Do You Know What Sort Of Asshole You Are?
We all have our flaws.
One of mine has always been my inability to make the right choices when it came to prioritising how I spend my time.
Just like all children, I started out knowing nothing of the needs of others, only my own. The bad behaviour and rambunctiousness of an unruly pup in the litter quickly gets leveled out with a few nips and growls from parents and peers, but take the pup too young or fail to keep it socialised, and you end up with an aggressive (frightened) child, unable to find their place in the pack for years, or even for life.
The specific circumstances of my own childhood experiences left me isolated and inward looking. I watched and listened. I learned to read people so that I could disappear into their landscape. Then — when I wasn’t pleasing others — I retreated into my own make-believe realm in which people behaved the way I wanted them to without me ever needing to reveal myself or expose my feelings for others to pick apart.
For me, the real world became this sort of transdimensional protuberance, jutting out of my inner fantasies, occupied only by the pieces of me that I needed it to, while the rest — the actual me — remained invisible inside my impenetrable membrane of illusory armour.
Selfish ass hole. That’s what that looked like. I simply ignored the things that made me uncomfortable. Easier than dealing with any of it.
Through some accident (it certainly was not by design or the consequences of some masterfully constructed plan) work became about doing the things that I wanted to do. Not everyone gets to be that lucky.
Somehow I managed to land a pretty good job straight out of college, and although I’ve had rough patches I’ve never truly known what it’s like to have to take whatever job came along, or (even worse) feel what it’s like to be jobless. My career just happened, and by chance I’ve had the luxury of being able to spend a lot of it doing what I liked…or at least that’s how I saw it. That came up time and again in workplace appraisals. “You’re great at doing the things you want to do, but you’re not good at doing all the other things we need you to do…”
Lazy ass hole is what that means.
When I started my first proper business, with no experience of running one and a business plan written the way I thought a business plan should look (which was nothing like what any of the business books I half-read tried fruitlessly to explain), I leaned heavily on my wife at the time without ever actually asking her if it was okay that I give up my well paid day job and become a stay at home shirker, haphazardly stumbling, slowly (but very surely) towards failure over the course of about five years.
Arrogant and ungrateful ass hole.
That pattern of unilateral life altering decision making without a respectful thought for anyone else repeated itself over and over, as I decided to up and move countries to follow my career choices three times over about 25 years. The final time was the catalyst that brought my second divorce petition popping (long overdue) through the letterbox, and was the reason my daughter (the one and only thing of worth my lifelong pursuit of something has ever produced) no longer talks to me.
Self-centred, heartless ass hole.
It’s a story of privilege in some ways. There are a whole lot of people in a worse position than me. I am lucky enough to have a handful of mediocre talents and abilities that have got me through without having to work particularly hard, but actually that’s left me a little bitter. My innate arrogance has had me shun the ratcheting steps of success that bring you the recognition and the permanent badges of status that would be useful today when my advancing age has become the first thing people see when I walk through the door, rather than the string of postnominals my younger and less experienced peers are able to hide their inability behind.
That’s putting me in a position with very few options and forcing me to accept my lot in life in a way that I’ve never really had to in the past.
See? Bitterness…
But I never said I wasn’t also a bitter ass hole.
If I had to give my younger self some advise, I probably wouldn’t bother. He wouldn’t listen anyway. So I’ll tell you — dear reader — instead.
Don’t listen to old ass holes. Do what you enjoy. Strive to always do what you enjoy, but make sure you are doing it with people around you who will tell you you’re an ass hole when you need to be told.
And don’t give the ones you love the most needless excuses to believe you’re the ass hole your fucked up head turns you into.
Merton Barracks lives in Hong Kong after a life literally and metaphorically on the road.
Why not buy me a coffee and we can chat?
He is a security technology expert, an autonomous vehicle expert, a counter-terrorism expert, a writer of fiction, a father, a ranter and an exposer of bullshit.
He is also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, who took half a century to face up to what that did to him and also what it made him. You don’t recover. You don’t repair.
Take a look at some of his fiction
Or read about the process of coping
