I just feel so sad and pathetic after getting my wallet stolen. Every time I feel like I’m making progress and getting things under control, I get slammed with a car dying, a new brake job, a new gear shift, a new key, a flat tire, a delinquent parking ticket for a car left outside the service station and ignored. But those are just the external events, what’s truly troubling me are my predictable emotion reactions of wanting to embrace defeat and annihilation and to sigh that all effort is useless, the universe is stacked against me, I’m an orphan of the soul.
Every time I encounter a setback, I just want to curl into a ball and retreat into the fetal position. Why do I want to keep regressing to this pathetic child-like state? Because at age 46 I’m stuck seeking out the nurturing I didn’t get as a tiny child and my primary ways of doing this are through manipulating you.
As I get older, I don’t become more mature, I just become more skilled at manipulating people to pay attention to me. I lack emotional resilience and adult strength. I want to be rescued. I want someone to cuddle me and to make everything better. I just have this deep sadness and desire to retreat to a pitiful state and wail and cry and gnash my teeth and obsess over my stolen wallet, parking ticket ($171!), and other unexpected expenses.
I wonder if there aren’t healthier ways for me to live than pouring out my heart on Facebook, isolating from human contact so I can blog about my feelings? I just want to dwell in my hurt and pain and lie on the floor and bewail my fate and manipulate you into liking this post and making comments that I’m adored. But nothing has changed inside of me since I was four years old. I’ve been having these emotional cycles for as long as I remember. I stub my toe and I want to cry, but I’ll control my sniffles if I can get you to admire my bravery.
I miss the days when I would idealize powerful people I’d meet and for days or weeks or months or years, I’d fantasize that they would rescue me, or at the very least, their greatness would rub off on me and that would make me well (Dennis Prager, Orthodox Judaism et al). Now I just see everyone in my life as screwed up as I am and less capable of rescuing me than I am of rescuing myself. There’s no Savior out there but hard work but I’ll never get anywhere significant unless I tap into passion and it’s been a long time since I was filled with enthusiasm and just pumping with adrenalin as I went about my day, sure that the world was about to recognize my greatness. I don’t daydream as much about rescue anymore and I don’t daydream as much about new people in my life and how they’re gonna be so well. I just see everyone in my life as frightfully and dangerously flawed and see how painful it will be to integrate with them and I have no desire to lean on them for long, maybe just some quick using to pep me up. I only write this because something popped up on FB that said: “Share how you’re feeling.”
In the summer of 1982, I was 16 and on my way to a truly spiritual first love. I kept separate my porny predatory feelings from my first GF Rainy and I never kissed her, never held her hand, instead I kept things on a sweet Moonlight Kingdom kind of plane totally in line with the teachings of our Adventist prophet Sister White and then when we were innocently playing like fawns in the Pacific Union College pool that sunny afternoon, that little black boy had to pop up between us and say to me in a loud clear voice, “Why is your penis sticking out like a lance?” And then Rainy yelped and swam away and I grabbed the boy and dunked him but it was too late. The idyll had been shattered. My nasty self had reared its ugly head and been exposed for the world to see. I’d been outed as a bloke who swam through the PUC pool like a Great White Shark, a loaded gun in my shorts just waiting to go off and split apart some innocent Adventist girl. I am Desmond’s shame.
