Profound..., no...?

What makes us, us? Are we defined by who we are, or what we have done? Is it the influences in our lives, or the choices we have made, that have brought us to this point? A wise being of well advanced years once said, "Luminous beings are we..., not this crude matter." That being said, what is it that makes the leap between a collection of atoms, and the self aware being?

To be honest with you, I have been lying on my bed for that last fifteen minutes, staring at that paragraph. All that time, and all my years, and I still don't have an answer. Though I do strongly believe that we are a product of our upbringing. As an example, I was raised by two, then later three, people who loved me very much, but did not love each other. Let's go deeper shall we....

Like I said earlier, I think..., my parents divorced when I was eleven. Up until that point, I thought that everything was fine. My parents took great effort to not let their true feelings show, in front of my brother and I. But that all changed one night, after a fight that could not be hidden. I remember standing at the door, in my pj's crying, as I watched my dad get into a taxi.

I don't remember the next few weeks that well, I had slipped into a kind of fugue state, where nothing mattered. I have brief flashes of fights at school, being sent home, and my mum yelling at me. I also remember crying myself to sleep at night, but is about it. After about a month of this, I came out of it, I was stronger, more determined, and certainly more independent. The problem was though, that the person that came back, was not me, I was no longer the happy carefree kid that I had been, I was a shell, hollow.

Ever since then, I have been seriously independent, distrustful, and somewhat self-serving. I do not need the company of others, to feel safe and happy, nor do  I need others to complete tasks. I am driven and self motivated. I learned through necessity that I could no longer rely on anyone for my personal survival. I learned to cook, to clean, to get myself up in the morning, to sew the buttons back on my shirts. It was a case of having to really. When my parents split, I chose to stay with my mum, in the vain hope that dad would come back. Like they say..., "Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment". To make matters worse, my mum threw herself into her work, in order to cope. Hence I was left to my own devices for most of the time.

Do I think that my parents screwed me up...? Not really, I think I was always screwed up to some extent, I just needed that catalyst for it to blossom. Some more back story. Not long after I was born, something went down between my father and his. This caused my dad to make some hard decisions. One of which was to move his family from the north island to the deep south of the south island, pretty much cutting us off from the rest of the family. I still feel like an outsider at family get togethers, just because I didn't grow up with them. All except one, an offshoot of my mothers line, also lived in the same region as us, so we did have that, my cousin and I still have a good relationship, and is probably the closest family member I have on that side of the family.

To this day, I still find it very hard to break out of this self sufficiency. I find it very hard to relay my feelings to others. It still takes a long time for me to trust, and even longer to put my survival in another's hands. The only man who I trust completely, as I have already mentioned, is my father. As for my family, I am still very distant, though I know they love and care for me. 

What you could say, is that it was the choices in my life, that have made me this way. The ones I have have made for myself, and those that have been made for me.But that is still only part of the whole. and that brings me to my next point, predeterminism.

Call it fate, call it destiny..., call it whatever you like. But what does it really mean, and more importantly what does it mean for us? I would like to hope that we are not just some minor cog in a big machine, grinding out our lives on a predetermined course, until we wear out and get replaced. If that is the case, then I would rather just quit now, and go get a nice oil bath! I would prefer to think that have the choice, that we can take that left fork in the road.

I have always felt that I am destined for greatness. I can't really back that up, but I have always felt it. What that great thing is, I have no bloody clue. But I feel it everyday, like I am waiting for something to happen, that I will be in the right place at the right time. And if I was to be honest, over the last couple of years that feeling has been getting stronger and stronger. Is it destiny, about to knock on my door? If so then surely I should have been provided with all the correct learning and tools to accomplish what ever the gods have laid out for me.

I am rambling now, so I am going to stop. I just wanted to get out how I was feeling at the moment. Maybe you guys will understanhd, maybe you won't. It's just how I feel.