Remember this one?

There is nothing I am supposed to be doing.

There is nothing I am supposed to be doing.

There is nothing I am supposed to be doing.

Repeat until believed.

But we already know that ain’t going to happen, This must be the fifth or sixth time I have returned to this topic and each time I have told myself the same thing and made like I had finally liberated myself from this oppressive and overpowering sense that I am constantly failing a test I can’t even see and every time, it makes me feel better for a little while but eventually my mind reverts to the old pattern and I am back to square 1.

The problem is that I can only resist this deadly default state by sheer force of will, and that is never, ever a good long term plan. Doing things by sheer force of will is meant to be for emergencies. It’s the spiritual equivalent of mothers lifting cars off their children when the adrenaline is pumping.

No, I will not be deflected into intellectualization. Nice try, subconscious mind.

The only hope I have of a lasting solution is to try to figure out why I always feel like there’s something I am supposed to be doing and try to fix that thing.

The problem is that this feeling of failure has been around for so long that I can’t easily remember where it started. And most of the time, it operates way in the background, so that I don’t consciously feel it.

And yet, it really rules over everything else. The whole reason I hide from the world so hard is to hide from this sense of constant failure. I can’t face the world and all its voices telling me that I should/could do this or that, so I just hide from the whole thing.

Like Mister Redding said…

So is the fundamental problem indecision? Namely, my inability choose between the seething sea of a near-infinite number of options that I perceive?

If so, why can’t I choose? Heck, how does anybody choose?

By not having my sort of vision, I suppose. Fundamentally. They either don’t see even a millionth of the possibilities I see, or something in them – call it will, desire, or instinct – lets them eliminate most of them and choose the one that suits them,

The one that feels right.

And maybe that’s the real problem. I am trying to actually computational process all those possibilities and that is obviously impossible.

Too many variables for even my big ol brain to handle.

Normal, healthy people have emotional solutions to the problem. And these work for them because they are not obsessed with finding the “right” answer.

They are not trying to control outcomes by anticipating and correcting for all potential problems like I am.

And they are definitely not waiting for the “right” answer before acting. They forge ahead and deal with life as it comes, with faith that whatever happens, they will be able to deal with it well enough to survive.

And how did they get that faith? By getting hurt and making mistakes and still being there afterwards. By surviving bad things happening to them, and thus learning that they are not the end of the world.

By being ‘stupid’ enough to go out and explore and learn instead of hiding from the world like I have done all my life.

By not being so fixated on being “safe”.

And we all know how I got that way.

(HINT : Rhymes with “grape”)

So it all comes down to my primary trauma taking my sense of safety away.

But why does all this make me feel like there is something I am supposed to be doing?

More after the break.

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Yeah, what’s with that?

For once, I am going to beat back all the competing ideas of what to write about that are trying to entice me into doing something “easier” and stick with my subject.

Imagine me beating back an unseen mob outside my open door while shouting “Back! Back, you savages!” before finally getting the door shut. Phew!

So why does all the above the line booshwa^[1] lead me to feeling like I am constantly failing to do whatever it is I am supposed to do?

The originating incident has to be when my parents took me out of college. Until that point, I had a clear idea what I was supposed to be doing.

I was supposed to be passing my classes and getting a degree. It would have been a double major in psych and philosophy. I would have used that to get into a master’s program in psych with the aim of becoming a therapist.

Not a psychiatrist. No plans for med school. But a therapist.

And I suppose when I got yanked out of school, that put all those plans to an end and I never replaced them, so that while the plans themselves died, the feeling that I am missing out and should be out there in the world “bettering myself” never went away.

It just disappeared into the background noise of my mind, silent but omnipresent.

And I can see why. I was a very different person back then, and that person did not know how to handle what had happened. Like a victim of a horribly violent crime, it was all so sudden that I didn’t even know how to process it.

Which is why it led to my losing my fucking mind and having to claw my way back to my current level of sanity way back in the early to mid Nineties.

It was such a huge conflict because I had done what I had always done, said “Sure thing! No problem!” when my parents asked something of me, and it had led to me being absolutely miserable in a way my parental programming did not even allow myself to recognize, let alone react against.

And you know what? I still haven’t processed it. Not entirely. I have at least gotten myself to the point where I see how profoundly I was betrayed and just how much life scarring damage that did to me – lost my friends and my future and my fragile grip on reality – but on a deeper level, I have never addressed the profound trauma to my (at the time) burgeoning adulthood that did and how it led to my not being able to move forward in life at all.

I was cut down in my prime and I still haven’t recovered.

Guess I know what I will talk about with my therapist next time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.