Wolves, Sheep, and Sheepdog

I was born out of a howl. I came from an angry valley. I've read that it's impossible to retain memories from before the age of 2, but my first memory is of a darkness without stars.

My mother was a keyboard and my father was a German Shepherd. Or maybe it's my mother was a Satanic Priestess and my father was a bat skull, and I was born with a sluice of blood, a whisper of a curse, an upside down cross marked on my forehead.

What I'm trying to say is that from the beginning learning how to exist was an act of violence.

I tore into this world with my mother's pain, and I giggled when my father accidentally burned himself on the stove, and I slapped my brother just because I wanted to see what it'd feel like to have my hand make contact with another person's face.

Later I'd look at that hand, horrified, like it didn't belong to me.

I am an evil being and I've chosen a G910 mechanical keyboard from Logitech (Not sponsored, I just really like this keyboard) as my method of destruction.

I have done many terrible things with my keyboard, and many without it. I'm petty, jealous, spiteful, hypocritical. I've used my mental illness to justify hurting people. I've physically and mentally assaulted people. I've taken advantage of people's compassion. I've dismissed human beings because they said something stupid once on Twitter, and they became worthless in my eyes. I've gotten too drunk and said things I regretted. I've become lazy when I should have been pushing forward. I've sunk down into self-pity instead of motivating myself to move forward.

A boy in Seattle once said we both had "vampire blood." He meant we were both crippled from abusive childhoods, but struggling not to be like our parents. Inside our hearts we pumped bad blood, had awful coping mechanisms, and struggled daily with things that would be easier for more well-adjusted individuals.

But we recognized that we were evil and our capacity for evil was great.

And you're probably evil too.

We all are, or at least have the capacity for it. Not recognizing that is the dangerous thing. A person who does not recognize their own evil will, as Jung would say, have a non-integrated shadow self. It'll become denser and blacker the more you ignore it. The shadow self was Jung's way of conceptualizing everything that we didn't want to face about ourselves - the difficult, uneasy, rotten parts of our self.

When you ignore your own capacity for evil, that's when it's most able to wreck havoc. It's why horrific murders and atrocities have been committed by people who considered themselves decent and kind. It's impossible to be virtuous without recognizing your evil and ability for violence, because without that, you are weak and easily swayed.

You do not see that at the core of you there is something black and swirling, and it's got fur and fangs, and holy shit it's alive, and it snaps when you reach down in there to touch it, protective of its gristled cosmic belly and everything you thought was too awful to even contemplate.

That thing is you, and you are it. And the more you recognize that, the more power you have the next time it decides it wants to come out for the sheer pleasure of destruction.

There is a saying in the military: There are three people in this world - sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. You want to be a sheepdog, because they protect the sheep from the wolves.

But the sheepdog is a relative of the wolf. They are built anatomically very similar. They both have clawed legs, fur, and eat meat. In order to be a sheepdog, the dog must be raised as a pup with the sheep and become accustomed to them. Otherwise, they would chase the sheep.

In the sheepdog's bones, in the core of it, there's a reflex. It wants to hunt and kill the sheep. That's in its nature.

It is the sheepdog's violence and capacity for evil that allows it to fight head-on with the wolf.

And so it is with you.