I went to the store today to get morphine for Bubbie. We thought she wouldn't make it through the night last night and at 2:30 in the morning I sat next to her bed and wept as I said what I thought would be my final goodbye. Even if it wasn't the finale, she's been fast asleep since Friday and will probably never wake.
When leaving the Giant, the ignition in my car locked, I tried to get it to work for five minutes, then I realized I'd left my phone at home. I had to go to the store's customer service, where there was a long line. I learned I could only call from a landline if they would dial the number for me, and I had to tell my parents what happened on speakerphone as everyone could listen in. After I was done, there was an old, pushy, grouchy New Yorker in back of me and she raised her voice at me for not clearing away from the front of the line, which I didn't do because I was waiting to see if my parents would call me back. I got home and had to be on the line with GEICO for twenty minutes (and it's usually much longer...), I was constantly thereafter being asked to get my own new phone set up when all I wanted was to nap, and then finally bordered on an anxiety attack in which I fought against the urge to hyperventilate as my hands shake and my esophagus feels as though it's carrying a five pound weight and my eyes blink ad infinitum.
I then had to go back for the car to meet the GEICO tow truck. The operation which everybody thought would take five minutes took two hours. During which I literally just had to sit there as yet another thing the guy tried didn't work. In my mind, the car is still in the Giant lot, forever, until like Orwell's elephant a soldier decides to shoot it, and then its corpse sits in the street as everyone in the crowd picks it apart for meat before it rots.
I realize that this one wasn't my fault. But whether or not it's my doing, this is a regular day in the life of a person with learning disabilities and adjacent emotional difficulty. It's generally at least a once a week experience here, and if this were the worst mental experience I encounter over the course of a week, I might count myself a blessed life.
In many ways, if you're feeling humiliated rather than numb to the experience, that is evidence that you're otherwise living a very comfortable life. I have never grown used to all these things going wrong, perhaps it's because my life is otherwise rather blessed, but the feeling of humiliation is always there. Perhaps it comes not because of what goes wrong, but the humiliation happens because every new experience of it is salt in the original wound of a person who either was led to believe life would give him much more, or misremembers what he seemed in his younger years in one of his many delusional faults of memory.
My life particularly was supposed to be so much better than this. I was supposed to be spoiled by life beyond compare. Read my dreamy prose, discuss any subject with me, any at all... bathe in the translucency of my wit. I shit these essays out more easily than you shit out unrefrigerated sushi. So if you find me an incorrigible turd (and many obviously do...), it's because I'm smarter than you, you know it, and you plebes just can't take it... The view up here is very lonely. To whom could I speak that could follow the thoughts of my Brobdinagian brain?
When you're dealing with crap like I deal with all the time, you have that much more need to lord it over everyone you meet or else you're going to forget anything that's good about yourself and jump into the grave with your grandmother. If that makes me a narcissist lacking in empathy and baseline humility, so be it (and for the record I'm not, for anybody who cares I'm just a run of the mill bi-polar manic with continual delusions of grandeur... along with intractable self-loathing depression and obsessive thoughts and accompanying anxiety that causes my emotional state to be perpetually fraught at an existential level. So there....).
We all need our ways of growing thick skin, mine is knowing in my bones that I was supposed to be fucking Beethoven or Tolstoy, being entirely aware that this spark is somewhere in me, and assuring myself that one day, my time will come.
It's certainly not that I view any fame or posterity as my future (for so many reasons I'd rather not have it), or that such an achievement is any guarantee of lasting satisfaction, if anything it makes satisfaction much more difficult.
The reason is that when you're in that rare moment of real creation, the possibilities of the world are stretched out before you, and you feel as though God is working through you as a mere instrument. There is no heroin, or sex, or love that can ever compare to that manic feeling of being chosen for some kind of ultimate knowledge. You literally feel as though the universe is in your palm, and whether anybody else likes what you produce, a rare moment of that inspiration can carry you for months at a time.
But when you experience yet another of life's little humiliations, every small humiliation feels colossal, because it's yet another reminder of the incompetent you really are. This same guy whose mind is a steel database of memory is the guy who can't get through a single menial task without bungling everything, ho could barely get through school, can't exist in a life on his own without the most humiliating limitations, and can never get the help he needs without colossal resentments building in both the helper and the helped, because both of us are stuck with the question: how can a person so smart possibly be so dumb? And how can a person so smart not figure out how to solve these problems?
And would that these were the largest problems of my life. Would that my anxieties and obsessive thoughts had to do with being an incompetent rather than a monster, would that I were continually thinking about how I failed myself rather than how I failed others, would that I did not have obsessions and obsessive compulsions that spiral, and spiral, and spiral until my mind satisfies itself that it's arrived at the theoretical center of a mental galaxy that lost whatever center it had while still a child. Would that my steel trap of a memory not have black holes where delusions can embed themselves in the very mental faculties that always seemed more perfect than everyone else's. It's the ultimate joke: superrationality and super-irrationality locked in the same brain, with neither side able to convince the other of its veracity, and all left in its wake is the anguish of a mental house divided.
People think they can understand, people think they can be compassionate. But they're not. Just as I do, they choose to frame their lives in a narrative that best fits themselves as the good person or the smart one and others as bad or stupid. We all do our best to concern ourselves more with what others did to us rather than what we did to others. If we didn't, we'd all die of shame.
It's one of human beings' greatest paradoxes. We can only gain our full measure of humanity by dehumanizing others. Material well being is almost always procured at the expense of someone else. Hundreds of people die to pick your fruit, make your computer, make your cars, collect your garbage, build your houses, heat your rooms, line your electricity, and no amount of regulation can stop any of that.
And just as we can only gain material well-being at others' expense, so can we only gain spiritual well-being at others' expense. There are all sorts of dreams, left and right, of a world where people come together and treat each other with liberty, equality, community, decency, and humility. And yet the more we believe in those goals, the further we seem to get from them. It's easy to act decently to a community of like-minded individuals. Long as you're rallying around the same banner, nearly every disagreement is solved by an appeal to the common goal. But whether you're conservative or socialist, libertarian or progressive, Christianist or intersectionalist, what do you do about all those billions of people whose goals are different from yours? What do you do when they resist your preferred vision with every ounce of effort in their being?
Well, for many people, the answer is pretty simple. There's no motivator in the entire world more powerful than war. You may think you're immune to war fever, but there is no drug in the world more intoxicating than self-righteousness. There is no more effective way to band a community together than the sense that people are trying to kill them. There is no way to reclaim your humanity that gives more meaning to your life than to give it away of your own free will to something you believe in. There is no self-esteem higher than the person who fights for what they love, but in order to fight for what we love, we need other people to hate.
You may not have heard or read, but gun sales are going up yet again. Maybe it's purely for recreational purposes because they think gun restrictions will soon happen, but it may or may not be a matter of time before people start using them on us for political purposes in serious quantities. If they do, what choice will people on our side of the ledger have but to buy the same guns? What choice would there be but discriminatory practices until we figure out who's a threat to us and who isn't? So where would your dreams of an equal world be then?
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