In a lost little desert town without traffic lights in the south west portion of riverside county in Southern California I woke up and threw myself into an oncoming train of arrogance and didn’t feel a thing when it struck me.
I don’t remember the exact year I came to this revelation.
Perhaps the late 80’s, truth be told it doesn’t matter.
I was walking around the groves of my step-fathers ranch with all the pomp and circumstance that some sub-20 year old could muster and simply announced to the grape vines, squirrels, rabbits and random citrus trees “I am perfect”.
I said this with conviction and absolute certainty.
Not a single small rodent or shrubbery challenged this assertion, hence, it was truth personified.
Back then I had these thoughts in my brain that I could do no wrong, and that there was no piece of information I didn’t know that I actually needed to know.
I evidently had formalized that the world revolves around me and it was indisputable.
My opinions had become facts.
Evidently I came to the conclusion that wherever I was would be the ideal place for anyone else to be or they were missing out on the divine grace that I clearly exuded to all that gazed upon me.
The sun will rise, the sun will set and I am in fact without any human flaw...
I cringe even writing these words.
What was I thinking?
Seriously, what was I thinking?
It was not like I was popular or had a lot of friends.
I wasn’t and I didn’t.
To the contrary, I had very few friends and avoided being around other people because truthfully I was scared of pretty much everything.
The depth of this delusion went much further I am ashamed to admit.
I would form these beliefs in my mind of how I was the single most important person that existed in every moment.
I would look down on anyone that challenged me. And for the record, I had no just cause to do so.
Clearly you people were inferior, like duh...
I had comments and opinions for every subject, whether you wanted them or not.
With perfection came the obligation to point out your flaws and I think I was shocked when other people didn’t agree with me or didn’t like having their faults pointed out by some arrogant nobody that had never actually accomplished anything.
I was annoying to be around; and that is an understatement of the decade.
If your clothes didn’t match because they were a different, I would remind you of how primary colors are to be paired. If your stereo system wasn’t equalized correctly I would tell you how the carpet, furniture and drywall in your apartment would absorb specific frequencies you needed to accommodate for; and if you didn’t you were an clueless dolt along with the rest of the unwashed masses that didn’t listen to me in my infinite wisdom.
People that potentially knew facts that I did not were to be easily dismissed as misguided fools that had wasted their time on the trivial and unimportant.
Unlike me, of course.
I was judgmental to the extreme and without any rationale as to why.
Those that didn’t pay attention to me as I wanted, needed or desired were to be ostracized immediately.
Didn’t they know who I was?
Or better yet, what I was?
If you watched the TV series ‘Vikings’ I made King Ivar look like a normal beacon of benevolence and altruistically motivated behavior.
If I had been smart enough to know what a cult was, and had sufficient resources my next logical step probably would have been I should attempt to father children from as many women as I could to perpetuate my genes into the future.
Lucky for me, I hadn’t even had a girlfriend of any measure yet in my life at this time. Let alone any ‘experience’ in fathering anything. That and the whole ‘cult’ thing is generally speaking a bad idea.
Yes, you read all of that correctly. The degree of things that are wrong with this entire line of reasoning is disturbing on so many levels I am not qualified to even comment on.
Perhaps, If I am really lucky the DSM-6 will have a section on me for their next release.
It’s a full time job to be a #Narcissist, so I have been told.
The problem is I once actually believed all of that nonsense.
To make matters worse, I wasn’t doing drugs or drinking.
All of this insanity was created with a naive and young untarnished mind.
The arrogance of those original moments still haunts me to this today. It has been a long-standing cause of nightmares and unanswered questions for many years.
What pushed me over into that pit of self-induced megalomania?
To be fair, I was fairly bright and had a well read vocabulary for my age and did possess above average problem solving skills.
However, this alone does not justify the madness of screaming to Mount Olympus that I am just short of divine and the world should reward me and take notice.
But, perfect, no, not even close. Not in the same ballpark, not in the parking lot of that ballpark, not even in the same hemisphere of that parking lot of that ballpark.
Truth be told, I wasn’t even in the same solar system as perfection (and still am not).
In retrospect I was closer to being an undiscovered asteroid parked out between two insignificant moons of Saturn.
There is me, Tethys and Dione just hanging out playing dungeons and dragons and trying to figure stuff out in the cold darkness of space and it’s around 1986.
In other words, I was just some misguided teenager with no one telling me right from wrong; so as a defensive mechanism I made up right and wrong to suit my narrative.
Back then that narrative was about survival for me.
As I reflect into the past, my childhood and subsequent formative years wasn’t bad in the scheme of things, but it was lonely. I wasn’t connected to anyone; and it turns out that is important for emotional and spiritual growth.
And loneliness speaks its own language for those in its wake…
I never fit in it seemed and my parents weren’t around much in my teenage years to tell me I was an idiot. Or, at a minimum guide me out of the darkness of my self-imposed delusions.
I wonder what it was like for other kids my age. I still know a few of them, but it’s hard to create a conversation to dredge up the ancient past to see if my demons were better or worse than theirs.
But let’s go back to perfection.
Over time the insanity of somewhat all of of those beliefs faded or was reshaped by experience and by being proven far from perfect.
Life has a way of tempering people like me and bringing us back to reality.
“It hurts when I go like this!” - Henny Youngman
There have been a few individuals in my life that saw my delusion first hand and rather than walk away laughing decided to take some pity on me and show me my own mirror.
I wasn’t about to listen to anyone else, but you can not refute the mirror never lies.
Well you can, but that is actual insanity and not my self aggrandizing and toxic take on it.
My step father was one of those people that attempted to help a few times. He didn’t spend a lot of time talking to me, but when he did he usually asked a few rhetorical questions, laughed at my answers and then went back to watching the stock market or making some strange thing for lunch.
These types of interaction made me question myself.
While I didn’t find answers, I found better; questions.
I don’t know where I heard this but I still believe it ‘answers are a prison and questions will set you free’. There is no greater truth in this life.
My step father’s philosophy about most situations was something along the line of ‘try to not let people do stupid things or hurt themselves (or others), but let them fail so they learn’.
“Nothing good ever happens without some pain.” - Roland Orzabal
To this day I actually accept that same world view as a valuable tool for people that choose not to listen to advice that they have solicited.
I laugh thinking about all of that.
I would ask for advice occasionally during this period of time, not with the intent to get advice, but with the intent to prove I was right about some inconsequential fact.
Which back then also meant, I wanted to prove you wrong in some capacity, so I could continue to validate this perfection motif I carried so close to my chest like a armor.
For the record, that almost always backfired on me.
I had far too many opinions as it turned out.
“Ignorance is painful, and it should be.” - Scott Burrows
A few years earlier before my trajectory to perfection was fully realized I had barely graduated high school. My grade point average probably never got above 2.0. I liked a few classes and a few teachers and got an occasional A or a B.
For everything else I was lucky to get a D and failed out of 20% of my classes because I didn’t feel like doing the work to get a good grade.
The irony there was the classes were not hard, I just felt they were beneath me or they were boring, because I was so above it all.
To this day I don’t actually know why I had that mindset.
High school back then was not great.
It was easy to slip through the cracks because there were gaping canyons due to insufficient funding, lack of supplies, burnt out teachers, economic recession, fear of an ice age, acid rain or nuclear winter and complete lack of parents around to tell me I was a screw up.
I don’t know who was supposed to give me guidance, but I needed it desperately. And the screams into that chamber of nothing were answered by and overwhelming echo of silence.
And with all of that said, I am still 100% responsible for all of my words and actions.
I don’t blame the school, the president, the system, the Russians, the teachers or my parents.
I blame myself because I could see the decisions I was making and had thought about each one before I made them.
In other words I was perfectly ok with making bad decisions because even when I knew they were bad and would come back to haunt me, I was greater than the sum of the parts involved in the equation.
I had convinced myself I was immune to the impacts of my choices. Because I had convinced myself I was perfect.
Ultimately this is a victim mentality.
I was so beyond ‘special’ that things happened to me and it wasn’t my fault because I always knew better. In my mind, that is. So I countered that and created the perfection trap to justify my interactions with the world.
It was a storm building that would eventually make landfall.
Which of course I said it would never actually impact me.
Which that part turned out to not be true, the storm did eventually hit. That is a story for another time, however.
It’s just that I defined right as me and wrong as everyone else.
I think a lot of people do that now. It’s easier than facing yourself and looking into your mirror.
“The mind is a terrible thing to taste.” - Al Jourgensen
It’s a confusing time now with far too much information and unimportant data being hurled at us at 180 characters at a time 24 hours a day and with as many hashtags as we can fit into those electronic postcards of the inane.
Our existence now is spent staring at glowing pixels attempting to define our humanity and for that matter, everyone else’s.
So where do we go now?
Because this isn’t really working out for a lot of us, and it is of our own creation.
We have access to limitless amounts of data. We can communicate with virtually anyone at anytime, but we never unplug to actually enjoy each other.
That takes too much time and what if we miss out on something?
There is an actual term for that now FOMO ‘Fear Of Missing Out’.
But what are we actually missing?
That’s the thing, it’s nothing.
We have more now than our species has had ever.
Yet we aren’t happy people.
We have far too many opinions and complaints and on every topic all the time.
It is as though we have decided that individually we are perfect and everyone else is flawed and we reinforce it and perpetuate it because we have convinced ourselves the world happens to us and that it revolves around us.
But it doesn’t.
I see myself and my delusions from long ago on the faces of strangers in airports and restaurants and walking down the street.
We are broadcasting our misery by looking down at everyone and everything and convincing ourselves we are better than they are.
If you use the wrong pronoun someone will jump down your throat on some social media platform. If you take a picture wearing an Iron Maiden concert shirt and someone is offended your character will be attacked ruthlessly. We have allowed ourselves to go to extremes to one up each other to validate that perfection complex.
If you don’t like someone they are hitler. The other political party that isn’t you is nazi fascists that hunt orphans and your political party are angels from heaven.
Why?
Because that self aggrandizing perfection complex took over and we point out everyone’s faults even when they aren’t real. Because it makes us feel special and better when we do it.
We can no longer question a person’s actions because someone else will accuse you of something that ends in ‘ist’ or ‘ism’, when that was never your intention.
Because the perfection complex allows us to tell you that others are wrong and should be socially punished for it.
I could go on about this for a while, but you really do either get it and want out or you are part of it.
The middle ground is gone.
Social media addictions killed that for us.
The solution is difficult to imagine for many people. The thought of not constantly being connected is frightening. We have become scared of too many things to let go of our electronic dog collar.
I say you need to unplug and be with people and simply listen and interact. Forsake your need to give an opinion and be in the moment.
Enjoy sunsets and the sounds of cats purring and dogs playing.
Turn off the Constant Negative News network and read a book or go for a walk and look trees and the clouds; it’s wonderful. It’s real and it is freedom and happiness at the same time.
You need less opinions about things that simply don’t matter. Because the world is changed by your actions not your opinions, tweets or posts or pictures of your lunch.
“Happiness is inversely proportional to having less opinions.” - Michael Gunn
You need to go back to being ok that you aren’t special and that you are not perfect. Because we are all in that same boat.
I think Mark Manson said it in one of his books, ‘you are ordinary and that’s ok’.
You are good enough the way your are and embracing that is freedom from the delusion. It is the growth of the spirt and the soul.
You aren’t perfect and never will be because perfection is unattainable and attempting to become that is a guaranteed path towards misery and loneliness.
I wished I had figured that out a long time ago.
But I am glad I did finally see that light and be able to smile back into the mirror.
“Enjoy the silence” - Depeche Mode
