We’ve all been there. You take the wrong turn and end up at a dead end or in a cul-de-sac. You know you screwed up, but part of you doesn’t want to believe it because, subjectively speaking, there’s more than a mere navigational error happening here.

It’s a reality error. The world was working a certain way – namely, streets being laid out in a more or less gridlike fashion – then suddenly it wasn’t. And your mind is not ready to deal with that right away. You’re momentarily stunned, as if suddenly walking stopped working.

And everyone knows what to do in that situation. Get turned around, go back to where you came, and make a different turn. Write whatever time you lost off as the price of a life lesson and get on with things.

But part of you doesn’t want to do that. It wants to keep going forward, as if everything was normal and the dead end had merely been an illusion. Turning around and going back feels very unnatural and wrong to this stubbornly anti-reality part of our minds and, if it had its way, that Dead End sign would be denied, the whole thing would be patched over with stubborn pride and a certain brutal sort of imagination, and you would never ever ever have reason to doubt your perceptions and intentions, and most of all, you would never ever ever ever EVER have to admit you were wrong.

Don’t worry. I am not about to talk about politics.

Instead, I want to talk about my own wrong turnings and how my stubborn insistence on never, ever going backwards has left me in a rather nasty cul-de-sac of my own.

It centers around a certain fundamental weakness in how I think. I call it the Lily-pad Problem. My mind makes and follows logical connections between things very, very rapidly, like a frog leaping from lily-pad to lily-pad in rapid succession. It allows me to reach complex conclusions very rapidly and intuitively – when it works.

But you can’t connect things so rapidly without taking risks. Sometimes, you end up on the wrong lily-pad. And there you are, with no likely seeming lily-pads around, totally lost and with no idea where to hop next.

But only if going backwards is out of the question.  

And granted, sometimes everything has happened so fast that you honestly do not remember your route. In your eagerness to reach your conclusion, you didn’t make note of your route, and now backtracking is no longer a possibility.

Hence all my dreams where I get progressively more lost.

But the route is always there in my mind, if I just slow down and think back instead of panicking because I am lost and don’t know where I am any more.  It’s hard to slow down and calm down because that same burst of energy that propelled me to my mysterious destination can easily convert into the exact kind of panic and disorientation that leaves me feeling stranded, abandoned, and alone.

And it is that burst of cascading, flowering, overflowing creative energy that leads to genius, or at least, my subvariant of it. It’s that sort of thing that powers creative leaps and high level deductions and such.

As my dude and halfways-hero Nietzsche said, “one must have chaos in one’s heart in order to give birth to a dancing star. ”

Right on, brother.

Wisdom, in this scheme, is measure by how often I end up on the right lily-pad. When I do, I am wise, smart, insightful, and so on.

When I do not, I am the muddle-headed confused person who can barely take care of himself that everyone that knows me knows and loves, or at least tolerates with varying degrees of affection based on how much of a fuckup I have been lately.

I try so hard.

Anyhow, the point I was tacking towards in my thought boat is that in order to go forward in my recovery, I may have to be willing to regress. Not to the point where I become a toddler again in my own mind – nobody wants that. But there has to be a way to psychologically time travel and fix some of the damage done to me.

These victories would be, obviously, largely symbolic. Actually traveling into the past is, as far as modern physics can tell, completely impossible.

This controlled regression of which I speak is very tricky to pull off. It involves mentally returning to some of the worst moments of your life and then hanging in there, resisting the urge to give up and escape, for long enough to finish feeling all those emotions you have suppressed for so long.

In fact, suppression of these terrible emotions might well be one of the foundations of your adult personality. So this is no small change we are talking about. Standard “sensibility” would tell you that you are crazy to try it, the risks are too big, and you should just give it up as remind yourself to never do it again.

The test, then, is to go on anyways, because you are goddamned sick of your life as it is and the person you have become and there is no change without risk. The human mind has a phenomenal capacity to pull itself together, and even if one house of cards falls because you have removed a load bearing card, it will not take long for your mind to rebuild itself into a stronger, saner, happier version of yourself.

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That’s the real nitty gritty of personal growth : going beyond what you know and perceive into the green-gray light of the complete unknown, where there are no signposts and no horizons and nothing to rely on but youself.

Trust me, somehow, you will manage. There is even a good chance that, after all is said and done, you will be left wondering what all the fuss was about.

Maybe smart frogs forget about the lily-pad they were heading towards and instead look to make the best of the one where they ended up.

Or maybe they just learn to backtrack.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.