Too Many Trees

I am about to shamelessly mix metaphors.

All throughout my life I have struggled and strained and mourned and fought with the existence I have been given, its limitations, and its possibilities. Anger, anxiety, depression, and even despair have been the foundations of my experience. I could blame it on my parents or my childhood, and most folks do so most folks would buy it, but the truth is that when push comes to shove I never had it that bad. So my father is emotionally distant and utterly incomprehensible. Most are! So my mother had a decade long 'bout of the crazies. Most do! I was never seriously physically hurt by either parent nor by my step mother nor by my step father nor by any of the successive parade of paramours. Any psychological abuse I could claim was the result of either incomprehension or incapacity and was very rarely inflicted intentionally. So many can claim so very much worse than anything I have known and they turned out better than I.

If I knew why they'd give me a Nobel prize.

What I do know is that I have always suffered from being able to see too much of the forest. It feels like I am standing on a hill and I can see the forest that is life and all it's possibilities spread out below me, and I am terrified by the sheer number of trees spread before my view. Worse yet, I am painfully aware that what I see is only a fraction of the forest which lies beyond the next hill, and the hill after that, and the hill after that, and only-god-knows how many hills after THAT. I am no Quisach Haderach.I can never see the full forest, and the small portion that is mine to view is already both over and underwhelming. You see: they're all trees. Oh, sure, they're different kinds of trees and that's wonderful and grand and fantastic.... but there are no Lorax, no Yggdrasil, no Chamalla, nor even a lone Lotus tree to wrap me up in dreams of more magical forests. There are hundreds, thousands, millions.... aw hell, INFINITE trees with wonderful and unique but ultimately cosmetic differences. I stand where two paths diverse in the wood and am paralyzed because I realize that I have infinite choices before me. It is not a choice between the path well worn and the road less traveled. It is a choice between any and all of the infinite potential radials of a sphere. They each make all the difference, but never difference enough.

You see, while I see so many possibilities I also see an infinite array of disappointment. I have never quite been able to vomit up this nasty belly full of idealism I somehow found myself in possession of. Reality disappoints. With all those options there is not one that guarantees any form of happiness, or even simple contentment. I look around me at a race with staggering potential and an abysmal history of squandering it and even as I disapprove I cannot claim to be any better. I see problem after problem and while I can think of solutions to many of them none of those solutions are viable so long as humanity is Homeo Sapiens. I despair of us ever becoming Homo Ethos or even Homo Storge. I fear we are much more likely to devolve into Homo Ignavus, if we have not already.

I fail to be motivated by money. I understand it's inherently symbolic nature but simply cannot internalize it. I continue to value Value itself rather than monetary placeholders for it. I have lived in a home where money was readily available and in a home where we counted squares of toilette paper so we could afford our next batch of Top Raman. They both had benefits and faults. I was happy in neither.

I fail to be motivated by success or social acclaim. It is fine, I suppose, but the only approval I really crave is that of a small group of friends who approve of me anyway.... which is why they are friends in the first place.

I fail to be motivated by humanitarian goals because I have no faith in humanity. I do not trust that any gift I give my race will be well used. I do not even trust that we will not simply find a way to use any gift I could give to generate further misery. Not even Christ could give good enough advice to keep folks from killing each other over it... even though one of their most important rules is to not kill each other. I am not even certain I wish to contribute anything to my own race. I cannot help but wonder if a swift end to this wretched experiment in sentience might be best all around. It is also very unlikely that I will ever reproduce. At this point I cannot ovulate naturally and am already missing half of my right ovary. I have no genetic legacy to leave. My line ends with me. Past my own lifetime I have no physical investment in humanity.

That having been said I cannot even choose between my own interests. There are too many things I COULD do. Many of them I could enjoy, but I would be horribly poor. I could be adequate at nearly anything I chose, but why put forth the effort? I could milk the system like so many others, but my pride simply won't allow it. I could choose a path that I am fairly certain would make me wealthy, but to do so I would have to sacrifice almost everything I currently enjoy with little hope of greater enjoyment later.

I can not choose. There are too many trees.

The only real thing I have ever found that meant anything to me was the regard and interaction of a handful of wonderful eccentrics. The only insubstantial that more me are a cursedly persistent curiosity about the human psyche, composing my poetry and vignettes, and some of the obscure flights of fancy that philosophy allows.

So maybe it is time to pick an external lodestone. I can rattle about in my own bewildering internal landscape forever, but psyche-spelunking is only moderately satisfying if there is no rich outer life to stimulate it. The only thing that ever got me voluntarily out of bed in the mornings is love. I cannot "follow my dreams." My imagination is, as my teachers always swore, an impressively well developed beast. But I HAVE fallen in love with a man who has dreams. Real dream. Achievable dreams. And he has the motivation and energy to follow them. I can hear years of feminism howling in rage, but perhaps the most satisfying thing I can do is let him choose which of those infinite paths we will take, though it be little better or worse than any other, and let my love for him make all the difference.

Dream A Little Dream

I have been dreaming, and remembering my dreams, much more than usual recently, and boy howdy have they been odd.

July 4: I was locked in a room with several other people for "Tardiness and Poor Penmanship." Then the apocalypse happened and that room was the only one not destroyed. A bunch of lazy, crappy writers and a basket with a cat and its kittens which I found in the closet are the last living things on Earth.

July 3: Sleep-quit a job I don't have because a boss I've never met cut my hours to 6 a week and my pay to $1.25 an hour just after I completed a majorly crucial project ahead of schedule and saved everybody's ass. So I ran off into an overgrown urban dystopia....

July 1: Something (one must assume some infection or mold) is causing anything living to give off basically some combination of a stink bomb, mustard gas, and nerve gas. It reeks, puts off an odd yellow-green-orange cloud, and is fatal when it becomes too strong. I was trying to rescue people...

June 29:   smuggling dogs onto airplanes in luggage is hard, fleeing unknown pursuers by flying and blending into wilderness landscape, and then having to listen to some highschooler's amateur rendition of "From A Distance" when in a gorgeous tropical archipelago.

June 28: woke up fighting with the covers and scaring Koren because I was wrestling with an alligator caught in a bear trap.

Degradation

So painfully carefully I must walk,
husbanding my precious inner pitfalls,
twitchingly vigilant against the world,
and hyper-attuned to disappointment,
Compulsively reciting litanies
of each thing's potential to do me harm,
each person's potential for treachery,
each place's potential imprisonment
Tight-lacing my armor of self-restraint
self-hobbled against bolting from my fears
the price an inability to act
hording my reserves of strength jealously
against my panic's sapping exhaustion
Compression chokes up nervous babbling,
(both a diversion and a substitute
against my weak yearnings for connection)
quickly dismissed and easily ignored,
created only to be rejected;
goading me to scramble further inside,
baffled in choking swaths of apathy
against desire and stark disregard,
starving in my hollow shell of my self
for want of company

Being awake and alone late at night is often a bad idea for me.

 How is it that the only innate talents I have and the only things I find to be of true interest and importance are considered to be so mind-numbingly boring and distasteful by the rest of my species that they have become sad and tired jokes one would go through nearly any lengths to avoid having to discuss, much less participate in?

Midnight Musings

What if we have the symbolism for The Fall all wrong? What if the myth is supposed to convey that all the sins of man stem from the MISTAKEN conviction that some things in the world are good while others are evil and you know the difference. How many of our history's horrors have had that poison at their root? That would mean those who carry the greatest sin are those who seek most passionately to destroy Evil. 
These are the sorts of things I think about when I can't sleep.

My Value

I have been wondering recently about the value of people, especially myself. I am far too critical to believe that every human life has inherent value. Successfully continuing to breathe just isn’t enough. So what does give a person value?
Things like “character” and “personality” are so nebulous and subjective that I don’t even know how to properly consider them as possible suppliers of value for a person’s existence, and I refuse to believe that wealth or physical attractiveness are how a person should be measured.
One could argue that people derive value through their work, and for many people that may be true, but that has an inherent problem. There are, at this moment, too many people for everybody to be meaningfully employed. Our country desperately scrambles to create more and more “service” jobs that mostly cater to the middle class' desire to be treated as if they were people of social importance and the Sisyphean paper pushing our increasingly bloated corporate bureaucracy generates. Not everybody has the ability nor opportunity to be a doctor, firefighter, farmer, etc. Our technology has guaranteed that only a fraction of the population is necessary for actually essential jobs. So, what about all of us who simply don’t have what it takes to be great nor the opportunity to be essential? I would like to think that value can be derived from something other than one’s career which, let’s face it, is usually just a way to put food on the table. If I accept a person’s work as their value I myself am currently value-less.
Social impact is another route, but a lot of how capable a person is of influencing those around them, for good or ill, depends upon simple charisma. Should a person’s value really be determined via popularity contest?  Intelligence and cognitive ability could be argued as a measure of value, but of the people I know some of the most intelligent are the least successful and happy. My own intelligence has routinely been more hindrance than help to me. Creative talents are another highly subjective criteria and the cultural value for any given skill waxes and wanes with aesthetic fads. For example, the only creative endeavor I could truly claim to be gifted in is poetry, an art form which has only ever enjoyed brief moments of popularity before falling back out of style yet which has never had the dignity to just curl up and die.
So I find myself, a misanthropic college drop-out unemployed shut-in, struggling to find any way in which I can truly call myself a valuable human being. I cannot believe I am the only one

Building an Ego

     There is a lack of time for stillness and contemplation in our culture. Even Sunday, the nationally adopted Christian day of rest, is rarely observed as such anymore. Many of us work lest there be a gap of one whole day (gasp) in customer service. Many others use their days off, whichever those may be, as time to take care of chores and social networking/obligations that their week leaves inadequate time for. Any truly free time we may have is generally filled with various media distractions desperately distracting ourselves from our own thoughts.
     I have notices that a lack of contemplation, especially introspection, leads me to a lack of firm opinions and a weakening of my usually strong sense of self-identity. I need time in which to observe my own motives and evolution in order to maintain a unique and dynamic personality. Without this I find myself with little of substance to contribute to social interactions. I am forced to fall back on pre-fabricated labels and group identity: fast-food for the psyche. In uncertainty I am more prone to get sucked into the advertisement fueled consumer mindset, attempting to make myself happy by buying new things, always dissatisfied and searching for the product I can purchase that will make me feel fulfilled. A vague sense of purposelessness and of dangling over and undefined void stokes panic attacks. Food, alcohol, caffeine, and more exotic chemicals all start to seem more of a crutch than a recreational enhancement or aesthetic enjoyment. I have to wonder if a part of the consumption mad, over eating, drug addicted, attention deficit herd mentality of our culture is the result of a simple lack of taking time for self contemplation and the building of a strong and defined self-identity.
     I wonder how much we suffer for lack of boredom?

Greetings

     In my beginning there was me, and I pronounced myself good. For those of you who have not yet had the dubious pleasure of reading my various pseudo-literary endeavors, allow me to introduce myself: I am Ms Myriad, and I have neither wealth nor taste but am possessed of an overabundance of perspectives and a drive towards psychological exhibitionist. This site is the forum where I expose my mind (such as it is) for the perusal of all you concupiscent little kumquats out there. My endowments may not be great, but they are arranged in an interesting and unusual configuration that some seem to have developed a taste for over the years of my various journals, blogs, and random publications. Stick around, you'll get the idea. 

Herein I have made a case-study of myself and my own internal processes. Practically speaking this is a site full of mere sketches of contemplations, kvetching, hypotheses, flights of fantasy, and random purgative rants that, in themselves, may offer a different perspective and food for thought but are hardly revolutionary. However, when viewed as a gestalt, the picture that I hope to create is the autobiography not of a person (which typically involve mostly life events, dates, occurrences, etc) but of a consciousness, written as it happens, so that one may observe the evolution of its structural concepts and have the rare opportunity of witnessing the intimate workings of a psyche not your own. I also heartily encourage you, my readers, to do the same. How interesting the world would be if we could readily research the cognitive history and emotional development of those we wished to better understand. 

My exposure does have a purpose beyond simple ego-flaunting (though I admit to a double helping of vanity). I believe heartily that our tendency to create normative personas through which we interact with each other is the basis for much of our neurosis and insecurities. By only presenting acceptable facades to each other we also only observe the similarly streamlined presentations of others, and so perpetuate the illusion of humanity's normalcy. One comes to believe one's self to be freakish and perverse because we never are permitted to see all the bizarre desires, eccentricities of behavior, and abnormalities of temperament that our neighbors so assiduously hide for the sake of appearances and their own fears of freakishness. The end result being a mass delusion that there is something wrong with us as individuals and that we somehow deviant from our species' norm. We confuse deviance with dysfunction and have a warped and foreshortened concept of our species' natural range of behaviors. We visit therapists in droves striving to "fix" our unacceptable differences. I do not believe that shame was ever bred from the knowledge of good and evil. Shame's genesis lies in not knowing that everybody else is also naked beneath their clothes, and hence being ashamed of our own nudity. 

So as you subject yourself to my little psychological travelogue I encourage you to consider the origins of your own perspectives in hopes of one day being better able to write out directions so that others may see your point of view. Consider my own exposure and self-analysis and whether your own life might benefit from more public introspections. It is my firm belief that the study of our fellow humans is the most crucial science for us to develop, though it is a distressingly recent addition to the field. Until we understand each other and ourselves how can we ever hope to intelligently and responsibly utilize the fruits other sciences yield for our own best benefit? It is time for our humanity to surpass our technology, and I haven't a clue as to where to start such an enormous project, so I'm starting right here.