Repeat after me : Nothing is so good that it can’t be made better.

Call it the Optimizer’s Prayer. It’s something I truly believe, and making things better (or making better things) is what I want to do with my life.

But it is not a matter of faith. It’s based on a lifetime of seeing how things are and imagining how they could be better. That’s all the evidence I need. And the older I get, the better I am at seeing these superior solutions with clarity and certainty.

And the better I am at being to articulate it as well.

And as long as this drive to optimize the world remains withing the soft and cozy walls of sanity, it’s a wonderful thing. I could do the world a lot of good. I could be a pretty amazing guy.

But of course,. I am a crazy person, so my drive to optimize is as corrupt and untrustworthy as any other part of my mindscape.

What happens is that “this could be better” turns into “this should be better” which rapidly devolves into “you should have done better” and finally “you suck because you didn’t do that the best possible way, you useless fucking loser. ”

My mind is stuck in a loop of constantly trying to do my best while constantly failing my own test because I cna always see what I could have done better.

Sometimes it’s hard to see anything else.

The missing ingredient, as usual, is forgiveness. Humanity. An understanding that all I can do is make the best decisions I can based on what I know at the time and the odds are very low that it will be the ideal or even the superior solution because I am not a perfect person.

I hate those perfect people.

SO why do I hold myself to such impossible and inhuman standards? I think it has something to do with being so alone in my formative years that I had to kind of make things up as I went long, and that’s lovely if you’re a jazz pianist but not so good when you are building the mental machinery that you will have for the rest of your life.

In fact, I think a lot of my problems make a lot more sense if you think of me as a grown ass man with a mind designed by a child.

There was nobody else in my head to help me! I was all alone in there. Nobidy was trying to guide me or support me or make sure I got what I needed to develop properly. Nobody gave a significant enough fraction of a shit to actually try to influence me.

Instead. experience taught me to go away and not bother anybody, and I am still doing that to this very day. I sometimes wonder if my agoraphobia is, at its root, a desire to stay out of the way and not be noticed.

After all, there was a time when not being noticed was key to my survival. It was the only way to make it through recess and lunch without getting bullied. And at home, it was the same basic thing. The only safety lay in blending in with the furniture.

So I was a stealth kid. A ghost. I learned to disappear and not draw any attention to myself.

And that’s why, for all my talk abvout walking in the sun and wanting to be a part of life and all that razzamatazz, there is a great and terrible force working against that goal and that is the great fear within me that says that exposure equals danger and my only hope is to remain hidden and hope nobody notices me.

That’s the monster that rears its ugly head every time I think seriously about stepping outside my little box and pushes me firmly back to square one.

It’s the only square I know.

I have been thinking about this great fear a lot lately. It’s also a great sadness. I have spoken before about how when I am gearing up to do something, this great sadness will turns its head away from the world, tears in its eyes, faces the wall, and say “No. ”

And that’s where it stops. Because to proceed would be to enter the territory of the biggest monster of them well, the time I was raped as a child.

I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to see that’s where I first turned my head to the wall and said no. Shut out absolutely everything and took my mind away.

And it’s never come back. It’s too scared.

So I can’t just push past that barrier. Not yet. Maybe in the not too distant future, but I am just plain not there yet.

Of course, ideally, I would be able to do it right now. But I am just too lame.

And just like that he comes full circle and gets back to talking about his brutal and corrupy optimization instincts. Ta da!

Bet ya didn’t see THAT coming!

What is needed is some kind of humanizing factor. Call it the mercy to my judging mind’s justice. The voice that says “But I am, after all, only human. ”

Then adds, “and that’s fine!”.

It says something about one’s unbalanced state of mind when being merely human means you are not good enough.

So I need to learn to show mercy to myself. Forgive myself for being a frail, finite, limited, vulnerable, imperfect naked beach ape and not the superhuman demigod that my overweaning intellect sometimes makes me feel like I am.

It’s hard to see yourself as merely human when you feel the difference between yourself and mainstream humanity so keenly and feel like it has to make you somehow both less and more than the average joe.

Their minds and worlds seem so small and limited to me.

But then again, they’re happy and I’m not.

So what the hell do I know?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.