NZ Herald : Learning to live with our past sins 5:00 AM Monday Feb 27, 2017
‘Sex really is the ultimate displacement activity.’
Truth Bites: one person’s story -
)I've had a lot of love affairs in my life. Years of crushes, hangovers and hookups; silly, slutty, unrequited, quick and dirty, brutish.
Sex really is the ultimate displacement activity. So much easier than doing the much harder work of learning to be a human being.
Now I just wish I could go back and tidy up my grizzled past.
Do it all again, neater, with more care, less rage, be kinder, water the plants. Be less of a tramp.
If you let go of your rationalisations for your phoney bullshit in the present, accept you don't shit rainbows, then you have to see the past in all its glory too. And that's not a pretty sight.
Absurd, I know. You can't make life better because you can't let go of how much worse it used to be.
I'm not just talking about lost opportunities and regret, although I do wonder what I could have achieved if only I had harnessed my urge to foment trouble into more productive channels.
Distracting myself with petty self-
I can also see why Born Agains get born again.
But all those years of ego, infatuation and lust. I don't have any excuse, drink or the devil, they were all on me. It's impossible not to realise that I used to hold others hostage to do the stuff that I should be doing for myself. Help! Please make me feel safe, help me cope with the pain of being alive, make the world not seem so terrifying. My own feelings were too intense. I needed someone else to hold them for me, someone to shove them onto. Here, have this! I was a monster.
Because the good stuff was never in the highs, after all. It was always in the middle,
the non-
I went from one extreme to the other. It was all about me, me, me -
The real fight of our lives is not writing a symphony or achieving in whatever status-