So it’s up to me to go out and get it done. I don’t have artificial external motivation assistance like I normally do. It’s the sort of thing I have to do myself, beginning to end.

That makes it a very good test case for my newly hatched project to be more of a grownup.

And I almost made it. But then that sneaky evil advisor in my brain said “But it’s cold and rainy out, and you have that chest thing that keeps threatening to turn into a chest cold plus that raw scratchy feeling in your throat… do you really want to go out there and risk turning that into like, double pneumonia?”

(That’s pneumonia in both lungs. Very nasty. )

And that was just enough of a valid point to keep me in. I had even been planning on treating myself to a meal at White Spot on the way back home in order to reward myself for going out there and doing the grown up thing.

But no. Didn’t make it. And now I am left dancing on the edge of a knife trying to figure out how to work this information so that it leads to positive action and not self-loathing, depression, and the downward spiral.

Sure, it’s my own personal hell down there, but I’m used to it.

My first thought was “I hate myself for not going!”. But that’s wrong. That’s exactly the kind of thinking I am trying to correct in myself. A better version : “I hate that I didn’t go.” Still too harsh, but… better.

It’s hard to know what emotional interpretation is safe. My overactive superego has had the run of my mind for a long time, and it has grown strong and powerful and very devious when it comes to subverting everything to its agenda.

On the one hand, I need to kill that fucking machine of mine. Scratch that, I want to kill the machine. Desire is stronger than need. I want to smash every last bit of it with a sledgehammer made of rage and pain. And that means stopping it from damaging me with all its usual tricks.

But on the other hand, you can’t improve yourself without some idea of what it is you are trying to fix. You can’t totally turn off your self-consciousness and capacity for self-reflection. And most importantly, you can’t entirely deactivate the part of you that judges your actions and assigns positive or negative value to them.

So the trick is to correct the excesses of the machine without utterly destroying it. As always, the solution is complicated, nuanced, and middling, and not something that satisfies the id with its purity and simplicity.

The id hates all this complicated crap and just wants to kick some ass. And I am letting it for now, because I need the id’s strength and power of identity to smash all the evil parts of the machine.

Good Kirk needs Evil Kirk around, at least for now.

I can feel the id stirring within me, wanting to be set loose. I know the direction it wants me to go. The direction of arrogance, elitism, dismissiveness, self-indulgence, and callous sarcasm. It wants me to tell the whole goddamned world to go fuck itself, destroy everything that is holding me back, and ride a flaming rocket into the sky.

I’m a goddamned genius and I deserve to be treated like one, it says. Who are all these primitives and savages to stand in my way? Why must I walk on eggshells through a world full of Lilliputian intellects? They should be the ones worrying. I could stride through this world like a king.

But I can’t go there. If I let that side of me take over, not only would it make me a pretty terrible human being, but I am pretty sure I would end up super crazy. If I let my lomg suppressed ego do the driving, I am pretty sure I would lose touch with reason and reality, at least for a while.

I don’t know if I would become actively delusional. Probably not. But I am pretty sure that white-hot arrogance and raging egotism could land me in jail, or the loony bin, or both.

Or just turn me into a big scary ranting homeless dude. Those kind of ego trips could be very addictive.

Still, I am really tired of being afraid of that side of me. My machine is very good at using that fear to keep me in my place. I am going to have to make peace with that side of me, the reverse image of my depression, in order to put my two Kirks together again into one functional, happy, integrated human being.

Where’s a transporter controlled by Scotty when you you need one?

So once more, I try to figure out how to integrate the truth about my intellect and capabilities into my self-image without turning into a raving loon or an unmitigated prick. There has to be a sane middle ground between thinking you’re the Messiah and thinking you’re shit, and I am going to keep looking till I find it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.