And therefore, I already am.
Time to wrestle with my fear of my own power and attendant issues.
Yes, again. The previous rounds were inconclusive.
It’s easy to see my fear of my own quite significant gifts as being a function of my depression, and perhaps that’s all it is.
Make me too scared to even focus my powers on a particular goal, let alone actually wield them to that end and face resistance from the world, and that will most definitely keep me all bottled up in this measly little life of mine.
Put a pin in that bit about resistance, though. That seems important.
I’m definitely scared of the world. To the extreme. My only safety lay in concealment and/or not being noticed for a formative chunk of my childhood. That was the only way I could be safe from my bullies.
And that bad programming runs awfully deep. Try as I might, here I am 44 years later and I still can’t convince myself that I’m safe.
So part of my fear of using my own powers is definitely fear of attracting attention to myself. That greatest of terrors for the avoidant and socially anxious : exposure.
Because for shy folk like myself, exposure equals death. We live in constant fear of a predator that lives in our head and these anxious and avoidant tendencies we develop are, we are convinced against all reason, what keeps us “safe” from this overblown shadow puppet we use to scare ourselves.
So yeah. Fear of exposure is definitely a big part of it.
And as I haver said here before, fear of the responsibility implied by my outsized brain and all its powers is another factor.
I have a strange relationship with responsibility. On one level, I dodge it like Scooby Doo dodges ghosts. I can’t help but feel it as a noose closing around my body trying to trap me and that is Very Much Not Good so I flee.
But on another level, I am perfectly fine with it. Doesn’t bother me at all.
I suppose it all depends on how competent I feel to uphold said responsibilities. If I am one hundred percent sure I can do it, it’s no big deal.
Like when I was organizing FRED. Minimal work, easy and fun. No problem.
But when I am not sure, it becomes a source of anxiety and therefore something I very much seek to avoid.
And thirdly, there’s the question of what I would even do with these powers of mine if I could access them.
That leads directly back to that giant crushing question of WHAT DO I WANT?
And I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I haven’t fully recovered from being afraid to want anything, sad to say. At some point I adopted an attitude of never wanting things because whatever it is, I can’t have it, so wanting it can only cause me pain.
It’s like the world’s worst version of Buddhism.
And even I can see that is a horrible attitude and a terrible way to go through life. No wonder I have such a cold interior, I have cut myself off from the very base of all existence which is desire.
And with the stuff I know I want, like a job and a boyfriend, it doesn’t really feel real. If I suddenly had the ability to grant myself these things whenever I wanted to, I am not sure that I would.
Right now they are safely locked away in my dreams of “some day”.
The thought of them being REALLY real, like right now, makes my tummy hurt.
More after the break.
My dark side
Another aspect of my fear of my own strength is that when I start thinking the evil thoughts and that scares me.
It’s easy to be virtuous and sweet and nice when you have no power. No power means no temptation. If you have no reason to be bad, why not be good?
After all, then people will like you. And there is a certain advantages to being harmless. To being no kind of threat to anybody. Makes people feel safe around you and in the crazy world we live in now, people need that feeling of safety.
Neil Innes gets it.
But like poor ol Ringo Starr found out, being the cute one can be rather limiting and even quite humiliating when it comes time to stop being a fluffy little cloud and start being an actual person, with dignity, drives, and desires.
And when I start seriously thinking about making my way in the world and going after the things that I want, that’s when ol’ Machiavelli rears his ugly head.
He’s always lurking around in my mind somewhere, the prick.
See, with my combination of empathy, insight, and intelligence, I could be quite the schemer behind the scenes. I can think concentric rings around most people and it would be a trivial matter for me to use that fact to make people do whatever I want them to do just by manipulating them on a level too sophisticated for them to see.
It would be like doing magic tricks for a kindergarten class. Easy.
And I have known this to be true for a very long time. The feeling of being a giant among pygmies, or rather an adult among pygmies, is overwhelming sometimes and that’s why this is a subject I have zealously avoided thinking about.
Because it creeps me out. Makes me feel all wiggly and weird inside.
The takeaway from this discussion is, I think, that this new sense of self I am laboring to create has to rely a lot less on my self-image as cute, fluffy, and harmless, and has to include my being potentially threatening to people.
God, I hate the very sound of that.
But I think it’s where I need to go.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.