Being Special and Excuses in Life Is A Circle, Or A Torus

I went grocery shopping and made a little dinner tonight. Thinking of doing some kind of baking. Muffins perhaps. Pretty sure I have a packet of muffin mix for being lazy, but also I’m trying to make more “from scratch”. I mean I guess I’m not milling the flour myself, so it’s in a bit of a gray area, but it’s fun. I’ve been learning to cook with tofu much better; if you don’t know the secret, a little bit of cornstarch helps make crispy pieces. Didn’t know until recently. Overall I’ve been cooking more, eating better, and healthier options are often cheap and good for a budget (though that’s not entirely true or enough; food stamps isn’t enough).

But the whole time in the back of my mind is this pull. History is happening right now, and this is what you’re doing?

It’s something like survivor’s guilt, I think. Not exactly obviously, but that same sort of grief and guilt about: here I am, living my life, while so many others struggle in one way or another. I guess I’ve had my own struggles, but it just doesn’t feel right to try to compare. I just want to know how to help and just keep coming up blank.

I was always the “honors” kid, in the “gifted” program growing up. Grew up hearing family and teachers calling me “smart”, which always left me feeling really uncomfortable honestly as I never liked comparing myself to other people. I liked the things I liked, and that was it. But it left me with two consequences I feel like I’m only beginning to unravel in the last few years.

Firstly, the pressure on me as an “honors” kid to focus on academics I think stunted my social skills. And maybe there’s a touch of the ‘tism or ADHD or something in there too, though I’ve never been diagnosed (though I suspect as much as other family members are diagnosed and share a lot of similarities in behavior with me…). Either way, I have always had an extremely hit or miss relationship with being social. Sometimes I “nail it” and do really well; when I was teaching for example I genuinely enjoyed it, probably because I could talk about my special interests as a professional, and did so in a friendly and fun way that students always gave me high ratings for. However, outside of those times, I have always been enormously awkward because I just have never grasped neurotypical social convention. I have always felt like I was trying to scientifically study some invisible set of rules everyone expected me to follow yet no one would tell me about. Before I go too far on a tangent, let me save that topic for a next post.

Secondly, more related to this post, it left me with perhaps too much self-confidence in other areas beyond personal interactions. Everything else, I felt like I could figure out; even if I didn’t know anything yet, I could learn it rapidly. I got used to being able to just kind of sit on the couch with a book, study for a weekend, and then Bam! I knew what to do.

I feel so utterly lost and useless with world events right now that the confidence has broken and inverted into a sort of survivors’ guilt. Perhaps a poor analogy? But something along those lines; I feel like, Here I am cooking dinner while the world is on fire, shouldn’t I know something or be able to do something to help?.

But I have no idea. For maybe the first time in my life, I feel useless. It makes me angry and upset to sit here making dinner. Shouldn’t I do more?

At one time a few years ago, I thought I could have more direct impact or influence. At one time I tried to get involved in “politics”. I’m not a huge fan of that word because many misunderstand it, although for good reason because of how corrupted it’s become in US debate. Politics should be about forming community, and working with all community members to solve problems, make sure everyone is taken care of. In practice, it’s egotistical fights over elected offices funded by wealthy people to maintain their power and wealth which comes from exploiting and ripping off the rest of us. We don’t have community in many places, just cold, unfeeling bureaucracy whether government or corporate. To get involved in that world means either alienating yourself, or conforming to the bureaucracy; I chose the alienation, to speak out for what’s right, but that is of course a lonely path that ends up burning bridges more than building community. I hesitate to say it was a complete waste of time, but I think the valuable results from that time are more in learning what not to do than accomplishing anything particularly tangible.

It dawned on me that, perhaps this is exactly what the white guy savior complex looks like. Am I beating myself up for not having answers when it isn’t even really my time to be “leading”? I think being the “smart honors kid” put it in my brain that I am “special” and always have to find the answers, which sort of implicitly means you’re not listening to other people who probably have better answers than you do. Maybe it’s my time to just sit down, shut up, and listen for what is needed and act on it when I am needed and called on.

I try to turn off the guilt, the sense of uselessness, and instead look closer to home. My family, my friends (who in a sense are my family and closer to me more than my blood relatives in many ways), and myself.

My partner has been struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma. I helped her today to get a psychiatrist appointment set up that she’s been putting off for ages. It’s tough to get started when you’re struggling with depression, so I reminded her of it and encouraged her. That was the help she needed and asked for, so I did. Now she’s feeling more relaxed having that little task done. And that makes me feel better. And of course she needed to eat, so I made her dinner.

A friend of mine is recovering from covid, now with some kind of “long covid” nausea, cough, exhaustion nearly a month after first getting sick. After she texted that, I offered to bring her down some dinner or groceries or anything she needed. She was very thankful.

I went for a walk, and stopped at my neighbor’s house. An elderly woman lives there who has trouble walking. I saw her sitting on the porch and wanted to stop and talk to her and ask how she was and if she needed anything. She seems to always enjoy the company. I don’t know how often she gets visitors.

I stopped at the local library and talked with the librarians about new TV shows coming out. The library is a great place to rent things for free instead of all the expensive streaming services by the way. They’re hosting more reading programs for kids in the neighborhood and were doing a fundraising drive. I donated to help the kids.

I’m reconnecting with an old friend. I’ve never not cared or stopped thinking about her. I always wished her well. I’ve just been horrible at being a good friend, and maybe some of that was the bad focus on what it means to “act”. Reflecting on that, I finally summoned up the willpower to stop procrastinating and to follow through and send her a message. Her ecstatic response and long video voicemail (is there a word for that?) response made me smile, because she was smiling to hear from me.

Maybe I’m not so useless. Maybe the help we all need is just different than what we’ve been trained to think it is. Maybe whatever comes next in life, what matters is these little moments more so than the grand “politics” or finding a “smart” solution. Seems really cliche. It makes me smirk a little at the cheesiness. But maybe there’s honestly something to it that I wasn’t paying attention to as much before.

I worry a little bit that maybe this is some level of excuses just to make me feel better about myself. I don’t have to do anything about the world being on fire because I’m checking on friends. It sure seems like a cop out. But I don’t know what to do about any of that, really. And maybe that is in itself the problem, I still keep expecting to solve things myself. I need to listen more. And for right now at least, when I listen, I hear friends and neighbors that need help – and honestly, my own health asking for a little bit of attention it has rarely received. And not help in the sense of coming in and solving problems for them, but just being there with them as we all come to terms with our emotions over this weird point in history, and aiding with chores and life in whatever little ways we can. I need to take better care of myself so I can be there for other people. Maybe that’s good enough for right now. Maybe if everyone listened to their friends, and those friends listened to their other friends, and so on, the world as a whole would be in a better place.

I don’t need to be “famous” or have all the answers. I just want to do my part.

Last updated October 13, 2023