"Ive got some issues that nobody can see and all of these emotions are pouring out of me"
This blog is inspired by the moment that I am at in my life, and that moment is my 31st birthday (today November 5th, 2009) and the Kid Cudi song above kind of describes some of the ways I feel, not all because Cudi was saying some stuff that doesnt directly relate to me. I have been in deep thought for the past 2 weeks or so leading up to today because I started to look at myself and I wasn't totally happy with what I was seeing. I started to see my shortcomings, my fears, my insecurities, etc and I realized that I hadn't allowed myself enough time to deal with my own issues...allow me to elaborate. I like to look at my life in 10 year increments beginning at the age of 1 so the past 10 years have been from the age of 21 to 31 and when I looked into the mirror the person looking back was not the person I expected to still be at this stage of my life. The past 10 years have been filled with a mixture of pleasure and pain...5 years of pain (time before my wife) and then 5 years of pleasure (time since I met my wife).
Those 1st 5 years were filled with many personal failures in love and in my life, suicidal thoughts, empty/broken promises, mistreatment of those that only wanted the best for me, all coming to a head when my father was sentenced to life in prison for being a habitual felon. In his absence I had to assume the role & position that he held in the family thus putting my own life on the back burner to aid in the development of my family. I had to move from being a big brother and a son to a Father and a stand in Husband for my stepmother and it was tough and in some regards I am still dealing with this. I went through a breakup, moved from NJ to Atlanta pretty much by myself aside from my few family members in Atl, dealt with being unemployed for a couple years and then only finding work stocking shelves at Target for about $7 an hour.
Then I landed a job with the IRS and moved back to NJ, met my wife and things began to go the right way. She and I hit it off great as most of you know due to the fact that we are still going so strong, but we unexpectedly had our 1st child Shania, and then a year and a half later my son was on the way. So that again shifted the attention from myself to those I love, putting myself on the backburner again but this time for the right reasons because I love my babies & my wife with all my heart. They have brought me nothing but joy but the problem is I never had a chance to properly dead the first 5 years of my last 10 years or allowed myself to deal with my own internal issues over the last 5 years because I had to focus my energies into being a father & a husband. These things lead to my past 2 weeks of thinking and beginning to realize I dont like who I am. I never gave myself the room to deal with my own personal issues and problems because I have been doing all I can to make sure those around me, those I care about, and in some instances those I don't even know feel better about their own lives, part of the reason why I call myself Neo and if you saw the Matrix movies this part is self explanatory.
So I took a long look in the mirror and I just didnt like the reflection, I didnt like who I was inside, not the person everyone else can see because in the eyes of others I am a beautiful person but looking at myself through my own eyes all I saw was disappointment and something had to be done. I began to look in depth at what I have become and who I am and I realized I am caught in between being the old me and the new me (or the person I am supposed to be at this stage of my life). The issues that I have had I havent been able to express and share so I decided to speak to the Lord and I said that I have to break the mirror on the old me and start to look forward to the new me and embrace it, thus the quote I wrote on Twitter earlier today (extra words added in that couldn't fit into 140 characters):
"I looked in my mirror & didn't like the one staring back at me, so I closed my eyes, broke the mirror & began to look forward to a better me"
And in this quote I am simply saying that I am closing the door to who I once was and accepting who I have become, the path that life has lead me to and I am looking forward to who I will be now thus beginning the 1st steps in my next 10 years of life. My journey has been a long one filled with things no one has or ever will know about, pieces of my past that I am not proud of, parts of my present that I wish I could eliminate from my memory...but my future holds so many bright things and thats what I am going to focus on. I dealt with my own internal struggles on my own, I cried, I hurt, I hit rock bottom emotionally to the point where I didnt care about some things, I lectured myself, but I handled those things and I am not looking back. The old me died when that mirror broke and he will not return, he was ugly in nature, no not all entirely his fault but he made many decisions that played a part in who he was, yet he was also watched over and didn't suffer too bad through bad decisions. He was hurting yet you never knew about it, he was crying & screaming for help yet you didn't hear him because he didnt want you to......so he did it all alone trapped in his own pain & darkness, he was failing while you thought he was winning, he wasn't always who the picture portrayed because many saw strength but hidden deep within the paint was weakness and frailty. But I have accepted these things and am ready to move on, and this blog was merely my chance to open up, my chance to be weak, my chance to cry & expose myself to show that yes even Neo has weaknesses, yes even Neo can't always save the day, but mainly that yes Neo aka Dwight James Allen is human....
