New here today

First time here on this site. I'm a man, mid-30s. Not sure I'll give too much detail. I will just say things I want to say out loud but nobody to speak to.

Struggling to live.
I am tired in my heart.
I need to rest at a safe place.
Never been in the military but feels like I've been to war.
I like to try and think about nature especially flowers and gentle things like that. Not sure if it helps.
I feel like a monster but I lie and tell myself I'm a flower.

I guess I'll add to this later or whatever. Cheers all.

When your ready I will look forward to speaking to you. Take care for now.

Peter

Thanks for the reply. I hope I'm ready sometime. Cheers Peter.

I have to be honest. I feel like puking after writing that first post.

Spent the last couple of days totally on edge and trying to look around for things around the house to support my weight for hanging myself. I'm not fat but I'm a big boy and I can't find a thing so far.

The only background I can say without going into 'bad stuff' is that I can fight with the best of them. I've been tried and tested not just in the ring but more times than I can count in street encounters. Spent my life doing 6 martial arts and bit of bare knuckle work and 5 years of pain/body conditioning. You have no idea how hard it is for me to say what I said about gentle things in my first post and that's why I feel like being sick.

I think I'm from another planet to everybody else. I can't see how talking about my bad experiences in the past will help. I'm just thinking out loud.

You shouldn't feel sick. I think you are brave and wonderful. My husband has a problem, and from what he tells me he feels like you do, but he would never have the courage to write it. I wish the hell he would. There's nothing wrong with gentle feelings, the wrong is this blasted twisted world where we all seem to becoming more lonely and isolated. I know from looking at this site there are some amazing stories of people overcoming or coping with all manners of problems. Hang on in there, I bet there's someone with exactly the sort of support you need just waiting to help.
With very best wishes, Millie

Thanks Millie. I really appreciate you writing. It helps to be anonymous to write these things but it's still difficult (I felt sick). Also I don't feel understood in where I'm from and what I want out of life. The whole gentle thing is considered gay and especially the places I've been, it's just never possible to share. I'm a straight man who never backs down but I dream of gentle things. Dream isn't a strong enough word. I long for it. Reminds me of Bobby Kennedy's speech "too often we honour swagger and bluster and wielders of force". I am isolated by the nature of my problems. I don't trust easily and intimacy is terrifying including when people hug. I've had relationships but never felt love/loved in them. Maybe I wasn't in the right place mentally. I want to find a gentleness and experience a simple love (even platonic). But I've also learnt that wanting things I can't have makes me an unhappy person.

P.s. Here is the whole Bobby Kennedy speech. I'm sure most have heard it before. It sometimes moves me to tears because I wonder if people are out there that believe or know of a thoughtful/caring life.

"Surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and sisters once again" (paraphrased)

Thanks for the link to the speech, it is one of the great speeches of recent times. People to often admire the easy speeches that light fires in peoples souls releasing violent fury on to the world. It is far harder to quench such fury with the power of words, to offer a glimpse of real peace. I cant think of any other speaker that stopped a city burning.
Try not to let the hope turn into despair, or let the transparent and wicked manipulators of the world anger you to the point of cynicism. I am a terrible cynic and it is not something I admire, its just a lazy reaction to the world when you give up fighting. Hope though is a beautiful thing and well worth hanging on to. Despair might not be about losing feelings of hope for the world it can be a feeling that your alone in hopeful dreams while no one else seems to care. People are all filled with hope they just more often than not don't know it. It can be drawn out of them by powerful words, pictures, films, and quite often sport.
People need hope, its just on their planet (if I might join you on yours and believe me you are not alone feeling that) they don't realise they do. People are comfortable and happy, easily led in what they should believe, but still they buy a lottery ticket, pine for their team to score, or one day win a cup. I think deep down that everyone has a hope for more beauty and peace in the world if only they realised it, instead of being given aspirations by lazy cynics; like me.
The tougher and more horrific things are the clearer and more focused peoples hope becomes. I cant believe it was a coincidence that the NHS was born from the horror of a world war. Bobby Kennedy speaks after the horror of Dr. King getting shot and gives peace to an entire city. Your horror is your own, mine is my own, don't share it here unless you want to.
Don't despair though there is hope in everyone even grumpy cynics like me. You are not alone.
I have great admiration for your courageous writing, and its style. Funny thing the internet it is utterly impersonal but it sure doesn't feel that way when you press send and wait for a reply.

Couldn't agree more, intimacy is the most terryfing of things, I see someone coming with a hug and could outrun this Bolt chap. Once you give intimacy, you can't get it back, it's a giving of a bit of yourself and a trust that allows someone to get at your feelings and trample them underfoot. I wonder sometimes if anyone ever feels that they 'belong' or if they just play at it. I've always been a bloody disaster at it, kids at school had groups and clics, but I never really fitted into one. People try to put you in boxes and hammer the lid on, you do something 'gentle' and you're male so you're effiminate; stick up for yourself as a woman and you are 'butch'. People want to fit in because it makes them feel safe. Sometimes life just feels like a game, and I just never seemed to quite get the hang of the rules. When I was a kid I could never get the hang of hockey, I'd study the picture of the pitch for ages and tell myself where I was and was not meant to run, and the minute my freezing cold knees were on that pitch I'd charge up and down with the ruddy stick without any clue where I was and where I was meant to be. Thing is it always seemed that everyone else knew where they were and what they were doing. I really think life's like that, I think other people pretend that they have the foggiest idea and travel hopefully. I don't think any of us are black or white or gay or straight or the died in the wool bigots they pretend to be, it's fear of being found out, if you have a soft bit of flesh on display some bastard is going to come along and stick something in it, so you grow a shell to protect it.
It takes courage to question who you are, and what you want. Even more so, because there probably isn't an answer to either, or at least not a simple one. I agree with Mat, we need hope; it's that grain of possibility that keeps people going. I don't want to win the lottery, but I'd sell my soul for a guarantee that this time next year I'll be in a content and happy place where I don't feel the constant need to question myself and everyone around me. I don't know about ignorance being bliss, but certainly self knowledge and 'know theyself' ain't all it's cracked up to be. Again Mat got it just right when he said it's the anonimity here that's to great. You can share any thing about yourself that you feel ready to, the one thing I think I can guarantee, is that there will be someone out there who has felt it too, and nobody who is going to question your right to feel it.
Millie

Thanks for your comments about the speech Matt. Never a truer word spoken. People love to kick off but it takes something or someone special to motivate them to do the opposite and calm. A hard task! I like what you said about hopeful dreams. Very nice. I am a dreamer. Thank you.

I'm with you on the 'belonging' thing Millie. I wasn't allowed to be a fully fledged member of any group at any of my schools. People are always stereotyping me and they are all opposite views of each other! A compliment I suppose that I can be anything I want. But also confusing and I wish people would just be more open minded.

I love the picture of you playing hockey as a child. While it was difficult for you, I found it kind of sweet actually. I suppose I take more interest in the ones trying so hard but not getting there. It's more of an interesting endearing picture. I think this is because when I was a child I made up my own world in my head. In this world, all my frailties became cool just to myself. Like living in a bubble. So actually now, the things that people hate about themselves are often what I like and think are super cool.

That's so true about having a soft bit of flesh on display. This is happening everywhere I look but to ridiculous levels. For example, everyone has suddenly become gangster hard men. How did that happen? All these hard blokes/teens walking around with attitudes but most aren't hard or have serious fight experience. One guy in town today had a t-shirt that had in big letters "I haven't got tourettes. I just think you're a cu*t".

*sigh* It shows no class. All front. A real hard man shows a kindness to strangers because he has nothing to prove. My boxing gym is in a dire part of town. It's horrendous. But all the fighters, no matter how crap their backgrounds are total gents! An older woman walked backwards into me at the supermarket today and I very quickly made sure she didn't fall and said "are you ok darlin?".

I was in a traffic jam not so long ago and just sitting there. A woman reversed out on to the main road and backed into me while my car was stationary. Obviously her fault but she got out and went ballistic at me, banging on my window and yelling. I just said really calmly and nicely "are you ok?" and repeated it until she stopped shouting and said "what?". I said slowly, "are... you... ok?". She went "oh.... um... yeah", looked a bit tired out from her ranting and just went back to her car. I thought "Poor lass. It's ok. She's scared".

So many situations like that have happened to me. I got dragged into some street problems recently with 3 dodgy blokes. A lady had asked me to intervene. All three blokes were right in my face, shouting, swearing, getting really agro. I never backed down and said really calmly "it's a mystery to you how to speak normally to me". By the end of it, they all left saying sorry, shaking my hand and fixing the damage they had caused.

Tires me and saddens me a bit. Being indoors is my time to patch myself up and recharge the ole batteries a bit away from it all.

the_illusive, when you write I can totally picture the situation, you describe it beautifully. I actually had to groan and put my hands over my face at the horror of encountering 'Mr. vulgar T-shirt' imagine trying to explain that one to a twelve year old, or am I being Peter Panish, maybe regrettably they may understand. I think there is a great wealth of people wandering around scared as hell of being hurt and errect these 'hard man' fences. Things have changed so drastically over the last few years. I don't know how to relate, or how to protect people from this scared and scary society. Yesterday, I took my eight year old son to a lake not far from me, and he's quite slightly built and also pretty (he may one day be hansom, but now he's just pretty) and as he was playing I found two older boys, probably 12 or 13 year olds tormenting him and saying 'your'e not a boy, you're a girl) he got quite upset, and I explained later that they were just rather plain looking and probably jealous of his good looks? What the hell do I do when he's 17 and out with his mates? Teach him to fight harder to defend himself, get him to masque the soft and caring part of his nature so that he 'fits in'. I don't want to live in a world where we have to do that. I want to rail and get cross at a world that judges people like that. It sounds like you have been judged on occassion the_illusive, and don't like it either. I can rebuild my bits of world, I can make a loving and nice world for my son, the problem is that someday you have to open the door and let the outside world in, and the the outside world isn't always so nice. At the same time, I believe with a certainty that the vast majority really are good, they just get caught up in the noise of the world, get people on a one to one level and they respond, it just takes so much time. As with the group of men you encountered, when you met them they were a gang, by the time you'd finished with them they were three individuals. Groups are always terrifying - sheep with long teeth. I try to work out if it's the breakdown of organised religion, the family, consumerism, quite what that's bringing about this wave of not caring, and I can't work out what. I'm not really religious, and my only knowledge of a family (other than me and my kid) has been something that would make James Herbert wince. Maybe it's lack of time, or respect? You the_illusive, have to recharge your batteries and keep on keeping on. You sound like you are making a difference.
Millie

(on a technical level, is it just me, or does this website have an alarming habit of eating bits of your message, just as you have expressed yourself succinctly, you hope, thereby causing you to type it all again in a diffrent fashion? Is this a theraputic aid, or just designed to make me de-stress myself by severely beating the PC)