I think that in my teenage years, I tried very hard to help the people around me, not just to gain their respect or goodwill, but to make them better, honestly, because in doing so I felt I could move them toward better things.
About a year and a half ago, before I turned twenty, all this came tumbling down on me in a few unrelated events where I realized that all this helping would come to nothing since I cared about people more than they did about me. That was when a number of long friendships came to a jarring halt, because I had the idiocy to put myself in situations where I was always stupidly willing to give more than I got, and being the sheer weakling that I was then, I always expected the best out of people, expected the same in return.
Months later I emerged, determined not to repeat my mistakes, and I realized that doing things for, well, myself wasn’t a bad thing. Self preservation isn’t a crime - though taking from others is a crime - and I guess there is a balance that must be kept.
Having spent my entire teenage life trying to put everyone in front of me in an almost religiously zealous way had left me totally exhausted and jaded, I guess it was at this point where I actually shifted toward the balance - where I began to accept the fact that looking out for Mr. Joel instead of the many people around me wasn’t a crime, where I began to question anew my idea of what was “good”.
Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil that the point where one questions one’s own immorality is a step on the a flight of stairs which, at the highest point one will question one’s own morality.
Perhaps it is that point where I questioned my own morality, on hindsight. Where I realized that the notions of “right” and “wrong” were mere subjective notions. It is probably around this time where I turned to literature for answers, and I fortunately (or unfortunately) chanced upon Oscar Wilde’s body of work.
Back then, the Joel who was then so used to being concerned with doing “right” things, who had too often borne the cross of putting others in front of him 24/7 was instantly delighted with Oscar Wilde’s devilishly irresistable duo: Lord Henry and Dorian Gray. How they revelled in the moment, taking pleasure in precisely doing and saying that which would cause controversy, not just because it was meant to provoke, but because they could.
It is perhaps a sad, funny and cruel thing to say that my first taste of inspiration to be liberated from the laypeoples’ (or, what Nietzsche would call the “herd man”) sense of morality from a pair of Oscar Wilde’s flamboyantly homosexual hedonists - especially Dorian Gray, who finally meets the deserving, vile fate he admittedly had coming for his accumulated actions.
However, it is from these two, as well as Oscar Wilde’s other flagrantly colourful characters that I realized that I had so mired myself in trying to fix other peoples’ issues that I had forsaken mine, and that this imbalance had caused so much detriment to myself through all those years. I had in fact forsaken my own needs to the point where I had foolishly tried not to lie for a week, and had pissed off numerous schoolmates / friends in the process.
It is from Wilde’s characters that I realized that life was well and truly meant to be lived, not spent worrying 24/7 about grand metaphysical issues and weighing the consequences of my every action.
And so it is that I find myself today between my teenage past and my relatively newer revelation.
Between that teenage boy who tried his best to emulate Jesus and the Saints but ultimately found himself lacking, who cried out and tore at himself for not being able to carry the burden of everyone else, and ended up being wracked with guilt for not being able to do so. Found himself an ignorantly asleep Apostle at the Garden of Gethsemane, found his flesh perpetually too weak, though his spirit was all too willing to plunge itself - and the flesh that encompassed it - into gauntlet after gauntlet of pain, in order to strive for an ideal of… morality. Of goodness.
Between the person who picked himself up when he turned 20, who embraced himself for the first time as if he was reborn, who was so delighted at Lord Henry and Dorian Gray’s antics. The person who had begun to question his morality, and subsequently threw caution into the wind, emancipating and embracing the caged, enraged Dionysus within him who had slept all these years, denied by “slave morality” (Nietzsche’s term) all this time.
Where am I now?
I think I’ve changed in the year-plus since I turned twenty. I know I’ve been humbled by events - by serious physical injury, by… something sacred, far greater than myself. By other things.
Where am I now?
