Murder with a Side of Coffee
And a few other confessions
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Somewhere between 7:07 AM and 9:31 AM central standard time, I committed murdered.
Murder was not a line item scribbled neatly into my to-do list created the night before.
It was not part of my plans as I’d finished the last remanent of my morning coffee.
I was taken by surprise, and “forced” to complete the violent act within 60 seconds of learning of the requirement to do it.
I’d come this far, and I knew there was no turning back.
It was just as violent as the book described it, but less painful to endure than I had imagined.
When it was over, there was perfect silence, just as the author had promised.
The creature in my life, coddling me, and keeping me comfortable in a cage I didn’t even understand existed, no longer had a voice.
True Change Comes from Death of One Thing and the Birth of Another
I purchased the book out of desperation just shy of two months ago. I didn’t have the money to buy the book and still don’t.
I’ve been struggling the last 12 months in more than one way, and needed to examine further layers of what was happening in my life to see if there was any unseen, unturned stones.
Up until now, I’ve turned over and examined all of the ones I could find both in my personal life, my professional life, stretch goals, immediate goals, and everywhere in between.
I had no idea that this book would lead me to uncover certain pieces about myself that I had never previously seen. Through therapy and Internet articles and self-help gurus, yes, you can find many of these surface level items in your everyday life, patterns that sabotage you, and so on and so forth.
But this book turned out to be much deeper than that.
The author points out, that to do this, you must first demand proof of, document, and then dismantle all the lies.
Violent Self-Reflection Turns into Calculated Action
To gather the proof, you must commit a violent act of self-analysis, document the surrounding the facts of your life, and record the data resulting from patterns you harbor but your therapist never bothered to disclose.
It is the only way to spot the figurative creature that feeds on your forgotten dreams.
I did not realize that as I turned the page, 1/3 of the way down, that the book would inform me that I would be committing murder and that I would be required to do it in the next 60 seconds.
My target?
The pieces of at me that were programmed into me by society, culture, and media from birth that are, in fact, not true.
I learned that this creature (the programming, the sub-texts, the false beliefs, mindsets, and habitual actions lived out we see as “normal”) is actually not part of me and never has been as much as it would have loved for me to believe that.
And now staring it in the face like eye-balling a cornered tarantula, it was time to say goodbye.
No time for last words. No time for a nice, bowtie, clean ending.
Just death.
Anxiety of possible consequences flooded my nervous system. My throat went dry. My hands froze, but my eyes never moved away from the creature in the corner.
By now (6 to 7 weeks since I started working through this book), I spotted it for what it was: a death rattle of the lie. And that anxiety, that fear is just one tool in the arsenal uses to keep you comfortable: not quite, alive not quite dead, but somewhere in between.
The author was very specific: no hesitation was allowed. Thinking about it was just another delay tactic of the creature.
The thing that kills it? Immediate action. No planning, not reading more books, just action.
But not any action, and I will stress again, not the surface level stuff you see on the internet or the kind you see bro’s huffing around on Instagram.
Specifically, the kind that is honed, calculated, vetted, perceived, honored, and tempered, like a blade that pierces and may even bend a little, but never breaks.
It’s not an action that just sounds logical because it’s something you’ve been avoiding all this time, because it’s something you need to do to “stand up for yourself” or even correct an injustice that has been long ignored.
No, that is all surface level.
The action the author was describing was far deeper and more layered than these, the methods of discovery clearly laid out in his book.
The author gave the reader several choices of things they should do in that immediate moment. Each choice provided an option in which there was no return, no known safety net, and living with whatever consequences may come.
You can’t undo murder.
I took one more gulp, one more deep breath, picked up my pen, clicked it’s perfect little sprouty top, and made a list:
Delete small money-making apps on my phone that we’re actually wasting my time rather than valuing my time (removes the temptation to feel comfortable with financial crumbs when my time is irreplaceable and no longer ignore the false reinforcement of “I deserve scraps because that’s all I can get/am allowed to have.”)
Purchase an AI stater pack for world-building and fiction writing that I’ve been on the fence about (could be a scam, but staying on the edge rather than making a choice is a ploy.)
Publish this post with all of its gory details (no going back, even if there are typos and I wish I hadn’t said something!)
Purchase an AI job hunting/application software (no refunds and it could be a total bust, but by God, I had better do it or I’m just gonna keep circling with excuses.)
And then I began doing exactly those things in the order in which I wrote them. I have not stopped since. The clock says it’s been about 6 hours since then, and I’ve felt nothing but alive for the first time, in a very, very, long time.
I Didn’t Want to Say Anything
The last 12 months have not turned out in the ways I have imagined.
Everywhere I turned there seem to be a new fire to put out, a new crisis to deal with, a new thing to be afraid of, all while dealing with the worst job market I’ve ever seen in my entire life, dwindling buying power, shrink inflation, inflation, depression-like economy indicators all decorated in a very dark cloud of despair, covered in a thick blanket of exhaustion.
I needed to do something. Anything.
And since I have tried just about everything to fix all the problems, I started turning inward. Because maybe, just maybe the problem is somewhere inside of me.
Not a mental health crisis, not a mental health diagnosis, but some sort of belief system that I thought I had fixed but maybe in reality I had not.
Maybe there was some “default programming” somewhere that got better at hiding itself in my psyche fooling me into believing that the actions I’m taking and that the results of those actions that I’m imagining are true. Maybe the imagined results of the planning that I had come up with are not true.
But how do I find out?
What did I have left to lose by examining it?
That’s when the book popped up in one of my timeline feeds while I was scrolling.
Of course it had. Algorithms have gotten freakish in terms of their predictive analysis.
Buying the Book was the Same as Biting a Bullet
Except, I didn’t know that yet.
And I didn’t have the money to buy it. I haven’t had the money to do really anything in a very long time.
At first, the book was comfortable.
It felt like it was speaking directly to me like it understood everything I was dealing with, everything I had tried, and affirming that none of it was all in my head.
It turns out, as the author describes, it was only partially in my head with the rest being partially in my body, and the rest, mostly from the world around me.
And that’s where things got interesting.
It showed, in very explicit detail just how far back all of this goes. This applies to not just me, but my enemies (real or supposed?), and the entire human population as we know it.
The book forewarned that change was coming, that if you proceeded through the book, you would become someone that you may not like.
The preamble of the book came with a hefty and very detailed and very unique legal and mental health warning.
I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire life.
The warnings were clear: Not everyone was going to be able to mentally handle the undoing, the changes, or what you would be like if you started and abandoned the process part of the through. Real harm could take place if you do not finish.
And of course I wanted to keep reading. I was cautiously both captivated and terrified at the same time.
I’m not finished with the book.
I’m only 6-7 weeks in and I don’t know how much longer it will take me to finish, digest, and learn the rest.
But I do know, as of this morning, the figurative creature hiding in the corner is dead. Its body is laying there fully on display: hairy legs, too many eyeballs for its own good, and a weird, unworldly saliva dribbling out of its fangs. It no longer has the power to shape-shift into things resembling comfort, reassurance, or safety.
This book, in some respect, is very dangerous.
It has an affiliate program, but I’m not convinced yet that it’s safe enough to share with my entire readership at random. I would never give it to a teenager or even someone who shows the slightest hint of uncontrolled rage or narcissistic tendencies.
If you’ve been through this book, and you are reading this article, then you know which book I’m talking about.
If not, don’t worry about it right now.
The mental issues it can cause a person are very real. I don’t wanna be directly responsible for that harm because I referred a stranger to this book.
This book, I can safely describe as 30 years of therapy condensed into one month. It’s a boot camp, an overhaul, a complete removal of unhealthy behavior and insights and the full replacement and installation of default networking with something far more balanced and precise.
I had already considered myself to be balanced and precise before reading this book. My work and previous experience indicate this.
I not only began to dissect my personal thought patterns, identify, in very vivid detail, my default neural networks, the beliefs and mindsets I have believed on a much, much deeper level than I ever had in my entire life (generic articles and insights on the internet have nothing on tools provided in the book), but I’ve also learned how to read other people more deeply with specialist-like tactics.
It’s a mixture of stoicism, martial arts, mental health work, therapy, and weapon-like level training.
It shows you exactly how to manipulate people most people, how we have been manipulated as a species (and for how long and in what ways) and shows you how to, once you gain this knowledge, to never, (EVER!) even accidentally manipulate others ever again.
To highly specialized individuals who know these things see the people who need to manipulate others as weak, predictable, and easily controllable. I never understood that before.
Interactions were Extraordinarily Uncomfortable
During the first parts of the book, every day you had to practice a different technique to learn more about yourself through interactions with other people. You had homework each day, questions to answer, and observations to record.
This was all to help you spot patterns, triggers, layers, and nuances that you’d never seen about yourself or the people you interact with. I have entire handwritten notebook full of failings, observations, patterns, and discoveries.
The book teaches you about:
blind spots you have
micro expressions
somatic expressions
body language combinations
linguistic analysis
and more.
I haven’t wanted to tell any of you about any of this either.
Why?
False fear, and I know that now.
You deserve to know the things that can actually serve your growth, your insight, and the betterment of your life.
You deserve the raw, unvarnished parts of my voice that I’ve unknowingly taken steps to squelch over the last several years.
People who may threaten me (and I haven’t even gotten to that part of the story yet) in the future are also weak, predictable, and far more powerless than they realize.
Power is not necessarily about being able TO DO something about a situation, it’s about the ABILITY TO SEE what is and then SEE THROUGH IT with absolute clarity and fearlessness and then CHOOSE for yourself how you move forward.
Because this figurative creature is dead via this figurative murder, I can now live without that false fear hanging over my head.
Side Note: For My Enemies
Those of you who may be reading this who are angry with me for this newly internalized realization really need to ask yourselves what it is you are afraid of?
Why are you angry?
Do you feel betrayed?
Disgust?
All-consuming rage?
You’re afraid of a loss of control and what that means for you.
Because the truth is, for the last decade, I’ve allowed you, your relatives, your friends, associates, and others, to quietly, in partial ways, control me. I thought that if I had started publishing under my own name again, that I was “past of all that and no longer afraid.”
Turns out, that’s not entirely true.
And discovering that or even fully admitting to it, is not a side effect of this book that I expected. But it is true, and it finally needed to be said.
Here’s the comfort, a secret that I learned that no one bothered to tell either of us:
That “control” is and always has been an illusion that was handed to you by predecessors. Every predecessor. Not just your parents or your previous mentors, but the legal, financial, educational, health, and media systems themselves. Not just the control itself, but the construct and all the related support systems behind it.
It was all a setup and has been in place for decades before any of us were born.
Just think about it. Think really far back.
Look at the layers intellectually. Look at them carefully. You’re not bad at this, you’ve just never started looking this deeply before.
This may takes you weeks or months to unravel for yourself and for you to clearly see it.
We were pitted against each with carefully crafted false narratives handed to us like weapons assigned in a video game.
At the center of the arena they placed the most precious things to us for survival and protection:
our children
families
freedoms
finances (or all of them at once)
We were told to battle it out with the tools and confines that the systems created for us. Every debate, every dissent, every legal action, all are “allowed” by those who created the construct so very long ago.
We collectively justified our actions and choices because we each felt, “We had no choice.”
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Not knowing any better, we all fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. The results is that all of our lives were irrevocably changed.
They played us.
The system laughed, fed on us, and went about its business. Do you understand?
It’s disgusting, isn’t it?
If you think I’m wrong, you’re not ready to be free yet.
I Started Looking for Husband Last Fall
Yep, a husband.
I went through the standard, traditional channels in my local Muslim community and to-date, it’s yielded zero possible marriage candidates. I have my suspected reasons for this, but I’m no longer bothered by it.
Around the same time I bought this book, I joined an online Muslim marriage app. Paid for 3 months. My research has shown that none of the marriage apps are actually better than the others. They all have scammers that get through, fake accounts, bots, and men who lie. I have about 6 weeks left in my membership as of this writing. When I’m through, I will never put myself through this process again.
I’m not required to open the door for poor treatment by random strange men on such levels (and pay for the privilege of the experience, to boot.)
I used some of the tools in the book to analyze conversations with some of the men I interacted with. This kept the interactions clinical, educational, and data-driven. Not romantic or emotional.
I gathered facts, spotted issues, and patterns, and could assign a level of trust without negotiating my energy levels or trying to figure out “how much I need to compromise to make this work.” It enabled me to quickly unmatch from liars, unserious, and entitled men. It also helped me unearth possibly dangerous subtexts that would actually turn out to be true within the next week of interactions with them.
Within 24 hours of each conversation I was able to extract warning signs, facts, and issue gaps that in most situations a woman would otherwise ignore. Seeing the gaps enabled me to ask questions to close those gaps and get at their true desires or visions for how they really wanted their wife to live. At the end of each analysis I created a factual, point-blank summary, scrawling by hand on notebook paper and drawing a neat little box around it to punctuate it’s finality.
With others I encounter in public, I started noticing deeper things:
their motivations
true beliefs
mindsets
what they needed through that particular expression of themselves
probably where the wound that caused it came from
the deeper pain and longing some of them have tried to hide
Most people want to be more free than we really are in every area of their life.
Being able to see more keeps me safer.
What I’ve seen allows me to have more compassion and empathy without being so “on-guard” all the time.
Energy Expenditure has a Switch
The protocols in the book taught me how turn my energy valves on and off like switch without fear or guilt. That has been an amazing blessing. As women, we are often expected to spend energy well past our energy reserves simply because someone decided it “was in our nature” without respecting the guardrails around our needs first.
Now, I can hold a conversation with someone and not be nearly as drained as I previously was, and I find I have more control over where I place my attention verses being bothered with random thoughts and feelings that were’t really mine from the beginning.
Even if I cannot unravel the answer for my original issue “fix all the problems,” I at least know now WHY I’ve been driven to find solutions. Now that I know what I know, I feel comfort and acceptance knowing that if I never find the answer I think I’m looking for, I’m still going to be just fine and dandy no matter what.
I’m less emotionally and mentally exhausted, and now only recently again, am I starting to feel creative and whole again on a larger scale.
The Unseen Gag Order
I felt for some reason that I couldn’t talk about the combinations that were causing the heaviness. It was all fake programming to keep me (all of us) quiet.
CDL Work
I did end up going to CDL school. I ended up hiring on a Swift Transportation. For a large combination of factors, I did not stay long.
To pay the rent, I ended up driving school bus part-time in my local area.
Part of me would like to learn how to back and maneuver a 53 foot trailer with a sleeper cab in tight and awkward spaces because I never really learned how.
I can’t tell if that’s an unclosed loop I would like to close or if it’s something I can’t just let go. It seems to be a shame to waste to that hard-earned skill by giving it up completely.
There are many rewarding aspects to being a truck driver. But there are also an extremely large amount of overwhelmingly stressful pieces to that role.
Looking back over the last year at my experiences, I’ve been able to determine it was the environment that I was in and not the driving or the truck itself (except for you Kenworth. Your headlights leave much room for improvement).
It’s running up against the clock that doesn’t match what your body is doing and it’s asking your body to do things it was never meant to actually do by constantly switching from days to night to some hybrid nightmare in between just to make enough money to justify driving rather than working at a fast-food joint.
I feel confident that in a different type of environment, that I could close the gap on that skill and probably be very successful at truck driving. I have not closed myself off to it completely.
For transparency, the mega-carrier I was with makes employees sign a social media agreement that says you will never say anything negative about them in public or on social media. I’ve come to learn that many other mega-carriers probably have a similar arrangement and that’s why you cannot find certain things about them on the Internet.
I’ve also contemplated that maybe team driving might be better for me or being married to someone who I can team drive with might work until I get the backing part of things down. I would try again on my own if I had plenty of cash saved up, but I do not. Like many, that money is gone.
Surviving as hard work. The economy has only gotten worse. Job hunting has not gotten any better.
The Dog
I still have Maverick, but I do doubt sometimes whether or not I will be able to hang onto him long-term. I want to but I don’t know if I’ll be able to.
Creative Pursuits
Over this last year I even invented a pen name to write more brazenly and more openly about certain things that I’ve dealt with or to say certain things that need to be said. And you know what happened with it?
Nothing. I went gung-ho for about 48 hours and I have not published anything with it since.
I know now after going through this book why I did that. I’m also realizing I may not need a pen name ever again. We’ll see how I feel about that (or what the data shows) by the time I do finish the book.
I even started another website that I’ve only told a few people about. It has not gotten off the ground the way I had hoped because of my previously struggling energy levels and competing priorities.
And only I can decide how I go forward in building or not building that website. Building it would still be a good thing to do, and it is something I would like to finish.
If I integrate everything properly, I may never need to do that (separate out all my writing) and instead just speak to you in the voice that you need to hear from here, from me. But I have not arrived at that place yet.
I felt very guilty for a very long time about not publishing here in so very long.
I didn’t know where to start or what to say or what story to tell you first or whether or not I should even keep sharing about my life.
All of that was just noise.
It was part of that creature that I didn’t know was keeping me comfortable and convinced the staying in a cage was good for me.
I don’t need to apologize. I don’t even need to explain.
Things are far clearer now. I’m unstuck.
And Rahila Rivers? My main character and pen name for my fiction? She’s morphed. In fact, The Stealthy Scribbler Society is morphing.
The reason I was having so much difficulty with telling Rahila’s story is because I was trying to make her the center of an entire series of fiction.
What I have recently come to learn as an author, is that Rahila is just one part of a much larger story, a much larger fictional world that I have recently built, a much larger set of series of fiction novels to hopefully, inshallah, (Arabic for “God Willing”) happen in the future. Thanks to AI, the groundwork for that is almost finished.
For those of you worried about AI being involved in some of my future work, please know that just this morning I found a gap in its logic and because I’m an accomplished author, and a lifelong writer, I was able to spot it and have the AI fix its outputs. Otherwise the world, and the plots of would have crumbled before they even had a chance to breathe. Lesser, experienced writers just would have trusted the AI’s “instincts.”
No More Dancing
In the last post I had made about peacocks in the trucking lane, I talked about the requirements of society that makes you want to dance in order to earn your provision.
I didn’t wanna do that then, and I still don’t today.
But now I understand I also no longer want to dance around uncomfortable topics, uncomfortable truths. Things that I should talk about, but for one reason or another have always been afraid of some imaginary consequence of doing so.
I have a better opinion of the One who provides my provision than I do of the creature that lays dead in the corner.
Let’s rip off the Band-Aid:
I’m not sorry that I chose Islam as an American who was born here in America.
I am happy being a Muslim. I have more peace than I ever have in my entire life by being Muslim.
I do not see myself changing my religion in the future. For those of you hoping that this was just a phase, it is not.
I am no longer afraid of certain forms of enemies. I am no longer afraid of certain people from my past or those who still hold a grudge from their own failed past perceiving.
I have had threats against me more than once in the last 12 months by men who are physically close to me in my proximity. Both have been dealt with. Legally and swiftly.
I’ve had online threats, attempted online attacks, and recently, a calculated individual attempt to get at me a few different ways online, all in the last 12 months. This combination is part of what has kept me quiet.
There’s an energy shift that has happened. I no longer make choices based on what longtime enemies would have me do or not do. I’m almost 50 years old. Your immaturity, insecurities, and lack of development is not my fault or my problem.
For a very long time, I’ve been comfortable with the idea of me being forced into homelessness because of the actions of my enemies, should that time come. In other words, you’re just threatening me with a good time. Find something more productive in society to do.
I no longer apologize or shrink when it comes to my safety.
I no longer cover things up in policy. Truth stands on its own and it’s not harmed by examination.
I recently learned of some semi-hostile feelings from some folks here in Texas towards Islam. Many of those people are forgetting that many people here that are Muslim were born here in America, and they accepted Islam on their own. And that many of those Muslims, including myself, are not lawbreakers. Additionally, as an American citizen I stand in all of my rights as an American citizen. This means I don’t have to accept your bullying, your garbage, or your threats. And I don’t have to be idle when you cross the lines that no one is allowed to cross. There’s plenty of articles on this site that illustrate the levels I’m willing to involve law enforcement, not just for myself, but for my neighbors, and acquaintances, too.
AI is a tool and should be used responsibly. I use it responsibly in my work to speed the processes of things.
I don’t agree with the conditions many trucking mega-carriers quasi-force their drivers into. In many cases they really have the drivers over a barrel all the name of a handful of cents per mile.
I am excellent a pre-trip inspections both on a semi and also on a school bus. I am very grateful for the opportunity to help other people stay safe.
I do not make apologies to some people for my “choice of masculine work...”
I also look forward to the day when my income levels meet or exceed the levels I know they deserve.
I no longer have my paid for video-editing software. I can’t afford it at the moment and I cannot guarantee there will be any more videos. I hate the tediousness of video editing and there is no money to pay someone to do it for me.
This article was longer than most. But it’s been a long time since I’ve written.
I hope you’re well.