Sometimes you just need to repeat yourself

[hummingwolf]

Or at least sometimes I feel the need to repeat myself. As I have said before:

You associate happiness with children and believe that misery is a sign of maturity. When bad things happen to the good person you want yourself to be, you consider it validation, proof you are truly an adult now that you endure things you never imagined when you were a kid. You see your life as significant when you find yourself screwing it up so royally that you rival anyone in the history books. You do things to hurt yourself just to prove you are no longer an infant, and you rationalize dragging others down into your pit and inflicting them with your wounds by saying they should have been mature enough to know what was coming, the way you did, the way you know it every single time you twist that knife in your own sullied flesh. You call your attitude "world-weariness" or (God help us) the "wisdom of age" when what you're really talking about is the result of willfully making the same damn mistakes over and over. This, to you, is what it means to grow up: Melancholy punctuated by the occasional tragedy. If it must all be self-inflicted, that is the price you willingly pay just to avoid being seen (by yourself or others) as a deluded (happy) child.

If any of the above sounds like you, please smack yourself now so I won't have to.

This rerun is not directed specifically at anyone likely to read this post; but if you happen to recognize yourself in these words, you know what to do.

Comments

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I don't know who you have in mind, but hell, I'll smack 'em for you!

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm half-tempted to take you up on that offer, but it probably wouldn't be a great idea.

[paradigm-palace.livejournal.com]

Eeek.

"Melancholy punctuated by the occasional tragedy"

What that means to me is Depression. I don't associate that with being a "grown up". But I can relate to what that feels like. I even got a visual as I was reading it. Sometimes I might be a deluded adult :-P

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

From the outside, looking at who I'm thinking of, it doesn't seem like depression, or at least not like anything chemically-induced. It looks like a choice, a decision made by someone who would rather be unhappy than have anyone think of them as immature. What I still don't quite get is why they think unhappiness is maturity.

Sometimes when people hear that I watched my mother die when I was 14, they think that means I grew up at a young age. What it actually means is that I was a kid with a dead mother, but some people don't get that.