04 Mar 2012, Posted by yohami in personal, 8 Comments.

My weird, random, first Alpha passage

I found a new blog with some good stories. “When I was Alpha” reminds me of my own.

When I was 18 years old I had a four months Alpha passage. It was all there, the confidence, the social proof, the self reasurement, the success, the girls chasing me… the way people looked at me, the way I interacted, commanded, the way I was the center of good and bad attention but got my way, etc. I got there in a random way and wasnt able to sustain it, nor wanted to, because I didnt see it as a “thing”.

Let’s go back a bit.

I graduated highschool with poor grades and no colleges wanted me. I was 17. I was quite smart but socially inept. I was living in a petty, small and superficial beach town that didnt even have pretty girls. I was an angst-driven obsessive omega fuck back then. I had no friends but my books, I was a perfectionist with no tangibles on my favor. My family was dysfunctional and I had no clue of being a man. I was a person. Sort of. I didnt fit anywhere. When I woke up in the morning my first thoughts revolved around killing myself.

So I had no college admissions and no future and had to do something with my life, or to end it, but I had to escape small town. I traveled to the big city to do admission exams for colleges there. I stayed at my grandmother’s apartment. I had a few months to prepare and had to study a lot. I bought some math books, and while I was at it some other stuff caught my eye. “Your erroneous zones”, “Yes, I can say no”, “Emotional Intelligence”, “Lateral Thinking”, “Quantum physics” and some metaphysical stuff as well. I bought all of it.

I wasnt sure if I was going to live, I had this countdown. I had like six months to decide. I spent my days hardcore studying math, popcorn psychology, meditating and screaming in the bathroom. I was angry.

By the time the exams came I knew all I needed about math, and had found I actually liked that stuff. This is a story for another time, but I was unable to grasp math during hishchool – and picked it on my own and then excelled at it. I learned I could only learn my-way, and that meant intense, focused, all-in, and fast, in big chunks of data, and it meant questioning everything, and never turning a page until “I knew” what I had just seen, like I had invented it or reasoned it myself. I learned so much in that small frame of time. I presented the exams and made it to the top 10 on both colleges and both granted me admissions. Something was changing.

Then limbo came. I was on the date where I should decide if I lived or died but I had this college thing going on for me. I was still angry, but I felt like I had superpowers (thanks, popcorn psychology) and wanted to blow things up. I wanted to rub my dissonance on everyone’s faces. I had no immediate business on big city and my grandmother wanted me out. I had six more months before college started and nothing to do with my time.

So I went back to small beach town and enrolled in a private college, on a random computer sciences degree that was just starting, just to burn these months while learning something.

But I didnt give a fuck. I was only going to stay there for six months. I didnt respect the college, the town, the people, the low standards, the mediocrity, I had all my inferiority/superiority complexes and anger, now channeled into asertiveness, and a sense of safety since I had my ticket for a bigger college, in a bigger town, for a better future, just around the corner. I was only there, at that small town and college to learn something for myself, and that meant learning it my way, and the professors and stuff, “they better be good and worth my money and measure up to my standards”… and the girls werent even that pretty.

Maybe you’ll recognize that frame.

I didnt belong there, I was destined for something better, I didnt fit, but I had no intentions to fit. I wasnt boastful, but I wasnt scared, I wasnt shy, I wasnt submissive. I was relaxed and confident, inquisitive and brutally honest. I would sit on the first row close to the professor so I could grasp all the knowledge. I created a space around me, I took risks. Often I would interrupt the class to disagree and debate theories. I made fun of people. I would laugh open and free. I was detached. I didnt care. I was me.

I would be in the middle of a group and if I got bored, I would climb the chair and say something funny. Or I would just climb something high. I would grab the cigarettes from some smoker girl and destroy them (smoking is bad for you puppy), then grab her lighter and chase her around. I was fun. I was unpredictable. I was dangerous.

I became a focus of attention. People started to gather around me and invited me to places. I was the hot guy. Grades started to come and I had only As. Professors respected me. Guys wanted my advice and girls my company. I started teaching math on small groups. I led. I commanded. I owned. I was the authority.

I became accepted.

I went from from the last row in the social chain to the first row with no in betweens and no specific “want” on my part.

I remember one day I was sitting with some girl who had the hots for me and I was trying to “enlighten” her… then she came with this herd story about me being the oh so special man and how I was the shit and everyone looked up to me. And it hit me.

I started caring and that was the beginning of the end. I started having something to lose. I started to fear. I started valuing that reality, that ego. When I invested back on my ego, it was still broken. I was still needy. I was still lonely. It all crumbled.

During the next weeks what happened was surreal. People liked me less. I was insecure. Stuff faded away like it had never been there. And the more it crumbled, the more I cared. The more I was doubted, the more I doubted myself, the more I got lost.

I failed the shit test.

I quit the college and spent the remaining month in a mild crisis. When the big city college time arrived I was back on freak mode.

I got the wrong message there. My conclusion was that since “attachment” was making me a loser, and “caring” brought me down… I had to not care and have no attachments at all. Which I took to the extreme and just became a nihilist zen “saint”, but a full of pain one. Which is a story for another time.

So that brief limbo of not caring while being the king of the world was my first Alpha passage. I wasnt able to repeat it, or even to recognize it, for another 10 years.

Which is also a story for another time.