And hello to all of you – I see a few familiar names on your roster. I’m one of the moderators on GoingYourOwnWay.com, a forum board that sprang from the ashes of Nacho Vidal’s MGTOW Forums; I’m also on MGTOW HQ, so this isn’t my first rodeo, no-sirree-Bob!
A lot of us came to the going-our-own-way lifestyle after a personal catastrophe – a cheating wife, a DV accusal, a nasty divorce where “your little kitten” turned into a vicious bitch-jaguar and tore your world apart. A red-pill enema administered with a fire-hose. You’ve had it with that life, you’re Going Your Own Way and you sure as hell aren’t going back.
Well … my story is completely different. I’m here because I grew up “going a different way;” you might say that I’ve lived in MGTOW-space all of my life, from growing up in the Fifties and Sixties as the only son of a single mother … to being an adult in the Seventies, who spent the Sexual Revolution “interned as an enemy alien,” to basing my life and my choices on what I saw as ethically correct and proper rather than on following the herd.
I grew up in a decent neighborhood in the suburbs of Washington, DC, with my mother, her sister, and their mother as materfamilias. It wasn’t conducive to growing up a boy; I had very little example from male role-models, and I got used to cat-fights between my Mom and my Dear Auntie on a regular basis. I learned to slink through my home, and through life, like a mouse slinking along the baseboards. I tended to absorb what life was serving up to me, though, rather than to rebel and swing out fighting it … I was fat and nearsighted and out-of-shape, and you can guess that I was left out of the good times when puberty rolled around. And I left high school with no money for college, no hopes of a scholarship and no direction to follow, while 95% of my senior class went straight on to college.
Oh, did I mention that I didn’t even have the solace of sharing a religion with my peers? They were Christian for the most part, or Jewish. I’d grown up a Scientologist, and when my friends went off to their colleges and universities, I went to the Academy of Scientology in downtown DC and learned to become an “auditor,” a spiritual counselor. I spent two years there, living at home, until Dear Aune kicked us out of my boyhood home … Mom and I took an apartment nearby, and I left the Academy to find myself a job.
This was the early 1970s, so one didn’t need a college degree to find decent work. I had taken a couple of years of drafting in high school, and it was enough to get me in as a GS-2 “technical aide” in the Federal government. I learned the rudiments of mapmaking in twelve weeks of training, and took my place as a cartographic aide, learning map-drafting and photo mosaics and photo-rectification and darkroom work. It was pretty cool to me, and I got involved with photography outside the office, too.
Then, in the beginning of 1980, I got bit by the flying bug. I’d had a couple of nice romances after I got into the Map Factory, but nothing serious; I’d never gotten enough pussy to get addicted to it, and I felt responsible for my mother’s well-being, so I accepted life in the friend-zone. Not having to spend my money on “Cupcake” meant that I could spend it on flying lessons … and being a DoD civilian gave me access to the Andrews AFB flying club. And once I got my pilot’s license, my mother was an enthusiastic co-pilot. By then, the early Eighties, Mom was ready to retire – and in 1985, after she got a nice bit of inheritance from a cousin of my by-then-deceased grandmother. We took her down payment and my ability to pay a monthly mortgage, and bought a house
together.
We had left Scientology by then … after the Church tried to get us to spend Mom’s inheritance on more “advanced” courses, rather than spending it our way. After a couple of years, Mom learned about a new program called the Avatar Course, and it basically left Scientology in the dust … You might be forming the idea that I was just going along with Mom, as a married man would “just go along with Cupcake.” Not exactly … I found the “different-drummer” spiritual path more fulfilling than I’d found those dismal samples I’d tasted of the “herd path” of Western society.
I had a couple more “romances” in the following years, but gave up on the game in 1986 … I went on living with Mom, traveling with her, taking her on cruise-ship vacations after her 80th birthday … then, in early 2000, she was found to have colon cancer. She went through surgery, and it looked like they’d gotten it all – till her oncologist found, in early 2002, that it had spread to her liver and lungs. She died August 28, 2002, after 86 good years and a few bad months. I was 48 years old, and an orphan. (I agree, it is ludicrous for a man who is 48 years old to regard himself as an ‘orphan.’ But … I was alone in my house, for the first time since I was born. I learned to deal with it, right away.)
I’ve spent the past twelve years (2002-2014) alone, Going My Own Way in the truest classical sense. Our house became MY house when Mom let go of her last breath … I worked a few more years, and retired the day after I was eligible … and a few years after THAT, I learned about the Manosphere via The Spearhead and AVFM.
But this is the point I want to emphasize … Men have been Going Their (Our) Own Way since way before MGTOW Forums … since before ProBoards … since before DARPA-Net, before Henry David Thoreau, since before Walden Pond, since fergawdssake before Odysseus and Gautama Siddhartha and the Rig-Veda.
There have ALWAYS been a certain number of Men who have Gone Their Own Way.
And I was MGTOW when MGTOW wasn’t cool.
VileNord 5 years, 4 months ago.
