So, about Project Big Ego…

I realized today that part of the reason that I have resisted my potential for a big ego for so long is that I really don’t want to look down on people. The thought of it makes me feel queasy. I want to be with people, included and accepted. Looking down on them is like the opposite of that.

In some ways, I would rather be included at the bottom than lonely at the top.

Plus there’s the issue of responsibility and leadership. Were I to give in and assume the throne I have denied all my life, I would feel like it was now my responsibility to use the throne to lead people to a better life, and not only does that feel to me like a pathway to Crazytown, the idea of that much responsibility weighing me down and restricting me scares the ever loving bejesus out of me.

That’s always been the paradox with me. To me, power and responsibility are intimately linked on a 1:1 basis, and that is not negotiable. I am not capable of knowingly behaving in an irresponsible way. This is both a virtue and a burden. It could be argued that I would be better off not taking things so seriously. But I am what I am.

But responsibility scares me. I am someone who values his autonomy very highly, perhaps too highly. I can only feel safe when I am free to move as I please in all directions in order to evade or escape the bad stuff. Restrictions fill me with dread so acute it’s more or less panic. I deeply suspect that if I could work through that panic, I would come out the other side of it far healthier and stronger, and wonder what all the fuss was about.

But I am who I am right now, and right now, it’s freakout city.

Thus far, my solution has been simple, elegant, and awful : simple avoid having any power. No power, no responsibility, no panic. An ingenious form of self-defeat.

Well I am nothing if not clever.

But the thing is, I do have power. The same power I have always had : the power of my mind. Intelligence is a profound kind of power, and combined with my creativity, insight, and all the rest, I am walking around with a head full of power 24/7. Power so profound that it scares me sometimes.

Even I sometimes feel like nobody is supposed to be as smart as I am.

So the real situation is not that I am safely powerless, it’s that I pretend to be powerless while ignoring, discounting, and otherwise suppressing the power I do have.

That’s why I keep coming back to the question of whether or not someone has a moral obligation to use their gifts to benefit society. I have always held that if you have the power to help, you must help. It’s a positive duty, something you must do, as opposed to a negative duty, something you must NOT do.

By that logic, I should be out there using my gifts to help in any way I can. For instance, I could be a fairly potent spokesperson for a noble and just cause. Or I could work behind the scenes writing speeches and organizing advocacy. I could write about my own brand of pragmatic liberalism with hopes of starting a movement. And so forth and so on.

But I want a life as well. And a fun career. I want to write for television, and I will just have to save the world that way, so to speak. Whatever I write, I will find ways to advance my agenda, often in ways that seem like nothing but harmless fun and silliness. I’m sneaky like that.

As always, there is also the lurking issue of option paralysis to contend with. There are so many things I could do with all this potential. How do I know which one is right? I can’t help but feel that if I was a less cerebral person and more in touch with my emotions and instincts, I would be better equipped to make that kind of decision. I would have gut instincts I trusted and a sense that even if I make the wrong choice, I will be okay.

Instead, I am like the Wimpy Kirk from the Two Kirks episode of the original Star Trek series. Sensitive…. but indecisive.

And I definitely feel that this indecision is an excuse that I hide behind. An excuse to avoid risk and stay in the safe world of mere potential instead of having to become a real person.

That’s why I like that I have now made a choice. I am going to write for TV. All I have to do is keep plugging away at school and I will get there. I chose my bus and got on it, so I am now on my way to somewhere instead of remaining an inert lump of nothingness that played video games and hung out online.

For twenty fucking years. Damn.

Which brings us all the way back to… the topic! Quelle shoq!

If I were to really take full responsibility for my power and sit my ass down on that throne, the only way I can see of relating to the world is to turn those around me into adherents to the cult of me. Not that I dream of power, but the problem is that if I felt this responsibility for the welfare of others, it would inevitably lead to my feeling the need to lead them.

And I don’t know any other way to lead than to get people believing in me and my own, for lack of a better word, wisdom. There are formal ways of getting power, like rising up in an organization, but that is not the sort of power I am looking for.

It would have to be a cult of personality.

And I hate those.

So what’s a fella suppose to do?

Stay a humble human just trying to get by in this big ol room, I guess.

But I could be so much more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m back on contemplating the idea of just letting myself become all smug and cocky again.

I need some way of sealing the big hole in my self and my self-esteem. I have enough positive attributes to make for one heck of an amazing fellow if I let it happen. I have resisted this possibility for my whole love out of some admonition not to get a “swelled head” when I was a child. But more important, out of a desire not to become the sort of arrogant flippant smug asshole that seem to me to be attached to this potential version of myself.

I value being a nice person. It’s always been one of my best attributes as far as I am concerned. And it gives me great pleasure in the doing of it, too. It makes me feel very good to actively reduce the amount of hurt and pain in the world.

On the other hand…. I would kind of like to have a life, too. And it can be argued that with my nice-guy persona comes a lot of my passivity and timidity. Either way, it’s a bad deal.

And I have to ask myself a very harsh question : am I willing to live the rest of my life as a useless lump and a burden on others just to save the world for the awfulness in me? Is that a deal I am prepared to make with the world? For all I know, opening the floodgates would actually make me a much better person because I would finally be engaged in living instead of retreating into my mental isolation in order to cope. I might discover a whole new equilibrium, far superior to my current deathly doldrums.

I might finally get the sort of positive social input that I need to repair my ancient social damage and be whole again.

Surely that’s worth a certain amount of risk.

As to becoming a smug and callous asshole, I can handle that on a case by case basis. I know that this transformation may end up disrupting existing relationships. I don’t want that to happen, but I am no longer willing to stay in my tiny little box in order to prevent. I will work hard to minimize the damage, but this is something I need to do.

It definitely feels like this is the Next Thing. And the secret of life is to do the Next Thing, every time. That’s how you preserve momentum.

And that’s far more important than doing the best thing. Maybe you’ll make a huge mistake. Maybe it will be the best thing you ever did. Either way, you will keep going, and with your momentum preserved, it will be far easier to fix whatever you have done wrong.

Almost anything beats floundering in endless indecision because of your inability to connect with the powerful vital force which lies within all of us. Call it the id, call it the life force, call it whatever you want, but it’s as real and valid as any act of mentation and without it, we are toys without batteries.

Had therapy today, for the first time in two months. It felt good. One of the things that this past week and change of contemplation has revealed unto me is that I have been terribly isolated for a while. For this month, certainly. At some point, I lost that vital momentum and reverted to being very closed off to the world, and I feel like that cost me some of my current social progress. In between the distorting effect that social isolation has on what I say and do and the chilliness and fear I no doubt project, I was not getting on with my fellow students, and that is not good.

I am hoping that our experiences in the trenches of hardcore writing this term will forge tighter bonds. I already feel like we are slowly gelling as a group. We’re certainly pretty darn relaxed around one another. These are the people who are meant to be lifelong friends and contacts in “the biz”, so hopefully they will not hold my recent withdrawal and crankiness against me.

And after all, there’s four more terms to go, so there is plenty of time to repair whatever damage I might have done!

Tomorrow, I will throw myself into my writing. I am going to try to get to ten pages done on my movie and five pages done on my Bob’s Burgers episode before the day is done. I assume I will have to work on both of them at the same time, seeing as there will be pages due in both classes, so it’s not like I have the luxury to do one then the other.

And frankly, I am enjoying writing the Bob’s Burgers episode more. So I will use it as a kind of treat for myself. This is the first time in my life I have written sitcom dialogue and it’s loads of fun. I honestly feel like part of me has been doing it ever since I was a sitcom-loving kid trying, subconsciously, to live in a sitcom version of the world.

Writing the movie is way harder. So much more to think about. It will be easier once I am through the visual stuff at the beginning. It was really, really hard for me to write the opening montage. I could see it in my head, but writing it all down was hard in a way that is hard to quantify because the difficulty came not from the actual act but how hard it was to get myself thinking that way.

Guides to the previous sentence are available for purchase in the lobby.

I am sure I will learn to think visually (or at least, visually enough) in time. It’s just new territory for me. Dialogue is my natural environment. I am a conversationally biased critter.

I just realized, though…. I can try writing sight gags now! Wow!

I mean, not like Angie Tribeca sight gags… that would not be the style of Bob’s Burgers at all… but still.

I have so much fun ahead of me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.