Now there’s a whopper of a topic.

I have never been particularly comfortable with the topic of who deserves what. Especially when you get into the nebulous and unstable area of personal fortune. Who deserves X happening to them?

Everybody? Nobody? There’s just too many variables and too many assumptions.

I can handle it in the form of social justice. I am all about the social justice. People deserve, to the maximum possible extent, to be protected from the cruel and callous hand of fate and to be given everything they need to grow, prosper, and thrive.

They don’t need to do anything to deserve that. They don’t have to “earn” it because it’s a human right. Earning should only enter into the equation when it supports human thriving and personal self-worth.

People need to be able to earn accomplishments and feel pride and earn recognition for them. It’s programmed into our social matrix. We need to feel we are a valued member of a tribe we can be proud of.

There I go, veering into theory again. Bringing it back to myself.

What do I deserve? A lot more than I am getting, that’s for sure. My self-worth has at least grown to that point. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all I do all day is play video games when I could bhe making major contributions to my society and the world if only I could get around my psychological and logistical barriers.

Plus, I am a pretty nice fellow. If we are going on societal brownie points, I have many. I am a sweet, sensitive, empathic fellow who does his best to make the world a better place no matter where he is.

To a fault, really. I could stand to be a little more selfish.

Deep down, I believe that my low station in life and resulting low status and lifestyle is an error on society’s side. If the world were just and sane, someone would have realized my potential when I was still a little kid and taken an interest in developing my gifts and steering me gently but firmly towards what I needed in order to find my position in society and make a success of myself so that all my potential was realized.

Instead, everybody ignored me and nobody wanted to deal with me and nobody thought I was worthy of their attention, let alone any actual investment of time, effort, money, or even just monitoring.

It’s insane that someone like me should have slipped through the cracks. Objectgively speaking, I am amazing. I never had to study, I aced every academic subject, I was head shoulders and torso above the rest of my class, and I found pretty much everything I was asked to do to be ridiculously easy.

Society has a vested interest in finding people like me and guiding me into productivity.

But that’s one of those things we just stopped doing in my lifetime.

It’s not too late. I could still get into the game somehow and make my contributions. The problem is that it is all up to me whether that happens or not, and that means getting there is going to take a lot of time.

Why? Because I am unhealthy. I am sick. For me to climb out of my depression on my own is like a man with two broken legs crawling painfully through the desert in search of civilization and rescue.

He might get there eventually. But it would be a lot faster and more humane if he had someone to help him along.

So it all comes down to getting assistance. And that’s where things get very sticky because as a 45 year old man I am not “supposed” to need help.

Plus I have a lot of bad tapes in this capacious noggin of mine that say that there is no point in asking for help because I will only be turned down and made to feel like yesterday’s worst crap for even daring to ask for something from the worthy, decent, healthy people who deserve everything more than I do.

Ah, there’s the rub. If you ask my depression, I don’t deserve a goddamned thing. I don’t even deserve to live. The fact that I continue to exist and therefore use up any resource whatsoever is a galling affront to the very concept of justice and the world would be a far better place without a massive liability like myself. My only hope lies in disppearing into the woodwork and hoping nobody notices what an impacted pustule of a human being I am and finally does the world a favour by taking me out of it.

I should be deeply ashamed to even take up space that could be taken up by something more worthy, which is literally anything else.

I know that was unpleasant to read, but I feel better for having vented it. So thanks.

So my depression tells me I deserve absolutely nothing.  That is my default position and while that is, of course, completely horrifying and utterly wrong, it does have the virtue of simplicity. I don’t have to think about what I deserve. It’s always nothing.

So trying to escape that is a bit of a sticky wicket. As tonight’s column readily testifies, the first place my mind naturally goes from “nothing” is “everything”.

It’s always easiest to go to the opposite extreme for me. Changing the magnitude of something requires something of equal and opposite magnitude.

But switching polarities only requires multiplying by -1.

Thus, right now, my position on what I deserve is “a lot more”. That’s about as specific as I can get right now. I don’t see myself as deserving the whole world on a silver platter but I don’t see any reason to put an upper limit on what I deserve either.

Because when you really get down to it, it’s not about what I deserve.

It’s about what I want.

And I want it ALL.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.