Nov 16
What’s up everybody? How was your week?
I should start off by saying that I’m writing this post on my brand new AlphaSmart Neo and I’m not sure how exactly it will work out. Because I can only see four (short) lines of text at any given time there is a slight concern on how the technology will affect my syntax and flow. That is to say, if I were to write a longer and more complicated sentence – such as this one – by the time I reached the end of my thought its beginning will have disappeared from sight. As such, I am forced to write in a stream of consciousness manner and more or less just hope that it all works out at the end.
Still, typing on this Neo is incredibly satisfying.
Alright… so lets get to the post…
Truthfully, I’m not sure what I should write about here. There are a number of subjects that I could discuss. For instance, I am moving to a new apartment over the weekend. I guess that is somewhat interesting in a fairly boring way. Or maybe I could write about the political rally that I went to this afternoon in an effort to show our campaign’s strength prior to the evening’s national debate. There are a number of interesting stories to tell. It is hard to fully convey but it would be fair to describe today’s rally as the political equivalent of ComicCon. What made it even worse, though, is that in the eyes of the rally’s organizers and participants my attendance presumed enthusiasm. I was glad to help out but it is not unreasonable to assume that I will NEVER feel as passionate about ANYTHING as many of these people are about politics. The rally was organized and for the most part surprisingly civil, but somehow at the same time it was chaotic and terrifying. Given the number of active supporters and their extreme degree of positive enthusiasm, if even a small fraction of our population feels the same way in its opposition (as reason would lead any normal person to conclude to be a certainty) it is one of the great mysteries of this universe that more of our politicians are not assassinated.
I could go into further detail on the rally but it is going on 4am. That isn’t to say that I need to stop writing and go to sleep, though, but rather to explain to you that I need to change the subject. See, for the past week I have not been sleeping well at all. Every night I lay awake in the darkness while the same sad conversation of thoughts plays out within my mind. The sleep I do manage is restless and interrupted and without fail each morning I wake up exhausted. I created LittleWyvern to be a more powerful extension of PersonalLegend, but I created PersonalLegend specifically to combat my insomnia. This site has drifted from that purpose, but at its heart this blog serves no higher purpose than to allow its author a few nightly hours of peace. And to that end I must on occasion use this space to vent some small part of the mental and emotional sludge that threatens to bring the machinery at large to an agonizing halt.
Those of you still reading should consider yourselves warned.
I am not sure where exactly to begin here, but maybe it would be best to explain that while there were specific events that brought about this journal entry, I will not be discussing them here. Instead I will only be describing their consequence to my state of mind. I want to be open here, but let’s face it, we just don’t know each other well enough yet.
Ok, so here goes… (man, typing on this Neo just feels so… right)
The internal frustration that I experience every single day is a well documented phenomenon (check the LJ archives for some of my more thoroughly articulated examples). That, of course, is nothing new. I imagine that this sort of mental and emotional discord would be more than enough to justify regular visits to a therapist, but for the most part I manage just fine. Similar to John Nash’s approach to his schizophrenia I am always aware of the problem, but constantly choose to ignore it. Sure, it makes me profoundly sad from time to time, and on occasion it keeps me awake long past dawn, but were it not for my approach I expect that I’d have given into madness or depression a long time ago.
Recent events have sharpened that pain and made it more difficult to ignore, but in my efforts to contain the problem I inadvertently stumbled upon its root cause. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I didn’t discover anything so much as merely find a way to put it into words, but the end result is the same: I think that I finally understand just what the fuck is wrong with me.
Author’s Note: Please forgive the rest of this journal entry. There is a very complicated idea inside my head right now and trying to put that emotion into words that a stranger can understand is a challenge to which I assume myself inadequate. At best I can only hope that you might walk away with a vague hint of a notion of the most general sense of my deeper meaning.
As with most truths, everything begins simple. In my case the personal breakthrough has been in recognizing what that simple beginning is. I will present it to you as an academic…
Wyvern Axiom #1 – There are two powerful and distinct forces at work within my mind. For the lack of a better naming convention I will call them my Reasonable Self and my Unreasonable Self.
Wyvern Axiom #2 – My Reasonable Self (RS) controls my daily activities and is the foundation, as its name implies, for my sense of logic and reason.
Wyvern Axiom #3 – My Unreasonable Self (US) controls my subconscious and is the foundation for emotion.
Alright, that’s perhaps all obvious enough to you, but here is the important part…
Wyvern Axiom #4 – The RS is responsible for my success, but the US is responsible for my happiness.
I am not trying to be Dr. Phil here, but maybe you should take a minute and think about what exactly this means. Again, this may all be obvious to you, but it is profoundly important to me. Now I can not even begin to imagine how your brain works; it is ridiculous to presume that your perception of the world is anything similar to my own. I can only call the sky blue and assume you see colors too.
Just as well, I expect that you and I are fairly similar in regards to Wyvern’s Axioms – even if you don’t totally follow my meaning just yet. These two Selfs exist within us all. It is, however, quite likely to be true that we all differ in terms of the strengths of our internal forces.
Many of you are predominantly governed by your Reasonable Self; you live life practically and find satisfaction in the ways that you craft and shape your own world. Your Unreasonable Self is highly deferential to your RS and you usually become happy or sad for obvious reasons which you understand and make an effort to control.
Similarly, some of you are predominately ruled by your Unreasonable Self. You live life at a whim and find satisfaction at the mercy of the world. You expect the world to operate in ways that are not always true and as a result might often have occasion to be called naive. When you get upset the cause is generally non-specific and often evolves to a sensation that the world at large is at fault and “life isn’t fair.”
Geez, I don’t want this to turn into a dissertation on amateur psychology so I am going to stop with the generalizations. Let it be enough to say that we all fall somewhere in the middle, maintaining some unknown balance between our RS and US.
So who gives a shit, right? How does this stupid and underdeveloped concept matter? When is this post going to end already?
I am going to answer the second part first and the third part last.
This rough concept may obviously not matter at all to you, but it goes a long way in helping me understand why it is that no matter what I do or where I go I can not ever hope to shake my general unhappiness and permanent sense of total frustration at life. The answer that I have come up with is this: I have no internal balance.
My daily life is governed by reason. My mind and thought process is strictly, if not sometimes bizarrely, logical. My success in life is tied directly to my RS and given my talents in that respect (reason, logic, overall smartness) I feel supremely confident in my ability to succeed at just about anything I might attempt. I could get a PhD. I could start a company. I could write ten books.
But I realize now that none of that will ever make me truly happy. Why? Because as strongly as I am controlled by my RS I am somehow equally a victim to my US; and my Unreasonable Self doesn’t give a shit about any of that.
Let me put that another way…
My Reasonable Self sees the world as a blank canvas of opportunity. There is optimism and limitless hope for the future. Meanwhile, my Unreasonable Self sees the world as broken and irrational. The way things are is not the way that things are supposed to be.
I desperately want to live in a world made perfect, but I know that such a world does not and can not exist.
Imagine for a minute the frustration of that conflict. That concept, lame and poorly articulated as it may be, is very much the reason that I haven’t been able to sleep this week. My heart wants me to do one thing. My brain tells me to do another. My perception of reality is at direct odds with the reality that I want to build, and neither Self can get the other to back down. Each part of me believes the other’s desire to be an impossibility.
And so I wake up each morning hoping to find myself in a world that doesn’t exist. Disappointed, I buckle down and make the best of what is there, but take little joy in a life that falls far short of what I know it could otherwise be.
Is that total nonsense?