When a potted plant grows too large for its pot, it needs to be repotted. If it isn’t, the plant’s roots will continue to spread out and grow in search of the nutrients a growing plant needs, but with nowhere to go, the roots bunch up under the soil instead. If left unchecked, this can cause the roots to take up so much of the soil inside their pot that they displace the soil and cause the plant to no longer have enough soil to support its growth.

So the plant stops growing and goes into a semi-dormant state. This state is called being rootbound, and it can kill the plant if it goes on long enough.

I have talked about what happens to other people when there are no jobs and therefore no ability to grow into adulthood.

Today I will talk about what it’s done to me.

But first, today’s video.

Funny stuff! Now, back to angst.

I have been severely rootbound for a very long time. Failure to grow is never cost free. All that growth is still within you, bunching up inside you and causing you great pain and suffering. You must grow, or die inside.

I have not been growing.

As a result, I have become severely ingrown. I have all this potential growth within me just waiting to bloom, but I can’t grow like I want to grow precisely because of the pain inside me from all that stunted growth.

That’s a Catch-22 for you.

Just to remind you nice people of the facts : I am 41 years old and I have never had a job that supported me. My last regular employment of any sort was in the mid Nineties. In terms of growth, this is practically identical to have never had any sort of job. I have never supported myself. I have always relied on others.

I have never gone to work in the morning, or adjusted to office life, or had to tough it out to learn a physically demanding job. I therefore qualify as a parasite on the body politic. Said body is not particularly hurt by me, true, but it is nevertheless a very poor position for developing self-respect.

And it does not keep me from feeling incredibly guilty for being a burden on not just society but everyone around me as well. I have felt incompetent and helpless and worthless for as long as I can remember. I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life when I felt qualified to exist. Even when I was in college, it was my brother who took care of the practical details of life.

I think the abandonment I felt at an early age, and the abuse I got even earlier, broke something vital inside me. Some vital part of one’s psychological skeleton is missing in me, some important bit that provides a solid fulcrum for ones efforts in the big bad world.

And so I have never felt complete. I have never felt… sufficient. No matter how good I get at recognizing my considerable talents, the sense of insufficiency persists. Somehow it never adds up to a legitimate person.

I’m an amazing guy. And yet, I still kind of hate myself. It’s just… easier, I guess. Belief in self leads to action, after all.

And action leads to going into situations where I would have to make decisions in realtime and thus not be able to control the results as well as I do online.

It means leaving my entirely passive comfort zone. And that is something I still have trouble doing. There are so many variables in the real world.

Oh, getting back to my biography of pathos, I have also never been in a relationship, or even had good sex. Even third generation poor kids from broken homes with no education manage to get laid and married. Not me.

I have been too good at hiding from the world.

So here I am, 41 and falling apart and rootbound as ever. VFS was supposed to be my ticket to a bigger, better pot, but the world just does not like me enough to allow those kinds of things to happen to me.

There are things I could do to maybe make that dream come true in the long run. I know what those things are. And I just don’t do them.

And I couldn’t tell you why.

There is such a thing as being too adaptable. I have clearly adapted to this rootbound life far too well. If I was less adaptable, then I would have found my situation intolerable and acted to change it.

But it’s amazing what you can get used to, when you’re a wimp.

So every day, my roots get longer and the pressure in my pot increases. I am terrified that I will burst my pot open and ends up just a disorganized pile of dirt and twigs on the floor somewhere.

I feel like I am barely keeping things together as is.

I feel like I need somebody else to be my skeleton. I am just not capable of producing my own structure. The endless empty days have left me formless and helpless. Adaptable, and maladapted. Brilliant, and hopeless.

It’s thoughts like these that make me wonder why I even bother with anything. Nothing is really going to change. I am clearly missing some vital element that would keep me focused and together. Until I get whatever that is, I will remain a sad little puddle at the bottom of life’s well.

But do no worry, my friends. I will carry on, no matter what. Even if the only place I end up is an early grave and a life that never even got started, I will carry my torch onwards into the night.

Who knows… maybe one day I will find the key to unlock myself, and be able to leave this sad and pointless life behind me.

Until then, the struggle continues.