“for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
– Dr. Johnson
I realized now that the biggest factor of who i was laid in how i reacted to those situation in which i was thrust. This is my pain split into several pieces and in no particular order.
First was the pain of separation, several actually. The first great separation happened not long after being born. My grandmother decided that a baby was too much for my mother to handle and she raised me for the first years of my life. Unfortunately she also raised me like if she was my mom and my mother was my sister. Its something that is still deeply ingrained in me. The next pain was when my mother left mexico to go to america. She left first then me and my dad went after she had settled in a job. It was so long from when she left to when i saw her again that i cried and made her promise never to leave me alone again. The last separations were the worst. The first one was when my father walked out on my mom briefly after one of their common but endless fights. I was so sad then, thinking i was going to lose my father but the bastard did it two more times though in a less dramatic form. The next time he abandoned me and my mom was after buying a car. He left my mom to drive the new car and he took off straight home. Not even leading us out of a part of LA that my mom had very little experience with. We finished a whole tank of gas lost, if not for the money i brought with me that day we would have been stuck there longer. The last one was when my parents fought at my grandpa’s house and my dad refused to drive us back home, or even back to grandpa’s. This was not a good thing for me to experience on top of their constant fights.
My next great pain is one i inflicted on myself, a death by a thousand cuts. In my childhood naivety I thought that i could fix my parents relationship. I thought i could mend the wounds that two very broken people had. Needless to say i couldn’t and it started to affect me that i couldn’t. My self esteem started to go down and really it hasn’t picked up much since. I always cherish the memories i have of my parents enjoying themselves without a fight afterwards. Funnily enough most of that was when we used to go to the beach. My life goal as a kid was for mom and dad to stop fighting everyday and that is not healthy. I have been trying to de-program this from me ever since.
Another pain is that of being taken advantage of. As a kid i would never imagine myself trying to take advantage of others and so i imagined the same of everyone else, boy was i wrong. Stolen belongings, false friends and violence taught me that not everyone is as compassionate as i am. Even then i was still suckered in, i wanted to believe that there was good people but those people are few and far between. For the most part people bullied me or stole from me or just plain old used me. The two most notable example off the top of my head was A. a lady i would encounter at the light stop of the major avenue along my way to school. For no good reason she would be angry at me and yell at me. It got to the point where i would shake whenever i saw her. The other example being that the first girl i kissed and my first “girlfriend” was actually interested in my cousin and just used me to get to him.
The way i must have seen it then is that the whole world abandoned me. Almost no one liked me and the few that did really didn’t understand me. I saw the world as a den of wolves ready to devour me. There was one thing that i could identify with however, reptiles. Well if i want to be completely accurate it would be squamates. Seemed really obvious then, most people hate lizards and lizards rarely show emotion in a way that mammals would understand. Plus watching lots of Steve Irwin back in the day definitely helped. The final deciding factor was actually learning about Warhammer Fantasy. That particular setting features a race of lizardmen modeled after mesoamerican culture. Since i have always been fascinated with the culture of my ancestors it was a perfect match. My affinity for lizardsmorphs grew with that. However the final thing that pushed me into being a scalie was all the weird movies i watched in my puberty. Movies that had monster chicks as the primary antagonist, mostly trashy sci-fi channel shit but it impacted the things that turned me on greatly.
That is why i pretend what i pretend, because its easier for me to rationalize my failures and the hatred i have received from people as humans despising a lizardman than it is to really ponder on it like i am right now. Plus the metaphor of shedding one’s skin to be born anew is really appealing to me. Ever since highschool i have wished to be able to forget everything and become a totally new person. More escapism i guess. Anyway this is here for those that wish to know why.