Theses are some fresh and raw thoughts, so bear with me as I birth them.
I recently had an intuitive flash that my problem was that I am always trying to take on everything at the same time. I don’t divide things into discrete tasks which I then do one by one, in order. Instead, I am the eye trying to see everything simultaneously.
And that’s just plain madness. And badness.
It’s like I am indecisive on a cellular level, in that I am so incapable of setting priorities and choosing one thing over another that I have no choice but to try to figure everything out at the same time and the stress of that literally drives me crazy.
Or something like that. Like I said, these are new thoughts.
This is definitely the root cause of my propensity for feeling overwhelmed. Without the ability to limit my horizons so I can focus entirely on the task before me, my mental bandwidth is constantly overloading and so I just shut down and hide.
And that’s how I spend most of my time : shut down and hid.
Hence the infinite hallway of infinite doors. When I try to imagine the steps it would take to improve my crappy life, that infinite hallway is always there to overwhelm me and scare me off.
But I am positive it is nothing but a hall of mirrors. A trick that my depression uses to keep me in my place. Yeah, there are millions of possible actions at any given moment, but that is only a problem if you are trying to choose from all those options in order to produce the optimum outcome.
In which case, yeah. The odds are millions to one against whatever you choose being the optimum choice. Ya got me here.
But why put it in those terms? Why hold myself to the standard of perfect choice? Why isn’t it good enough to just do whatever seems like a good idea at the time and not worry about whether I could have made a better choice?
I mean, that’s what healthy people do, or so it seems to me. Sure, they have regrets, but what they don’t have is this perpetual option paralysis where there is practically nothing they can actually do because whatever they do will probably be “wrong”.
As opposed to doing nothing. Which can also be wrong, and in my case, invariably is. But it feels like the least wrong option because no choice has been made and so life has not blown up in my face due to choosing the “wrong” thing.
Instead, I just slowly fall apart physically due to easily treatable medical issues because it’s so hard to actually decide to do things.
It’s so much easier to just ignore everything and hide out in my mental bunker, and let the days go by while my life slips away from it and the day I finally land in the hospital for good approaches and I could totally stop that from happening but I don’t.
Because deep down, I am actually looking forward to that day.
Because then I won’t have to decide what to do any more.
Because, then, finally, someone else will be in charge.
More after the break.
Looking at what I wrote earlier, I have to wonder if there is a deep part of me that has been waiting for someone else to take over for my entire life.
Patient readers know that I feel I more or less raised myself. There was never anybody there for me on an emotional level. My parents were both tired and uninterested and preferred to simple ignore my existence. I didn’t have any friends to talk to. The teachers were worse than useless and just wanted me to leave them alone.
Just like my parents, really.
And so I had a very lonely childhood. And not just lonely – alone. Words cannot describe how incredibly isolated and alone I was for large parts of my childhood.
And that’s just plain wrong.
And I think part of how I coped with that is that on a very deep level, I told myself that this was temporary. That eventually, some adult would notice my plight and rescue me from being entirely in charge of myself all the time and take over and look after me, guide me, discipline me, and otherwise care for me and relieve me of the burden of my own terrible, terrible autonomy.
It’s what my babysitter Betty had done for me, after all. And unlike the other kids, I didn’t go to kindergarten so I had absolutely no transition period between “cared for all the time” and “nobody cares fuck off”.
So part of me is still waiting for someone to come along and take over. Hence my constantly going on about clearly not being qualified to care for myself.
It seems like you can’t just skip developmental steps. I was given full autonomy far, far too early in life and that has left me with deep feelings of abandonment and isolation as well as severe self-esteem issues (because if nobody cares for you, there must be something horribly wrong with you, no matter how “gifted” you are, right?”) and absolutely no faith in my ability to care for myself.
There was nobody there to give me structure – so I never learned to structure myself. All I know how to do is keep myself entertained. I never learned self-discipline because I never needed to. Everything was so easy.
I never even had to learn to focus on the here and now.
And because I never (past school age) had anyone watching over me to keep me safe, I just plain stopped exploring and buried myself in my media consumption instead.
And here I am at 46, body falling apart due to neglect, leading a pathetically small and sad life when I have abilities many would kill for, stuck inside the invisible playpen walls I constructed when I was six years old, and wondering why I am so damned unhappy.
I guess it will remain a mystery forever.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.