A need for a more focused POV.

Written by Christopher Pentecost on February 21, 2024

POV, is something we haven’t talked about yet, like art, and music. The point of view is held by both the artist and the viewer/listener. We, as people, move around our little portion of the Earth, looking around and taking everything in from a certain point of view. Not to become Holy Star Wars about this, but Obi-Wan Kenobi makes a great point in Return of the Jedi: that from a certain point of view, what we may see may be different from someone else. Throughout this journey that I’ve been on, one thing that has always stood out was maybe my point of view to how my life has been may not be exactly the truth. And I know everyone has their truth that they have to come to terms with, but not all truths truly reflect our points of view.

Truth be told, I was always an awkward kid. I just was, there was no rhyme or reason about it, it’s just who I was. And there are certain times when I think that awkwardness got me in trouble, and it’s nobody’s fault but my own. Ultimately, I truly believe that there were a lot of times, even from my point of view, I brought a lot of negativity on myself. Let’s start with being bullied when I was younger. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I had a couple of really good friends, one of whom I’m still friends with to this day. And then there were the kids that would hang around in groups, mainly people who were friends with the couple of friends I had. And then there were girls (you know, those with cooties that we all secretly liked but never really admitted it to ourselves). And then there were the groups of kids that were always the popular sort of kids, but they could have sort of a Mean Street when it came to me or people like me. You know, those awkward kids, ones that they could pick on easily because, like wolves, humans tend to run in packs. And if you want to get over on someone, you just make sure that they’re kind of on their own, which I was. So yeah, now did I truly set myself out there to be picked on, and bullied mentally and/or physically? No, no one ever wants to go through that. But there were times where in the back of my mind, the mental bullying was worse than any physical beating would be. And sometimes I would say something or do something that would allow a physical altercation to happen, and thus would relieve my senses and anxiety because now I could be sort of left alone. So did I bring it on myself sometimes? But it was more trying to make things easier on myself. And I know that just seems incredibly backward, but in my point of view, what’s better: always looking over your shoulder, wondering when they’re finally going to beat you up, or turning around, telling them to go f*** themselves, and then actually getting it out and over with? So there’s a bunch that, you know, I’m assuming some therapist is going to have fun with.

Now, to be fair, I really didn’t like putting myself out there because I was awkward or eccentric, as some people may call me, and that was okay. I’ve sort of always been a sort of Lone Wolf/mole, happy to be on my own, sitting in my basement, listening to music, getting lost in my thoughts. I always really identified with Wil Wheaton’s character from Stand By Me, Gordie LaChance, someone who could create worlds in situations as a storyteller, as an artist, as the narrator of that entire story, where he tells the story of the fat kid in the pie-eating contest because he wants to do something different instead of creating the same sort of story of the war hero. And Corey Feldman’s Teddy was not really interested in a new character in a small version of a story. But I like a good story, and I liked his story, and I like the way that he could create a world in his mind and be able to recite it to other people, sort of what I used to do on my own, be able to create a world where all that mattered was my point of view and how I could use that to either numb my pain physically or drown out the anxiety mentally. This sort of blog has now become my creative venting process. But instead of creating my world and recounting real-life events in a way that allows me to try and silence the anxiety that still resides there, we’ve all seen the meme where it’s anxiety coming up and deciding to tell you about that weird embarrassing altercation you had when you were eight years old in art class and your art teacher wasn’t all that impressed with your misshapen liger (to pull from Napoleon Dynamite) and to also pull from Pink Floyd. I had teachers who had no qualms about making me feel like I was something less than human, maybe for their enjoyment or maybe because I was the fat kid, and most of them were gym teachers. But I find those anxieties also created sort of the door that sort of forced me to push my mind in more of a creative form as a way to silence them and to keep my sanity.

To be fair, there were a lot of times when I didn’t know whether it was anxiety, depression, or ADHD that drove me to try to be creative consistently. I know that bug was in me when I was preparing to go to university, and I know it bubbled up continuously, and it was just ready to explode when I got accepted to Windsor’s English and creative writing program, and I was going to finally be able to put a passion forward, or maybe even my father could accept that I was good at something. But to no avail, I was unable to go. I wasn’t able to do something. I went to Western, but all I could think about was the creative aspect that I was missing. I was unable to focus, just like the picture, everything was blurry. I still did relatively well when I put my mind to it, but my heart wasn’t in it. But I only stopped writing when I decided to try to drown out the anxiety and the depression with alcohol, and that’s sort of where my creative juices kind of went dormant. It’s only been recently, now that I’m doing this, that my creativity has sort of come back. It sort of makes me want to use this platform to maybe create one of those worlds in which a portion of me can sort of have that space to exude its point of view and put into focus things that I should have done a long time ago.

So where do we go from here? Well, some people like to go this way, some people like to go that way, and some people like to go both ways (we’ll just give you some credit to the Scarecrow there). I’ve decided to sort of step into looking at therapy to get a better grip on the current reality. Not to say that reality is all that bad, but as we can see from some of the things above, there seem to be a few unanswered issues that could use to be looked at, rehashed, and hopefully put down. Maybe it’s not like I want to off part of me, it would just be nice for the anxiety just to, you know, maybe take a long-deserved vacation because the ebb and flow of this is taking its toll over the past like 20 years. And maybe I can come to a little more sense of clarity with the things going around in my life, which is always a benefit for me, my family, and the other people that are around me. So, I’m taking that adventure while also doing this adventure. And to anyone thinking that, hey, he’s finally going to get some therapy, this is not my first rodeo with it. I’ve had multiple therapists talk to multiple different social workers with a million letters after their names, and not anyone has gotten to the point where they’ve been able to, you know, hammer down what exactly is wrong with me. But even I will say there’s something wrong with me, but I’m not too sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Coming to terms with the point of view that I have and that I had when I was younger has made me start to look for changes and make changes in my life. Even though sometimes my wife looks at me and goes, “Why? This doesn’t make sense to me,” it doesn’t need to make sense for her; it needs to make sense for me. A lot of these changes also work to change my point of view in the way that I view the world. I will be now the first person to tell you that yes, I have white privilege, even though if you look at my life, you wouldn’t think that I was or had lived a privileged life. What I’ll say is, I probably wasted most of my privilege that I had, which is by all definitions white privilege because who else could seriously waste privilege like that? So even in my older years, I haven’t made things easy on myself. I think if anything, that is the one thing I took from the Buddha: that life in itself is suffering, which leads to enlightenment. So maybe I am coming into my Enlightenment phase, who knows? But I have made changes to my life and to my… (was going to say point of view) but let’s say to the way that I view the world and myself in it (because I’m pretty sure at some point someone’s going to yell at me for saying “point of view” one more time; I’ll save at least one of them for the conclusion). I finally got to George Carlin’s chain-link fence Paradigm where we can all look at the chain-link fence one way and it bends a certain way, but then when we look at it the other way, it bends the other way. That was the simplest way I could kind of go that way, but if you don’t get the reference, maybe we’ll say we’ve reached the Escher phase of my sort of existence where maybe I’ve continued to go up the NeverEnding staircase that even though it’s going up, it’s also going down. The way that I used to view the world is different than how I view it today. I credit some of that to a really good friend (I tend not to use names here, mainly because I haven’t asked for permission, but if they’re reading, they know who they are). He and I have discussed things, and I rely on him for his view of the world and his lived experiences so that I can expand mine and become more rounded in a world that sort of looks at me and goes, “I’m the enemy.” I also have started, in a roundabout way, to change my view on things by purging myself of physical things. I won’t say I’m going full minimalist lifestyle, but there are ways to declutter yourself physically and mentally that allow for more growth. It’s like weeding a garden; get rid of the weeds, and the garden can grow, which is kind of weird because I’ve always seen myself more of a weed that can just grow no matter what the situation. I’m like the thistle; I just pop up everywhere and I’m prickly as f***.

I don’t know if I will ever not be the weird dude in the corner at the party, the loner on the bleachers at the high school dance, or the one guy sitting by himself in a quiet library thinking about lines of forgotten lore, but I’m okay with that because I have grown to a point where I can carry on a conversation with a stranger. They may have to instigate it, but I can participate. I know my limits; I know what it means to be uncomfortable to both myself and other people around me, so I know sort of how to manage that. I know what it’s like to allow myself out of my shell, even though most times I don’t want to, and I’m still going to be that guy who tries to make a joke or the entire crowd falls silent and makes me feel as if I’m standing in a room with no clothes on trying to explain the French Revolution to a bunch of intellectuals that already know what the hell I’m talking about. But that’s okay; it’s my acceptance of that that allows me to do those things and not feel as horrible as I used to (I don’t know how many more references I can throw in this thing, but let’s find out). Jim Morrison said, “People are strange when you are a stranger, faces look ugly when you’re alone.” It’s not wrong; I try not to look at everyone that I pass on the street as ugly. That’s kind of judgmental, and that’s a part of me that I’m still working on, if not for the people on the outside, mainly more for me because I am my own worst critic, and knowing that, I try to ease up on myself. It’s like learning the one rule our parents tried to teach us: we all make mistakes; it’s what we do with those mistakes and how we learn from those mistakes that allow us to grow. Where in the past, my mistakes would just lead to more crippling anxiety, nowadays, at least recently, they lead to, well, I could let this stop me in my tracks or I could let this help me learn. Slowly, I’ve started to not let it stop me, but I allow myself to slow down but keep moving forward.

I’m pretty sure someone reading this is going to be like, “Hey, I thought the Wednesday posts were supposed to be about art and music and pop culture and things in society that sort of grew up with or influenced me in a certain way.” And that’s true; I’d like to think I put enough references to pop culture and music and art and movies that I can sort of get away with it. But I understand if you don’t see it that way. So how can I be true to the essence of what this post was supposed to be about? And I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got a playlist that could help us. Okay, so the first playlist is an album that is one of those where I can listen to the entire thing all the way through, and it’s by a Canadian artist by the name of Esthero, and the album is called “Breathe from Another”. It’s a very good mix of sort of dance-rock ambient elements that sort of all flow together, and it’s a trip, a good trip. It’s a trip. The second is a Lo-Fi Jazz playlist; songs are very short, very bass-centric, very light, and airy with beats that can help concentrate a sound and still give you a walk-in-the-park type feel. I understand that both of them are kind of different, so you may listen to one, you may listen to the other, you may listen to both back to back. The main idea is to let the songs take you somewhere as songs took me when listening to my dad’s records in the basement. The sounds are eclectic and they may be eccentric, but for me, there’s a balance that helped shape my current point of view and brought it into focus.

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash