Man I feel like crap today.
Anyhow. Today’s oft-chewed bone to gnaw upon is my intensely lonely childhood.
It was just so wrong. That’s the thought I can’t seem to get past. By all objective and rational scientific measures, my friendless, isolated, terrified, bored, and above all lonely childhood was extremely unhealthy and no child should go through that.
Perhaps I can’t get past that thought because, on some level, I am still mourning it. Now that I can see my childhood from enough distance that I can tolerate interacting with all those painful memories – and worse, all that intense emotional coldness – that I can grieve for myself and all that should have been there and wasn’t.
It definitely feels like grief. A great and terrible sadness and a feeling of something being terribly wrong because something is missing. Something vitall. something needed, something very very important.
The only difference between it and the usual kind of grief, besides it being the mourning of a childhood and not a person, is that I’m not missing something or someone I once had. And that makes things a little more complicated.
And that’s why it took me so long to be able to do it, methinks. I had to wrap my brain around the idea of my childhood as not merely tragic or sad but wrong, and then work from there to the idea of mourning it.
And that’ kind of mourning is not the sort of thing at which I excel. In fact, it’s the exact kind of deep emotional skill I lack due to the exact lack of socialization we’re talking about in today’s blog entry.
Like how I came around full circle on that?
Anyhow, I am too mentally drained to really drive this concept home so I’mma gonna have to change frequencies on y’all.
I am so fried because for some reason, I slept very poorly last night.
And not in the usual way, where I wake up sweaty and dizzy from oxygen deprival and stumble around in a thick fog for a while.
No, this was that frustratingly hard to convey kind of sleep where it’s like I never truly fell one hundred percept asleep.
I suppose “shallow sleep” gets the basic idea across. Shallow, broken sleep. Almost like the body slept but the brain didn’t. Not really.
And so when I am trying to concentrate on blogging away for all you lovely lovely people, my mind keeps drifting away from the task and I keep having to forcibly yank myself back to the here and now and try topick up where I left off.
And that is like, super frustrating and irritating. Normally, my mind wanders some while I am blogging but only in ways that are related to the task at hand. Exploring ideas, pondering how to phrase things, processing emotions and memories in order to be able to express them in words, that kind of thing.
This drifting, on the other hand. is injurious to the process and makes me feel foolish.
Luckily, it only happens when I am sleep deprived, and I am gonna go fix that right now.
The Pragmatist and the Poet
One of the paired attributes – I won’t say conflicts – in my personality lies upon the axis between my being a tough minded, hard-nosed, even ruthless pragmatists while also, at the same time, being a total moonbeam of a mystic poet philosopher.
Traditionally, these are seen as opposite by our beknightedly zero-sum dualism obsessed culture. But to me, they are one and the same thing.
Because I am a deeply humanistic idealist with a lot of deep, complex feelings about matters emotional and moral,. I am an extremely demanding pragmatist.
My high ideals demand no less. To me, it is unthinkable to profess an ideal but be unwilling or unable to deal with the harsh realities of the world in order to advance dsaid ideal. Because I see the potential for the advancement of human harmony, happiness, and health in a saner, smarter, and safer world, I have to be willing to do whatever it takes in order to see that potential realizes, and to hell with whatever tender feelings in myself or others that violates.
Because it’s not about me. It’s about the common good and if advancing the common good requires that I do things I find distasteful, unpleasant, or painful, that doesn’t matter to me. I seriously don’t fucking care.
Because to fail to do what I can to make things better because of my own personal sensitivities is unthinkable to me. If I was to fail to advance the common good because of such things, to me it would mean that my ideals mean absolutely nothing.
It all comes down to two things : priorities, and sacrifice. If you have the right priorities then you know what you need to do and are willing to accept that you will have to make personal sacrifices in order to get things done.
I think people these days have lowered the bar for personal sacrifice so low that people feel like they are sacrificing for a cause by clicking on a link.
And as long as that’s all you are willing to do, the bastards win. All they have to do is make sure real change can only come from real effort and the sheep will herd themselves while the shepherds laugh like demons at how easy it is to keep their corrupt grip on power.
As long as everyone stays lazy and continues to consider every single heartbeat of their private time as precious beyond all ,measure, the people can occupy, protest. petition, and scream all they want and the bastards don’t care because they know absoluitely nothing will come of it.
If world peace only took half an hour a weekend, people wouldn’t bother. They would say to each other, “Yeah, but then I would have to drive there, and find parking, and then find the place to do it, and by then it’s this whole thing. ”
And then they would go back to bitterly complaining about Trump while also reassuring themselves that there would be no point in trying to change anything because “what can one person do to fix such huge problems?”.
You can do exactly one person’s work towards fixing the problems.
The real question is why that isn’t enough for you.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.