Golly! An Existential Crisis!

I think its kind of nifty that I really might be having a true existential crisis. Not some theoretical philosophical gambit, but a really real time where I’ve pulled the rug out from under my own feet.  Before I go making the whole thing complicated again, maybe I should summate, and just put down what I really think, even if simplifying makes it more real than I feel I can handle:
There is nothing really wrong with me. Oh, I have problems, but then I do have ADHD and have social issues at times, but nothing as humongous as I’ve always painted the insufferable torment of my painful life to be. I don’t need to feel abnormal anymore. I’m still uncommon, but that’s good, being fucked-up all the time can be over if I want it. I was much the overprotected and hard-to-understand kid who craved attention and hated being told what to do (like most kids.) I wasn’t made much responsible and industrious throughout my youth, so I had plenty of time to sit and creatively brood in my bedroom about the terrible injustice of it all. I think the more I brooded, the deeper I went into myself, and further away from everyone else, so that I created unwittingly a process that exponentially manufactured the right formula to brew up a conviction of total paranoid oppression. The worse I behaved, the harder it was to get along with my peers, the more my peers rejected me for that friction with the system, the more the reason for me to continue to believe I was being “exiled.” Just somewhere along the line, possibly I got really lost in the way that some kids don’t understand what it means to be responsible, so I could deflect the shame I felt over “failing,” by blaming the “way things are” for all my problems. And I withdrew further and further, leaving me to spend a good majority of my time to try to figure out what was wrong with everyone else. I was smart, but imaginatively irrational. My existence was based on being wrong and broken, and making sure I knew absolutely where the proper source of fault was. I’ve known a lot of this, a long time, but I wasn’t ready, I think, to bring it together and question a huge chunk of the foundation of who I thought I was (and am) and what I could do to make it better. A few real issues, and a few actual failures in communication with myself, my family, and the institutions I was born into, became the basis of a huge and complicated system of justification for my problems and defense against an enemy that in the end, appears never to have existed.

I’ve not really talked with anyone about what’s going on but on here, and with my shrink. And the shrink was freaky enough. He did that thing some therapists do when they get enthused and attentative where they go Spock with the fingers meeting and the side of their hands pressed against their lower face, and called the session, “one of the most important conversations we’ve ever had.” I’m still acting the same, I think, as I continue to go through my usual motions, bad habits and all, automatically, without reason. Maybe I do seem different to others, I’m not sure. I probably should ask. It’s not so much that I am resisting, which I am doing some, but more that I am overwhelmed. When I try to process, I can sometimes real the effects, but I have a harder time seeing the change directly, because this time (beyond my prior hyperbole) it is so much further outside my frame of reference that thoughts unravel in my head, when they reach the end of their limits. It’s like I can sometimes really perceive it on the periphery, even though it really spread thoroughly into me, because ahead is a huge blind spot where my perceptions are pulling blanks, unable to “see” what is there. I’ve been locked in a series of logical cycle traps for so much time that I keep expecting what “always” happens when something “monumental” is achieved, to the point where I am afraid of resulting events and behaviors that I no longer really do, or might have done for years, but believed I did because my expectations defined a lot of my reality. This is just so weird. I haven’t even explained what “it” is, have I? I guess that could be part of the problem, because this is so existential that I can only see it when I project it outward and read the reflections.
Still, I know know that something is different. I wrote this entry with a considerable lack of absolutes, and second-person references. I didn’t start it as the planned experiment; it started to happen on its own. Maybe this is how it supposed to be. I wonder if the new code has been injected, and the meta-program is rewriting itself, and when I see the new programming enacted as different choices leading to living as a really interactive being amongst the other interactive beings. I feel like the fault shouldn’t really matter unless I’m responsible for my own life. For a long time, I felt like I was somehow a sensory sink, where my perceptions never reached some kind of fullness, because I refused to let them bounce back off me, because I wanted to control how everyone else saw things. I was right, but I didn’t want to follow through to see that I was doing this to control what I saw. I was deeply possessive of my ideas, and I know for certain what happens when I think someone is telling me I’m wrong.  
I don’t know what’s harder to take, that I’ve worked hard to expose some of this stuff so clearly, or but made it so difficult to convince myself of how much larger and deeper it all went. Then, there’s the unsettling thought, that I dramatized the “journey” to being a “greater” person, that I couldn’t see the possibility I’ve done all this work just to catch back up to being just a person. I’ll believe, least for now, that tackling the task itself, and maybe making it this “far,” means I will still have created in myself something greater than I started with.
This could be what happens when for whatever my illusionary motives or misdirected means birthed the need to question, that questioning itself lives as an article of faith, until I do what I least wanted and unconsciously hoped, that one day, I’d even question the new questioning of the original questioning and end up with my head out of my ass. I like the sound of that. The worst feeling is that I’ve lost the belief that everything did happen to me for a reason, it was all necessary to make me “the man I am now.” Why else would I have gone through the gauntlet I crossed through to be a freethinker, and find the message in my experiences and teach it to others? I think that the answer was for awhile, that I did all this to find out I didn’t need anyone else and I could make my own purpose now that I was “free of society’s preconceived paths.” (It’s hard to believe how pretentious that sounds when I think about it. Probably was a lot worse for others to here. If I had come up with any message, I’m not sure anyone would want to hear it coming from me in that way.) Now, I’m losing the reality that I made for myself to fulfill that question, so both the question and answer fall away from me.  
TT tells me often that he doesn’t think he’s special. And I should not think that I am special. I guess I see his point. I scripted cerebrally a sweeping epic saga of one unique soul out to find himself in suffering world… and so on. I am a freethinker, and a Way seeker, but then so is TT, the Woman, a lot of other people.  Different doesn’t have to be separate. In my head, I had to be all that I thought I was, and sitting alone for hours, it made some sense that I was alone, because no-one else was my equal. Something so simpoleThat kind of specialness, I can do without. But, I am someone who asks for more out of life than most people really need. I do want to know the big and importance meanings, and never stop looking for ways to improve myself, but naked as I feel right now, least I’m not alone, whether I can see it or not.

An epic saga about too much epic sagas in my life.

If I wasn’t so tired, I’d be effervescent over having time night back at the old back door desk, with a supervisor who prefers to do all the footwork for the shift. Sorry to have been long in the posts again, but primarily, its been really tiring to adjust to my new schedule, in full site rotation (meaning I work wherever they put me,) so that my job is now as rove-heavy as it was rove-light before the change. I’ve slept more than usual, and I had trouble being anything but lethargic, or least, mildly hedonistic, on my last two weekends. Not that I considered these weekends wasted, or felt (all that much) guilty over it. But I’ve been really resistant to sitting down and writing out what I’ve been mulling over so intently the fortnight, because of the troubling nature of those thoughts, and this is the secondary reasoning. It could be the primary, but I’m so good at being lethargic that I was being too lazy too tell the difference.

     Much as I like deconstruction, I loath what happens when I do it to myself, especially when I come across something that makes me decidedly uncomfortable to challenge. My self-work is mostly stripping back the layers of things I do/have done and I say/have said, which are really important indicators of identity I project (as opposed to the one I believe I have,) to expose the source motivators and beliefs that hold my reality-tunnel in place. I can’t say any of the process is pleasant, but some can be downright gruesome, especially with my control issues.  When I speak of finding the mountain when I crash right into it, this is a sparkling example. Add in the heavier impact of discoveries when working at these deeper levels of myself. And here I am, facing what I feel is a core definer, something that I’ve discolored my world with for years, going back into the ill-remembered days of childhood, and back even further into one of my most basic fears; that when I have peeled away the projection of me, there is little of the true me underneath. The realization is quite simple, unsurprisingly. Complications are more my own doing. I’ve been dancing around this for the last several years, but all that didn’t solidify until I was “ready” more recently.

So much more of my understanding comes from trigger events that bust open what is underneath them, when I need to know. I’d like to stroke my ego, but in public that’s probably indecent, and I’m not directly the source of all my changes like I always want to believe. Some stuff comes when it comes, usually when I am aiming to blindly do a major repeat of a bad decision. Management transferred some officers from night shift to swing, just recently, and to fill those slots; I’ve been moved into full site rotation, meaning I’m more likely to be doing mall roves, than desk duty. At first I didn’t know about the whole transfer thing when I found out, and I got really mad. I had been told I would be working the back door desk, except for irregular training on other parts of the site. I couldn’t understand why I needed to work anywhere else, and I resented the amount of burnt shoe-leather the roves entailed. Naturally, I started complaining to anyone who would listen, but it was only until I realize I was questioning the decision vocally with a supervisor, that this time, I knew I’d gone too far. I figured I must have been damn obnoxious to listen to, with all that presumptuousness. And that’s when I clicked over. Who in the hell did I think I was demanding how and where I should work, at a service industry job no less? It was that I felt entitled to working as I pleased, as if I knew better, and that meant there was no reason what I wanted shouldn’t be. Here I was, Mr. Independence, and I was still trying to manipulate the system to get what I want, while cursing it out at the same time. When I had sought security, swallowing enough pride, I’d been sure I’d get something less comfortable than the peach post I had. I wanted the desk job, though, and I was already working up some way to get it back, when it dawned on me that I was handling this precisely as I’d handled anything else I didn’t like, and anything I felt to which I thought myself entitled. Where did I get this sense of entitlement? How could I believe something not that hard to do, was too hard for me, and I couldn’t do it? Did I see much of my life in the same way? And when I started to cringe is when I what I believed was probably wrong, and had been wrong much of my life, going all the way back. And when I worked through that, I came up with a believed truth that has turned everything upside-down. Again.
     
My life ain’t been so tough. There. That’s all there is. Amazing, isn’t it? A simple unassuming statement, that happens to undermine a greater majority of my approach to my life.  I’ve actually worked with this bugger on several occasions, but the narrowness of my reality tunnel of the time hadn’t broadened enough for me to really question this truth, as in I only glanced off the mountain. I don’t ever remember a time I didn’t feel like the heavier weight of the troubles of my life was found outside myself, in the very iconic structures of my childhood, from my father to Western Civilization. Being smart made the whole society-is-at-fault a lot easier to justify rationally. In my inner eye, my life has been a veritable hell of persecution and abandonment by all the things and people I was told I could count on to produce a good life. Now I am dueling with this fallacy: Certainly I have a persecution complex, but that’s because, well, I was so savagely persecuted.  My life had been a hell born of unending social failures which left me open to the constant attacks by my peers, as if I was being thrown sacrificially with my blood used to oil the great wheels of social conformity. (I know I sound overdramatic in presenting this image of my childhood, but that’s the point. It’s over dramatized.) I am a creature of paradox born of the endless pain of rejection and solitude. It’s all so horrible that I have blocked out nearly all my memories up until I was seventeen. Yadda yadda. I can go on like that for pages. I’ve managed to make something out of my oppression, but like a truly dogmatic zealot, I have never really dared question the truth of that oppression.
     Don’t get me wrong here. I did get the really bad end of the social stick. I was badly misunderstood by the various authority figures and institutions, and I did end up alone and angry a lot. My parents are indeed control freaks, as are both side of my family, and they really didn’t have any idea what to make of their unexpected learning-disabled son, but I could still get them to get me anything I wanted, really. I was immature, and blind in my desire for attention. (All my life I’ve been given to histrionics. When I was told to get out from my last job, I screamed and bawled simultaneously. This is the first time I’ve owned that. I acted a lot worse on my last day, than I’ve ever let on, and probably just buried myself deeper.)  I really did go through some rough stuff as a kid, but I won’t own up that it wasn’t as rough as I believed. I’ve gained even a measure of comparative suffering only recently. It’s not that hard to do. I listen to what the Woman went through, and I bet she thinks my life sounded like a cakewalk, albeit maybe with a really bad thigh rash. So much of it, I think is “compromise” I made so that I could get along with others, and not accept that their pain is less than my pain.
     I’ve walked such a thin line in confronting my past that I’ve just drawn up more detailed rationalities, and accepted them as facts. I’ve always believed that I blocked out so much of my childhood because it was so terrible and humiliating that I could only function if I forgot the whole damn thing and moved on. I feel weird for only now finding the huge flaws in this piece of fine logic. My hyperactivity is present in my life now, but not nearly at the uncontrollable levels of the climb up to the  peak at around the young teens, and my hold on that plateau until my senior year of high school (which was also the height of my medication dosages.) If my focus is loose now, and my memory unreliable also, that I forget the names of people I live with, and my street address, then how worse was my storage when I was at the heights. My mother has told me that I used to forget my own name, when I was around ten. My life is still a massive blur at times, where when I am running hot, I can become very disjointed from time and space references in my head. What if I can’t remember my youth because it got washed over and blurred out of my memory? Then also, I’ve done so much work to rebuild myself into a functional person, that I find I can’t quite grasp my frame of mind before the GF. Maybe, it’s like I’ve rendered my neural memory pathways to then semi-obsolete, so that my software can’t really access it.  I’d taken the troubles remembering and incorporated them intrinsically that they helped build a false sense of foundation, which formed the very way I see and react to the world around me, and to myself.
     Weirder is the idea that I drew up this elaborate psychodrama, like some individual mythology, based on a few nuggets of actual experience, because I didn’t have it so rough. I’m not the child of high privilege, but I never did any chores, or the few I was asked to do I weaseled my way out. With few friends, no extracurricular activities, and low expectations, I spent nearly all my free time in my room, reading and watching TV. (Mostly watching TV.) So I had all the time in the world to dwell on how I was a social misfit, and build a fine fortress from a small house in my head to explain it all away. The pain was real, but I did more damage just sitting around and trying to resolve my suffering. My ability to communicate was just about nil, and was until college. So, even though my parents spent gobs of money on pills, shrinks, and other help, I didn’t even know how to ask for that help. And the help assumed away on who I was and what was wrong, so that I can imagine how frustrated I must have been. And how baffled I was, since I felt entitled to answers that made sense to me, that I felt I could control and master, if I just knew them. And I got angrier and angrier. Ever since the GF, I’ve been afraid of my anger. I don’t like how it feels now, and I still can barely keep it in check, but back then I had no self-control. Resentment festers much quicker in my self-professed” exile, along with the sadness I guess I was trying to escape. That was a bad time, and one I wish I was more thankful I survived. No matter how bad, or more over  in matter of how bad I thought my life was, I never crossed the lines, with my right being suicide or drug addiction, and my right being Columbine. Least that I know I am not exaggerating, since I do at least remember how intensely I hated school, and dreamed of exacting my revenge. I’ve never been sure if it was luck or cowardice that kept it from going any further. Hope seems like an invention of conceit, as another invention of that time when I attempted to glory in my unbound heroic struggle against the universe. But I’d like to think otherwise, still.
     Man, this is really hard. I’ve worked out a lot of this sporadically, but I’ve never brought together like this. As I write, I’m confirming to myself the distinct possibility that indeed, everything I know is wrong. I’ve spent years trying to give up my self-beatified victimization, when I could never give it up, because so much of it just isn’t real. I can’t even imagine how I will manage to understand what I see or what I think without this personal paradigm. Honestly, I am scared that I’ve invested so much of myself in over-rationalizing my problems, that like my memory, who I am might have been completely forced out in the miasma of one smart spoiled kid trying to figure out why no-one understands him, and passing the responsibility off onto the system and turning the whole thing into this epic battle of one guy against the universe. My life is mostly just a big misunderstanding… with myself. Ugh. What will I do if no-one, even myself, is to blame? How much more of my sense of perception and experience are quasi-illusions needed to keep the fantasy going?

I've decided for extra-long Word documents, of which I am producing many.. this one was four pages in a small font... that I will post them here and cross-link them to my other journal. Once again we'll see how this works out.