2007 in review, part 3
An inner dialogue, a play in one act. Dramatis Personae: Part of me, and another part of me. A strictly realistic representation of how the mind operates is not necessarily intended. Details have been redacted to protect the privacy of those who wish privacy.
Agent, wake up. Wake the whole brain up.
What? Hello?
You're my agent, you have to take my calls. Wake up. I hereby call a meeting of the Congress of Complexes.
Ugh. Client? What time is it? Unholy o'clock in the morning?
I am in my element at this time. Memories are closer then, emotions more immediate, the reality more painful. I want to revisit the issue of using the surplus from the emotional bumper crop of 2006.
I can tell. You woke up the whole brain again with a dream of intense joy. Look, now you've done it, the windows are open and there's the ceiling. Why do you keep doing this?
Did you expect me to stop? I've been relentless for five years.
And look where it led us. I let you run things for a year and look what we did. The "Watching Out For The Best Interests Of People Other Than Me" system is not to be tampered with. I'm not great at remodeling that system and keeping it working. It looked safe for everybody on paper, but it broke. I had at least one Rationalization Malfunction, a whole bunch of Attention Deficits, and I'm still not sure how many more bugs are still flowing around in there.
I said I was sorry.
I know you are. So why don't you let it go? It's been months and months, and I was seriously wondering when you would. We can't touch the surplus. It's tainted.
It was joy. Normally nobody gets anything that good without narcotics.
How do you know they don't? As if we know anything about narcotics.
Memory, check up every romantic movie and book we've ever seen or read.
OK, I stand corrected, at least if we are to believe the bards about what's normal in the human experience. Which I'm not sure I do.
It wasn't normal in our experience.
Chalk it up to our inexperience then. We've been over this and over this. My life arrangements are seeing to the provision of all your emotional needs. You can't deny it. We're in the relationship where we belong. We love and are loved in return.
This has nothing to do with that. I'm not saying I'm dissatisfied. But the past seems unresolved. The present doesn't undo that. It's two separate relationships. Two separate issues.
What do you want then?
I do not use the word "joy" lightly, as if it were a synonym for mere delight. It is a reaction to dreams, visions, passions, holy crusades, goals toward which to leap out of bed in the morning, fulfillment so beautiful and right that it approaches a dangerously religious experience.
That's when your authority and mine come dangerously close. My mental functions can usually recognize your land grabs when I see one. You are as bad at my job as I am at yours. What you described is a chemical and electrical experience inside the head you and I occupy, and does not correspond exactly to the real world. I am operating a tight ship here. We are a mature and self-respecting person. We walked away from that situation.
Walked away from who though? I'm starting to think you walked away from me, the emotional side. You have been shutting me down all year. Instead of thinking about those events every day, and then every few days, I now think about them every week or two.
That exactly what I hoped to accomplish. Look, I don't know what else to do but bring the hammer down. It's not good for you.
I've had to resort to messing around in the subconscious. I still possess some autonomy. There's a part of the chest that is still in my control. It hasn't got the memo about what happened. That part of the chest leaps whenever it sees that face.
I sent a nice diplomatic note to that part of the chest. "Thank you for that, it felt very nice, but leave that alone. You are out of touch with reality." It doesn't hear me.
Of course it doesn't. I'm good at selling people on a dream, and I sold myself on this one rather hard for several years. After all that investment of effort, and such a dramatic payoff, I think we might have to feed off the surplus.
No. No pining. No dependence. And don't even bother trying to threaten me with the idea that you'd shut down the motivational machinery and put me out of a job. Not when our current non-tainted emotional wellsprings are so good.
But I can keep yelling in the subconscious. You have to listen. You have to do something. This stuff has got to go somewhere, I'm drowning in it down here... If this is so common in human experience, how does everybody else handle it?
Darned if I know. But I have a plan. We might be able to convert the emotional fuel.
I'm listening.
Look at the contrast with other things we've put on pedestals. One difference between religion toppling off its pedestal, and other dreams toppling from pedestals, is that we inherited our religion. Heaven and worship were what you were supposed to desire. But you didn't really.
I despised that. It was crippling.
Although I sincerely tried to fulfill it, you didn't flourish. It had never really belonged and was making us do each other's jobs, badly. It was an example of thinking something will make you happy, and finding out it won't.
What does this have to do with her? I can't muster any animosity for her. I never will.
No, I'm making a contrast with that experience, not a comparison. Actually you and I learned a great deal about each other during the whole saga of 2006, which has something to do with my plan to convert the fuel. This experience helped me identify a lot of things that you really, truly like, down deep. The fact that the object of our affections turned out to be half mirage does not change the fact that I learned about what makes you happy. And I learned that there are certain desires that consistently make you happy, desires which seriously never fade, on a scale of years. Glaciers change faster than you, sir. It's convenient for me because goals hold still long enough to achieve them. But it's awfully troublesome for adaptability.
I just don't know what to apply it to anymore.
Well, there's Ambition. We got that from watching her example.
Hi.
Greetings Ambition, and again, welcome. It's been productive working with you for my client.
Better late than never.
So, I guess what we're letting go of is the mirage of the super-competent person who has her shit together. The reason the dream has been so hard to suppress, is that it's only partly about someone out there. It was also partly about the experience going on in this brain in reaction to that.
I was self-absorbed with the importance of it all.
Yes. And nobody lives up to that expectation. It wasn't fair to her. But pay attention, this is the key. As long as this motivational fuel supply is at least partly about admiration of an image of a person who has their shit together... well, we still have access to that.
I don't get it. What are you talking about?
Live up to the image anyway. We've got this clear image now of happiness-inducing competence and wisdom. Stop thinking of it as an inaccurate description of someone out there, and think of it as a blueprint to build us. Go ahead and burn that emotional fuel to live up to our own ideals. Become like what we admire.
Ohhhhh...
Ambition was a good start. Now, focus less on which partner or partners to be with, and focus more on being a good partner to be with.
This could work.
Sleep on it. Now the windows are shutting... The ventilation is becoming regular... We're going back to sleep...
Comments
twoofdtm on Dec. 29, 2007 7:10 AM
Beautiful.
rachelann1977 on Dec. 29, 2007 3:36 PM
Makes a whole lot of sense. Also a very nice bit of prose.
le-bebna-kamni on Jul. 26, 2008 7:07 PM
Thank you for sharing this with me, Matt, and for explaining what it refers to. I love hearing about how you think. :)
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