The twisted irony is not wasted on this mind. Here I am the day before my fifty-second birthday and I am thinking about what I am going to say at the college’s commencement ceremony. That is not the real irony though, this is for my GED class that I am speaking for – at my college’s commencement. An old man speaking of value in community and the learning, that goes on outside of the rooms and buildings. A freaking introvert on top of that who feels like he is flunking out of college in his first quarter. I have had my headshot and have done the interview, this is going into print so there is no backing down now. The doozy came at the end of the interview when she asked what advice I had to give to the College graduates, and I suppose the other GED/HS alums…
This old guy with a few issues dealing with the younger generation, I mean, I have problems with all of the generations but the younger ones are just more spread out and diverse. They haven’t had time to settle into deep resentments, but they still cause an itch. I am their biggest supporter at the same time and I have to realize when I am being “old minded” in my delivery and thinking. The other delicious irony is that for my English final essay thesis is about conflict and the human brain, how we are basically programmed not to get along and compromise. That kind of primitive mind reaction turns us right back around at some predisposed point in time, when our brains decide to just argue instead. So this speech on top of it all is icing on a very big lesson cake.
This is kind of nuts, this piece is taking the better part of a a few weeks to get it out. I think that in some way I am afraid of using up all of my writing on this medium and not having enough left for school work… The commencement is five days away now and I am still polishing up my speech. I have a bunch of work to do on that essay too, so this may wrap up this piece and it may not. This is going to definitely be one of those pieces to look back upon. Oh, on top of that the sewer is being worked on right in front of our place and the front yard is a collection of heavy equipment at the moment. With plans for next week to work on that same front yard, during hell week.
The commencement is done and I really screwed up on everything about my speech. I am hearing good things, but I still feel like a big dweeb that lost his cool. Like I said it is done and I finally understand something about myself. If I feel I cannot learn something, that I am too dumb to get it, then I will set myself up for failure. I will not attack something as hard as I should because I know I will fail in some area, and then people would find out how really dumb I am. I know that sounds twisted and it is, I am just noticing it now because of repetition. That drumbeat of dumbass, both from myself and my family and others too when I was younger, has not left me. It is a haunting reminder of the nature of learning and the very same reptilian brain that I just wrote about. The fears are not of success, those don’t register as anything with me. The things that register are the negatives, the wrongs and all the meanings that they could entail. Out of my minds, I am doing cognitive exercises to notice these things, but it takes a lot of work.
My Mom’s last and oldest brother passed away on the 4th so there was also a flurry of family related stuff. Phone calls from drunk cousins and making sure that Mom is ok. Like I said, this is taking weeks to write, and that is unlike me and my automatic script mind(s). I guess I had little time for reflection because I had real world work to do, it is hard accepting that I am a college student in my dummy conditions. Here is the good news that I can at least try to ease my own mind with. I have been in these kind of logical stupors before, when they break I start being too manic about things, but I am sharp as a razor when this is all happening. So I have to watch out for the manic part, but still allow my abilities to rise. I have been keeping everything hidden so long I have to undo my training. The abilities I have do not make me something weird or too strange, they just make me me. I know that is basic stuff for many though I just found out about a lot of this within the last few years, so I am a child at the same time with much of it.
I wasn’t going to publish this, but I don’t want to lose it either. Better an honest post than a regret when I need to see this again. I am learning, albeit slowly in so many ways. To this is the bitter end of me, always searching.