To fall into despair is such a quiet thing is it not. To let yourself drift into your own shadow, to let the loathing and hatred of this age take you. It is a quiet thing, a lonely thing. The misery grips you, the shadows of yesterday pulling at you, blackened claws pulling you down, down into yourself and the darkness within. Tis' indeed a foul thing indeed. You lose yourself, you lose sight of what matters, what is important, you forget who you are. You bind yourself in chains, a prisoner to your own sorrows and regrets. The topic of today is simply this; that freedom for ourselves can only be achieved by ourselves.

Tell me dear friends, how many of you have suffered or suffer currently in this age of madness and chaos. How many of you stare in the mirror nary comprehending the man before you. He is but a stranger, a remnant of the whole you. In previous topics I covered the ailments of this age, alcohol, pornography, self loathing, many a shadow come from these. In today's topic I choose to focus on the other part that drags the soul to become merely an ember in place of a raging inferno, that of resolving the memories of the past. Letting go of the chains that shackle the soul to darkness and finding resolution. One would be a liar were he to claim he had no regrets, no ghosts that haunt him still. Betrayals and abandonment by those we trusted, being left alone upon the rocky shores of this world to stand alone against the tide. Mistakes made, trusting those unworthy of our trust. We have, all of us, been affected by such things. Oh, we can blame outside sources, we can claim any number of reasons for what we hang on too, many of them likely true, but it is the coming to terms with such events that we must learn to do. Tell me, if you were to jump a gaping chasm to safety would you bind your ankles before the jump? If a friend were suffering and you sought to relieve their pain would you pass unto them your own? No, no of course not. It is the things that haunt us we must free ourselves from, that we must bring to a close. It is the ghosts of the past we must excorcise from ourselves if we are to stand tall, we are the arbiters of our own fate in this way. Do we face suppression for our words, our thoughts, most certainly, we are Men against time, against a system that would have kneel in subjugation to it, that would have us engorge ourselves on every vice known in order to alleviate our pains and our sadness', becoming hollow men akin to those who live vicariously through all forms of modern diseased media and product. But we are not them. We are not those who sit for hours on end, indulging ourselves in every distraction and whim, we are not those who poison our minds and our bodies with cheap chemical laden goods, we are Men who stand defiant to such things, Men who hear the call of something greater, in our blood, in our hearts, in our souls. We are outsiders one and all. Thusly if we are to restore sanity to this world, if we are to become the beacons we are needed to be then we must not merely come to embrace our values and represent them but be able to dispel the darkness within us that holds us back.