Cloud Journal

[TheCloud]

I'm thinking of starting a journal here.  I have many unexpressed/repressed sentiments, and an often burdensome sense of personal space, so this seems like the perfect place to push my boundaries.  I was going to name the journal something like "Crisis Mid-life", but I'm planning to extend this beyond any single issue, so a more neutral name was obviously appropriate.  Well, I'll get to it, then.

 

I am indeed having a mid-life crisis.  I'm at an age, and state of body and mind, that makes it obvious that my youth has passed.  Passed me by, actually.  I didn't make much of it.  I couldn't, with the burdens of what I was given as a child and adolescent.  Rather than growing my experiences as a vital young man, my teenage years were spent staring at a ceiling, composing a vindictive suicide note in my head and wishing I'd never been born.  My home environment was commensurate to that activity, with a hateful and aggressive step-father, and a mother with her head in the clouds who was unwilling to confront the reality that her husband was bringing ruin to her dreams of a happy home.

When I went to college out of state, I was able to discover a new perspective on things, and a new consciousness, but was unable to make this new consciousness my home.  I was academically gifted, but lacked a lot in life and communication skills.  Furthermore, I had learned unnecessary "skills" for survival in a cruel household and unsympathetic community that further hindered me from making my way.

I developed my new consciousness as best I could figure out how, but without supporting skills, my experiments generally led to failure in practical outcomes, and I became cynical and morose.  If I hadn't had the financial support of my birth father, an emotionally distant but dutiful man, and his side of the family, I don't know what kind of situation I would have descended into.

 

I'm tired now.  Thinking about all this, with the wealth of unhappy unexpressed details and the unhappy knowledge of what comes after, is draining.  I think the hardest part, perhaps the one thing that made everything hard, was and is the lack of communication.  My mother, who did well as a single parent, stopped listening or wanting to know our situation after remarrying.  She had to have known it was bad, but she was so determined that a fantastic vision of happiness in her head had to be reality that she cut off contact with the actual reality of her childrens' suffering.

Our community was a conservative rural one where I didn't fit in as an academically oriented and practical-skill disoriented individual.  I wasn't ostracized, is simply didn't have any peers who I could share any interests with, not caring about football or farming or small engine repair.  One further feature of the community, though not a unique one, was the lack of support for struggling parents, and for children struggling under struggling parents.

It was a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil situation.  Never do I remember anyone coming to address my conspicuously severe adolescent depression.  I've since become aware that there were people who knew my step-father's nature and our suffering, but were disenabled from any positive action by the relentless indifference of the community.

So I had nowhere to say anything.  My experience was unwanted.  My gifts, though recognized in my letter grades, were otherwise unneeded.  In college, I came to accept that I was atheistic, a perspective which which had no place or forum in a conservative Christian community.  Anything I would have had to say would have meant confronting everyone with something they didn't need or want.

The upshot is that I learned that my kind of communication was a skill with no remunerative value, and anything that doesn't make money is worth as much as the money given to support it;  nothing.  At best, it can be considered a hobby;  otherwise, a disgrace.  Hard physical labor is paid for, and praised.  Running a business is paid for, and praised.  Shilling in a church is supported by donations, and praised.  Raising children, while not directly compensated, is given financial support by the community and government, and is praised.

So I've, erroneously, come to the conclusion that my skills in finding the truth behind matters and expressing it, are an insignificant hobby.  Even writing this, I feel that every word that I say is somehow less significant than when I do productive physical labor at work.  I somehow feel that my only value is as an oxen, a large stupid beast of burden who has no unnecessary thoughts.

I'll never be able to live happily this way, though.  I have to find a way to see past the rejection I've experienced, and assign equally great meaning to my words as I do to the products of capitalism.  Perhaps that is what maturity is, is being able to assign as much significance to one's self as to authority and conformity and money.  As a child, one prioritizes one's parents.  As an adolescent, one prioritizes one's peers.  As a young adult, one prioritizes one's livelihood.

Generally, at no point is it made clear that one needs to discard anything and everything that hinders the prioritization of one's self-determination.  There is no wide-spread institution, formal or informal, for introducing such knowledge.  I've lived, if not without the knowledge, then without the determination.  I've had the knowledge for nearly two decades.  I'm not sure yet what my mistake was in applying that knowledge, whether it has been ignorance or cowardice or self-annihilation.

 

Part of it is probably addiction, addiction to the tool of the internet to support various deleterious habits.  The internet its self is not the issue, nor so much are the habits, but rather the combination.  Even knowing this, I have trouble maintaining a state of mind where I can imagine a present or future of greater gratification than these addictive behaviors provide.

That is my mid-life crisis;  I've reached the point where the greatest pleasure I can imagine is the dull and unsatisfying experience of cheap self-gratification.  I no can no longer support the youthful enthusiasm that there is something left for me to grasp for.  When I was younger, even when I failed, I couldn't help but have hopes for the future.  After all, I was still young.

Now, having surpassed my physical peak, even if I know better, I can't help but to be bereft of hope.  Even if I achieve something, I have no youth left with which to enjoy it.  I lost those times.  Actually, it feels more like those times were taken from me, by callousness and ignorance and outright malice.  I can't help but resent those who never cared what I was losing.  I've never been able to communicate with those people.  Maybe I've lacked the determination to do so.  It's hard to blame myself for being unable to communicate with someone who won't hear what I have to say, but maybe a part of communicating is being able to persevere through rejection, and to maintain confidence in the significance of my own words even when situations where nothing comes of them persist.  To be self-determined.

[TheCloud]

I'm thinking more that my voice is my value and means of survival.  It's what I need, and it's not something trivial or secondary.  I'm someone who lives best by communicating.  I'm not centrally suited for craftsmanship, leadership, care-taking, adventure or risk-taking.  I'm suited for communicating, but my voice has become suppressed.  I spent too long without any outlet, and now I'm middle-aged yet lacking skills in my central competency.

Thinking about it, I've concluded that one central necessity for communication in any healthy relationship is the conveyance of suffering.  It's a fundamental necessity, and it's something I often don't do, and can't do with grace.  I have a friend who's a writer, the emotionally-honest and literary-minded sort.  I've been recently learning from him that writing, and communication in general, is believing that my message is or will be part of a meaningful relationship and exchange.

Over time, I've become dishonest.  Not just in the sense of speaking untruths, but being generally disengaged, speaking only as a means of deflecting conversation away from myself, precluding the possibility of my even needing to be honest.  And in that dark space that I create, I become someone who matches the darkness and who would be ugly if shed light upon, creating a vicious cycle of ugliness and darkness.

It seems pretty obvious to me how I became this way.  The frightening thing is;  what will I say if I'm honest?  I can't know that ahead of time, just as life can't be lived ahead of time.  Most communication is spontaneous, and it's fairly useless to expect a truly predictable result.  Part of the point is to cast aside rigid forms, and become a product of the moment.  After all, I may not even live to see any prediction I make, accurate or no.