Listen to this track. Nathan’s words say me better than I can today. Just asked a friend and fellow writer: can I let go of my pain, when pain makes me who and what I am. Pain. Darkness. They are the juice that flow in my veins and from my pen. Take them away, what have I got? Who the fuck am I, even?

Second therapy session complete. That said I’m exhausted and I’m exhausting, and I know it. Call me out, on anything, odds are I’ll agree with you. I’m a fractured mess who sees life through a broken lens.

I’ve earned respect, so where is it?

From people I thought were close to me, understood me? Women loved, worshipped, whom I’ve entered and swam up? Persons who know my heart and mind, know what I stand for?

Every fucking day I feel I’d be better off dead. They only people who’d miss me, are people I’ve never met (yet) who see more intrinsic worth, than persons I’ve never ceased to be there for. I don’t want approval or pats on the back, I just want to be recognized. We all do, truthfully. I just won’t be whoring myself chasing it.

Someone I treasure recently told me ‘anyone who writes like you ain’t expendable’

That one opinion saved my life. I had the pills in my fucking hand again.

I guess with my lovers I dared to ask the wrong questions: ‘what about me?’ ‘what do I get?’

These inquiries make me selfish, in the eyes of those who have reached inside of me and taken, and taken, and taken (while I was complicit, from a place of love and devotion), only to walk away when I’d served whatever purpose.

You ain’t all like that, ladies, I know. And I don’t want to be ‘that’ guy. I don’t want to ride the slide, that spirals into misogyny. But what boils my man piss is reading all these pseudo chic-sta feministas and their ‘men are the devil’ mantras.

We ain’t all like that, either. For all the good it did this particular one…

The emotional abuse coin has two sides.

I can’t trust, now. Not sure I’ll ever be able to, ever again. I been let down too much, too deep and too damn often.

See, I’m not a bad guy. But I have a cavernous capacity to become one, and a healthy fear of it…

Arguments, vitriol and passive aggression are welcome in the box below.