LJIdol 10.1 - "I need the struggle to feel alive"
Well, hey, let's start this off right:
Content Advisory for content related to mental/emotional health. Seems proper to advise around such issues.
I don't like myself.
The reasons for this are long and varied and tend to be based in habit and internalization of parts of my environment as much as the more active work of self-evaluation that I think is incredibly necessary to the work of being human. This is not, mind you, a plea for aid in this matter. I have never met a good-hearted attempt to change this truth of myself that was not infinitely less pleasant than the constant bubbling knowledge that I'm a real piece of shit. Nor is this me doing some smug dick-swinging nonsense wherein I talk about my awfulness as if it were some diffuse virtue, some Tyler Durden drag where I talk about how by being a jerk, I'm really being a good person.
So, after a certain point, I just sorta stopped trying to get that whole "higher self-esteem" thing going. I'm given to understand it's a fairly common thing in the folks who grew up in similar stretches of space, time, and socioeconomic milieu as I did, but I really couldn't say too much because every time someone talks about it, there's a torrent of "how to feel a different way" advice, which is always well-intentioned, but... well, which really stymies the conversation, doesn't it?
It's like a whole mess of other things that were culturally decided to be bad without a lot of nuance or even a by-your-leave that makes it really hard for some folks to exist without feeling like their bodies and/or souls are problems, which does wonders for everyone's self-esteem, which just brings the whole thing 360.
On the other hand, though, becoming ambivalent (at best) to the concept has freed up a lot of mental bandwidth that would otherwise be caught up in trying to resolve the dissonance that arrives when "I don't like me" meets "But I really, really should".
Mostly because it gives me space to work with things that matter a bit more to me than what some jerk (me) thinks of some jerk (also me). Things like getting my mental health in order, things like trying to calm my over-anxious ass down, things like art, and beauty, and the cultivation of the soul.
And it's those last things that have become more important to me. I realize it might be read as a kind of false-dichotomy (like yourself/work on things that matter to you), but the way I had been approaching things, it very much has been a dichotomy for me because, frankly, being around 35 (next week), I begin to realize that I don't really have the time or inclination to make a lot of really big, really major changes in my self-image. That's a lot of focused effort for something I've got this far without and, frankly, between wrapping my head around putting a name to the things that have long made me feel an awkward fit with the world around me (and even medicating some of them), I don't really care to devote the energy to it.
Instead, that energy--that weird, sometimes hyperfocused (because of the medicinal-grade amphetamine that is constantly goosing the underdeveloped bit at the front of my brain) energy that I'm still learning to deal with--so often goes into making things outside myself I can be proud of on some level.
At the moment, a lot of it is various kinds of fiction (even if I'm a bit behind where I'd like to be on a lot of it), and later it'll be papers in a couple languages so I can get around to continuing my university education, but whatever form it takes, that's the place I've learned to focus that good-feeling energy.
Because ultimately, I know for a fact that there's enough going on inside this weird meat-machine, between changes of mind, changes of perspective, changes of location, and changes of heart, I'll never be able to be a trustworthy judge of myself. I already don't like myself and every thought that pops up in my gob is suspect because of it.
But, with a properly jaundiced eye, the things I create (and, by extension, the things we all create) can be better than the people who make them. They're moments captured in amber and run through the weird perceptual filters DWWinnicot spoke of: the twin desires to hide and to communicate something that is so personal as to be uncommunicable and also super-goddamn-obvious to the person making it. And sometimes not even then.
Which is what makes it worth doing for me and is, honestly, better than having any kind of great opinion of myself because for all I will always be able to see the faults in a thing that came from me (my particular and incorrect use of some forms of punctuation, my inability to have a thought that is not interrupted by another thought, my particular attention being paid to certain words or combinations thereof, not to mention certain bad habits of thought coming through), that's also where I can find the good things. Seen outside myself, these pieces of me, these carefully-curated moments in time, become the person I wish I was or, as the case may be, would have been at that time.
And sometimes, when I am very lucky, I find that person that work speaks of to be not entirely without merit.
I can give them the same love for what's on the surface, for what I can see, that I give to my families both blood and chosen. I can look at these artifacts--real or ephemeral--and see not a person who's neck-deep in spiritual dogshit and trying to figure out how on Earth to even start cleaning it up (while being thankful to no longer be swimming in the stuff), but instead see whatever this person was trying to put out. I can see him without also being him and in that moment, perhaps find something of value. Some turn of phrase, some structural trick, some poetic language that was worth a damn.
Which might not actually be self-love, but is the kind I've learned to have.
And while, in the words of the Late Great, it ain't easy, it's also the only thing I know how to do.
Content Advisory for content related to mental/emotional health. Seems proper to advise around such issues.
I don't like myself.
The reasons for this are long and varied and tend to be based in habit and internalization of parts of my environment as much as the more active work of self-evaluation that I think is incredibly necessary to the work of being human. This is not, mind you, a plea for aid in this matter. I have never met a good-hearted attempt to change this truth of myself that was not infinitely less pleasant than the constant bubbling knowledge that I'm a real piece of shit. Nor is this me doing some smug dick-swinging nonsense wherein I talk about my awfulness as if it were some diffuse virtue, some Tyler Durden drag where I talk about how by being a jerk, I'm really being a good person.
So, after a certain point, I just sorta stopped trying to get that whole "higher self-esteem" thing going. I'm given to understand it's a fairly common thing in the folks who grew up in similar stretches of space, time, and socioeconomic milieu as I did, but I really couldn't say too much because every time someone talks about it, there's a torrent of "how to feel a different way" advice, which is always well-intentioned, but... well, which really stymies the conversation, doesn't it?
It's like a whole mess of other things that were culturally decided to be bad without a lot of nuance or even a by-your-leave that makes it really hard for some folks to exist without feeling like their bodies and/or souls are problems, which does wonders for everyone's self-esteem, which just brings the whole thing 360.
On the other hand, though, becoming ambivalent (at best) to the concept has freed up a lot of mental bandwidth that would otherwise be caught up in trying to resolve the dissonance that arrives when "I don't like me" meets "But I really, really should".
Mostly because it gives me space to work with things that matter a bit more to me than what some jerk (me) thinks of some jerk (also me). Things like getting my mental health in order, things like trying to calm my over-anxious ass down, things like art, and beauty, and the cultivation of the soul.
And it's those last things that have become more important to me. I realize it might be read as a kind of false-dichotomy (like yourself/work on things that matter to you), but the way I had been approaching things, it very much has been a dichotomy for me because, frankly, being around 35 (next week), I begin to realize that I don't really have the time or inclination to make a lot of really big, really major changes in my self-image. That's a lot of focused effort for something I've got this far without and, frankly, between wrapping my head around putting a name to the things that have long made me feel an awkward fit with the world around me (and even medicating some of them), I don't really care to devote the energy to it.
Instead, that energy--that weird, sometimes hyperfocused (because of the medicinal-grade amphetamine that is constantly goosing the underdeveloped bit at the front of my brain) energy that I'm still learning to deal with--so often goes into making things outside myself I can be proud of on some level.
At the moment, a lot of it is various kinds of fiction (even if I'm a bit behind where I'd like to be on a lot of it), and later it'll be papers in a couple languages so I can get around to continuing my university education, but whatever form it takes, that's the place I've learned to focus that good-feeling energy.
Because ultimately, I know for a fact that there's enough going on inside this weird meat-machine, between changes of mind, changes of perspective, changes of location, and changes of heart, I'll never be able to be a trustworthy judge of myself. I already don't like myself and every thought that pops up in my gob is suspect because of it.
But, with a properly jaundiced eye, the things I create (and, by extension, the things we all create) can be better than the people who make them. They're moments captured in amber and run through the weird perceptual filters DWWinnicot spoke of: the twin desires to hide and to communicate something that is so personal as to be uncommunicable and also super-goddamn-obvious to the person making it. And sometimes not even then.
Which is what makes it worth doing for me and is, honestly, better than having any kind of great opinion of myself because for all I will always be able to see the faults in a thing that came from me (my particular and incorrect use of some forms of punctuation, my inability to have a thought that is not interrupted by another thought, my particular attention being paid to certain words or combinations thereof, not to mention certain bad habits of thought coming through), that's also where I can find the good things. Seen outside myself, these pieces of me, these carefully-curated moments in time, become the person I wish I was or, as the case may be, would have been at that time.
And sometimes, when I am very lucky, I find that person that work speaks of to be not entirely without merit.
I can give them the same love for what's on the surface, for what I can see, that I give to my families both blood and chosen. I can look at these artifacts--real or ephemeral--and see not a person who's neck-deep in spiritual dogshit and trying to figure out how on Earth to even start cleaning it up (while being thankful to no longer be swimming in the stuff), but instead see whatever this person was trying to put out. I can see him without also being him and in that moment, perhaps find something of value. Some turn of phrase, some structural trick, some poetic language that was worth a damn.
Which might not actually be self-love, but is the kind I've learned to have.
And while, in the words of the Late Great, it ain't easy, it's also the only thing I know how to do.