I hate to prattle on about asinine bullshit, but I was thinking about this again today: that perhaps a great deal of the alienation I feel from society, and alienation about myself to myself, was the result of the subconscious conditioning my incompetent mother did as I grew up. Basically, I got an idea of "What adults are and how they should behave" from my mother (and other adults) as I grew up, which I think is a fair assumption. My problem however, is I believe the unconscious assumption I got about adulthood is that adults:
1) Are nonsensical. My mom never had a plan or intention for anything, and only worked and paid bills reluctantly because she had to, and even then she worked herself into permanent disability. Other than that, she partied, fought wildly with whomever for whatever reason, drank, just lived life in however she felt without caring about the consequences. That pretty much sums it up "Fuck reason! Fuck plans! Fuck everything but the immediate here and now!", that leads into:
2) Adults are naturally self-destructive. So many adults, I'd see growing up, are just the ugliest, crippled, most overweight and pathetic creatures you'd ever see. The fact that living such carefree and degenerate lives is producing such a substantial bodily toll on them is apparently beside the point, cause fuck the consequences you gotta remember, they're not going to stop or curb any bad habit, the habit isn't the problem, the problem is that life is a bitch and you just gotta live with it. Which leads into:
3) Adults are uncaring to the extreme. The fact that we lived in squalor was apparently never an issue growing up. If you can just push your trash into a corner and get on with your life, then why not do that? If you can let your dishes pile up until there is literally no counter table space left, but you still only need a few to get through the day, then why not just do one at a time to get through the day? I remember, in the depths of my childhood and teenage depression, I never wanted to shower or clean myself, or shave, or really do anything hygienic, and as a consequence I was just the fucking stinky and unpopular kid at school, but if I could get through the day, what's the bother really, because my Mom and nobody of importance in my life really pressured me to maintain myself, so I was just a shabby smelly shithead for a not-insignificant portion of my life, long enough to build awful habits that persist to this day, and even now I only clean myself up regularly "because I have to" and not "because it's a good fucking idea". Which I suppose leads into the next thing:
4) Adults are unambitious and underachieving. I remember still very vividly my high school graduation party, which just consisted of my Mom and HER friends getting drunk and rowdy for a night, but the actual purported reasoning for the party was that I was the first person in my family in two or three generations to finish highschool. Not that I was happy about it, as at this point in my life I was at a completely closed deadend with no prospects or even desire to live beyond this point, but just the fact that I had that stupid piece of paper that I nearly traded my sanity for was apparently enough. Mom never made any real demands on me, ever... well, I remember in early elementary school, I'd bring home beginners math or writing, and I'd struggle with it, and she'd yell at the top of her lungs at me for being so stupid and just not getting it, and when I got better and her mood improved, I took that as motivation to become the 'smartest kid in school' or whatever, but then she stopped making demands on me, and at some point I realized that all my motivations in life were hollow, and I crashed and burned... but the fact that I crashed and burned was again, a nonproblem in the world of adults, the REAL problem was that 'I was depressed' or whatever shit that divorces the blame from the person and instead places onto a nebulous and unassailable other thing. And so, having achieved apparently what I was born to achieve, and with nothing else to do, I spent the next 3 or so years of my proper adulthood living as an American Hikikomori. But again, this was also OK, so no pressure to get out or do anything...
and I suppose the final thing:
5)Adults are naturally corrupt and dishonest. I remember vividly, on the eve of the year 2000, what I imagined in my head to be the biggest and most important celebration of the millennia, I spent it waiting patiently in my home by myself, waiting for Mom to come home, because she explicitly promised me that we would spend it together. And I watched the big countdown on Nickelodeon with no happiness as midnight came and went, again, by myself, and I still waited for some time before giving up and heading to bed. The only excuse I got in the morning was something along the lines of "Whoops! I forgot, sorry! I was out partying." from my Mom, and that shit still burns hot in my stomach to this day. And all throughout childhood I wanted to be an honest and good person, and that would frequently elicit remarks to something of the effect of "Oh Josh, you'd make such a bad politician!" as though honesty and naivety are inextricably tied together, and maturity and dishonestly are similarly tied together.
Obviously I'm not positing that any of these are true. They're not. Not even close. The problem was that they were presented as true when I was impressionable, and I feel they still linger as incontrovertible truths in my mind, and that those 'false truths' in my mind wind up poisoning and undermining my own identity and outlook on life, preventing me from really living how I want to live or even preventing me from being happy and satisfied with my life when I have every right to be but because I feel I'm not living up to these "Anti-ideals" that I'm living a false life, that I'm an imposter, that I'm still a manchild and I have no right to be happy when I'm still clinging so strongly to my perceived immaturity of wanting to live my life conscientiously.
I'm 28 years old now, still a virgin, and the thought hit me just the other day "It's totally reasonable for me to date a woman that is 30+ years old" and I nearly threw up in my mouth. There's nothing wrong with 30+ yr old women, but I remembered that my Mom gave birth to me when she was 25, and my own insecurity about myself hit me like a kick in the stomach. That I'm still "way behind" everyone in terms of "maturity" and that becoming "more mature" means embracing those "anti-ideals" and just becoming a dumbass fool that'll never make anything of himself. It's just... I want everything in my mind to line up, I want my actions, beliefs, outlook on life, just everything to all come together and reinforce eachother, so that I'm finally no longer paralyzed into indecision about every little thing. That "What I want to be" and what I subconsciously think "What is actually real and realistic" are in such irreconcilable conflict with eachother that moving forward with my life so often just feels impossible. I put up losing my virginity as the milestone I want to hit, but that's stupid, because I can't even decide what I want to do with my life, or what I want to learn, or what friends I want to have, or even what furniture I should have! My apartment has a few things, and I've been THINKING about getting a couch... for more than a solid year now, because I just can't bring myself to even make a commitment like that, that kind of decision requires that I not be paralyzed about the direction I want to go in life, but I am paralyzed, and so I don't make the decision I just let it sit there in limbo, for what might be forever... because I can, it's the easy thing to do, and most importantly, the fact that I COULD decide but choose not to, just gets me through the day.
Now I'm just tired, maybe I'll go to bed early today.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9511827 times)