place I am in now is so far from that. I stay grounded and present in my being and I look for new opportunities every day. We both so dearly want to just live on a farm and grow all our own food and disconnect from this cancerous country, but obviously even as I write this I can tell how "escapist" that sounds! But what should my attitude be? I see so many people on this forum giving advice on healing modalities, but are you all just living in your big city apartments and shopping at your local super market, or are people here actually "walking the walk" and developing self-sustainability? I feel too young and alienated, a big city slicker, and that I received such dreadful idiotic guidance from my peers growing up, it has taken all of this effort on my own part to educate MYSELF because everyone around seems basically insane and/or dissociated. Everything I was taught growing up was a lie, and now I am trying to pick up the pieces of my life and still make rent by the end of the month.

I know this post has covered a million different topics and was all over the place, but hopefully some of you can relate to it and maybe part of your story is in here too. I honestly still feel quite optimistic for the future, and I do not believe "all is lost" or "abandon all hope". But man, I am REALLY confused. Thanks for taking the time to read,
Tim