I think I hit upon a very rich vein of personal insight last night, and I want to explore it further in tonight’s blog entry.

Specifically, the idea that I am stuck in an “attract care” mode. It explains (at least in part) my tendency towards passivity.Part of me is always hoping someone else will step in and look after me, and relieve me of the burden of taking care of myself. Perhaps that even explains my tendency to neglect myself.

That same part of me is hoping someone will step in and give me the guidance and structure that I never got as a kid.

Kids shouldn’t have to raise themselves. They’re not good at it. They’re not qualified. But that is what I ended up doing. There were people who were there with me, but nobody was there for me. I grew up terribly alone.

Part of that, I recognize, is the illness. Depression. I withdrew into myself very deeply, and in doing so put up a wall between me and the world that I am still struggling to overcome. There were people on the other side of that wall who might have been able to help me. But when I laid down in that snowbank and willed myself to die, I gave up on life.

It’s the only thing you can do when you come to the conclusion that you are powerless to avoid the pain.  I was getting bullied all the time. Neither the teachers nor the administration at my school seemed able or even willing to intervene. All they wanted was for me to go away, just like at home.

It was a message I was pathetically accustomed to receiving.

I might have gone to my parents if I had been encouraged in any way to consult them when I was in trouble. Instead, it was made clear to me that I wasn’t to bother them with my life issues because they were too busy to view me as anything other than an irritating burden. I was always made to feel like I was not merely the lowest priority in their lives, I has zero priority, a null set, and therefore there was no logically possible condition in which I would matter.

It occurs to me that this attitude of pathetic need for nurturing probably contributed to people’s not wanting to deal with me. Especially when combined with my precocious and unpredictable intelligence. I have talked before in this space about the mixed messages I put out. A powerful mind, especially one like mine that sees through the social illusions and mental grooves that limit most people’s reality, sends a very strong message of power. In my case, it apparently comes off me in waves like being next to a power substation. And yet, this attitude of entreaty and eagerness to please sends an (at least) equally powerful message of being lower status than everyone I meet.

And when the human brain processes those kinds of messages,  power but not status, the emotional output of that process is “bad alpha”, and we HATE incompetent alphas.

So what I need to do to move forward is to change the message I am putting out into the world. I have to stop being the sad dog that wags his tail whenever anyone even looks in his direction and find a way to be someone people can respect.

Note, I do not mean by this to say I am planning to change who I am. Just that I need to change how I come across if I want to get closer to people without creeping them out.

We will take the need for improvements in personal grooming and care as a given.

The voyage to a less pathetic me has to begin with the ability to imagine the destination, and I am not there yet. I have no idea what a more respectable me would be like. I have been the sad version of me for so long.

The lack of employability and resulting low income lifestyle had done a number on me as well. I hope to correct that via my VFS education and my natural abilities, but that’s six months away and I would kind of like to feel good about myself before then.

Besides, when I am hustling for a job out there in Entertainment Land, an air of pathetic neediness will not serve me well.

Without a clear vision of the version of me I want to project into the world, I will have to kind of feel my way around till something occurs to me.

Certainly, I need to lose (or at least, conceal) the feelings of hopelessness and uselessness. I am not as incompetent as I often feel. It’s true that I have difficulties in doing some things, but that’s due to factors beyond my control. It in no way attaches to me as a person, any more than my eye color or my allergies.

Another thing that has to go is the desperate longing for positive attention. People inherently avoid people like that. It’s cruel but understandable. People around someone who is nakedly needy makes people uncomfortable because it feels like said person is asking for far more than you would normally give in social circumstances.

So I have to come across as more self-contained. And yet, at the same time, I can’t come across as closed off and aloof. It would be very easy for me to go into that mode. It feels like it’s the next setting on my personality controls. I am already prone to isolating myself and doing my own thing. Why not turn that into an asset?

Because I would come across as a total penis, that’s why. Plus, my warm personality is the power core of my charisma and I would be a fool to cut myself off from that powerful an asset. I can be downright magnetic when I have my head right.

The trick is to get my head right.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.