(no subject)

Feb 11, 2008 08:20

February the fifteenth marks the five year anniversary of the day I ran away from my life. I had cloistered myself away emotionally a long time before that, and it seems to me that this was just the final step in the actualization of a (im)personality trait to which yeast had long ago been added, and which had then been given ample time to rise. Prized possessions of the middle class white kid though they are, there isn’t really a sob story associated with it, though it would certainly garner some sympathy (another prized possession of the middle class white kid) if I could come up with one. I'll work on it. The crux of this is more the emotional seclusion than my literal physical defection to the vagabond lifestyle, so I suppose I ought to talk more about the former than the latter, and hope that any insight I can tease out doing so will shed some light on the latter as well.
Long story short, sometime before high school, maybe as early as elementary school, I closed myself off from everybody. An apt metaphor from a hit-and-miss singer/songwriter is that I bore a striking resemblance to East Berlin. My contact with the outside world was limited to seeing its fireworks exploding in the air over the wall and the fact that I could pick up its radio signals. I got along well enough diplomatically because I knew how to go through the motions convincingly without having to actually feel anything. I have in my life, though, and not wholly infrequently either, made overtures to my friends, exposing certain faults or frailties in a desire for human connection or collaboration in my self-actualization (up yours, Maslow), but it's always left a bad taste in my mouth. Either in reality or, more likely, merely in my own perception I've felt spurned, or worse, ignored every time. In all likelihood, those overtures were mostly disingenuous in themselves and used more underhandedly as an excuse to maintain my police barricade.
I'm not trying to say I was friendless, bored and alone, because I wasn't. I had friends; in fact I had rather a lot. In general I'd say people like me, and conversely in general I'd say I like people. It's not even to say that I was perpetually unhappy, because most of the time I wasn't. So, what's with the hermit-crab shtick? As far as gaff goes, emotionally impersonating Al Gore is not particularly crowd pleasing, nor is it especially lucrative. Prostitution and reclusion are equally poor career choices, and neither holds much opportunity for advancement.
Almost definitely it's because in my heart I'm completely uncomfortable with myself. Something in me makes me grimace when I look back over old photographs and other autobiographical artifacts. I'm convinced that there's no way people could really like me as a person because I don't even like me myself. Lead by example, Fred, the internal motivational speaker interjects helpfully.
Damn. Re-reading this, I'm appalled at how trite, contrived and melodramatic the whole "I don't like myself" thing sounds. I suppose I can only justify it by assuring you that I really do have a stomach churning distaste for myself and nearly every aspect of my personality. It's only in the last year that I've even started to gain any sort of self-consciousness about this; I think the moment it really started to dawn on me was when I realized I was truly taken aback to find that two friends I had assumed thought of me infrequently and with mild compassion if ever at all actually cared for me quite earnestly. My first reaction, as I said, was shock. The second was the confused speculation as to why I felt so shocked. Thus, I was led down the path of inquisition until winding up here. I wonder if it wouldn't be accurate to speculate that it's not overly-dramatic to be self-loathing as long as you don't realize it.
I cleaned my room recently. (This may seem like an incongruous non-sequitur, but bear with me) Throughout my life I've always been a bit of a pack-rat, and my room has consequently always been a bit of an uninhabitable wreck (understatement much?). On my last visit home, it became to me a symbol of adulthood (one of those incomprehensible subconscious associations) to finally clean my room. In the three days that it took me I uncovered scraps and memories of basically my entire life, both things I enjoyed reminiscing about and things that I wished I hadn't remembered. In this way I was sort of forced to confront the entire panorama of my spotted personal history, and I realized that there are some pretty OK things about myself, and that the next step for me is to figure out what those things are and to bring those to the forefront while working to minimize or eliminate those parts of me that make me nauseated to think about.
I certainly don't mean to sound uncharacteristically hopeful, because there's nothing that alienates a reader more than sudden character change without a hint of believability; we all write and re-write our lives, though for whom we are writing seems to be dependent on the individual and dynamically and inextricably linked with his location in time and space. Regardless, whoever's reading the story of my life as I tell it is likely to be annoyed and forcefully drawn out of the story by this sudden 180. However, there are a couple of things working in my favor. First is my recent realization that it's time to have an emotional life - it's time to have people in my life that I love and love the people in my life. Second is the stability offered by finally in the last year having found a medication that works (which far outweighs in worth its staggering anaesthetizing effect). Last (or at any rate the last in this non-exhaustive list) is that in the last year or two I've become an entirely different person mentally. As I take my first tenuous steps on the stage of adulthood, I've sort of (paradoxically) withdrawn wholesale from the world in order to figure out my place in it, an exercise which requires a great deal of introspection. These all may be symbols of maturity, or they may be symbols of comprehensive burn-out (which is more my take on it), but their classification is mostly irrelevant and I suppose their greatest application is to be taken for what they are without worrying about what exactly it is that they mean. Give me another 8 months of introspection (3 of which will be on the road to Mongolia) and we'll see where I end up. It's Lao-Tzu’s proverbial single step beginning the thousand mile journey. All that remains to me right now is to re-iterate: bear with me.
Previous post Next post
Up