The world is my personal hell

When I was a teenager, I was something of a juvenile delinquent. I won't go into detail about that because it makes me feel uncomfortable.

What you have to know is that eventually, the police had found out about my criminal acts. As you can expect, this devastated my family. Even more so is the fact that for years I conditioned them to believe I was some sort of angel. A white knight. In secrecy, I was a scumbag.

I too was devasted, and felt a extreme amount of guilt after the fiasco ended. Still do. Thing is, my family never let me live it down and still don't. I eventually decided to seek redemption by helping people, which failed because it became something more than that. I wanted to be a hero. Fast foward later and I was having delusions of grandeur.

Yeah, I was a hero all right. Whenever I tried to do something good, I only ended up hurting more people just like how I hurt everyone back in my delinquent days. It came to a point where I was so in-roped in my hero delusion that I was in complete denial that I was doing anything wrong. Of course, this delusion came to an end eventually and I ended up worse than ever before.

So you see, the world is my personal hell because no matter how ######6 hard I try, I only end up hurting more people. I'm simply a bad person. It's in my nature to do bad. Not good. For this reason, I want to die. My family hates me and I have nothing to look foward to.

-- Sun Apr 19, 2015 10:55 pm --

Alright, I feel I haven't been specific enough in my post above. So I've decided to tell anyone who's reading this everything here goes nothing.

When I was a child, I was a very big kleptomaniac. I was already miserable due to a shoddy home life and as such, stealing things was a way of coping. And for the time being, it was fun.
Of course, it came to an end eventually. Someone found all those stolen goods and reported it to the police, who promptly arrested me. It was a slow day for the justice system because for some reason, I was found innocent, much to my chagrin today. It boggles my mind.

I expected a warm welcome but all I got was hate. From people and myself. And I can see why. Everyone thought I was a good kid due to my polite manner and good grades. But I was nothing but a petty thief. My life was and still is a lie. In fact, that's what hurts me the most. The lies. For such a long time I lied to people I supposedly loved or thought of as a friend. I realized that I had ###$ up big time and there is nothing I can do about it because people still give me $#%^ over it. Myself the most. Only some members of my family still care about me, but what good is that when the rest doesn't?

I fear that the time will come when I'll go mad and become an even worse person than I'm already am. I cannot be the hero I wish to be. Hell, a part of me litteraly wants me to go on a homicidal rampage. It's that bad.

I will never be able to adjust to a normal life because of my criminal nature. My talents lie elsewhere.

Personally, I strongly feel that you should not beat yourself up for the acts you committed as a child, especially those involving theft. While property crime can certainly be hurtful, it's in a very different ballpark to bodily, emotional or sexual crimes committed against a person. Stuff is just stuff at the end of the day, as important as we make it in our lives. Furthermore, as a child your brain was not yet developed as it is now. You were - in a very real sense - not the same person who you are today.

A lot of your concern seems to be that you have a 'criminal nature', which means that you will inevitably do wrong. I'm not so convinced this is the case (since your remorse is very clear) but even if it is, there are ways to channel this. 1.) Sometimes prolific criminals will become advisers on how to catch criminals - this is especially true of thieves and hackers. Perhaps you could set up a blog along these lines? 2.) If you feel like you can't help but create misrule, there are more positive and exciting ways to channel this. There are lots of ways of behaving disruptively, even socially unacceptably, without breaking any laws, or even hurting anyone. An interesting example are Pueblo Clowns!! 3.) Write a deeply transgressive, or even messed up story. You are the leader of your own mind and within your imagination there are no laws. I often think that some great authors like William Burroughs or Thomas de Quincey were essentially criminal in nature (in as much as having low impulse control, a tendency towards destruction and chaos, a distrust of society and its rules, a tendency to put havoc into other people's lives) but channeled these energies into writing. There are other outlets.

As for your family, I'd say that you should hold onto the ones to whom you are still close and don't worry too much about those who won't forgive you. I don't think 'only some members of my family still care about me, but what good is that when the rest doesn't?' is a healthy way of looking at things. You don't need everyone to like you.

P.S. Your subject title make me think of this quote by Mephistopheles from Dr. Faustus, which I imagine may have been deliberate, considering your username:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

I agree with Sprock - you don't need everyone to like you. In modern society, we don't need to depend so much on other people for our survival, but there is still an evolutionary hangover that triggers a fear based response at the prospect of being alone. It's time to face and question that fear honestly. We can't live our lives identifying with every single thought or impulse that pops into our heads. In any moment, the brain is a storm of millions of chemical reactions. Most (some would say all) of our thoughts and impulses are delivered from the darkness of the unconscious - the dumping ground for our past experiences. It makes no sense at all to identify with them as if you are them and they are you. They are stuff that happened. Learn the lessons from the past, but only in the same way you would learn from another person's mistakes.

You used the words "criminal nature". What does this really mean? How do you define your nature? You are basing your present (and potential future) on the conditioning of the past. You are relying on thoughts about yourself (the product of this conditioning) to tell you who you are NOW. This greatly limits your potential and creates a distorting lense through which you see life.

Why do you listen to/watch these thoughts as if they define who you are in this moment?

The solution, not just for you, but for anyone who is troubled by the self-deprecation of mind, is to stop living in the mind. It takes work, but you can remove the mind created tint that clouds your view of life and just be the life that is flowing through you. Pure, unfiltered, non-judgemental experience. This also means negative impulses won't have such a tight grip over you because they too are products of the conditioned mind.

I know it all sounds quite mystical, but if anything, a life lived from a perspective that only uses the mind as a practical and artistic tool - i.e. for problem solving and creativity - and less in the formation of personal identity, is potentially a much more authentic and peaceful life.

I've written about the illusion of the self in many of my posts here. It's probably the biggest illusion to dissolve and also the hardest conditioning to break down. But just because something feels real, it doesn't mean it is. Just because you feel like you are the same self as your past self, doesn't mean this is real. Just because you feel like you are this unitary "ghost in the machine", behind the controls of your mind, moving through time and space from cradle to grave, doesn't mean it's true.

You don't have to be the person you were. Your true potential is far greater than who you think you are, based on the limitations of a past self. But you have to let go of these self identifying thoughts that cloud your view of life. Only then are you free to exist fully in the present moment and not be bound by the happenings of the past.

Whether or not others judge you on your past is up to them. But just as you are not defined by your own thoughts, you are certainly not defined by other people's thoughts about you. You don't need anyone to define you.