It rings in my ears...

I was going to school in Sedalia at the time.  I remember it clearly.  The emotional impact was so significant that I will probably never forget that moment. 

During this time in my life I was often frustrated.  My upbringing has always been a source of great angst in my life.  I was in my thirties and still not where I wanted to be in life.  From my perspective, I was a guy who was still suffering because of how I was raised.  I didn't want to waste the prime of my life suffering because of what someone else did.  I wanted to be living my life.  Looking back I imagine it like I had a big brand on my forehead letting everyone know I was damaged goods, except I was the only one who could see the brand.  I was thirty something years old and was still having to undo what was done to me.  I was fed up.  I had had enough.  All I wanted to was to be healed.   

I was going to college to socialize, to make friends, and to learn about myself and life.  I wanted to get a sense of everyone else in the world.  The life I had lived made me different than everyone else in so many ways, and I finally had enough self-confidence to mingle with the rest.  Going to college was the appropriate thing to do.  I can't remember if I had had the conversation with my biological parents yet.  Wait!  I do remember.  I had already told them off because I had to call my grandmother to find out what time I was born.  I couldn't call my mother.  I was done with them. This was a pivotal time in my life.  I was bitter because they fucked me up so much, and it took so much effort to undo what they did, that they just didn’t deserve to know me any longer.  I felt that deep down, for me to be able to look myself in the mirror and it actually be true that I love myself, I couldn't allow those people in my life any longer.  They simply are not worthy.  We have not talked since.

I had a really close friend at the time.  We would spend hours on the phone together.  She was my girlfriend, you know, the platonic kind.  We talked about everything, and being the serious person I am, we talked a great deal about deep personal things.  She was the first person I called when I discovered this new information.  It was late in the evening.  I was taking a break from studying by reading articles on Facebook like I often do.  I came across a website that gives free birth charts.  I had always found astrology interesting, but too difficult to know which is real and which is not.  Which is crap, and which ones actually know what they are talking about.  Astrology is like all other professions, there are those who suck and those who are really good.  Anyways, I put in my date of birth.  I didn't know the hour I was born, but I found out that it doesn't change anything.  Not on the day I was born anyways.  All my life I had thought something was wrong with me, but nothing was wrong with me.  The planets and stars are to blame.  It is the universes doing. 

Go here to get your profile.  http://alabe.com/freechart/

I was so giddy after reading it that I could not contain myself.  I was dumbfounded.  Years of my life wasted; all that suffering for nothing, all that self-loathing, all that expelled energy, simply because I was ignorant of something so simple, yet so completely complex.  In my profile it says things about me that are so spot on it is disturbing.  The personality issues that I had been dealing with all my life are spelled out perfectly in my profile.  Because I was born Sept. 1st 1975 in Columbia MO.  I am super critical.  All my life I allowed people to make me think that there was something wrong with me, but in reality it is just who I am.  It has to do with the time and place of my birth and nothing else.  I was so relieved.  My outlook on myself, my Selfview, changed forever.   I have not felt negatively about myself for being so critical since that day.

For instance, the following quotes are from my birth chart:

"You are supercritical of yourself and others and, at times, prefer to be alone rather than deal with any imperfections in yourself or in those with whom you might relate."

"Your energies get turned on quickly whenever anything interests you. But you have a very short attention span and it is difficult for you to complete tasks because something else more interesting always seems to be beckoning."

"The way that you grow and develop is by being an uncompromising individualist."

"At times, you are so supercritical that you are merely nit-picky." 

Indeed.  I am supercritical.  Most of my life this super criticalness has been quite a bane.  I cannot turn it off.  It does not go away.  It is me.  I am it.  When you think Benjamin, you should also think supercritical.  We are one in the same.  I am Mercury born.  A Virgo.  All I do is think!  The issue is that super criticalness bugs people.  They find it quite annoying.  I always thought something was wrong with me because of this.  It makes people feel like they are never good enough.

At this same time in my life I was spending a lot of time alone.  I have always spent a lot of time alone.  This always bugged me too.  Our culture makes loneliness out to be a very negative and bad thing.  This culture makes people feel like something is wrong with them if they are lonely.  I kept thinking in my head that if I could remedy the trauma I would have lots of friends like everyone else, and I would never be lonely again.  Unfortunately, my childhood trauma and my loneliness in life had nothing to do with one another.   As my birth chart says, I prefer to be alone, that is, when I am not thinking something is wrong with me because I am alone.  Talk about inner conflict!  This is a perfect example of how culture screws us up.  We are told to be one way, but in reality we are another. 

Then, as I do now, I always pray to just be me, whatever it takes.   I didn't know it then, but my prayers were being answered because it is in my nature to be alone.  A lot actually.  Looking back on my life, I have often been in situations where I had no choice but to be alone, and often times alone for long periods of time.  Life is crazy.  To accept the loneliness, all I had to do was accept myself.  Crazy indeed.

The second example I listed has also been a bane in my life.  According to this American culture, to public schools especially, to all our career choices, we are supposed to pick one thing and stick to it for life.  I find this impossible.  More than anything public schools made me think I was flawed because I cannot stick to things for very long.  I am always eager to move on to the next experience.  Looking back on my life, I can do tons of things well, but none of them really well.  I never stick to things long enough.  There is nothing wrong with me.  It is simply how I am.  It is this culture which is broken.  There is as much gift in being able to do tons of things kind of good as there is in being able to do only one thing really well.  No one way is always better than another.  Fact of life. 

The third example I listed is something I found easy to embrace.  Put simply, I cannot be told what to do.  I do not compromise.  I do what I want to do and that is all.  It is a perfect one sentence description of me.  I will not do something just because I was told to do it. 

These few examples I listed are but a few sentences from a full page profile.  I just re-read it while writing this, and sentence after sentence describes me near perfectly.  There are however, some sentences which do not seem to fit.  I have pondered these sentences at great length, searching myself for the answers.  After all, my prayer is to be me, no matter what.

"You have an almost desperate need to be loved and wanted and needed by everyone with whom you come into contact, and you go out of your way to be accommodating to them."

"A born diplomat, you dislike discord so much that you will go out of your way to make others feel comfortable and at ease. You speak softly and pleasantly."

When I was younger my need to be loved caused me more suffering than I can currently understand.  Because I never actually received any love, within me, it turned to hate.  The environment in which I was born was completely against my personality.  I am trying to get back to that point.  It is hard work.  For a long time in my life I worked at not needing anyone.  My goal was to be autonomous.  It was a spiritual quest you could say, and I accomplished my goal.  I overcame this aspect of my personality.  When I was younger this aspect dominated my behavior.

Also I do not speak softly or pleasantly.  I am very direct.  I am actually quite confrontational.  This is the exact opposite of what my birth chart says of me.  Again, my environment played against my personality and environment won.  When I was younger the places I lived did not allow for me to be accommodating, polite and soft spoken.  It was the exact opposite.  I was raised in violence.  My childhood environment was the exact opposite of my personality.   I was hyper masculinized.  Hyper masculinized males are anything but soft spoken.  I cannot help but think that had my parents actually taken care of me that I would be a really nice guy.  Oh well, such is life.  I am taking what was given to me and making the best of it.  Who wouldn't?

As with all things, there are contradictions.  I have known friends who have read their birth charts and commented that they did not match.  I wonder if they are themselves or if environment won out?  Some people live their entire lives never figuring it out.  The fact that I am not soft spoken shows how environment can overcome personality if it is extreme enough.  Think of children born shy but forced on the stage by demanding parents.  Children like me who require security as children but are born in war or violent homes. From my perspective it is simply a matter of knowing one’s self and using whatever one can to understand just what exactly that is.  In my search for myself I came into alignment with my personality.  I found what I was searching for. 

It is not an issue of it needing to be contradiction free to be true, it is a matter of being able to hold contradictions as true.  It is only our labeling system, our language, and method of thought that makes things seem contradictory.  In reality, it is all true.  For instance, needing love and being an uncompromising individualist are completely contradictory, yet they are both true at the same time.  It is a matter of realizing at any given moment we are thousands of things simultaneously.  Our culture causes us to label things as one way or another, but nothing could be further from the truth.