There’s so many people I could be. ^[1]

I’m serious. I contain multitudes. I’m a protean mass of multi-n-dimensional neospace writhing with virtual particles chomping at the bit to exist for just long enough to truly piss physicists off by being absolutely necessary for things to balance out and completely unable to be detected.

Well, okay. maybe not, but that was really fun to write.

It all boils down to that evil, evil word : potential. The human kind. The kind that makes people tell you how much potential you have when you are a kid, which turns into them carping at you for squandering your potential when you completely fail to become a keener eager to kick the world’s ass and instead continue to be a coaster who naively figures that if school is easy for you, why make it hard by getting all Type A about it?

Because some day you’ll want money, you little idiot.

But enough about that.

I have had this notion of my great potential my whole life, and it ended up settling into one of the cracks in my mind as the notion that no matter what I do, it’s wrong. I live in a continuous state of feeling like I am making the wrong choices, and eventually you have to learn to just tune that shit out or you won’t even be able to move.

I mean, it’s a bug burden to put on a kid to tell them of all the amazing things they could (and therefore should) do. At least, if you’re somewhat responsibility-averse like me.

I would love to go out into the world and do amazing things, and I am fully confident that I can do it, too.

But of course, first I would have to choose which amazing things, and therein lies the rub. As I have written here before, the science is clear that giving people more than a certain number of options makes them less happy with their choices, because what are the odds they have chosen the “right” ones?

And past that point, the more options there are, the unhappier people get.

Now imagine you are me, and in every choice in life you can see ten times the options of the normal person, and you begin to get an idea of why I have such problems picking a path in life and why I keep talking about a million hallways with a million doors each and other such metaphors.

That might be a scam, though. Let me explain.

This whole option paralysis bullshti is probably just one of the tools my depression uses to keep me in my place. I’m thinking that’s the whole reason it generates all those options and all those potential versions of myself.

I’d be lying if I said I knew how to make my mind stop generating a gazillion possibilities all the damned time. But surely (hi Shirley!) there is some kind of solution.

Of course there is. It’s called growing up and growing a pair. It’s called being capable of making a decision and sticking to it without constantly doubting myself. It’s called connecting with my Evil Kirk so Good Kirk can finally make up his mind about things.

But that would involve actually, ya know…. doing stuff.

So that can’t be right.

Seriously though, I think I am making progress there. I am finding it easier to imagine myself as a joyously engaged in and connected with reality, with days full of doings and a solid feeling of productivity to justify my existence.

It helps enormously to imagine it all as a game. Fun stuff I do in order to get out there in the world (online) and try to trick the world into giving me money.

That makes the whole thing way, way less scary. I’m practically gamifying life. That way the gap between playing video games all day and actually being productive seems a lot more like something I could actually leap.

And it keeps reality from getting too real for me to handle by putting it on the other side of this here computer screen. If I do it all online, I can probably handle it. If it’s online, that no matter what the emotional and social content is, the physical content is still just text and pictures on my computer screen.

And I can handle that.

But again : what to do, specifically? Everything is so simple and easy when you speak in generalities but what will I actually do? Which of the billions of possibilities I contain will I choose to become real?

That makes it all sound like some bizarre existentialist reality show.

The problem is that I come up with a possibility, like all that talk about becoming a public speaker in yesterday’s blog entry. And it all seems righteously possible and like a wonderful idea that would totally work, and I can even feel myself beginning to engage with the idea as a possibility and starting to think of how I would make it real.

And then my mind says “Yes, that would be nice. ” and hits the pause button HARD. Because now, it’s a real battle between my desire to act and move forward and my depression’s desire to keep me right where I am, where it can control things.

It just wants to keep me safe. in its horribly misguided and fucked up way.

So nothing ever comes of it. But I have hope because those dreams might still be getting put on pause, but they are getting bigger and brighter and more real every single time I dream one up.

And some day, I will dream one so vivid and perfect it will become reality.

Because it will then become..a quest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.