Imagine to Remember

My deepest desire, my bottomless need has always been for goodness. To be good; in my own childish conception there was no middle ground, no greyness that would make room for real humanity. Not being good necessarily meant being bad, wicked, cast out of heaven, into an endless wandering. And I did not aspire to normal human good but saintliness, to be beyond all approach, angelic and without sin. Unbeknownst to me I accepted a mission I was destined to fail. This was no spiritual awakening, it was not even real religious fervour. Underneath this fear and desire was something entirely, the creeping suspicion, the shiver of knowing that I was bad. I have some understanding of how I came to be what I am, the origins of this neurosis, the endless spiral of obsession, compulsion, anxiety, depression. There are the obvious answers of my upbringing, the way religion was yielded as a weapon against me, the unlived lives of my parents, the cultural psyche and its shadows  And beyond even this conditioning I know there was and is something about me, a kind of sensitivity whether innate or learned, that made me susceptible in ways that other children were not. 

This thing, in me, about me, that made every joy sweeter and ever sorrow hollower, this thing that was once hated and is now declared an honour, bestowed upon me by the priests of popular psychology, telling me I am an empath, a healer, special in someway, divergent, better than the uncaring and unfeeling masses, that I am some exotic flower who requires particular care.This is a very seductive proposition, who amongst does not want to feel special, elect, chosen, divinely appointed? It is a kind of narcissism, a disease to which I have little immunity not unlike my self-loathing both extremes, both marked by a non-stop, day and night preoccupation with self. I have spent entirely too much time thinking about myself and the nature of my own neuroses. I have carefully by-passed the important lessons, lessons that I could learn only from my own body, soul, from the earth, from other people, and relied instead on the machinations of my mind, which provided me a false safety.