It's incredibly early, but oh well.

What things have I put a priority on, in my life, to repair/work on/fix/enhance/etc.

1. Finding a medium of not giving a shit about people's opinion, on anything, and falling back into the situation I was in a few years ago when I valued everyone's opinion far too much.
In the past, for a year prior to the suicide attempts, I valued everyone's opinion a good deal. More than was warranted in many circumstances. More than was warranted for many people. None were willing to value my own opinion too much, at all. Snap-back reaction: I turned away from valuing any other opinion at all, particularly in the months afterward. I had to let myself be proud of who I was, and what I had actually accomplished. I had to find a method of becoming strong once more, to ensure it didn't happen again. And I had to make absolutely certain that no fucker like Larry would ever make their way into my heart again, under any circumstances.

2. Finding a method of expressing love and other intimate feeling that is neither overbearing nor too covert to be noticed.
Too often I'm accused of not showing love and affection for another. In the past, I've shown either far, far, far too much and have smothered the one I'm with. Or, as a knee-jerk the other way, held back too much for worry over having the same response. Now I try and take a much longer term view of things and experiment with several different modes and incidents of expressing that love in an effort to find what the partner will and won't respond to. It just complicates and extends matters greatly, and leads to a lot of confusion initially, which I typically try and explain to them as to why I've done what I've done. Doesn't always work, but I'm trying.

3. Moving on from the past, whenever reasonable and possible to do so.
Probably fairly self-explanatory. My grudge holding, while still present, is much shorter term than it once was. It continues to grow smaller, from a grudge perspective. But, from a lesson-learned perspective, to ensure I don't repeat very bad mistakes again, I've been keeping more and more of the past in the fore of my mind. Probably not the wisest solution there, either, but there are a number of lessons that I consider to be critical to moving forward with my life. One set of which developed immediately from 1. above.

4. Finding ways of expressing anger that, while ideally will be socially acceptable, will also allow me, ultimately, to get it out of my system more effectively.
Relates back to 3. there, but WRT anger management, I developed the theory I gave you to handle a lot of the issues I have in general with anger management. I tend to hold onto it more than most, because I find betrayal very hard to cope with. And, at work especially, seeing people behave the way they do, seeing people do the things they do, and more, just makes me feel betrayed. When I started with Philips, I was a ball of fire, getting things done, making plans, and implementing loads of things. As time wore on, though, I came to realize it was essentially Bill and I against the world. And we were definitely in a losing battle. Eventually, I gave up because there was no way to win. I need to find a method of identifying and releasing that anger as it builds to help either prolong or prevent this sort of conclusion from being reached.

5. Finding a middle ground between my ideals and others'.
You'd stated in the past that I paid no attention whatsoever to your ideals, your thoughts, your feelings. That I devalued you utterly for everything while we were together. Some of them I did discard out of hand; I've owned that behavior previously as well. Some of them I did consider for a short while before discarding them, finding the problems with them. A few, though, I did find and start to implement. Primarily those related to how to teach you more with less. Many of the arguments you've been able to form over the past four months, barring the last few weeks, would have been exceedingly helpful in doing so, but you weren't in a place where you could have made such. And that's understandable. I've been trying to find ways of looking at others' arguments/statements/beliefs that doesn't immediately lend to complete discarding. It's difficult because on any level of cross-examination I find far too many contradictions and such in their beliefs. Going through high school, college and beyond, I spent many a night alone just contemplating what I did and didn't believe. And I have continued to do so. You haven't seen it happening, but even while playing a video game, I'm typically analzying some behavior, some belief, some arousal response and trying to figure out what it is, and why it is.

Last week

Well, I was chatting with Jake today, now that DSL is back online fully and the server is at least somewhat stable again. And I had been hashing over as much of what you'd said from last week as I could recall.

I have to say, I'm feeling incredibly disheartened and betrayed by you at this point, Kyle.

Opting to try and hold everything off until that last moment just to ensure you would give me no opportunity to say much of anything back to these accusations and these suppositions. Amazing. I have to wonder at this point how soon it'll be before I'm completely the villain here. I was rereading some of the earlier logs between you and Jake and I saw myself go, in the span of a few days, from warranting a large amount of respect from you to someone who you 'still have some respect' for in a very diminished sense.

It floors me that my views of myself are being completely trumped by your friends, friends who stand on the outside, with no input save perhaps from you and others who I chat with briefly and pass judgement like this. You say I pass judgement far too freely and easily. I can definitely see where this is applied to me in this case. I can hear you now saying, 'Yeah, take your fucking medicine, asshole', and I'm happy to. But don't fucking pretend that there is some moral high ground here. Yeah, bring up the Society of Submissives, here. Gotta love society at all. You get to find out all sorts of new and exciting things about yourself that you never, ever would have guessed at before. I mean, you could be 95% of the way to enlightenment, but a society always has the right to make you something completely else because the majority rules. Welcome back, Mat. So glad you could make another appearance.

I was also accused, by you/your friends and Jake/his friends, of being too rigid in my own wants and needs and I pursue them far too stringently for my own good. I'm too inflexible and unwilling to compromise. Hm. Aren't you doing the same thing? By standing up for yourself and not wanting to back down on a specific topic or issue, aren't you being wholly unwilling to compromise as well? Please say no, and come up with some incredibly odd-ball reason for thinking that way. I'd LOVE to see that shit.

I found myself, all day, rehashing your 'visits' to Jake's. And the VERY obvious transitions in your behavior and demeanor that you two talked a good deal about things that impact me, if not about me directly. Granted, it's fairly obvious you both have, but whatever. I only worry over what happens when you show yourself, yet again, to be completely fucked up with memory, association, and over-analysis. And I worry over decisions Jake is making based on your discussions with him, which will, necessarily, be a very polluted pool to draw from.

I find it more and more angering that you even told these friends of yours anything. Not because the need to discuss was present, and you felt you had nothing left to lose by talking to them. Rather, you normally have FAR too many issues with presenting anything but a one-sided, slanted, and skewed case. You've done it to me, you've done it to others, and I've called you on it. Now, because of this goofiness, suddenly no matter what work I have done on exploring my feelings, and my motivations, it'll be doubted for a good long while because you're too fucked up to realize them and you're too fucked up to actually recall and correlate correctly what I have told you. I opened my heart to you, on many, many, many occasions. And as was shown, yet again, with you laying on the floor and me sitting down, it got rather horribly overlooked until it was brought back to your mind. I told you secrets about me that fewer than one hand's fingers knew about. Yet, here you are, spouting them to your friends, 'sharing' your fears, with others. Fuck that. And please, don't waste my time with assurances you didn't do that, and you've never done that. You fucking well did it in front of me with Geoff when he was here. You don't realize you've done it; it doesn't even occur to you until long, long after the damage is done. You have no social filtration unit, you have no fucking clue what the fuck is going on around you. Yet, somehow, my feelings, experiences, and views are invalid because I actually tried to help you, I tried to provide for you, you fought me in many many ways, you used me in many ways that you're covering up for yourself on now, and you're breaking all my confidence and trust.

Let's start way back at ground zero, shall we? I want you to dig down, deeeeeeeeep into your head and recall something even more interesting. Do you recall the first few months of our relationship? I want you to focus especially on those times you insisted on being right, and called me on many memories and recollections I had of things. Knowing memory is faulty, and that mine is no longer near up to the photographic standard it once was, I accepted your statements because you were so certain of yourself. That was a blow to my ego, just as you claim it was a blow to yours when I did it to you. Every time I swallowed what I knew to be true, it was another blow to my ego. Then, finally, I stood up and started calling you on the bullshit. And then I started getting my ego back. Hm. Gee. Sound familiar? Sure does to me. Only, I tried eventually, to show where the mistake happened, and where the problem occurred, and when you recalled what had happened correctly, you thanked me because you were seeing the problems in more clear lighting. Yet, now, at the end, has all this been forgotten suddenly? Not by me it hasn't, but I'll bet it has by you. It staggers me to see just this sort of shit happening, time after time with you.

And that was just one more piece of evidence that you used me. You carefully couched a whole lot of shit together, and ran with it, milking me for everything you could get, working my emotions as you've worked so many others. My uncle worked with 'the droolies', I believe I mentioned. It was VERY interesting to hear something from him about one of the patients in the hospital he was in. The guy actually accused the orderly of sexually abusing him, just to get the orderly off his case. Upon deeper examination of the situation, the guy was eventually found innocent. Eventually. Manipulating other people's emotions for your own benefit doesn't even have to be a concious decision. Yet, on reading your logs with Jake, and on reading Jake's LJ entries, I found an amazing number of 'little' things done to me, by you, that fit with a lot of what he claims Marc did to him. VERY interesting indeed. Only, now, I'm too late. Jake carefully avoided a couple of topics, just as you did, which indicates there is a concerted effort to not discuss it with me. Great. Fucking great. Thanks ever so. Love that knife in my back, you miserable pile of shit.

And now, now you've got the happy little wrongness-shield of AS to hide behind. After all, now you can say every and any fucking thing you want to because you're taking the time to spell out up front that you're fucked up, you've got problems, and everyone needs to make extra special efforts for you and put up with a whole lot more. No matter what the consequence of those words might be, no matter how flaky that shit will be. I never, EVER want to hear the term 'manipulative' from you about me again. EVER.

Snicker

Hrm.