Smokey Quartz 3:

Where are you self-serving in you life? Explain.

Everything I do is self-serving. Even my benevolent actions towards others are attempts to make myself feel better about myself.

I don't know what I need in life from one minute to the next. I have had monetary success, all of the sexual attention any man could desire, loving friends and family. I could easily fall into self-hatred just to think about all of my blessings, and how I am almost immediately discontent.

It makes me humble. I look deeply into the eyes of every person I meet, and this too I see as self-serving. I look to see them see me. I look always with the arrogance that I have a wisdom and a grip on life that could inspire them. I continously ride this bravado.

It is all an illusion I cast. In reality, I am nothing without the steady flow of love from all people and things. I am self-serving to such a degree that, especially when I was younger, I would do almost anything to feel 'loved'.

These days, having failed at both marriage and true love, I am quite alone. I have no one around willing to play my game, and so I realize profoundly the extent of my selfishness. I realize the amount of negativity and despair that I have created for myself that I am afraid to rise above.

It is kicking my ass -- who am I? Where is happiness to be found? Is there anything that can be done about anything at all? I am left only with these hard questions that I must answer and execute if I am to feel better. I am very sad tonight.

Smokey Quartz 2:

Have you ever contemplated suicide?

Hell yah! Very seriously, however, every time I have contemplated it -- no matter how much I'm hating life -- there is some obstacle that I am not willing to compromise. When I was younger, the pain of it was enough to put me off. These days, I feel the effect it would have on my loved one's lives. My mother and father would be ruined. My true love would never forgive me.

So, ultimately, I recognize it is simply not an option. One way or the other, I chose life, and so I must choose life.

Smokey Quartz 1:

Have you ever experienced periods of depression or confusion?

Depression, darkness, and confusion have been with me for so long, in such a pervasive, daily way that it is hard to pinpoint a particular period. In this sense, I am not even sure what depression is.

I have certainly been very, very down lately -- lower than I can ever recall feeling. And yet, somehow I have, at this point in my life, a lifted, contented consciousness of it. I am almost amused (if not mortified) of this human condition that feels such emotion.

When Leticia broke up with me, and I moved back to my parents' home in Montana for six months, I hit a similar wall of pain. At that time, I remember feeling frantic. It was out of this terror that I did everything in my power to mend my relationship with her, even by proposing marriage!

She often wondered aloud of herself, "Why did I say yes??" That used to hurt my feelings, as I had not owned the pain. Now, I see it as such a 100% Leticia thing to say that it is actually rather comical...charming, even.

Before this whole 7 year love affair with Ms. Lacy began, I remember being a very depressed person. Although I had mastered an illusion of career/talent/& ambition, I was emotionally paralized. I spent most of my free time alone, hating myself for being unable to be with people. My friends were similarly dark, introspective folks. I avoided closeness to them. I worked single-mindedly on my drawing skills, angry that my dreams of being heralded for my amazing talent had not come to fruition.

Analytically, I draw connections between this state of my early 20s and my rather failed love-affair of high school. Somehow I concluded that if I had only played my cards differently, I would have consumated my relationship and everything would have been dandy. Instead, a guy I was already competitive with ended up being her first boyfriend.

Junior high was a story of brotherly betrayal, which I perpetrated. I was older and when I became attracted to having a friend-on-the-streets, I shot my little brother down until he no longer even wanted to be around me.

Before that, the stage had been set by the politics of sixth grade friendship -- Darrel wanted to wrestle with me, I didn't want to. We did anyway. He beat me, I let him. I thought, well, whatever, dork. But instead, my better friend Seth no longer liked me and began to hang out only with Darrel instead. They both joined the wrestling team. So funny!

Being much older, I wonder of myself, "Why didn't I have any inclination to fight? To hold my physical space sacred? Why did I just instantly give in?

Let's go back further: 4th grade was cake. Interesting that, for this one year, I lived in my elder's homeland for the first time in my chaotic childhood. I had some sort of a girlfriend or two, I remember winning everyone's admiration for a drawing that I copied. I had a fort in the backyard. I don't remember anything bad about that year, except when the Space Shuttle Columbia blew up with a teacher onboard.

Second and third grade were really messed up because of sickness. I was hit repeatedly with ear-infections, strep-throat, and to top it off: chicken pox. This rape of illness changed me. It made me afraid.

My younger years produce viable explanations for most of these events, actually. As for why I was such a push-over: well, I had already been totally broken. First by Mom and Dad for being a "terror", a tantrum-throwing, all-hell-to-be-paid monstrosity...at least when my will was thwarted. My relationship to my mother was a back-and-forth state between "I have spawned a demon-child." and "How can you hate him when he is so damn cute and charming?" Then, to drive the message home, at nursery school and kindergarten, I met kids who also did not like my ways. For my light, I remember getting beat up.

So, I believe I have been depressed ever since I began to believe that this world seems not to have a place for me. The rest of my life has just been a big play to find some role in which I could be loved. But I have found none. There has been no peace outside of myself.