And all I really want to do right now is take a nap.
Here is why :
With apologies to the ghost of Robert Frost :
But I have promises to keep
And words to write before I sleep
And words to write before I sleep
So I will have to just muddle on through like I always do.
I suppose if I was a more driven, focused, and disciplined person, I would not find myself muddling through and improvising quite so much.
But I would also be way more serious and way less fun and my boundless creativity would be smothered under all that structure, so fuck that.
Patient readers already know the story behind my lack of self-discipline. School was always so easy for me that I never even had to study, so I never had to develop any kind of grit or determination or the will to overcome myself to get by.
And there was certainly nobody in my life who cared enough to tell me to straighten up and fly right, for fuck’s sake, or I would end up just another hikikomori statistic, another brilliant little birdy who failed to fly when kicked out of the nest.
In that sense, there was no failure to launch. We launched just fine.
We just crashed immediately after.
Because something happened in our development that left us convinced that there was no way we’d survive in the outside world.
It doesn’t make any logical sense. We general possess the basic skills needed to make it in the world. Paying bills and rent is not all that complicated, after all.
Working a job is a whole thing, but it’s possible to survive without one, and what the hell, flipping burgers ain’t that hard either.
I wonder what role inadequate father figures play in our debility. In the classic gender based parenting setup, your mother is the one who cares for you, nurtures you, looks after you, and keeps you safe.
And the father is the one who is supposed to encourage you to take risks, learn from your mistakes, overcome your limitations, and strive.
You can see how such a balanced setup could lead to a well grounded, confident, secure young person who is ready to take on the world.
But if one of those roles is not adequately fulfilled, the child ends up highly neurotic.
Without a sufficient mother figure, the child never learns caution, restraint, nurturing, gentleness, and how to express love.
And without a proper father figure, the child grows up to be cowardly, timid, fearful, scared of the world, abd with zero confidence in their ability to take risks and survive let alone their ability to overcome their fears in order to grow strong and resilient.
And that sounds like us failure to launch types to me.
So often we are highly intelligent and creative yet we lack the sort of confidence and self-assuredness it takes to expand our boundaries, overcome our limitations, and go out and find our place in the world.
Instead we collapse in on ourselves due to a total lack of grit and internal structure and so we never graduate into pre-adulthood, let along becoming actual grownups.
Especially if, like me, you were removed from university halfway through and forced back into your childhood, essentially, by selfish Boomer parents.
I still haven’t gotten over that and it happened thirty years ago. Blaming my misfortunes on my parents is not very productive and indeed functions largely as a cheap excuse not to take responsibility for myself, but it’s all I have for now.
I want to get over it and move on with my life. But I can’t. The wound is too large and I am going to need to do some serious healing before this spindly soul of mine is ready to stand on its own.
Or I dunno. Maybe that’s just a bullshit excuse and all I really need to do is get the fuck over myself, grow a pair, and get on with it.
Guess we’ll never know.
More after the break.
Gnawing on that limb
The fact that the best metaphor I can think of for what it feels like to go against the groove I am stuck in is a trapped animal having to gnaw off a limb to escape a trap is fucked up beyond belief even by my standards.
And I know that it’s the latest – and possibly the last – manifestation of the power of my mental illness to keep me in my place. It provides a deep primal form of resistance to action because now my insanity has highjacked the instincts that keep us from hurting our own bodies by telling us not to do things like bend our wrist too far or over-extend our elbow or the like.
They say that in order to be free, one must give up a little part of oneself, and I feel like that’s the crossroads I am at right now.
I have successfully penetrated to the very heart of my madness and now I have to work up the nerve to kill it even though I know it’s going to make it feel like that would be like killing myself, or worse, mutilating myself horribly and permanently.
I know that it’s an illusion of sorts. I say “of sorts” because sometimes what seems like an illusion is a representation in symbolic form of a true force or idea in the mind and in that sense it is “real”.
I think what is really going on may be that I am close to breaching the outer wall of my enclosure and hence the struggle between my desire to be free and my desire to be “safe” within these walls is reaching a fever pitch and the question of, “Do I really want to go out there?” will have to be answered in the firm affirmative some time soon.
After that, whatever happens, happens.
It’s not like I’m in control anyhow.
Don’t ask me, I just work here.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.