StrangeJournal.com

03.15.09 – Driven

My wife and I were in San Diego last weekend visiting the parents of an old high school friend of mine. We sat in this old house that I have such distinct memories of, a house that has changed much in the intervening years. A wall removed, the floors replaced. We sat in this modified memory, the five of us, two couples and one child immune to memory, and talked of things old and things new, eating coffee cake that the mother of my friend had made for us, soaked in butter and sweetness.

Sitting and talking my friend’s mother talked of a friend her son and I shared, a good friend of mine whom I have separated from in these last few years, and we talked about his exploits and the engines behind them, and this mother of my friend called him driven. She then described herself as driven, and when said that neither I nor her son are driven the protest stuck in my throat. I tried to tell her that I was driven, but that the drive in me is twisted so that instead of pushing me forward it merely drives me downward, but I did not. I did not tell her any of this because it was a new ways of looking at myself, a new lens through which I was uncomfortable viewing myself, and because the mother of my friend is relentless in conversation, especially when she senses weakness, perhaps because she is driven.

I cannot honestly say that I am driven, at least, not that I am driven in the way that she means it. I am not pushed to excel in things, I am not obsessed by accomplishment. Except that I am. I am obsessed with my inability to accomplish. I am constantly tallying the things that I have not done, have not achieved, have only imperfectly learned. There are times, like tonight, when I feel that my life is little more than a ledger sheet bathed in the red ink of failure, near failure and incompletion; that I am little more than a ne’er-do-well and no driving passion.

I think that word is very important: passion. It is a word that a friend of mine and I have taken and turned inside out looking for what it means in our lives. We have often used it as a scourge to lash against our backs in punishment for our lack of accomplishment. It is a mean way to use a word, and meaner still because the word is ill-used in this fashion. Passion and drive are related, but passion is not drive, but a glamour that romanticizes something more primitive, something more fundamental. One can be driven and without passion; revenge, I think, is an excellent example of this, or perhaps more mundanely, resentment. I believe that passion and drive are related, but they are not identical, and that is a freeing thing for me.

The trouble is that I don’t care what, I care how. It doesn’t matter what I do, really, but how I do it that counts. I am, more than anything, a process person. I LOVE to process, much to my wife’s dismay. I can spend hours dissecting how a thing is done, why it wasn’t done well, and how we can do it better. In my natural state I not only prefer to as permission rather than forgiveness, but also would prefer it if in addition to permission we could discuss just what we’re looking for and how best to accomplish that to the mutual benefit of all. What matters to me isn’t whether or not things are accomplished, because I believe that what needs to be done will be done, but how people and things are treated when things are accomplished. I am, at my worst, the nemesis of getting things done if it means something isn’t going to work right. I do not kludge well, because I believe that kludging is at best inelegant (and elegance is inherent in the way a thing works) and at its worst destructive.

All of this leads to a lot of perfectionism in my life. I do not enjoy not doing well and the discomfort that comes with it. I am not driven, I suppose, because I do not enjoy the discomfort of the inelegant, clumsy, kludgy, because the reality of my talent does not match the size of my ambition. For example, I had an idea for a story this evening, a retelling of a piece of a novel that I am reading from another character’s point of view, with a first line and everything, but I was unwilling to start the story without being able to see the entire thing first. I didn’t know what the story was about, where it was leading, what the point was, and I didn’t want another unfinished story on my hard drive. My life is littered with unfinished stories, incomplete ideas, half-written essays, and that is tiring, that is draining. It is not a feeling of accomplishment for me, it is a tale of my failure.

I realize that there is another way to look at all of the evidence I have presented, as there is always another way to look at things. Perhaps the evidence isn’t the important thing, but its presentation that I am failing to describe. There is something looming and monumental to me about the inability to find some kind of validation in what I do. Maybe this glaring emptiness that stands on the other side of the mirror from me is yet another symptom of the deep and withering grip that codependence has on my life, my complete inability to validate myself and my work. This lack is without a doubt reflected in the way I view my struggle, because I know in my head that the road to success is littered with failure, so the mountain of writing I’ve done, the unfinished stories and half-written essays ought to be heralds of my coming glory rather than wraiths that hang above my head, crooning eerily in the twilight of my being. Yet, that is the place that I end up on days like this, days when I wake up still tired, when all I do is lose at chess, when time spent with a friend feels hollow and awkward, when I feel that I’ve accomplished nothing, and I stare uncomprehendingly at the idea of being driven, because what’s the point since nothing I ever do feels like it’s enough?

I have been working for the last year or so on recognizing carrot-or-stick thinking in my life. It is the engine of my codependence. I have lived most of my life, from adolescence through adulthood doing things for a reward or doing things to avoid penalty or punishment. It is an embarrassing revelation, and yet one that is useless to avoid since at just about any moment any stranger could walk up to me, point to something I just did, ask me why I did it and the only honest answer would be to gain someone’s approval or avoid someone’s disapproval. It is at the heart of my relationship with my wife, a strange battle we are fighting for honesty even when seems momentarily destructive, why I seek more accountability in my office, and why I thrive in traditional educational settings. I am constantly waiting for my wife, my parents, my boss and God to tell me that I either did something right (and here’s your reward) or that I did it wrong, and here’s what I can improve (and then get your reward).

Yet, I have no patience now for learning or accountability now. I chafe at it. I really want to do things my own way, and yet, having removed myself from all but a few situations wherein lie the carrot and the stick I find myself mostly inert, unexcited by things, unable to move forward. So I blame myself for being passionless and uninterested, for not practicing enough, not caring enough and ultimately not being talented enough, because if I was I wouldn’t find myself struggling through this bog of ennui and self-loathing. I would merely skate across it with the elegance of Christ walking across the water, not the clumsiness of Peter struggling towards his savior.

Rereading the last two paragraphs has triggered a voice in my head that I usually save for helping other people reframe their struggles when they are thrashing about in their lives and struggling to keep their heads above water, much as I am struggling now. The phrase that jumps out at me is transition period, which is a phrase I hate, since there is no time in life that I am not transitioning in or out of something. That said, in the sine wave of my life, I am on one side of a trough, perhaps even now beginning to climb out of it, since the writing has relieved the irrational pressure of self-loathing and disgust. Looking at the picture of the sine wave on Wikipedia, this occurred to me in a mystical way:

Turn the sine wave on its side and force it into three dimensions, make it into a spiral and know that though I have been through this before, it is not the same. Though I have seen space from a similar perspective, it is not identical. I am walking this road toward heaven, round and round again, traversing this slippery helix, hoping not to slide too far from where I fall.