Fear wears many masks. But when the pain of staying the same outweighs fear of change, get ready..

Love. Relationships. Emotions. I never really talk about this, and when I do I sound aggressive and hide behind violence and anger, but its all bullshit. Fear wears many masks. The truth would require me to be very vulnerable, and this area, above almost all others, is the LAST place I want to let my guard down in. But when the pain of remaining the same outweighs the fear of change, thats when you’ve truly been blessed. Get ready for one fuck of a ride. Let’s get into it.

We’ve all been hurt. But I’ll tell you something that sounds like common sense, but it truly isn’t to me: my Mom used to tell me, “if you stay guarded, you can keep out the bad, but you’ll also keep out the good.” She was right. Funny enough, all it did was keep out the good, I still dealt with “the bad”, however you want to define that. Typically shitshow nightmares in abusive, co-dependent, or in some cases, relations with legit narcissists that derailed my life. What is it that I’m really so afraid of? Is it that I’m afraid of being hurt by someone else, or is it that I don’t trust how I’ll react if I get my heart broken? Notice how I said those situations derailed “my” life. Who is responsible for my life? I am. Not them. Trust and abuse issues are real, but what the fuck is the deal with everyone wanting to put on this front like “I dont trust anyone but I trust me so I just stick to myself” I’ve never met a happy person with that mentality, and I’ve had that mentality myself too so I know what that shits about. If you trusted yourself then whats the problem with dealing with others, if you know you’re always gonna be okay? This might go over ppls heads or piss people off but a lot of human fear can be traced back to our own perceived failures of controlling a certain outcome. But we dont wanna look at that, so its always fuck so and so, its their fault.

**(This does not apply to people who are in abusive situations FYI, however if you’re in an abusive situation and remain there… I understand that, as I’ve done that sooo many times, but you’re still choosing to be in that relationship. The Stockholm syndrome shit is real, and it takes time to develop the self worth to walk away, especially if that dynamic is all you’ve ever known and all that was modeled to you growing up, I get it, its taken decades for me to see that.. but hopefully you do at some point if you’re in one, because if you wait too long, you might not live long enough to get that chance to walk away. It only takes one second in the heat of a moment to lose your life, whether by their hand, or yours.)**

Back to what I was saying, we can never really TRULY put our 1000% faith in any human, because we are all fallible, even those of us with the best of motives. We are not perfect and we can’t be anyone’s everything all the time, nor should we be. Shit its hard enough for us to even show up for ourselves like that. So is it that I’m afraid of “him”, whoever he is next time, hurting me? Or am I afraid that I’ll lose myself, and lose my life, in the aftermath? Because I’ve come very close to losing both my life and my sobriety over some of these relationships (or “situationships” lets not forget about those.) So somewhere along the line, because I saw how lost I had become, to the point where I stopped making music, could barely eat, barely function, I told myself I’d shut out all men, all relationships, all everything, because I couldnt risk that happening again. But if I examine that honestly…. Whose fault is that really?

Is it ever my fault if a violent or sexual assault goes down- no, im not talking about those situations, and yes I have been in them before. What I am talking about is taking a real good look at the following things that I will confess here:

-Having little to no boundaries, zero discernment skills. Rose colored glasses like a motherfucker, or even taking that a step further; due to unresolved issues from my past, lets say I’ve had a tendency to gravitate toward a certain type of person that anyone sound of mind would stay the hell away from, but to me, those people were just as addicting as heroin once was to me. The signs were there. I charged through red flags like a fuckin bull to a matador. I made excuses for their behavior. I created some image of who they were in my mind that did NOT reflect in reality. I chose to fixate on the small good things and overlook huge problems. They blew up in my face every single time, and I repeated this cycle for more years than I’d like to admit. Same nightmare, different face. When thats the case, I have to look at what the common denominator is, and that would be ME.

I had an addiction to adrenaline, to fantasy, to a certain type of lifestyle and person, and that brings me to something else someone told me: “You’re going to pick partners that treat you the way you subconsciously believe you deserve to be treated.” That shit is true for me. Our own self worth will dictate who we let into our lives, whether we are aware of it or not, and the majority of my life my self worth was non existent. Enough to fight when wronged, but definitely not enough to walk the fuck away. The shit I used to put up with, even as recently as two years ago, I’d drop that motherfucker like a hot rock without a second thought today, just at the slightest sign of it. But back then, that’d be the hook.

Once that’d happen, there goes x amount of years of my life to total chaos. I know damn well I didn’t survive a drug addicted youth just to waste my adult years being addicted to chaos- specifically in relationships. It lights your brain up the same way drugs do, the highs and lows, the adrenaline, and often we reenact trauma from our past, with a subconscious suffering from the delusion that if we could just be “enough” we could change it, we could change them, we could fix them. If we could pull that off, its like the brains way of trying to undo traumas of the past. Shit doesn’t work that way. Thats like being covered in third degree burns because your house burned down, so to solve the trauma from that you keep running into fires to heal your burns.

Then theres that whole bullshit of “I can change this, I can change him” well, thats not possible - every human has free agency, you cant change shit. Plus who the fuck are we to say where someone should be on their journey. The person that needed my attention was me, not them. That is still the case, I’m not claiming to be healed and perfect, I still maneuver with caution and as soon as I get that familiar feeling, like this situation feels like somethin I’ve been through before and didn’t go so well, I’m out. I guess the only difference is I finally learned to listen to my intuition as opposed to chasing instant gratification, at the expense of long term suffering, same as any addiction. So theres one part of it.

-The other part, well luckily I have moved past this but it took years of therapy and acting like a complete lunatic to hit a bottom around my behavior. I used to be consumed with paranoia, jealousy, and I would handle my “problems”, whether real or generated in my mind, with violence and other forms of verbal/mental abuse. I genuinely thought that “oh if they just wouldn’t have triggered those issues they know I have, I wouldn’t be acting like this, so its their fault.” I was punishing everyone close to me for shit they didn’t even do. When I first got into recovery I was told that the fucked up traumas that happened to you are not your fault, but your recovery from them is your responsibility. If we walk around half cocked with open wounds we refuse to look at, thats our choice, and we will raise hell everywhere we go- and not in the good way.

My triggers, my buttons, those are mine, not theirs. Many are legitimate, but the way I was responding to them was completely fucked, you cant run around treating people you claim to care about or love like that. Thats insane. But that was the best I could do at the time. Im glad I learned and that shit stopped, I paid a heavy price for it, but honestly in hindsight, it could have been so much worse. I’m still alive, and I learned and changed my behavior, so thats a win in my book. But the point im making here is those unresolved issues, if we do not deal with them, they will fuckin deal with us, they will come out sideways and make such a mess because that is our shadow trying to get our attention. That is our wound trying to tell us it needs attention. Ignoring your shadow is probably the most dangerous shit you can do, you can suppress it for a certain amount of time, but it’ll always come out, and the longer its been held down, the harder it’ll come out, and if you’re like me, that’ll get you in a lot of trouble. It can also get you killed, or worse, you could hurt someone else real bad. Fuck all that.

So the reason why I’m even writing this shit to whoever is reading, is because on Friday a song I did with another rapper (NuBorne) called “The Lie We Live” is about exactly all of this shit. However that song is only a few minutes long, the message is there without a doubt, but I can elaborate way more in a blog, so thats what im gonna do. The deal with the shadow, the shit we hide, the lie we live, we’re not just lying to the other person, we’re lying to ourselves above all. We do not recognize that chaos and that reaction within ourselves as OUR shadow, and the other person mirroring it. We do not (unless we’re already doing the work) recognize that its our own issues that we’re projecting onto the other person, because we haven’t dealt with our shit. We havent faced our fears. We all have trust issues, but really the only solution to that, for me at least, is I have to know I can trust myself, no matter what life throws at me. I have to feel safe and solid within myself, within my own body and mind. If I don’t, sure a relationship will start out fun and nice, but those demons will come out to play. Its normal for there to be forms of conflict in any human relationship, in healthy ones we’re able to talk and work through them and come to solutions, which helps build trust within the relationship. But if we have the reaction of either fight and burn it all to the ground, or run and hide and either ghost the person or just shut yourself off to the world and pretend you don’t have feelings, your own broken heart becomes contagious. You will leave a trail of broken glass wherever you go. Let me elaborate on something here: If someone is in an abusive relationship where they do not trust their partner, are not being respected, are being treated as an afterthought, are being abused, cheated on, lied to, any of that bullshit, I am NOT saying “ooh its your fault you gotta face your trauma and just let them do whatever” NOOO thats not what I’m saying. If one is in THAT situation, if you’re a person who values yourself, you’ll fuckin leave. Life is not promised, it is very short, we do need to protect our energy and our time on this planet, because we are all here for a purpose. I’m talking about relationships that don’t have crazy dealbreaker shit going on in them like violence, cheating, addiction, etc. but we still struggle anyway because we are so affected by what we’ve experienced in our past, that we can take a good situation and turn it into a self fulfilling prophecy of what we’re afraid of- which is it ending in some form of heartbreak.

We can tell ourselves all we want that we don’t need anyone and fuck the world, and I’ve spent a lot of my life doing exactly that, and honestly a lot of times I still do. But the reality is that we are tribal by nature, and we are supposed to be in union, in harmony, in relation to one another. We definitely can’t do that with each other if we can’t do that with ourselves. If we can’t face ourselves what the fuck do we have to give to someone else? Ever wonder why as soon as someone gets close to you you have the urge to run or sabotage the shit? Probably because you’ve got some unresolved shit that you don’t want anyone seeing, because if they see you, you’re gonna see you, and you don’t want to do that. You’re still running.

I felt compelled to write about it because the TRUTH is: yes of course I want love in my life. I’ve had it more than once, and its tremendously powerful and not something to be taken for granted, but of course I’ve been guilty of that. But to even admit that you want that back in your life, thats a hard one for me. I don’t want someone seeing my wounds. So there’s two parts to that. One is healing them by living true to myself and my purpose on this planet, and taking care of who I let into my life. The other is not tolerating the shit I used to in the past, whether that be behavior from myself or from someone else. If I wind up getting involved with my “old type” again, and it all goes to shit, doesn’t even matter what they do to me, at this point I know what the fuck that is, and the fault is mine. If you learn to spot a landmine and you still go and lay down on it, at that point its not on whoever left it there, its on you, because you knew exactly what the fuck was going to happen and you went and did it anyway.

Thats what I mean by having the self awareness of what kind of “feelings” certain interactions are generating in me. My intuition has never steered me wrong. My mind might lie to me, but my body won’t. If I notice somethings not right, its on me to remove myself from the situation. I am no longer interested in taking on more damage and becoming more jaded and closed off. I’m interested in any type of relationship that is respectful and equal in nature, I’m interested in genuine, authentic, honest people who have a desire to thrive in this life. If I put myself around the opposite, well we already know what that looks like.

I also have to make sure I take care of my physical, mental and spiritual condition on a daily basis so I remain in that category and dont fall back into old behaviors and start burning shit down because I cant regulate my emotions. That was a huge problem for me most my life. Its not anyone else’s job to “fix” me or make me feel better, my emotions are my responsibility. If someone does some dumb shit, cool, NEXT. I don’t need to waste my energy going into a rage over it. I’m gonna wrap this up and hopefully I made the point, but ultimately when I look around, I see a huge loneliness epidemic, and the fuckin pandemic made that shit 10x worse in a lot of areas. People are disconnected from themselves and others.

It’s sad, because I observe so many people with so much beauty in them, so much to offer, but they are consumed with their own demons and it just robs the world of them. You can take a diamond of a soul and instead of it lighting up the world it just cuts everyone it comes into contact with. I’ve been that person before. I’m sure I still have days where I can be. I just find it sad. It’d be cool if we could just all be direct and honest and get our shit together, but when we don’t its because we’re afraid of the vulnerability.

We’ve already decided in our minds how somethings gonna go, so we don’t even have that conversation, we just leave a trail of chaos and confusion and resentment. Or we just don’t give a shit about people at all, been seeing a lot of that lately. People so self obsessed and glued to their phones that they just can’t be bothered for shit, but wanna bitch about how they’re lonely. Well try thinking about someone else maybe for ten seconds? Idk. We’re all on various stages of this journey, but its part of the human condition, and humanity is in a really scary place right now with how divided we are. If we cant figure out how to accept ourselves we will never accept each other. If we can’t figure out how to value ourselves we will always get hurt. If we can’t figure out how to be honest, we will always be isolated. I’m gonna walk this road regardless of who walks with me, but I hope others do, because you can only distract yourself with shiny shit, money, drugs, Netflix, your phone, for so long before YOU catch up with YOU, and you’ll likely end up making that someone else’s problem, and there we go again, round and round on the cycle. Maybe we gotta find out what we all uniquely have to offer in this world, no matter how deep we have to dig, and if we approach life and everyone in it with “what can I add to the stream of life”, as opposed to “what can I get”, maybe, just maybe, shit would improve.

The Lie We Live Ft. NuBorne drops on all platforms Friday January 28th. Let us know how you relate to this one. Much love to you.