It has occurred to me that in order to transition from infancy to adulthood, like I want to do, I will kind of have to be a child for a while along the way.
I am not, at the moment, happy about that.
For one thing, I have no idea what that would even look like. Arguably I already live like a child on summer vacation. I spend all day entertaining myself. I have no responsibilities. I don’t have homework, or any other kind of work.
So what difference would it make?
Maybe the truth of it all is that I’ve been a child all these years. A weak and reclusive one, but a child nonetheless.
Well that would save some time.
A child with infant emotional patterns? I dunno. Children deal with things by attracting people to nurture them sometimes too, I suppose.
But most kids are more self-motivated and adventurous than I am. They explore, they try things, they get into trouble, they act on emotion, they learn by doing.
So if I am still a child, I am the kind of child I was : terrified, weak, isolated, easy to ignore, unable to advocate or pursue his own needs.
Well it’s someplace to start.
Call it being an arrested child. After all, it’s not like I got to have a real childhood. All that vital social development and the emotional maturity it brings passed me by entirely.
Things grow strange in the dark. And my childhood was midnight black.
So my next step is still childhood. Just a better one.
No idea how to pull that off. As usual, I know where I want to go but I have no idea how to get there. All routes require jumps I just cannot make, spans I cannot cross.
Maybe I just need to get better at jumping, then. Because figuring out how to get there via moves I can actually make seems impossible to me now.
Well one thing I have learned from video games is that if the problem seems impossible to solve, you’re looking at it wrong, and it’s time to pull back and rethink. Examine your assumptions and see if any of them are flawed,
Not easy for me given that whole “lack of a reverse gear” thing I talked about yesterday. My mind wants to rocket ahead full speed, and that’s very powerful but sometimes that is just plain the wrong tool.
And you can waste time trying to turn a screw with a wrench, or you can put the wrench down and pick up a freaking screwdriver.
Easier said than done.
So I will contemplate this seemingly intractable problem of not knowing how to get where I want to go via moves I have available to me.
Maybe the solution is there but my ancient psychological defenses are keeping me from seeing it because a solution would threaten the old regime.
The only way to overcome that is to keep plugging away at the problem, either subconsciously or consciously, until the ice melts and the fog clears and there’s the solution right where it was supposed to be.
It’s happened before.
Time to make it happen again.
More after the break.
Facing the future
Never been my strong suit.
Even back when I actually had a future, I didn’t think about it. All through high school, it was very clear that I was supposed to be thinking about what I was going to do after graduation, but I somehow never really got around to it,.
Of course, I am kicking myself for that now. With my academic record, I could have gone to any school in Canada, and on a full scholarship, most likely.
But that would have required focus and ambition and the ability to take things seriously, and I didn’t have any of those back then.
Instead, I took my post-high school life entirely for granted. I knew I would go to college afterwards, so I didn’t give it much thought at all. Which one? Dunno.
I was such an idiot.
So when my parents told me and my brother, “you’re going to UPEI because that’s the one we can afford (or so they said)”, I shrugged and said “okay dokey”.
And I liked my time at UPEI. I like my courses and my professors and my friends.
But it is not a good university. I could have done so much better. My academic average was over 90 percent.
And I know that I could have made a fantastic impression on scholarship committees and other funding bodies.
But oh well. Such thinking did not fit with my happy go lucky personality.
And I have done precious little planning for my future since. I’m like the class passive literary character to whom things happen but never at their own instigation.
Every time I have made a big change, like moving, it has not been my decision. It’s been because in one way or another I got kicked out of the situation I was in.
Usually, it was because roomies got sick and tired of me. I don’t blame them. I was much more burdensome when I was more depressed and the fog in my mind was much thicker and more opaque.
It can be pretty rough having the world’s oldest (and smartest) infant around.
I can be quite draining.
So really, the only thing I can truly own is going to Kwantlen then VFS. That was all me. My own initiative, my own impetus, and my own effort getting shit done.
Sadly, I screwed up the UNO job and then foolishly let myself sink back into depression, and then Skyrim happened and tore me up inside, and I have not made it back into the light since I crawled out of that goddamned hole.
In fact, I have never really recovered from Skyrim because that’s where I got addicted to playing video games all the time.
And I still do that today. It’s the main thing holding me back. The addiction makes it so hard to do anything else, such as the sort of things that might get me somewhere.
It’s a hard problem to get a grip on. I’ve become deeply dependent on the soothing state of mind I get into when playing a game and listening to music or a Reddit video.
In there, I am calm and happy and engaged, safe from the pressures and anxieties (oh, the anxieties) of the real world.
It’s killing me. But I can’t fight it alone.
Guess it’s time to look up Video Game Addicts Anonymous.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.