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[indubitablydyl]

I.

I wonder what it says about me, that I have only been able to find peace is being someone else for the vast majority of my life.  What is it about me that I find so utterly intolerable?  Why do I want to tear my body to shreds, to make myself scream, to make myself suffer so very much, refraining because of mere trivialities like medical bills?

Comments

[warmlonelyrain]

My only form of self-medication is in others, I guess.

For a very visual and odd example, I hate our house and wish I could find ways to make it cute, but I can't. I look at other houses and I can see clearly for each how easy of a fixer-upper it would make. But I can't fix ours.

It's kind of a forest for the trees thing, I think?

[indubitablydyl]

Heh, it sort of is. Especially from people in group counseling, something I've heard a fair bit is "It's easy to fix others' problems, but I can't fix myself." Probably because all "quick-fixes" are illusions anyway...

[captaintyler]

It's funny, the differences and similarities between us. I only started disliking myself recently, when I realized that all my life I was not that special, and that there were people in the world who were much more capable than I. Though I've never considered myself better or worse than anyone, I knew that I had this false idea of myself in my head. And other people DID consider themselves better (which they seem to want the world to know), a fact to which I was completely oblivious, apparently. Only then did I begin to retreat into myself, finding issue after issue, problem after problem. It's like my computer. If only I could just go inside myself, wipe it clean, and start all over again... I wish my jealousy would subside, my feelings of inferiority would disappear, and my mind would clear itself of paranoia. Alas, humans aren't computers

[maddict]

If Shakespeare and Dylan have anything to teach us, it's that there is no transcendental identity poking through our everyday reality like a needle through a map of your hometown. There's nothing buried deep inside you or impatiently awaiting your arrival a hundred months down the road; I don't imagine what we're engaged in as a process of discovery. Instead, I think it's a process of creativity--which you would probably hear as "artifice"--something invented, rather than happened upon. It's deterministic insofar as you don't rationally critique ever little aspect of your daily experience. ("Are tube socks an indefensible mode of oppression foisted upon us by an all-but-embalmed territorial legacy?") But it's up to you inasmuch as you redirect the flow of temporal activity along alternative pebble stones

[indubitablydyl]

I guess I don't really feel "free" to act as I'd like at this point in my life without some sort of security of place/income/support/whatever. It's not as behavioristic as it appears, but college is not the place where I think I can act as I would ideally act, which essentially means I'm stuck for the next three years. Yay?

[maddict]

Waiting for an ideal environment is a clever way of putting off the hard work of self-expression. Post-graduate life doesn't exactly include a dramatic rise in opportunities for creative freedom. This artificial college environment may be the one point in your life where intellect is free to dance with leisure before financial pressures erect that insurmountable wall between them.

Actions tell you more about yourself than internal monologue. What are you doing lately? Christ, make a list. Dog-paddling around a circular routine and clicking your heels for Cardboard Club and Beacon columns? I don't mean to trivialize the power of introversion or give undue weight to social engagements, but I think you might find some much-needed relief in the consciousness of the fact that you're doing something which you honestly approve of. Which is why I still want you to come to a poetry reading and recite some of your work

[maddict]

The "Dylan" I mentioned earlier with Shakespeare was "Bob Dylan"

http://www.theory.org.uk/

But really, look at that post. It's nothing but a bunch of announcements of what you aren't being right now, what you aren't doing right now, and careful explanations as to why this is so. You've put your nouns in this past and your verbs in the future. When are you going to start drawing them in?

[indubitablydyl]

Pt. 1

[maddict]

This is the first time you've ever even made the effort to talk back, to offer some response and criticism, and turn these lectures into mutual discussion. There's a qualitatively difference between a beating and a fight. One involves violence