i get this feeling, all the time, that i'm doing everything wrong. like, everything in my life. creative endeavors, handling responsible adult tasks, interacting with humans etc. i know most neurodivergent people struggle with this feeling. i think most people in general do. it feels like just another feature of this thing we call The Human Condition. still, it's hard not to think i'm the biggest weirdo to ever walk the earth. and as a result, to think that i'm incapable of being understood or loved by others. i know those thoughts are not true in reality. it's just difficult to shake the mental attitudes that got me here.
it seems like Being In Therapy is the defining aspect of my life in my late 20s. i kinda wish it wasn't tbh. like i love to grow, i love to change, i love to learn and understand myself. i love to be taking better care of myself and possess better emotional intelligence and regulation. that's all fantastic. but i hate so much of my personality revolving around recovery right now. around just allowing myself space to stand on two feet. you know? i dunno, is it cringe to heal? is it uncool and lame and uncomfortable for others looking in to see someone who isn't exactly doing a whole lot other than surviving? and why does that fucking matter to me so much?
there's a word that is often attached to the word "young" when being talked about by people who are not young. the word is "impressionable." i've always found that pairing interesting. since being in therapy i've learned one of the cardinal rules/stereotypes about seeing a mental health professional is true, painfully true. it all really does come back to your parents, and the environment you were raised in. those who existed in closest proximity while your embryonic appendages were still cooking tend to lay the biggest impressions on you. and an impression that big is hard to scrape up and paint over decades later. even if those people and times feel so far away that they might as well be myth.
i think part of the reason i feel like i'm doing everything wrong all the time is because i was met with a lot of indifference as a child. i had a fairly privileged childhood, i was the baby in a family of four children being parented by a Perennially At Work father and a mother who had been doing childcare since she first got pregnant at age 15. but even so, most adults didn't seem to know how to care about what i cared about. the best they could do was be happy that i was happy despite having no idea what i would be on about. it led me to believe that much of what seemed indicative of my "self" wasn't palatable to people who seemed to have their lives together. that much of what i was experiencing needed to be hidden. that authority figures especially shouldn't know that i'm stumbling my way through life at a pace at odds with theirs.
i should, i thought, instead act like i have it together around these people. i should codify a state of normalcy that i can perform around those who don't understand me. and let me tell you, when you're young, it feels like nobody walking this earth understands you. and the more this type of thinking sinks its teeth into you, the more it becomes habit and routine. it becomes your normal. this is how the mask is formed. and soon enough the dissonance between what is true to who you are and how you behave around others stops feeling like a variance of speed on the same race track and instead two completely different dances happening in parallel that bump into each other when stepping off-beat. i tell you, it makes for a profoundly confusing and paralyzing way of navigating being alive when you feel like you're on a completely different highway from everybody else. but one that still overlaps and intersects with the one everyone else is on.
one time in my tweenage years i walked over to a friend's house, unannounced, to hang out. something i did fairly often as a kid. came to find out it was my friend's birthday that day, and he had family over celebrating. lacking the ability to catch most social cues at that age, i decided to stay around for the celebration and act like it was just me and my buddy hanging out normal style. his family was pretty confused by the whole thing. they asked me where my parents were and what i was doing there. i didn't really know how to answer. later in the afternoon, i was fiddling with a super mario world level editor on their family computer. my friend's mother asked in a stern voice what i "was doing on her computer," as if i was standing there straight up jorking it to redtube in the living room. i panicked and closed the window trying to avoid a conflict, but that didn't make her feel any better about my presence there. as i got older, i realized i was unwelcome in their home that day. that to them, i had essentially invaded a private space they were cultivating and acted like me being there was their problem to solve. idk, a bit of unchecked entitlement on my end for sure. but it's a moment from that age i still remember for how viscerally uncomfortable it made me feel. maybe that was god's way of making me understand my surroundings better.
i guess what i'm getting at, is that wearing this mask so often has lead to a level of guardedness that simply doesn't need to be there. why do i feel compulsions to withhold information from my loved ones? to lie to the people being the most honest and open with me? or to think i'm unworthy of forgiveness? of love? of being accepted even while feeling shame? i can't exactly answer those questions, but i can tell you that paint is still something i'm trying to strip away.
i'm still learning that being like this is okay. and that everybody, at least in some ways, is like this too. nobody has the answers, nobody is doing anything precisely perfectly "correct." and we're all just approximating stability and security when we can, because it satisfies carnal fixtures of our evolution that have stuck with us like an appendix. there is no such thing as Normal. there is no such thing as The Right Way. rules are the inventions of people, as such they are only governed by people. sometimes we invent lies so that the truths feel less ephemeral. sometimes we need frameworks so we don't stumble so far out of the frame that we can't get back. i'm not advocating for solipsism. but i feel that sense of never quite checking the box on anything, never fully dotting the i's and crossing the t's, well that is the human condition. just trying to make sense of the unfeeling, uncaring, indifferent world we're stuck living in. a world that can be beautiful when you take that mask off more often.
there's beauty in our lives being limited. in our bodies being finite resources. in our experiences being frivolous. one day, hopefully far from now, it'll all be over and there will be words left unsaid and places left unexplored and people left unknown. and that'll be okay. and this life will have felt worth living. and in the end, hopefully, i will feel like i did it My Way. that i didn't need to do it The Right Way.