But then my actual experience of life becomes hollow and meaningless. When you ignore everything you are to try and honour some allegiance to reality, you end up living someone else's life. You realise you can do it, you can be normal and live normally, but you stop feeling alive. And then you get depressed and life doesn't feel worth living. Which brings me to a ridiculous choice: A suicidal life which is at least in touch with reality, or a life of insanity which feels worth living despite being nothing more than a fever-dream. Maybe I'm legitimately a lunatic and I should just embrace it and get on with it. Maybe I should just accept I'm crazy and be up-front with people about it. Maybe my real 'tribe' is actually a bunch of cross-eyed loons, even if we're forever at odds and I keep poking holes in their flimsy mumblings. I honestly never thought I'd become this person, get so far down my rope that I finally reach the end and realise the only way out is to willingly climb back up to crazytown. As far as I can tell, laughing at the absurdity is the only available response to the mess my mind is in; it cannot be untangled because there *is* no answer to what we are. The coherent, intentional self is an illusion. We're really each a crazy quilt.
I've slowly realised the people I connect the deepest with (or at least get the sense they understand what I'm talking about) are deeply neurotic. They usually have anxiety/depression or thought-based OCD. When I think about time spent with these people and try to piece together what makes me feel understood or 'seen', I keep finding it's evidence of instability. We resonate because they think about mental and moral hygiene, and their enormous failings at both, with the same dedication and crushing disappointment I do. But if you trace it with enough experience, you see that the root cause of all this tenaciously dedicated rumination is anxiety and obsessiveness - and so is the augmented sense of overwhelm. Always overwhelmed by the enormousness of the problem, or others' emotions, or one's regrets. Even the positive side of my moods is laced with an edge of intensity. (Crap, maybe they're/we're all bipolar.) The common thread there is helplessness, the root of which is anxiety. And I'm only seeing that now because I never realised before that one's response to life doesn't have to involve such intensity and suffering. Some people just don't get hit, or have learnt to let go and just forget because it doesn't matter. They don't expect an answer, they don't expect meaning or truth, they don't expect to do good, they don't expect "progress" in any way I'd understand. What on earth are they driven by? As far as I can tell, simply passing moods they don't question too much. A sense of meaning is just that - a sense. It doesn't need to be justified. You don't need coherent moods. You don't need a coherent ethical code - you just stuff up, shrug your shoulders sheepishly and go, "Humans! Waddya gonna do." You don't need a coherent sense of self - you just do what you do, blindly and unthinkingly. If you notice, laugh or cry then let it go. Whatever you do won't matter in a few weeks anyway. You'll have forgotten it. Suffering only exists when you're fighting, when you're trying not to feel what is. Let go of life being anything other than a series of passing events, meaninglessly connected by chronology.
Which I can do. I can live asleep. But then life stops feeling like life at all - it feels dead, and *I* feel dead. And it's not because I'm 'lying to myself' or 'doing it wrong'. There's no right or wrong here - all choices are equally deceitful. So I have to choose between low-key misery but outward functioning for the rest of my dreary shadow-life, or poorly-functioning extreme mood swings and wilful belief in fantasies of purpose and meaning which at least make me feel alive. I'm just wired to be intense/neurotic. Other people can easily let things go because that's how they work, but I operate better when I'm crazy, chasing ridiculous theories, being excited and serious and invested about something I know I'll discard within a week, grandstanding about some moral or rational issue I'll disagree with in a month, and feeling any number of feelings and any number of convictions which will dissolve into mist in a year.
How on earth can I raise a child? And why on earth would I even do such a thing, other than because it'd be hilarious? A bumbling goon, fanatically devoted to his patchwork methods - which change every month - and the terrified child at the wrong end of his experiments. Fun for the whole family! That's the other thing about this tired old journey down to the bedrock of my psyche (apparently just a bunch of pubes poorly knitted together to bear a passing resemblance to a wise beard) - it erases both empathy and ethics for me, once I see again how clearly all is for my choosing. Raise a kid badly - sure, why not? Fail and scar them for life in years of violent beatings - sure, why not? The scars don't really mean anything, as I've proven to myself. Go to jail for child abuse - sure, why not? Live there and win at prison, or fail terribly and hate everything. You get to press the escape button on life whenever you choose. There's no narrative weaving it all together except whatever you choose to tell yourself. Your mistakes can be erased if you spin it the right way; you could be any heroic character you want if you know how to pick the right notes from your history. If you aren't good at spin and you're tired of trying, kill yourself. Or take over other people so they work for you instead of against you with their moral qualms. The world is your oyster: Open it, fuck it and eat it. Then jump off a bridge.
I don't like thinking this way for too long though, so it's obviously not for me. I can see how it'd work for a select few though, and how struggling against it and trying to be 'normal' because their impulses are horrible deviants would be challenging. Eventually they'd succumb to their personal genetic destiny, justify it however they could to themselves, make a bunch of people butthurt in the process, then die like we all do.
This was way darker than I intended. I don't feel that hopeless at all. I'm not having a kid or anything either. Plus, this was all clearly written in extreme-dichotomy style - hallmark of anxiety. Catastrophizing, whether or not it's obvious to the reader. I'm familiar with what my mind does.
At the end of the day, the majority of me likes being fairly nice, will probably try hard to be 'good', and will push for the 'right things' to be done - simply because it goes with the grain of my makeup. If enough interference gets into my programming, I'll have a couple of epiphanies and become someone unrecognisable to myself - again. The potential in life accounts for all possibilities. But I'll probably always return to Mostly Me.
And/or I could just stop trying to find any identity internally and just let things happen around me/through me. I've found that to be the MO for a few people I know. They never have any real answer for why they've done anything, yet here they are in life, persisting. Works for them.
