One thing keeping me from growing up is that I am still looking for adult approval.

This occurred to me while I was urinating yesterday^[1]. I am still looking up for that approval from above. My mind (or soul, depending on your POV) is stuck at that stage. Even my desire to be a famous author that everyone says is brilliant is really just another way for me to seek the same praise for my intellect that I got when I was an absurdly precocious child.

In many ways, I still feel absurdly precocious, and I am 42.

Having recognized this, I now need to pick my way very carefully across the minefield of the zeitgeist. Common wisdom is that it is bad to need approval outside yourself before you can love yourself, and that you have to love yourself before you can let anyone else love you.

But for me, that’s a trap, because that line of reasoning can only lead me to having one more thing, and a fairly potent one at that, to hate myself for.

I’m such a pathetic loser, I don’t even love myself! I’m such an IDIOT!

That should be a cartoon somewhere.

Hence the minefield. It can be a very tricky thing to recognize one’s flaws enough to improve oneself without letting the demons of depression out of their cage to tear you into tiny twitching pieces.

I honestly think that is how some people become semi-narcissists with unflagging self-confidence no matter what the evidence might say. They didn’t say “I want to be a total prick!”, they just decided that they were going to believe in themselves no matter what and took it a little too far. To the point where, in the service of this phenomenon, they just plain stopped listening.

It would explain a lot, wouldn’t? About people like Donald Trump and his ilk? I assume it starts off within the realm of sanity – they start out just thinking “there’s no point listening to the naysayers, I have to follow my heart!”

A certain amount of that is actually quite healthy. Or so I’ve heard.

But then they start ignoring evidence as if it was just a negative opinion, and eventually, they fall into a sort of solipsistic black hole of ego protection.

Anyhow, back to the looking up thing.

So I am not going to beat myself up for this whole thing. I already knew that I was missing a whole lot of what I needed to grow up inside and that doing it now was going to involve some very unpleasant revelations and humiliating insights.

So it suck to realize that I am still looking for adult approval, but only by realizing this can I change it. It hurts, but it’s the worst part and now it’s over. Now I can start healing.

I don’t think there is anyone who is entirely immune to wanting validation from others. Even the holy men who wander out of the desert to teach people what they have learned about selflessness are looking for students to listen to them and validate what they are saying.

Ergo, while not needing the validation of others is a very healthy and worthy ideal, like most ideals, it is a direction, not a destination. Few people achieve it, but all should pursue it.

Right now, I need so much approval, validation, and reassurance that it humbles and frightens me to contemplate it. I have a very, very, very heft emotional tab that I have been running since I was very young, and sometimes, seeing it paid off with everything I have missed seems impossible.

But a starving man doesn’t need to eat every meal he’s ever missed in order to be healthy. He just needs enough for his body to use to repair itself.

And I have been emotionally starving for a very, very long time. I was just too lost and locked away in my very pretty ice castle to even be able to feel it. And that went on for a long, long time.

Drugs can only treat your symptoms. Paxil has helped me deal with it. But it’s only anesthetic. And anesthetic doesn’t cure a thing.

Even now, it is very hard to face the enormity of it. Something has been very very wrong in my life for a very very long time and the more I learn about myself, the bigger it gets.

Still, I have faith that there are solutions that even a hardcore materialistic rationalistic pragmatist like myself can accept. I am not exactly sure where someone like me gets the necessary permissions to override one’s internal sense of self-measurement and reset the scales like some people get from religion, but it must be possible.

Maybe instead of looking for a cosmic connection, I should be looking for the right person for me, and connecting with them. But I have a very hard time believing such a person exists. Another thing I have realized recently is that I have almost no faith in the ability of others to help me.

Not that nobody has ever helped me. Tons of people have. But they can’t help with the real problem, which lies deep inside me, and there is so much clear ice and hard snow between me and the world that I can’t feel the help I get, and so I still feel abandoned and alone inside.

And so, without the evidence that people do love and care about me being able to make it through, it feels like nobody can ever help me. Nobody can even reach me. Nothing gets through.

But I know there must be a way to crack the ice and let the sunshine in. Maybe it will be something I figure out, but probably not.

It will probably be something that just happens one day when I take a stone off my grave, a stone just like the millions I removed before, and my light can finally burst through to the surface and shine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.