You ever get the feeling that you work ten times as hard as the rest of humanity just to simply keep up, and find the results of your emotional and physical labor are minimal at best? I used to think I was the most unintelligent human on planet earth because very little of this experience made any sense to me, and I could not seem to remember a goddamn thing. I spent so much time memorizing behavior in the hope that I could simply document and move on, never having to think about it again. I could just use an equation for this or an equation for that, and free up what little space there was in my brain for creative endeavors. Unfortunately this approach to human interaction resulted in a total and complete lack of being present. Suffice to say it’s a lot harder to learn how to be human as a middle aged man than I imagine it would have been to do so as a kid.

Then again, maybe I’ve just been comparing myself to an unrealistic way of being… for someone like me. Because it turns out, I’m officially intelligent (according to modern scientific and psychological methods doctors use to determine this kind of shit), and although learning this has alleviated some of my former anxieties, it has most definitely introduced a whole other set of brand new anxieties and an unfathomable array of questions to ponder.

Oh, how fun it is to learn and grow.

Perfectionism is an unattainable goal. I used to think I used it as a kind of constantly moving goalpost in order to push myself further than I normally would, had there been no goalpost to aim for. But it turns out I was always just setting myself up for failure of the forever kind. It’s funny how no matter what age you are, you always seem to think you know “what’s going on.” But I’ve recently noticed that even things I once thought immovable have begun to shift. It’s as if I’d been some kind of somnambulistic magician my whole life, and had never realized I’d been duping myself with my own carefully crafted slight of hand for decades.

Or something like that.