Who the hell is Ryan Murphy?

I am writing this two days after my 27th birthday. Guess it has me being all introspective.

What should I tell about myself?

Guess I’ll go with some of the big things that happened to make me who I am. Some stuff about myself, and what I do is a good idea too I suppose.
We all have a need to be understood, so I guess this will also be a cleansing of sorts. Try to bear with me, it’s not a pleasant trip.

Also I suggest people read this all the way through, and not jump the gun on anything. I have read at a collage level since third grade, and my reading and more pertinently my writing skills have only improved since. Not my spelling by any stretch, but rather how I write things. Sometimes I am saying a great deal more, sometimes I am being flippant and don’t mean anything. Since I can only type this out the way I am wont to do, I leave it to you to figure it out. Good Luck!

My mother and I lived with my Grandmother, Grandfather, and one of my mom’s bothers. my uncle. Sometimes my mom’s sister lived there too. (If you say Aunt and Uncle, people will think married, easier to just say mom’s bro and sis) Till I was in my early 20s we lived there.

My best friends growing up were my cousins, by my mom’s youngest brother (she had six siblings). They were my support system, and is one reason I failed to develop much social skill early. The only other real friends I had growing up were my mom’s best friend’s kids.

The first biggie I can think of is an incident from around first grade. I had this friend named Michal. We were buddies for awhile, but he got to hanging out with the more popular crowd, and suddenly the stocky kid wasn’t good enough for him I guess. He started picking on me along with his new friends.
Things came to a head in a restroom one day, don’t even remember what they did. Outside the restroom I grabbed Michal by the throat with one hand, slammed him against a locker and lifted him up, I was about to pulp his face when our teacher pulled us apart. I didn’t get in trouble because she had been aware of the way they were messing with me, but I learned a couple of things from the whole thing.
1.    People are only as trustworthy as they need to be
and
2.    I wanted to hurt him, and it felt good. I liked it.

That set up a division in me that has haunted me ever since. I am a very empathic person, I feel what other people feel. I felt his fear and I liked it, I also hated myself for liking it.
So I have had to deal with these two facets of myself. The caring, peaceful person that just wants to enjoy life, and the sadistic monster that always lurks within.

I’ve always been stocky, and ranging from a bit overweight to obese. Going to school this made me a prime target for teasing. Being artistic and creative, a natural storyteller rather than athletic didn’t help any either. I learned to dislike, then hate people rather early in life. My natural introvert tendencies being slowly enforced by a steady stream of mean kids, and uncaring teachers.

Worst of all I never fought back physically. The lesson learned early always kept a reign on the beast, at least till I could take things out on objects rather than people. People I would be able to feel being hurt, and being afraid of me. I knew part of me would be revolted, and the other would love every second of it.
So I didn’t do anything, with only a couple of exceptions. Two outbursts in Jr High, when the teasing reached it’s worst point. Both were bloodless, and ultimately futile. My cousins had moved away before Jr high started which caused me some serious problems as well.

I got into magick in grade school. In second or Third grade. All of it of my own invention. I was heavily into mythology at that time, and pieced together rituals based on what I read. I put a curse on a particularly mean little punk, I wanted him to suffer. That summer (I think, this has been more than a little while back) I found out he had gotten killed by an accidental gun shot. I wont go into details, but I blamed myself for it. You may not believe in curses, but I do. I did then, and I still do. Guess that colored my lack of actions later as well. Simply put, I wanted payback, but his death was not what I had in mind.

I dropped magick for a while after that, then picked it up again in high school for a bit, then dropped it again till I hit the graphic design stuff.
However I have never stopped evolving my belief system. I have been working on it since I started reading advanced stuff. From my very first book on Egyptian mythology. A good 20 or so years ago.
Some individuals I know seem to think because I enjoy commercial magick books; and use them to inspire my practice, that i am a poseur. In reality I have a far richer belief system than any wiccan or coven.
I do not restrict myself at all in my pursuits. Some of the methods I found in books are geared toward goths, and appeal to my macabre sense of magick, however my overall methodology is purely of my own invention. Including the things I have written about black magick. The principles of Chaos Magick come closest to mine, not the childish tree hugging wiccans. To the real practitioner of Magick, belief is power. A spell is just a way to connect to the energy of the world.

From the decadent rituals of the satanic bible, to the Sumerian inspired; but ultimately fictitious, Simon Necronomicon they all have their followers, those who believe in them. That belief gives them power, not any real demons, devils or Old Ones. They are just ways to set aside the grip reality has on us, and connect to the energy. I don’t need to take a drug to see the truth. Everything is energy, material is just an illusion of our limited minds. Every book, every ritual, every exercise, every spell is all the same. The methods may differ, and some are far more dark in nature, but the goal is always the same. Connecting to the energy and getting it to do something.

Back to school.

I was tormented pretty much all through Jr high, and I guess in addition to re-enforcing my introvert tendencies it also gave me something similar to battered-wife syndrome. They beat down my sense of self-worth till nothing was left. I went into high-school shut off. I would socialize some, but I never let myself connect with anyone. Looking back I know there were some people that tried to reach out to me, and include me. Likely the more caring people, and others who had suffered similar tormenting. I didn’t see that then, I didn’t trust anyone. My grandfather died while I was in High school, which didn’t help.

Hard to say where I completely turned off. I know there was a period when I completely shut off my emotions altogether. I spent some time in a juvi-psych ward. I was diagnosed with Depression before that, and Manic-Depression while locked up. I was there because I wouldn’t go to school. Oddly enough that had nothing to do with my psych problems at that point. I used to associate school with fun and learning, at that point it was just painful and boring. I felt like school had nothing more to offer me at that point, and felt my time was better spent lying in bed hating the world and myself for not doing something about it. The lying in bed part was my damaged psyche in action, but not wanting to go to school was just from being tired of the system.

By the time I finally dropped out I was helping to care for my grandmother who had Alzheimer’s. I helped with her for a couple of years, and barely left the house till she died, and my Uncle told me I had to get a job.
I had my first full time job for 5 months, then got fired. I was told I wasn’t doing the job well enough, which did not help my almost non-existent ego.

I managed to get into a program that helped me get my GED, and put me into a collage. I scored in the high 90%s on all the GED tests, except math, but math has never been a strong subject for me. I did get a kick out of getting scores = to, or better than over 90% of all the seniors in my state (except math) with only a light refresher course from the program’s tutor. Proving me right that high school was a waste of time for me.

I then had a choice of courses I could pursue for collage, all at the programs expense. One of my few lucky breaks.

My entire life I have had one dream. To make music. I have always wanted to be in a band.

So I went into graphic design. I figured the more skills I had that would be valuable to a band, the better off I’d be.
I more or less stooged my way through the whole thing. I am a big picture guy, I see things in a way most people can’t understand. I take the relevant pieces to a topic and assemble them into a picture that makes sense to me, I don’t really care about small details. This makes me a very intuitive person. I pick up on things others don’t, and I can psycho-analyze people with frightening ease sometimes. Where others get bogged down in the little details, I can just look at a situation or topic and put it together quickly.
Unfortunately, Details matter in professional graphic design.

Luckily they don’t matter so much with logos and album covers, which is all I really wanted to learn about.

You see I have another psychological handicap, one that makes me pretty much undesirable for jobs.

I don’t give a fuck about any work or goals but my own, and I am incapable of forcing myself to care. The jobs I have had have always been a means to get what I wanted at the time, and I had help getting each. If it had come down to my interviews, I would not have been hired for any of them.

After I got my tech collage classes on graphic design I bailed on the program, and completing the degree. I didn’t care about the degree, I just wanted the tech skills education. That’s revealing something of my tendency towards self-defeatist/destructive behavior, but it’s the truth.

I ended up going to work at a restaurant, as a busser. Not fun work, but there were some cool people there, that helped me come out of my shell some. The nice thing about work like that, is that it’s more or less mindless. I can work with my music programs, and write with sore muscles, but a tired brain is another story.

Plans were made, and dropped. Things happened, and my on line pursuits came about.

Course bad luck seems to follow me like stink on shit. Don’t feel a need to go into specifics but my mom was my boss at the end of that period, and she got fired after almost kicking the bucket from a bleeding ulcer. Shortly after, I got canned too. Neither of us has found work, she’s trying to get on disability, and work on some cook book stuff for me to sell on line. I’ve been trying to get a decent amount of money coming in on line, but things have been hit and miss so far. More miss than hit really. Unemployment ran out and now we’re living with that best friend of her’s I mentioned earlier.

Obviously I haven’t given up, and I wont as long as I’m alive. I honestly can’t see myself getting hired on by anyone. I live in Wichita Kansas, and our main industry here is Airplane manufacturing. Our Economy has been slumping more and more since 9/11, and it keeps getting worse. On top of that I don’t have anyone in good position to help me get hired again.
Hell; the honest truth is, I don’t want to go back to working for someone else, and I’ve never been all that able to will myself to do anything I don’t want to do. I have willpower for my own pursuits, and a lot of it, but I can’t bull shit myself into being okay with a 9-5.

Well that brings things up to date, what else is pertinent?

My imagination I suppose, since it has shaped me more than anything else. I have an imagination that can create an entire mythology within hours. I have created the bones of games, and story worlds in mere minutes.
On the flip side I can also imagine everything that can go wrong in a given situation, which is why I’m still a virgin. It’s hard to talk to a girl; in that way, when you perceive yourself as being ugly. Add to that the ability to imagine not only all the ways she can hurt me, but a hyper-enhanced imagining of how it will feel to be hurt all those ways and you might have an idea of what lurks in my mind most of the time.

I have always avoided pain more than most. I don’t let it bother me once I’m experiencing it, I can be quite stoic in that regard. It’s not knowing how bad something will hurt that holds me from doing things. I can imagine just how bad it could be (worse than it really ever is actually), in a variety of different ways. Further, knowing things wont be as bad I imagine they will, does not stop me from having panic attacks when trying to force myself to try and do things that frighten me, like trying to ask a girl out.
On top of all that, I still don’t trust people at all. So even if a girl did honestly want to get to know me, I would probably chase her off by being standoffish. Once I have experienced pain I have a masochistic tendency to hold it to myself, and replay it in my head for ages. That’s mainly with arguments, and situations of a verbal nature. Physical pain I savor as much as I can. It’s better to feel pain than nothing at all.

I have a very hard time letting anything go. Both because, in some way I feel I deserve it, and because I have a need to understand what went wrong. I also have a need to try and get my point of view across and to explain it till I feel understanding is reached, something that can be very annoying to people.
I wont drop something that they think is long over with. The reason is simple, I feel I didn’t really say what I wanted to or that I wasn’t understood or was ignored, so I return to it. This is probably born of being around adults who tended (still do) to ignore what I said as a kid, and being a very intelligent person this has always annoyed the fuck out of me. There seems to be something about me which makes people not take me seriously. My mother still has a very bad habit of not listening to me, often to her detriment.

I guess I also come across as arrogant sometimes. I never realize this, and due to my severely reduced ego, I often find the notion idiotic. I do have a tendency to play up my intelligence, and creative abilities, mainly due to them being the only things I have any pride about. I also sometimes make erroneous leaps in logic, generally because I am lacking facts. However when presented with the right data, I can make leaps of analysis others far more learned on a subject apparently cannot, particularly when human behavior is part of the subject.

This is not arrogance, merely a keen insight into the things that drive people. When one is subjected to ones own failings, and psychology sans self-created bullshit cover (most people cannot face themselves, and build up a mask to prevent them from having to) one can more easily tear apart other people’s motives and drive as well.

I use Tarot cards, and I’ve never been wrong. I have dreams that come true. I read people like books, some are harder than others but they all give up their story eventually. I have witnessed curses I have placed on people carried out with brutal, and sometimes overzealous efficiency. I see the world in a strange way many can’t fathom.

I also don’t like dealing with people. I have almost non-existent social skills. I read people with ease, but I really don’t understand them. Most people are strange, stupid creatures to me. I seem to curse myself with self-depreciating and destructive behavior. Seeing things from a strange perspective separates me from them, but I still want to be part of them. I need approval just like anyone else, and find it an elusive beast.

Gifts tend to be balanced out by curses. I can do some amazing things sometimes, I can think in amazing ways sometimes too. I also find it nigh on impossible to deal with the “real world” on it’s terms. So I work to try and figure out how I can make it work with me, on my terms. It’s not easy, but nothing worth doing ever is.
I figure I will keep plugging away till something clicks, or I keel over, Or I crack and do my best to “go Joker” on my fair city.

In the end that’s all any of can do really. Keep on going and hope things get better before you die, Or you snap and shoot up a BurgerKing.

For now I’m working on a novel, and some short stories. I’m working on some other things to sell online, and maybe things will turn around with that. I’m still making my music, and don’t plan on stopping. Life may suck for now, but it keeps trucking on and all I can do is like the Do-Da Man and keep on trucking with it.

“Trucking, like the Do-Da Man, once told me you gotta play your hand
Sometimes the cards aint worth a dime, If you don’t lay’em down

Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been”
Grateful Dead: ‘Trucking’

Keep on Trucking my friends, Later
Ryan Murphy

P.S. He who gets the last laugh, laughs loudest! One way or another my day will come, so lighten the fuck up!