Musings on selfhood and inborn capacity
For all of my life I’ve operated as if immersed in sludge; like my body and mouth and pen are incapable of expressing what is in my heart, and so I suffer a perpetual dishonesty. When I’m idle or drunk this feeling becomes crushing: I am becoming old, and ugly, and it is no longer beautiful to struggle when you’re ugly and old, it’s merely sad. When I was young I was cursed by diagnoses—I was told I was dysgraphic and, worse, dyspraxic, literally “bad at doing.” Of course, I knew I was inept. Where other kids easily knew what to do with their shoelaces, or the locks of their lockers, or how to open up boxes, or how to fold paper, or how to colour within the lines, or how to organize objects within space, I was slow or incapable: my mind, still, becomes blank, unable to process stimuli, when confronted with an unfamiliar scenario of which I’ve yet to develop an appropriate heuristic to deal with. I never know what to say, if it is good enough (I am terrified of not being enough). More or less everyone is like this, I’m simply more like this. Being told—having been given a name for this phenomenom—was a curse. Child-Nathan was simply discouraged from trying. I grew up wanting to bite the world.
This is dishonesty. Because I want to say things, and believe I have thoughts or ideas of value, but am simply too slow to express them. I am always catching up: minutes, days, or weeks later I understand what I had meant to say. I am surrounded by people smarter and brighter and more capable than I am, whose ability to synthesize genuinely new thoughts, or understand the point, astonishes me; who read and retain, instead of, as I do, simply read in hopes that, somewhere, my brain will have subconsciously latched onto the thing of it, and will make the most of that thing of it-ness in the future. I work harder than others do, and read more and try more, and have been more disciplined (and less disciplined) and it doesn’t matter, whatever I do—my capacity has been fixed. I will die like I was born—I am a coyote, and I know how to eat garbage, and I love to laugh at the moon.
It is easier to hew toward practicality—this is why Aristotle was a weaker thinker than Plato: through prudence questions can be bounded, aimed at some purpose, and given meaning by their end—but meaning is never the point, has never been the point; meaning, and therefore prudence, is a kind of Devil, it is a vain distraction from Truth—vain because it derives itself from itself (a thing must mean what it does), and Devil because it is vain, and the Devil’s sin is pride. Yet how can the truth be divined by someone fundamentally incapable? who lacks the genius to be a holy fool or the requisite talent to be a prophet?
Sainthood, martyrdom and the mortification of the flesh, is another path. For years I disciplined my body because I found out I was good at being strong. It was the only thing I cared about. I still train out of habit, and the emotional distance I now have from my training has, ironically, made me stronger. The point of training was never to be the best, hence my lack of competing at any higher than the lowest levels in the various sports I’ve done. Instead, it has always been in service of reaching an absolute moment—a complete and utter sublimity of the present through the physical. That feeling of immediacy is what attracted me to squatting 500lbs, or driving myself to the brink in martial arts until I developed an autoimmune disease (A tragedy nobody could pity). I thrived in a position where, so drained from exertion, I felt and was nothing: yet this was all completely of my choice, it was an auto-alienation as a rejection of an imposed alienation. Because I will spit in the eye of anyone or anything that tries to make me a piece of meat.
Now my hope is that I can write my way into heaven. That, if I follow the right steps and make all the right moves, I can bootstrap myself into valuable personhood, become honest with myself, through writing. It is terrifying, to be honest. I am so, so scared whenever I share my work. This, too, is totally normal, I understand that. There has never been anything remotely special or unique about me. I am a laughing coyote. My fear is that it will never be good enough—never be true enough, never be honest. Or that, when I find out how to express myself without irony or artifice, that people will make fun of me for trying.
When you die, and lose all your memories of the people and things that are so beloved they bring you to tears to behold—really behold and think of—it will all be worthless if you create nothing of note. The only thing to do is to try.