Session Two

The following was dictated into my phone on my way home from my second one-on-one session at the Cancer Support Group.   Raw and unedited.  Enjoy.

So I'm walking out of session number two with a better understanding of what I am going to call "The Trinity of Self-Identity."   There is an old expression that every story has three side: you side, my side, and what really happened.  Same too of our self-identity.   There is the self we think we are; the self we want to be; and the self we actually are.   We have an idea of the first one, a hope for the second one, but it is impossible for us to ever know the third one.   We can lie, fool, or trick ourselves into believing we know that third self, but we never can just like you can't truly know a pattern when you are in the middle of it.  You can't know the end of a story before you start it.   We won't even have the option of knowing who we were until we are dead and even then we can't know: we are dead.   And who we were to them will change based on who remembers us, so even then there is no uniform sense of our self available.  GAR!  My Grandfather said Heaven and Hell is based on who remembers you and we all end up in both.   Didn't grasp that when he said it.

I am beginning to recognize that life is more of a hurdle race than a marathon.  It is just a series of obstacles in our way that must be overcome, but each one leads to another.  No single obstacle is greater than any obstacle that preceded it, but we are just a little more fatigued from previous hurdles that we just overcame that when we reach the next one, it seems bigger.   If you beat one, you can beat them all so long as you are rested between them and life rarely gives you the option of resting.  As Richard Bach wrote in Illusions:  "Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.   I have both found meaning in this and lost it.   It is the road I am trying to navigate right now.

I am starting to wonder if I am more sane than I thought I was and it is this sanity that is driving me insane.   Getting back to the "Trinity of Self-Identity:" I think I am a slightly over-intelligent asshole with a  lack of empathy for other people; I want to be Winnie the Pooh out of the Tao of Pooh, and what I am is unknown to me, but is probably a combination of the two.  I am more asshole to some and more Taoist to others depending upon my mood.     I think I am closer to that Taoist Master version of me than I have ever been and I am wondering if that knowledge is giving me confidence which is translating to arrogance.  It happened before.  I seem to recall that back in the early 90's when I first started anti-depressants that I was an asshole too.

After a lifetime of self-doubt and crippling insecurity, I was suddenly without it and I didn't know how to properly deal with these new feelings.   As a result, I overcompensated and, for about two months, I was the worst possible version of myself: a cocky arrogant piece of intolerant shit whose insecurities were the only things keeping him in check.  I had to slowly learn how to process these new feelings and learn how to be a more centered an better version of myself.  It took time, but I did it.  I think I might be there again.  I think coming through the other side of what I have gone through maybe has given me a new form of arrogant cockiness.

Maybe it is not that I'm afraid to be around people so much as I don't think I need them anymore.   Maybe my nihilism has taken a form of superiority where I look at people who I see as mired down with inconsequential aspects of their lives and think I'm somehow above them.   I am thinking I need to just find balance and that no aspect of what I;m feeling right now is wrong or needs to be changed so much as suimpl placed under control.   I am feeling confident I will be better in no time.