I have been reevaluating how I value things.
Or rather, how I value things. As opposed to, say, experiences. And it’s made me realize how apparently reasonable, rational, sensible thought can lead to heartbreak, misery, and starvation of the soul.
Here is my current scenario to use as a jumping off point :
Last weekend was VancouFur. As often happens at conventions, I overspent. That makes that, by my usual rubric, I can’t afford to order in tonight.
But I ordered in anyway, and here is why.
For some reason, even though I have skipped my Saturday night meal many times before with no ill effects, this time the prospect of doing it again was really depressing me. I was actually dreading the moment I would have to make it official by preparing my more usual kind of meal.
So I made the command decision to order in anyway and worry about the $ later.
This is not my usual mode.
I usually see the world through the lens of my poverty and how it means, or so screams my superego, that I have to be super careful and sensible and pragmatic about how i spend every single penny of it or disaster will ensue.
And that can be a very powerful way of looking at the world.
It can lead to a positive hedonic equation in that you are careful to get as much pleasure and joy from each dollar that you can.
And that sounds great on paper, but in practice, the fine distinctions disappear and the message turns into a more generalized sense of constant fear and insecurity about your money and makes it very hard to keep yourself happy because you end up with a very rigid and unforgiving mindset that equates being sensible with being safe.
And that just ain’t so. You can be so “sensible” that you makje yourself utterly miserable. Human thriving requires a more flexible sense of value that includes (for instance) the possibility of spending more than you “should” in order to treat yourself when you really need it and simply accept that this will mean going without something else in the future.
And that said outcome is not the end of the world. Nobody is going to lock me away for the crime of imprudence.
The real test will come Tuesday night, when my friends and I go out to eat and I can’t afford to order anything.
Anyhow, I finally remembered what I meant to talk about tonight.
What I should be doing
Nothing. Or a lot of things. Depends on how you look at it.
I shall explain.
I realized recently that I have been “shoulding” all over myself lately. I had fallen back into the bad habit of feeling like I am never ever feeling that I am doing whatever it is I am “supposed” to be doing. The number of things on the list of things I am “supposed” to be doing is functionally infinite thanks to the magic power of neurosis and so the programmed outcome of all this is that I feel like there is no way I can choose which thing to do so I choose to do nothing.
Well, nothing substantial, at any rate. Nothing that matters to me or anyone else. Instead, I play video games all fucking day in order to escape this omnipresent sense of doing the wrong thing, and that’s pretty much how the ecology of my depression works.
And the hub of it is my sense of “should”.
Patient readers know that I have been here before. I wrote a blog post saying more or less the same things once before, years ago.
But right after I wrote that post, I started wondering where I was going to go from there. Because the thing is, it’s one thing to realize that there is this huge irrational force ruining your life and quite another to get rid of it.
Because to be honest, I have no idea what to replace it with. Even as I made all my bold statements about ridding myself of my bad case of the shoulds, I could feel the massive gap it left in my mind and I could feel the substance of my mind starting to slowly ooze into the hole, where if left unchecked, it would simply revert back to my previous way of thinking over time.
It was left unchecked.
And all for lack of a replacement. And the truth is, I still have no idea what to replace it with. It is beyond my considerable imagination.
I feel like a convict who has just been let out of prison and is standing there at the bus stop wondering what the hell to do NOW.
I suppose I would need some sense of direction and purpose to my life, and those are things I have never really learned to supply for myself.
The next best thing would be, I suppose, to somehow attach myself to something that could give me that sense of direction and purpose.
Like school did. The great thing about going to Kwantlen and VFS is that I always knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing : going to school and doing my school work. And I knew that as long as I got that done, I was okay, and the rest of the time, I could goof off and do whatever because I had the obligatory part of my life covered.
I was doing what everyone would agree was what I was supposed to be doing.
But then that ended and I was released into the unbstructured wilds with no mentor willing to help me take the next step. For a while, I coasted on the momentum from school and that helped me get the Uno gig.
But then I stupidly took that for granted and even more stupidly quit the job and still more stupidly did not immediately start hunting for another.
And so I lost all my momentum and drifted back into the doldrums and that’s where I was when I discovered Skyrim and everything went all to hell after that.
I still haven’t fully recovered from that.
So here I am, wondering how I hook myself up with another source of direction and purpose. Like school, but not school, because I am done with school.
I suppose that means I would have to join…. something.
I will have to think about that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.