You know what I really want? Love.
And not just any kind of love. Big love. Powerful love. Strong love. The love of someone far stronger and smarter and wiser than my poor self. Someone who can take me in their arms and tell me everything is going to be alright and make me believe it. Someone who can protect me both from the world and from my own foolishness.
Someone who loves me deeply and completely but not blindly. Because they know me. They get me. They understand who I am and why. They know me flaws and all and still they love and affirm and value me and make me feel like I am truly worth something.
Someone who likes having me around. Someone who wants to hear what I have to say because they understand what I am trying to tell them and enjoy hearing it because they see that I have a lot of worthwhile things to say and value receiving them.
And they are strong. So, so strong. Strong enough to calm my fears and soothe my jangled nerves and make me feel safe. Someone whose power and warmth and vitality can penetrate my fragile frostbitten soul and let me finally feel warm inside.
Someone who can finally make me feel like I have come home. Truly come home. And that everything is going to be good now because at long long last, I am safe.
So basically, a parent. The parent I never got as a kid. Someone to give me all the love and affirmation and hope and protection and guidance and acceptance and encouragement that I never got as a kid and that still lingers as an unmet need even though I am 47.
Clearly, I can’t move forward without getting these needs met in some way on some level. They are not just going to go away. Human beings need certain inputs before they can grow up and like childhood malnutrition, a lack of them leaves marks that last a lifetime and stunt the child’s growth into a healthy adult.
Just as clearly, these needs are not something a big bearded 47 year old man can address via the direct route. I can’t go looking for this missing parent in the real world because such a person does not exist. Not to the point I need them to exist.
Because what I am basically talking about is God. And religious faith is not really an option for me. For better and definitely for worse, I am far too “rational” for my own good and faith a priori to evidence is not possible in my cold and calculating world.
But all is not lost. I might not be able to accept the logically absurd and nakedly petty and self-serving faith of others, but I am a dreamer, and dreamers dream what they need into existence without waiting for reality’s permission.
So maybe I can dream up a God for myself. One who meets all of my needs without needing to exist anywhere outside my capacious skull.
I mean, what the hell, that’s where other people’s God lives too.
I’m just cutting out the middleman.
More after the break.
Being your own parent
Um, yeah, that doesn’t happen. Not for me. Not yet, anyhow.
I mean, it sounds good. Plausible, even. It sure would be nice if I could do that.
But I can’t do that. So it’s worse than useless. Might as well be someone telling me to solve my transportation problems by flapping my wings.
That would definitely work.
But I have no wings.
And that’s a hard idea to get across to people. It’s only been in the last few days that I have come up with the idea of their being no sequence of moves available to me that would result in my doing X, and while that’s by far the best way of expressing it I have come up with, it’s not exactly accessible.
Except possibly to other INTJs. We all think in chess terms on the abstract level.
Still, I am at least somewhat closer to being able to explain to people why I can’t do that perfectly sensible sounding thing that it totally seems like I could totally do and that would totally improve my situation.
More importantly, I can explain it to myself.
Anyhow, back to self-parenting. Surprise! I remember what I was talking about.
Self-patenting is, to me, at this time, obviously impossible. I don’t have an inner parent that can take care of the paralyzed preschooler inside me. It’s just me, a timid child walking naked through midnight tundra trying to find the way home.
I have no idea where that inner parent would have come from because it’s not like I had any role models. There was nobody in my life at any point who would have modeled proper caring for me.
Even my favorite teacher, Mrs. Rogers, found me very frustrating to deal with. And while I will always adore her for being the only teacher who cared enough to keep at me long and hard enough to break through to me, she was not exactly a warm and compassionate kind of woman.
Just stubborn enough and dedicated enough to wrestles with the impossible kid.
I don’t even have the example of someone else’s parents. I mean, I am sure there were plenty of caring, involved parents around me when I was a kid but I was too socially isolated and miserable to take any notice of them.
More abstractly, to me the idea of being my own parent seems as ridiculous as trying to give yourself a piggy back ride. No matter how clever you are, or how deeply insightful you are, or how emotionally acrobatic you are, it is and always will be a two person job.
But I can see outside that paradigm. I can accept the abstract possibility of being able to be, if not exactly my own parent, than at least my own best friend.
But it will be a long time running.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.