You can’t reject your past without rejecting the person you are today because your past made you who you are today.
It’s a matter of acceptance. You want to learn to accept that whatever is in your past happened and there is nothing you can do about it now. Those things happened and left their mark, good or bad, on you, and you can’t change a single moment of it.
So there is no point in fighting your own memories. That doesn’t mean you have to dwell on them, or IN them for that matter.
It just means you have to do what you can to minimize the urge to push the memories down in your mind or try and pretend they never happened.
They happened. They are over and done with. They represent unalterable truth.
What you CAN change, however, is how you interpret your memories.
Like, nowadays I look back over my memories of my elementary school days and realize what a difficult child I was despite having the best of intentions.
For one, I was highly unpredictable. You never knew what I was going to say or how I was going to react to something.
About all you could predict is that whatever I said or did, it would not be normal.
I was also very blunt. Tact was a concept that did not really sink in for me until grade 5 or so. I grasped the concept easily enough. I could tell when characters on my beloved sitcoms had thoughtlessly said something they shouldn’t have, and I could judge them for doing so.
But it took a while for me to learn that this meant I have to kind of review things I was going to say before I said them and maybe not say them at all.
I think I was still trying to be the cute and clever kid from said sitcoms on some level, and those kids were always adorably blunt.
And I was, well, kinda pathetic. And gross.
I was a slob even back then. I was always rumpled and wrinkled and mussed. And I wasn’t the neatest of eaters, either.
As to the rest of hygiene, I can’t recall what my bathing schedule was like, or how often I brushed my teeth, and so on.
But with nobody paying much attention to me, I can’t imagine I took care of myself very well. After all, being a mess was my way of silently advertising the level to which I wa being neglected at home.
Of course, nobody saw it that way.
And I had a role in that as well because even back then, the smooth façade was in place, and I did not necessarily seem like a neglected child because I was so intelligent, articulate, and self-possessed.
And I am still like that today. I honestly can’t imagine letting my smooth façade slip. It is the shell in which I dwell, and I have no idea who I would be without it.
Someone a lot crankier, that’s for sure.
More after the break.
And fade to black
I have this feeling like I am fading away today, so I thought I’d write about it.
It’s been hard to stay awake. I’ve been bouncing in an out of Dreamland all day. Even when I am awake, I sort of feel like I am falling asleep any time I come to a rest for more than a minute or so.
It’s kind of a drag, man.
And emotionally I feel sort of listless and disjointed and angry in a very flat affect unfocused Black Hole Sun kind of way.
Obviously I have to link it now.
With occasional flareups of nihilistic rage as some dim part of me tries in vain to wake up and get my engine started.
That never lasts.
But I have been thinking a lot about the role of attitude in our subjective experience of life lately. One of depression’s subtlest tricks is to convince you that there is only one way to see reality – its way – but there’s actually a heck of a lot of wiggle room in how we react to life events both external and internal
So I tell myself :
“You are not objective. You are crazy. You are mentally ill. The version of reality you live in is a product of that mental illness and in your own,. less severe way, you are every bit as deluded as any psychotic. Don’t fall for depression’s old trick of making you think that if you FEEL bad, it’s because you ARE bad. ”
“Sorry kid, but life ain’t that fair. Good people can feel terrible for years without having done a single thing to deserve it. Your whole life could be massively unjust and unfair and there is no force in the universe whose job it is to set things right. ”
Wouldn’t it be wild if there were millions of people hating themselves and wanting to die because the alternative would be to face just how brutally unfair the universe is?
I’ve said before that one of the hardest things for the human mind to accept is the meaningless nature of the universe.
Things both horrible and sublime can happen and it means absolutely nothing. The universe isn’t trying to tell you anything. There is no great plan or great planner. There is no meaning of life and no inherent role for any of us that, if we can just find it, will mean that we are definitely doing what we are “supposed” to be doing and everything will be okay from that point on.
What meaning and purpose there is in life is there because we human beings manufactured it, not because the universe is just like that.
Even our pain has no meaning save the meaning we impose upon it.
The true lesson of existentialism is that this is not a bad thing. It is, in fact, quite liberating, because it means we can create our own rules and our own justice and continue to perfect them generation after generation until the end of time.
I’ve personally always seen the world as meaningless, heartless, and cruel.
To me, that just makes being kind to each other all the more important because if we don’t look after one another, nobody else will.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.