Have you ever had to break yourself down to the barest components, examine them one by one, and then put yourself back together from the ground up?
I have. I believe firmly that all people go through some version of this process at one point or another during one's course of life. For some, the process might be as simple as looking in the mirror and taking a moment to reaffirm one's commitment to core values or beliefs. For others though, the process may look like a breakdown, or an odyssey, or an anguished night spent tossing and turning, mind racing and limbs trembling at the possibilities that seem stunningly vivid in the small hours of the morning.
For me, the process took several anguished nights. I won't go into detail about what led to my dismantling, but long story short: I made an awful mistake, changed someone's life forever, and hurt many people close to me in the process. The first question I made myself answer was a simple binary.
"Yes or No? Am I a monster?"
While this question may seem overblown or over dramatic, I realized that I earnestly needed to be honest with myself. If the answer was yes, I am a monster, then all of my issues were solved with horrible finality. If I was to my core a monstrous person, then there was no reason for me to even attempt to dig myself out of the pit. Monsters are the antithesis of the dream of humanity; they occupy (like Vico's Giants) the perpetual now, and are not governed by any fear of regression or dream of improvement. They merely exist, intent only upon satisfying selfish needs with reckless abandon, without giving a second thought to the damage they inflict to those around them. If I was merely a monster, masquerading as a man who had feelings, and dreams, and fears, and a sense of the continuity of life, then it was better for me to stop denying my true form and merely live, unhappily but unfettered, as one who has no place in time. This, obviously, was the way out.
I answered No, and to this day I am glad that I forced myself to have that internal conversation. Once I had overcome this question, the rest of the process seemed to fall into place, and I was able to look at my life from the perspective of a one who wants desperately to improve, rather than one crippled by self doubt and given over to a steady decline into vice, which was a state of affairs that seemed plausible (as ridiculous as it seems for a twenty year old college student to consider, I certainly thought about the possibilities). Looking at matters of the heart, of one's core personality, within a stringent "right or wrong" parameter is dangerous; it presupposes that life will always present us with clean, black-and-white questions that we answer with formulas or facts, rather than with feelings or urges or impatience. Life choices are (and will remain) messy, and that is an absolute fact as far as I'm concerned. Narrowing situations down to simple binaries, therefore, is a particularly fallible way of making decisions, I think. Under certain situations though, situations similar to the one I described above, I think it works as well as anything else.
Honestly? I'm not really sure why I wrote this. Sometimes it's just good to take a second, look back, and reflect on the twisted roads that lead us to the places we need to be, for better or for worse.
