First, last night’s video :

Man, that ending sucks. Why is it I can’t see these huge flaws when I am composing the thing in the first place? I swear, music is the art form where I have the most problem being objective. Probably because music is so very right-brained, unlike words.

Anyhow, tonight I want to talk about blame.

I have been watching TED talks lately, and tonight I watched a few that dealt with blame in their own way.

One was by a man who had, in the prime of his youth, been crippled in an auto accident. It left him a hemiplegic, meaning only one side of his body works. He eventually tracked down the man who was driving the vehicle that slammed into his, and found that the man had no regret for the accident, only pity for himself for the ways he had suffered from the accident.

He forgave the guy anyone, which is more than I would have been able to manage.

The other was by a man who had murdered someone when he was young and spent 20 years in prison for it, 7.5 of the years in solitary confinement (which is barbaric). He talked about how when he was in prison, for a long time he blamed everyone but himself for his problems, and that kept him back.

And that made me think about my own blame structure and how it holds me back.

My siblings have told me I need to get over my childhood. Their reasons for saying so aren’t entirely altruistic, but they are right. The problem is, it’s not that simple.

Blame comforts people. The worst thing for a human is pain without meaning. When we blame someone for our predicament, it makes us feel better. It makes us feel like we have control of the situation and can keep it from happening again. Blame makes us,. in a way, feel powerful.

But when it goes on too long, it does something else : it keeps us from taking responsibility for ourselves. Everything, even things we do quite voluntarily, are somehow the fault of all the people in their blame structure, like their parents, society, lousy luck in love, an ex-spouse, and so on.

This blame structure is then shaped into an impenetrable wall against responsibility. People will abdicate all power and control of their lives if it gets them out of having to assume responsibility for their lives.

Because assuming responsibility for you life means fully acknowledging their own adulthood. Being in control means growing up, and there are a lot of people who will do anything to keep that from happening.

I’m one of them. I see that now.

Being in control is scary. It means that whatever happens to you short of the totally random is your fault. It means that you have to face the world without that impenetrable wall of blame to shelter you, and that can make you feel all alone in the world, and even abandoned.

But abandoned by who? You’re an adult. There is nobody whose job it is to care for you. Therefore there is nobody who has abandoned or is abandoning you.

And yet, I have felt quite abandoned for a long long time. By my parents, my schools, life in general. That made a lot of sense when I was a kid getting beaten up daily in school, but that was a long time ago, and there has to be a statute of limitations on certain kinds of pain.

This leads me to conclude that I have been actively resisting growing up for a long long time. For all my lofty talk of wanting to grow up, take on responsibilities, and face the world, when it came down to it, I balked, and I have been balking ever since.

I have, in fact, been balking ever since I was taken out of university half way through.

I wasn’t ready. Having to become an adult two years early was too much for me. It’s not just that I was facing the world two years early, but I was doing it without a college degree. I had no column for that in my mind. For most of my life, I thought the sequence was : get good marks in school, go to university, get a degree, use that degree to get a job.

Instead, I found myself back in my home town, complete with its chronic sky high unemployment rate, and without the kind of personality to go out there and take on that world, and, to be honest, still with middle class job expectations.

So instead of this being what spurred me to adulthood, I regressed. I can see that now too. I regressed to being the same sort of person I was before university, and that person had never truly made it out of childhood.

Bodies always mature. Everything else is up for grabs.

And that is the person I have been ever since. A child with a splendid mind and no life. I never lost that feeling of being pushed out the door when I wasn’t ready, and so I have been fighting adulthood ever since.

But all that shit went down twenty five years ago. How long does it take to get over something? The answer is : forever, if all you are interested in is having an excuse not to grow up and face the facts.

And blame and excuses are the bread and butter of depression. It’s amazing that millions of my fellow depression sufferers can simultaneously believe that they are powerless (and hence without responsibility) and yet also suck because of all the things they have never done and/or don’t have.

I am seriously pondering the possibility that depression comes from not growing up. At least some of the time. Why, exactly, a person fails to grow up is an open question. A lot of things could lead to it.

But I will guarantee you one thing : most depressives will be absolutely sure it wasn’t their fault.

And they will know exactly who to blame.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.