Either everyone is hounding me for the things that only I can offer or everyone’s being nice because they feel sorry for me. Either I can’t find time to work on the thing I want to work on because there are so many other things vying for my attention or I can’t bear to work on the same damn thing for another second and beg the walls and windows for something else to work on, that I might actually make progress on something for once. Either the rain is making me depressed and sleepy or the sun is making me cozy and sleepy or the nighttime is making me lonely and sleepy.
It’s so hard to tell, sometimes, which problems I’ve manufactured for my own convenience.
The scary thing about being clever enough to manipulate and trick people is that I can never be quite certain that I haven’t manipulated or tricked myself. I can’t help but second-guess myself every moment. Do I really feel as shitty as I just claimed I do? Am I really depressed today or am I just emulating the symptoms to myself so I can hide from my responsibilities? Did that actually hurt? Am I actually sad? Is this genuine happiness?
it’s too easy to write ourselves into scenes. In this scene I’m angry because people are supposed to be angry in this kind of situation. In this scene I’m depressed, because I don’t trust myself to act angry convincingly enough. In this scene I’m patient, in this scene I’m amused, in this scene I’m disgusted. The connection point between these emotions and our own are sometimes so tiny and tangential as to be virtually non-existent. It’s easy to get lost in a story we write for ourselves that ends up not being about us at all.
Our stories will eat us if we let them.
The realization which sets me free, every time, is that it doesn’t really matter how I feel or why. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m feeling sad or melancholy or depressed, angry or irritable or volatile, doesn’t matter whether it’s a problem I can’t handle or a problem I simply don’t handle, because in the end there is no real difference between the two. Being unable to do something and unwilling to do it are both just ways of saying that it didn’t get done. The only meaningful measure of what a human is capable of accomplishing is what that human accomplishes.
How is it that we can want to do something we don’t want to do? Are we of two minds, really? Or do we just deny where our desires are really coming from? We do the things we don’t want to do because, actually, we want to do them. The real questions, the ones that don’t always get answered, are:
Why, if you say you don’t want to do these things, do you still want to do them enough that you do them anyway?
Why, if you say you want to do something, do you want not to do it enough that you aren’t doing it now?
Why?