So let’s take a whack at the piñata full of maggots that is my desire for a “normal life”.
Patient readers know my formula for a “normal life” : a job that lets me support myself for the first time in my life and a boyfriend to cuddle and laugh and have actual sex with and a home I can call my own.
Doesn’t seem like too much to ask, does it?
But I’m crazy. So it is.
So that’s the normal life I want to lead. I want to finally graduate to adulthood by being able to earn a living and have my own place and be in a good relationship.
This nothing of a life of mine is intolerable. I have too much power and talent and charisma to spend the rest of my limited days of life rotting away in a filthy bedroom playing video games all god damned day.
I want more. I need more. I can do so, so much more.
I could make the right people a hell of a lot of money, given the chance. Sign me to your creative team and watch me light up the sky in your good name. Give me the resources and authority I need to make the kind of television I want to make, and people will be saying Shonda who?
But, ya know, I’d still be living that normal life I just mentioned. Ahem.
I suppose that’s one of the many complexities of my personality. There’s the part of me who is absolutely determined to settle down to a quiet suburban life with my Man of Life, and there’s the part of me that wants to set the world on fire with my gifts.
And that doesn’t even include how hard it is to choose WHICH gifts. I have so many!
I suppose those dreams are not really mutually exclusive. I am sure there are plenty of famous creatives who have a nice quiet “normal” lives.
I sure as heck have no desire for a mansion or a yacht or a bleeding Rolls Royce.
Those things might be fun for a little while but it wouldn’t be long before my deep homey-ness would assert itself and I would want quiet domestic bliss instead.
So I would be happiest in a modest middle class home in a modest middle class neighborhood like the one I grew up in.
Some place with lots of green and lots of families and a sense of community. A place of dinner parties and barbeques and a relaxed and friendly attitude.
And no bloody HOAs!
Sure, try to tell me how long my grass can be or what colors I am allowed to paint my house or what lawn ornaments I can have.
See how that works out for ya.
All I know is that this shit can’t go on forever. To quote The Police, I know that something somewhere has to break.
I will either bust out of this squalid cage of mine, or I will implode and my health will fall apart and I will go to an early grave.
Because I want to.
More after the break.
Can’t stop the hate
At this point in my life, hating myself is not just a symptom, it’s a habit.
And like all deeply ingrained habits. it no longer requires any justification. Habit is its own reward. It is the path of least resistance. It’s the most cognitively efficient route.
Going with it feels good. Going against it feels bad. And this is all governed by a very ancient and powerful part of our brain.
Habit is like a programmable instinct.
And that’s why despite how I keep pumping myself up by reminding myself how goddamned amazing I am, all that hot air drains right back out me the moment I stop concentrating on it.
My brain returns to normal, and my normal sucks.
But habit is not destiny. It can be overcome. The deeper mind will resist but if you keep the pressure up your mind with inevitably bend in the right direction until it’s in a much healthier shape than before.
So I am going to keep pumping myself up as often and as well as I can until I force the birth of a new normal where I love or at least like myself and where I feel comfortable in my own skin and content to be myself and I am finally able to act in the world from a grounded and stable starting point and thus act effectively.
Wow, I didn’t know even half of that before I started writing about it.
What will keep me pumping is the fact that even after all the air goes out of the balloon it’s still not the same balloon it was before I started pumping. It’s a little bigger, a little stronger, a little more flexible. And that means the next pump-up will encounter less resistance and thus be easier to do and go further than before.
And I am not falling for my depression’s bullshit scare tactic of making me feel like I will develop delusions of grandeur if I let my ego start to rise any more.
Yeah, it can feel that way sometimes as my needle swings too far in the other direction from all my self-hate. Overcompensation is inevitable when you are trying to recover from an imbalance this egregious.
The pendulum has to swing back and forth in pretty extreme arcs at first before losing its momentum and ending up somewhere in the middle.
So I will not let those first big swings scare me any more.
There’s a lot of room between self-loathing and narcissism. I am positive I can land somewhere comfortably between those poles.
But first, I have to let that pendulum swing free.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.