Releasing The Dark Side

This was really a combination of an on-line collaboration topic posed to the group, and a suggestion from a counselor. The concept of facing your inner most pain, your dark side, and releasing it isn't new. It is interesting to know someone, my ex-lover, could touch my life in such a way as to overshadow everything else in my life. I never imagined there was such a person on Earth, who could make me love so much and hate so much, to such a level, so thoroughly.

I still have a hard time dealing with the desires, my dark side, for a man who is so obviously way wrong for me. Perhaps that is way I want him? Perhaps, I'm simply one of those people who is attracted to the one thing which is really bad for them?

misanthropic
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I'm told I am driven, yet I don't really see it in myself. I still see myself as an easy going person who would rather listen to the music and drift away on images in my own mind rather than deal with the mundane complexities of daily living.

I do have some demons which taunt and haunt me, and drive me toward my own forms of success. Truth and Honesty are the names of these annoying demons, and they keep me going because I can not and will not accept anything less than those demons which drive me; I will not accept anything less from myself or from others.

I used to accept lies as a way of life, and it wasn't too long ago when lies came as naturally to me as breathing. I changed because I fell in love, and I had love revealed to me to be the greatest lie of all.

Once the cold hard truth of how I had been used was revealed to me, I became a true believer in truth. The love I felt was as real to me as the ground on which I stand, but my perspective of what was real wasn't accurate. Or maybe it was a momentary reading on some internal meter which measures love? A fluctuation of a needle, registering a false reading which misled me just enough to blind me to the truth of the situation.

So my obsession with the truth blinded me to the truth itself. And the truth to which I was blind, that which I simply could not see, was how lucky I was to be free of the love I once felt; Even if that love was occasionally reciprocated in the form of mind blowing sex, which only succeeded in blinding me to my own faults and the faults of another.

In any event, I allowed myself to be manipulated because I feared my own success, or the possibility of my own success, so much I was willing to give up trying and live my life for the pleasure of another person.

When I finally stopped to examine this obsession, I realized I had almost given up everything of importance in my life because someone I cared for asked me to do so. It's very plain I am once again referring to my ex-lover.

I use the word lover, but realize I should refer to him as my oppressor. He knew the extent of my feelings for him, and used them to control me by pursuing me to become more involved in his life, by working for him, or doing his work for him, telling me he had to find a way of being with me more often. He flattered me and I was so blinded by my own feelings of sexual pleasure, I failed to see all I was losing of myself by becoming more involved in his life.

My identity, the identity with which I was comfortable, was stripped from me. In the long run losing the identity I had outgrown was a good thing, but I couldn't see it that way in the short term.

I now realize, if he hadn't switched his focus from me to another more easily oppressed person, I would have ended up being completely overshadowed by him. I had become and extension of him by association, and the most frightening part of all of this is how willing I was to comply with his every wish and whim.

This is the dark side of my nature, the side that I have finally faced and released. The willingness I see in others to give up their lives, their careers, their potential, and live only to please another person, is the very thing I usually despise about them. I have never thought of myself as someone who was incomplete without a partner or companion, yet I was acting exactly like those people who needed so much to belong to another person they would lose themselves in that person.

Being an extension of a person, his mate, care giver to his offspring, housekeeper, maid, cook, is, to me, a terrible existence. It may seem like a safety net to curl up in someone else's ambition, take on their crusades, but it is only a way of fending off the necessity of having to put your own ambitions to the test. As long as I was involved with someone else's life, I didn't have to work on my own goals and risk success or failure.

Yes, I still want to get lost in the Rock 'N' Roll, but now I'm lost in my own beat, and the music is beautiful once again.