*adjusts dials*
*flips switches*
Hello? Is this thing on? Great.
Operation "change into someone else completely overnight" is going just about as well as you think it would. Monday and Tuesday were fairly successful. Which was then, of course, followed by a massive cascade failure of motivation and discipline for the rest of the week. I remain committed to "collapsing the waveform" though, however difficult. I'm trying to limit the universe of possible me's to the one I so desperately want to be and am not. My attitude probably needs adjustment of course, I'm just so frustrated with myself right now. I keep trying to develop new habits and keep actively sabotaging myself out of, I believe, complete cowardice over changing. I am, and have been for far too long, comfortable in my misery, apathy and purposeful lack of achievement. I mean, I know the brain gets comfortable with its chemical balances, and actively resists changing them, but this is ridiculous.
I have been under the persistent delusion that coming out of the closet was what I needed to fix for my life to suddenly move forward with purpose, drive and satisfaction. And don't get me wrong, coming of the closet was VITAL to my sanity. It's just been dis-enheartening to realize that this is not the end of my struggle. For one thing, I seem to be fighting some form of learned helplessness I picked up somewhere down the line, probably back as a kid.
As it turns out, people tend to have one of two responses to pain, pushback, or difficulty: They get beaten down until they just stop trying, or they use it as motivation to fuel their anger and push back. For most of my life, I have been the former kind of person, and it is, I am ashamed to say, a terrible habit. I grew up in a religion and family that, while well meaning, taught me in part that I could not be who I was and be healthy (the kind of guy who falls in love with guys), and I could not leave their system of rules without risking social status and my immortal soul, even if those rules seemed incredibly dumb to me from an early age. Many of my friends laughed off things like this early on. Somehow they had picked up something I had not: that not everything adults tell you is true, and you're free to not agree with, not believe, and not conform to ideas that you personally find untrue or unrealistic.
My experience was different. I, for some reason, felt obligated to please those around me by conforming to these beliefs without challenge. I decided, on some level I guess, that my family, my church and my culture were too big to challenge, and I just was going to swallow that nagging inner voice that said that this wasn't me, and just wait it out. Which, I believe in retrospect, is simply choosing to learn helplessness. From there I did what I was told in school, I picked a college major and post-graduate degree that was expected me ("I am good at math and science so I should be a physicist"), and tried to make the best of it.
Except I wasn't making the best of it. It's impossible to make the best of it when what you are externally is at odds with who you are internally and have learned to be helpless about changing that. Put another, way, it's hard to succeed at projects, goals and life in general when your heart really isn't in anything you're doing, and you, for some insane reason, have convinced yourself on some deep, fundamental levels that you are powerless to change anything about any of it.
So, since college, I think I kind of turned my brain off. This helplessness I learned went hand-in-hand with a lack of discipline which led to a lack of productivity overall. I've been skating by, doing the bare minimum, which is what you do when you're not really invested in what you're doing. It's why I dated women so apathetically (sorry everyone), put so little into my job and had so very few ambitions. There was also some Smart Kid Syndrome in there of course, which is a different symptom with the same cause. I had so internalized that I was a Smart Kid who was bound to do great things, that I was both afraid to do anything for fear of proving people wrong, and afraid to challenge what anyone else wanted for me. Maybe I wanted to be an artist instead? Who doesn't, I know.
And, this entire time, I was aware that I wasn't "achieving" and whether that means "living up to my potential as specified by other people" or simply pursuing projects that made me happy (or the gender that made me happy) I was not doing it. And that, to put it mildly, doesn't feel very good. And again, instead of using that feeling to motivate change, my responses were to collapse harder, and numb the pain as best I could. I was too adventist to lean on alcohol to heavily, and I was afraid of any other drugs (until pot very recently), so I leaned very, very heavily on video games, sitcoms and comic books to numb myself. With video games especially I could really zone out for hours upon hours at a time, and trick my brain into believing I was accomplishing something by attaching higher numbers to a pixelated character (and it was easy, so I didn't have to try to hard at it). I may have felt trapped, isolated, under-achieving, and hemmed in by everyone else's expectations, but by god I had a commanding knowledge of the X-men, Azeroth and Newsradio.
These hobbies aren't intrinsically bad of course, but they're more the flavor of life than the meat of it. And i was trying to subsist on a steady diet of ketchup, mustard and relish packets. And there's only so long you can eat condiments before you start to crave some meat to put it on, which is an especially apt metaphor considering I was in the closet most of this time. The point is, I eventually made myself sick and realized I had to change, had agency in my life, and had to do something before I died fat, unhappy, unfulfilled and lonely. But it's one thing to realize this intellectually, it turns out to be another thing entirely to believe it emotionally.
Don't get me wrong, I don't believe my life has been an unmitigated failure until now. I have made good friends, and have even managed to snag an amazing boyfriend, in the interim. I have made changes in the last few years. I have started dating the correct gender for me, which has made life better for everyone involved. I have come out of the closet and been very honest about it with everyone I know. I have sporadically started exercising, socializing, coming out of my shell, even if I do still have periods of marked introversion.
So, here I am stuck on the last big hurdle. Well, that's wrong, there will be other hurdles in my life, but this is the one that really seems to inspire ye olde learned helplessness response. I just can't figure out exactly what the problem is. Well, I do know. I think I'm holding on to my numbing and displacing activities because they're soothing the one last area of active discomfort in my life: my job. I fell into my career back in my passive years, never even looked for another job once this one was offered, and have been, ever since, steadily under-performing. I am capable of so much more and I know it, and my boss knows it, and still, I underperform. And it's only gotten worse since I came out of the closet and started my second-adolescence, extended mid-life crisis, whatever you want to call it. I'm so much more in touch with what makes me happy and fulfilled that I ever have been, and that increasingly looks less like science, and more like art. I can think of so many jobs I would thrive at right now, and for the life of me, I can't figure out if my frustrations with this job, and my behavior in relation to it, are a result of the fact that I just don't want to do it anymore, or whether I'm just so trapped in my bad habits and helpless apathy from the last decade that I can't enjoy it, or at least just DO it. Which came first? I don't know if I would just pull the same crap at a new job, or if leaving the job would fix everything magically. And I work every day wondering if I'm going to get fired before i figure it out.
So that's where I'm at. Trying to figure out what to do about my job. Trying to get my sleep schedule under control and make the other positive changes I want to make without shooting myself in the foot. Wishing this were all so much easier and I didn't sound like a spoiled kid talking about it. Trying to be a better person, who makes better choices and makes the ones I really want to make, who gets energized in the face of challenge and adversity and contradictory people instead of apathetic. Trying not to be so hard on myself in the meantime. Wondering how that parallel me, that I can still see so clearly, makes all those decisions without looking or sounding like a crazy person.
In any case, I am working on it. I hope to figure it all out soon. Sorry for the angsty post, just where my head is at today. Postings of a less whiny, introspective, tmi nature forthcoming.
That is all.
Parallel H, age 36
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