Time to get more specific.
If I had as high an opinion of myself as my abilities warrant, what would change?
Well I guess I would stop hating myself. At least on some levels. For a while.
And that IS the whole point of the exercise : to solve my tragically low self-worth by applying the high worth of my talents to it.
I mean, surely it’s possible. Surely being a genius can help soothe my nearly fatally wounded ego and help me get to some kind of healthy equilibrium instead of being this bizarre and contradictory combination of self-loathing and total confidence.
I keep telling myself what a great guy I am, a truly amazing creature, and it helps for a while but then the chemical imbalance reasserts itself and I lose the distinction between feeling bad and being bad.
“But I’m awesome!” squeaked my ego.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP. ” said my imbalance.
Still, my ego gets a little stronger every day.
Besides, what good is being awesome if you’re still unhappy? If you still hate your stupid dignity free life but feel (despite how it looks) helpless to improve it? If no matter what you do, the darkness returns?
Anyhow, back to the damned ego thing.
How would I feel I went around thinking about what a great guy I am, a real wizard?
Nauseous. That’s how I’d feel. I’d sicken myself.
Not saying that’s a healthy reaction, but it’s what I’ve got to work with.
More seriously, I can imagine being happy with myself, at least. In theory. In practice, it’s kind of hard to imagine life without that constant gnawing self-doubt devouring me down in the bowels of my soul.
Jesus that’s depressing.
I think the problem is that I need proof. I need accomplishments, victories, things I can look back on and verify as evidence of my worth to society.
Being a genius sounds great but depression has no problem turning that into a negative to use against me too.
I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, with all these natural gifts, and all I do is squander them by playing video games all day.
I’m clearly not living up to my potential.
Well fuck you, it’s my potential and I’ll do what I want with it.
But that’s a very unhealthy view and I am vying to change it. I should be seeing my gifts as being like money in the bank just waiting for me to spend it, not as merely something that makes my life even more of an obscene farce.
Perhaps one of the things blocking the expansion of my ego is the feeling that if I believed in myself, I might feel compelled to, ya know, do stuff.
Ambitious stuff. Scary stuff. Outside my microscopic comfort zone stuff. Stuff that might truly wake me up inside to face the blaring blazing overstimulating real world that feels like it might shatter my mind with its intensity.
Presumably I’d get used to it eventually, if I manages to stick with it and not immediately go right back into my shell.
I dunno. Time for me to go down for a nap.
Maybe I will actually answer the question in the second half.
It’s proving to be quite slippery.
More after the break.
Just keep hacking away
The fact that I keep trying to grasp the subject of me and a potential big ego and it just keeps slipping through my fingers like a soapy ice cube is beginning to piss me off.
Which is good because it means I will stubbornly keep trying.
It may not be pretty, but sheer bloody-mindedness gets shit done.
So what’s making me shy away? How come I keep approaching the subject but then threadjacking myself into some other avenue of consideration?
Clearly it’s a very tender subject for me. Emphasis on the “very” because normally, when I find something I really don’t want to talk about, I have no problem honing right in on it and looting it of it therapeutic gold.
But when I try to tackle the really rough subjects like anger and self-worth, suddenly it’s soapy ice cube time.
How do I get around that? Asked and answered : sheer bloody-mindedness.
In other words, keep on trying.
One angle to look at is the conflict between what I want to get, a strong and healthy self-worth, and what I want to keep, which is my being an awfully nice fellow.
Like I said in a post recently, I love being nice. Can’t imagine being any other way.
And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that Big Ego Me would be a sarcastic jerk. And I am not sure why I feel that way. Those two things are not logically connected. There is no reason a big ego means being a big asshole.
Perhaps I am worried that unlocking the ego’s cage will inevitably let loose the sarcastic jerk that has been lurking inside me all this time.
I do have a hell of a lot of suppressed anger and a severely suppressed id.
Here comes Mister Hyde again. The Big Bad Bear. Shadow Fru.
But I learned from The Hulk and Doctor Jekyll and the Two Kirks. The only way to beat your dark side is to embrace it. Own it. Love it. Bring it back into the light and let it know that it can stay. Then sit down and listen to what it has been trying to tell you.
Rejection only strengthens it. As per Jung, It is made of all the things we do not accept about ourselves. Only through accepting that this, too, is a good and vital part of you that deserves to be heard can you defeat it.
So what is my dark side trying to express? Anger, obviously, from all the pain I have been through and all the loneliness and isolation I have endured.
Affection, too, both the need to get and to give it. Lust – so much lust. I have done almost nothing in my life to see that my sexual needs are met.
Only masturbation, and that only goes so far.
Passion, in all its forms. Ultimately that is what it’s all about. At some point, possibly when I was raped, I clamped down so hard on all possible passions because my intellectual outlook mistrusted them severely.
After all, who knows where they will lead? And with no faith in myself or the world, how can I possibly trust something I can’t verify intellectually?
If the answer to, “Where is this going?” is “I don’t know”, I’m not going.
And that is so goddamned limiting. So much of life requires you to take risks. Risks most people thankfully have no idea they are taking.
But boy, do I know.
When you never set foot on a road unless you know where it leads, you end up not going anywhere at all.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.