Well okay, the afternoon before reading week.

Still have no idea what I will do to fill my time. But I am unconcerned about it. I am confident that I will find something or other to do. No need for me to decide it all ahead of time. That only leads to me getting all uptight about it, and ignoring my plans because I can’t handle the pressure, and then feeling guilty about not doing them and beating myself up for being a lazy loser, and blah blah blah.

Fuck it. The days will be whatever suits me at the time. I have plans, but that’s all they are…. plans. Plans can change. They’re not moral obligations if the only person involved is yourself. To repeat a tired but still valid refrain, what matters is what I want to do, not what I ought to do.

During last Thursday’s therapy, the subject of self-worth, self-esteem, and all that came up, and I told my therapist that I don’t like thinking in those terms. That I prefer to leave those values blank. Nothing but big question marks.

And as I was trying to explain this to him, I figured out why that is. It’s because those are evaluative terms, and in order to preserve myself from my out of control superego, I have to escape the evaluative mode entirely. And that means the neutrality of blankness. No judgment in either direction, no values entered, no analysis performed. I have to get away from my powerful but deeply corrupted meta-consciousness and get to a place where I can just be myself, warm and whole and not concerned with constant self-dissection.

It’s a hard habit to break, this brutal self-analysis. It’s a habit that runs very deep in my mind, on a very basic level of consciousness. I have been really focusing on creating powerful positive self-talk to counter the automatic self-negation that has ruled the roost for so long. I have been catching myself in the act of self-destruction and pushing back hard.

When I make some minor mistake, I’ve been telling myself that I am okay, I am just fine, I didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything anyone else hasn’t done or never does, and that by and large, I do a fine job of living my life.

And it’s working. So far so good. It will take a lot of emotional muscle to push back against the inner voice that tells me I am incompetent in all things and pathetic and so on. But I have never lacked that kind of muscle. When I am determined to do something, I can always find the strength.

The real struggle will be against the escapist element of thinking of oneself as incompetent. It makes for a great excuse not to try, to give up the instant you meet resistance, to flee from challenge and crawl back into my hidey-hole, curl up with my safe distractions, and go back to pretending the big mean world doesn’t exist.

All to escape the paralyzing terror that comes when I try to do things. That voice inside that says don’t bother, you will just makes things worse, just stay out of the way and wait is very old and very strong and backed up by certain issues I have with my eye-hand coordination, my sense of balance, and so forth.

But none of my physical problems make it impossible for me to do things properly. It just makes it harder to learn to do it. I think the real problem is that I give up trying to teach myself to do things as fast (or faster) than others gave up trying to teach them to me in the past. I have never had someone firm and patient enough to stick with me for as long as it takes for me to learn something.

They made the shortsighted decision that it was easier to just do it themselves. So I never learned to do stuff.

I want to be a better parent than that to myself. Patient, understanding, and above all, persistent. And very firm without being severe about it. I need the firmness because it helps me to calm down and focus on the task and learning it in an open and accepting way, instead of getting freaked out and eager to escape.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the nervousness of the un-led. How people get nervous and agitated if there isn’t some force, internal or external, that reassures them that someone or something above them has everything under control and they can go back to just worrying about their own problems now.

I think the rise of democracy and consumer culture has had the unintended effect of leaving us all without concrete leadership. By taking out the (quite awful) power structure and maximizing individual autonomy, we inadvertently created a large leadership deficit.

We made the mistake of thinking that, because we no longer needed the existing forms of leadership, we didn’t need leadership at all. And this has proved to be a correct assumption, but only up to a point. We still have the same hierarchical instincts of any socially cooperative advanced mammal, and that means we all possess a need for a leader to look to for assurance and a calm, steadying hand.

I think conservatives under this truth in a dim and shadowy way. That’s why they are always looking for firm, decisive leadership, often to the point of completely ignoring what said leadership actually does in favour of getting the feeling of warmth and security they so badly need by believing in it.

And this is why liberalism just doesn’t do it for some people because liberals value individuality (and their own self-image as nice, gentle people) too much to dominate people even a little. That’s why they can’t project leadership and why conservatives tend to go berserk when they are in charge because conservatives need someone to dominate them into feeling secure and will act out till they get it.

I could go on and on, but I will leave that for tomorrow’s blog entry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.