Being human is one of the most untapped artss

Billions of human beings live on this planet earth and hundreds of millions aspire to perform a specific task after going to school or growing past a certain age and I was one of them for at least the middle third of my almost 30 years.

If you'll read through and ignore the lack of pictures, please enjoy and if you like, share my short journey of self discovery...

When I was about to turn 18 I thought about utility and efficiency and wondered why I had spent so long studying survival skills while ignoring my personal, physical and emotional growth. I had decided the best way to work on those and squash the weakest parts of myself would be to enlist in the U.S. armed forces. I tried and didn't qualify. My recruiter told me if I wrote false answers to the medical questions I could get in but I would need to make sure when asked that I couldn't remember my past if I was ever asked why I had lied. I never went for MEPS after the ASVAB. I was too afraid of going to military prison to follow through with the idea.

I started to work out. It seemed like the easiest way to begin self improvement. I still neglected my mind and emotions. I was arrogant. I believed the teachers throughout my education who said that I was gifted and had amazing potential. I was pushed through school with their help it seems like now and never really needed to exert any effort to be in the top 10% of anything to do with my mind.

I assumed that most people wanted to have my outlook and intelligence and I became selfish and lazy and egotistical. I actually believed that I was the winner of an amazingly lucky evolutionary mutation. Sure I had met prodigy after prodigy who towered above my mind but they were strange enough to make me thank the heavens that I wasn't smart THAT way.

I grew bored and stopped trying to do anything. I started to smoke pot and hang out with the other people who weren't trying to improve their lives. The kids who had business plans and were getting accepted into colleges became alien and stopped returning phone calls.

Still, I thought I was above them. "Hadn't I done so well in high school? Who even really wanted to go to college?", I thought. The only thing they had was a piece of paper that costs my time and energy I could use better enjoying the last years my drop out friends would be around to encourage my supporting all of our habits.

I was blinded by my arrogance and ignorance. I assumed that all people would think like I did at 16 if they worked hard enough.

I got caught up in addiction after addiction. "Different drugs would be easy to avoid becoming addicted to." I'd say after recovery from the last one. I didn't like the 12 steps because the word God made me feel like I was being sucked in to a cult.

The 4th and 5th steps, the ones where I had to admit to myself on paper the ways I hurt others and then tell them to another person terrified me. Honesty was terrifying. It still is sometimes. How could facing the parts of me I wanted to forget help me be a better person?

Of course, those were the things I wanted to destroy and to destroy them I had to destroy myself. I wanted to die rather than work to be healthy minded. I was sick. I'm still sick. The habit of lying to myself about who I was was the reason why lying to others came so easily.
I was a coward too. I didn't have the courage needed to take my life directly so I tried harder and harder drugs and combinations of risky behavior in the hope that the next blackout would be the last time I lost consciousness.

I read inspirational books and religious texts while high hoping to figure out a short cut to whatever the hell I defined as my personal ideal without doing any work.

Acting like an enlightened person only made me more aware of the shadows behind me and luckily they were what I needed most. I couldn't hide from myself any longer. I had everything written down on paper and I was still too afraid to admit to myself that I might not be as perfect as I wanted to be.
It got to a point where my life seemed back on track but I felt like I wanted to drive into a wall to escape.
I confessed to a friend what was on my mind and he said "is that it?"

I had made myself sick.

I, who had felt so unique, was just like any other person.

That conversation was the first in a line of honest conversations with each getting easier to go into and almost always with an unexpected response.

My lies tied me to an ideal that I could not live up to.

I had finally started to grow as a human, instead of just as a tool that performs functions. Honesty makes me much more efficient. I'm proud to say that for almost two years now I've been walking upright as a human being.

Now that I have the ability to be me I'm learning that the forgotten quarter of my being, the spiritual, is the paint that gives my being substance.