Crazy Fuel

Thus Spake Omega:
There is something deeply pleasant about hitting rocks with a bat. The swing, the force, the crack, the rock spinning fast enough to hum, it all makes for a very satisfying, very boyish past-time. For whatever reason, carrying a bat around always made me feel a bit more powerful. I think that I instinctively knew that as fun as hitting things was, the bat was a weapon and if I needed to I could defend myself with it. Men are hard wired to be attracted to weapons. It does not matter if the weapon is a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, an M1911 (.45 of course), or a high quality stick, we love weapons. Somehow, we know that we are meant to take up arms in defense of our families, lives, and homes. We are meant to be aggressive. Yet for some, as a boy grows up, that drive, that fascination with violence, for various reasons, is excised like a cancer. For others it is never trained and becomes uncontrollable and destructive. Either way, a boy who does not know how to channel and use his aggression is not a man. Of the two fates, mine was the former.

Due to a deep depression that settled on me in my mid teens, I never learned how to use my aggression. I definitely had it, and frequently used it in school and on my cousins, but as I moved into my teens a growing sense of fear and anxiety began to push back on it. It always got me into trouble, and despite my father's insistence that I use it to defend myself, I received no training on when and how much. There were other far more severe factors that I will not mention here (suffice it to say if I had had male training it may have saved me from losing my mind), and all of it combined drove me deeper into depression. By the time I hit my twenties I was crazy. The aggression had turned inwards with no outlet. I felt helpless and I began to consider suicide. Eventually after years of depression I sought help.

So, as I approach the end of my twenties, it is no small thing when I say that I have not been depressed at all this year. There have been some bad days, but even those are better than my best days were during depression. Best of all I only occasionally think about testing the integrity of my skull with a high velocity lead slug (.45 of course). However, this is not my personal therapy journal, but a post about game, so let me explain why I am no longer depressed, and what changed.

I have spent a lot of time (and a shit-load of money) in therapy. While I do not recommend it for most people, for the genuinely crazy it may do some good. Paying someone to care is not a bad way to go if nothing else has worked. But despite learning to control my emotions, the one thing that turned everything around was aggression. If you are a guy you will have it in abundance. While there is merit in learning to calm yourself, you must learn to channel your aggression. It has to go somewhere. If you do not it will cause problems. I had a triple whammy: I could not control it, which terrified me; the terror fueled a need to bottle it up; and so I channeled it inwards (which turned to visions of sugar plums dancing in my head: .45 of course). After years of trying to understand what was going on in the course of a few week I had an epiphany and I began to channel it outwards. It was relief like nothing I had ever felt.

After the initial awkward steps, once as I got used to the idea, I found that, to stay sane, I had to have an outlet. I had to have a place to channel the aggression; I had to have a target. I was unfamiliar enough with this new need that the most obvious outlet did not occur to me. Aggression though is a fairly simple impulse and martial arts quickly came to mind as the clearest choice. I joined a local Muay Thai gym and working out there is very calming. Punching things rivals hypnosis in its therapeutic value (way cheaper too). When I go there I pour myself into the exercise. I have to. I take all the anger, fear, frustration, sex drive, and depression, and I grind it up and use it as fuel, and unexpectedly it turns into a sort of exhausted, jagged joy. I limp home feeling better than I have ever felt in my life. Aggression is medicine for men. Learning to channel it is a necessary daily practice.

The benefits are many and varied. As long as I do not let the aggression build up, it improves my focus, determination, and willpower. I can approach girls fearlessly. Before, approach anxiety felt like walking through tar, now it feels like a light breeze pushing me back. I went on a date recently and just for kicks, I decided I was not interested, walked away, and did not look back. This was a major turning point. I have always been afraid of breaking the rules, regardless of the rules' source, and I decided that I was not going to be afraid of it anymore, so I walked away. I had no reason, or justification, I simply refused to be afraid of losing. Now I talk to random strangers on the street, almost more than people I know. My game has a long way to go, but feeling no fear while conversing with an 8 and her 8.5 sister seems to me to be a good sign. My voice is louder. Tomorrow I will have my second date with a girl I approached on the street. She is a 7 and seems to be into me. Things are really looking up.

Learning controlled aggression has changed everything for me. I feel as though I am carrying a bat at all times. I can use it to nudge people and get their attention. I can swing it to warn people away. And, my favorite, I can take it to side of someone's head, should they deserve it. Knowing that I can hit back has been extremely therapeutic. Who would have thought that acting like a man would be the cure for not feeling like a man?