Saturday, February 11, 2006

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.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dark star crashes, pouring it’s light into ashes.
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis.
Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.

Dark Star - Grateful Dead

Check these out.

11:18 PM  

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