#NerdsUnite: On a Quest to Find My (Bat)manhood: Bad Ideas Are Just As Important As The Good Ones
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Taco. (Funny how the important the word "buddy" is in that sentence.) We've been Facebook buds for sometime now, but he's about to embark on a personal quest and has asked to write about it. I only have one more thing left to say ... HIT IT TACO!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @Redknave
After I accepted that there was nothing I could have done to stop my One Bad Day from happening, the next few months I felt very numb at times. I remember being attracted to the anti-hero Dexter, from the Showtime series of the same name. For those that don’t know, Dexter is a serial killer who kills other serial killers. And I wanted to emulate him, minus the killing. I was attracted to the idea of living without emotions. Dexter lives his whole life without emotions and to me he seemed to have it all together. I didn’t realize at the time that wanting to emulate him was just another bad idea in a long line of bad ideas.
I lived in a place of hurt for so long, that last thing I wanted to do was to feel things. As cheesy at it sounds, I didn’t want to feel emotions because it hurt. It hurt to feel sad and feeling like shit was the last thing on my list to do. The idea of idolizing a man who couldn’t feel seemed to offer a solution. I was told, again and again, that this was a bad idea. But I still went for it.
I don’t remember the details, and the past few years of my life are such a blur that I’m trying to piece together the important bits. I remember constantly switching from feeling numb, to feeling like shit. So the whole try-to-be-like-Dexter thing didn’t work because I would still feel like shit I remember Dawn telling me that yes, emotions hurt, but once it’s felt it can’t hurt you anymore. So instead of running away from the emotions, of running away from getting hurt again, I allowed myself to feel things.
I remember realizing that I’ve already been through the worst of it with my One Bad Day. What can emotions possibly do to me now? They can’t physically harm me. They can’t put a gun to my face and pull the trigger. They can’t knife me through the heart. And once I feel them they go away. I realized there was a pattern to the way I feel things. I will feel like shit for a period of time and then it would stop and I could go back to doing things. There would be times that I would spend the entire day in bed because I just felt so lonely, trying to rationalize to myself that it would be a good idea to get up and eat. Then there would be other days I would spend enjoying my time by losing myself in comics, video games, or being out with friends. It finally hit me that emotions may hurt, but only for a moment in my life. And that the bad moments will pass. So whenever I feel like shit, I just had to wait for the moment to pass. Dawn would always tell me whenever I felt like crap that “this moment isn’t the rest of your life.” It just took me awhile to understand that.
Letting my emotions being felt, and allowing myself feel like shit actually did lead to more moments that were happy. Once I started to let myself feel things, that feeling would be gone. If I felt lonely, I would let myself feel lonely and after that the feeling wouldn’t be there. And if it were, it wouldn’t be as strong. There are times today that I feel lonely, but it’s more of a nuisance than a paralyzing fear. I’m still not completely better; I still have to learn how to live again. I still need to learn to take better control of my emotions and how to act with compassion and empathy towards others.
I needed something to follow to help me. Religion, for various reasons, wasn’t for me. Using Dexter was a failure. And the one constant in my life was Batman. So I decided to emulate Batman, and initially, even that had disastrous first results. In the end I learned that choosing to follow these bad ideas wasn’t a bad idea. Yes, it would have been “better” had I not wasted my time trying to copy a “broken” man like Dexter. But I wouldn’t have learned anything. I wouldn’t have realized that I need to feel my emotions instead of trying to run away from them. Thomas Wayne in the film Batman Begins, tells little Bruce Wayne “Why do we fall Bruce? So we could learn to pick ourselves up.” Well, I’ve fallen and gotten back up only to fall again. Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop getting back up.