Motherless Brooklyn Was Okay
I came home after dinner tonight and felt a now-familiar decline in mood. I had gotten a movie ticket for Motherless Brooklyn (a solid B) and I was gonna bail on it because I hated myself and I was frustrated by my perpetual inability to sustain any momentum. As recently as a month ago, I felt like I was on a real roll, y'know? I was making meals at home, and I was keeping my apartment somewhat clean, and keeping appointments n' shit, and then I had a bad week that turned into 4 bad weeks in a row.
This isn't what I wanted this post to be about. Been trying to write it for like two months and it was gonna be about my changing self-perceptions, but it's probably high time I learned that planning these things out any more than an hour in advance just doesn't work. So now this is gonna be about something else, which I will figure out as I go.
I managed to convince myself to abandon my new plans of sitting here and feeling like shit while feebly trying to distract myself, and I went and saw a self-indulgent-but-serviceable noir film while evaluating the breadth of my life in the background. On one hand, this was a good thing. The biggest indicator of improvement I've had is this ability to push past these nosedives, to muscle through these walls I hit. I did shit I needed to do today, and it's enabled me to do shit I want to do tomorrow, and that's very much a good thing.
Less good is that expending that energy to do the things I needed to do made it harder to feel good about myself, an excruciatingly self-defeating aspect of self-care that sometimes makes it an absolutely miserable exercise. This elicits the usual whys and why-nots. Why bother trying so hard if it's just gonna make me feel like shit? Why not just fuckin' quit? Why persist in pretending that I can simply will motivation into being by rote insistence? Why not just give up on being social or creative or productive and lay in bed all day and not eat and waste away, which would at least result in some weight-loss, and would literally require me to do nothing?
And it all leaves me with this leaden thing in my brain that masquerades as a heretical truth, some elusive shadow that I tell myself I know is there but I'm afraid to admit it. It says that the only thing I've ever consistently wanted to do is die. It says that it's only a matter of time, which conveniently leverages the basic fact of mortality to seem legitimate.
I am not dead, and as I think about it, that must mean that there are in fact two things I've consistently wanted to do, two equal and opposite things that wax as the other wanes, pulling me to and fro on kalpic waves that leave me in this state of fugue; an alternating current of psychiatric affliction powering this nexus of personality disorder and post-trauma.
It fits this model I've been building over the last few years, this Theory of Me that tries to tie together every disparate personality trait flitting about in my brain, each seemingly intent on destroying one of the other little butterflies occupying the same space. It fits this paradox where the harder I try to be okay, the harder it is to be okay. The thing I'm using to try so hard is the same thing powering this current, right? So the harder I push it, the more intense the current, and while things might occasionally align to let me do A Thing, most of the time it keeps me trapped.
I already have grand ideas on how to potentially escape, and they seem sound, but now I have to quietly wonder if those ideas aren't also a trap because they're also built from that binary foundation, and then I feel frustrated because what the fuck else do I have to use? Is this engine not the engine of Me? Is it not the one tool of achievement I have? How long would it take to build a new one from scratch? Could that ever truly be done, since I would have to use this engine to do it?
This is the limit of self-narrative. It enables me to navigate all this shit in ways that I can understand, but it's also incredibly susceptible to cognitive distortion. It's so easy to accept the narrative as objective fact, and then you stop considering things outside of the narrative, and that's how you get stuck in that loop, right? Here we go again. I just can't help myself. This is just who I am.
If that's true, how did I take that shower today? How did I get myself to go see that pretty-okay movie? How did I suss out any of this in the span of a few hours?
The truth is that my dip tonight was not the same dip I've had previous nights. And those dips weren't the same as the ones before, either. The truth is that I am getting better - demonstrably so, even. The truth is that the Me that I so ravenously pry apart during these kalpic cycles is always, always a different me, because each day is different and new and builds upon the previous days. I sit here and I fret about how to move grains of sand when the reality is that they move simply by my being.
And that feels so close to the answer, like it's sitting just on the periphery of spotlight. How do I stop trying and do? How do I accept without capitulating? How do I let go without abandoning?
Is it control? Is that the thing? If I accept the things I can't control, will that enable me to control the things I can? Is that where all the judgments come from? I do the thing, but I can't control the aftermath of the thing, so I feel disappointed when it doesn't go the way I want?
Is that why everything seems so fucking daunting all the time? Like, it's not just doing the thing, but it's this obsession with doing the thing in just such a way as to dictate an exact outcome. It's not saying 'hi' to somebody, it's saying 'hi' in a way that they can't possibly react negatively to it. It's rehearsing that over and over and over again until I just give up on the notion altogether because who has the fuckin' energy to say 'hi?'
I get it. I get this need to feel like I'm in control. I have very real reasons to expect physical danger if I'm not perfectly in-line, so if I'm gonna do a thing, I better fuckin' do that thing right or so help me. And I can sit here and tell myself that I don't know how to let go of that, but I think I'm starting to realize the flaw in that worry: there is no 'how.'
That's not how life works. The days will come and go of their own accord, and I don't get to say how those days will go. This is not a game where I just need to hit such and such objectives and it'll unlock this new ability. This is a shitty CYOA book with one page and exactly one choice: you gonna do today, or nah?
I don't know how true any of that is, which is absolutely maddening. Right now it feels pretty fuckin' real, but I might forget it all tomorrow and it might mean nothing in the long run, but it might just be that I'll only ever be able to build the things I wanna build by choosing to do today. The grains of sand are moving on their own, and I'll only ever have a say in where they move by actively being, and not passively wishing.
Or maybe I'm just doomed to be in this constant spiral, and maybe that movie was actually great and I'm just being snobbish because the big twist two hours in was given away in the first ten minutes.
Who knows?
This isn't what I wanted this post to be about. Been trying to write it for like two months and it was gonna be about my changing self-perceptions, but it's probably high time I learned that planning these things out any more than an hour in advance just doesn't work. So now this is gonna be about something else, which I will figure out as I go.
I managed to convince myself to abandon my new plans of sitting here and feeling like shit while feebly trying to distract myself, and I went and saw a self-indulgent-but-serviceable noir film while evaluating the breadth of my life in the background. On one hand, this was a good thing. The biggest indicator of improvement I've had is this ability to push past these nosedives, to muscle through these walls I hit. I did shit I needed to do today, and it's enabled me to do shit I want to do tomorrow, and that's very much a good thing.
Less good is that expending that energy to do the things I needed to do made it harder to feel good about myself, an excruciatingly self-defeating aspect of self-care that sometimes makes it an absolutely miserable exercise. This elicits the usual whys and why-nots. Why bother trying so hard if it's just gonna make me feel like shit? Why not just fuckin' quit? Why persist in pretending that I can simply will motivation into being by rote insistence? Why not just give up on being social or creative or productive and lay in bed all day and not eat and waste away, which would at least result in some weight-loss, and would literally require me to do nothing?
And it all leaves me with this leaden thing in my brain that masquerades as a heretical truth, some elusive shadow that I tell myself I know is there but I'm afraid to admit it. It says that the only thing I've ever consistently wanted to do is die. It says that it's only a matter of time, which conveniently leverages the basic fact of mortality to seem legitimate.
I am not dead, and as I think about it, that must mean that there are in fact two things I've consistently wanted to do, two equal and opposite things that wax as the other wanes, pulling me to and fro on kalpic waves that leave me in this state of fugue; an alternating current of psychiatric affliction powering this nexus of personality disorder and post-trauma.
It fits this model I've been building over the last few years, this Theory of Me that tries to tie together every disparate personality trait flitting about in my brain, each seemingly intent on destroying one of the other little butterflies occupying the same space. It fits this paradox where the harder I try to be okay, the harder it is to be okay. The thing I'm using to try so hard is the same thing powering this current, right? So the harder I push it, the more intense the current, and while things might occasionally align to let me do A Thing, most of the time it keeps me trapped.
I already have grand ideas on how to potentially escape, and they seem sound, but now I have to quietly wonder if those ideas aren't also a trap because they're also built from that binary foundation, and then I feel frustrated because what the fuck else do I have to use? Is this engine not the engine of Me? Is it not the one tool of achievement I have? How long would it take to build a new one from scratch? Could that ever truly be done, since I would have to use this engine to do it?
This is the limit of self-narrative. It enables me to navigate all this shit in ways that I can understand, but it's also incredibly susceptible to cognitive distortion. It's so easy to accept the narrative as objective fact, and then you stop considering things outside of the narrative, and that's how you get stuck in that loop, right? Here we go again. I just can't help myself. This is just who I am.
If that's true, how did I take that shower today? How did I get myself to go see that pretty-okay movie? How did I suss out any of this in the span of a few hours?
The truth is that my dip tonight was not the same dip I've had previous nights. And those dips weren't the same as the ones before, either. The truth is that I am getting better - demonstrably so, even. The truth is that the Me that I so ravenously pry apart during these kalpic cycles is always, always a different me, because each day is different and new and builds upon the previous days. I sit here and I fret about how to move grains of sand when the reality is that they move simply by my being.
And that feels so close to the answer, like it's sitting just on the periphery of spotlight. How do I stop trying and do? How do I accept without capitulating? How do I let go without abandoning?
Is it control? Is that the thing? If I accept the things I can't control, will that enable me to control the things I can? Is that where all the judgments come from? I do the thing, but I can't control the aftermath of the thing, so I feel disappointed when it doesn't go the way I want?
Is that why everything seems so fucking daunting all the time? Like, it's not just doing the thing, but it's this obsession with doing the thing in just such a way as to dictate an exact outcome. It's not saying 'hi' to somebody, it's saying 'hi' in a way that they can't possibly react negatively to it. It's rehearsing that over and over and over again until I just give up on the notion altogether because who has the fuckin' energy to say 'hi?'
I get it. I get this need to feel like I'm in control. I have very real reasons to expect physical danger if I'm not perfectly in-line, so if I'm gonna do a thing, I better fuckin' do that thing right or so help me. And I can sit here and tell myself that I don't know how to let go of that, but I think I'm starting to realize the flaw in that worry: there is no 'how.'
That's not how life works. The days will come and go of their own accord, and I don't get to say how those days will go. This is not a game where I just need to hit such and such objectives and it'll unlock this new ability. This is a shitty CYOA book with one page and exactly one choice: you gonna do today, or nah?
I don't know how true any of that is, which is absolutely maddening. Right now it feels pretty fuckin' real, but I might forget it all tomorrow and it might mean nothing in the long run, but it might just be that I'll only ever be able to build the things I wanna build by choosing to do today. The grains of sand are moving on their own, and I'll only ever have a say in where they move by actively being, and not passively wishing.
Or maybe I'm just doomed to be in this constant spiral, and maybe that movie was actually great and I'm just being snobbish because the big twist two hours in was given away in the first ten minutes.
Who knows?
Comments
Post a Comment