I watched Finding Dory recently.

For those of you who are not up on your Pixar, it’s the sequel to Finding Nemo , which is the tale of a clownfish child named Nemo who gets separated from his family and ends up in a fish tank in a dentist’s office. It is up to his nervous and overwrought father, Marlin (get it?) and his newly found friend Dory to come to the rescue and reunite the family.

Note to self : family reuniting is an excellent plot motivator. Who hasn’t longed to be reunited with their family?

Maybe not all of it, but….

Dory, voiced by Ellen Degeneres, really steals the show as an adorable, lovable blue tang (that’s also a fish) who has a wee bit of a problem with remembering things.

For the most part, she doesn’t.

And while with someone else voicing her that might be annoying, with Ellen that just makes her all the more lovable.

I was not surprised at all that she was the star of the sequel.

In  Finding Dory. Dory suddenly remembers that she has a family, and the rest of the plot is the story of her looking for them.

So technically, it should be called Finding Dory’s Family. But whatever.

In the movie, they delve deeper into Dory’s memory issues. In one scene, Dory is worried that her parents might not want to see her because she forgot them for so long and because she is kind of broken.

Marlin and Nemo (yup, they’re in this crazy trip too) reassure her that she’s a lovely fish and her parents will be overjoyed to see her and that her flaws won’t matter at all.

And in another scene, Dory has an “all is lost” moment where she finally gets to the tank at the Marine Life Institute where she was born, there are tons of blue tangs there… but not her parents. Then she ends up getting washed down the drain into this dark grey area of the sea, and there she is, in the existential void, questioning everything about herself as she desperately tries (and fails) to keep her parents and her friends in her memory. Eventually, she has to give up, and at that point utterly hates herself for her flaw.

These two scenes hit hard and sank deep with me. I am a terribly absentminded person who often beats himself up for being such an airhead and wonders why anyone puts up with him and truly feels like he is broken and worthless sometimes.

This, despite the fact that people in my life clearly value me and my company. And I know that I have a vast amount of talent and ability just waiting to makes its place in the world.

What can I say, depression makes you think crazy things.

The movie also touched on something I wrestle with, which is the unstable nature of the subjective reality of the absentminded person. It’s very hard to develop a sense of stability and safety when, subjectively speaking, things “disappear” all the time. My reality shifts around a lot, and I feel like I can’t keep up with it. There’s always too many variables to track and too much to try to keep together in my head and it all falls apart eventually.

The fact that this also causes you to be repeatedly humiliated by your own fucked up nature and even worse, causes you to fail others only makes things worse.

It is a hard thing to wrap your head around. I know for a fact that, despite my best efforts, I am going to continue to mess up. I know that this will inevitably make me need to ask people really basic things over and over again. I know that this costs me a lot of respect from others and makes me kind of a pain to be around.

Dory and I both handle that the same way : by being really friendly and likable and charming and therefore able to generate the necessary sympathy in people for them to help you when you need it. Ideally, the person or people we prevail upon will just roll their eyes and say “Well, that’s our Fruvous/Dory!” and consider us adorably helpless and quite the character, as opposed to resenting us and wishing we would go away.

Because if you tell us to go away, we will. It’s that easy. We’re quite fragile.

And it works, but it doesn’t allow for much dignity. And dignity is very important to human happiness. Even wacky funsters like myself need dignity. Dignity represents your sense of worth and your boundaries, and acts as a shield against the forces that would crush your self esteem. It also acts as a mask, and while I consider myself a very open and genuine person, a mask may well be necessary sometimes in order to hide what is going on inside and have some time alone in one’s head when in public.

I don’t like being helpless. I wish I could simply get my shit together and keep it that way. I want to be the sort of person who marshals facts and masters his life with the power of his focused and diligent mind. I want to be a person of substance and gain the respect of others instead of being a pathetic clown. I want to feel good about myself and stop constantly tripping over my own feet. I want to be able to present a strong and competent face to the world instead of my usual expression of confusion and worry.

I want to be a real person, dammit. I know that doesn’t make sense to others, but it is nevertheless how I feel. Right now, I am not a real person because I am so incomplete.I have no substance to me. I have never ever earned my keep and that really hurts when you are 43 years old. I feel like I am a bright child who got trapped in an adult’s body and can’t make it in the adult world.

And I want to grow the fuck up already.

Two more months of school, and then….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.