Waiting

I’d be ordering the tools I need to execute my plan… if the balance in my bank account weren’t negative. For now, though, my financial difficulties are an obstacle rather than a motivator… which I kind of like. It feels more appropriate, honestly. Money would be such a stupid thing to die over, and while struggling to make ends meet is certainly an added stressor, I feel there’s some kind of extra legitimacy that comes with needing to wait — even to save up, maybe — to meet the financial requirements of the end.

I’m not sure why. Maybe because it suggests that the course is not being chosen on impulse. Maybe because it makes a statement that one knows what one is doing and does not do it lightly. Not that those things aren’t clear enough when one has a clear and exhaustively-researched plan.

None of that’s to say that I’m not conflicted. Even now, even where I am, I’m torn. My instincts are alive and well. There’s an urge to survive. It’s a humble urge, not like an urge for sex or drugs or anything like that, but a modest drive just to carry forward on autopilot, no matter how bad things get. It’s an urge not to think. It’s an urge not to feel, but to simply live. It’s something deep in my reptile brain that doesn’t understand what my mammal brain is so worked up about.

But the conflict is between a rational self and a self that I can’t even describe as “irrational” so much as “arational.” And my rational self says that this has to stop. It says that if no one else is going to stop it for me… and they won’t… then I have to do it myself.

I know there’s a tendency to regard self-destructive feelings as being irrational, but I’m not convinced. It sounds to me like a mix of allowing reason to be subsumed by a part of the self that does not reason and an automatic committment to cultural mores and values that evolved to serve our collective self-preservation rather than our capacities for higher thought.

Really, the choice seems awfully clear. The problem is that I am not a being of pure reason. I am an animal, and beneath my understanding of what is best for me as an entitity with a complicated and ailing consciousness, that animal is programmed to survive… for all I wish that it weren’t so and for all that everything would be so much easier if it were otherwise.