I am kind of scared of myself, lately. Maybe I am really just fearful for myself. It isn’t the typical sense of fear, though. More of a suspense. That suspense of not really knowing what the person is going to do next. The thing about suspense, is there doesn’t have to be any real sign of danger, the fact that you realize how truly random life is can be more than enough subconscious terror for one to handle.
Anyway, I guess I have this notion that I have become intoxicated with the idea of disconnecting. Because I am intoxicated, I have no real control over it at the moment. What tie will I sever next? Will I cut myself off completely, and disappear to some distant sector of the world and start over? Or maybe I am just a kid playing with sharp objects– a marionette playing with his own strings, cutting them with no direction until I incidentally cut off the one controlling my hand. Then I’ll just be a partially functional doll, something even Pinocchio would mock.
Surprisingly, none of this seems to concern me that much. I think it boils down to one thematic factor of my life. I don’t make mistakes.
Joking, of course I make plenty of mistakes, but my entire life I’ve been obsessed with trying to make the optimal decision. Anytime I have failed to, even if it was still arguably a good decision, I let myself have it. It isn’t an innovative system, it is just typical, but it has always been in overdrive. (here come the ridiculous statements..) I feel like, relative to everyone else I’ve grown up around, that I’ve really made very few mistakes. Of course, what do I mean by mistake? Well, I don’t know if I have a concrete definition, but I guess I really mean, those kind of decisions that you know are likely just so stupid, yet you do it anyway. We have a lot of words and phrases that kind of feed into this concept, but they all hit different areas. Chance, gambling, throwing it all away, risk, youth, folly, ignorance, ad nauseam. It doesn’t even necessarily have a negative connotation, it just is what it is.
In high school, my coaches would always get on to us, about how we weren’t playing to win, we were playing not to lose. In some sense, I feel like I could say this is sort of how I feel about my life. So I say that I feel that relative to all the people I know and have grown up with I have made less mistakes because I have obsessed so much about it. Maybe it wasn’t me trying to make ‘the right decision,’ or do the right thing, but just me trying to not make ‘the wrong decision.’
I don’t know how much sense this is making, I’ve written this in my head dozens and dozens of times– it came out a lot better each of those times, but the point is this; it has driven me crazy.
I am not advocating waking up in the morning, leaving the house and setting out to screw up as much as possible, nor am I saying that the thought that I should be afforded some of these phases of poor judgment that I didn’t allow myself to have, but anyone who has ever learned anything difficult (aka, everyone) knows that you are probably going to learn more from your shortcomings and mistakes– I mean, otherwise, you’ve already learned it… or something to that effect.
This isn’t a declaration that I am about to turn myself into a moron for a while, or any sort of statement that I am on the market to make myself some fancy new ‘mistakes’. If it is taken for anything, take it as an individual coming to grips that as hard as I try to avoid it, I am going to make some decisions that later leave me feeling regret, or just plain wondering what on Earth I was thinking. This is trying to learn how to accept that fact that I really have no grip on the future. I can predict what tomorrow will look like, and usually do a good job, but that isn’t to my own merit, because I also can predict what tomorrow will look like and end that day blind– if you know what I mean.
Forgive me, please. Ha, actually, those 3 words outline everything perfectly.
I probably only make sense to myself.
Rock on!