Docile

Docile

To find one to love
Find failings in yourself to
See the other's strength

Do you want to know who I am?

I'm a twenty-five year old guy trapped in a dead-end job, making barely
enough to keep his head above water who has had a boring but largely
happy life. I'm not just being coy or self-effacing when I say I'm not
good looking - I'm really not. I'm sick of everywhere you look your
heroes are slim, well-built, well adjusted guys with great charisma and
dashing good looks - and they get the girl. My hero is Bill
Hicks.

While I in no way consider myself a hero, I sure as hell am the
protagonist of the bulk of my tales, so either bear with me or fuck off
now. Still here?

I'm six foot tall, have a ginger beard, am bald by choice and way
overweight. My eyes fluctuate between light blue, grey and green,
depending on the weather. To the casual observer I am polite, quick to
smile and a decent, well meaning guy. In reality I harbour a great deal
of hatred and resentment to a society that regards me and those like me
with disgust. I try to hide my manic depression and schizophrenia, but
I feel like everyone can smell it on me. I am coping what can only be
described as moderately well despite refusing to take any
medication.

I consider myself a loser and hate myself to such a degree that part of
me believes that suicide is too good for me and I have to endure this
life as long as possible. I have put a limit on this, however. I had
until my twenty-fifth birthday to be happy, or I'd have checked out on
my own terms. I don't look at this in a bad way. Death will be a
positive experience, as I don't have any religion. I think there'll
just be complete oblivion, which will be a nice change because I am
really tired at the moment, but I know intellectually that there are
times when it's worth living - that's why I threw in the being happy
clause.

I believe that there is absolutely no way that I will ever be happy in
the way that I want. I've been in love four times in my life, every one
of those unrequited. I won't mention names, but they probably know who
they are. The first was when I was seventeen, and I'd been friends with
her for four years. I eventually told her how I felt, which was really
stupid (yeah, you know hindsight?). I was drunk, she wasn't. I thought
I put forward my case pretty well, she didn't. I ended up breaking my
hand on a wall that night. Enough said.

The one directly after (or it may have been during, I can't quite
remember) I had known for almost three months before I told her I loved
her. She told me she loved me, too. Like a dick, I believed her (she'll
definitely know who she is), though to be fair, she was drunk. A few
days later she told me that she couldn't be involved with me like that.
We remained close friends - in fact, she more or less lived with me for
almost a year before moving away. We still keep in touch, though I only
recently got over her. Her fianc? is a great guy too, and she is
happy.

She definitely had the biggest effect on my life. I started cutting
wholesale due to something I thought she had done. She had been seeing
some married guy while she was staying with me, which certainly burned
away at my ego, but I endured. I came in one time to find a pair of
knickers on my bedroom floor and my bed made - I never make my
bed.

I flipped.

I kicked seven types of shit out of my bedroom, then plunged my craft
knife into my arm and dragged it down. I'll never forget the
stomach-churning joy of seeing the blood actually spurt out of my arm,
then flowing freely over the ends of my fingers. I dropped to my knees,
then passed out.

I came to when a friend had come to the door - at this point in my
life, the front door was always open, everyone was welcome. The friend
saw my arm and rushed in to help me. She cleaned the wound, made me
some dinner, then left because I didn't say a word the whole time.
Without even thinking, I stitched the wound up on my own, covering it
with a thin layer of super glue and went happily about my day. Almost
six years later, the girl I loved admitted to me that she hadn't
actually done anything in my house with the guy, she had just used my
room to undress in to go for a bath. Besides, she usually did it with
him in the back of his van. How reassuring.

The third person I ever fell in love with, I will talk about later. I
met her once, for exactly 2 hours and 24 minutes. I then spent just
over 3 hours with her on the phone before we both decided to wait until
I was able to do anything about moving on with my life. Ironically, I'm
not even sure if her name was Karen. It was a running joke. She had
told me her name, which I promptly forgot, and I had made a guess that
it was Karen. She didn't let on until I called her the first time, when
at the end of the conversation she told me her name wasn't Karen, and
that if I couldn't remember her name she wasn't going to tell me it. It
just goes to show that you don't have to spend a great deal of time
with - or even actually know the name of - someone you love. I will
always wonder if she felt the same way about me. Doubt it.

The fourth person I ever loved is in some dispute in my mind. At the
moment, I think I may be in love with someone (hence the writing -
we'll come to that eventually), but I'm not sure when I fell for this
person, so number four is the girl whose name I razored into my upper
left arm. I don't really want to talk about her right now because I
still do really like her and I don't think she knows who she is. At the
time of writing, she was going out with a guy, and seemed fairly
happy.

At this point, I'd like to state that I apply no irony when I say that
I am pleased for these girls to be with other guys. You know you're
really in love when it doesn't matter if the other person is with you
or not, as long as they are happy. Otherwise, it's just a crush, of
which I have had plenty. With lady number 2, I believed that I could
make her happier than the married guy - that's why I was jealous.

I know what I want in a relationship, and am actually fairly
uncompromising in that pursuit. I want someone that can love me more
than I hate myself. I know it sounds dramatic, but I have known people
who hate themselves so much that it seems you're spending more time
actually trying to convince them that you actually like them than
talking with them properly. I need someone who I believe when they tell
me they like me.

As it stands, I don't see how anyone can like me - I really must
apologise to anyone who does, but I can't believe you - there are times
that I feel the only reason anyone has anything to do with me is
through habit, pity or fear. In my mind I know this is not true, but I
don't function on logic alone.

It seems strange to me, but on revision, I have only just realised that
all of the above times I was in love involved varying degrees of
self-harm. There comes a point in your life when you don't actually
think about it as harm any more. In each of the cases above, the pain
acted as a reminder to me that I was out of my depth, that I was
dealing with something that wasn't for me. The type of person I am is
definitely a peripheral - I can be the funny guy, the caring guy, the
nice guy or the angry guy.

But it ends there. I think it may be easier for people that way, so I
don't usually show much of myself. You know, it's sometimes nice to
slide into that role, that persona, just for a while. Sometimes I can
even believe it myself, sometimes for a long time. For a while back
there, I had bottled up into myself an awful lot of feelings, a lot of
love and a lot of hate, which I have recently started releasing.

As my accounts above have shown, I have hurt myself in the name of love
(don't worry, that sounds just as laughable to me as it does to you). A
lot of the time the pain - but mostly the bleeding - acts as both a
surrogate and discouragement to the feeling of love. When I feel myself
growing more than friendship towards anybody, I find myself cutting
either more or deeper. The feelings of self-hate make me cut, but the
cutting makes me feel good - if you see what I mean. This is no
substitute for anything else though. Not even in the way that
masturbation is a substitute for sex - this a purely emotional/physical
trade off.

However, I have been so long without actual intimate contact (not sex)
that now I can't handle being touched. Any contact that I have no
control over - people touching my shoulder, brief contact when
receiving change, stupid little things - makes me physically
sick.

For the most part I play a basically docile character, but have allowed
myself to become more outwardly hostile, so the impression people
should get is that I am a young man who is acting jaded and spiteful,
is prone to outbursts on society, but is generally harmless. Sadly, I
think I come across as an asshole more often than not, but it really is
my favourite role. My motivation is to get through the day.

It never used to have to wear a face. I actually used to just be who I
was, happily bouncing from one event in my life to the next, like a
normal person, directionless and fazed, but happy. But a lot happened
in my life to make who I am now wake up.

I can even trace back to the point I stopped being docile.

A guy I used know at school - let's call him Scott, because that's his
name - met me in the pub once. In 1997 I think it was, two years after
I had left school. Now, this cocky motherfucker walks up to me and has
the barefaced cheek to come up and?
>How are you, man! How you doin'? We used to be best mates?
And I had the cheek to chuckle and say?
> Not bad, man, not bad.
Then a stray memory popped into my head, that quite frankly filled me
with absolute disgust not only at him, but mainly at myself.
Unsurprisingly, I used to get bullied at school, and as I remember,
this fuck used to stand and watch. I had went to the same primary
school as this guy, who had every ability to help me (he was a big
fellow), but didn't, because he was too busy watching the fat little
ginger kid getting humiliated in front a group of fucking idiots. He
didn't even have the fucking decency to hate me. He just couldn't give
a fuck.

I remember two guys pulling off my T-shirt, laughing at how my tits
were bigger than any of the girls'. I remember thinking about how my
mum had said it wasn't worth fighting, so I shrugged and asked if they
were a pair of poofs that they spend so much time looking at my tits. I
remember the dazing punch to the back of the head and the crippling,
strength-robbing jab to the kidney. I remember how my dad told me not
to take any shit and to hit them back. I remember the pathetically
thrown punch with no energy that was easily sidestepped. I remember the
cost of my feeble retaliation. I remember both hands being grabbed and
held by both guys at shoulder level as I was kicked to my knees. I
remember the looks of anticipation on everyone's face. I remember the
looks of excitement.

+Shit! The fucking idiot tried to hit him back!+

I remember being kicked in the armpits for what felt like an hour. I
remember pain so fierce +You'll never be able to hurt me like that
again, you fucks+ that I greyed out. I remember that I couldn't put my
arms down for a long time after that. I remember lying there and
getting no help as the class filed out. I remember someone spat on me -
the only way they could alleviate the guilt of watching that was by
hating me that much. I remember the look of pure disgust on the PE
teacher's face when he found me. I remember his hateful expression as
he told me to get myself cleaned up.
I remember my mum's tears that night when I wouldn't tell her what had
happened. I remember my dad's indifference >Hit them back.

But what I remembered the most when I met Scott was his eyes. The look
of hope in them when I threw my punch - the look of disgust when I
missed - the look of joy as I was kicked again and again and again and
again.

>I was never your friend. I never liked you and you sure as shit
never liked me.

He looked stunned.

>Let me buy you?

Another memory jumped unbidden into my
not-drunk-enough-to-fight-brain.

>Remember Primary 7?

His eyes lit up.

>Yeah! You scored in the wrang goal! You were the only one tae get
one past Kevin! Whit were ye thinking!

I laughed briefly before?

>I was thinking: "Naebody expects ye tae score - yer here tae make
up the numbers". I was thinking "Fuck you".

I pushed his shoulder as I walked past him.

>Fuck you.

His mate made a move.

>Hey!

I glared.

Scott held his mate back.

>He's right enough. I never fuckin' liked him.

>Fat prick!

I glared a while longer. Scott never looked back at me. I snorted my
disgust, collected my mates and moved on.

By no means was this the start of the releasing of the hatred I was
talking about. That had started years prior, but this was the end of my
docility. I think it's also given you a nice enough guideline to my
character that I'll probably soon try to justify while protesting that
I don't care what you think.

So, in summary, I have many, many issues, all of them probably fairly
dull and basically stuff that normal people can deal with and get on
with their lives. Well, I can too, but I feel like sharing, but more
importantly I feel like rambling. Feel free to stop reading at any
point.