Being Me

Being Unique & Always “the Other”

Born in a refugee camp following WW2 to parents fleeing from Lithuania just ahead of Stalin's army, I have always been the outsider, the foreigner, the stranger. Till 18, I didn’t even qualify for the citizenship of any country. Truly an outsider.

Always being the "other" has given me a different perspective about life & everything in it. The unique perspective is often not in line with expected norms, & for that, I am tremendously grateful. To be "normal" in today's world would require me to be crazy. Yes, I'm crazy, but not in the way the general (m)asses of people tend to be. I'm "crazy" in that I don't buy the horseshit that everyone else believes in, like the foundational myths of Western Civilization, which I see as tremendously flawed & going over a cliff. I am standing aside & cheering as it all goes over the edge.

The foundational myths? Religion, nationalism & patriotism, democracy, capitalism, competition, indoctrinating schooling, the family, monogamy = all BS & at the heart of why the U$$$$$ is folding up shop & going on a suicidal rampage which, unfortunately, will reverberate around the globe because too many for too long have looked at the U$$$$ as El Dorado, thanks to its tremendous propaganda & globalized cultural hegemony.

The world is now paying the price for following the U$$$$'s manipulative & aggressively violent lead. Nature's vehement unacceptance of its climate collapsing is being placed on the heads of all the self-aggrandizing dummies that persist in going along with all the idiocies like owning individual cars, ignoring mass transit or walking anywhere, using plastic as though it were water, using water as if it were air, & assuming air would clean itself as fast as we could pollute it.

It has not been an easy life. To be authentic, open, able & willing to fully express oneself fully, spontaneously, is hard. Few people can handle it & give in to the mass mind, become robots, just zombies following the rest. I never could. My uniqueness is what makes me who I am. If not, then I am just one of the crowd, just a number, a statistic, or even less than that—a zero.

Though unaware for a long time that it was this inner unique self that I was allowing to live, to burst forth, I felt uncomfortable being myself. From religion, schooljail, & the media, I’d quickly learned that it was not okay to be me, different, not fitting in. The growing awareness of this fallacy was a gradual shift in perspective from out there to in here, & a bit at a time caring less & less how I appeared & what others thought, I became more the observer rather than a joiner. It was a process of removing the crust that had caked itself upon me, limiting my being, trying to make me like the rest. I resisted being tied & beholden to lifeless self-demeaning standards & traditions.

The Benefit of Being “Crazy”

Being called crazy gives me great leeway in my behavior. It frees me up from the straightjacket of styles, customs, & other simple-minded & lazy-assed ways of avoiding the responsibility of being who I am by surrendering oneself to societal expectations, requirements. We see the world going to hell-in-a-basket yet continue to do & to be like we’ve always done & been. Such stupidity is intolerable to someone who is truly aware of one’s environment & our relationship with it.

I’m not going to touch on the religious aspect of my heresies other than to say that a lifelong dream along with a couple of others, at least since I awoke from the devil-inspired anti-life philosophy of Catholicism as a young adult, is to outlive that abomination against human nature. At this point they’re winning, having censored me most critically here in Lithuania, but it’s given me more time to write, which is bringing what I have to say to a wider global audience about destructive myths of all sorts, not just the stifling ones of religions of every brand which basically require everyone to castrate themselves & to leave their brains at the curb. Powerless nonthinkers are what clerics need to maintain their roles as cocks of the roost. The masses are conditioned from early childhood into the required passivity.

Considering how berserk & chaotic the world has grown in recent years with the appearance of mental & emotional throwbacks like Bush II & Trump being elected to the U$ presidency & nutjobs like the Laser Lady & the pillow guy rising to national prominence, the denial of science, the blustering return of fascism, & a fervent concoction of & belief in alternate realities should not be that shocking. What is shocking is how long their grip can be maintained & how deep the trauma from all the consequences will be. Recently, while people in the U$ were dying at a rate of a 1000+ per day from the COVID virus, 10s of millions ignored the proven means of prevention of the tragedy.

A Benefit of Being Unique

One major consequence of my being considered “interesting” by someone whom I’d worked with several years earlier resulted in a major personal windfall many years ago. A young lady, having returned from living abroad for a while, stumbled across a center & professional association focused on promoting & teaching conflict resolution & mediation with which I had been associated. She had gone to the center looking for both a job & the possibility of meeting some interesting people with whom she’d have something in common not just professionally as a fellow psychologist but personally. Additionally, she was an inveterate traveler & feeling rather lost & alone, her friends from her life before her sojourn abroad having themselves left for parts unknown.

When the center director suggested a certain Lithuanian-American (me) he’d known who might be interesting for her to meet, she contacted me & we met. Unfortunately, I myself was due to leave shortly for several years, so our contact at the time was brief & strictly “professional”. We walked, we talked, & I loaned her a couple boxes of my psychology books for the duration of my time away. Over the next couple of years, both our e-mail addresses & phone numbers changed suddenly & we lost contact with one another.

Oh, well, I sighed, “goodbye” to a couple boxes of books. I hadn’t even considered the friendship or more significant relationship possibilities because our 1st contacts had been so brief & our age difference seemed to make anything more a pipedream rather than a reality, although I was not averse to the possibilities.

5 years after our 1st encounter, however, a fresh set of circumstances & a couple of coincidences brought us back together not only as friends but very quickly as lovers, fellow travelers, & co-workers. During our several years together, we traveled about 4000 in a motor home, visited 15 U$ states, 2 Canadian provinces, & passed through about a dozen airports in 5 countries on 2 continents.

Back in Lithuania we also worked & traveled throughout the country bringing novelty & human relations skills to a most conservative population by way of more physically active & involving workshops than those offered previously by traditional psychologists & others. For a while, we blended our lives, love, & careers through a unity of purpose as few others seem fortunate enough to forge. Those years were extremely exhilarating.

How could I be comfortable being anything less than who I am? Who would I be? What would I be? Why would I be if I couldn’t be me? It’s been a lonely life, for the most part. Being different yet keeping that uniqueness is something few can maintain because of the responsibility it requires to speak up when the whole society is shitting on your head & what you stand for.

I once heard of a small boy who when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up said "I want to be me." That kid was well on his way to self-actualization at an early age. Few adults, caught up in the rat race & peer pressure of fashions & trends, to win, to be #1, get that close to it. I aspire, like that young boy, to be me—always.

Well, almost always. My favorite holidays are Halloween & April Fool’s Day. Watch out!

© Vytas Stoskus, 2022 www.stoskus.net/en/

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