REVOLUTIONARY X—UNCLOTHED:
What does it take to undue all this madness?
This madness that is the culmination of years of being lost in a drug induced binge…a panopoly of bad decisions. It’s tempting to look outside of the root causes of my problems & try to find a scape goat, in order to lessen responisibility & face the facts that I have flaws & imperfections…Who should I thwart the blame to? Could I say it was my enviorment? Eventhough I consciously & willfully choose to hang around in areas where I knew illegal activities were openly being partook in…Could I say that everything is the fault of my peers, that I was a young man influenced & mentored by cats whom I looked up to & who was doing things that is shunned by most in society…Yet once again, when I dig a little deeper, I choose to hang around those people, no one ever held a gun to my head & forced me to anything, (well that is not necessarily true, I been on the wrong end of a gun held by criminals & I have been held at gunpoint by the police) but I mean that in the context of: Nobody ever forced me to commit any illegal acts or make bad decisions…Could I blame the way my life turned out on drugs?…
Well truthfully, as far as I know, I never have done a drug that could walk or talk, and that could force me to make a decision, I never did a drug that held a gun to my head & said: “Do this or else…” It wasn’t drugs that held my brain captive, it was ignorance…Can I blame my family? Well my brother is the person who taught me how to steal when I was 8, but I did it because I wanted to, he never forced me to do anything bad…So what is left? Who is left?
The things I have done, don’t just happen, Maybe that explains why my conscious is marred by years of abuse…self-inflicted abuse, I thought I was the sheep, when really I was the wolf, I thought I was the victim, when in reality I was the perpetrator…My conscious is scarred by the fact I have done so much wrong in my life, not only to others, friends, associates, strangers, family, but also myself, because ultimately, I am the one who has to suffer the most when it comes down to it…God is the one who doles out the ultimate retribution for those who are deserving….
Often I ask myself, what would my decision making skills be like if I based them off of what God would want me to do, according to my limited knowledge of his scriptures?
When I thought I was a good person, was I really a heartless, socipathic, egotiscally wreck? Was I really a self-serving, selfish mess who never cared about anyone, especially myself? It’s hard to ask these questions, it’s even harder to answer them, and even harder so, when I do answer them to accept the answers that I come up with.
I would like to convince myself that I am a changed man, that I have matured a lot and grown up. I would like to convince myself that I have become more wise, more humble & understanding towards other people. I would like to believe that the old temptations and desires that I once allowed to dominate my life & my decision making, no longer have authority in my life. I would like to believe that the things that once triggered me and set me off, no longer have an effect on me, & I have the strength to resist falling into old behaviors…
But the truth is, it’s easy to meander down a new road, when not being tested. What happens when a person is put in a situation where they have to confront the demons of the past, when your will power, resolve & determination it pitted against the temptation to do things you told yourself you would never do again, or to think thoughts you told yourself you would never think again….In the end of being testing, will the outcome be the same as before? Will all the time invested, all the struggle, all the wisdom & knowledge I gained, or thought I have gained come into play and rescue me from an ugly situation?
Even when I am untested, the knowledge of who I was, who I am now & the battle I have been fighting, is always in the back of my mind. The battle is between the nature that God created people to be on, which is the righteous path, and the devil whispering in my ear, appealing to my darker side, trying to get me to do wrong, even when I know what is right…
All the devil can do, is influence me, whether I take that step and do what I know is wrong, according to God, then it is all on me, no one is to blame but me…
They say everyone goes through life with blinders on & tinted lenses…they say these blinders allow us to view the world in a tainted way and justify how we percieve things, how we interpret things, how we see things, how we think and how we act…
For some of us, the trauma we have endured in life can have a damaging affect on our perceptions of self, and perceptions of being others and perception of the world, how things really work, how they should work, and how we want them to work…The most damaging things to me personally, was being in the streets for so long acting up, and being around others who was acting up, then the 2nd most damaging reality altering thing for me, is being incarcerated…sometimes the psychological effects can’t be understood, much less determined…it is easy to go on through life trying to put on a tough persona like the events that we went through and experienced didn’t hurt us or have any adverse effects, but in reality, the skeletons in the closet continue to build up, the past continues to haunt, and the future can seem to look more desolate & bleak…How did I ever let others messed up perceptions of the world, determine how I viewed the world? How did I ever let others messed perceptions of myself, mess up how I felt about myself?
Where did I go wrong with that, & how do I rebuild my identity, do I even have an identity of my own? Or am I an accumulation of what everyone else is, what everyone else wants me to be, and everyone else tells me that I am? In my quest to belong, I have actually further outcasted myself, and alienated myself from what is considered normal in society, the things I thought made me fit in, are really the things that keep me from fitting in with the people I should have been seeking company with…My exile was self imposed, the world is a big place, yet I consciously choose to seclude myself in the streets and away from.
http://www.jonathankeenangordon.name/jongordon
Jonathan Gordon
DOC #793350
