I don’t know how many times I have prophesied (moped) in these pages that TPS blog was “winding down,” each death knell followed by second, third, and fourth winds. This time it is true. I have not had any new ideas in a long while, and by age or experience or fatigue, I find that I don’t care to. It is true that I have wondered why so few people want to honor, or cherish, their history by knowing it deeply. If one’s life “flashes before one’s eyes” on the death bed, that seems to suggest that a deep feeling about one’s unique history is important. Yet many people don’t want to “go there.” They would rather be a newspaper than a history book.
Another piece of shrapnel hit me recently: the notion of being a “disappointment” to one’s parent. I’ve heard this a fair number of times in twenty-four years of therapy. While we can see the direct problem inherent in this shaming – given to feel your soul is inadequate and can never be right or good enough – we may miss the other side of that coin. A parent who sees his child as a disappointment is saying that he owns the child, that he has a right to feel let down by her. Imagine going up to your neighbor six houses down, whom you have never met, and saying: “I am disappointed in you for failing to mow your lawn every Sunday. I am disappointed in your son for growing his hair long. You are disappointments.” You would, doubtless as the sun is big, either be insane or so copious of personality disorder as to overflow the banks of the Nile. Parents do not own their children, do not have a right to assume the child has an obligation to live their life according to the parent. To assume such a right is to be sick.
What I have been doing is compiling approximately a hundred of these blog posts into what may become a self-published book. I know that sounds egotistical. But from my angle, in the process I’ve perused the six-hundred other ones and decided they are not worthy. At their writing, though, I sure liked them! And there’s the fact that the four or five people who would buy my iconoclastic and rancid (clear-thinking and benevolent) thinking are those to whom I’d give a free copy anyway.
The working title is: The Pessimistic Shrink, selected blog posts. Acid and delusion. Which one are you?
