Auto-didacticism

A drawback of losing a parent when you’re young is that there’s nobody to teach you the ways of the world. Sure, mom can try, but she needs to recover from her injuries and grieve her loss. Also, she doesn’t really like you very much—on a personal level.

My adolescence was very tumultuous, and I was ready for things to be easy. I had worked very hard to make lots of money for people I mostly didn’t know.

Now it was my time to bask.

However, instead, I had a stroke (a few, as it were) and find myself alone again. I hope to recover and keep riding, but I thought it would be different.

When this all began—when the pandemic began—and my fiancée and I came to Texas, my goal was to make amends with my mother, and to have a “normal” life, wherein my mom meets my fiancée and vice versa, and we proceed to have our life together (me and my fiancée), married and happy.

Instead, here I go again on my own.

I do not think I will feel close to my mother anymore. I do not have a girlfriend, and frankly I did not need her to talk so much about loving me. Talk, it seems, is cheap.

I think it was Martin Luther King Jr. who said (something like) 2 things are certain: everyone needs to have faith on his own, and everyone needs to die alone. The implication being that you can only change so much and that the truly deep questions are individual.

This has always seemed accurate to me inasmuch as there’s always stuff we cannot affect and may not like.  I always felt like my mother had my back, but now I see that it’s all me. When I was younger, I felt like she was looking out for me [to the best of her abilities], but now it’s very clear to me I’m on my own.

Moreover, I used to feel like my mother is pretty smart, but I have similarly been disabused of that, too. And so I originally believed the goal was to leave this experience with new humility for everyone who helped. Instead, I see:  

-mothers can be quite limited in the care they offer, too.

-we have a LOT to do, civilization depends on us.

When I regained consciousness after my stroke and surgery, I knew there was a lot to do. But even when I was barely verbal, people wanted me to think and to decide. There’s not really downtime. So long as we’re alive, we will be busy. Anything you _want_ to do must fit in amid all the other stuff.

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