When I was a child I was challenged to see the world from other people's perspective. Why was the other child right? Why was the neighbor right? Why was I wrong? No action of mine was ever really fully correct and I always should have known better. The action of every other was to be seen in the best light, given the full extent of benefit of the doubt, and assumed to be in good faith.
My mother would sometimes require we play this game when I got in trouble. We would sit and talk through what happened and find what specific action, or lack of action meant that I was wrong. What could I have done to have avoided the situation? I suppose she didn't see it as a game, she saw it as good parenting. I saw it as a game we played, where we built models of the world and people in our heads and then played with them.
When my mother wanted us to do something, she also built worlds and then told us about them. For example, when my brother was 11 or 12, he flipped the front of his hair up with hair gel and thought he looked super cool. It was the style, it was all over Disney and he was super pleased with himself.
My mother wanted him to go to the store with her and took one look at his hair, "Change your hair."
"No," my brother said, "I like it."
"Chris, change your hair, it looks stupid, hurry."
He made another sound, something between a whine and the word no, and my mother grew impatient, so the world was born.
"Chris, only little gay boys wear their hair like that. Do you want to be a little gay boy? Should we go and get you a boyfriend? Would you like to kiss a boy?"
He made another sound, something between a whine and the word no.
"No? Well, that's what your hair is saying. Go fix it." And, he did.
My brother's reaction to this has always been to stay quiet and out of her way. My reaction has been to go further into whatever world she's made, and argue it with her. Find and prove that this world is false, using the rules of the world she built, and knowledge of the world we are actually in. Ultimately this is exhusting because she screams a lot, demeans me, insults me. I become angry at this. Then tells me she's not sure why I'm so angry, I really should deal with that, and instead of hating everyone I should look inside myself and answer why I am such a bad child.
In the last 15 months I've realized how much deeper and core some of the false realities are and how much they have impacted me. That even after decades of simply avoiding any emotional connection with my mother, after years of rejecting her worlds, some of her ideas linger. Some of the survival habits linger from her and my step-father.
So it happened that three months ago my brain got stuck on a problem that broke it. I didn't know what my job was. My mother says my job is to make my boss happy. The law says my job is to work for some amount of hours in exchange for money. A lot of different people at work seem to think my job is different things. Most of them seem disapointed or mad, indifference or mild-interest is the default. If I work on one of them, I'm not working on the other one and then the other person is mad.
Well, certainly this is a very simple problem to solve, isn't it? In a job like mine, I exchange an amount of time for money. For the time I am working, I should be dedicated to the interests of my empolyeer. It is in his interest that I ask him what he would like me to work on if I do not know. If I have something I think should be worked on, I should suggest it. If I run into a problem I cannot independantly solve, I should state the problem and give any options I believe may help and ask how he would like to proceed. Certainly he would like that.
I couldn't think that at the time, however. Because a core idea that I have left from my mother is that if you must ask what to work on, or need clarification, you're probably too stupid to work on it. So solve the problem, and don't bother people.
I take this as a big risk on any project I work on. I must be able to see the world in which the project exists, and how to get there before I really buy-in to a project at work. The bigger the project though, the bigger the risk that the worlds don't align perfectly at some point before I am done. So I try to spend time thinking about how to correct that and realign the worlds, and a lot of the time I can. I'll avoid the problem and feel uncomfortable, but then enough stress will push me to complete it.
Sometimes, that doesn't happen. Sometimes I just cannot get to the world where the project is complete. It will make my boss happy when that world is here, and my job is to make my boss happy. I must work on this specific thing, because it's what has been assigned and to work on anything else would be avoiding the work I'm supposed to work on. I cannot work on anything productive of my own, because anything else I make isn't actually mine. So with no way to proceed, I disassociate and avoid until I can justify that it's no longer the work day. Yet, I'm feeling pretty bad about myself, so nothing else useful is happening at this time either.
When this pattern happens, the problem eventually solves itself. I'm fired, so now I don't live in the world with these restrictions, and then I set about solving the problem of making money. It's likely that I view work environments as authoritarian homes/small communities, because when I am in this mindset the idea that I can quit doesn't occur to me. The idea I can change the environment doesn't occur to me.
I set out to solve it, really I wanted to be doing productive things again. I'm sitting here watching my wife publish two books, start teaching classes, and being an amazing woman who loves me... and I'm being stressed out at work and yet accomplishing nothing.
I decide the way to solve this is to tell my boss about my vision of some sort of amalgamation of him leaving me alone so I can make a friend-company he can have a percentage of and also letting me just run a department that does stuff I want that benefits him, in an arrangment that would make a mob boss happy.
He's not interested in that arrangement, but asks more questions about the business idea. So I can then only see the business itself in a model where I've been fired and have six months to make a profitable business. We talk a bit more, and his responses suprise me and teach me things. I ask to take a three month leave of absense to sort my brain out.
I did not know everything I was going to do, but I knew a few things. I knew I needed to make routines and explore them, I made a solid morning routine of waking up, going for a walk, and writing stream of conciousness on my typewriter. I explored memories, thoughts, traced the timeline of my childhood. I typed for hours some mornings. I meditated.
Some ideas kept coming out when I was typing. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourself can free our mind. The Bob Marley record I got on my 9th birthday playing in my mind. The god who forgot... a story or a retelling of it I can't place about getting lost in day dreams. Stories and ideas and bits of things came out. Strong emotions. Seeing situations more objectively and from an adult mindset.
The most profound change I've experienced is how anger feels. For my whole life, anger was an emotion that filled every part of my body with energy. Within a few weeks I was absolutely shocked to find anger was only in my chest. My arms, legs, back, they all felt normal. A few weeks later, I found anger registers as a small feeling, like being mildly hungry.
Secondly, I've stopped getting stuck in hypothetical worlds as much. I used to talk to people in my mind a lot. Replay a situation, change things about it. I would see a model of the person or people, and whatever situation had unfolded, how things could have gone different. Sometimes I still do, but I'm much faster at catching myself and reminding myself to focus on what I'm doing.
Other times I would see a world I wanted to be in. A cabin in Lake Tahoe, a woodshop, walking around the forrest, a vague notion of having a profitable cornerstone business that let me experiment with whatever is interesting, perhaps a business location that's a coffee shop and a tech incubator or co-working space. It's fine and good to think about, but it's magical thinking, and the accomplishments that happened in this world to get here are handwaved over. Sometimes I still do this as shared thought experiments, where we're discussing things that could happen and granting huge leeway of means. When not discussing things with people, however, I made a concious effort to try to distill from that world what I might really want and understand it for what it is. It's happened that this type of day dreaming has largely just stopped.
I admit, I have no prescriptive way of getting here. I had to unpack a lot of thoughts and ideas, pull up a lot of childhood memories and really look at them. I had to take months away from external obligations to really allow myself to focus inside my own mind. I am very lucky, my wife has shown me what unconditional love, acceptance, and support is.
Sorting my head has been good and useful. Some time during this, I realized that I had no foundation. That I have poor concepts around boundries, responsibility, agreements, and obligations. I needed to make them explict to really understand them.
I set out to fix my mind and build a better foundation