1969:Surviving Suicidal Times

The worst thing about surviving suicidal times in your life is everything and everyone that gave your life enough meaning to stay alive is gone.

The best thing about surviving suicidal times is that if you are a strong enough and intelligent enough person you recreate yourself into someone better that can survive so much more than before.

It is sort of like you learn (if you are lucky) that "Anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger"

and if you are really lucky, "Much much happier than you ever could have been before" (if you are creative about recreating yourself and your life into someone that is fun to be the rest of your life.(Even though it took me about 5 years to be really happy once again in my life.

One day while being very depressed I came to the conclusion that I didn't have to be the person I had been before. All my reasons for being that person were gone. So, that meant that I could recreate my whole psychological substructure into anyone I wanted to be. So, a went about recreating myself into the ideal person I wanted to be rather than the person I became sort of by accident that my parents and people around me had created as I grew up.

I began this complete transformation of myself in the fall of 1969 when my previous world came to an end and I wanted to die. It began to die the summer of 1969 about a month before the astronauts first landed on the moon.

So, I kept all the things in my life and me that were working and simply dropped away anything that wasn't working and became a completely different person at core than I had ever been before.

If you met me I might have seemed the same person but internally I was different. I was battle scarred. I was a veteran of when things go very bad. I was sad but also hopeful of a better future(after about 2 years of completely rebuilding myself).

My attitude became this: "Fuck all you idiots who disapprove of me and my life! I'm going to live whether all of you want me to or not. I'm going to make my own way because I am infinitely creative and innovative as a person. I am very intelligent and not small minded like many of you. I can rise above all difficulties. I am brilliant and I refuse to let all this get me down and kill me. I am strong, I am alive. I am young. I am handsome. I am intelligent. And I will survive all this and have a good life anyway, by God's Grace!

It might be important to realize the U.S. and World was in the middle of the largest Social Revolution probably since the Civil War. In fact I would say the 1960s and the 1970s changed the world in a fundamental way even more than the Civil War did. If you lived then you know what I mean. I was one of the survivors of this social revolution but many of us died along the way for many different reasons. I was right! I was smart enough to find a way forward that I could live with. I've had a good life ever since. I just had to be strong enough and to know that I was strong enough to do it and to live an infinitely creative life from then on. By God's Grace!