So in pt1 I talked about how I tried to bully myself as a child, how ineffective that was, how miserable, how we are each internally conflicted, and how desperate I think I was, in retrospect, to hold on to my tiny sense of sovereignty in what felt like a cruel, oppressive world. How precious that was to me, and how little of a shit anybody else gave about that. Because, and here I can hear an authoritarian-self bellow, who are you to give a shit about something as pathetic as your soul? You can worry about your “soul” once you have a degree! Once you have money! Once you have prestige, accolades, status! Once you are a big man, then you can worry about your soul!
But I think even as a child I knew that this was a bullshit ploy. Because I had eyes. I could see. That while there were certainly big men around with degrees and money and prestige and accolades and status, they hardly had any soul. That’s why they bought expensive sports cars and cheated on their wives and had to have multiple heart-bypass operations. To try and fill the void where their soul would’ve been, which they had mortgaged away for mere trinkets.
I am eternally grateful to my childself for his stubborn protection of what he felt was sacred, even as he was clumsy about it, and even as he was gripped with fear and nausea. I wish I could’ve been there to protect him, to have his back. But the thing is, while I am lucky enough to have made it to adulthood intact, it wasn’t without scars. The mental image I have is – I tried to protect my light, but I was surrounded by darkness, and the darkness actively sought to snuff my light out. I know this mental image isn’t necessarily the entire truth of what was happening, but it is the truth of my experience, it’s the truth of what it felt like to me. Much like how being ostracized from one’s friend group as a teenager can feel legitimately apocalyptic, I felt like the world was actively trying to poison my heart. It really seemed that way, and felt that way. And I think it partially succeeded.
Despite my best efforts – and what could I have done, as a child? – some of the corruption of my environment seeped into my being. And I think that’s very difficult if not impossible to avoid, as a child, because part of what it means to be a child growing up is to absorb lessons from the environment around you. And one of the greatest struggles of growing up, transitioning into adulthood, is to realize that the environment that was supposed to nurture and protect you – and by this we might be talking first about parents, but also peers, and the wider culture we’re immersed in – can be wrong. Sometimes terribly wrong. Despite trying their best not to be. We have so many coming-of-age movies about this, where the protagonist learns about the sins and wrongdoings of the father. (I might want to write a separate blogpost about this…)
The final page of The Hero With A Thousand Faces quotes Nietzsche saying “live, as though the day were here”. Meaning, don’t wait for the world to change before you do what you know you’re supposed to do. Live as though the day were here.
Writing this book has been such a journey. I can point to a date when I decided that I was going to start writing the book – it dates back to around 2018 – but the contents of the book? I’ve been studying since I first learned to read, and been working on since I first started to write. And I have been hemming and hawing about publishing it because it feels like I’m not ready. And I know I will never be ready, the book will never be good enough. But it is time. The day is here. I must live as though the day were here. It’s impossible to fully explain all of the thinking and reasoning and feeling that go into this realization, and I have to make my peace with that, too. There is a knowing that’s beyond explaining.
Okay but what else is there to say about confronting the minotaur, the authoritarian-tyrant of the self? I’ve talked about where I inherited it from, but ultimately there’s an expiration date on blaming other people for your problems. Yes, I was somewhat poisoned and corrupted by the world around me, but it’s since become my responsibility to take care of it, face it, deal with it. I have made pretty good progress with it overall, bit by bit, with the help of art, music, literature, and friends. And I have helped other people with their own, in bits and pieces, in ways that was meaningful to them. Which is why I’m writing this book. But I have struggled tremendously in writing it, partially because of the technical challenges of writing a book (which are numerous and substantial, though also genuinely interesting), but I think mainly because of fear. It’s always fear. What’s the fear here? I’ve described a few over the course of writing this book. First I was afraid the book wouldn’t be good, in that it would make me look like a bad writer. I think I accepted that, dealt with that. Then I was afraid that the book might be damaging for some, lead them to waste their time. Dealt with that. Then I think I found some deeper fears, about the role that I’m stepping into. I’m afraid of becoming some kind of guru figure, I’m afraid of attracting responses from people who are struggling – and that I might not be able to help them. And there was also this struggle where… I feel like, in writing about inner authoritarian-tyrants, my own rose up to resist me, resist being described, identified. Which is kind of funny and in retrospect exactly what I should have expected. It’s just so on the nose. That egos resist being attacked. I really have to put aside my ego to finish this book, and the act of doing that is a tricky and challenging one, and boy has it been a tedious and long-winded dance. And then it tries to protect itself by saying, “see, you took so long, it means you’re not qualified to write this”. That’s always how it is. That voice is never going away. I just have to smile, nod, and finish the book anyway.