It has occurred to me lately just how artificial and unnatural my life has been.
Now, I do not mean “unnatural” in any of the profoundly illogical and laughably wrongheaded ways people have abused the word in the past. The only “unnatural” form of sex is abstinence. Otherwise, every critter in the world gets its freak on and nature is not too choosy about how. Nature merely says “do that thing that feels good” and assumes that instinct will get enough of the right bits into their counterparts to propagate the species and anything else that happens is harmless biological exuberance.
Nor do I mean it in the sense that some foods are “natural” and others “artificial”. Whatever you are making something out of, it comes from nature, whether it’s the pure sweet honey from wild bees feeding from free range aloe plants lovingly and humanely transported by Andean monks, or the cheapest and most chemically unique of plastic products.
Oil is just as much the product of Mother Nature’s bounty as honey, after all. To suggest there is some sort of moral distinction between the two is to indulge in magical thinking of the most basic sort. Argue about healthy and unhealthy foods all you like, that has a basis in science and can be verified. But all that is possible is natural.
So much for the petty moralists.
No, when I say I have led an unnatural life, what I mean is that I have led a life which has been highly proscribed and compartmentalized by my desire to be logical and reasonable and sensible, to the point where all emotion is suspect and there are powerful all-encompassing blocks between emotion and action that render me essentially without motivation or even basic normal emotional functioning, and hence, I am a very ill man, emotionally speaking, and all in the name of supposedly being “smart”.
Well, smart is as smart does, and this smart doesn’t do jack shit.
It is like a ferociously micromanaged office. The office manager (my superego, I suppose) has lost all sense of proportion and is obsessed with making absolutely sure that every single thing, no matter how minor, is done in exact accordance with policy, and so doing absolutely anything requires his express permission, and he is just one overworked and overstressed guy, so there is only so many things he can approve in any given time, and so things happen very, very slowly and inefficiently.
And all in the name of efficiency, of course.
And eventually, things just grind to a halt, and the business of the office as part of a larger organization ceases entirely, and the office barely scrapes through each day doing the minimum required to keep the office itself going, and not very well.
And lots of parts of the office have not done anything ever, or not done anything in a long long time, and so the employees there are practically dead from boredom and have long since forgotten what it is they are supposed to be doing, let alone how to do it.
And all, of course, in the name of logic and reason!
What I am getting at is that this determination to always be logical and rational has had the effect of completely usurping the natural ecology of a normal person’s emotional metabolism. Certain things are supposed to simply happen naturally, flowing one to the other according to the purely internal logic of one’s unique emotional landscape, and not according to some preconceived and unnatural and unhealthy notion of how one’s emotions “should” work.
No wonder I feel so cold and dead inside. All this blocking and checking compleyely inhibits the lifeblood of my emotional life from getting to all the parts of my mind that desperately need it, and so I am downright cyanotic if not positively necrotic inside.
At the very least, I am more asleep than awake inside, and the pain I feel when I try to become motivated to do things outside my comfort zone is possibly nothing more than the pain one feels when trying to wriggle something life into your foot when it has fallen asleep.
Sadly, this bogus rationality is not something someone can simply decide to stop doing, all at once. It is a foundational axiom of my entire psyche, and you cannot simply throw those into the outer darkness without dire consequences for one’s very sanity.
But perhaps, with my therapist’s help, I can unpack, thaw, and release enough of these blockages to begin to be able to live a more natural and wholesome and happy life.
I want to be alive.