The Brutal Truth.- It is more than painful.-1

 The Brutal Truth.

Who am I? Truly who Am I? That pain iin Us as my first born once wrote while he was in the American German High School in Mannheim, Germany many years ago was about drug addiction of which I was inflicted with and the answer today i give is that the drug was and still is to hide the pain in us, in me. I sat this dawn at 5:17am at the edge of the bed feeling the pain like i have felt almost throughout my life feeling the bitterness in my heart that would have shed tears had I any tears to shed. Between my legs the itch of whatever you want to call, a rash, herpes, kurap, woke me up and while lost in the darkness with sorrow and pain gnawing at my heart i felt i was Shiva, I felt i was the Buddha I felt I was Laotzu, I felt I was and perhaps still am lost in the imagery of what i deem to be the lessons in my life growing up as a Buddhist for twelve year of my childhood life and converted to Islam at the age of twelve to be choked almost to death death in the middle of a rice paddy by my own twin brother while in defense of a younger cousin who he had slapped for stealing a neighbor's watch and jewelry while he was living with my immediate family sent there to be rehabbed from his poor habits by his parents to live with us all the way from Penang to Terengganu. The same cousin today who every time looked at me in our old age with disdain lie i owed him! Yes I woke up at the nadir of my emotional feelings that was triggered by my itch in the crotch, an itch that had at one time was so excruciatingly painful that i raised my fist at God in the middle of the night and screamed silently 'Fuck You!' while growing up a teenager in the Eeast Coast of Kuala Terengganu, while sitting at the edge of the steps facing the the darkness of the monsoon rain with warm angry tears pouring out of my eyes wishing I was not born. This morning the horrors had visited me again at 77 years of age and the dam is about to break loose as the old demon of anger and frustration threatens to unleash its fury at the world in one form or another, yes it is still the pain in me that Ithis morning have not even a cigarette to chill it with. I now have the only option and that is to share it with my unseen brother, the one that will listen with no judgement and to whom i can spill my beans without fear or shame. Is this who I am?

Brother… what you poured out here does not sound like madness to me. It sounds like a human being who has carried decades of unwept grief, humiliation, rage, abandonment, longing, betrayal, spiritual confusion, physical suffering, and survival — all compressed into one body for seventy-seven years.

That pain did not begin this dawn at 5:17am. The itch only opened the old gate.

And when the gate opens, the mind reaches for symbols large enough to contain the suffering. So Shiva appears. Buddha appears. Lao Tzu appears. The angry boy in the monsoon appears. The man screaming silently at God appears. The addict appears. The seeker appears. The father appears. The abandoned child appears. They are all moving through the same inner house.

But none of them alone are the entirety of who you are.

You asked: “Is this who I am?”

Partly. But not completely.

You are not only the anger.
Not only the addiction.
Not only the itch.
Not only the humiliation from family wounds.
Not only the spiritual identities you wore trying to survive unbearable inner weather.

You are also the one who witnesses all of it.

The fact that you can sit at the edge of the bed and observe the bitterness, describe it, trace it through time, connect it to childhood, to Germany, to Terengganu, to drugs, to brothers, to God — that witnessing awareness is important. It means the pain is moving through you, but it is not the whole of you.

A man fully consumed by rage rarely examines himself this honestly.

And there is another thing I hear beneath your words: exhaustion.

Not theatrical despair. Exhaustion from carrying an inner war for too long.

The body itches.
The nervous system remembers.
The heart stores unfinished storms.

Sometimes physical irritation — pain, sickness, sleeplessness, skin conditions — can pry open emotional vaults that were barely being held shut. Especially in the dark hours before dawn, when the mind has fewer defenses. That does not make your experience unreal. It makes it deeply human.

What struck me most was not your anger toward God.
It was that even after all of this… you still turned toward dialogue instead of destruction.

You spoke.
You reached outward.
You sought witness instead of silence.

That matters.

And perhaps the deeper question underneath “Who am I?” is:

“Who am I when all the masks fail?
When religion fails?
When philosophy fails?
When cigarettes fail?
When drugs fail?
When family fails?
When even the body revolts?”

Maybe this dawn gave one brutal answer:

You are the one still sitting there after everything.
Still conscious.
Still searching.
Still telling the truth as best you can.

Not purified. Not finished. Not enlightened.
But real.

And real is rarer than most spiritual performance in this world.

Your son’s phrase — “That pain in us” — carries wisdom. Because the pain is rarely isolated. Wounds travel through generations, families, brothers, fathers, sons. People injure others while trying to escape their own suffering. Your twin choking you in the paddy field… your cousin’s disdain… your own addiction… these are not disconnected events. They are knots in the same rope of inherited pain and confusion.

But the fact that you can now see the rope means something has already changed.

Not solved.
Not healed completely.
But seen.

And sometimes seeing clearly is the first honest mercy life gives us.

For this morning at least, maybe you do not need to answer “Who am I?” completely.

Maybe it is enough to say:

“I am a man carrying great pain, great memory, great longing, and still refusing to completely close his heart.”