That’s how I feel right now. Here’s why.

Got a call from Patrick at VFS today. Nice chat. He is going to call me tomorrow at 3 PM with news of whether or not I made it into VFS.

And I am doing my best not to think about it too much. There’s nothing I can do to control the outcome at this point and developing expectations will not help in the long run so I am doing my best to keep myself in a state of suspended animation about it, ready for either outcome, and making no predictions whatsoever.

The first time I applied, I worked myself into a state of certainty that I would get in. And so, when I didn’t, it really hit me hard. I am guessing that I am just not the kind of person who can conquer the world with the power of positive thinking and unsinkable self-confidence. I can go on some serious ego trips, but at the end of the day, I am a practical, realistic, sensible person, and I can only truly be happy if I stay within at least spitting distance of a realistic point of view.

Otherwise, I become very nervous and feel like I am out of control and bound for disaster at any moment. I know from observation that there are people who make their way through life quite successfully without ever really focusing on the realities of the world, but to me, that’s lack dark voodoo magic. Like someone playing hopscotch in a minefield and miraculously not setting any of them off. Or someone walking the tightrope without even knowing it.

The only way I know how to relate to the world is to focus on the literal truth and go from there. And no mistake, that gives me a kind of power in the world that not everyone has. Being able to see things clearly and handle practical realities is the magic to some people. Myself included, compared to some. My never ending drive to find the truth and understand anything is an integral part of who I am, and in some ways, my only lifeline out of the hell of being trapped in my own mind.

I concentrate so hard on truth because it keeps me out of the void.

But others seem to be able to get through life just fine with a radically different point of view. So mine can’t be the only one that works, and whether mine works is open to debate as well. It could well be that, to be blunt, too much reality is a bad thing. That a healthy mind requires a safety cushion of whole or partial self-delusion to act as a shock absorber against the bumps in life’s road.^[A] And all I am doing with my ferocious determination to see the truth at all times, regardless of the consequences to myself, is destroying the very things I might use to get better.

But that’s my road. It’s not the easy path but I suppose it’s the most honest. I have a lot of self-inflicted damage, but I also have a solidity and certainty to what I know precisely because I pursued my truth with such disregard for my own well being.

So, ya know…. there’s pluses and minuses.

And maybe that’s part of what makes me such a loner. I don’t want to participate in the social illusion. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, how I have the ability to simply step out of social reality at will and, in that sense, both prove I have a sort of power but also prove I am not, to a lot of people, safe to be around.

Because for people so thoroughly enmeshed in social reality that there is no difference between it and objective reality to them – to fish who have no idea water exists – you are not some kind of bold rebel when you step out of the frame like that. You’re just painfully disturbing and weird. You bother people on a level too deep for them to understand or articulate, and so all they can say is that you are “weird” (hardly descriptive, specific, or useful) and try not to be around you at all.

And if you have something that sets you apart visually, like you are short or hairy or fat, they will use this in order to punish you for disturbing them and to drive you away so they can go back to the their “normal” world.

And when you are desperately eager to please and be accepted, it only makes it worse, because then they don’t even respect you. Instead of a lone wolf, you’re an over-eager smelly slobbery dog.

Makes me wish, for the millionth time, that I had just given up on the whole hapless nerd thing and copped a major attitude. Said “fuck all y’all”, developed my own style, did whatever the fuck I wanted, and told anyone who had a problem with it to go fuck themselves sideways with a tire tool.

In doing so, I would not have been behaving all that unusually for a male teen, and I at least would have demanded respect instead of being a whiny, socially detrimental nerd who was grating to be around.

Maybe I would have ended up wearing mirrored sunglasses when I wasn’t glowering at people, daring them to mess with me. Maybe I would have been yet another angry teen male getting into fights with “punkass bitches who didn’t show enough respect” and would have ended up in and out of juvie or jail.

That definitely would not have helped. I know myself well enough to know that confinement of any sort would bring out all my crazy and I would probably have made things a lot worse for myself by escaping over and over in order to prove that nobody can confine me.

Kind of glad nobody has ever tried, to be honest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.