“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”

-        Oscar Wilde

Much like all things that we find and purchase, we desire to be captivated or proven that something is worthwhile, worth our time and money. When it comes to character-types and personalities we find that the origin story is not so much what draws us in. No, the origin story is what makes a near Godlike celebrity human, the origin story is where we find ourselves within that Godlike narrative. This connection to a centralized narrative is what we buy into when we consciously decide to follow someone. Not in an obsessive manner, but rather routinely. As if our day or week isn’t quite right if we go without their work or content, despite having no formal meeting or friendship. So, despite my not being Godlike, here is my origin story; the story where I grew up without any true sense of self, how it drained me of my own existence, and how I am working to every day to serve the purpose of my re-discovered self. Don’t worry, I’ll break this all down within a single post and will then get to the fun stuff, promise. My journey of healing at first seems naïve, juvenile even, but the wounds and scars ran deep. Deep enough that I still fight to heal them even today. First, the pretext; how I came to realize that I was out of alignment with myself and how my masked life all went up in flames, though much like a Phoenix, or even more humanlike in the words of Maya Angelou, “I rise.”

While my full life story doesn’t start here, my origin story does.

My whole journey of growth and rediscovery starts with the woman who effectively broke my crystal glass heart. This woman, who will remain unnamed, broke through all that I had built to keep my heart in place for nearly a decade, albeit still fragile, insecure, and out of alignment. Everything I had put in place as protection from good and wholesome love: my walls, my emotional and mental mechanisms of defense, my aversions and fears toward affection, and the multi-layered mask of masculinity that I had worn for the better part of my adult life… all gone.

In ten days, this woman penetrated ten years’ worth of masked pseudo-masculinity with full acceptance of my person, and with wholesome unconditional love for herself and in return, for me.

That Love, wholesome and unconditional, intoxicated me beyond the likes of what any natural or synthetic drug could ever accomplish, but the Devil in me couldn’t and wouldn’t allow it. He still had my life and my love in his death grip, relentless and unyielding in his yearning to be the only love of my life. No matter how destructive, no matter the cost against my happiness.

The life I knew and that was finally nurtured by the woman I had thought could be “the one” was turned upside down on May 4th. On this day, I was subtly called out on my shit and left alone to fix myself, to be my own hero. On this day, from about 3pm until the start of my workday the following Monday, time kind of stood still. I felt empty, like I was falling into the depths of the deepest mental trench of both anguish and despair, what was worse was it felt like there was no bottom to hit. In those many hours and in the weeks that would follow I did whatever I could to just feel something, anything. I would spar in boxing beyond what I knew my limits were or I would workout well past my breaking point just to feel pain. I wanted, no needed, to feel immense physical pain. Anything to numb the emotional and mental pain that I could not seemingly escape. Hell, I even ran 5 miles straight throughout Brooklyn that Saturday – kind of like Forrest Gump when Jenny left him, but not coast to coast. Nothing worked. I saw her in every woman that I would innocently lock eyes with throughout the city. I still literally see her name plastered upon buildings on my commute from Park Slope into the Flatiron District. Each time I thought of her or saw her name, I would feel some form of anger, sadness, resentment, or guilt - sometimes all at once. Anything bad or self-destructive, I thought of it. Something needed to change, I needed to change. I remember almost everything from those ten days, the good and the bad. The biggest part of the breakup that I remember was when she told me that I was fake. That most of what I was putting up was a front to only serve myself. Thing is, she was right. She knew it, she was smart in that way. So, while a story of heartbreak isn’t where I saw my life starting for me, sometimes we have to have our heart completely broken to open our eyes.

One of my favorite musical artists wrote a song with a lyric, “it takes a real good woman to make a mess of a man,”  and that sentiment could not ring truer for me if it came from whatever deity you choose to believe in.

Growing up without a sense of myself.

The first cognizant memory I have is waking up on a cream color leather sofa, much like the one I am sitting on now in my mother’s home in Hawaii. I was four years old and had just woken up from a nap. The house was clean, the TV was off, and it was kind of quiet in our modest two-bedroom military housing apartment in Yokosuka, Japan. To this day, I don’t remember much beyond that point as I believe the rest of the memory doesn’t serve me. All I remember is waking up, and now nearly twenty-six years later I am writing to you purely off of my first real memory. Not a memory aided by a photograph or a retelling of someone else’s memory. Just my own. I digress. Fast forward to the next memory that sticks out to me like a sore thumb and we find something far more tragic than a nap.

The night my parents decided to end their marriage, a decision that would end with bloodshed and two children left with their next-door neighbor while their parents went to individually mend their broken pieces. My sister and I hid in front of one of our couches. We hid from the yelling and screams of our mother and father fighting from behind us in the kitchen. We would finally emerge after the front door had slammed shut, my mother leaving. Our father holding the freshly bleeding cut on his arm, the blood dripping onto the tiled floor. He left and returned quickly after asking our neighbor to watch my sister and I so that he might go to the emergency room to receive stitches, my mother long gone by this time. I would spend the remainder of what I remember from that night playing Mario Kart on our neighbors Super Nintendo and eating cut up chicken nuggets until I fell asleep. That’s the night my family ceased to exist as a full, nuclear unit. Little did I know just how much this night would change my entire life. Not so much for the most obvious reasons, but we’ll approach that later.

My father won the custody battle over my sister and I for reasons that I may speculate upon, but whatever they were, he ended up becoming the main caregiver for my sister and I. Due to whatever hardship, trauma, or upbringing he had, my father grew up to be very rigid. One of his all-time favorite justifications, even when he was wrong, was “because I said so,” which didn’t leave much to the fight when working to commit reason toward any argument or debate. Even during a conversation just a few years ago, I had asked him, “what if I were gay?” To which he replied sternly, “you’re not gay because you’re my son and my son is not gay.” As if my choices were his to make. Despite the fact that I am not gay, my choices are mine and mine alone.  Without piling on all the times I felt unable to express myself, make my own choices, make mistakes, be imperfect, or even

the times in which my successes were used to abuse my sister, I can assure you that growing up with an emotionally and mentally abusive and manipulative paternal figure is beyond damaging to the development of any child, especially when this is the only parent they have access to.

How Lacking a Sense of Self Drained My Existence

Without any real sense of being, any real sense of what I needed, I never understood how to be my best and most authentic self. How can anyone be their best self when they don’t have the tools to get there?

It is of the utmost importance that we realize that the words BEST and PERFECT are mutually exclusive.

If we equate perfection with being our best, then we set the bar for our best far too high to achieve. This personal and mental malpractice can be detrimental to our life. It drains our very being from the inside out. It is not hard to imagine how perfectionism can drain our own existence, how it can make us our own greatest villain while disguised as a hero. Due to my upbringing, I grew up believing that I was the universe’s gift to all mankind, that the world owed me a debt of unyielding gratitude purely for my existence. This sense of entitlement had a severe impact on all of my relationships. I became friends with people who were exclusively benefiting from an image that I created to benefit my pseudo-self. Friendships that would stroke my unaligned ego if only to feel like this unevolved version of myself belonged to some sort of tribe. I took on unhealthy habits, both physically and financially, that didn’t serve me or my existence. I chose drugs and women that I had no business in choosing. I lived the Rockstar lifestyle instead of being honest with myself and acknowledging my emotions. I didn’t do this because it felt good. I chose these activities to numb my inner turmoil. I had conditioned myself into accepting this numb feeling as normal, as a means to live a masked life away from myself. How can one feel emotional pain when they’ve numbed their state of being so much that all they can do is live in this physical state of existence?

Even before my adult life and Rockstar lifestyle, this lack of development toward a sense of self had destroyed my ability to thrive with friendships and in loving, romantic relationships. I would lie if only to promote my masked masculinity. I would please anyone and everyone to protect my frailness and to continue moving forward without having to face my feelings and recognize my thoughts. Living in this mask and displaying it out to the world, I presented myself as a well-kept young man: great grades, a seemingly good home life, and a great social life. But none of that was quite nurturing or worthwhile to my well-being, my personhood. The academic accomplishments were to suffice the perfectionist desires of my father and assured that I would remain the “good kid” in a dysfunctional household. The one that kept everything together while everyone fell apart. The seemingly good home life was marred with the stark reality that our house was divided. By the time I graduated high school and moved on to college, my father and step-mother didn’t so much have his and her bathrooms, but his and her bedrooms. More so, their kid-like mentalities and all the problems that come along with that level of division never really dissipated. Finally, the “great” social life was a façade, merely there to hide that I had no idea who the hell I was or who the hell I wanted to be.

This façade would lead me to lie to the women I felt emotional and mental intimacy toward in both my teenage years and my early twenties.

So, what gives? What changed and how did I right the ship? Answer, daily double. I didn’t do it alone and it wasn’t necessarily through therapy. Please do not misconstrue my words. Therapy is healthy. Going to therapy is healthy and if it helps you then it is something to be proud of, and I am proud for you. Though, after going to therapy and learning a good bit about myself, I still experienced dismay and recurring failed attempts at love and building relationships with women and, more importantly, with myself. So, I hired a Sex, Love, and Life coach; better known to me as Justina, my Life+ Coach.

The Journey of Healing, Rediscovery, and Growth

I will be the first to tell you, I was apprehensive about the idea of hiring a life coach, much more a sex and love coach. I mean, I am a man damn it! Why the hell do I need a coach, even more, so a female coach to tell me what I am doing wrong with my sex and love life? We already know the societal stigma of people much like myself. Depression and anxiety aren’t so much accepted as normal, ya know? So why would I stigmatize and alienate myself further by hiring a Life+ Coach? Why would I afford to the world an opportunity to crucify my perceived manhood, my “man-card”? Here’s the thing… men and women, we’re all a little crazy. We’re all a little broken or, better put, out of alignment with ourselves. We all need help. Silence and solitude are for the fool who thinks the world is theirs alone. Human growth in its fullest, most robust capacity is full of vulnerability, sharing, feeling, and expressing. Most importantly, human growth is full of accepting the imperfections that make us, in something of a paradoxical way, good enough for whatever we desire.

And in being and in accepting that we are good enough just as we are, we become imperfectly perfect.

My coach and I had several breakthroughs wherein we found that it wasn’t exclusively my dysfunctional father’s fault that I grew up with such a disdain for myself and my love.  It was the fact that I didn’t quite have a maternal figure in my life to balance out both my feminine nature and my masculine nature. I didn’t have a mother around to nurture my development, to tell me things would be okay after feeling rejection for the first time. Nor did I have a mother around to assure me that being a sensitive person was more than just okay, it was perfectly fine and perfectly enough – that being sensitive is what made me, me. Now before we equate that I have mother-issues, I grew up without knowing the reason as to why my mother left, and with only partially knowing one side of that story I conditioned myself into believing the lies my father told me about their love’s demise. All I had ever really known and internalized up until this point was that despite how “good” I was or how well I “loved,” a woman would always leave – nothing I would ever do could possibly be enough. That’s the conditioning I came to understand and practice both consciously and subconsciously. There are two song lyrics that come to mind – because music is where I rest in tranquility – the first, “this is not what it is only baby scars, I need your love like a boy needs his mother’s side,” the second, “I need no lover, I need a mother to come to my room.” The first lyric spoke to my spirit the first time that I heard it, though I didn’t quite grasp why until my work with Justina. The second lyric came during the middle of my work with her wherein I was able to feel the weight of the words on my heart and just how true they rang within my own life experience.

So, I had found my devil and I realized the little hell that I lived in was of my own subconscious creation. I recognized this devil and I removed his mask and hood, realizing all along that my devil was myself. My devil was that 4-year-old boy hiding in front of the couch being held by his sister - sobbing, fearful, and without any sense or idea of what was transpiring in the kitchen or how his life came to that moment. Until a few months ago I had no real knowledge that the gatekeeper to the unconditional love I yearned for was the 4-year-old me replaying the trauma of that night. My conditioning around that emotional trauma had led me to reject any form of good, wholesome, or unconditional love before it could ever really begin. That hurt from twenty-five years ago, and all the compounding traumas of my dysfunctional upbringing thereafter, had indoctrinated me to believe that I wasn’t good enough. I had come to believe that if the love I felt for my mother wasn’t good enough to keep her in my life then the love I have for any woman in my life would never be enough.

The journey of rediscovery is filled with pain, but not in the fatal sense. No, it is best to think of this type of pain as the same pain we feel when we workout at the gym. We tear down and tear our muscles so that they may grow stronger through that exercise.

Growth isn’t one size fits all and healing doesn’t ever happen overnight. These two ideals take work, lots of it, as well as an unlimited amount of patience and unconditional love for yourself. I have grown exponentially since starting to work with my Life+ Coach. I am no longer afraid of love. I am no longer fearful of rejection, personally or professionally. I am no longer afraid to lose people through fully expressing myself. I have come to realize that I haven’t any semblance of control over who comes in and out of my life, the only person I can ever control is myself. If I look to swerve outside of that rule, then I begin to move out of my own alignment and that alignment is all I should ever really concern myself with. If I try to take on the weight of the world then I only stymie my growth. After a full-on decade of having no real personal growth, I’m done with that. I am done hating the person that stares back at me when I look in the mirror. I am enough. I am beautiful and whole. I am loving and I am fierce. I am imperfect and that makes me perfectly human. I hope so much for you that you have all that you desire and need to make you whole. I ask that you forever cherish all the things that serve your purpose and that you let go of the things that no longer serve you. I wish for you the necessary peace of mind, and heart, to let go of the things and people that are no longer for your life.

Before I relinquish you back into your daily life, I’d like to leave you with some words that I have found along my way. Words that helped me as I started my journey to where I am today.

To my younger self,

I am sorry you went through that. I am sorry that you made the choices that hurt you. I am sorry that you believed you were unworthy. I want you to know that you made the choices you did with the feelings and limited experience that you had at the time. You did your best with what you knew.

I’m taking over now and I promise you that I will look after us.

We’re in this together.

I’m so excited to have you as a part of my journey and I can’t wait to share more goodness with you.

Cheers, y’all.

               - Joshua M. Aldridge