Tyler (guest) 23 Dec 2009 04:16
I'm not even entirely certain how I found out about the whole 2012 debacle. I just woke up one morning when I was 29 and decided that everything I was hearing was correct. That Nostradamus, the Mayans and the Hopi Indians were all in collusion with the Zetas and Nancy Leider and that the whole damn ship was headed to certain destruction before I could even figure out what I was going to do with my life. Like many stories I've been reading on this site, there was many nights of severe hopelessness, crying uncontrollably, insomnia and unplanned weight loss (which WAS a nice by-product of the experience…I lost 23 pounds and have yet to gain it back…). While some had issues for what sounds like a few days or possible weeks, I endured this hell for a year and a half (yeah…where the hell were you guys when I needed you in 2007?). As a writer, my mind has always been prone to flights of extreme fancy and imagination. Placing my mindset into that of another person with a reasonable level of approximation has always been something I have excelled at. THIS was not somewhere I wanted to go…and I have written stories about the end of the world.
From what I've read on this site (and it has been ALL OF IT. Including the forum posts.), I feel like my mind was in a very strange state of fugue. For most, it sounds as though they hear about these asinine predictions and instantly decide to believe them or not. I would best equate my experience as though my mind were a cocktail party with one-hundred people in attendance. Ninety-nine of these people are conducting themselves in a quiet and reasonable manner, discussing things that most people would open conversation about in such a situation. Then there's that one a-hole in the middle of the room, bringing the party down with his crackpot conspiracy theories on this and that. You know the type. That one guy WHO KNOWS the score and is going to tell you exactly "what the government doesn't want you to know" and "could be killed for telling you." Usually, you can shut him up and tell him to leave, but in this case, someone saw fit to give him a bullhorn and turn him into Gilbert-Frakkin'-Godfrey. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all talk of the Yellowstone super-caldera blowing, Oort cloud comets, and Planet X (which DOES exist…Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers told me so…) were so beyond the beyond of anything rational, yet I still found myself powerless in the face of irrational fear.
I would drive my friends Tom Cruise crazy with how much I would try to talk to them about this. Of course, no one wanted to, and I felt kind of cast off for a very long time. So, true to my personal nature, when something comes along that rattles my fragile sense of control in my life, I studied. I found books on Mayan history and after a while, something strange happened. I stopped worrying and wound up finding myself fascinated by the culture itself, and realized that there was nothing in the annals of their history (or the Aztecs, the Olmecs or the Hopi, for that matter) that would EVER indicate that they even came close to predicting some great cataclysm. Furthermore, I proceeded to take up the study of cults and abnormal psychology as well as western and eastern philosophy. These ideas are nothing new and in the modern age, it would seem that this kind of fear-mongering is more of an attempt by the tin-foil hat brigade to fight off that last wave of reason delivering the deathstroke to magic and wonder. Specifically in the "First World" as it were, seems to live in a perpetual state of technological advancement, and as such has developed an unparalleled ability to categorize, rationalize and put everything in its place. We have absolutely no more wonder. No sense of awe over anything. As a civilization, the last of our mythology has died. Killed by the indiscriminate hand of all that is intellectual.
I feel a level of empathy with those who want to believe, with all their hearts, that something, ANYTHING, will happen on December 21, 2012. In a world of instant gratification and better, faster, now-er, there's nothing left. We've caught up to the precipice of knowledge, and this seems more a way for some to maintain some sense of wonder and awe. Unfortunately, their desire to retain this has already come at a cost immesurable to the psychological and, in the extreme cases, physical damage this has caused to children and adults alike.
For myself, I've finally come full-circle. Where, like some, I would feel like I was getting over my fears and apprehension and something would come along and screw it up (I refused to go to the movies for the better part of a year because I didn't want to see a trailer for a certain Roland Emmerich movie). I was still very tenuous right up until about a month ago. Music would reference it, the news would talk about the presidential election and Sarah Palin making a bid (which would send me RIGHT BACK DOWN if she were to win), or just some random convergence of those numbers would make me stop short and my heart would skip a beat. But time has passed, I found this website, and I now have no more fear of the future. Hell, I'm even kinda looking forward to seeing that epic pile that Emmerich has laid down at our feet just for a good laugh, if nothing else.
…who am I kidding…that flick actually looks like a lot of fun now that I can take it for what it is…
For those who wind up reading this, just know that no matter how old you are, no prophesy, prediction, premonition or precognition will come to pass that can do more violence to you than what you are capable of in your own mind. It just takes time. Chances are, you won't even realize that you're doing better until well into 2013.
Keep the faith my friends. Listen to Hoax, Astro, Posh and the gang. These cats know what they're talking about. But don't just take their word for it. Look it up. Research. Not just those things that verify what you want to hear, but also the other side of the argument, so you can then successfully challenge all who try to tell you otherwise. Hell, I enrolled in a course at the community college in Meso-American anthropology and have now found a new love of history. And now I know.
And knowing is half the battle.
