I’m on it. And I am not sure that is a good thing.

The way I see it, there are two main paths to recovery for me. There is the path of peace, where I learn to love myself and strive to become harmonious with my life as it is right now and hope that by doing so, I will stop wasting so much personal energy on inner conflict and find peace, comfort, and strength from inner harmony.

And then there is the path of discontent, where I harness my rage and frustrations into the energy needed to make the kind of landmass-altering changes I need in order to get well. This manifests as a growing dissatisfaction with things the way they are in my life and that dissasisfaction builds to a fever pitch until a very useful crisis occurs where the rage is suddenly gone and I feel wonderful and I know I have made my mental cage a bit bigger, a bit roomier, and a lot less painful.

It has happened before.

It was very weird.

Those are the two paths I find myself choosing between, and it would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking I have to choose one and stick with it and thus increase the amount of inner conflict by adding yet another front to the war.

But I am the sworn and implacable enemy of all false dichotomies and thus I know better than to think I have to pick a side when both modes are useful.

One is just a lot more pleasant than the other.

And that makes it seem like I should forget the path of conflict and embrace only the path of peace. After all, the path of peace is one of increasing harmony and health and wellbeing, and the path of discontent goes in the exact opposite direction and leads to increasing pain, frustration, and rage.

So why not do the fun one exclusively?

But it’s not that simple. The path of peace is lovely but it doesn’t bring real change. Sometimes you really do have to destroy the old in order to give birth to the new. Some things simply cannot be done peacefully. They are inherently violent and painful and if you spend all your time trying to maintain inner peace at any cost, you will never get anywhere because there is too much inner baggage in the way.

Sometimes the only way to get freedom is by revolution, with all that entails.

Sometimes the only way out is through a sea of blood and fire.

Sometimes you have to embrace the pain and let it change you.

But the path of discontent can’t be followed exclusively either because it takes so much energy and does so much short term damage that it destroys its own motivation. Sooner or later, without some peaceful time in which to renew oneself, the impetus to keep doing will run out.

There goes your pilot light.

The only way around that is to become a very hard and severe person. And I won’t lie, there are times when I am really tempted. It would be so satisfying to say “fuck everyone but me” and become harsh and unforgiving of myself and others.

Be a real ball busting prick, in other words.

That would let me truly embrace the pain, jock style, but at the cost of becoming the sort of person I despise.

I am not saying there isn’t something I could learn from that kind of person. But I sure as hell don’t want to turn into one.

The temptation comes from my highly repressed and underexpressed id. The id always wants nothing more than to ditch the ego and superego and express itself without restraint in a huge glorious release.

And that’s what embracing my dark side would be, essentially. It would mean taking all my dark angry thoughts and handing them a blank check to do whatever the fuck they want as long as it gets me ahead.

Clearly, the answer lies somewhere between the two paths.

I mean, I am fully prepared to embrace ambition and greed if I am the only one getting hurt by it. But I can’t see a way of keeping the damage to myself. I will invariably hurt people because I will be bossy as hell. merciless, selfish, and possessed of enough cleverness and empathy to really know how to hurt people.

I’d rather be a dreamer, thank ye kindly.

But you can’t live on your ideals. Or at least I can’t. My ferocious pragmatism will always demand action and results.

And somewhere underneath all my flabby passivity lies a great and terrible craving for everything – better lifestyle, higher status,. huge gobs of money, and sex sex sex…- that I have been denied by life so far.

I’m no angel. I want all that shit too. Gimmie gimmie gimmie!

But I truly want it all, because I want to get all that AND keep my soul.

Althought I must admit, the older I get, the less that last point matters to me. Perhaps that’s a sign that I too can become old and greedy and mean just like the Boomers.

But dammit, I want stuff.

And as ugly as that is, maybe that’s the key to getting and staying motivated. just keep thinking of that sweet, sweet money and let my greed drive me to do all those things I currently do not do.

Like editing my work, for instance, and making it as good as I possibly can before sending it out into the world.

And chasing those Upwork jobs and rebuilding my rep as a hard worker who delivers amazing results at lightning speed.

And doing all the other shit I “should” be doing in order to make a life for myself.

Maybe every morning, I should wake up, take a few nice deep breaths, then say “There’s money out there with my name on it!’ and go for it,

I could be that kind of person. The potential is inside me, waiting.

But I am still too damned scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.