Ten Years Of Going My Own Way
Written By Rogue Wolf
Hello, for those that don’t know me I go by the self-given sobriquet, Rogue Wolf. I have no blog or Youtube channel. Nor do I have a website to disseminate my views. In fact, I prefer to keep a relatively low profile in the manosphere, for good or ill. What projects I’ve contributed to rarely have my name on them by design. However, if you’d allow me, I’d like to give a "view from the bleachers," so to speak, from someone who, while not prominent, has lingered nonetheless.
As I get older I've come to realize that life is a series of choices, most of which are so casual that they are hardly given notice. In lock step with these choices are the events that frame them. Of the inconsequential choices and random events that are committed to memory there are a handful that I’ll call "cardinal," or more exactly stated, come to define and influence the whole of your life sometimes for years or even decades after the fact. There are of course the events and choices we are all "supposed" to have as offered up by whatever culture you happen to live in. High School Senior Prom, as well as being the favored setting for most teen drama movies and books, is supposed to be life defining and a treasured event. ...I didn’t go to mine. I certainly don’t regret that choice. Another major choice is buying your first car or house. The general idea I suspect is that the major purchase is supposed to signify the move into adult style responsibility. Personally, I felt like I was going to throw up after paying the bill, like eyeing a big feast while having diarrhea. No matter how fun the revelry is during consumption, eventually you know that at some point in the near future you’ll be staring at plain walls possibly sweating while making sound that are a cross between damnations of your stupidity and prayers to god.
In any case, of the culturally-manufactured high points in my life, only a few get a passing mention after the fact, and usually not in the tone I’m supposed to regard them with. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case for most people. The actual cardinal points of my life were frequently orchestrated, not always by design, but of my own choosing. I remember quite fondly the day my tail feathers were cut (the back of my shirt) following my first solo flight. I remember writing the last word on the last page of my first book. I remember when my best friend and I had a fist fight over some nothing I can’t even remember, and which was of no real consequence later. I'd like to tell you about another one - the day I went my own way.
I didn’t know at the time that I was going my own way. It’s the height of folly to think that thought and feelings, even those internally generated, can be read and understood like a book. Rather, they have to be interpreted like the Witch Doctors of old would attempt to interpret a bolt of lightning striking down a tree. I was on a date, one of my first, with a girl I rather fancied and whom I thought fancied me as well. I was charming. I was funny. I was all of the things I was "supposed" to be. And I was told, "Let’s just be friends." That was not a new or unique statement, at least for me at the time. Nevertheless, I sat in stunned silence. There was no real emotional pain. I liked her but I didn’t pine for her. The general sexual teasing and disappointments I’d suffered at the hands of women to that point wouldn’t allow me to be that foolish. To her credit she tried to soften the obvious blow after its effect was evident, but she had no idea of its source and neither did I at the time. A tree had been struck down from the heavens and the witnesses could only play with the splinters and ponder why it happened.
That was ten years ago. I remember being deeply depressed. Not suicidal or anything so dramatic, but nevertheless, long hours were spent brooding alone in the dark holding what remained of the tree trying to tackle the eternal question, "why?" I didn’t want to be bothered with much of a nything, really. Not women. Not family. Not friends. I'd been forced down the path of going my own way due to the simple fact that it hurt too much to do anything else.
I was always of independent mind and spirit. I should buy a T-Shirt that says, "When everybody goes right I go left." Be that as it may, I wasn’t "happy." I was reactionary... irritable, to put it charitably. It was not strength or power. It was the difference between being a tiger walking calmly through his jungle and his wounded, aging counterpart growling at every passing noise or disturbance. The aggression merely masked that I was that much closer to oblivion and that I knew that to be the case.
It is only now, years later, that I fully comprehend what I was going through, and the significance of the bolt of lightning. It reminds me of when I took a scenic flight on the east coast and saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. It was sobering to realize that, in the aircraft I was in, I could never cross that body of water. I could take off with full fuel tanks, fly due east until they were empty, and still not make a meaningful fraction of the distance. On my date, a year or two removed at that point, I became subconsciously aware of my predicament. The fuel gauge was on empty, the engine was sputtering, and even if I'd done my best to stretch a powerless glide, I'd still never have made it. I could never have bridged the gulf between me and her. It had been impossible from the outset despite my best attempts. The subsequent rage and depression I had felt was actually rage against my own stupidity for trying in the first place. It was as if I had been drowning all along and only suddenly realized the severity of my situation.
With this realization, a change came over me. My desperate flailing about produced the effect where, by some miracle, I could keep my head above water. I realized everything I had been taught about the way men and women interacted was wrong, misguided, or simply out of date, even if sympathetically well intentioned. It is my opinion that this is the most dangerous time for any man going his own way. Going your own way is the hard path, and the weight of new knowledge thrust upon him can sometimes be too much. It is far easier to simply stop trying and drown in your final resting place, be that the mediocrity of a wage slave husband, cynical nihilism, drugs, or even outright suicide.
During my swim back to shore all non-essentials were trimmed. The number of friends I had dropped to a small handful. The sting of the opinions of others dropped to a dull ache, and over time was hardly noticed at all. My material wants dropped to just a whimper. Most important and difficult was dropping the incorrect assumptions and knowledge that had been trained into me almost from birth. Phrases like, "Be a real man," that had once prompted zealous obedience, now produced a laugh at their absurdity. Once known, actual truth cannot be unknown regardless of how much you may wish to return to ignorance. Once you have taken the "red pill," when there is no going back.
For the uninitiated reading this, I caution them. I would describe the sensation as being akin to ripping your own arm off. There may be no escaping wonderland after it pulls you down the rabbit hole....
It wasn’t long before I met like-minded individuals: Some on the internet or some as a strange passer-by whose bearing made it clear they also realized the fantasy land they were forced to inhabit was composed of nothing but noise and violence. I marveled at their knowledge, and like a Witch Doctor meeting a scientist, their ability to actually predict and understand events and aspects of reality that had previously left me scratching my head over splintered wood.
Going Your Own Way, I realized, was a skill and not a talent. It wasn’t long before I was learning enough to be "dangerous," - a dangerous person in this day and age being someone who questions what they see. At first my views were simply imitations of the various luminaries of the movement, like a child role modeling their parents. As would be imagined, my forays into the schoolyard against others not as precocious as I fared in poor fashion. The perfect logic and wisdom of the luminaries of MGTOW, when uttered from my lips, made me bitter in most people’s eyes. I also apparently had a little dick, hated women, would never get laid and was a variety pack of loserdom, among other vices.
Slowly, over the years, the views and opinions of the wisest of the wisest became colored by my own personality and perspective. It is said that it takes ten years to master a skill. On my tenth year anniversary of Going My Own Way I am not arrogant enough to say that I am a master of anything. But of the future, and on quiet reflection of my own past I will say this: men have been packed and herded into such a densely populated corner of misandric law and hatred that their explosion shall be in all directions. There is no "proper" path to going your own way. No, we are each warrior poets seeking to conquer the undiscovered countries of our own vision. The slow motion chaos of our explosion cannot be gauged by spitting on a finger and holding it up to the wind. In the same vein, neither I nor anyone else can tell a man going his own way the best way to proceed. General advice may be given to the follow traveler - advice on the eventual outcome to a chosen path - but each man must walk it on his own. This is no curse. Unlike women, we do not feel life as directly as in the joy of conception. We forcefully engage it, bend it to our will, and discover its limits - and by extension our own. In times past, women worked to convince men to join with them and continue the cycle anew. Such things have been lost to the rise of feminism. They cannot be found by me personally nor by us as a group. Like Pandora’s Box, once the bonds have been broken, that contained within is let loose on the land in rapid and unpredictable ways. It remains to be seen if women will close the dreadful box they have opened in enough to time to keep something worth saving.
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"There are two doors. The door to your right leads to the Source and the salvation of Zion. The door to your left leads back to the Matrix, to her... and to the end of your species. As you adequately put it, the problem is choice." -- The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded
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