Sympathy for the devil

 “Someone has to pray for the devil, and it has to be me!” 

This idea appeared into my head sometime when I was very young, and has gone on to inform nearly all my behaviors in all my interactions with people. 

I love the bad guy, but I’m comically bad at identifying him! 

It became painfully obvious to me I started to become acquainted with more and more people in the online space. Streamers, youtubers, social media influencers etc. 

 I’d always felt out of place in settings like school. I got along well with everyone but I was never actually anyone’s best friend, or a solid part of any single friend group. These days, in hindsight I wonder if everyone wasn’t just tolerating me out of pity, or as part of one big unspoken joke. When I started meeting these internet people however, I suddenly felt like I was finally in a community of like minded people, who had the same mindsets about creativity, and just having that particular feeling about yourself and everything else, that you were just meant to do something outside of the normal programming. It wasn’t just hubris I thought, I finally met people like me! 

 In my short interactions and acquaintanceship with these people I was immediately ready to declare how wonderful they all were just as people, beyond the cameras! How they were all so nice to me and were just great people over all. 

It’s very funny to me now that a good amount of these people have gone on to be “canceled” or revealed to be quite dark, duplicitous people later on. 

Perhaps it’s just as simple as a case of ‘birds of a feather flocking together’ After all I’ve made heinous jokes in my past that would get me canceled today, I made a video once describing what it was like to grow up on the darkest corners of the internet, and to have my mind warped and corrupted by it all. Maybe *thats* why I’ve always wanted to be the one to pray for all these devils, maybe I knew I really always was more like them than any other decent person. Or maybe I’m a real empathetic cat that just wants to have compassion for everyone else, I don’t know! 

I remember many moments from very very early on in my childhood, usually my mind is in a very hazy and unreliable state, but there are these memories that act like anchors, no matter how murky the waters get, these memories are always clear. I remember being 2 or 3, and playing with the fridge magnets in my parent’s first apartment. I remember being 5 and hiding the equivalent of a 20 dollar bill I had just stolen from someone in my mother’s sewing school. I remember thinking I should hide it right behind the leg of a table that was up against the wall of the room the lady had spent the last 30 minutes in, that way if she noticed her money had gone missing and started looking for it, there was a reasonable explanation for its absence. “Oh I found it behind the leg of this table right next to where you’ve been sitting this whole time!” 

“Oh thank you honey! You’re such a helpful boy! Here take 5 dollars as a reward!” was how I imagined the interaction going in the event that she noticed. (She never did, my kleptomania only advanced from that point forward.) 

I remember being 6, walking in the lot at night after buying a chocolate bar, and planning on how I would use it to bribe the simple neighbor girl to do a favor for me. I remember being 9 and realizing that I can do whatever I want as long as I don’t get caught, or can lie well enough to escape the consequences of my transgressions. “What people don’t know won’t hurt them! It’s the knowing that causes them pain!” I’ve operated this way since then. I remember being 11, stealing my dads credit card, and starting a little ebay store, buying and selling whatever I wanted. When the bank alerted them of this activity, I lied and denied involvement for months, beyond the point of the police getting involved. 

My parents love to tell this story, that one day they caught me doing something I shouldn’t have been, and immediately grabbed my father’s belt and started whipping myself with it. I don’t remember that incident, but my father tells the story as if he witnessed it himself, and if he did, I could only have been almost 2 years old, as that’s right around the time he left for America.I have always been lucid, I have always been aware, I have always understood morality, and yet I have always been “bad”. 

 It’s not that I wanted to be, it’s just that before I noticed it, it was as if I was on autopilot, I would blink and I was doing something bad, I just naturally gravitate towards it. I got in trouble a lot in elementary school. In my home country the teachers would whip me, in America they’d give me ‘in school suspension’. On one autumn afternoon, walking home from school, I had the distinct feeling of deep boredom. I realized I hadn’t gotten in trouble in a while, that’s what it was.  

My parents always believed I was an exceptionally blessed and compassionate child, I cried for hours when a mouse was caught in a trap in our home they said! I don’t remember this particular incident as well, but I do remember always being a particularly sensitive kid so it’s not like I was all bad right? That stopped at some point though. I’m not sure what did it, maybe all the trauma, the beatings, the SA, but at some point, somewhere along the line that part of me that you’d call empathy, or a conscience, it went very quiet. 

I think people romanticize characters like this, and in a way, I hate that. It’s not cool or sexy, as some of my previous partners seemed to believe when they noticed this about me. Rather, I always feel disoriented, I could never tell what the right thing to say or do was, and always ended up accidentally hurting people because of this. You wouldn’t believe just how much of interpersonal communication happens without words. The most subtle of exchanges in body language and micro expressions . But I’ve practiced! Now I know the right thing to say, the right inflection to put in my voice, the correct  angle to twist my eyebrows into at the right points in whatever story I’m suffering through at any given moment. This is good for 90% of short interactions with people, but when it comes time for more substantial, deeper connections, eventually I will be caught. I will fuck up, and I’ll have to leave or I’ll be left.  The glass wall between me and the rest of the world becomes palpable again.

It is much easier to be a shitty person usually, but I think the punishment for bad people isn’t hell, it’s their own existence.The inside of their own heads becomes the hell. When you keep fucking up, when you keep getting yourself in dangerous, twisted situations, you can never have any peace. That wears on you after a while, I'm perpetually exhausted because of it. Suddenly I find myself in a position of privilege, on some sort of platform, with my words holding weight and influence over people. I try really hard to be different, I want to be a good man, I want to be the thing people think I am, I want to be the embodiment of whatever it is they think they see in me. 

I want to be a kinder, gentler person. 

I want to be a stronger person.