Black White etc

To continue my exploring of the clichés of death/life and winter/spring, I will try to explain why I think these clichés still will be usefull. After all, it is probably me that is most worried about making it into a cliché movie. Ok, it will be a cliché movie. It will also be a very personal movie, and that scares the shit out of me. I know that only very few people will bother to see it, and they won't even know if it is real or not, but I am more worried about looking at it myself. That is, I am worried if I can do this at all. Will I be honest about my own feelings? Do I know my own feelings? Do I know myself? Will it be obvious that I am a nut case? I have thought about these questions a lot of times. I think a lot of people think about questions like these a lot of times. In other words, it is pretty common (i.e. 'normal') to think about yourself as 'ab-normal.' At least, this is what I tell myself. Norway is often regarded the 'best' country in the world, according to a set of parameters like health care, income, expected life rate, women's rights etc. Still, Norway has one of the highest rates in the world of suicide among the youth. Why is that? Well, one explanation is the dark winter we often experience here. It is dark. And the further north you go, the darker it gets. Luckily, where I live, we have a little bit of sun even at the darkest day of the year (unless it is overcast). In any case, the dark is a factor for sure. Another thing that has been said to be a factor, is the fact that Norway is such a wonderful country to grow up in, everything is perfect, everyone is happy, everyone has it made. If you are not happy, live a perfect life, there is something wrong with you. You are not normal. And to not be normal in a perfect place is really hard. You feel guilty. How can you feel bad in the best country in the world?

For me it was a bit different. Although, 'different' was exactly what I did not wanted to be, and that was my biggest problem. Since my father died when I was 13, I tried to hide the fact that I was different. I wanted to be 'normal' too, like everybody else. Most of all, I was missing the possibility to say out loud 'Dad!' At that point I did not emotionally miss my real dad, probably as a result of some sort of emotional self defence, and was generally feeling 'happy.' I felt lucky that I could live by my aunt and uncle, two people I was really looking up to. I felt especially happy to be with my uncle since he was my mother's brother, and to be with him was to be closer to my mom, a mom I never knew, and hardly know anything about even today. As I grew older, I realized that my situation was special, and that I was not like everybody else, and most importantly, it was not even necessary to be like everybody else. This was not until I was at least 20 years old. Maybe even 25. In any case, this was also at the time that I stopped being 'happy' all the time, probably because I was starting to listen a little bit more to my own feelings, daring to feel sad, but not much.

I still can't control my emotions very well. Since I have years and years of practice of hiding my real feelings, it has become a part of me. Well, the real question is of course if I have lost my ability to have feelings at all. This is a very hard question to answer, and it bothers me a lot.

One of the consequences of suppressing your own feelings is that you become bitter, angry, sad. So what can you do? I don't know, and that makes me scared. I know that what I am trying to do right now, is to recreate my own childhood, through my own son, but with a different outcome. In other words, I will do my best to stay alive so that my son will have a safe and 'normal' upbringing, which of course is what every parent wants for their child. If I can make him happy, I will be happy, that is the plan. To keep him happy at all times, though, has proved to be very hard, as it is the case with every kid. Those situations though, are the ones that become very hard for me. I get very upset when my kid is not satisfied, when all I do is to try very hard to keep him happy. The same thing happens with my wife. If she gets mad at me, or gets sad because of me, I get mad. I feel misunderstood, frustrated, desperate, lost, but also angry and hateful. Many times I have been walking away, thinking the only way to satisfy my vife, and the only way for me to end my confused emotional chaos inside my head is to commit suicide. What is holding me back, logically, is the thought of my son, and that I have promised him, and myself, that I shall be there for him, and I know that he will be a happier person with me alive, than dead. But it really feels awful to not be the perfect dad I was hoping to be, to give my son a better upbringing than I got myself (my dad also had a lot of anger controll issues, maybe as a consequnce of his wife's death, or maybe it is something we are born with?) and to see myself doing the same mistakes as my dad did, losing temper etc, does really not feel good.