With an ungainly bump and a thud, I’m off on another internet adventure. Come journey with me through the rippled silliness of my grey matter, as I project it (word-wise) onto the screen before me. All for your consumption, my special special friends. Meaning anyone who bothers clicking onto here.
Which I hope is everyone, really. I hope there are people learning English just so they can read my half-baked and all-skewed take on things. Written in styles borrowed from any number of semi-popular authors, all mixed together in the blender of my brain into a pancake batter of this-is-a-bad-metaphor.
So what to write about? Not a whole lot has changed. No thoughts strongly provoked, other than those of food, in the past 24 hours. A few paranoid delusions, to be sure, but which one of us hasn’t sat in an awkward silence with the eerie feeling there is a small projector on the back of your head, shining your inner thoughts of murderous rage on the wall? None, I say. None of us.
The thing about paranoia is that it’s so wonderfully unfounded and narcissistic. Normally narcissism falls (in most people’s minds) on the other end of the spectrum, an overly positive imagine of oneself. But I argue that paranoia is the same thing, in that one believes him or herself important enough to be the subject of plotting and planning. Most of the time it turns out, when you’re well and truly paranoid, that no one notices you at all. Except for maybe sticking briefly in their memory as “that twitchy guy with the shifty eyes.”
I admit it. I’ve got shifty eyes. I am self-obsessed and take damn near everything personally. It has damaged my career prospects, my interpersonal relationships… And oh! To speak of romantic ones is something I’d rather not do. Trying to remember when it developed is a bit like trying to remember when you got a shirt you never wear. Not a horribly ugly one, but the one you just can’t find an occasion for. It’s probably yellow, or worse puce (or one of those other colors that sounds like a disease), and sits insultingly in your closet. You see it, you don’t throw it away, but you don’t like it.
That’s how most neuroses feel, to me. I can spend my life navel gazing with a professional witness (read: in therapy) and get basically nowhere in terms of the cause or origins of these little quirks. My foibles. All my little getting-to-know-me’s. But that doesn’t do much good, does it? It’s better to explore them, to dive in headfirst into how they make me feel right now and get to the bottom of each individual situation, like a large-lunged Southeast Asian boy snorkeling for clams. Except instead of a pearl, it’s an even greater prize. An instance of my being wrong about things.
Not wrong like “I am factually incorrect” or “I did something reprehensible.” The subtle, tasty wrongness of misreading a situation, making it about myself. Sometimes other people are damn near autonomous! I know! Hard to believe. There was a time I would have chortled at the thought, being a self-centered disgust-o-phile.
Aside: Do you know that if we all spent the energy we spend hating each other on productive things, we could have antigravity technology right now? I firmly believe that. In a sort of metaphorical way, which it turns out isn’t the firm at all. If we bitch less about the present, the future will get here, brighter, shinier, and quicker. I firmly believe that too, as it is my original point restated in a less ridiculous fashion.
An example is in order: I am convinced that people speak badly about me behind my back. Meaning they say bad things, not that they fail to use correct grammar and diction when I’m not present. I am intensely sensitive to criticism, so much so that the wrong person chuckling about one of my foibles causes blood to flush my cheeks and my pupils to dilate. At least that’s what it feels like. I’ve never been in an eye exam when it happened.
Rage! Instant and shattering. I’ve had a bad temper my whole life, and been picked on a fair bit. And responded a fair bit in kind. Perhaps too much so. I’ve evolved defenses capable of rendering the strongest psyche unbased, its owner tearful. This is not something I’m proud of, you see. It’s something that happens. Something that I do.
When this kind of thing happens, instead of avoiding it, pushing it down, or passive-aggressiving my way out of it, I find the truth, by hook or by crook. Now asking someone tends to lead to an response that you can’t believe. Of course they wouldn’t tell you to your face, gleaming and open with eyes and mouth, what they say to others behind you. But if you can get someone else to probe them or employ a little covert surveillance (including but not limited to: Eavesdropping, checking the email of people who don’t sign out, other nefarious and varyingly technological things) you’ll usually find what I find.
When you’re that way, people don’t talk about you much. People don’t think about you. The fact is, I think, people don’t care. It’s too much of a hassle to deal with a volatile human being. It’s too much work to constantly reassure someone that they’re okay in your book. Or maybe you just aren’t bothered by the things they think you are. It’s interesting.
All of this is in reference to specific recent examples I won’t get into. Specifics aren’t the point, the point is a mindset.
People who believe themselves to be victims will always be victims.
That’s the mindset. That’s the thing that gets in the way. And it’s selfish. Oh so selfish. And I don’t write this accusingly. I write this with the cheerfully painful burden of self knowledge. The knowledge that I have been so consumed by this issue of what others think of me that it nearly destroyed me. And ultimately, it was in no way—NO WAY—what others thought that nearly destroyed me. It was in my head. It was me playing games with myself. Self-destructive mental masturbation. Navel gazing with a professional witness.
That’s about it for now. This was a bit weird, a bit personal, but hopefully interesting or at least comical in some regard or another. Comment below.
RJC
