A statement about adultness, part 2

I’m slightly more adult than the miscreants who run the country, run the world, shoot elderly women in church and teens at the theatre, march in free-floating rage carrying placards of insanity.

The essential differences between them and me are that I have some care and decency that are not solipsistic – are actually for the other person, and I am predominately a passive type. That means I keep my damage – the historical, internalized damage we all have – to myself: I don’t throw it at the world. As no one is perfect, I do project childhood pain in one main direction: to authority. Based on overwhelming evidence, I grew up without a molecule of respect for the adults. By virtue of other degenerations in my psyche over time, I came to have what might be called a radical libertarian emotionality: an inability to respect or tolerate anyone who feels he or she should bend my life their way. That would include bosses, managers, directors. My weapons are narcissistic sarcasm, inviting crash-and-burn scenarios, and throwing down the gauntlet. Owing to the passivity and feelings of care, I make an exception for my wife, who does many things to me, from my laundry to choosing some of my counseling CEU’s without asking.

Next to, then, the scant handful of platinum-good people scattered about (and who can really say what their deeper motives are?), I am the best role model to prescribe the minimum essential qualities of adultness to the legion of wayward souls. Listen to my guidance for being a grown-up:

* Question your thoughts and ideas. Be self-scrutinizing. Our thinking is mostly a way we’ve escaped from or soothed our furnace of childhood pain, so it is guaranteed to be fallacious. “I love my old mom to death.” “I want to be a computer programmer. I want to be a writer.” “Jews are poison.” “Blacks are lazy.” “I’d be happy with the right woman.” “I fall in love easily.” “Liberals are virtuous.” “Mental illness is a chemical imbalance.” “Suicidal people are selfish.” “Mother Teresa was truly a saint.” “My religion is right.” “I know who I am.” “I want to be successful.” These and billions of other thoughts are likely to be self-medicatively wrong.

* Don’t do anything violent or hurtful to people who haven’t harmed you, such as those who go to synagogue rather than church; who opt for a less photogenic higher power than Jesus; who speak with an accent or a lisp.

* Those who have harmed you, such as parents, siblings, strangers or bosses: See if you want to have the kind of dignity and life a survivor of childhood deserves. See if you have grown to the developmental stage that enables you to speak forcibly, not just hit forcibly; that enables you to name justice and stand up for yourself, not burn up your gut in rage. See if you have enough self-care to remain living free rather than in prison.

* If you don’t have that dignity, or self-actualization, or self-care, you are a child, and the rest of us will have to watch out for you.

These are the basic infrastructure points of the adult. Notice that they speak to a conception of maturity or arrival that is not what people, in their consensus minds, believe. You don’t have to want to work for a living (though you do). You don’t have to like people, or like children. You don’t have to know what you want to be. You don’t have to smile when people urge you to. You can have childish feelings and fantasies, depression and anxiety, you can mope or wander lost. You only have to be harmless and decently aware of yourself. The rest will be in place: inner child and adult coexisting.