The price of redemption
Your Pyrrhic escape from the false self
The most painful part of fending off your demons to rediscover your true, innocent self is the realisation that the best people were there for you all along… and all you did was hurt them, shun them, betray them.
Your demons - those self-hating voices - were nothing other than the personification of your trauma, an allegory for your abuses, subconsciously created by your innocent inner child to make sense of the evil committed against you. You were innocent and uncritical, so you concluded that you deserved to be abused. You were too naively pure to trust in yourself more than in those who hurt you.
The monster
Each trauma becomes a building block for a monstrous false self built around your true, innocent self… Brick upon brick, you construct your prison for the child who was innocent enough to conclude it worthy of its trauma, when it wasn’t. This prison does not safeguard it from more harm; if anything, the false self is self-destructive.
The false self is the result of your innocence concluding that you were never worthy of anything other than the abuses you endured.
And so, you subconsciously structure the monster around you to suppress your innocence, to numb its sensitivity… but at the cost of your true self, your true feelings, your true love.
This monster distorts who you are, and it replaces your pure mental processes with twisted ones, satirical shadows of what you truly are. The monstrous false self suppresses who you really are, what you really feel, as a counter-productive knee-jerk reaction to the pain of abuse. So, you see the world through the distorting eyes of the monster, instead of the pure, innocent child you truly were… and still are, buried underneath the monster.
The false self goes against your innocence, your sensitivity to the slightest of people’s abuses. It convinces you that you are someone else, someone hard, emotionless, corrupt, distorted, impure, fake… anything but innocent, vulnerable, and true to your core self.
So, the false self creates a masquerade for you, one impervious to the pain of innocence, the unnecessary self-hating conclusions from the abuses you absorbed… the abuses you allowed to infect your purity. What the false self can’t mitigate is your shared self-loathing.
The false self’s mask of narcissism is proof of its hopeless insecurity, as it cannot be grounded, cannot be humble without compromising self-esteem… because your pure self-esteem is substituted by arrogance: faux self-conviction.
“It is all your fault. You are not good enough. You don’t deserve what you love. You are useless. You’ve become a bad boy. You deserve the abuse you get.”
These voices in your head are nothing but exaggerated caricatures of the people who traumatised you, and are often worse than the reality of those people. Our innocent self gives undeserved credence to the hopelessly insecure people who had a desperate need to abuse us for their cheap, meaningless validation.
Our abusers, though, didn’t have free will or agency for being abusive - they were mindless automata passively responding to their stimuli, their own abusive inner demons. So, their decision to abuse you had no weight, no dire meaning for you, nor for your worth. They were just like the wind, a random, senseless force of nature - mindless, random, and meaningless. This is not a justification for your abusers; this is just an explanation to take away the impact of the abuse they inflicted on you. This is so you don’t attribute undeserved meaning to the abuses you received.
When you are relentlessly and systematically abused, your true self withdraws and hides. The humiliation you suffer erodes your dignity and integrity, and so you put aside yourself to hide from sight. Inevitably, you also put aside what you value and what you love. You have lost respect for yourself, and so you must deny your true callings, your values, and the people you love. The false self will go after cheap substitutes for those things, and convince you it’s what you always wanted.
After your purity is infected by abuse, you don’t consider yourself good enough to value anything, let alone worthy enough to want it. So you begin “wanting” lesser things, cheaper things, as cheap as you are.
Your life becomes nothing but an animalistic existence: eat, sleep, fuck, wander, repeat. There is nothing meaningful, no values to grant you identity, purpose, or meaning. You believed them, the voices of your abusers - that “you were not good enough” for the things you valued. So you discarded the things you valued. You literally threw yourself away. You lost sight of who you are. You don’t exist; you are just meat spasming to electrical impulses, waiting to die, but also scared of death.
This gap of identity is quickly filled by the false self. In your mind, heart, and soul, your subconscious inner child creates this false self as scar tissue, a shell around your innocent core being. Not only does the false self have nothing to do with who you truly are deep inside, but it suffocates you and blinds you from your innermost fundamental feelings. Then, every thought, every word, every decision, every action that flows through you, you assume is a product of free will - but it isn’t. It’s just your false self hijacking your thoughts and feelings. And your true inner self passively follows, unable now to regain the control it has surrendered to this monster.
Love denied
The false self, this shell enveloping and suffocating your true self, denies you your real feelings, your real intentions, your true love. It buries what you had truly valued all along - what your core, innocent self had always revered, and blinds you to the people you truly deeply loved. This monster denies your love for the things and the people who truly loved you and were indeed worthy of loving back.
Instead, your false self feigns love and lust for things that aren’t in line with your true core values, your true identity. It twists your pure yearning for love into greed, gluttony, and lust for things that aren’t for you.
It messes up your entire direction in life because you can’t even see the compass of your heart.
Your true self is suppressed, blindfolded, and gagged, forbidden to see, speak, hear, or even think. In essence, your true self dies so that the monster (the false self) can live through the animated corpse of your innocent inner child. It’s not real life - it’s a zombified existence, an insult to your true calling. The monster humiliates you: it dishonours your true values by going after the things and the people that are most antithetical and deleterious to you…
This is the result of trauma unresolved due to the non-existence of support networks, people who will insist on loving your inner innocence. This is the hell of living as a corrupt, infected orc, knowing that deep down, you were once innocent and kind and bright. It is, quite literally, worse than death. This is what causes suicide: the final escape from the defilement of self.
Demonic possession
When the monster is in control, your soul is hijacked. Your actions aren’t yours. Your feelings aren’t yours. Not even your love is yours. You feel possessed by another entity - a demon. Deep down, you know this isn’t you, but you can’t quite describe it, can’t control it. You sense that it’s not you doing what you’re doing, but you can’t explain it, let alone escape it. Have you ever done something and wondered what possibly could have possessed you to act or feel that way? Have you ever kept doing something that you knew was in disharmony with who you truly were? That’s your false self taking over your innocent core self.
But you don’t understand why because you can’t access your true, innocent self. You just assume that your false self is you… But “you” isn’t you… not when your true self is engulfed by the monster.
Yes, you’re still accountable for what you allowed your false self to do, think, say, and feel… You are still responsible for the people your false self has hurt. But make no mistake - your false self is not you… It never was. A blatant misalignment with your core, pure, innocent being cannot be your real self.
The first step to escaping the prison of the false self is to recognise the false self, and then reaffirm your true, pure, childlike, innocent self. How were you as a child before you were corrupted by abuse? The second step is to contrast the two selves and deny the false self completely: return to your childlike innocence, with the scars of the journey as your costly education.
Ask yourself: how would you feel if your mind travelled back in time into the body of your younger, more innocent, less traumatised self? How would the wisdom you have now benefit the purity of your yet-to-be-defiled innocence?
The monster is not you. Its thoughts, actions, and voice do not belong to you. It’s not even real. Never was, never will be.
The escape
Escaping the false self feels like clarity, like wiping away the fog on the mirror and seeing your true self for the first time. It’s rediscovering your real self. It’s relearning what and whom you truly valued all along, deep down inside, but weren’t even aware of it. You don’t feel confused anymore. The things you want and the things you truly fear make sense now, unlike before. Everything makes sense now, and you wish you had escaped much earlier, to have made better choices in line with your values.
You are now free from your false self’s fixations that had nothing to do with your real values. You don’t even know why you were obsessed with things so incongruent with your core being. These obsessions had no clear motive behind them because they were just the random needs of the corrupt and chaotic false self: That inflexible paralysis in the mental quicksand of a nightmare, the misadventures of the false self who is always concerned with stupid things that never spoke to you. You now notice that your false self has been obsessing over all the things antithetical to your true being, as if out of spite for your innocence.
You might never manage to escape your false self, the monstrous shell enveloping you, drowning you. It may not even be worth it if freeing your true self means realising what you’ve lost. Perhaps Edmond Dantès would have been better off staying in prison than escaping to face his loss, to experience the hell of ‘what could have been.’
But if you do manage to break free from the prison of the monstrous false self - the defiler of your innocence… if you manage to squeeze your head between the prison bars just enough to breathe and look at the world with the eyes of who you always were deep down… then you’ll finally feel your true feelings, your true values, your true love. You’ll finally realise whom you really loved all along, and realise that your fixations with the wrong people were just your false self’s obsessions to deny you your vulnerable purity.
You’ll see that the good people were always there for you, always trying to reach you, and yet you ignored them, hurt them, and rejected them. Your monstrous shell, your false self, could not see value in them for itself. The monster was only after monstrous things. And your inner core self, that child… was locked in a prison of its own making… blind and deaf to the good in the world. The child felt safer in death… its innocence had concluded that.
To break free from the prison of the false self, you must redeem yourself for the horrors you allowed your false self to commit in your name. Sometimes, all it takes is to reconnect with a person from your childhood before the raping of your psyche… and perhaps that is enough to spark an inner awakening, a yerning for the true self to escape the prison of the monstrous false self. Perhaps this can be powerful enough to reconnect you with the part of yourself before it was corrupted by abuse.
To free the self, you must take the burden of responsibility and acknowledge all your false self’s monstrosities as mistakes never to be repeated. This way, you courageously hold yourself accountable while refusing to be defined by your evils. In the words of 3 Doors Down: “Your mistakes do not define you; they tell you who you’re not.” Treat your mistakes as mistakes… no excuses, no repetitions. And ask for forgiveness, especially your own.
To stay out of the prison of the false self, you must remain faithful to the things and the people your true self valued all along. Don’t betray them again. Accept the pain of being you. Accept the pain from being abused; don’t look the other way. The pain is your permission to be you. Avoiding the pain creates a false self that isn’t vulnerable to abuse.
Embracing the pain from being the true you grants you the power to prevent a false self from forming. Don’t be afraid to be and want what you truly value. Ignore the demons of abuse and humiliation when they tell you that you don’t deserve to want what you want. You deserve it. Why? Because you are willing to hurt for it.
Be audacious and brave enough to respect yourself and to be yourself despite the meaningless abuses from weaklings against you - they desperately need to abuse you because they are weak (you don’t need to abuse anyone). Keep valuing what you value, keep being you, even if it hurts. Don’t avoid the pain of being you, if pain is what it takes (it mostly doesn’t). Otherwise, the monster will envelop you again.
The desolate landscape
As you emerge free from the enclosure of your false self, you begin to feel differently about everything. You finally understand that, in reality, you’ve been loving different people all along. The people you thought you loved, you didn’t, not really. It was just the false, corrupt self and its misguided misdirections of twisted desire. What it desired was to corrupt your pure longing to love and be loved by people aligned with your true values. The true people risk reviving your true self, and the false self can’t have that. Your false self was going after the wrong things and loving the wrong people to keep you down.
But suffering for the mistakes of your false self isn’t the hardest part of escaping the monster. It’s not even the part where you have to sincerely apologise and make amends, if you can. The hardest part is the regret… not of doing evil, but of not doing good. Because good is heavier than evil. You’ll begin to see that your false self, the monstrous shell of a man that kept your real self dormant, had blinded you from the true people, the good people around you. They were the people who believed in you enough to hold you accountable. For some reason, they could see your inner true self, and they could acknowledge it more than you could. But in your suppressed state, pushed down by the outer false-self monstrosity, you could not appreciate them when they were there. What a shame… What a loss…
Years pass, decades pass, and when you, your true self, manage to barely stick your head out of the window of your mind’s Château d’If, you look back and you realise: You fool, they were always there; the real people were there for you all along. You were just hopelessly blind to them. You only had to acknowledge them. Were you unworthy of them at the time, or even still are? Perhaps. But they saw your true, innocent self. That must have been worth something. And perhaps, had you acknowledged them from the start, that may have been all the encouragement you needed to become worthy of them.
They are painful… the “what ifs.”
It’s tempting to hate yourself for the chances wasted, the time lost. It’s tempting, after seeing the hell of ‘what could have been,’ to want to push your inner child back into another prison, a worse monstrosity of a false self. That will mask the pain.
But don’t abuse your innocence… not anymore. Accept the regrets, without judgment of the child that failed… it failed precisely because it was innocent. It was its innocence, its virtue, that was the cause of its suffering… it was innocent and pure enough to foolishly believe the demon’s voices, to grant undeserved regard to abusers. It was innocent enough to build monuments to its abusers: the demons, the tantalising voices demanding to be heard, to ensnare the true self, to give birth to the monster.
The pain of redemption is the knowledge that you betrayed the people who saw your inner innocent self, but you couldn’t see them back until it was too late. The pain of redemption is knowing you betrayed yourself by allowing the demons to win and overpower it. You betrayed yourself, and you betrayed the people who saw your true self better than you could.
You’ve managed to kill the false self and escape his prison… but you’ve escaped to find a scorched earth. It’s too late to do anything meaningful with it now. Choosing to go back to hide in prison, like Old Boy, is understandable. No one will judge you. But you can also choose to keep the pain as your permission, your purgatory, to be innocent again.
Regrets
The pain of regret is the price for regaining your true self. Truth hurts. Perhaps the false-self monster was a comforting lie.
Nothing hurts like regret for not doing good… the guilt from wasting potential, the Erynies of ‘what could have been.’
This pain of regret is your purgatory, your redemption. It’s your permission to salvage what’s left of your innocence, your inner pure self.
Is it worth it? Maybe not, not when it’s too late to do good with your newfound freedom and wisdom. Perhaps it would have been better to let the monster live, and keep your inner innocence entombed, protected from the pain of realisation, the purgatory of an empty redemption. I can’t weigh pain. I know you’ll suffer regardless.
But there is still one act of good left for you: be kinder to your inner innocence, your true core self, the subconscious child that suffered because of its innocence. It wasn’t its fault. Don’t hate the false self either for ensnaring you - the more emotion you invest in it, the stronger you make it, and you risk revitalising it. Ignore it. It was never real anyway. The false self was just the imaginary creation of your inner child. Be kind to it, too.
Your mind was captive. Unfortunately for you, you weren’t living while the false self was in control. How to know when your will was hijacked by the false self? This is how:
Often, the people with genuinely good intentions towards you, with pure affection towards you (without a false, insecure self of their own in charge), call you out on it when you lose your way. They tell you this, not as an insult, but as a cry to your pure self to snap out of it. This is because they have witnessed your inner self, and it was beautiful. But when you react aggressively to them pointing out to you that you are lost, when you instead take it as an insult and you retreat further in self-hatred, when you close yourself to them for their desperate cry to love you… then you know it’s your monstrous false self in charge of your mind, heart, and soul. When you mistake their well-intentioned cry as abuse, you’ve lost sight of who you are. And this has killed you.
Last apologies
I’m sorry I was too late to break free to see the good I could have done, and the brilliant people I could have valued, and lost. I am sorry. I wish I could change time, but time is one demon we can’t overcome.
Not worth torturing yourself over what could have been. Just embrace your inner child, and let it cry. Let it cry tears of innocence. It wasn’t its fault. It wasn’t your fault. The child was captive of a monster of its own making… The creation of that monster was an act of innocence and purity… the consequence of selflessly giving more value to others than to itself… so much that the child made idols in their name, demons to torture it… to honour its abusers. This is how innocent it was. It was beautiful.
It wasn’t your fault for being born either. You were placed here… with needs, desires, and hostile environments. You were confused and built by nature to be hopelessly reliant upon support networks, which you never got, or didn’t have the eyes to see them when they were there. It’s ok.
It’s fine to feel frustrated: you were abandoned here in life to suffer with the added insult to injury of realising too late that your demons were liars, and that you could have loved the right people from the start. It’s life’s way of rubbing it in when it shows you way too late what you could have had and can’t ever have anymore.
Life is cruel because we learn too late to use that knowledge, but not too early to not torture ourselves with ‘what could have been.’ It’s why we are angry at “god.” Whatever made this reality is nothing if not cruel and indifferent to our insignificant suffering. But our suffering matters to us, as little as that may be… Nobody cares, except the people who have loved your pure self. I’ll take that any day over the possessive “love” of a despotic “god.”
Life is overrated anyway. We were never entitled to anything in this poorly executed simulation. And this is all we are… entities in an open-world video game. Take nothing seriously. Most of your life was wasted on a false self, anyway.
As a troubled Bowie once said, “Aging is the extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.” The cruel, tragic irony of this is “should.” It’s that you had wasted it all as someone completely false, along with your immense potential for good. And you realise it only when it’s too late to make a difference. You are graced with the freedom to finally be you only when it doesn’t matter anymore, if you ever find freedom at all. Maybe it would have been better to have stayed in the prison of the false self. It’s ok. Life is a losing battle, anyway. This won’t last much longer.
Dedicated to T.V.
Perfectly describes my life. Each time I took a wrong turn, sometimes years later, something shows me what life would have looked like if I had kept on the "path."
I'm afraid to get on another path now so I'm just sitting around.
👏👏👏