No (Tyrannical) Ideologies

I woke up early this morning but still lay around in bed wondering how to overcome my resistance to living, a strange malaise that’s overtaken me in recent days, beating hard on the door of my heart, disturbing my well-laid plans and ambitions. Some visitors refuse to be ignored, they won’t wait a while at the door and, receiving no answer, just slink off into the mundanity of a hot indifferent day. These kinds of visitors keep hanging around, they keep coming back again in a few hours, and they start coming at all hours of the day, just when you were starting to think they were gone forever, they turn up again, and start the door-banging all over. I’ve been wondering about this caller a lot since I clearly can’t shake her off. I’ve tried distracting myself with beauty and with work but it’s not working. The minute the distractions are done, the harangue of the heart begins anew.

I was planning on beginning today’s writing session by recognizing my joy at being free from tyrannical ideologies but the unwelcome visitor decided to crash my self-righteousness party and demand to be seen, heard, and recognized. Yesterday, I sort of hinted at this visitor’s form by skirting around the issue of place and identity and I suspect that this is what’s starting to shape up as the gist of the matter. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been besieged by the audacity of my ambitions which now includes having to write a dissertation. In trying to make plans to deal with this ambition (and actually write the damn thing) I have locked down the creative freedom zones and built a kind of prison where I have to sit at my desk and engage in activities that are not feeding my soul. Something about the way I’m going about it is not feeding my soul, it is not bringing me closer to my place of true identity, but rather dragging me away somewhere far off, where plans are made, where diligence becomes a four-letter word, an external force that is enforced upon me from the beyond. This makes it not mine, makes it not a naturally occurring inheritance but a forcefield made of “must” and “should” and “ought.” This is not the burning passion of internally generated desire, which is how magic and brilliance are fueled (and how a dissertation about magic “ought” to be written). So I’m twisting around in a Neptunian fog while some heartbreak kid bangs on my door demanding that I figure things out a lot quicker.

And this brings me back to place and identity. I think place and identity are identical twins. You can’t have an identity if you don’t know your place. And you can’t know your place if you don’t understand who you are. This is why so many people are so severely lost these days because they look for one before the other or vice versa. We need both at the same time. Here’s what I’ve discovered: my identity is — I am a writer. And my place is — at my desk, writing. If I don’t do this every day, first thing in the morning, nothing else ends up working for me. If I persist in believing that because now I have a big project like a dissertation to write, it must come first, then no matter how intensely I plan my day, no matter how many good intentions I arm myself with the night before, the minute I wake up I am attacked by doubts, fears, hesitation, and heartbreak. Yes, heartbreak! For that is the only way I can describe just how sad I have felt the last two months. I keep thinking it’s because I feel lonely, that I need community and friends. And I do, I need those things and that’s not nothing (I’m looking into it, thank you for your concern, dear reader). But I realize today that I feel sad and lonely mainly because I have not been writing. Writing is my place and my identity. When I don’t write, I have no place, no identity. Then, I am truly alone, unmoored in an uncaring selfish world with nothing to hold on to, no one to have fun with. My solitude becomes a curse then, not a blessing. My solitude is only a blessing when I am writing and creating, nonstop. The minute some tall, linear foreman enters the picture and starts drawing straight lines around me and my unique intuitive way of creating, things go awry and the magic machine stops churning.

Here’s the amazing part: I can write! I’m actually pretty good at it now, and I’m getting a little bit better at it every day. I know I can write three hundred pages worth of ideas, theories, and conjectures about why disco is an underground religion. No problem. What’s been tripping me up are ideas about structure, reading and research habits, notes, references, and a lot of other weirdly linear conceptual ideations that I don’t normally entertain with such vehemence. These ideas about structure have been making life hell for me, making me want to avoid anything having to do with my dissertation like the plague. I’m an intuitive introvert. I’ve written many academic papers that end up being pretty good but I never began them with an outline, per se, or a preset structural design. I write my papers in what I call an oracular fashion. I pick the day, I do some reading and then I just start writing, grabbing at books and opening them at random pages, magically landing on exactly the quote I need to substantiate the claim I just made, and hey presto, abracadabra, the thing is written, the professor is happy enough to give me an A, and the paper is ready to send out for peer review and possible publication.

So I guess this piece ended up being about freedom from tyrannical ideologies after all. The trouble is that we often don’t realize the tyrannies to which we are exposed are emanating from within our own minds. We externalize the feeling of tyranny, the feeling of being trapped, we project it out onto the world around us, onto people and cultural facets of reality, we make our internal prison the problem and responsibility of the state, our boss, or our partner. But it’s not their problem, is it? We always want our own internally derived problems to be someone else’s fault because it’s easier that way. But this only prolongs the suffering, so what on earth is easier about that? I suffered for a couple of months until I realized I am doing this to myself and that all I need to do is go back to my usual method of being happy which involves me doing the thing that defines who I am and where I belong. I didn’t need anyone’s permission for this and I certainly don’t feel the need to wait for the approval and approbation of an entire community. I don’t need Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to approve my choices before I can be happy and feel that I am occupying my place and embodying my true identity.

The most insidious creeps in all the world are the unrecognized psychological complexes (aka tyrannical ideologies) we carry around with us all the day long. As long as they remain unknown like this, they operate as though from the shadows, tugging on our strings and affecting our movements like a master puppeteer. To me, this is the most serious area, where so much of our focus should be attending. The state can’t fix your complexes for you and you are a little child-baby if that’s where your consciousness is at. You can’t have a safe place out in the world when the inner world of your true identity is in an unconscious shambles.

Therefore, “Know Thyself” seems like the wisest action of all. No wonder that adage is still going strong.