“Personal growth commences with an ego death. Self-pride blunts personal growth because the ego resists change. The ego wants to maintain the status quo by holding onto false notions of the self. The ego desires me to see all of my failures as someone else’s fault.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster
I have been having a hard time writing recently. Part of it is laziness wrapped in exhaustion (quite the contradiction, huh?) The other part is just this over-stimulation of the political end of the world, which is just… everything… going on in the US under Trump’s first 90 days in his second term. As helpless as I am, it still consumes me. It consumes me to such a frightful point, even though I may be the last of the types of people affected by all of it. I won the lottery by being born a white male. This does not comfort me.
Unfortunately, I somehow developed something called “empathy” somewhere along the way. I don’t know how or why. I can trace a very real path of narcissism ingrained within me and then reinforced through observing my father. I recall “Karen” indoctrination, where he was sure to instruct me that the correct way to handle telephone communication with businesses was to keep asking for the person’s manager on the phone until I got what I wanted. This sense of entitlement grew so much that I would rage at a speeding ticket and claim that by the end, “I WILL HAVE THAT COP’S BADGE”. What does that even mean? I don’t know.
I eventually did a lot of hallucinogens and experienced “ego death” more times than I can count. Maybe I just cured the worst part of me while doing the worst possible things? Druggy me would say “yeah man, that’s what it does, dude!” But current me says, “I have no idea… maybe I just grew up?”
If I could sum up the majority of my life, starting from puberty until… I don’t know… maybe a few years ago, it would be “existential crisis”. I did the quarter-life crisis like nobody has done before. I am being generous in my life’s timeline, even calling it a quarter-life crisis, as it will be miraculous if I live long enough for that math to check out.
Something changed in my mid-Forties, and I don’t mean my body starting to tell me I am now about to slowly fall apart. Good Lord, why is Forty-Five when shit just gets real?
They say Americans grow more conservative as they age. There is a quote on that which I won’t type because it is just stupid. Well, the opposite occurred with me.
I may hate people, on principle, because I am an introvert. I may hate people, on principle, because I never dared to achieve what they have… usually on just blind urge. An urge I never had. I may hate people, on principle, because even though I was gifted every opportunity from the start and despite my best attempts to self-sabotage, the opportunities kept coming… and I… I… I just didn’t want them. Countless attempts at college that I would drop out of. Countless promotions in corporate America that I just didn’t want. They say a lot of rich people tend to fail forward. I am evidence of someone that forward fails… because I resisted every promotion and eventually collapsed into homelessness and despair. (Spoiler alert: I got better.)
If you are wondering why I was so self-sabotaging? It was mostly of some strange idealistic view of the world in which employment meant something that it really does not in modern America, especially early 2000’s America. I would always say, “I am good at this thing (programming, tech support, etc.), and I want to keep doing this thing. I don’t want to manage people. I want to be the best at doing this thing!”
Fun fact: I manage people now… as basically the entirety of my job. I mean, I do real work too, but only because I want to. I do most of the stocking because someone has to, and the biggest nightmare of my job is the wrangling of cats, which is scheduling and payroll… so I do it myself. My peers just sit in their offices. I would go crazy. I am not saying this to make me sound good… I have a disease! Maybe a spark left of that dumb learned narcissism where I sooooo want to be the best at something. Alas, as I type that… nah, I just want to be good at something.
Good is enough.