Project Sour Grapes

Almost got into a fight with a motorcyclist who tried to run me over near Central. Apparently, I was not crossing the crosswalk quickly enough for his liking, so he got as close as possible to me on his big black motorcycle. Almost coasted into me. Big guy in a neon, yellow-green, long sleeve shirt. So as soon as his bike was within a foot of my body, I reached my right arm out, just patted his right shoulder softly, and kept walking. It was the gentlest way I knew to say, "I am not afraid of you or your bike. You are in my space." And wouldn't you know it, he kept riding away, and I kept walking to the store.

Not sure what went through his mind. I'm sure he felt like his bike served as an intimidating shield, but guess what, buddy? I have arms. In that moment, I could very well have pushed him off his bike, and maybe he realized that. I was within arms reach of fucking up his whole day. If his bike was a Harley, it was definitely one of the $50,000 ones with the farings and everything. If he has ever trained in boxing or another striking martial art, he would know that if I can touch his shoulder, he is exactly at striking distance. Or maybe nobody else is brave enough to get in his space like that, so he realized in that moment he would not actually know what to do; He made a move with his bike, I countered confidently and calmly, and he did not know how to respond. Other possibilities are that he had a shitty day and his boss ripped him a new one, so he decided to take it own on "guy in the crosswalk" (me), but then I responded with a gentle shoulder pat, and he went, "Oh, I'm being a dick," and then he continued riding home. Likewise, the gentle shoulder pat could have served as a, "Hey, bud, we don't have to do this. Bye." A lot was communicated in that moment lol.

Or maybe with my beard/Carhartt hat combo plus the ability to calmly play chicken, he thought I was an off-duty cop and was like, "Sheeeeit." Who knows? Anyway, so much of masculinity seems to be little, non-stop games of chicken. Who cares the least? Who is willing to risk it all? Collateral damage and all that. It's like gazelles stotting when predators are nearby. All of that is to say, fuck bullies. I try to give everybody grace, and I ultimately gave this guy the same, but I will risk everything in the face of bullying. Run me over, buddy. If you get in my space, I will gently but firmly cuddle your ass to the ground into side control and hang with you until the cops arrive.

Really, if you told me the only way to shoot a bully in the foot was to first have the bullet go through my own foot, I'd pull the trigger. Blam. Done.

On a totally different note, much thinking has been done in the past month about identity and "becoming" something. This is in relation to gender stuff, career stuff, all sorts of things. I'm at the point now where I am okay with obstacles in life as long at they are in service of an ultimately goal. There has to be meaning to the suffering. This discovery is not new to me, and the philosophical concepts are just things I co-opted from Viktor Frankl and Ernest Becker. But at this point though, I have personally experienced the emotional and existential dead end that comes with trying life any other way. Half-assing things in order to dampen the blow of the obstacles is not working. "Keeping my options open" is not working. It's like, by flip-flopping so much, my brain can't even feel the meaning of the suffering, because what if there is no meaning in the end? By switching and double-dipping into so many career paths, then maybe that one tangent that I went off on will ultimately have no meaning. And by running away from discomfort and obstacles, I am ultimately never seeing the fruit of overcoming any of them, so no wonder my brain is burnt out. That is also on top of my just not finding joy in things in the aftermath of my mom's death. I have been running on the fumes of fumes.

This past week, amongst the absolutely anxiety-fueled loafing, I have finally told myself point blank that I have OCD. No humor-based defense mechanisms or ,"Weeell, it could be this or could be that." Just straight up telling myself that this is what is going on. And I haven't started intentionally either. I wasn't trying to heal myself. I just hit a low and labeled it in a frank manner, because there was no other option.

The only thing that has changed the pace of this has been letting myself work on my business--the business where I code and teach other people how to be better at coding, specifically for scientific purposes. I feel empty when I don't get to create things, whether or not the other obligations in my life are providing other benefits, like a good paycheck or social status or whatever. I feel like a real human again when I get to create and teach others.

I am afraid to accomplish anything at all, because one day, somebody is going to accuse me of something terrible (falsely) or they are going to bring up my real, actual mistakes. Then the whole world will hate me, and I will only ever be able to work in a no-name town--perhaps at a Verizon store as a lowly technician or salesman. All of my accomplishments will be meaningless. No one will care that I ever tried to help people, because I will be associated with disgust in people's minds for some perceived mistake.

It does not help that I see other people getting cancelled as soon as one person claims that some mistake happened, sometimes 5, 10, 20 years ago. Some of these claims are true and are awful if they really happened. Others are not true, but the accused is ruined. A soccer referee may very well have killed himself this week in a situation like this. I say "may," because his cause of death is not being released, but this guy (a Dutch referee) was going to be a referee at the World Cup. However, he was accused of sexual assault. From the articles I read, it appears that FIFA dropped him, even though he handed over all of his devices immediately to the police and police found no evidence that anything remotely like that had occurred. And though the articles don't state the cause of death, he was only 38 years old and an absence of "foul play" by others was ruled out. I'm going to hedge that he killed himself due to either or both of the terrible things that this brought upon him: firstly, the loss of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for what might be the equivalent of Mt. Everest in his chosen career, and secondly, the chance at being associated at all with sexual assault.

This is going to sound wild to some people, but there is something called "POCD," where a person's particular OCD theme (or obsession) is that they're going to hurt children. (You can guess what the "P" in POCD stands for then.) Thankfully, this is not my theme, but this shit sounds like torture for the people who have it. How do you even talk to other people about something like that? The average person has a hard enough time sympathizing with regular old depression (though, during the pandemic, I think a lot more people finally said, "Oh."). With people who have POCD, their fear about actually hurting people, and the intensity of their obsessions and compulsions, is actually a reflection of just how intensely they value never doing that thing. OCD is sinister in that way. It takes whatever you value and inverts it and uses it against you.

Underlying OCD obsessions, as I've learned recently, are a person's values and an intense fear that they won't live up to them. A person may have an OCD theme about germs, because underneath that is a fear of giving it to others or even dying from a rare disease that would leave their children destitute. There is a hyperresponsibility aspect as well as a desire for absolute certainty. "I can't consider myself a good person unless I make absolutely sure that touching the door handle at Planet Fitness didn't accidentally spread Covid to any immunocompromised grandmas who walked in right after me."

OCD is that stupid. But underneath it is often a real concern about others or about how to exist "correctly" in a messy universe.

This was a mild tangent, but honestly, I have realized this week that OCD, especially cancellation OCD, is the last thing that is keeping me from achieving my goals. I sabotage myself. I don't want to be seen anymore. I was just browsing threads on Reddit from other people who have it, and the comments are like, "I am afraid to have a social media presence. I see other people get cancelled and it takes me out for like week." One user, "okdokke," actually shared their experience of getting cancelled on TikTok. They only had like 100 followers, and then one thing went viral in a bad way and got 100,000 views, and people bullied the shit out of them in the comments. They apparently posted something that some group of people didn't like. Whatever it was, this Reddit user now can't even use TikTok without getting anxious and nauseous. They even tried to defend themselves and people would respond, "I am not going to read all of that." Absolutely insane behavior by strangers.

But I guess humans have done this across our societies since the dawn of time: public hangings, the gallows, the guillotines, sacrificial ceremonies, the crucifixion of Jesus H. Christ himself. There is some human desire at scale to lob guilt onto one singular person all at once like some public cleansing ritual. Maybe if we all gang up on this one person, we will be freed from our own hidden shame. Contrapoints has said as much, and people try to reignite her cancellation at least once per year about some inane bullshit. For celebrities in general, I don't blame the ones who bite back. It must take a Sisyphean amount of restraint to not bitch slap people and to instead be a Keanu in this world.

phone addiction

"Decide what to be and go be it." - Ryan Holiday's "Daily Stoic" for today

The universe is full of opposing ideas that are all in tension with each other. Systems pull on each other. Things oscillate back and forth. Everything happens in waves. Yin and yang. I'm not trying to sound like an ethereal douche. I have touched on why I see through this lens a few times before but want to jot this down before I run to the gym before it closes.

My mom's obituary is sitting on the table next to me. I see the two pictures of her face, mostly the one of her on her last trip to Disneyland a month before her passing. What would she think of what I am doing right now? Floundering, making excuses, fumbling opportunities, beating myself up in anticipation of failure (plus my cancellation OCD). My mom was not perfect. She was, without exaggeration, abused as a child. She carried that shit with her for years, and it accidentally spilled over into the next generation. But she always tried to get better. That was all she could do, and she did the fuck out of it. Relentless self improvement.

Does it honor her if I wallow in pity? If I squander what she has given to me in terms of life lessons and the ability to move beyond whatever baggage her family and her generation had to carry? My mother wanted to springboard people into being their best selves.

Swing dancing kind of fucked with my head. Also, the Graham Platner shit is making my head spin. Everything seems messy and like no system is worth contributing to or trusting.

I have all of these things that I have tried--hobbies, careers, classes, schools, friend groups--and the "outsider" feeling persists in each one of them. Side note: if I blended into the group, I'd probably be equally unhappy. I gravitated toward being the leader in any groups that I was in growing up, so my brain kind of doesn't know how to be otherwise. This isn't necessarily a problem. The pitcher of a baseball team isn't a bad player for sticking to being a pitcher and getting better at pitching. It is just "a role" to have, which has pros and cons.