I have an attitude problem. Or a personality problem. Personality disorder/s. The problem is me. My feelings, my thoughts, the way I react to the world. When I see something I want but can’t have, my response is despair. Rather than making the most of whatever I do have. Because what’s the point, if I can’t have that crucial, essential, fundamental thing? Everything else becomes meaningless in comparison.
I can go through the motions, and try to make the most of my situation. But it’s like carrying a dead weight around – my hearts not in it. So inevitably i retreat back into dysfunction. Because I don’t care – if I can’t have that, I don’t really want anything else.
It’s a stupid, self-destructive attitude to have. It means I inevitably end up with nothing. Rather than getting some of what I want, I choose complete failure. I allow my longing for the ideal to destroy any chance of anything good.
But I don’t know how to stop. How to give up on the fantasy, and accept the reality. I don’t know how to invest it with meaning and value.
4 comments
What happens with the passage of time? Does the urge to have the thing you can’t have become less strong? I sometimes have a similar despair, but find that if I can calm myself for a day, or a week, that the urge to have it subsides.
Not really. I just distract myself from it for a while. I’ve had basically the same stuff going round and round in my head for the last 12 years.
I think that idealism in whatever form it might take can be crippling. I speak for myself anyways. Always wanting something better. It must be a form of pessimism to encounter something that is suitable, but to reject it because it should be something different. Maybe it’s the result of people having unrealistic expectations of you and you feeling guilty about “failing” them…
In my case I think it’s totally selfish. It’s me having unrealistic expectations for what my life should be. Possibly based upon absorbing popular culture while young, combined with a very sheltered early upbringing. Maybe I was able to avoid harsh realities for too long, and so never learned to adjust my expectations. Or perhaps it’s just an inherited predisposition.