I know I’ve talked about this stuff before. But bear with me.
I’ve known myself to have a multifaceted personality ever since my early teens, when I discovered how much I identified with the late great Robin Williams.
I saw this thing about how much fun both he and the animators had when he showed up to voice the Genie in Aladdin and one of the talking hairdos interviewing him referred to his performances as “schizophrenic” and that really stuck with me.
Because while I saw why they said that, I knew they were wrong. I knew that while it might seem that way to an innocent outsider, I knew he was the same person no matter what voice he was using.
Because I’m the same way.
It’s not really about having a head full of voices like an actual psychotic.
It’s about having far too much to express for one static persona to be anywhere near enough to express it all.
Hence my being such a shapeshifter. And mask maker/wearer. There’s far too much going on in my head and my heart at any given moment for me to express without the freedom to shift around and strongly emote whatever pops into my head.
Luckily, I more or less manage to do most of that behind the scenes, so I can maintain a fairly consistent outward persona.
Otherwise I’d seem way nuttier than I already do.
Right now, I can write it all off as being “wacky” or “zany”.
But I want more. A lot more. This time, I am going to try to hold on to the idea that my happiness comes from being busy instead of letting the idea slip away like a wet bar of soap in a too-eager hand because it’s so incompatible with the rest of my mind.
What with all that anti-effort bullshit still hanging around.
What I am trying to do is reinforce the idea that moving to a more effort-rich lifestyle is not about punishing myself or making myself do something for my own good – it’s all about doing something that will feel good while I do it and feel even better once I have done it enough to dissipate all this excess energy superheating my brain.
Maybe then I could learn to look forward to my time instead of viewing it as something I simply must endure.
This “survival mode” bullshit has got to end. I realized today that my mind automatically extends into the future in a completely insane way, as if the only point of life is to last as long as you can and conserve absolutely everything for… a rainy day?
At this point, I have enough stored up to survive the biblical Flood.
It’s a lot like hoarding, or its more organized and focused twin, prepping. You compulsively retain and stockpile not because you know something terrible is coming but because you are incapable of actually having a good time and the cold comfort of having made it through another day.
Except with anti-effort, you’re not stockpiling jack shit. You are, in fact, wasting a lot of valuable personal energy by not using it and letting it go to waste.
And all in the name of not becoming anxious…. by not really living.
I think I’d rather be scared and alive, to be honest.
More after the break.
I’d be crabby if I was rich
It just occurred to me that I am actually a fairly cranky person. I just keep it under wraps.
Throughout my day, a lot of sarcastic and grumpy comments will pass through my head when something annoys me.
But being a sensitive and civilized human being, I don’t say them.
I mean, even regular folk of average abilities shouldn’t go around grousing at people all the time, like their bad mood gives them the right.
But I have superlative verbal skills and a caustic wit, and I could do a lot of damage with a single cutting remark.
So I keep my rapier wit in its scabbard.
After all, I don’t want it getting any rapier.
But things might change if I were rich. Wealth does tend to bring out the worst in people and I am not so foolish as to think myself immune.
Because if I was rich, the power dynamics of my life would shift radically. I would pursue my dream of gathering a big “second family” around me by having a large house and filling it with people I like.
So far so good. But I am pretty sure that would unlock the “angry middle class father” part of my brain and I can see myself stomping about the place muttering about how this is MY house and things should be how I want them and would it kill people to PICK UP AFTER THEMSELVES and so forth and so on.
In other words, I’d turn into my Dad (RIP), god damn it.
Well, forewarned is forearmed. As far as I can tell, the only way to keep from turning into your parents is to acknowledge that it’s a possibility even with the best of intentions and so you have to ask yourself the very tough question of what made them how they are so you can head that shit off at the pass.
And I sure don’t want to end up a glowering grump like my late father, who ruined any chance of a close relationship with his kids by making us terrified of him.
And yet, I know those forces are within me. The bitterness, the emotional reactivity, the tendency to interpret emotional cues very negatively, the pessimism, even the tendency to react to hurt with anger, it’s all in there waiting to be activated.
So all I can do is watch myself and be ready to squash or (better) redirect that crap when it tries to take control of me.
We don’t have to play our bad tapes. We don’t have to follow our programming.
But to be truly free, we have to be ready to hit Ctrl-Break at the right time.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.