New Year's Resolution

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days of auld lang syne?

To all the ones who said I would amount to nothing, would do nothing, would go nowhere, would be nothing, was nothing, was irrevocably broken—whether implied, spoken aloud, intimated, imagined, written down and placed atop a pile of my nearly-worthless belongings or spoken in the eloquent language of action—I want to thank you. To everyone who let me down, kicked me while I was down, laughed when I fell, and tripped me when I tried to stand, I extend to you my gratitude. To the teachers who refused to teach, to the caretakers who refused to care, to the lovers who failed to love, the friends unclear on the concept of friendship; to the strangers who picked at the intimate, vulnerable and/or wounded spots of my psyche for their amusement; to the ones who could only raise themselves by pushing somebody else down; to the ones who cold have done something but just watched, impassively, dispassionately, inhumanely: I thank you all. Every success, every accomplishment I ever achieved was my way of saying 'fuck you'. And believe me, they were heartfelt, each and every one.

But now it's time for me to take a different approach. Anger, resentment, rage and bitter hatred are great motivators, and I accomplished far more because of them (and you) than I probably would have, otherwise. The problem is that they just aren't sustainable. The cost is too high. Every time I managed to crawl through a desert to spit in your eye, it was just a symbolic victory that ultimately cost me more than it was worth. Not that the satisfaction wasn't real. It was very real, and kept me warm on many a bitterly cold night when I had nothing and no one else.

But a thought occurred to me today on the train: If I managed to write and publish a book to spite the one who destroyed all my writing; if I managed to survive four years in the army to spite all those older, bigger, and stronger than me who belittled me as a child (some my peers, some grown fucking men) and who questioned my manhood when I was a teenager (some my peers, some grown fucking men); if I won academic award after academic award to prove to those teachers who thought I was stupid or lazy that in actuality I was just bored out of my fucking skull…. If I could do all that, operating from a position of weakness, for all the wrong reasons, what could I have done if I had been motivated by some positive force, operating from a healthy, strengthening environment?

The truth is, I'll never know. You can't apply 'what if' to the past with any success. You can only do that to the future.

So I need to let go of you, my beloved enemies. You who I have clung so tightly to, for such a long time. You whose memories I know more intimately than a lover knows the curves and secret recesses of his love. You've served your purpose, you see, and now you're just stinking up the joint, you carcasses of injustices past. The truth is, the strength that you gave me was the strength of the doomed and the damned and the hopeless. Every success carried with it the seed of the next failure. All my victories were ultimately either tainted or rendered meaningless.

But I'm not the skinny, helpless, disadvantaged kid anymore. I'm not the gawky, awkward young punk desperate to fit in. I'm not the confused, wounded lover anymore. I'm not the easy target or the convenient sucker. And I am most definitely not anybody's whipping boy. And the next desert I cross on hands and knees, it won't be your ghosts on the other side. It'll be something or someone that actually matters. You aren't worth the blood and sweat and suffering. You never were. You never will be.

So to all of you, my faithful fiends, a final 'fuck you' and farewell. May we never meet again. To everybody else, have a happy, healthy new year, and may all the desert journeys you make this year have shade and cool water waiting at the end.