Sometimes you’re just wired that way, right?
Like, I tell myself, ‘Don’t be the crazy person’ over and over again, but I’m not sure if it does any good—shoveling furiously against a mental tide that never exhausts itself. It seems futile, and I know it’s futile, yet I must think that there’s some infinitesimal hope that maybe this time I’ll break through, this time it’ll be different, this time I’ll succeed.
“Hey Charlie Brown! Wanna kick this football?”
Yeah, so I’m a blockhead sucker who desperately wants to believe that my self-nurture can somehow win out against my self nature. I guess the comfort—if you’re seeking that in this—is probably not being the only one with cross-wiring, frayed wires, wires that don’t connect, missing wires ….
Why-res? Ugh.
The other part of the schematic is that … darkness? black hole? dead battery? at the middle of me. The constant hydra of uncertainty that never quite relents, never really can exhale, for fear of relaxing or being happy—because both of those don’t seem to be things I’m entitled to.
Dumb, I know, but it’s there. And it’s a struggle, really—daily, hourly, by the minute, by the second, to shake that belief that something BAD is always lurking, ready to pounce and devour a good moment or feeling. How do you shake that? You can’t really reach into your mind and rewire it all.
Well, not yet, anyway.
I do better understand and tepidly endorse the concept of a lobotomy, if not the actual procedure itself. If only there was a way to cut away at your gray matter and axons while you’re conscious so you could give an indication of what was being deleted and if it was actually the BAD parts.
*Insert old observation that in Frankenstein, the doctor is the actual monster*
It’d be nice if I could even just loosen up the wiring a bit. You know, to give me some slack as I maneuver through this world so that any random bump doesn’t end up short-circuiting me.
Get help, you say? I don’t know that the kind of help I need is anywhere to be found or accessed. I’ve been trying amateur re-wiring for years to change the way I process the world and experiences, and I’ve had some success in taking in something and not immediately responding with my gut reaction. I’ve learned to be kinder and more patient and more selfless in my actions, and just … nicer. However, those initial mean and impatient and selfish first thoughts are often still there, snapping at me like hungry baby piranha.
Again, faulty wiring.
Maybe I’m just at the point when the wires are too corroded, fused together forever in a helpless, hapless lump of a brain that is beyond fixing? Except I’m somehow trapped inside it, all too aware that the Tilt-a-Whirl is spinning and I can’t get off until someone pulls the plug or it tips over, cartwheels across the carnival midway, and wrecks itself in a corndog-fueled blaze of glory!
Wait, what in the name of Tallulah Bankhead did I just write? ‘A corndog-fueled blaze of glory‘? See, I’m not sure how or why I got to that vivid, yet stupid, vision.
Oh yeah, the wiring ….
Looking back, this all sounds like the ramblings of a suicide note—not that I’ve ever written one. (Maybe someday–fingers crossed! [inside my head joke]) But honestly, that’s not a spot I’ll ever be at. Because at the center of all my wiring, you/I may have noticed, the faint pulse of hope continues to beat. The hope that I can or will somehow beat—or just accept—my wiring, recognize that more good comes to and out of me than BAD on any given day, and that someday, somehow, it all will genuinely be okay to exhale, to relax, to live.
Yeah, hope is a four-letter word. But some days, that’s o-k-a-y.
***
On a side note: This was a first-draft (life raft) that I banged out in an hour. Yay for me for somehow staying on theme for this entire rant. Even after actually coming up with “why-res.” I mean, that’s just got no juice whatsoever. (You know, like that weak joke I just tried to splice in here.)