The Illusion of the Tough Guy.
A friend once told me he’d never had a physical fight. This concept amazed me at the time, and I really couldn’t imagine how he had accomplished it. I was only seventeen and already set on a course which would dictate my entire life.
Thinking back to that time, a point in my life where I thought being some sort of tough guy would shield me from the world, I wonder what my life would have been like if I too had never had a fight. Would I be scared, jumping at shadows? Or would I remain unaware of what the world is really like and sleep comfortably at night, wrapped tightly in my ignorance?
I’ll never know.
I see young men these days when I’m working in nightclubs, scared of being considered cowards and willing to attack at any perceived insult just to prove they aren’t afraid. It is all such grand nonsense. I have long lost count of the fights I’ve been involved in now, but it would easily be somewhere over a thousand, and I’m a far cry from the seventeen year old amazed his friend had never had a single one. For me to fight now is a chore, something mechanical I have done so many times it has become boring.
I am no tough guy, not the man I dreamed of becoming, anyway. I thought that once I was that guy I wouldn’t be scared, that people would respect me and move aside when I walked down the street.
Well, I reached that point. I remember distinctly feeling disappointed when I recognized it. I was that guy, but in order to get there I had to appreciate how pointless it all was. I’d spent years doing things which will haunt me forever in order to reach that point only to realize it was an illusion.
Some will read all this and think I am boasting or something ridiculous, but they will be wrong. In order to live the life I have lived I gave up so much, and closed off so much of myself, that I now understand I only ever lived half a life, missing out on so much along the way.
Not one to normally live in the past, I often remember that friend and wonder if his life without violence is a mirror of mine. Does he wish he hadn’t been conservative, leaping into any situation in an effort to prove something to people who don’t matter? Does he look at his mediocrity and yearn for a life spent hurting others in a vain search for hollow respect?
I doubt it.
Now I search for the life I should have lived, but understand I could never be here without the life I regret. I couldn’t be what I am without what I have done, and as such could not have found my true path in life without treading one which brought me so much pain.
And so the heroes in my writing will never be perfect, because I know it’s an impossibility. Only fools believe in perfection, and I am no fool, not any more. I am a man who has seen more than I ever imagined possible, and found the thing I sought wasn’t what it had originally appeared to be. Don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of settling down, hiding behind a white picket fence in between travelling to my office job between 9 and 5 before coming home and bitching about how crap my life is.
Nah, that ain’t me.
But now the intensity I used before will be focused elsewhere, on a single goal without thought of failure. Whether or not I make it is immaterial, and something I have no control over, but the amount of effort I put into it is within my control, and so I will not fail, not this time.
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Welcome To My World.
My life has never been normal. Never.
Even these days I live a pseudo-psycho existence on the fringe of a world most people never even glimpse, but one which feels more comfortable for me than a supermarket.
Nightclubs.
They are a universe unto themselves, where alcohol, violence and drugs can run rampant and the odd ones out are those who choose to remain sober and calm. How strange that a person could become so used to this lifestyle that to depart is like leaving behind a part of yourself, and yet that is how I always feel when I try to separate from this world.
It’s not that I crave violence – far from it; there’s nothing I could imagine yearning for more than to live in peace, mainly with myself – but the outside world, the one most feel is normal, seems totally alien to me, like being on another planet. I am not designed to exist in such a place.
And so recently, despite owning two businesses and working hard to launch my writing career, I have found myself yet again in the midst of this world, among people as broken as me. Not the clients, they are from the normal world; no the ones I bond with are those whose warped sense of belonging is the same as mine. Stepping back into this life is like coming home, the violence and stupidity around me are as nothing compared to the sense of family which exists in such places among such conditions.
I will inadvertently come to hate this world once more, of that I have no doubt. There is no true love here, just comfort, and dealing with what I face each night is no way to live a life, but I fear it will always be a part of me, despite yearning for it not to be. A friend, a man closer to me than a brother, once told me this life was in my blood and I would never escape it. At the time I laughed his statement off and proclaimed I could give it up at any time, and yet whenever I try I find reality too boring. It’s like living a two-dimensional life after seeing all three, knowing that even though I might interact with these people, I will never be one of them because I simply don’t know how to.
My writing is the bridge.
Through the words I put on a page I communicate with those who exist in a world I don’t understand; I give them a glimpse of what I see and know, but which I have twisted through fiction. In this way I can exist in both worlds without feeling like a fraud, without fearing that people will realize what I am. It is like a lifeline I cling to, an umbilical cord which nourishes me with hope and yet something I also need to feed with my life and experiences in order for it to survive.
This is what drives me. This is what I yearn for. And though I might never make a penny nor have fans screaming my name, if a single person reads my words and is touched by them it has been a life well lived.
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