Everyone's got issues

I've been casting around the past to try and figure out how it all went so wrong
And why it took me so many years to offer others the help I craved in the middle of the fire
With the number of times I've run backwards, asleep
You'd think I would have found at least the shadow of an answer by now
But I have been fistfighting depression and mania
Long before I had the vocabulary to define them.
Been carelessly trampling through the rose gardens of polite society
Long before I developed any kind of coping mechanism for the destructive force that is myself.

I have been a villain, murderer, racist, cheater and abuser by proximity
Idly stood by while myself and others were made to feel less for the way we were born.
I have been a monster, emotionally frozen
In a state where love couldn't get its teeth in,
I've spent so long shut in.
I've been shut up and shut out
And I'm an expert at shutting people out.
I stuttered my way through I-love-you's and danced around "forever".
I got cold feet
And left those I had cared for high and dry on a sea of "why's"
I ran from vulnerability as if it were coming at me like a freight train

What I'm trying to do here is understand what a life wasted is worth.
The number of times I've ignored the guilt and allowed others to walk blindly into lions' dens
Is far outnumbered by the instances in which I have kept quiet while a man I loved used me as a crash test dummy
Slamming whatever he felt like against me and my psyche just to see if something would stick-
Believe me when I say it stuck.
Like trying to shake loose double-sided tape with one hand,
Some things can't be cut out once they get their hands inside of you.
Some demons can't be exercised.
So maybe I have been less sympathetic than I should for fellow humans.
Because why would I care about them and their problems when no one cared about mine?

But that's the wrong way to see it.
No one asked to be hurt like this.
So I gouged out my own eyes
And found that the new perspective was not without its cost
But the good it's dragged out of me has far outweighed my nostalgia for sight
My fear and self consciousness at taking myself seriously as an artist
Has been replaced by an overwhelming desire to do things that matter.
Because there can never be too many voices screaming for change from a system built for winners to keep winning.
And there are far too many losers that look ahead and see only years of continued suffering
And choose to give up instead.
I don't want to give up anymore.
I just want to be better,
Want us all to be better to each other.
I just want to know;
What's wrong with you?
What's wrong with me?