It’s still there, whispering in my ear, but now there’s no one else to blame.
Oh, I could — and did, for many years. If it wasn’t this or that holding me back, pushing me down, it was her or them, sometimes them and that, or it. I’m sure I don’t have to elaborate very much, and you can fill in your own blanks. But it never really was about where I live, what I’m doing, who I’m with, or what the weather’s like. It wasn’t even about my parents, although it partly grew from my experience with them.
No, it was always just the voice, I know that now. The one that would have me blamed for everything, that limits, derides, worries, terrorizes, and wails incessantly to an audience of one — a voice that was (and is) in fact trying to kill me, literally and metaphorically. From time to time in days gone by, I’d see this intellectually but never feel it. Hauling out the nearby scapegoats was always more compelling and dramatic, naturally.
So, yadda-yadda-yadda, okay, time passes, I mostly deal with that bunch. An ongoing process to some extent, but the conclusion is clear: not enough evidence to convict. That’s where the voice comes in. Again and again and again, in fact. Louder and stronger than ever because it’s unfiltered, apparently. Jesus, you don’t mean — oh, yes.
I’m doing it to myself. It’s all about the voice, and the voice is lying…
Oh, the wonderment of lasting this long! Now it’s just the two of us, no go-betweens. I may have to shout, but at least I won’t be wasting my breath.
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That old quack, Dr. Freud, was wrong about a lot of things, but I always thought there was something in his notion of the superego – the punishing censorious part of us that won’t let us feel joy in the use of our minds or pleasure in the use of our bones. He thought that this part of us, though it professed to be the keeper of a higher morality, was really allied with the id – the blind subconscious animal thing in us that is prior to intelligence and certainly prior to morality. This Dr. Hyde of the soul, when obstructed and thwarted in its natural outlets, would, he thought, express itself in a twisted way in self-lacerating gestures of morality. This all seems intuitively true, at least to me: Think of your typical Elmer Gantry or Jimmy Swaggart type. Think of your murderer of abortion doctors. Think of certain types on the left – the Unibomber, animal rights activitists at their most extreme, Greenpeace at times. The fury behind the self-righteous posturing of these folks has to me a primitive feel about it. The return of the suppressed id? A maniacal lust to dominate others in the way the id lusts to dominate the other parts of the human personality? –It would take a wiser man than me to say what makes anyone else tick. I’ll stick with Socrates’ injunction to try to know myself a bit better. What little self-knowledge I can get usually takes me down a peg and makes me feel in need of forgiveness – a strangely satisfying emotion. We humans all need to cut our own poor tortured selves some slack – as well as all the other similarly tortured selves out there peopling this funny old world of ours.