Had a specious freakout earlier today and last night.
Counted the cash in my wallet. Was surprised (for some reason) that there was only around $925 there. Somehow expected a lot more.
Immediately leapt to the conclusion that a whole bunch of money had gone “missing”. I did the math : the check I cashed on Friday was for $1300, plus I had $200 or so left over from the previous month, so I should have like… $1500!
That means over $500 is MISSING! Oh noes! Calamity! Debacle! FINANCIAL LOSS!
And thus I started a slow burn freakout about the whole thing. I sat there wracking my brains over where the missing money could be. Did it fall out of my wallet somehow? Did the bank not give it to me? WAS IT THE GNOMES AGAIN???
Um, forget I said that. There are no gnomes. There are. No. Gnomes.
Finally the anxiety boiled over and I blurted my troubles out to Julian on the way to Wound Care today, and he was kind enough to brave my waves of hysteria in order to remind me that $600 was indeed missing…. because I’d used it to pay my rent.
D’oh! I instantly felt both stupid and relieved, a combination of emotions I know all too well. I have a well known history of leaping to conclusions both negative and absurd.
But I don’t beat myself up too much over these incidents because I know where they come from : background anxiety accumulates in my mind like (as?) electrical charge and eventually it spontaneously discharges as one of these silly freakouts.
It’s a lot like a moral panic in that sense. Unaddressed fears and tension build up until some news item or rumour provides a “path to ground” and it drives perfectly sound citizens temporarily crazy and they freak out over some bit of nonsense that emerged from the collective unconscious until the fever passes and they all end up feeling rather silly about the whole thing and quickly forget about it.
I don’t have the luxury of burying mine in an unmarked grave at midnight.
But I try not to dwell.
Of course, the real long term solution would be to learn to process and express my emotions, passions, and energies well enough that I don’t have this pattern of escalating undischarged anxiety in the first place.
And I am working on it.
But it’s slow going because I have to laboriously work through all of this bullshit consciously and logically, in writing, because I lack the capacity to make any kind of leap of faith and so everything has to make sense and fit together.
And that takes a long goddamned time. It’s like crossing a chasm by building a bridge across it instead of jumping across.
The only benefit is that if you are lucky, others will be able to follow behind you and not have to go through what you did because of your work.
Hopefully, one day, I will use what I have learned from all this blogging to write a beautiful allegorical tale of overcoming the darkness and finding your way to the light despite a long and miserable captivity.
Knowing me, it will probably be about a sad little robot,
More after the break.
A really big ego
The problem I have been agonizing over for a while now of how to deal with the reality of my outsized intellect and abilities has one obvious, natural solution :
Develop a really huge ego. Simple, really.
And on paper I have no philosophical or moral objection to that. I have no belief in humility as a virtue unto itself nor do I feel I need to hide my light under a bushel just because other people can’t handle how bright it is.
I’ve always held that you have the right to as big an ego as you can sustain as long as you’re not using it as an excuse to hurt people.
But I have always shied away from developing that kind of ego out of feeling a sort of reverse vertigo that makes me feel like I will go rocketing into the sky if I let my ego rise and lose myself forever in the stratosphere of Ziggy Stardust egotism and delusions of grandeur and other upper atmospheric mental illnesses.
And that thought truly terrifies me. I feel like I could lose myself forever if I went that way. End up some drooling raving cackling maniac in a rubber room somewhere.
Whether this is a real possibility or just yet another phantom my depression cooked up to keep me under its thumb is up for debate.
Maybe I would be fine. Sure, my ego would shoot up and I might be a little crazy for a while, but then it would settle back down to a much higher but still sane level and then I would be much saner and happier Fru.
But then again…. maybe not.
It’s too big a risk to take, and that’s what my depression is counting on. That bastard.
So it’s up to me to figure out how to inflate my ego balloon a little at a time. Sure, the urge to release the pressure all at once is strong (typical male) but the best course of action is to take it slow and safe, at least for now.
I don’t think I can ever have an ego proportionate to my abilities. It’s just too much for any personality structure I can think of to withstand.
I’d need some kind of strong stabilizing force to anchor me and remind me that I am merely human in order to let that big balloon bloom.
Problem is, I have no idea what that could be. In theory, it would have to be someone who can humble me and hopefully even kick my ass now and then when I need it.
Or, whispers my long suffering id, I could just let go completely and deal with the consequences when I return to sanity.
Appealing thought but far too irresponsible for me.
I will keep working on it.
Such delicate compromises I must forge!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.