Context

I have three places I want to focus attention on in my life so that I can meet my eventual, natural death with fewer regrets: Tell my story, read my books, eliminate my debts. In this year A.D. 2024, I’m going to be recounting some personal experiences because I have to. It’s oversharing but more importantly it’s a prerequisite for death not rendering my existence a total waste. I’m a big believer in tragic mistakes yielding hidden treasures.

My deepest underlying intention for pretty much all writing I do for the rest of my life is to express the truth of my experience as best I can.

There are earlier posts where I stated I wanted to live a more narrative life. I didn’t use these words but since I’m reading Crafting the Character Arc by my former grad instructor Jennie Jarvis (who gave my thesis screenplay a fair roasting), I didn’t realize at the time of writing those posts that I was deciding to become a more active than reactive protagonist in my own life. 

For the most part, I have unabashedly selected the path of least resistance for each choice I faced consciously and unconsciously. On Christmas Day two or so years ago, I made a pact with the Universe that I would approach life as a collaborative performance art project with him – God – playing the Andy Kaufman to my Jim Carrey. On some level I understood this meant that I was accepting the challenge to be my whole ridiculous truth-seeking self.

After making this pact to live more proactively and engage with the world more honestly and authentically (whatever that means), and experiencing a sweeping social rejection as a result, I found I didn’t even know how to pick the correct path if it wasn’t easy. 

At a previous workplace I developed a confusing friendship with a coworker 16 years my junior, and since it ended in burning flames on a pile of shit, I’ve been on a solitary and extended ride that recalls Thor’s strapped-in trip to meet the Grandmaster in the first Taika Waititi Marvel movie. It’s so wild I had to get in touch with a doctor in order to schedule a serious psychiatric evaluation to see if it’s a sign of clinical narcissism with a touch of schizophrenia. (More on that later.)

My feelings now are that I should never have relaxed enough to be myself around this kid. He was 20 years old when I met him, so he was grown but not. I definitely should have been more grown and I’m living with intense shame that I was nowhere near as skilled and experienced and intelligent as I thought I was. 

I wish I could’ve closed parts of myself off for the sake of decency, propriety, and professionalism. It’s a necessary way of navigating the maze of forced social interaction that is the workplace. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to express all the colors within to everyone around me, no matter how ugly and unwelcome these colors were at the end.

And I’m copping out a bit here. I flexed what emotional skill I did have, and the social power it granted me, to seduce this person as far as my 200lb aging hag ass and reality would allow. I loved having his attention and affection; it generated feelings that hit like a drug. The high lasted long and wove itself deep into my personality – almost like the supports of a structure – but like a drug it was rare and inconsistent, and sudden shocks of sobriety were painful. Without it I felt powerless and ashamed, suddenly wide awake in a hard world where the colors had faded. 

By the end, I felt so undesirable and stupid – feelings that were not at all unwarranted. A year after leaving the situation, the pain still exists and now I seek invisibility at social functions, where I had once achieved equilibrium as a wise introvert genuinely curious about other people. 

I’m finding my way to “knowing better” from a screwy baseline – for which I have to take full responsibility after a lifetime of using blame as a buoy in every dark and scary emotional storm. 

All those addictive feelings had seemed like a legitimate romantic storyline, and I believed I was being invited to live this story in the shoes of the protagonist I’d always wanted to become: worthy, beautiful, intelligent. I tripped and ate shit on the wayside of this misadventure feeling exactly the opposite.

So, this is the experience shaping my upcoming reflections on media. By media, I mean a narrow range of music, movies, television, books, and podcasts. Not a day goes by without something on the airwaves or Internet casting a light or throwing a shadow on this past experience.

When I left the situation over a year ago, the only thing I wanted was to be over it quickly. That’s not what happened. I think about it every day. It might be the greatest motivation to turning myself around from wasting my life to making use of it, and not just in the catalytic way that sudden rock-bottom tragedies tend to do; I have to do actual work now. I have to say yes to hard things. Not just because I need to disrupt the pattern of choosing distractions over solutions, but because I desperately wish to stop thinking about all this shit and focus my attention on work that will make my life better. 

Per the pact I made with the Universe, I’m going to stick with this ridiculous game and see where we land up.