In fact, I have loads of missions. Dozens of them.

Okay, not really.

Sorry, no 5th dimensional hijinks tonight. Not quite sure where I am going next. I know some things, but not enough to put them together into an actual plot. So, think time is needed.

Hope everybody liked Silence Speaks. I know Felicity did.

Turns out my standup comedy thing isn’t till next Friday. Apparently Felicity did a far better job of reading and remembering the emails from David Granrier than I did. Do’h! Good thing I brought it up last night or things could have gotten very stupid.

It’s hard being a genius and doofus at the same time. Einstein’s wife, and all that. It’s hard to see the genius under the cluelessness.

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I have decided, tentatively, that I am great.

And not just in the sense of “the new Daredevil series is really great!”, but in the sense of “some people are born great, some people achieve greatness in their lives, and some people have greatness thrust upon them.”

I have tried humility and it hasn’t worked out. And for whatever reason, I have a tendency to go from one extreme to the other. It’s like I have to wobble back and forth like a pendulum until air resistance drags me to compromise.

It’s like when there is an air bubble trapped at the bottom of a bottle of water. A tap on the plastic, and it goes all the way to the top with no stops in between.

Oh well, I have often suspected the reason I am such a passionate moderate is that I have to keep so many conflicting forces inside me in balance that it makes me always seek the moderate middle path.

What appears to be peace can turn out to be the result of powerful forces being carefully balanced.

So anyhow, I have decided that I am a great person, in both senses. I have spent so long feeling like I was worse than nothing, that I was actually a liability and a burden and the world would be better off without me (ouch), that I got all cramped up and stuck in that position.

It is shocking to realize that you feel guilty for existing.

So fuck that. I am an amazing person and I have nothing to be ashamed of. And I am going to keep saying that until it penetrates all the way to the core of my psyche.

And yeah, I know I have been down this road many times before in this very space. Sometimes you have to circle the block many times before you find a place to park, okay?

In fact, I may have said this before too : I think one of the big barriers to my accepting my extra-ordinariness is that I just don’t want to accept the responsibility. If I truly am extraordinarily gifted, then I would have to accept an obligation to do something worthy with my gifts, and I just can’t seem to accept that kind of burden.

It scares the shit out of me.

That’s why I keep asking people if they think intelligence comes with an obligation to use it.

I guess I am hoping they will say “no”.

But it’s not the world telling me that accepting my extraordinary skills would be accepting their burden as well. It’s my basic nature telling me that. I believe down to the roots of my soul that the only acceptable world is one in which power and responsibility are always in strict one-to-one parity, and so for me, fully accepting the good parts of being very intelligent without accepting the burdens is not an option.

I realize that is a somewhat rigid and limiting way of seeing things, but it’s what I’ve got to work with.

But what does it say about me that I would rather be powerless and hence free of responsibility than powerful and obligated? I have this deep reaction to anything that seems like it would restrict my freedom of action or limit my intellectual (or literal) maneuverability. Like it would kill me, or worse, trap me.

Maybe some things are worth being trapped for, though. Maybe all this “freedom” comes at too high a cost.

And aren’t I the person always complaining about option paralysis while also complaining about feeling like my life is a deep dark Gulag with exceptionally cruel Cossack guards?

There’s just a whole mess of mutual exclusivity there. Those can’t all be true at the same time. There has to be some kind of sane and rational middle path through this tangled jungle of psychological extremes.

Part of me thinks the only answer is to stop negotiating peace between all the conflicting influences and let them finally have the big WWII sized war I’ve been holding back all my life, and let the chips fall where they may. Sure, the war will be brutal, but when it is all over, the conflicts will be resolved and the tension will be gone.

The iron hand of self-control can easily turn into the hand on your throat choking the life out of you. Maybe it’s time I threw open the cages and let the animals sort it out amongst themselves.

And this time, I am not going to bring this all back to somewhere rational and safe at the end. No “Oh, but I could never… ” or “I don’t know if I am even capable of… ” or “I wouldn’t even know where to start…” or all that shit.

I have been safe and rational for a long long time. My overreaching superego is proof of that. I have brutally repressed myself on nearly every level for decades, compressing myself into an unnaturally tiny space in search of some elusive and impossible sense of calmness and safety.

And all the while, that Jagoff of mine, my eternal enabler, is there to convince me that it isn’t so bad and hey, it’s no big deal, we can still have fun in this perpetual state of home arrest.

Fuck that guy. I’m going to stop being content and start being angry enough to do something about my captivity.

Time to grow up and get moving.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.