Where We Are Now

I need to keep writing.  I've spent literally half the day asleep and three quarters of the day in bed, so some low-quality rambling introspection is necessary to even validate my existence.

I'll be the first to admit that I am not a person of good humor.  Witty, maybe, but not of good humor.  I'm pretty much a cynical bastard who derives an uncomfortable amount of pleasure from the misfortune and suffering of others.  Say something stupid?  I'll call you out in a heartbeat and make you feel stupid.  It's not that that's necessarily something I can help but choose not to.  I am not - nor have I ever been - a particularly compassionate person.  However, I recognize the need for compassionate people in this world.  I've become possessed by the idea that a little bit less cynicism in the world might keep myself (and others) from becoming possessed by the idea that this life is not worth sticking around for.  The universe is chaotic neutral, but that doesn't mean that the Kalamazoo community or Ann Arbor community or the human community has to be.  Cynics like me can sit back and mock others for bothering to defend a guy who tYpeZZ Liek DIs ONda inTanet, but that doesn't make us exempt from wanting to be defended - or more importantly, loved.  There is no point in wanting to mock the human experience when we all live it as brutally earnestly as the next guy.  At the end of the day, everybody wants to be loved.  The lonely blogger teenage nerds, the crying toddlers, the abandoned elderly, the victims of bullying and the bullies themselves all just want to be loved.

The longing for love is a powerful need.  It's arguably more powerful than the experience of being in love.  I wouldn't know, personally, but I think that this is the explanation behind the urges of a man or woman to cheat on his or her significant other.  It's not about the forsaking of one's beloved.  It's about seeing opportunities for feeling loved elsewhere.  It's not a very smart opportunity to take, mind you, but it's there, and it's tempting for a lot of people.  And unfortunately it's not always a longing that is met.  As I said earlier, the universe is chaotic neutral.  Whether or not we're able to find love is never dependent on whether or not we deserve it more than anybody else.  It's only dependent on where one is in space and time - whether or not you're in a position to meet "the right one".

The problem with that last statement is that it's not actually true.  The only thing we have control over when it comes to finding love is our disposition.  You could be a cocky misogynist who still manages to get the girl because he has no doubt in his mind that he is capable of bedding this dumb bitch and exudes a confidence that is (to the seductee) incredibly attractive and (to the cynic) incredibly infuriating.  Alternately, you could be the cynic who doesn't even manage to speak a word to the beautiful woman sitting next to him on the bus because in his head he's battling a blizzard of self-defeating thoughts, like "You're way too neurotic for women to find you attractive," and "She's way out of your league, what chance have you got with her?"  The key to finding love is confidence, and the key to confidence is loving oneself. 

Loving myself is something I've absolutely never been able to do.  I was just born without self-esteem, I guess.  I don't even necessarily want self-esteem.  Self-esteem is often just an excuse for being the asshole.  But even self-esteem doesn't necessarily involve loving oneself.  Take the cynic, again.  If self-esteem is relative, the cynic thinks he's king of the world.  But he is not capable of loving himself as long as he views life as a predictable and futile pursuit of happiness.  He just doesn't recognize that the answer to the universal longing for love is staring him right in the face.  If you want love, love yourself.  That's as close as it gets.  It's not companionship, no, but it's as close as you're gonna get until you're in the right place at the right time to meet the right one. 

The reason why I don't love myself is because I base my self-worth far too highly on what other people think of me.  I feel unloved.  I feel unimportant.  I feel like because I recognize that everyone is the hero of their own story, everyone is just as capable of passing a collective judgment on my value as a person as I am, if not more capable.  But nobody else knows me.  Everyone's too self-absorbed to know me.  Everyone feels unimportant and unloved because nobody else is willing to look outside themselves because the longing for love overrides all desire to bother to look past oneself and actually love somebody else.  That is until they reach that coming-of-age moment and learn to look past themselves and actually learn how to be compassionate and learn how to love other people.  Love is far too much of a social experience for anyone to find it by navel-gazing and sitting on their asses waiting to be in the right position in space and time. 

Which is my problem.  I'm not done navel-gazing.  I have no fucking idea how to love myself.  You don't learn that shit by recognizing that that's where you need to start.  You don't realize that you love yourself.  If you don't love yourself, you simply just don't.  My problem is that I have absolutely no idea how to learn how to do it, either.  I'm really, really confused by my own existence.  To love someone you have to know him, or at least feel like you know him.  I don't know myself.  Hence the navel-gazing.  Is the ability to focus one's attention on someone other than oneself gained by knowing oneself, or is it just apathy?  How does one get to know oneself? 

I'm at an impasse with myself.  There is no way I can proceed from here that doesn't involve, well, distracting myself until an actual solution comes to me.  I've finally obtained some medication (even though for some reason I experience all the side-effects even at a dosage low enough to not affect anything other than my will to move) and I'm supposed to be seeing a therapist, even though in reality she's way overbooked and not terribly intellectually stimulating.  I don't expect any of these to fix me.  The only thing that can fix me is me, and that means being able to separate myself from my mental illness.  Which is a problem, because I can't do that.  Self-loathing isn't a symptom of a disease, it's a reality.  I just have to be able to identify which bits of that self-hatred constitute the depressed, self-sabotaging Nigel and which constitute the possibly-normal Nigel who is capable of using the knowledge of his own flaws to make himself a better person and love himself and be loved in return and ride off into the sunset on a silver unicorn with his blushing bride and millions of doubloons.

By the way, I still think I'm right about all love being conditional, even though that did admittedly come out of a moment of pure misanthropy.  Loving yourself unconditionally is impossible.  We set up a ton of conditions for loving ourselves, and they're often the same conditions we set up for loving others.  We don't hold ourselves to higher standards than others, they're the same.  That's the basis of the golden rule.  You appropriately despise someone who hurts others, but you deserve to despise yourself the same amount for hurting others, too.  And that's what anyone with a trace of self-awareness will do.  This is just more evidence that love for oneself and love for others are intertwined.

I mentioned earlier that the longing for love is a symptom of the need to be loved, i.e. we will die without love.  This is true.  I am not even nineteen and I feel as if I'm wasting away.  I can feel myself dying with each crack of my joints.  I just want to experience with happiness that it looks like other people have before I do, in fact, die.  And I want it to be soon because right now just kind of sucks.  I'm not being cynical, I'm stating a fact.  Compassion is a symptom of the ability to love oneself and, in turn, the ability to love others.  I want that ability.  I need compassion.  I need love.  I need things to get better.  I need to come up with a solution, not just a "fix" as everyone keeps telling me.  I need to figure out why I am who I am and how to accept the part of me that is me and reject that part of me that is a disease.  I need to get out of bed and interview other people or something.  I need to live before I die.