I'm almost 40, most of you reading this are also around 40. I'm unmarried, I have no children, I will probably have neither. Most jobs are impossible for me due to a mixture of infinitely unpredicable learning disabilities and eternally predictable mental duress, It's entirely possible I will not live a long life due either to mental health (delusions frankly more likely than suicide), or physical health problems which already made me feel like consistent physical shit throughout my 30s. The average lifespan for a person with my level of mental duress is sixty, and at this rate it may astound me if I make it to half the age of my close centenarian who passed so recently. It is so extraordinarily difficult to maintain the morale required for health: eating the right food, exercising, or menial tasks and spending one's days outside of a chair. Whether it's heart attacks, cancer, or something neurological, it's coming, and possibly quite soon.
I don't deserve for the black dog to do anything else to me than this. I try to be a good person, but so often I fail. I know not if it's the illness that keeps me partial monster or if it is my own innate character, but I am doomed to an eternal movie of the shameful moments of my life and see the ways I have so grotesquely failed others for reasons which may or may not be fabrications of a faulty memory. A long string of therapists have assured me that I am not nearly so terrible as I seem to myself, but it ought go without saying, I obviously don't believe them. I know myself better than they. I’m the savant-’genius’ with a memory of iron, who commits books to memory, and within that conceit is still more hubris to demonstrate that I am one of humanity's villains.
The reason I write this in public (obviously not the first time) is certainly not to get sympathy. Sympathy so easily procured is easily withdrawn, but to illustrate the importance of finding worthwhile distraction through work. The direction of my life was always going to trap me like this before I was fifty, as the limitations make ones options smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until some of us become basic invalids, burdens to those who can't escape responsibility for us. And one day, whether sooner or later, perhaps even they will have sufficient reason to divest themselves of me. Who will I be then but completely alone, incapable even of being a charge to anyone? To lesser and greater extents, this is the place to which all of those who never find their niches in life eventually go. We either find themselves or we remain lost souls growing ever more lost, ever-increasing burdens to people who find us odder and odder and odder and odder until they can no longer abide our company because we seem so different from the norm, and indeed so harmful, that our company can only ever be occasional and begrudging.
Writing is the only nuclear family I will ever have for which I am capable of heading an orderly house. It ever more becomes the obsession I attend to as though it were my children, and the only worthwhile thing that may save me from the black dog pulling me in forever.The only salvation is work, and the things which I work at, I’m damn good at. I'm more than good. I'm good past what most people I know will ever be at their jobs.
Maybe it’s narcissistic. But even if it’s not, it’s directly correlated to everything which makes me deeply sick. The charitable interpretation is that I either operate in a state of manic delusion, or the mania is what spurs a level of creativity that might hurl a ne'er do well loser like me to achievement well past the many many superachievers I know. It’s not delusion that I have always heard extravagant claims for my brain applied to me, along with the corresponding phrases "What the *&^% happened? What a waste...". Whether anything even remotely resembling the ‘G’ word applies to me (and nothing I’ve ever done so far has even been 1% deserving of it), I’m pretty certain had my life gone differently, I would have been precisely that sort of ultra-volatile male savant who gets the ‘G’ word appended to him far too frequently with too little evidence, and from which today's creative class wants an eternal divorce. Who can blame them? What use are we at this point? The lives of people like me are already wretched enough that if we could end these mental oddities and live a normal life, any of us savants left with some small vestige of sanity would sign up immediately. We've gotten so much glory in the past, but to whose benefit? Not even our own. The lives of most savants are miserable, and history now shows so easily that we don't contribute 10% so valuably as a creative collaboration between sound human beings whose gifts can complement one another and prevent each other from indulging their worst instincts.
But what choice do I have? If I don’t work like possessed, if I don’t now pursue the idea every day with the intensity parents apply to their families, I am absolutely certain that the Black Dog will pull me in forever. I’m about to become exactly the sort of suffering artist everybody hates, and even if the work kills my health, at least I know I’ll have done something worthwhile and raged against the dying of the light.
So maybe this is all a blinding delusion in a moment of deep darkness, but I am 99% certain that the idea I'm currently working on is a once-in-a-lifetime idea that could make me famous, whatever heirs I have rich, and launch me into an accursed posterity I really, REALLY don't want. But what else is there to do now? If I don’t, I will die anyway, and to what purpose?
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