My senior year of high school was fucked. Expelled from one school part way through, and required at the next school to play a whole bunch of credit catch-up from spending too much time whacking off with nonsense classes at the first school. Something in the fuckshittery of all this tripped something in my brain prematurely- the sort of realization and awareness that I was an adult now, and done with high school. That’s where my head was, even though I technically wasn’t there yet, and hadn’t quite gotten ahold of the Diploma of which the entire 13 year exercise was for. The last thing standing between me and it was a bunch of time consuming silly easy classes with underclassmen, and something about that dynamic- real life adulthood with bills and responsibilities and opportunities and excitements that I was completely ready for, sitting there with the door open, while I am told instead to go back to the bunny hill with the toddlers and ride the Dino chair lift for the rest of the year.
I did it, but it was awful, and more difficult than doing actual difficult things.
I feel much the same way with work, now. And almost everyone I talk to on the daily. I can probably just round it all off to “society as a whole.” People work to fund a vision of themselves in their minds mostly based on others, acquire a sense of security, a sense of future, a sense of routine, a sense of meaning and joy (sometimes)- and then they retire, cope and rearrange their lives and priorities as best they can- then decline into their autumn years. Along the way we have family to look after, strangers to conduct business with, friends to have fun with laugh with or compete with.
And that’s all great, except- I’m over it. Most of it, at least. My brothers and I meet at the crack of dawn most mornings to stay on the same page, work wise- at least that was the idea. We are all kind of in our own lanes and wouldn’t cross paths much otherwise, and the scheduled meetings give us a chance to have a reliable place to touch base or invite customers for group conversations. I could still do without the meetings, honestly, but I see the logic in that much. My hot headed brother, however- who came up with the idea and, like many things, requires people to go along with what he wants- uses almost an entire hour every meeting to recharge his social batteries at our expense.
He behaves towards us the same way he behaves towards his friends, which I have seen and find nauseating. It’s all silly social games of power, dominance, fake projected personalities, fake friendship cloaking animosity, fake laughter cloaking rage, fake humor cloaking aggression. Not only am I uninterested in that entire social dynamic, which I abandoned at least 25 maybe even 30 years ago, but I’ve come to be uninterested in subsequent dynamics. Meta dynamics. The dynamic where I understand that I just need to listen to him and not judge and be present because his ego is tiny for whatever reason and he is my brother and I love him and desire to take care of him, even that dynamic is getting old. Wearing thin.
My other brother, supremely earnest, supremely religious, supremely slow at work overly cautious and autistic/OCD with everything he does- the patience I had for him, once infinite based again on being my brother, but also on this sort of perceived “goodness” and “deservingness” for his inherent kindness and self sacrificing meekness- that patience has also evaporated under the glaring realization that all of his fawning “kindness” is just a cope for being terrified of responsibility. And change. And everything. There is a video clip of him when he is 6 or so that we all make fun of him for, because he literally hasn’t changed at all. In the video he is stumbling out of the woods holding someone’s hand, crying- my mother, filming and narrating says:
*”And there’s Matthew! Like he usually is. Wondering where mama is.” *
As soon as he was old enough he married a clone of our mother, and has been following her direct instruction ever since.
All of which is a long winded way of saying that one of the main pillars of my motivation to work, the joy I receive in working with and getting to help out my dearly loved brothers- seems to have expired, and with it any comfortable certainty I have in maintaining the present course.
My buddy Gary was complaining about his dad, who is in his mid to late 80s at this point. He said that his dad became the exact opposite of who he raised him to be- who he always pretended to be, or was but changed and inverted somehow. He said the only thing he cares about is prolonging his life, which includes hoarding his money and properties and yelling at anyone who might come visit him if they had even heard of someone that was sick.
What my buddy doesn’t realize is that he is also the exact opposite of who he thinks he is and projects onto the world and genuinely tries to be and legitimately behaves like, when he has conscious control over it. He hates capitalism and billionaires, but is the most greedy, stingy, no-tipping, selfish, SUPREMELY CONSERVATIVE rat I have ever met. He has many lofty community and collectivist based ideas, but literally hates and mistrusts everyone, and would live alone in a walled castle if he could. And I am not saying that anything what so ever is wrong with him by pointing this out.
He’s like his dad, but he’s also like me. And everyone. At some point our development is largely fixed around a dash of nature and a whole lot of nurture into a Person of arbitrary imbalances. The shape of those imbalances- I like to picture a white bar graph with a black background, generating a yin/yang symbol of sorts- creates the Jungian “shadow.” But it isn’t really a “shadow” at all, it’s the base layer of ourselves. Atop it comes the superego and the conscious mind, which gets its priorities directly from our weakest and most frightened attributes, and thus fabricates a character of compensatory qualities that we both admire and decide is who we are. When really, it’s who we want to be. Who who choose to be.
And as we age, and our brains deteriorate- it’s that conscious pre-frontal part that deteriorates first, leaving that base layer more exposed to the sun than it’s used to.
Loading comments...