The Devil

 

I've been a hypocrite in so many aspects of my life. Is it really being a hypocrite though?

Some people may just be better coaches than they are players. Why not take your own advice? 

I think the maybe not so obvious answer is because it'd easier not to. In recent years I think the world collectively as a whole has reached a level of self-awareness of the issues that have always been there. Mental health issues, or the suppression of them. People have so many demons within them that they might not be able to deal with them if they had the choice not to, but that seed of darkness is always going to be within you till it comes out to the light.

Thinking back at my past I remember bits and pieces of events that have happened, especially in my childhood. It's as if your mind tries to block them out to protect you. The complexity of the brain is amazing in that way. I can just remember being a small little kind being taught about the evils of the devil by a man who I thought was the devil, my father. Maybe 10 years old I remember doing something that upset him, what that something was I can't remember, but I know it wasn't anything serious. It never was. I just remember the grabbing of the belt, the whipping, and the screaming. I can feel myself younger self seeing himself from a third-person point of view. Just seeing himself get whipped over and over and over again. Running around like a chicken let loose in the slaughterhouse. Yelling incoherent things in Arabic. The look of the devil on his face. My little self running, tryna get behind my mom for protection as she said stop that's enough, he pulls me from behind her and continues. Every strike he gets angrier and angrier the louder I yelled the angrier he got, it was as if he was mad that I wasn't taking it and shutting up. At this point, my mother gave up on tryna convince him to stop. Maybe in the back of the head she thought, what did he do to get him angry, or maybe she thought I deserved it. He grabs me by the neck and lifts me up with one hand, now to hands, and begins to choke me why yelling god knows what. Getting harder to breath going in and out of consciousness, anything to do, and no superman to save the day. The rooms getting darker my hearing is getting lower, last words I hear is a woman's voice, my mother. She didn't say stop you're going to kill him, she said stop Gamal, “he has school tomorrow”. He let me go, Bam! I hit the floor hard of breathing seeing distorted. Crawled to my room not to be seen until I had to get up for school in the morning. If I understood what suicide was at that given time I probably would have slit my throat. I didn't know any better. I work up and went to school beaten and traumatized as if it was nothing, nobody knew. I would mask the pain by being the class clown, being the little kid with the “I don't give a fuck attitude”. The messed up thing about that story is that it wasn't uncommon to me, the ass-whooping. It was a typical Tuesday. The normality of things desensitized things. When you're a little kid you don't have any knowledge for the most part of what the world really is, especially of the age pre-social media and cellphones. What you see if what you know. I just thought this is what life is like I guess. That type of upbringing typically, at least in my experiences, makes people who were victims become the victimizer. I became mean, malicious, spiteful, resentful, etc. Just redistributing the pain I was feeling. I didn't want it to feel like it was only happening to me. That pain. The thing is, is that I know I'm not special there are hundreds of thousands of kids who have the same story if not worst. Those kids become that same person they were running from in the first place. The Devil!