Revisions
Posted on | February 16, 2010 | 3 Comments
I’m chasing my history and finding discrepancies between who I am and who I’ve thought I should become.
I fashioned myself in the image of a spirited warrior from the start, but so many scars later and I don’t know what I’ve gained from all of these fabrications. I was the toddler seeking diplomacy to avoid a fight his brazen confrontation got him into. I was the little boy daring: chasing the assailant, only to shamble back to his mother, wheezing for his inhaler. The youth with the megaphone, then silent and punched, kicked, beaten up and around the neighborhood once that final school bell rang. The enlistee asking for infantry, assigned to journalism. Begging and pleading with the military doctor to ignore my asthma, my twisted spine, my feeble figure. The one at the back of the formation runs in boot camp, struggling to catch up. Eventually assigned to a desk and told that, right here, I was a genius, maybe the best in the service. No awards for valor, no combat deployments. Just a kid serving with all the guys who beat me up in middle school. Doing a poorer job of fooling others than I did myself.
Like nations facing a great loss, all my life I’ve salted my wounds with introspection, following each failure with reflection. But if this boldness was just a face I presented to the world, then whom was it hiding?
My greatest source of frustration until now has been my perpetual attempt to juggle at once the contradicting notions of proud aggression and somber deliberation. I’ve always been ashamed of being a dreamer; thinking as the means and the end was selfish and unproductive. No, I had to do something great with all that thinking.
I could trace it back to that imaginary country I built up as a coping mechanism. When reality put me in my place, I made my ideals grand enough for residency. But what use is he who spends his life in his mind, I thought? I projected in order avoid the humiliation of being satisfied with thought alone. And wherever reality couldn’t ever match the image I’d constructed in my mind, I resented and hated it.
Instead, I couldn’t just be interested in policy; I would have to be a politician. I couldn’t just be a guy trying to figure out how things could be better; I would have to be the one changing them. In order to justify the obscene amount of time I spent thinking, I would doom myself to become the leader of the free world. But the people in the free world aren’t like their iterations in my imagination. And the free world isn’t as free as my mind.
I’m tired of denying myself for the sake of stoic resistance. I’m tired of who it makes me. Some people out there I just don’t have the mercy required to call my brethren. Some people I just don’t want to fight for.
I must be willing to accept the whole of these weaknesses before I can reach the zenith of my strengths. Until then, I’m only bogging myself down in perpetual defeat, entangled in the knowledge that I’m trying to portray someone whom I was never intended to be. All this time and energy used up on creating a convincing enough face, it could all be better spent.
Maybe behind all the skewing of my personal history that led to the invention of myself as a warrior, I’m just the boy who believed he could fly when nobody was looking. I used to paint on the world like a canvas with my thoughts. And to this day, in spite of everything I’ve learned that would have me deny it, I still believe deep down that I did fly. Would it really be so terrible to stick with that? To stop worrying about what’s real and go back to focusing my life on what’s possible?
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3 Responses to “Revisions”
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February 16th, 2010 @ 8:25 pm
fucking awesome.
February 17th, 2010 @ 1:53 pm
Thanks, Joe. I’m working through a lot of buried thoughts right now and it just felt impossible to go to sleep the other night without some catharsis.
February 17th, 2010 @ 1:56 pm
If you’re going to have a major psychological breakthrough, this is how to do it in style.
Nicely done.