This just happened :
Wanted some ice water. Got a tray of ice cubes from the freezer. Noticed that I had somehow managed to overfill the thing again and now there’s a solid gnarylt sheet of ice over the left hand edge of the tray.
That makes it hard to crack the tray to get the ice out. I pit forth a Herculean effort and the tray cracks. This sends ice cubes every which way. Lovely.
I bend down to pick up the cubes that ended up on the floor. Straighten up… and whack my head hard on the still open freezer door.
I really did not need that.
And yeah, I know that in the grand scheme of things, it’s not big deal. Excrement occurs. These things happen to everybody from time to time.
And at least I’m not super sleepy any more.
But still, I am not very happy with my own little world right now. And my world sucks on the best of days, which this is not.
There has got to be more to life than playing video games all the god damned time. It keeps me busy but it also keeps me down. Keeps me trapped in a life which is far too limited and constrained to satisfy a great and mighty soul like mine.
But it gets me through the day. Like I have said many times before, while I am playing a video game, I am not depressed. I’m not anxious. I know what to do. I am not overwhelmed by options. My actions are purposeful, as false as that pruporse might be. I feel competent,. And safe.
And I barely hate myself at all.
To exit this tiny little comfort zone of mine is to have to face the great big world outside of it and actually figure out what the fuck to do with myself. As long as I stay “inside”, I don’t have to face the Infinite Hallway of Infinite Doors, as illusory as I know that to be. I don’t have to face my feelings of total inadequacy, utter unfitness for existence, and pervasive physical incompetence.
I don’t have to face anything as long as I obey the fear.
But it’s killing me, both physically and spiritually. I need more than this. I need a position in the world where I am paid for my labour and where I actually create things with all this raw power of mine, things that are seen, things that have substance and value.
I need a job, god damn it. Something to add value to my existence. Something to do with my time. Something to take me out of my grotty grotto and into the bright and shining world where all those emotional nutrient I lack can be found.
But the fear holds me back. Freezes me in place. Suck the light and the heat and the life out of my intentions. Keeps me from reaching out in even the most minor ways.
And yet, it’s not some alien force acting on me from without. It’s the enemy within, and it works for me. I could stop it if I really wanted to.
But I am too scared of what would happen if I did.
More after the break.
Peter Pan is Doomed
Here’s the thing about never growing up : it sucks.
Take it from one who knows : remaining a child inside comes at a terrible price. Because all the energy that was supposed to take you all the way to adulthood is still inside you. The only difference is that with you, it has no way out.
Because people like me – you know, us “failure to launch” types – for whatever reason, when we approached the precipice of adulthood, we balked. It’s like we reached the end of the high dive board and froze there, too scared to jump.
Why? I am not sure. There probably isn’t one unifying answer. But I think it has a lot to do with not getting what we needed out of previous stages of development.
Call it self-confidence. Call it faith. Call it the result of being smart enough to know you have a choice. But something went drastically wrong and we failed to evolve to the next stage of life. The stage that’s supposed to last from college graduation to middle age, the longest of all the stages, the one that defines us as organisms and as people.
We didn’t make it. We failed to launch.
And I hate it. I hate that I have a particularly humiliating form of arrested development. I hate that everyone else my age has been all the way through the adult phase and has moved into middle age, with kids and spouses and careers and everything else, while I am not even sure I finished puberty on anything but the purely physical level.
I hate falling behind. I had being left behind. I hate missing out on life. I hate feeling like the world’s oldest tadpole. I hate looking out at all the other kiddies playing in the sun and enjoying life while I am stuck here like a housebound invalid wishing like hell that I could leave this cell of mine and go be part of the living, breathing world but knowing that I can’t because there is something very very broken in me, and I just plain can’t.
Not until I heal, and there are days – like today – when it feels like that is never going to happen. I missed the bus to the real world and now I am lost and forgotten in a world where that bus doesn’t even stop here any more.
If I had known the stakes, I would have foguht much harder not to lose out on life and worked like hell to keep proving to the world that I was worth something instead of just fading way into the background of life, content to be forgotten.
But I’m not content. Not any more. I am pissed off and enraged by the massive inustice of my current life and I am going to use my powers to amplify my voice till it is so loud that nobody can ignore it any more.
Because I am fucking amazing, god damn it.
And I deserve a better life.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.