Variform
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- Mar 11, 2014
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I spent most of yesterday reading Elliot Rodger's manifesto. I carefully read his thoughts and got under his skin. This was quite easy for me because I can relate and understand him quite well, which is somewhat disturbing. The fact is, he and I are not so different.
Admitting to that is a dangerous thing to do because it will immediately invoke antipathy against me by the association with a disturbing serial killer.
After reading it I am confronted with many similarities between his thinking and mine. But also I share similar events with him. It makes me wonder how close I would be to his final actions, had I lived in the usa.
But I differ from him in some core ways that leave me an escape from flipping like that. I wonder to what part culture in all its many and varied aspects played a role in his final acts bit I also feel that to say this is all solely his doing is not right.
We are all affected deeply by society and the actions and feelings and attitudes of others. No man or woman stands alone but is part of a whole. And this being fact, decisions we make have connections to how other treat us.
One of the most scarring events in Elliot's life was by the teasing or bullying of Monette Moio, now apparently an actual model. I would not easily dismiss her actions because Eliiot became a killer. She contributed to his emotional state right up to the end because she could not control herself and bullied him years before in school. And he had a crush on her!
I think it should now be very clear in society, that bullying people can be extremely hurtful. We have programs in schools, we even have a tv show about it here, which records the bullying with secret camera's to confront the participants later. Controversial, but seemingly very much needed, because despite all actions to battle it, bullying keeps happening.
I was bullied in school. This undermined my already fragile self-esteem.
Another similarity and misconception is the one of Elliot being privileged. I never lacked anything in my life but emotional support. Physically I was kept fed, clothed, warmed. Although my parents were not rich, we did well, lived in a suburb in a two level house etc. I never lacked anything. It makes no different if you are well-off or poor, the reason for bullying doesn't make the pain different or less.
Things we share are shyness, easily rejected, feels things deeply, has a good sense of injustice that in his case becomes totally warped. That is what bullying does to you.
In some ways he did better than I did. He had Maddy, a girl that was his friend early in life, where I had no female friends, ever. He hugged girls as a form of greeting in school, which is a cultural thing. I never had that. He danced once at a school party, so did I but I was younger and found myself so self-conscious at this party, halfway I stopped and no girl that asked me could drag me onto the floor again. I lost my nerve. I wonder why, cause the girls liked my dancing.
Overall he cannot connect to peers. Neither could I very well. He tried his best to fit in and was more successful in doing so than I ever was, as he learned to skateboard well. He is able to take steps to improve his social skills, like working out and going on karate class.
But he suffers from intense social anxiety, enough for a dx. Like I suffer from it still. He has some friends, but they come and go and he cannot keep them but only a few stick around, like his friend James. He flees in games, so did I.
He never feels equal to anyone, I know how that is. He minimizes his successes and inflates negative feedback. He feels unworthy but knows it need not be so, that he has inherent value. But no one extends much of a helping hand to him, maybe because he is closed and doesn't share, like I never did.
Yet as responsibility goes, his parents do understand he has problems and get him professional help. The professional mental health care fails him, as can be seen with Robi Ludwig, psychotherapist, who never seemed to understand him at all. Some articles suggest Elliot hears voices too, but he never shares that in his manifesto, so I think it is nonsense.
I never got any professional help and my parents let my severe anxieties and behavior towards them slip. In some ways I was worse off then he was.
His father is often away, my father was emotionally distant or away. He has bad role models, so did I. he blames his parents for not guiding him better, so do I. He feels things deeply, so do I, he has a high libido, so do I, he comes to terms with sexuality a little late and fell behind. I was late too, where my high school class mates, age 13, 14, talked about blow jobs, I didn't really understand all that yet. They told me they had seen vagina's fooling around with girls, I was like Elliot, shocked about it.
He is afraid of girls, so am I, because of my overbearing mother with her self-aggrandizement in combination with her victimization stories. His mother arranges his play dates and doesn't seem able to grow him up, but he loves her. So did I, despite the fact she treated me wrong, abandoned me emotionally or nurtured me badly.
He is intelligent, so am I. He can apply himself to schoolwork better than I, seems to have working systems to do home work properly. I severely lacked, so maybe he was smarter than I am. Or maybe american courses are easier.
I always kept one room in one house, but he seems to spend his life moving from house to house on the rhythm of the financial success of his parents. He dislikes these changes before adapting.
He has normal empathy towards others, so did I. He starts obsessing about sex, so did I, but that could be any pubic boy. He develops a thing for blond girls, he is absolutely not gay at all. This suggestion made in public is a vile attempt of smearing if you ask me. Like me, he starts to idealize sex and girls and starts to believe that his social anxiety can be resolved by sex and the self-respect it will grant. I cannot say if, like Elliot, I felt it would give me status, that he desperately seeks for some reason. Maybe this is because to be equal to his peers, he needs to be like them, so his sense of identity is diminished, even more so after the bullying starts.
So already social anxious lack of self-worth and self-esteem become diminished by bullying and a negative feedback loop twists his thinking into a single-minded ideation of girls and the act of sex and his sense of identity becomes dependent on this. I recognize this in myself. It is shocking.
This negative cycle continues throughout his life. No one recognizes his value, extends their hand in understanding because he remains silent and withdrawn, becomes socially isolated, like me.
Has trouble with people being intimate, jealous, like me. I could not handle duplicitous sexual jokes or references. It made me mad, like Elliot. I wanted a girlfriend so bad but could not overcome anxiety and insecurities and feelings of not fitting in and so forth and so on. This continued through his life and mine, up till the point I finally found a partner in the loony bin.
What we also share is acts of aggression. I took a real looking starter gun and fired it at my in-training psychiatrist to underline my suicidal tendencies in an abject and self-loathing act of hatred and aggression, to which I had to appear in court, where I was sentenced to a a probationary task punishment for 5 years, which I passed without problems. I was so high on Paxil that it allowed for 'aggressive impulse breakthroughs' which Elliot has in the last year of his life, when he attacks people with a super soaker or throws coffee and tea from his car as he passes by couples. But he has no medication, whereas with me it was the medication.
Hope keeps him going, same here and he has regrets about not finding love and intimacy at a younger age, like I do. These years you cannot get back and is very painful, believe me.
I feel that had I known this dude, he and I might have shared the killing spree. I am someplace maybe between Elliot and his friend James, who also struggled with attracting girls.
Elliot's thinking becomes increasingly narrowed into obsessive ruminations about blond girls, sex, love, desire to be appreciated for who you are. The desire to be appreciated, loved and recognized for your character, your ability to be good, to not be shallow, to have depth of character I deeply recognize.
He is in fact worthy of love, not ugly, yet so social anxious that even if a girl had talked to him, he might have not been able to respond. At this point he wants the girl, but fears them. He starts to hate them, where I never did so. Yes I had these moments of resentment, but not as Elliot had.
Elliot feels betrayed easily and maybe rightly so. Peers can be brutal and unkind and people throughout his life seem very much self-absorbed invividuals, only fighting for their own best interest and succeeding where Elliot and I do not. This sparks resentment and feelings of inadequacy while remaining lucid about the fact that you do have the right to be and are worthy of a respect and relationships.
But it is this dichotomy that is where the pain lies, to be aware of that you should feel worthy to be who you are, that you have intrinsic value to yourself and society and people around you, if you could only find a way into showing this but on the other hand being incapable and thwarted continuously by your own anxieties, so, that you feel unworthy yet.
All this then starts to warp critical thinking, in him and me, about relationships, about sex, about love. In essence here too a dichotomy arises: on one hand you know what pure love is, that you recognize the need for it, that you understand no one can snap their fingers that easily, yet see this is what happens to some people, you are indeed realistic about it and yet on the other hand desire it deeply and become confronted that inf act some people get to it with apparent ease. So what is it about you that makes it so hard.
And that answer is confronting and humiliating. And so the mind enters into deep recesses of political analyses, sociological and cultural contemplations, philosophical hide-outs and basically deforms to to cope with the stress and all the different negative emotions. I get Elliot just as well as he would have gotten me.
At this point any help provided can't come through anymore. The ways are set, the mind locked, declaring itself free. Coping mechanism have formed, patterns of thought deeply established, negative feedback loops occur, schemes of thinking cloud realistic judgment.
Elliot goes through this process quick and because he feels things so deeply he is on a fast track, whereas I would have taken a longer time to radicalize. His emotional unbalance follows a high and steep curve up to 22 years of age and I think american culture and society and all that contributes to the meeting point between self and external reality, so to say, contributes to this fast descend. My culture is very different and has a more moderating effect.
We do not have highschool shootings here or rampages. We had one some years ago, when a kid shot his teacher dead, which was an immense shock. There have been a few cases in Germany, and in Scandinavian nations. Overall the culture is different enough to limit access to weapons and people don't seem to flip as much, though even that seems a product america exports unfortunately.
Elliot ruminates continually. So do I. His mind never comes to terms with who he is, why he suffers, he tries to analyze but never gets it. Why so unlucky? What did he do wrong? I recognize these patterns. I know them from the inside. Had I access to real guns, I might have taken my own life many years ago, maybe even as a child, maybe at the age of 16 or so.
Elliot cannot be comforted much as a child, neither could I. I would kick away from me any person who wanted to help me when I would topple or hurt myself, because I was apparently, as my brother explains, angry with myself for allowing myself to be hurt, or being stupid.
The question is, what makes a young boy have feeling of self-loathing and anger directed to the self, so unforgiving towards himself? Is it the emotional neglect of parents? Is it a brain chemistry issue or some other brain related malfunction? To this day I do not know for sure. Elliot didn't understand either, but he and I share this self-defeatist complex.
Always thinking we are flawed, always believing the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, eager to accept our own inadequacies and having difficulty with praise, always this paranoia that it is not meant or true. I sense this in him but maybe I project too much. But he ruminates to no end, like me and his topics of thought are similar.
In the last years he has magical thinking about the lottery, desperately clings to self help books and tries to influence the universe by sheer willpower. I do not think this necessarily means a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder, but I feel it is a stress induced coping mechanism in recognition of the self slipping into an vengeful mindset capable of murder.
He may have had at least one episode of derealization or depersonalization. He feels as in trance outside a museum he visits with friends, but any social contacts are always confronting him. He suffers from depression. He probably would be diagnosed with dysthymia, like me, which results from the constant self-reflecting undermining thoughts. But with periods of actual clinical full blown depression.
He had intense sexual fantasies, like me. Elaborate in scope and range they can last between minutes and hours up to full days. They can be complete life stories of finding a girlfriend, dating, sex, ending the relationship or growing old together. He doesn't say too much about it but I think it is too embarrassing for him to disclose it.
In an effort to battle and compensate feelings of being unworthy and inadequate, he develops notions of grandeur, of being a hero. This is why magic and fantasy gaming appeals so much. Fantasies of being a hero mix with sexual fantasies, one becomes the hero in their own mind, saving girls from sexual assault or being great in some way, like an artist, or great guitarist or just being plane awesome to a girl. But these fantasies only outline the failure in real life that he felt he was. That goes for me too.
The mind is the cause of agony yet battles desperately to stay sane.
In Elliot this battle came to a conclusion when he could not cope anymore and all that he saw as a possible way out, like becoming very wealthy and in being wealthy, being able to attract girls, was lost. The combination of losing hope, feeling no more options existed, no more excuses of fantasies to cling to lead to a deep depression and existential crisis. Like I have.
Both Elliot and I know not who we are, what we are, what we are supposed to be, how to become a better person, how to fight these anxieties, why we are so different, why we need to endure life rather than enjoy it. In a society where guns can be easily obtained, he took steps, whereas I will never harm another. I would only harm myself but yet I have not given up all hope.
I share the end game process though, in that I feel I have to give myself a chance, whereas he hopes that girls, society, the world, life itself give him another chance to prevent his death and the death of others.
I might get a dx for ADD. I have hope and trust in medication. I desire therapy that I will go for in a last attempt to get to understand myself and get a grip on life. I don't know if I succeed. If not, I hope I have the courage to take my life, but that is against such a basal instinct it is very hard.
But I am glad I do not live in america. I cannot say to what extent I would act out in violence against a world that doesn't seem to be able to or help me be. I already acted out once. And I can so deeply understand his need to take people with him, because it is true, no one is alone in the world and we are all affected by others and how they treat us, relate to us.
All Elliot's friends or acquaintances and his parents, his coaches, his mental health professionals must now introspect to what extent they contributed to this tragedy and own up their part for it. What did they do or failed to do? All those who bullied him needlessly, or who looked away or hurt him intensionally or out of sheer callousness or disinterest, like his step mother need to examine to what their impact was on him. That he felt so lonely, so lost and that no one was there for him. No I refuse to see him isolated from his environment, that his act of aggression was only his own doing. The fact is, society does play a part, culture does play its role and inter-human relations do affect the mind of a person.
In essence, these influences all had their finger on the trigger that day. But society shies away from responsibility, because it knows it has impact on people. And how tragic that 'innocent' people died, people who may have had similar problems getting a relationship. After all, it doesn't show on the outside. That he killed people like him, possibly. And who knows, these victims might have contributed to the mental instability of someone in their own environment. A scary thought, but we are all related, and tied by invisible strings. What have I done in my life to hurt another? Who will ask these questions now?
RIP Elliot Rodger.
Admitting to that is a dangerous thing to do because it will immediately invoke antipathy against me by the association with a disturbing serial killer.
After reading it I am confronted with many similarities between his thinking and mine. But also I share similar events with him. It makes me wonder how close I would be to his final actions, had I lived in the usa.
But I differ from him in some core ways that leave me an escape from flipping like that. I wonder to what part culture in all its many and varied aspects played a role in his final acts bit I also feel that to say this is all solely his doing is not right.
We are all affected deeply by society and the actions and feelings and attitudes of others. No man or woman stands alone but is part of a whole. And this being fact, decisions we make have connections to how other treat us.
One of the most scarring events in Elliot's life was by the teasing or bullying of Monette Moio, now apparently an actual model. I would not easily dismiss her actions because Eliiot became a killer. She contributed to his emotional state right up to the end because she could not control herself and bullied him years before in school. And he had a crush on her!
I think it should now be very clear in society, that bullying people can be extremely hurtful. We have programs in schools, we even have a tv show about it here, which records the bullying with secret camera's to confront the participants later. Controversial, but seemingly very much needed, because despite all actions to battle it, bullying keeps happening.
I was bullied in school. This undermined my already fragile self-esteem.
Another similarity and misconception is the one of Elliot being privileged. I never lacked anything in my life but emotional support. Physically I was kept fed, clothed, warmed. Although my parents were not rich, we did well, lived in a suburb in a two level house etc. I never lacked anything. It makes no different if you are well-off or poor, the reason for bullying doesn't make the pain different or less.
Things we share are shyness, easily rejected, feels things deeply, has a good sense of injustice that in his case becomes totally warped. That is what bullying does to you.
In some ways he did better than I did. He had Maddy, a girl that was his friend early in life, where I had no female friends, ever. He hugged girls as a form of greeting in school, which is a cultural thing. I never had that. He danced once at a school party, so did I but I was younger and found myself so self-conscious at this party, halfway I stopped and no girl that asked me could drag me onto the floor again. I lost my nerve. I wonder why, cause the girls liked my dancing.
Overall he cannot connect to peers. Neither could I very well. He tried his best to fit in and was more successful in doing so than I ever was, as he learned to skateboard well. He is able to take steps to improve his social skills, like working out and going on karate class.
But he suffers from intense social anxiety, enough for a dx. Like I suffer from it still. He has some friends, but they come and go and he cannot keep them but only a few stick around, like his friend James. He flees in games, so did I.
He never feels equal to anyone, I know how that is. He minimizes his successes and inflates negative feedback. He feels unworthy but knows it need not be so, that he has inherent value. But no one extends much of a helping hand to him, maybe because he is closed and doesn't share, like I never did.
Yet as responsibility goes, his parents do understand he has problems and get him professional help. The professional mental health care fails him, as can be seen with Robi Ludwig, psychotherapist, who never seemed to understand him at all. Some articles suggest Elliot hears voices too, but he never shares that in his manifesto, so I think it is nonsense.
I never got any professional help and my parents let my severe anxieties and behavior towards them slip. In some ways I was worse off then he was.
His father is often away, my father was emotionally distant or away. He has bad role models, so did I. he blames his parents for not guiding him better, so do I. He feels things deeply, so do I, he has a high libido, so do I, he comes to terms with sexuality a little late and fell behind. I was late too, where my high school class mates, age 13, 14, talked about blow jobs, I didn't really understand all that yet. They told me they had seen vagina's fooling around with girls, I was like Elliot, shocked about it.
He is afraid of girls, so am I, because of my overbearing mother with her self-aggrandizement in combination with her victimization stories. His mother arranges his play dates and doesn't seem able to grow him up, but he loves her. So did I, despite the fact she treated me wrong, abandoned me emotionally or nurtured me badly.
He is intelligent, so am I. He can apply himself to schoolwork better than I, seems to have working systems to do home work properly. I severely lacked, so maybe he was smarter than I am. Or maybe american courses are easier.
I always kept one room in one house, but he seems to spend his life moving from house to house on the rhythm of the financial success of his parents. He dislikes these changes before adapting.
He has normal empathy towards others, so did I. He starts obsessing about sex, so did I, but that could be any pubic boy. He develops a thing for blond girls, he is absolutely not gay at all. This suggestion made in public is a vile attempt of smearing if you ask me. Like me, he starts to idealize sex and girls and starts to believe that his social anxiety can be resolved by sex and the self-respect it will grant. I cannot say if, like Elliot, I felt it would give me status, that he desperately seeks for some reason. Maybe this is because to be equal to his peers, he needs to be like them, so his sense of identity is diminished, even more so after the bullying starts.
So already social anxious lack of self-worth and self-esteem become diminished by bullying and a negative feedback loop twists his thinking into a single-minded ideation of girls and the act of sex and his sense of identity becomes dependent on this. I recognize this in myself. It is shocking.
This negative cycle continues throughout his life. No one recognizes his value, extends their hand in understanding because he remains silent and withdrawn, becomes socially isolated, like me.
Has trouble with people being intimate, jealous, like me. I could not handle duplicitous sexual jokes or references. It made me mad, like Elliot. I wanted a girlfriend so bad but could not overcome anxiety and insecurities and feelings of not fitting in and so forth and so on. This continued through his life and mine, up till the point I finally found a partner in the loony bin.
What we also share is acts of aggression. I took a real looking starter gun and fired it at my in-training psychiatrist to underline my suicidal tendencies in an abject and self-loathing act of hatred and aggression, to which I had to appear in court, where I was sentenced to a a probationary task punishment for 5 years, which I passed without problems. I was so high on Paxil that it allowed for 'aggressive impulse breakthroughs' which Elliot has in the last year of his life, when he attacks people with a super soaker or throws coffee and tea from his car as he passes by couples. But he has no medication, whereas with me it was the medication.
Hope keeps him going, same here and he has regrets about not finding love and intimacy at a younger age, like I do. These years you cannot get back and is very painful, believe me.
I feel that had I known this dude, he and I might have shared the killing spree. I am someplace maybe between Elliot and his friend James, who also struggled with attracting girls.
Elliot's thinking becomes increasingly narrowed into obsessive ruminations about blond girls, sex, love, desire to be appreciated for who you are. The desire to be appreciated, loved and recognized for your character, your ability to be good, to not be shallow, to have depth of character I deeply recognize.
He is in fact worthy of love, not ugly, yet so social anxious that even if a girl had talked to him, he might have not been able to respond. At this point he wants the girl, but fears them. He starts to hate them, where I never did so. Yes I had these moments of resentment, but not as Elliot had.
Elliot feels betrayed easily and maybe rightly so. Peers can be brutal and unkind and people throughout his life seem very much self-absorbed invividuals, only fighting for their own best interest and succeeding where Elliot and I do not. This sparks resentment and feelings of inadequacy while remaining lucid about the fact that you do have the right to be and are worthy of a respect and relationships.
But it is this dichotomy that is where the pain lies, to be aware of that you should feel worthy to be who you are, that you have intrinsic value to yourself and society and people around you, if you could only find a way into showing this but on the other hand being incapable and thwarted continuously by your own anxieties, so, that you feel unworthy yet.
All this then starts to warp critical thinking, in him and me, about relationships, about sex, about love. In essence here too a dichotomy arises: on one hand you know what pure love is, that you recognize the need for it, that you understand no one can snap their fingers that easily, yet see this is what happens to some people, you are indeed realistic about it and yet on the other hand desire it deeply and become confronted that inf act some people get to it with apparent ease. So what is it about you that makes it so hard.
And that answer is confronting and humiliating. And so the mind enters into deep recesses of political analyses, sociological and cultural contemplations, philosophical hide-outs and basically deforms to to cope with the stress and all the different negative emotions. I get Elliot just as well as he would have gotten me.
At this point any help provided can't come through anymore. The ways are set, the mind locked, declaring itself free. Coping mechanism have formed, patterns of thought deeply established, negative feedback loops occur, schemes of thinking cloud realistic judgment.
Elliot goes through this process quick and because he feels things so deeply he is on a fast track, whereas I would have taken a longer time to radicalize. His emotional unbalance follows a high and steep curve up to 22 years of age and I think american culture and society and all that contributes to the meeting point between self and external reality, so to say, contributes to this fast descend. My culture is very different and has a more moderating effect.
We do not have highschool shootings here or rampages. We had one some years ago, when a kid shot his teacher dead, which was an immense shock. There have been a few cases in Germany, and in Scandinavian nations. Overall the culture is different enough to limit access to weapons and people don't seem to flip as much, though even that seems a product america exports unfortunately.
Elliot ruminates continually. So do I. His mind never comes to terms with who he is, why he suffers, he tries to analyze but never gets it. Why so unlucky? What did he do wrong? I recognize these patterns. I know them from the inside. Had I access to real guns, I might have taken my own life many years ago, maybe even as a child, maybe at the age of 16 or so.
Elliot cannot be comforted much as a child, neither could I. I would kick away from me any person who wanted to help me when I would topple or hurt myself, because I was apparently, as my brother explains, angry with myself for allowing myself to be hurt, or being stupid.
The question is, what makes a young boy have feeling of self-loathing and anger directed to the self, so unforgiving towards himself? Is it the emotional neglect of parents? Is it a brain chemistry issue or some other brain related malfunction? To this day I do not know for sure. Elliot didn't understand either, but he and I share this self-defeatist complex.
Always thinking we are flawed, always believing the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, eager to accept our own inadequacies and having difficulty with praise, always this paranoia that it is not meant or true. I sense this in him but maybe I project too much. But he ruminates to no end, like me and his topics of thought are similar.
In the last years he has magical thinking about the lottery, desperately clings to self help books and tries to influence the universe by sheer willpower. I do not think this necessarily means a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder, but I feel it is a stress induced coping mechanism in recognition of the self slipping into an vengeful mindset capable of murder.
He may have had at least one episode of derealization or depersonalization. He feels as in trance outside a museum he visits with friends, but any social contacts are always confronting him. He suffers from depression. He probably would be diagnosed with dysthymia, like me, which results from the constant self-reflecting undermining thoughts. But with periods of actual clinical full blown depression.
He had intense sexual fantasies, like me. Elaborate in scope and range they can last between minutes and hours up to full days. They can be complete life stories of finding a girlfriend, dating, sex, ending the relationship or growing old together. He doesn't say too much about it but I think it is too embarrassing for him to disclose it.
In an effort to battle and compensate feelings of being unworthy and inadequate, he develops notions of grandeur, of being a hero. This is why magic and fantasy gaming appeals so much. Fantasies of being a hero mix with sexual fantasies, one becomes the hero in their own mind, saving girls from sexual assault or being great in some way, like an artist, or great guitarist or just being plane awesome to a girl. But these fantasies only outline the failure in real life that he felt he was. That goes for me too.
The mind is the cause of agony yet battles desperately to stay sane.
In Elliot this battle came to a conclusion when he could not cope anymore and all that he saw as a possible way out, like becoming very wealthy and in being wealthy, being able to attract girls, was lost. The combination of losing hope, feeling no more options existed, no more excuses of fantasies to cling to lead to a deep depression and existential crisis. Like I have.
Both Elliot and I know not who we are, what we are, what we are supposed to be, how to become a better person, how to fight these anxieties, why we are so different, why we need to endure life rather than enjoy it. In a society where guns can be easily obtained, he took steps, whereas I will never harm another. I would only harm myself but yet I have not given up all hope.
I share the end game process though, in that I feel I have to give myself a chance, whereas he hopes that girls, society, the world, life itself give him another chance to prevent his death and the death of others.
I might get a dx for ADD. I have hope and trust in medication. I desire therapy that I will go for in a last attempt to get to understand myself and get a grip on life. I don't know if I succeed. If not, I hope I have the courage to take my life, but that is against such a basal instinct it is very hard.
But I am glad I do not live in america. I cannot say to what extent I would act out in violence against a world that doesn't seem to be able to or help me be. I already acted out once. And I can so deeply understand his need to take people with him, because it is true, no one is alone in the world and we are all affected by others and how they treat us, relate to us.
All Elliot's friends or acquaintances and his parents, his coaches, his mental health professionals must now introspect to what extent they contributed to this tragedy and own up their part for it. What did they do or failed to do? All those who bullied him needlessly, or who looked away or hurt him intensionally or out of sheer callousness or disinterest, like his step mother need to examine to what their impact was on him. That he felt so lonely, so lost and that no one was there for him. No I refuse to see him isolated from his environment, that his act of aggression was only his own doing. The fact is, society does play a part, culture does play its role and inter-human relations do affect the mind of a person.
In essence, these influences all had their finger on the trigger that day. But society shies away from responsibility, because it knows it has impact on people. And how tragic that 'innocent' people died, people who may have had similar problems getting a relationship. After all, it doesn't show on the outside. That he killed people like him, possibly. And who knows, these victims might have contributed to the mental instability of someone in their own environment. A scary thought, but we are all related, and tied by invisible strings. What have I done in my life to hurt another? Who will ask these questions now?
RIP Elliot Rodger.