Sher And Sher Alike

I bought this book, written by Barbara Sher, I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was. My life is a bit of a trainwreck. You know it, I know it. I checked out of my life when it refused to play nicely with me. Now I sit on the sidelines of things and talk about lofty ambitions I have that I never really get around to fulfilling.

I started reading it today. The book is about resistance, about resisting things. Things you want to do. In a comical absurdist fashion I found myself resisting my desire to read the book. I set aside today to do nothing but read it. I read about three or four chapters, but I was distracted throughout. I would check Twitter constantly. I would be distracted by the songs in my headphones. I stopped at one point to ‘take a break’ to play a computer game and listen to a podcast and somehow never returned to the book…

The problem I guess is even reading it while distracting myself, I started realising things about myself. I could feel my world shifting. And yes it felt scary. So I went and played that computer game that I’ve finished a thousand times before because I know how to do that. When everything else in my life is turning to crap I still feel like I can exercise some control over that game.

I feel uncomfortable when I see happy people, because I am not happy and I don’t believe I can be happy. But when I express how I feel, people jump in with trite inspirational cliches and assurances that everything will be fine. This grates on me. I find it genuinely vexing. And I guess it’s human nature to want to ‘fix’ things and people. But sometimes I just want someone to acknowledge my pain.

And… frankly, that is the word that keeps coming up for me. Acknowledge. Acknowledgment. I want to be ackowledged, but I also need to acknowledge things myself. It was disappointing when that person didn’t reciprocate my affections for them. But what was truly heart breaking was not being able to be disappointed, not being able to be sad because I wasn’t supposed to have those romantic feelings for that person in the first place. So you pretend to be fine, you pretend to be functional. You wake up in the morning and get ready and go to work and go through all the motions. Each moment felt like dying, but you had to pour all your energy into maintaining the facade. I didn’t ‘snap.’ I just stopped pretending. But I also took it very personally. I said, “I’m done.” And I was. With everything.

But I can’t live there.

All the things I try to tell myself to help myself function feel empty and pointless. I have these moments when I realise I’ll never know why I wasn’t good enough for that person. I used to theorise endlessly until I couldn’t stand to be terrorised by own mind any further. You let it go for a while, but it’s always there. It will always be there, unresolved forever.

In a podcast, Barbara says:

Everybody feels guilty about not being loved. And I don’t think we can tolerate the fact that it probably wasn’t us, it was them. Because then in our hearts we feel there’s no way to change that. If it was us, maybe someday we’ll stop being bad and then everyone will love us.

Expressions like ‘be yourself’ and ‘the real me’ have bounced around in conversations for the last few weeks. Increasingly I am getting clarity on the ‘real me’ and I think I should go as myself because the alternative requires much too much energy. But another part of me thinks that’s such poor marketing. Yes, go as yourself. The neurotic messy awkward guy from a regional town in the middle of nowhere. People will eat that up. And I know so much of this stems from that feeling of not being ‘enough,’ of not fulfilling the roles that are expected of me. I don’t know which elements of my makeup seemed so offensive to all the people who didn’t want anything to do with me, so might as well just try to reign everything in and see how we go.

I started writing a memoir about all this actually. The whole crux of it is basically ‘I must be really horrible.’ But there’s no other clarity than the fear itself. There’s no clarity on what specifically is so abhorrent or unpalatable about myself that I should change it. So you just go around feeling hopeless and broken and eager to change anything, everything, about yourself but not being able to. There’s no self-worth there. You don’t even feel bad when people treat you poorly. I mean, why wouldn’t they? You’re awful, remember?

It’s madness, all of it. Clearly.

But what to do with it?

Tagged as: Barbara Sher, depression