In a matter of days, I’ll have officially been alive for twenty years. Irrespective of how little responsibility the youth of today are expected to have assumed for their own affairs at that age in comparison to how quickly they were working and autonomous in days of old, that’s still something of a big milestone. It’s a nice round number, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine that at least a slim majority of people will have done something interesting or achieved something notable and praiseworthy by age 20. And by that measure I don’t think I’m where I would have liked to be by this age. It’s not to suggest that anyone is responsible for having the world completely figured out, but I should think that there are certain elementary matters that most others in my peer group seem to grasp, and to have willingly taken control of by now, where I haven’t, and in addition, most youth my age who are at my level of intelligence have accomplished things which are more noble than me.
I’m not saying this to invite self-pity or to insult myself; it’s simply an observation, not intended with any of the kind of malicious self-hatred that inevitably gets parents and psychiatrists alarmed whenever it’s exhibited by any youth, as has happened with me in my past instances of depression and suicidal self-loathing. What I’m presently talking about hasn’t to do with any lingering perceptions of myself as unethical or unworthy of respect, such as they are. To whatever effect I can construct a healthy and rational self-critique to encourage myself to work to achieve on a level I haven’t yet, I’m attempting to do that now.
One of the most puzzling and damning things about growing up in extremely privileged, affluent circumstances in more or less the safest country in the whole world is that if the conditions into which I’ve been born are so naturally advantageous, and if I have privileges I haven’t earned through my own sweat and access to opportunity that an extremely vast number of people around the globe, whose worth on a person-to-person level is of course a hundred per cent equal to mine, simply don’t, then I think it might be objectionable not to expect that I (or someone else in my position) should do more to cultivate those opportunities, and be a benefit to others, than I’ve yet done.
Part of what feeds this critique is the fact that many of the people I grew up around, in middle and elementary school and so forth, were exceptionally bright and kind individuals, altruistic in a very real sense, who were unpretentious and unassuming about exerting hours and hours’ worth of hard effort to go the extra mile to achieve selfless goals. Someone I knew from school, a ninth-grade crush, got involved with the United Way and did more than five hundred hours of volunteer community service instead of high school’s requisite 40. Another school acquaintance, David Berkal, was one of those supremely talented, organized and motivated people who has enough inner strength and wherewithal to achieve things many adults never manage to; he founded Project Equity, a nonprofit devoted to spreading awareness and demanding action to end the ongoing Darfur genocide, and also got involved in promoting microcredit and sustainable development in Africa. Some friends of mine went on aid missions to help schools in the developing world; others worked steady jobs and taught children to ski or swim or dance, something I never had the patience to even apply to do because I don’t like kids enough to want to work on their behalf, or pander to them, or deal with them—an exception is my adorable two-year-old niece, Aaliyah, but even she gets annoying sometimes. It’s not to suggest that these people I knew from high school were inveterately superior to me because they did these things and I didn’t, but I definitely felt like I lacked something essential that they had, especially because I never really saw any of them complain about having to perform such challenging tasks. None of them seemed to be selfish about it; they all just performed, and they succeeded phenomenally. There were many such people around me, throughout my childhood and early adolescence, and I was always awed by the way they willed themselves to do such altruistic things, but I was always too lazy, too unsure of myself, and too self-interested to follow in their footsteps. I did win awards from teachers and school staff, from elementary school to a prestigious citywide award for “courage and strength of character” or something in eighth grade, all the way up through some similar award at high school graduation. It was lovely of the people who thought to bestow these awards that they saw good things in me worth respecting, and I can’t deny that I have a good effect on some people and I have some characteristics that people have always admired. But I can’t help but feel that, if not mistaken, the people who’ve admired me so much—and there are still many people who praise me highly—have a subtly different criterion than I do for what makes a person worthy of praise and respect. I’ve said some things that others have found eloquent or inspiring, and I do like being (somewhat ostentatiously) generous and sweet to people, doing things like holding doors open for girls or being ready with a tissue when a stranger sneezes. But I do feel like most of that which is seen by others as the good in me is rather shallow and tepid compared to the actions and behaviours of most of the other people I grew up around, who expressed their goodness not with mere words, but with very substantive, and strenuous, deeds; things that they did at great cost to themselves and their comfort that benefited others and the world around them. Generally, I haven’t exerted a great deal of effort or put myself under major duress to do right for other people or commit altruistic acts; it’s almost all been facile, easily accomplished token decency, and although it’s almost always sincere, and practically never done for show, I definitely do revel in the attention and adulation it’s earned, and I did when I was younger as well. Nowadays, I look back at the younger me, who won awards for decency at school and summer camp, and I see a calculatedly cloying prat. And I look at the person I presently am, a week before I’m to be twenty years of age, and I don’t see a completely worthless, horrible person, but I see a chronically overvalued, silver-tongued, lazy, self-centred, risk-averse underachiever, hardly at all competent in a majority of the basic areas that are necessary to learn how to deal with in order to get by in the world, even if I excel in some trivial matters that won’t really help me excel or be of any lasting benefit to anyone else. And the way I’m talking about myself at present is gentle in comparison to the way it often is, when I don’t have the calming effects of prescribed mood-stabilizer and anti-psychotic medication to calm the seething spasms of self-hatred that sometimes afflict me; if I weren’t taking medication, it would be considerably worse.
The problem I now have is that after all of this very precise self-analysis (which, as I see it, probably bespeaks a certain self-importance just by being so exactingly detailed), I don’t know where to go from here, or when I do have some seemingly feasible solutions, I’m too lazy, afraid and complacent to put them into action. I’m seduced by comfort into a lethargic unwillingness to work to make myself more productive and more in line with the model I’ve got for how an ethical person should behave. Because I so regularly sublimate my ‘ideals’ to my fear and laziness, I usually critique myself rather harshly as an nnethical person, and to some degree I think that’s valid, because an ethical person should showcase their goodness through actions, not just rhetoric. I consider it unethical that I haven’t fought harder to find myself a paying job, for example; most of my peers got their first jobs at 12, 14, 16 and have been working steadily and with little complaint ever since, whereas the only jobs I’ve gotten have been through nepotism or through the forceful hand of my father, who’s pushed me to do many things I haven’t wanted to do in the name of my betterment, and whose manner and personality, diametrically opposed to my own in many key respects, bring me into conflict with him for other reasons that I could probably discuss in a long full-throated rant at some other time all by itself. He’s upbraided me about not fighting to get myself a job—not knocking on every door, asking every friend, pushing my c.v. into every pair of hands—for many months, and still I’ve done nothing. And while he and certain other smart critics, who can see through my nicely spun sentences to detect that I’m avoiding the issue and forestalling the taking of responsibility—notably my brother, who’s unfailingly perceptive, and not at all afraid to be upfront about critiquing my faults and calling me on what he perceives as bullshit (not always accurate, but always worth considering)—would probably lay into me even now for being evasive and letting myself off the hook by talking about my experiences with the issue rather than going out and working hard and resolving it—might rage at me, I’ve still done nothing. I find it easy to spin excuses and convince myself to believe them, which makes it more difficult. I tend to attack their methods or small inconsistencies in their arguments, which makes me feel good about myself and allows me not to feel as guilty about continuing to delay a confrontation with the problem. And nothing has changed. On most days, when I’m feeling an intense surge of self-hate, I tend to tell myself that I don’t even think I’m capable of changing, that I’ve let myself down so many times that I can’t trust myself to make positive change in any meaningful way. Sometimes I genuinely believe that’s true.
And the troubling aspect of that is that, by my ethical standards, it’s impermissible to allow that belief. Because if I concede that to myself, then I’ll never move on. I’ll have invented a mechanism by which my continually delayed progress—which sometimes leads me to spitefully tell myself I’m in ‘arrested development’, eternally a dependent child—becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, impossible to get beyond. And, because in my flurry of self-hate I’ll have pilloried myself so much and piled so much scorn and contempt on myself that I’ll think myself entirely worthy of abasement, I’ll tell myself it’s congruent with my fundamentally lazy and shiftless nature, which would make the continued suffering I’d feel by letting myself down over and over again and staying underdeveloped entirely justified.
I usually tell myself that the main challenge is to force myself to change. And when others inquire into how I feel about myself or when those friends of mine who know about some of these anxiety issues ask me how I’m doing in dealing with them, I usually tell them that I’ve met a roadblock in the ongoing effort to better myself, and that I’m stumped, but I’ll triumph one day. It’s very easy for me to spin such blather in very eloquent language, which stops others from thinking it might be revealing or necessary to inquire further. And the crucial missing ingredient is any hint that any real effort, requiring pain or suffering, or even a disruption of my present hedonistic way of life, is necessary, will be exerted, or is even possible. I don’t make those demands on myself. And that’s the problem. I’m at an impasse, and whenever I’m confident that I know what to do, I feel mentally blocked or tied down to daily life and unable to do so. Or I make excuses. So I’m stuck, at least for now.
