That’s a revelation I had this morning, right before I went to bed. Seemed like a big deal at the time but now… I’m not feeling it.
Pretty self-explanatory, at least if you know me. Been (far too) keenly aware of having a lot of this mythical attribute “potential” due to my intellect and so on.
As you may have picked up, this did not fill me with joy. For various reasons, it always seemed more like a burden or a curse to me. Meant expectations were higher for me and I have some serious , and largely specious, issues with expectations.
Maybe that’s the problem. Nobody ever actually had high expectations of me, or if they did, they never told me what those were. So I had to imagine them. And as we all know, the monsters we create for ourselves are always far worse than the real ones.
Anyhow, what occurred to me this morning was that this big potential of mine vastly multiplied the number of possible courses my life could take. My gifts could be applied in so many different ways that it’s no wonder I have had an acute case of option paralysis about the whole issue for as long as I can remember.
Even as a kid, the whole “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question scared me in ways I didn’t understand at the time. I was so averse to even thinking about the subject that I went to UPEI without the slightest idea of what I wanted to do with my life besides “I aced Accounting so…. business maybe?”.
Oh, and “I like computers so…. programming?”.
Neither of those worked out. I never even glanced at the business courses when I was thrown into the unexpected chaos of registration day, and programmed turned out to be something I could do but definitely something I could not enjoy.
I might do better now, being forewarned. If I decided to try to get into programming now, I would know that this was something I would have to actually struggle to understand, as opposed to all of the subjects in which I excelled on natural talent alone.
The end goal would be to be able to make my own fun little apps that either entertain or make life easier for people in some way, and sell them for a buck a pop online.
Meanwhile, back at the topic….
My point is, my abilities are so profound that they can be applied to a staggeringly large number of things, and so they do not naturally lead to one thing or another.
The myth I was raised on was that as you went through the education, you would find out what you liked and what you were good at, and then you would go to college, get a degree in that, and do that for a living.
Naive, I suppose. But that’s what I was told growing up. Nothing prepared me for the possibility of being able to do so many different things.
And following my interests doesn’t help much as I have so many of them.
I went full tilt for my dream of being a TV writer. And I still could be, on paper. But the fundamental issues with the machinery of my mind plus a lot of people deciding, at the last minute, I was not worth their help at VFS, killed that dream.
Maybe I should look at becoming a therapist of some sort instead.
But not right now.
Right now, I need a nap.
The Queen of Air and Darkness
That’s the name of a Poul Anderson story I read today, and it had a strange but ultimately beneficial effect on me.
The basic story is that there are humans living on an alien planet and there’s also aliens on that planet called Outlings that the humans mostly think are mythical.
But they aren’t. And one of them snatches a human child to be raised as a changeling. For you see, for highly bullshitty reasons, these aliens are taking forms drawn from European mythos like wraiths, nicors, and even a faerie Queen.
Hence the title.
And this story got me thinking about that vast uncharted area outside my conscious, rational mind where I normally fear to tread. That’s the place where these mythical creatures come from, after all, and so projecting my mind into that realm as part of reading the story was a way to accidentally end up going there.
In particular, there was a passage where the aliens are mind-magicking the mother of the missing child and convincing her to leave the harsh realm of science and other “grey stories” about the world and come join them.
And I think that must have tapped into something in me, because after I finished the story, put the book down, and was falling asleep, I felt this wonderfully warm feeling deep inside me, and realized what a harsh and hostile and cold world my rational mind had made for me, and how badly I wanted to stay in this warm feeling and not go back to that harsh cold world ever again.
And now that I am awake, I find myself wondering whether my view of the world as being a cold cruel place is accurate or if it’s just what happens when you build your worldview from such an icy and unforgiving and merciless substance as logic.
Maybe human beings just aren’t meant to live on logic alone, and when we try, we end up cutting ourselves off from humanity and human warmth and the vital life-sustaining heartblood that keeps us sane and healthy.
Maybe my depression and my merciless and unsentimental pursuit of “the truth” are intimately interconnected and in order to become healthy, I am going to have to learn to accept the irrational, the unknowable, and the merely human into my mind.
Maybe what I really need is to abandon my Olympian POV and climb down into the valley where it’s warm and friendly and human and whether or not something is really, really “true” or not gives way to more human concerns.
Maybe everything, even objectivity, turns toxic when overapplied.
Maybe I need to rescue myself from the truth,
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.