And it’s time I learned to live with it.

I was raised, by and large, by television. ^[1] And as I have mentioned before, rather flippantly, to me the sitcom world was ideal life. A world where everyone was witty, good always on over evil, and everything was always fine by the end of the 22 minutes.

But I think the problem goes much deeper than that. I think that, in a deep subconscious way, I have been trying to turn myself into a sitcom character for a very long time. And I think that’s possibly part of my problem relating to people. Normal people don’t go around trying to be as witty as a sitcom character, so right away I am behaving in a strange way.

On some deep level, I think I feel like if I could only become that sitcom version of myself, my life would become a sitcom and everything would be all right from then on. And when that doesn’t work, I blame myself instead of blaming the flat out impossibility of what I am trying to achieve.

It’s my fault for not being sitcom enough! Maybe my life needs a laugh track.

This what happens when you are raised by television. All my role models were TV people. All my life modeling came from TV lives. All my moral training came from the morals taught on TV. I never had anyone to teach me right from wrong, or what is safe and what is not, or what I should be doing with my life…. nothing. I had extraordinarily little input from adults about whatsoever.

All I had was television, and it makes for a very poor substitute indeed.

So in some ways, I am made of television. No wonder I want to be a part of the television industry so badly. It’s the closest I can get not just to going home to my parents, but to crawling inside the TV and living there for the rest of my life.

Just let me in…. I promise I’ll be good! This is the only place where I feel like I belong! Like I am welcome!

It’s a rather bracing and profound thing to realize about oneself – that you have been pursuing a literally impossible ideal for a great deal of your life. No matter how hard I try, I will always live in the real world, not TV land, and that means making peace with being merely human and nonfictional and hence governed by all the rules and restrictions of a drearily mundane existence.

Right now, this piece of my interminable inner puzzle is still too freshly detached for me to have a clue what its long term effects will be once it had disappeared over yonder horizon. But it’s such a huge piece that it can’t help but shake me to my very core.

Obviously, if before now you had asked me if I thought I was living in a TV universe or if I was trying to become a sitcom character, I would have said no. These things work on levels much deeper than that bit of ourselves that is known to us and that we cannot help but think is, on some level, our entire selves.

After all, knowing you have a subconscious mind does not you cease to have it. Drag all the demons into the light you want. The darkness outside the circle of light will remain.

I am curious to see who I am once I have really processed this revelation. I am hoping it leads to a revolution in self-forgiveness. My world will never be like the TV world because I am a real person. And the sooner I accept that, the better off I will be and the sooner I can get on with my oh so real life.

This television model of life also explains some of my feeling of unreality. Not all of it – the bulk of it comes from spending too much time in a very low stimulus environment causing my nervous system to tune out my environment so completely that I don’t even perceive it on an emotional level any more.

But the remainder, I think, comes from some deep feeling that the world inside the TV is the “real world”. When I was a lonely little kid, I often felt like life was this annoying thing that kept interrupting my TV watching. This was especially true in the summer. To the weak, fictional worlds are always better because fictional worlds are safe.

It takes a feeling of strength and competence (and above all, safety) to prefer the real world. Only then can the real world truly be more rewarding that our well developed inner lives. And the thing is, that feeling of strength and competence cannot be found within the confines of said inner lives.

Only by going out into the real world and surviving can you build up the confidence in your own ability to cope that leads to the strength and the courage you need. That’s the catch. There is no safe road there. You will have to venture at least a little ways outside of your comfort zone.

And what do you know – if you do, your comfort zone grows. And then you go a little further, and a little further, and slowly you become healthier.

For now, all I can do is repeat to myself that I will never be a sitcom kid who is precocious and witty and funny and whom everyone loves. That’s not a real thing. No matter how hard I love all the TV families I have joined in my life, they can never loved me back, and if I want to get the connection and belonging I crave, it will have to be in the real world.

And it starts with tearing down the walls inside me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.