I have some very high level empowerment to do.

The long dormant state of my spirit (id) and my feral childhood plus my early almost total withdrawal from reality has left me feeling utterly powerless and led to the unfounded feeling of being unable to make things better for myself.

Like, in any way. Even if it’s just a matter of moving a few things.

My disability has only magnified this issue because it gives me this rich well of excuses for not doing anything or going anywhere in my life.

And those work… up to a point. But they don’t really stand up to scrutiny. The fact that my legs don’t work right does limit my options – I’m not exactly going to sign up to be a longshoreman any time real soon – but it’s hardly a total life-crippling issue.

There’s still plenty of things I can do. I just have to do them sitting down.

So let me state this as my baseline for this discussion :

I am physically capable of all kinds of remote work jobs and there is no reason I can’t actively and energetically pursue such employment.

Or even volunteer. Honestly, I just need meaningful things to do. Something to make me feel good about myself and less like a drain on society and those around me.

I must remember : I make things better when I’m around.

My point is that my physical disability is no excuse for remaining so detached and withdrawn from the world that I can’t do even little things to help myself.

Like clean off my bed so I can flip the mattress and save myself from the tyranny of those spikes poking up from below from the bedsprings poking through.

My upper legs and hips are covered in punctures and scratches for those things. One look at that and someone would be forgiven for thinking that I have either been self-harming or subject to torture.

And the thing is, I know I can fix this problem. It will take some work to clear off my bed but it can mostly be done while sitting or even laying on the bed and I don’t have to do it all at once either.

So all that is really keeping me from doing it is this deep and deadly and destructive desire to hide from the world and spend as little time and energy on life outside my screens as possible.

But there’s something even deeper and more toxic than that going on. It’s a terrible fear – a dread, really – of leaving the warm but fetid bunker I have built in my mind for the cold and exposed real world, with its overstimulation and exposure and other people.

I feel like at some point I was supposed to develop this hard outer layer to my personality that would protect me like a wetsuit or a knight’s armor as I navigate the physical and social world out there, and it just never happened.

I guess I never had the stimulation that leads to growing one. We tend to only develop the defenses we need in order to cope and by staying out of the real world entirely I ensured I would never “need” to toughen up.

That’s not a normal way to live. Most other people, even some of my fellow failures to launch, will feel the impetus to go out and find their place in the world. Especially, of course, when they are young.

But not me. I just kept hiding. Never with any sort of plan. It’s not like I made a conscious choice to stay in my cubby hole of a life forever.

I just couldn’t do anything else. Or so I thought.

But now I wonder if there’s something I could do to give myself a chance to start climbing out of this rotten hole of mind to face the world at last.

I can do this. I can fix things. I can make things better.

So why don’t I?

More after the break.

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It’s my responsibility

Part of the problem is definitely a fear of responsibility.

Taking responsibility for my own life and my own happiness sounds like a no-brainer. It’s one of the basic foundational virtues of modern society – self-reliance.

We are considered, by default, to be responsible for ourselves. That’s the hidden price of maximizing autonomy, freedom, and choice.

You have more options than ever, but you’re the one that has to choose among them.

But for me, self-reliance never fully arrived. There was that period when I first moved to this region in 1998 when I lived on my own in a bachelor apartment.

And I did fine once I was on welfare. Paid the rent, shopped for groceries once a month, hauled my laundry to the laundromat (ick), did the very minimal amount of cleaning needed when one lives in a closet, and got by thanks to, what else, the internet.

And I hope to go back to an expanded version of that some day. I know I have been amazingly lucky to have the awesome and supportive friends that I have, and there is definitely nothing wrong with them.

But ever since I moved out of said closet, I have had roommates, and ended up leaning pretty heavily on them for like, reality issues, and that’s not ideal.

I think I will need to live on my own for a while just to build up my confidence in myself and my ability to handle the real world.

Like I always say, I am perfectly capable of doing all the tasks involved in living on my own. So it’s just a matter of getting over myself first.

Not that I am expecting to strike out on my own any time soon. This is a medium term plan, for when I have my own earned income.

So I suppose I am only afraid of responsibility in the abstract. The idea of having to face that infinite corridor of infinite doors scares the hell out of me.

How could I possibly choose?

But realistically, our choices tend to be fairly limited by things like opportunity and location and vocation and such.

It’s still a pretty big corridor.

But a manageable one, I think.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.