Fuller Wiser

Normal. I’ve never been entirely sure what that feels like. What worries me is that I may be headed that way.

I was raised with the idea of individuality. That’s unusual in my part of the world, where people idealize the rugged pioneer, but in practice really want everyone to sit quietly in their place so as not to lump the gravy. My parents, though, were people who never fit in, plus they had a touch of that West Texas isolationism, and it was always made very clear to me that there was something very wrong with the majority. It almost didn’t matter what the majority was promoting, it was probably suspect if most people were in favor of it.

A good portion of my twenties was spent ironing out that problem, getting rid of my inborn knee-jerk rejection of anything remotely popular. My father never got rid of it, and his blindness on that front makes our interactions very frustrating. My mother has it in the way that I do, which is cautious skepticism. I find that to be healthy, but then I would, wouldn’t I?

Mistrust of majorities can lead to exceptionalism. If you’re going to be different than everyone else, why not be different because you’re a shining star, instead of an irregularly lumped rock? When I cast a critical eye over my aspirations to be a famous this or that, aspirations which I have never completely shed, the obvious root is a need to provide a good reason for not fitting into normal society. The reasons are very simply dichotomized: Either it’s because you’re a freak, or because you’re special.

I’ve always opted for the special, and not in the euphemistic mental health sense. I was always going to be the famous this or that, the one who couldn’t fit in because his vision was just too blindingly bright to be contained by workaday life. I won’t go into all the different fields I’ve tried to establish myself in, but suffice it to say that I’ve remained the virtually unknown this or that despite my best efforts at notoriety.

The denial of reality is something I attack on a regular basis, particularly where it concerns religious believers, a group growing frighteningly large despite—and likely in reaction to—the advance of reason and science. These people live in a fog of preconceived notions that no amount of logical analysis can penetrate. Facts pile up at their doorstep, only to be swept aside as they shovel their way into the street with their blunt instruments of coercion, chief among which is the possession of the majority opinion. To attack them, you must attack the society at large, and that is a thankless and often futile task.

Yet if I am to be honest, I must aim my penetrating laser of reason on my own life. Years of extremely hard work and agonizing nights of angst have completely and utterly failed to give me the life I set out to achieve. What is one to conclude from that? I’m often tempted to revert to determinism, and take comfort in the belief that since I’m different from everyone else, my path to success must also be different than everyone else, and so I must keep trying until I find the “right” path. But of course that assumes that there is a “right” path and that I will find it, and that I haven’t already missed it.

An honest assessment might suggest that though I have received some rewards for my hard work, the pursuit of my unrequited desires is in fact detrimental to my happiness. Buddhist thought supports this, and indeed Siddhartha’s insight into this fact of life is one of the glaring truths that keep me tossing and turning at night. Giving up my youthful desires is to give up on everything I’ve ever believed about life, about myself.

But is asking myself to release those desires any more demanding than asking Christians to give up their god? If a god is the bedrock of their entire sense of themselves, as it was more peripherally for me, the two situations are more analogous than not. My religion, my immovable object, is the belief in my own exceptionalism.

As with all such conundrums, though, there is a significant amount of gray area. In the course of pursuing these various career plans, I have gained a considerable amount of skill in those areas. Not top of the heap, but well above average. The fact that these pursuits (you’ve no doubt deciphered that they are artistic in nature) have yet to yield a substantial paycheck doesn’t keep me from believing that it would be a waste to just toss all of that collected experience just because it won’t make me a living, especially since I enjoy the projects while I’m doing them.

And of course, there’s the “then what”? Let’s say I rid myself of my artistic and exceptional aspirations. Who or what does that make me? My sense of self is almost entirely defined by what I am trying to be, given that it has never become what I am. If I accept that what I am at the moment is REALLY what I am, is that enough to make me happy?

Let’s take an inventory: Father, husband, son, secretary, friend, blogger, reader, writer, listener, art appreciator, thinker. Doesn’t sound like a bad life, really. But it’s awfully…normal.

And I think that’s what’s bothering me. Nowhere in there is the sparkle, the biographical verve that I always believed would constitute my life. I haven’t led one of those types of lives where nothing happens, certainly. But nor have I led the sort that is really different enough to take special note of. It isn’t the me that I’ve been expecting all these years. My being different hasn’t yielded unusual success, it’s yielded normality. What the hell?

Growing up, I got along well with my paternal grandfather. But he had a quality that perplexed me: Contentment. No amount of drama or complication in his life ever shook him from being content just to be himself.

It wasn’t that he never got mad. My father and his siblings can certainly testify to that. The thing with my grandfather was that he was perfectly content to know what he knew and not really bother with the rest. He was not learned in foreign policy, domestic politics, quantum weirdness, philosophy, or even, for that matter, Christianity, though he was a lifelong churchgoer.

But in his areas of interest, he could not be matched. He was a creator, mostly with stained glass, but also with stone, metal, and wood. His garage, largely untouched by my grandmother since his death a few years ago, remains a reflection of his passion, filled to bursting with tools and tiny found objects, components collected and saved with an eye to incorporating them into his work. By profession, he was a lumberyard manager in a small West Texas town, and knew his business inside-out. It provided him a livelihood and retirement. But his heart was in that garage, and you can still feel it there.

My father’s own path was not dissimilar. After a brief attempt at a musical career (the details of which remain murky), he fell into the family industry and became a lumber salesman at a large corporation, staying for 30 years, mostly in management. Like his father, though, his heart was elsewhere. Though he hardly touched his guitar, he spent untold hours out in his workshop, a dusty lair of wood, steel, and tools both ancient and modern. By the time his children woke up on weekend mornings, he had already been at work in the shop for hours, and would remain there until dinnertime. If it could be made, my father could construct it with wood. Like my grandfather, my old man barely made a dime from his creations.

But here the similarities end, for my father is one of the least contented human beings on the planet. It remains beyond me to catalog the demons that haunt him, or their origins. Though he served in the Air Force, he spent his entire four years stateside in an accounting office, so PTSD is hardly on the table. He is not an alcoholic, and hasn’t smoked in nearly two decades. Whereas my grandfather exuded calm and satisfaction, my father radiates discomfort and resignation.

Why the difference? I think our friend Siddhartha may have at least part of the answer: Expectation and desire.

Everyone I’ve spoken to who knew my grandfather agrees that he really didn’t have many preconceived notions of how his life would turn out. All he wanted to do was find something he could do to make a living, and to be able to do things he enjoyed, like hunting for arrowheads and fossils and practicing the aforementioned crafts.

That all seems fairly normal, though other details show a man who was not concerned with being terribly normal. He remained unmarried until age 35, when he married my grandmother, 15 years his junior. Surely people in a small town consisting mostly of farmers and oil workers with 13 kids apiece must have gossiped about this middle-aged bachelor, who my grandmother admits she saw as a bit of an interesting challenge. According to her and others who knew him at that time, he wasn’t bitter, though. He just liked things the way he liked them, and didn’t worry about what people thought.

Maybe it was a generational thing, maybe it was mass media, I don’t know, but from all accounts, my father has never been content. To an extent, it could be traced to class consciousness, having been raised in an oil town where the haves (bosses) and have-nots (my people) are dramatically divided, with a resulting effect on self-image. Maybe a regular diet of radio broadcasts from places that were not dusty oil towns raised hopes in my father’s heart that he could become something great, or at least something different than those he wasn’t fitting in with.

Maybe it was racism. My father’s skin is noticeably darker than mine, due to both his grandmothers being full-blood Cherokee. Were that a factor in his out-group status, the Republicanism of most of his adult life would be ironic, but hardly unprecedented among oppressed populations.

Whatever the reasons, the result was someone who wanted something that ultimately, he didn’t get. No son can ever be entirely sure what his father wanted from life, but in my dad’s case he clearly didn’t get it, and has been dealing with that sense of failure and loss for longer than I’ve been alive. He expected, he desired, and then he suffered.

Cue the son’s entrance. Individualism turns to exceptionalism turns to ambition, work ethic and commitment fail to deliver the desired result, and now the very things I enjoy are tinged with a pang of pain, an echo of what I once thought they meant about me. I am a career artist trapped in a hobbyist’s life, as far as my brain is concerned, and the inevitable dissonance is emotional, not logical. As the Jesuits say, give me the boy and I’ll show you the man. Much as my brain tries to tell me otherwise, my heart still wants what it can’t have.

Like most converted atheists, I mourn, in almost exactly the way one mourns the death of a loved one. Whether that entity being mourned ever existed seems to make no difference. Emotionally, it’s not a logical discovery, it’s a death in the family. For me, the belief in my exceptional destiny as conceived in my childhood may have been even more instrumental in the development of my sense of self than my belief in a nebulous god figure. I’m bracing for another death in the family, one that I didn’t even know could die. Can I pursue my artistic projects, knowing they’re now hobbies, and not feel as if that admission betrays my entire existence?

The only way that will work is with a sufficient replacement self-image. Is my psyche capable of finding itself worthwhile as a normal person with unexceptional goals? I fear it may not be, and I fear even the path to finding out. It is the most terrifying journey I’ve ever been on. When I started it a year ago, the gentle piercing of that protective membrane for the first time nearly drove me to madness. Therapy, good friends, and a few minor artistic breakthroughs kept me from bringing a quick end to the pain, but it was never far from my mind.

There is a disconcerting undercurrent that lingers ironically at the fringes of this story, threatening to turn tragedy into farce. That is the father/son conflict.

With disturbing consistency, I and male friends of mine have repudiated the lives, values, and attitudes of our fathers, only to find ourselves reliving key portions of their lives. What makes it worse is that often it’s the rejection itself that opens up behaviors that eventually drive us down our parent’s path. Worse still is abundant evidence that our fathers did the same thing in regard to their fathers, and who knows, that trend could stretch back for generations.

Realizing this, any belief in the power of the individual to determine our own fate starts to come under fire a bit. Sure, we don’t live exactly the same lives as our fathers, but obviously something very fundamental must change drastically in order to bring about an alteration substantive enough to actually change our fate. God is not required for damnation, only unwillingness to face root causes.

So here I am, in search of the root cause. What if I’ve found it? What if I can’t remove it? What if it’s like one of those parasites that, once attached, cannot be killed without irrevocably harming the organism? Who am I without my desires, and my pursuit of them?

Above all of this, though, has always floated a more cloudy, but persistent desire: To be happy. It is this desire that leads me to question the others, so I might logically conclude that it is more powerful, and thus more important. Whether it is achievable is quite another question, but if I’ve learned one thing from observing my father, it is that happiness is necessary in more than sporadic bursts. It is essential, in whatever form it takes, and regret is its enemy.

I cannot rewrite history and be reborn as a man like my grandfather, with modest goals and aspirations. But I can re-examine my ambitions in the knowledge that a greater desire may find them an obstacle to its own achievement. If I must sweep myself aside, let it be in the name of happiness.