Living in a fantasy world

My brother once told me he was a sex addict. I thought he was talking about compulsively having sex with loads of women, but he was really talking about being a porn addict. I'm not surprised that one of us ended up developing that habit. The more I look at my prototypical adults, my parents, the more I see the template of my inward orientation. Watching your parents either pull on head phones to read a book about Patton or sit and do cross stitch all night doesn't exactly set the stage for me to pour out my feelings at the first opportunity. A porn addiction is about as inward as it gets. You sit alone and satisfy yourself with fantasy images. There's no complexity or depth to the experience. It's stunting rather than expanding. 

Something like a porn addiction shrinks your world. You get so fixated on what's in you, you don't get a chance to really interact with the world. That's the inward orientation. The world gets filtered through whatever need you're trying to satisfy with your fantasy world. My brother turned to sexual images on the internet. I turned to the promise of jobs in Boston or the potential of pursing a law degree. My dad dreamed of being a powerful military leader. 

These were just fantasies. Fantasies are distractions. I can't rewind my life to see what would have happened if I hadn't spent pretty much one year applying to law school. Sure my employer was going through a bit of a transition at the time, but that was really just an excuse. Law school was something that I could pursue without having to worry about how things would actually turn out. There was little risk, but there was plenty of reward for somebody who puts a great deal of stock in what strangers think of him. It felt really good to get accepted into all those schools, but who knows what I would have done if I had been focused on something that would actually improve my life. I could have done something to improve my career prospects. I could have gotten a paper published with a comparable level of effort. I could have started digging into all the crap that I've been plowing through for the last couple of weeks. I could have worked out harder, read more books, or done something that would have had some kind of measurable benefit on to my life. Instead, I spent tons of energy on something that wasn't going to really going to change anything. 

But the fact that I spent so much energy on that project must say something about me. What drove me to spend all that effort for a few emails offering me a spot in their law school class? I wanted validation that I was better than all those other people who also applied. I wanted to win at something. I wanted a little badge that noted that I was able to do something that others couldn't accomplish. Maybe it was comparable to training for a marathon or an Ironman, to distinguish myself from those who were unable. That's overly generous. I just wanted something of little consequence to strive for. I didn't want to do the work to make my life better, but I wanted to do something that made me think I was doing something constructive. 

My Boston saga (I'm really going to need to add some links to this post) is another good illustration of how I've shuffled energy into something that doesn't really matter. I liked the idea of something different, a fresh start, because it saved me the trouble of confronting the real issues that I was facing. Rather than finding a way to improve my situation, I took comfort in finding the possibility of a way out, a route that I never would have taken. I can dig deep into my history to find where I used the allure of an unreal fantasy to help me deal with the struggles of my life. The alternative world of a video game was preferable to actually confronting high school or college life. I could have been out trying to experience something that college life had to offer, but instead I retreated to the comfort of Tetris. Predictable, safe, and risk free is always better than risking your ego to the whims of other people's fancy when you're entire orientation is inward.

Going out is too risky when all you do is look in. Every interaction with the outside is a challenge to who you are. I wanted the world to tell me that the image that I had of myself was real rather than interacting with other people and trying different things to find out who I really was. I avoided what was around me in order to make sure I didn't find out who I really was. I had to stay the same so the people who mattered in my life would keep loving me. They made me who I was to serve their needs. Becoming who I was meant to be would put an end to their fantasy.