I can relate
I posted this in the Shark/Badboy forum a few weeks ago, since then I've found this forum and decided it is more to my taste. It has helped me a lot more than the tiny nuggets of information Badboy would post like every other week.
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First of all I’d like to say what’s up to everybody. I’ve been sitting behind a desk for several weeks now just waiting for customers to come in. It’s given me time to read the entire forum here and now that I’ve completed that, I think it’s time to ask my own questions. But first let me give you a little (ok a lot) of history.
I’m a 9-9.5, 6 ft. tall, 175 lbs., 21 year old, college student. But what I am today is but a shadow of my former self.
It all started my freshman year of high school. For some reason, all the seniors, the ones who ran our small school, took a liking to me. While my friends from my age group were sitting at home watching TV or whatever it was that they were doing, I was out with them getting drunk, high, and laid. My sophomore year was similar, with our party attendance lessened I was allowed to invite a few of the people from my grade to hang out with us. It was this year that I started reading philosophy during my study halls. Using your terminology, I was searching for a frame that could define me and I thought using the same one as a famous Greek philosopher would give it some credibility. It wasn’t long before I found one, Epicureanism, the pursuit of pleasure as the highest possible goal in life.
With this I could stop being a lucky tag along and start controlling my life. It didn’t take long before I, a late sophomore, was the life of the party. My frame was impenetrable, not that people wanted to change it, as it promised them a great time too. I’m posting this here because I see so many parallels between BadBoy/Sharks frame and mine. I was a loud mouth and did whatever the **** I wanted. If you didn’t join my frame it was your loss and you could kiss my ass. My friends and I would go to the park with a megaphone and **** with people long before Tom Green started doing it. I would go up to any girl at any time and talk about whatever was on my mind, being nervous or trying to say the right thing weren’t even a possibility. If my friends and I were in a conversation I would ask strangers about their opinion on the matter. I believe shark/badboy and I would have the same frame if he were born in America or had I been born in croatia. Theirs is a slightly more cynical worldview because of the harsher environment they’ve been forced to deal with. When I was playing football they were shooting people, you get the idea.
Anyway, this lasted until after the first semester of my first year of college. I went away to college to study pharmacy at a private school, but when I dropped that as a major, there was no need to stay there and pay $37,000 a year for a degree in business. So I came back home to go to a local, but still respectable college. What I came back to find was devastating.
The group of people I left behind were nothing like the people who were waiting on me when I came back. My friends in the grade above had become hippy Rastafarian potheads who never left the house if it wasn’t to buy weed. The people from my grade were huge cokeheads and/or prescription drug addicts who had withered away to skin and bones from staying up 72 hours at a time and never eating, and my friends from the grade below me had become devil-worshipping goth losers even though less than a year before they had joined me in mercilessly making fun of those types. The hot chicks I had hung out with had almost all went away to college for some reason, and those that didn’t were now devoted girlfriends of people from other high schools.
I had nobody, not a single person was the way I remembered him/her. Remember though that I am still a mack daddy at this time, while it was undoubtedly frustrating, I had just finished making a completely new set of friends at the private college I had attended, so I knew it would be no problem to do the same thing again at this new school. The only problem was I wasn’t going to be able to go back to classes for like 6 weeks. What was I going to do for these 6 weeks with nobody to hang out with? The decision I made ruined my life.
Was it to start smoking crack? To join a cult? To deal drugs for some extra spending money and then get caught? If only it had been this dramatic. I wouldn’t be so ashamed of admitting it. No, while I was at the private school, some of the guys in the fraternity I was rushing were playing a particular computer game and seemed to REALLY like it. I had tried playing it but could never really get the time and didn’t want to buy it anyway. Now that I had 6 weeks to kill and nothing better to do, I said what the hell and went to Babbages and picked myself up a copy. The game? EVERQUEST. Just saying(typing) that name makes me want to ****ing puke. It was the best video game I had ever played in my entire life times 10. I played it into the wee hours of the morning, slept for a few hours and then started playing it again. When my “friends” called me, I wouldn’t even stop playing, I would just say “yes, no, I don’t know” until they would get tired of it and hang up. Hey, it didn’t matter because my little character had just gained a level and found a glowing cape of strength. (fukking gay I know)
This went on for over a year and a half, I didn’t bother making friends at my new school, I just wanted to get home and play my game. I didn’t do **** with anybody and hardly talked to anybody in any of my classes. Then came New Year’s Eve, 2004. For whatever reason I decided I wanted to party like I did in the old days that night. So I called my old friends and asked what they were doing for the night. They didn’t want to tell me. They had tried too many times trying to get me to do something, and I had been unbelievably rude every time. I honestly don’t blame them. Finally I called one of the hippy pot heads and he told me what was going on and where to go. The night was a joke, I felt like a COMPLETE outsider and didn’t have ANY of my social skills left to help me. I went home after the ball dropped miserable and depressed, what had I let happen? I deleted everything off my computer and broke the CD. It was time to start picking up the pieces.
Like a said, I am nothing even remotely like my former self, on a scale of 1-10, my self esteem is currently a negative 3.
http://fastseduction.com/masf/16/166679/ has helped my social skills recover a bit, but I have completely forgotten those that I once had. And that’s why I’m here. I know my potential but I just can’t seem to get there. I’ve read tons of books and bought some Tony Robbins’ stuff, none of it helped, nor was it what I was looking for anyway.
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After reading this and Badboy's forum, I came up with a plan of action that is gradually working.
1. First i had to rediscover and fortify my frame, if you don't know exactly what a frame is, look it up on the mASF forum at fastseduction.com
2. Then I decided once and for all where I wanted my life to go, what my goals were.
3. I completely stopped watching TV and definitely no more playing video games, i think they caused a lot of the anxiety I was experiencing.
4. I started taking Karate again, I highly recommend this or any activity that introduces you to a new circle of people. It's a hell of a lot easier than going to a mall/club/whatever and trying to make friends with someone out of the blue.
5. Set low, attainable goals at first and congratulate yourself when you achieve them, then of course gradually increase what you expect of yourself. When i first started my recovery I tried to jump right back into where I used to be, and then when I didn't have the skills to do this, I would be extremely hard on myself.
6. I've had one phrase that has helped tremendously in the face of failure and disappointment. It's nothing fancy but every time you say it it becomes a little more true... I DON'T CARE. This I believe is the ultimate goal of the DJ, it's is alluded to in DarkDreams post, "Just Play the Game,"
http://www.sosuave.net/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15909 as well as many others around here.
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This should get you started, just remember that you're not gonna go from zero to hero in a day, but if you keep trying, you will eventually get there.
