It’s a semi-big undertaking, trying to communicate a lot of autobiographical stuff for the sake of saying, “this is how I was, and this is how I’d like to be instead.” So, I’m still working most of this one out in the drafts.

It’s not all that shameful or embarrassing, necessarily, but somewhat funny to look back on as a “confessional.” There was a period from about 2016-2018 where I think my current “self” made a significant break from the identity and personality and beliefs of the previous “self.” I scrapped everything from before, control-alt-delete, hard restart.

For better or worse, the new personality was SUPER influenced by my two favorite books at the time, which I read and re-read and underlined and carried around with me in my backpack at all times, and (yikes) gave my highlighted/margin-filled/dog-eared copy to my college girlfriend as part of a birthday gift, because I really really really wanted her to understand ME on her birthday. (double yikes).

So here’s the not-really-embarassing, but it kind of feels like it is VERY embarrassing confession: I carried around a two-in-one print edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and The Damned for nearly two years. And I have always, (even back then, a little bit), had an awareness that the characters with whom I felt so connected, were full of faults and satirical quirks and were intentionally painted in a not-so-good light on purpose. Fitzgerald was writing semi-autobiographically and exaggerating the less than pleasant parts of himself, criticizing those faults and features of his own personality by writing them into characters with less-than-happy endings.

He was seemingly warning himself (and me), “do not continue on the path you are currently on, you are an arrogant, sexist, alcoholic, who romanticizes the idea of being a smart-and-sad-Would-Be-man-of-the-people-if-you-weren’t-so-goddamed-priveleged-and-educated kind of Guy Who Says No To Regular Opportunities.”

Fitzgerald was bashing himself, and there I was, absolutely eating it up, NINETY FIVE YEARS LATER, responding, “hey, yeah, we are kind of the worst, aren’t we, Old Sport?”

AND YET!

I had never before felt so seen and understood. The most important passages that informed who I thought I was at the time, are linked here: This Side of Paradise Excerpt and The Beautiful and The Damned Excerpt. Even though I have yet to really decide how I want to write about what I found to be so important in these two passages, and why, for all of their contemporarily problematic nature, I’d still hang on to them and admit to their personal significance here, I am practicing to fight against the impulse to control-alt-delete every time I am embarrassed of a past version of myself. I do still like his writing, sue me.

The basic connection between the me then and the characters I loved reading was that we were truly self-centered romantics, who were looking to find meaning in our own life story more than anywhere else. It doesn’t embarrass me too much to admit, though, because at the time I had JUST scrapped religion and was a belief-system-newborn, feeling sorry for myself for being so far behind all of the already-educated people, and for what it’s worth, romanticizing one’s own life story is a built in requirement for Youths in America in The 20Teens. And wanting to write about NOT wanting to do that anymore, and talking about that by going through the story of my own personal education, just like Maury in “Symposium”,  is kind of why this piece would be a bit of an ironic pickle to write.

I don’t know yet just how much to disparage some of the values I no longer hold and how much to prosyletize the ones that are currently serving me. I do know that in the place I’ve ended up (for now), the World-View-Wedge that I drive into most conversations still annoys quite a few people.

Which is one of the main things I’ve been thinking about and WISHING I could communicate more clearly, but this is the best I’ve got:

I desperately want to be a Valued and Important member of Community A, so I learn the A beliefs faster and better than anyone in Community A, I become The Best Believer Community A has ever seen. And wanting so desperately to prove that, I myself, “get it” and will be granted membership into the club (which comes with love and belonging and acceptance, right?), I become intolerant to the “luke-warm” only-half-committed members of Community A, and I say, “look here, my Community A brethren, you’re not living by the book! you’ve got a lot of hypocrisy going on here, you’ve gotta really re-commit yourself to the teachings of Community A!” (I say while my eyes dart back and forth, checking for how well it is being received that I am proving myself so dedicated) And even though I’m so scared of getting myself kicked out of Community A, most of the Community A folks get pretty tired of me telling them that they’re not actually very good at A, not really as much as I have become, good at A, and somehow, by diving too deep too fast, I am provided with a feeling of  alienation, somehow? What luck! So then I realize it was never about Community A, specifically, it was about Community in General! So, then I move on to Community B, and I learn everything about what it means to B.

Yada,yada,yada, funny,funny,funny.

The story of the chameleon who finds himself in a mirror. What color would it turn? Would it disappear entirely?

And you’ve got religion and politics and whatever the angry-people-online-progressivism thing that is happening right now, and truly the more you play the more you lose, in the old “Prove You’re a Member” game.

It’s hard to separate this from the Self-Spiraler piece, because I fully know that it is “not the vibe,” and in any larger public forum with significant social consequences, it should not be touched with a ten foot pole, and yet that is THE THING that I want to talk about, the not-touching-with-a-ten-foot-pole-ing sort of suppression of experience that makes us lie to ourselves about ourselves.

I want to talk about the control-alt-delete thing we do now to get the perfectly matching Instagram Grid Color Palette with all photos prior to 2021 archived and invisible.

It’s ironic to me, in a “squeaky wheel gets the grease” kind of way, that to ADMIT to even thinking something uncool, with a self awareness about it being uncool, is somehow worse than not having a single thought inside of your head at all, (even though, that was why you were fessing up, about the regrettable thought, to get better, right? to learn and grow?) so then the unexamined life becomes the coolest and most safe of all possible ways of being, out of its lack of touching any topics with any poles at all, ten feet or otherwise.

Basically, despite any intentional practice of a lot of the values that I find important and aspirational, they have yet to lead to me becoming less of an angry, judgmental, and defensive chameleon when I’m out in the wild, searching for mirrors. I find myself in a lot of conversations that basically seem to follow a pattern of “I used to think like you, but it hurt me in all of these ways, so then I started to think differently, and now I feel better,” and even though I know that I am acting as self-righteous preacher, I accidentally speak in a very animated and energetic and defensive way, and continue the self-fulfilling loop of predicting that I will be perceived wrongly, and so I will feel very much alone, and a little bit insane, every time I realize that the World-View-Wedge is preventing mutual understanding, just as I thought it would, acting the same, expecting different results, knowing I shouldn’t, loopty-loo.

Plenty of supplemental therapeutic perspectives from all kinds of books and all kinds of people have shed some light on the fact that I might, by having a real life argument with a co-worker about religion, be possibly acting out a sort of shadow-practice-conversation, a stand-in for the imaginary event in which my parents and I, after a long and productive discussion, encompassing virtually every moment of my life, will fully understand each other, “be on the same page,” and hold no judgments about each other. And until such time as either A), we DO really understand each other, OR B), I just finally rid myself entirely of the desire for the fictional event to occur, I will continue to speak very defensively and annoyingly about all of the things that make Me both “Myself” and “Correct.”

For all the belly aching I’m doing about feeling misunderstood, I stand right in front of people and tell them to their face that I do not understand how and why they could think the way they do, and that if only they thought like me, then we’d understand each other.

BUT HONESTLY, I still think that there exists some truth to know and agree upon, and some right and wrong, and some positive values that we CAN take for granted, cultural relativism be damned!

There are all kinds of mysteries-of-the-unvierse-esque /  We-Don’t-Know-What-Consciousness-Is sort of humble curiosity and beautiful wondering, but I do believe that we can KNOW some stuff for certain, even if certainty is usually less than ideal, right?

Arguing with someone who happily moves through the world with ideas like, “we can’t really know anything / we can’t trust the experts / people are fundamentally bad and selfish / (christian)god made us so that we can’t understand or comprehend real truth, so we might as well not go searching for it anywhere other than the sixty-six books he told us to look at” is still such a tasty little treat that’s so hard to avoid, because it does feel like it is important and that there are consequences to the sheer amount of those thoughts that are out there, just bouncing around all willy-nilly like they aren’t destroying people’s lives.

I preach to people about how preaching to people is not good, and then I acknowledge the hypocrisy, and then I keep going anyway, because I think it’s different.

But It IS different, isn’t it?  

And I think I need to figure out how to square the circle on having a perspective that is less judgmental and less self-righteous before I write my cheeky little autobiographical piece about how I used to think A, and now I think B, and I’m the better for it, happier these days, and my wife helped me get there, and maybe you should read all of the same things I have read and think about all the same things I like to think about, and talk to the same people, and listen to the same stuff, and probably be married to the same person I’m married to, and basically BE exactly like me, as a favor to me, just so that living doesn’t feel so lonely, for MEmemememe.

So I don’t know yet, how I’d like to write about my own “personal story,” and my own changes in perspective, because I’m not done figuring it out yet, which is also the point of writing THIS instead.