As opposed to who I really am.

The subject came up in therapy today. I was talking about how frustrated I get sometimes and that led to talking about how, compared to me, most people are idiots.

Not you, of course, gentle reader. You know. Others.

That not the kind of thing I would bring up to anyone but somehow who I trust implicitly to see things I say in the best possible light, of course.

And after I had said it, I felt embarrassed. Such smug elitism!

I detest elitism and felt the need to establish my egalitarian bona fides at that point, so I told my therapist about the time when a well-meaning teacher saw how bored I was in class and gave me a pamplet for Mensa.

I read it. And I hated it.

It was dripping with that selfsame smug elitism and that made me react to it with uttery disgust. It made me want to puke, to be honest. I can still remember the visceral digust I felt after reading it.

I have him the pamphlet back and told him I was not interesting. Thankfully, he read the expression on my face and did not ask why.

I finished the anecdote and then added something about how I don’t like feeling like other people are idiots – like I am a grownup in a world of children – because I wanted to be an egalitarian.

Then my therapist asked, “But what if that egalitarianism is not the real you?”

And that made me realize that a whole lot of what I think of as me is what I think I should be according to my own ethics and judgment. I have contructed myself out of my ideals and paved over who I really am to achieve it.

But you are who you are. Even the parts of you that you do not like.

Like, say, the part that now and then wants to scream,. “You’re all a bunch of idiots and I am taking over!” into the sky.

This is how dictators get started, I am sure. I’m conquering you idiots for your own good!

What this all boils down to is that I don’t know who I really am. It’s a heck of a thing to realize that a lot of your sense of self is not you.

It’s a reflection of you. It’s something you made according to your own ideals. As prosthetic parts go, it is sturdy and reliable.

But it’s not really you.

I can’t help but link this with my emotional malnourishment and spiritual underdevelopment. Without a social connection to rely on, I had to provide my own social stimulation towards growth and I was not very good at it.

Things people learning from experience I figured out on my own, in this big egg of a head I have. Most of those things never got put to the test because I was far too isolated from the world to have to make moral decisions very often, and I had very little responsibility to shoulder as well.

So a whole lot of me is, as it were, hypothetical.

I knew that part of my current karmic mission was to figure out who I really was and build something like a functional identity for myself.

But until today. I didn’t realize I would have to cut away a lot of false ideas about myself in the process.

Written down, it seems super obvious. Of course I would have to replace these false beliefs about myself with the real deal. And that was always going to be a major surgery that required a lot more than just fixing the obvious bits of self-loathing self-talk.

But we are talking about the unformed and inarticule world of emotion now, and that plays by different rules. Rules I don’t understand.

But I can feel them.

Anyhow, so now I know that there is very hard emotional work ahead of me. I have always found it easier to create than to destroy, and that means I am ill suited to the task of chiseling away the BS in order to reveal the splender of the real me.

That generally requires someone a lot harder than me.

But it’s got to be done. Now that I know this falseness exists, there is no way I can tolerate it. I have to free my true self from its false encumberances.

In fact, I better be careful not to think about it too much because I might end up giving myself a case of the heebie jeebies on an existential level.

I don’t know if I could survive an attack of claustrophobia of the soul.

The image in my mind now is of myself as some sort of anime giant robot, and the kids inside me just found the button that puts me in “cleaning” mode, where all my exterior surfaces heat up with shiny blue-white energy and burn away all the garbage that got stuck to my chassis over the years.

That sounds a lot better that self-surgery, to be honest. Way cleaner, too.

I somehow doubt it will be that easy, however, because the stuff that has to go is not just debris stuck to the outside of my robot. It’s the very nuts and bolts that it’s made of. And you can’t fix THAT with a quick and cleansing heat-up.

I feel like this is all wandering vaguely in the direction of an anime script. Something superficially superficial but actually deeply metaphorical, like Neon Genesis Evangelion or Ghost In The Shell.

But nah. I am not into that stuff enough to write it. I would have to get a very specific inspiration for a story that could not be told any other way.

Dragging myself bodily back to the point, I don’t see any alternative to doing some serious hardcore soul searching in order to find out who I really am.

And the first step will be the hardest : learning to tell what is really me versus the stuff I filled in based on what I believe.

In thery, there could be a lot of me that has to go so that something real and true and healthy can take its place.

And that’s not an easy thing to face.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.