Getting Back Up, VI: Hard Work, Changing Nothing

I’ve taken a MOUNTAIN of therapy. I’ve made a stack of amazing, earth shattering realizations about how I live my life. And they did nothing. At first. Seven years ago, I learned I self-sabotage. Not “I’m afraid of my own success so I can’t cope with it” self-sabotage. “I want to fail at life, destroy everything good in my life, and lay down to wait to die, to assert even the merest illusion of self-determination and will in a life where I feel out of control and in over my head” is more how it goes. A tiny, poisonous, but insanely influential part of me is done. Wants everything to fall away so I can lay down and let time sweep all memory of me away and let it sweep me from the Universe and the Universe from me. That realization left me in shock for three weeks. But it changed nothing. And there've been a steady stream of other equally momentous realizations along the way. They changed nothing either.

I’m a smart guy. Very. No, really. Very. And I’m beyond introspective. I’ve figured out a lot about how I function. For much of my life, it's what I've done most of with my time. But that information is conceptual. An intellectual eureka is not a revelation. It won’t change your life. I’ve had more than I can remember anymore. And they change nothing. They need years to percolate down into the subconscious and take actual HOLD someplace other than just in an intellectualization. They need to seep down and marinate your guts in the new truth they offer. Until you reek of it, and one day you have a whole body Eureka. That rumbles up from the gut, scours the heart clean in the pressure and shoots out the top of your head. And the only thing that will set off the final explosion is the Universe kicking you on your face, which you have no ability to dictate the timing of.