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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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3:07 p.m. - 2005-07-24
I am moved to talk today. Yet I am here. Not on the phone. Not using my keyboard for email. I have quite a number of people who I'd like to catch up with individually, but realized I want to yammer on about my thoughts and lack the patience to give equal time to what's doing with my friends. I'm working right now to lighten my load of self-serving dishonesty. I am beginning to feel weighted down by justifications and pride-related obligations. The nice thing is I'm not doing this to punish myself. Normally my self-improvement binges are rooted in guilt. It's all, "Gotta root out bad behavior, you sinning coward." I notice here that I tend to couch my failings and responses to those failings in religious terms. It makes sense. Ethics are my religion. True, I am a witch, but I am not a Wiccan. Witching is just part and parcel of any sane housewife's regular routine. My true faith lies in living an ethical life. For far too long I equated ethics with being nice. Not honest, mind you, but nice. You ask any low self-esteem type what 'nice' means and inevitably it means giving in to the point of self-abnegation. The only way to reach 'nice' nirvana is to reduce your personal needs to none and to spend 100% of your time seeing to it that every person you know is living the swell life because you have made it possible. You've made their lives wonderful, successful, emotionally rich, and safe because you've given up all 'selfish' desire and slave tirelessly for their happiness. And when those lovingly served people don't respond with gratitude and devotion of their own, we castigate ourselves for still not being 'good enough'. Yeah? Well shit on that noise. Lately I've been falling back into the 'nice' thing. That version of nice is wrong. It's dishonest. Gods preserve me from that 'Let it all hang out' honesty briefly in vogue during the mid-70's. That wasn't honesty. That was Boomer self-love reaching its zenith. But doing for others just because you want to prove what a 'good' person you are is wrong. It's manipulative. It's also dumb. Slaving breeds resentment. Cultivating resentful waspishness isn't on my To-Do list this season. What is on my To-Do list is offloading some of the prevaricating I do for the sake of being 'nice'. The dumb nice. I want to live an ethical life, not be voted Homecoming Queen. It's important to me that I can look at what I do honestly. Behavior isn't enough, I want to be ethical in my motivations too. It's part of the process of seeing myself as a whole human being. I am learning to acknowledge my needs and see them less in terms of good and bad, but as normal urges. Except for athletes and other chronically ill folk I know, I pay closer attention to what's going on with my physical self than others. Most crips learn to judge their body and its functions dispassionately. I know my body is just the car my psyche drives around and I have no problem checking its oil and testing its brakes with the eye of the experienced driver going over her ride before a big race. If I can sound my body so non-judgmentally, I should be able to look into my non-corporeal self with the same clear eyes. Hence right now I want to run my mouth and not phonily be giving as good as I'm getting. This is a real break-through for me. Admitting to myself something as simple as not being up for conversation is truly a Big Deal. And not apologizing or making plausible (but dishonest) excuse for posting here when I 'owe' so many is nothing short of amazing. I'm hoping eventually I won't have to over-think this kind of stuff. I'm sort of the camp which believes the truly honest life is lived without a lot of thought. No, not heedless abandon. I guess maybe I mean work. I'm hoping that eventually the ability to go about in a forthright ethical manner won't require so much examination and deliberate construction. I realize to the self-aware that breezing along without wondering what it all means and whether we are doing it 'right' is nigh on impossible. But a girl can try. Just wanting to do the right thing, ~LA
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