But, like Data, Pinocchio, and Dexter, I’m working on it.
There are entire sweeping categories of emotion missing in me, Places where vital human emotions and drives should be that are just plain empty, or at best, faintly sketched in, and marked “this space intentionally left blank”.
And I know these emotions must be in me someone, waiting to be born. But their seeds are buried too deep for the warm sunlight of love to ever reach them, and so they sleep through the long dark winter of my depression, dreaming without meaning until spring finally comes to their soil.
For example, everything to do with love and romance is drearily dormant. To me, love is only a pleasant theoretical. Never been in love, never been in a relationship, never even been in lust with someone. Barely ever even dated.
I’m not even sure I am capable of it. I’ve been so dead for so long.
So for me, that entire huge part of human existence might as well be Paris to me, in that I have heard great things about it and it seems very nice and I hope to go there someday, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.
But what bothers me more is the lack of a drive towards it, or even a longing. Presumably, there are powerful instincts that cause most human beings to be driven to seek out a mate, or at least someone to mate with, but like all my other instincts, my partner seeking drive lies buried beneath a thousand years of compacted snow.
Ditto with all the urges and drives related to finding a place in one’s community, both in terms of social structure and in terms of being a contributing member of society.
Never had a full time job. I’ve never supported myself. Never known the dignity of work. I’ve always felt like a burden on others.
And I have dreams of employment, but not enough drives to take me there. They too lie buried in an icy tomb.
Dreams aren’t drives. In fact, they can be the exact opposite : instead of driving you to achieve them, they become substitutes for the real thing.
I don’t even have the proper grooming and cleaning urges. That’s why my room looks like an overturned dumpster. I never clean anything ever. I just ignore the mess as I focus all my attention on the world inside my computer instead.
I wash my comforter maybe once a year. My bed has no other bedding. My bed is absolutely filthy and yet I lack the motivation to do anything about it.
Ther are supposed to be emotions and drives that make us clean out environments, but mune are in that same snowbank as all my other drives.
SO there’s a lot that is “not quite there” about me. I am one weird dude, made all the weirder by the fact that I am also warm and friendly.
The Friendly Alien, that’s me.
More after the break.
Not so sweet
As I grow older, my tolerance for sweetness slowly decreases.
Like the last time I got Diet A&W Rootbeer, I frankly did not care for it much. It seemed way too sweet and quite cloying as well.
These guys got it right,
Except I seem to be going in the opposite direction. The more I drink of it, the less I like it, and that’s happening pretty much across the board vis a vis sweetness.
Not at all a bad thing for a diabetic like me, obviously. And I never had a major sweet tooth anyway. I enjoyed sweet things as much as the next primate, but it was never a big deal to me.
In fact, it was the sudden development of a major sugar craving that was my first clue that I was becoming diabetic.
Suddenly I was eating entire boxes of cookies in one sitting and craving more. I didn’t do shit like that even when I was a teenager with a bottomless appetite.
I’m just glad that I didn’t end up on the fatal path some diabetic fatsos end up on where they just eat more and more sweet stuff in order to stop the cravings until their endocrine system explodes like an overheated gearbox,.
Luckily, I have iron nerves and steel-belted self-discipline and I couldn’t afford it.
And I suppose I am becoming less sweet as a person over time too. One of the ugliest truths I know (brace yourself) is that the nicest people are often the ones whose fears drive them to constantly try to placate the big bad scary world.
I suppose it happens mostly in those of us with some natural charm, Instead of running away from our daily demons or fighting them as hard as we can or even hiding away from them under the blankets, we try our best to charm and befriend them and make them love us.
Because if they love us, they won’t hurt us…. right?
As a result, as confidence and self-esteem and assertiveness rise, the compulsion to be “sweet” relaxes some and we can behave in a more balanced and healthy way.
Better for us by far, of course. But to the world, it might well seem like this nice, sweet,. lovable person is “suddenly” way more rude and hard to deal with.
And there is no use trying to explain to them that you are only learning to assert yourself. They do not want to hear it. And if you try to explain in detail, at some point they will realize that if they accept your view of things it means that they, on some level, have been unwittingly victimizing you for a long time, and then the steel shutters close with monster truck force.
That’s not how I see things. I most definitely do not expect people to somehow know they are taking advantage of me and restrain themselves when I am trying so hard to send the exact opposite message.
It does mean people like me have another ugly truth to deal with, though :
That in order to be well, we will have to do things that risk upsetting and hurting people. And that as a result, in order to escape out own private hell, we will have to firmly and decisively choose ourselves over others.
And that really fucking hurts.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.