How many people do you know? How did you meet them? What does it mean to “know” someone? We live in a different world than we did 30, 20 even 10 years ago. The nature and state of human interpersonal relationships have evolved just as the way we communicate has evolved. We can communicate in instantaneous methods that would have been unimaginable just 20 years ago yet we still maintain the same standards of the make up of a relationship as we did before. We can communicate in new ways previously impossible yet we have not changed our expectations of the results of said communication.

     For the sake of exposition of the problem at hand we can create a small case study of the details of the relationships of two separate pairs of people. Take these two sets of people, two separate relationships if you can at a minimum pass over the obstacle of accepting that these are in fact relationships, and examine the details of these sets of people with a connective personal relationship built on love, “like”, interest in each other or just a general mutual desire to be together and learn about the other person. These two groups of people communicate primarily via phone and internet due to the unfortunate fact that they are currently not living in the same location or even in a close by drivable distance. Thanks to modern technology like Skype they are able to communicate over video calls as well. Both groups talk every single day. They always say goodnight before going to sleep and talk again very shortly after waking up the next morning. We will assume we can all safely consider the two groups as in fact having a relationship so they will be referred to as couples from this point on. Each of these couples are identical in their commitment and intensity for one another. For all intents and purposes they are in what is commonly labeled, and publicly accepted, as a “distance relationship.” They each know everything there is to know about the other person. They each value and appreciate the qualities of the other person. They each talk as much or more every single day than a couple not dealing with the added burden of the distance relationship. They define themselves and feel the same way as a couple in a non-distance relationship by calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend. They are fully committed to making this temporary obstacle that is a distance relationship work. They are probably even more attentive than most because they are aware of the fragility of the situation.

     Most people have been in a distance relationship at some point for some duration of time. We all know the difficulties and high chance of failure. While everything has been detailed on the equivalence of the two couples and not the differences, it may seem as though there is no point to this case study. There is one difference though that has not been revealed. Couple B has not yet seen each other in person yet. They met online either through work or friends and due to current insurmountable odds are unable to see each other in person quite yet. We’ve already covered all the details of the relationships and agreed that they are equal in all respects and were justly classified as the commonly accepted relationship type of a “distance relationship.” Yet if you get either member from Couple B to tell one of their friends or family the situation there is the immediate and inevitable question that arises: “Have you met him/her before?” What does that mean when you ask, “have you met him/her before?” How could they know each other if they never met? “No, No,” says the friend, “Have you met him/her in person?” Therein lies the rub.

     The golden standard of a face-to-face meeting, a handshake or a hug. By the old world standards you have not “met” someone until you have met/been introduced to that person IN person. Of course, there was no other way to communicate in as rich a method as good old fashioned face-to-face. Now however, there are multitudes of ways to communicate in equally as productive and rewarding a method as in person, but we still have a stranglehold on those old expectations — that golden standard of “meeting in person.”

     Let’s assume for a moment that couple B have been talking everyday with few exceptions for 5 years. They know more about each other than any person that they know in their “real life.” Even their families do not know them as well as they know each other. They have done this diligently and with love for 5 years. Do we still say they “haven’t met?” Because according to this golden standard of meeting face-to-face do we say they don’t really know each other? Suddenly couple A is now not only better than couple B, but couple B is suddenly invalid and no longer qualified to be considered a couple. How does this logically make any sense? How can we judge couple B and discount their relationship down to nothing? The couples are exactly the same in commitment, knowledge of each other, love and care for the other person. They are no different except couple B has only spoke over video call and not in person. Once couple B “meets” in person is there a magical dust that falls on their heads and annoints them by the common social standard as finally actually being a couple? How does this magical process work? Does anything actually change in their minds or hearts at that point? Is there a certificate mailed to their residences from the central relationship validity authority council?

     Put aside your preconceived notions of what it means to “know” someone, what it means to “meet” someone and what truly defines a relationship, and think about it rationally, logically and objectively. To make things easier for you I will hold your hand and walk you to to finish line on this one: There is absolutely no difference. There is absolutely no change. There is no magic metaphysical gateway that is passed when light is projected into the back of your eyes where your optic nerve then transmits the collected sensory data to the brain where the brain then translates this data into a visual representation of what is physically outside of your body, thus becoming a person, according to the golden standard, that you have in fact “met” — in person that is. To point out the asinine nature of this irrelevant and outdated methodology you can take the tenants of actually “meeting” someone and apply it to a blind couple. It may sound ridiculous but think about it for a moment. The depth of their communication is not more visually validated than couple B. In fact, couple B has seen each other in real time while talking thanks to video call technology while the blind couple has never seen each other. Do we say the blind couple haven’t really “met?” Of course not. That sounds ridiculous by any standards. Yet we as a society tell couple B that they do not “really” know each other. They have never “met.”

     ”How can you really know someone you haven’t met before?” “How can you be in a relationship with someone if you’ve never “met” them ?” Don’t discount anyone’s feelings that are not your own. Couple B have “met.” They are in a relationship just like couple A. Next time a friend or family member wants to tell you about a person who they feel strongly for and really care about and you catch yourself about to ask, “have you actually “met” him/her?”, or even further say, “How can you be in a relationship with someone you’ve never met?”, stop yourself and take a moment to consider the whole situation and all of the factors. Because while you question the validity of the relationship they are telling you about, the relationship between you and the person that is sharing their story with you that you are unjustly judging, in person I might add, may be absolute shit in comparison to that “not real” relationship that you deem invalid from atop your Olympus of stalwart authority.

     How do you quantify anger? When you’re really upset how do you express it? Why do we let other people have complete control over our moods? I am no expert in this field. I do many things that most people would probably call “warning signs” or be “very concerned about,” but it’s not like I’m not aware of them. I know full well how I should react — yet I can’t. I know full well what I shouldn’t do — yet I still do. Our bodies and our minds develop their own way of coping with the harshness of living in society. I’m fully aware of the ways that I choose to cope with things, but those are my choices. My choices don’t choose me; I choose my choices. What I am not allowed to choose is the manner and magnitude of the endless onslaught of shit that I am forced to deal with.

     The one core factor I’ve learned I must live with everyday but I haven’t learned how to live with is control — control of my life. I was not made by who ever or whatever made us to not be in control of myself. Lacking even the smallest ability to have some control over my life over the past 6 years has slowly whittled away my personality. Every time that I am confronted with some ridiculous situation, some meaningless asshole or basically anything negative in my life that I am absolutely powerless to avoid, another piece of myself is stripped away and I find myself further and further down the rabbit hole.

     While I have not been amazed at my ability to confront or deal with my burdens and obstacles of the past 6 years, I have been amazed at my ability to continue on functioning as a stable person. The one defense I have found that allows me to continue living without descending into the non-functioning rung of society is a highly tuned nearly surgical ability to selectively wipe things from my memory. Whenever life decides to completely shit on me, which is more often than not, I black it out. It may sound hyperbolic and like I am making it up, but I assure you, I do not remember. For example, the 9 weeks of Hell in 2004 that I had to endure called Army Basic Training is a complete blur. I can honestly tell you that I barely remember any details and I could not piece together a full day if my life depended on it. The subconscious entities in my mind decided to save myself from myself and completely remove these memories. One of the most traumatic periods of my life, and I feel like the few memories I have were pulled from a movie I watched once and that there is no way they came from real life experiences.

     So that is what I do — forget. Even when I get immediately angry at some situation that blindsides me in life, my initial reaction is to do something else and forget it. Watch a movie, go to sleep even drink so that it doesn’t matter anymore. The demonization of drinking in moderation is far greater in expression than it is in reality. You cry, you yell, you do whatever you do when you have a problem; I have a glass of wine, or a few, and forget that I was angry at anything. Is it really that wrong? Forgetting things that bother you is not an easy task. It takes time and effort. Several weeks, or several months, down the road it no longer matters, but when something happens right now, something that makes you so angry you get physically sick and it infects your mind and your daily life that you can physically feel your emotions, you need a little artificial boost. I come home have a glass of wine, put on a movie that is inversely representative of my current mood and I self medicate myself into submission. A glass or two of wine later, I am laughing at the comedy I am watching or I’m smiling at the love story glowing on screen. I enjoy the pseudo-reality adn then I go to sleep. Wake up the next day and continue on with my life. Problem solved.

     The common conservative reaction to that may be negative, but while they may choose to cry and moan over problems, I prefer to purge and reset. There are few people who I know have been through as many things that I have been and that I truly respect and listen to when they contradict what I say or tell me it’s not that bad. Few people I said. As most of you who may be reading think to yourself that I don’t have it that bad or that I don’t deal with things in a healthy way, I have but one thing to say: Get over yourself. I wouldn’t say there are more than one or two people who know all the things that have happened to me in the past 6 years, and this applies to everyone not just me. And I can confidently say there is no one that has felt everything that i have felt as I have felt it for the past 6 years. Yet we pass judgment and act like we are better capable of dealing with problems than another person. Even if said person knew everything in vivid detail as if read from a report on what all has happened to me in my life that person would still not feel it as I felt it. They didn’t live in those situations. Just because I’ve read a book or watched a movie about a person who has cancer doesn’t mean that I truly know what it is like to have cancer. We forget sometimes, and by sometimes I mean nearly all of the time, that we know nothing unless we experience it ourselves. Don’t dare tell someone how to live their life or how to cope with their burdens unless you have in fact been through the exact same situation — lest make a complete ass of yourself and lose all credibility.

     Few things make angrier than when someone tells me, “you know it’s really not that bad.” Everyone reacts to things differently. Everyone feels things differently. The thing that happened to you in passing 3 days ago that you can barely remember and you couldn’t care less about could be the pivotal point of change and power on another person’s life. Why do we forget this? I’m sure everyone at some point while they were a child yelled over tear filled eyes to one of their parents, “You don’t know how I feel!” Yet we grow up and we convince ourselves we do know how everyone feels. If we really knew how everyone felt and how they would react then we wouldn’t do the things we do to other people — or would we still? If we knew how people felt and why they do the things we do it would be logical, and extremely optimistic considering human nature, to assume that we would never do something to someone that will hurt them. But we don’t know how other people feel. We don’t know the extent to which we hurt them whenever we do even realize that we hurt them in the first place. You can’t quantify a person’s emotions — you don’t feel as they do.

     How do you even quantify your own emotions when there’s no standard of measurement except yourself to compare it to? We don’t know how anyone feels. We don’t even know how we feel ourselves. We are all trying to discover our way to deal with the world and the meaningless bullshit that it throws into our path. Why do we put unneeded stress on others when we are already receiving our own dose of stress from the rest of the world? The sado-masochistic tendencies of man are enough to write the final chapter of our doomed experiment at civilized society itself. When we feel pressure or pain, we do not learn a single lesson and we later inflict those same burdens on another person. Why don’t we think about what we do to others? Why do we think so much on how to better ourselves when we should be thinking on how to make others better? If everyone made an effort to lighten the load for someone else, then those effects would eventually become a factor in our own lives. Treat others as you wish to be treated is not some lofty religion based ideal. It’s logic. It’s Science. If we treat others how we wish to be treated, and everyone adopts this policy, we will then be treated in such a manner in return. Unfortunately the inverse of this policy is the standard occurrence and yet is still just as logical. Do not treat others as you wish to be treated and they will certainly not treat you how you wish to be treated in return.

     Why do we allow this to happen? Why do we let others control our lives and the way we treat others? We can’t even control how we treat others; much less control how and when others treat us poorly and our reaction to that. Even if you are successful in treating others well in spite of how you are treated, the benefit of this way of life is only seen as a group effort. The cycle of anger, the cycle of hate, the cycle of bullshit, whatever you want to call it, is everyone’s fault. You may be able to pull yourself out of the cycle but unless that other person does the same thing, you will keep getting hit with negativity and stress, except now you are the only one taking it and you’re not giving it back. Our instinct is to want to give it back immediately — an eye for an eye — but this is the crux of the dilemma that is the struggle of our existence. To keep from fighting others we must learn to fight ourselves — in any way we can.

     You can deal with your problems however you want, you can unjustly treat me like shit without considering what it does to me and you can attempt to make me hate my life all you want. I’ll be here. I’ll be here with a bottle of wine and a trained indifference. Do whatever the fuck you want; I’ll still be here tomorrow.

Since getting off a bus shortly after midnight at a dimly lit brick building in the woods just inside the gate of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri on June 24th 2004, I have been counting up the minutes and counting down the level of my sanity to one thing — 2010. 2010 being the year that I will finally be released from my voluntary bout in involuntary federal slavery. Now some of you twats are probably thinking, “You signed up for it,” or possibly “no one forced you to join the military,” and I have one thing to say to you: How about you shut your fucking mouth and join the Army also then. Nothing makes my skin crawl more than listening to the asinine remarks of people who have no idea what they are talking about.

Nearly 6 Years have passed and I am a far different person than I was before. On the positive end I am smarter, more established, worldly, experienced, and ready to accomplish anything that I please to. On the flip side, I am immensely negative, cynical, prone to depression, pessimistic, unable to trust people, and generally seconds away from going completely bat shit insane at any given moment. I have been to the depths of hell my friends, and it is having your socks and underwear counted for the 3rd time in a month by someone higher ranked than you who graduated high school when you hit your three year enlistment anniversary.

I have lost my dignity, my sanity, my family, and nearly every ounce of ‘me’ that there was left. Alas, here I am. 5 1/2 years in with only 5 1/2 more months remaining and the same skill I developed to save myself from the day to day prevents me from being able to even get marginally excited about my soon-to-be liberation — forgetting it all. I can hardly remember anything from the past 6 years but blinding hate and rage. I have taught myself for survival that I must block it out. Block every single act of stupidity, moment of pure idiocy, and migraine inducing display of complete disregard for common sense and the well-being of others under a misguided banner of “caring for soldiers,” so that I may be able to wake up the next morning and go right back into the thick of it as if yesterday never happened. I wish I would have kept a daily journal. I wish I could have wrote the story of “serving my country,” but I can hardly remember last month let alone 5 or 6 years ago. I wish I could have looked back on these years with pride instead of disgust.

After only 5 1/2 more months I will be driving off an Army post for the last time. “2010 is the year I’ll be free,” was my mantra. Said over and over to myself with no more belief that it would ever happen than belief that I will one day be on the moon. Psychologically I’ve been in prison this entire time. The naive and bright eyed child that was my mind beat and degraded daily by the guards. You begin to lose sight of reality. The absence of pain is so long gone that the existence of pain is your new reality. It may sound unbelievable to you whom have never experienced it, but the thought of ever being released from this gauntlet of the mind has been a fact that was completely unfathomable — until recently. A day finally came that I was quite sure would never come before I most certainly jumped off a cliff to silence the noise or shot blood out of my ears in an uncontrollable fit of rage. January 1, 2010. As the calendar turned so did my thoughts to the future.

2010 is here. 2010 will be the end of it all. 2010. The End.

Soon I will embark on the beginning of the rest of my life. My real life. The life that has apparently been waiting for me. I’ve paid my dues and walked through the fires, and hopefully it’s time. Time to move on with my life and remember the past as if it was some horrible and depressing movie that I once saw. I am so ready for a change. A change for the better than won’t make me further hate my own life. A change to start the next chapter of my life. The chapter where I win and they do not. The part where I can make my own way; where I am in charge again. I am ready for it to begin.

2010 is here. 2010 will be the beginning of it all. 2010. Begin.