Re-imaging myself

Still depressed.

I suprised myself by talking to my dad about it for awhile last night. I don’t remember the whole conversation, but it wasn’t terribly encouraging. He sees me as belatedly undergoing an emotional transition that most people go through a few years earlier. He compared my feelings to those of the 20-year-old who got a girl pregnant, married her, dropped out of school, and now is watching all his friends go off to college. I think he’s right: that’s a good description of how I feel.

All my life I’ve been trying to reshape my surroundings to make them like the life I wish I’d had. Like when I made fancy breakfasts for my dad and me after my mom moved out. Or when I went into youth ministry in order to create a youth group like the dynamic, loving ones I’d seen at other churches. A hopeless attempt to conjure up the circle of close, spiritual friends I never had.

Likewise, when I got married I was trying to recreate the type of family I had come to consider the ideal, as a child. There were these familes I knew – large families, lots of kids. The parents were laid-back, easygoing. They lived in big old farmhouses in the country with dogs and cats and snakes and maybe other animals. The kids were largely home-schooled and bright and all got along pretty well, and at any given time there’d be a few guests spending the night so you never quite knew how many people really lived there. Tough times would come and go, but they’d weather them with grace as a family.

That’s the vision I had, and still have. A benign patriarch, presiding over a big family in a warm hospitable home. But just because you have a vision doesn’t mean you’re equipped to realize it. And those dreams weren’t visions so much as longing for the family I never had.

My dad had similar dreams when he set out to start a family. He bought a place in the country, and was going to raise me on a farm. But he simply wasn’t cut out for it. He’s a late-riser, disorganized, and has a hard time finishing what he starts. There are things he’s good at, but that lifestyle wasn’t one of them. So I grew up in a ramshackle house among half-built projects and unrealized dreams. You can spend your whole life trying to make something a reality and still fail, if it’s not in your nature.

There’s another archetypal household I’ve become familiar with as I’ve grown older. It’s the abode of the perpetual teenager. He’s smart, sophisticated, in his late twenties or thirties, or even forties. It’s a small place, stylishly furnished and kept very neat. If he has any companion at all it’s a cat. He dates a lot but can never seem to find the right girl to settle down with. He’s fun to hang out with, up for anything, interesting to talk to. But he’s kind of uptight, and he’s not very good with kids.

I see a lot of potential in myself to become that latter personality. Much more than I see any potential for the former. I’m so very uptight. I’m a neat-freak. I’m wierd about kids. I want my space, my freedom, and my financial security.

I don’t want to become that person. Neither in actuality, nor a frustrated version of him, grudgingly bound to a family. But I’m beginning to doubt that I am suited to the role of the happy patriarch, either. Which means I have to re-envision myself, come up with a new self-image defining who I am, who I want to be, and what drives me. And where my family fits into that picture.

At this point in my life I’m not able to define myself in terms of my family. I can’t make the family my grand, over-arching life-project. I could try, but I’d fail. It’s just not in me to define myself that way.

I don’t want to define myself in terms of my work, or my music collection, or my diverse knowledge.

I have faint glimmerings of who I want to be, but I don’t really have the words for it as yet.

My dad’s right – this is an existential depression. Who am I? I have to come up with a ralistic answer to that question.

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9 Comments

  1. not sure what to say to you on this, i go thru this prolly once every 3 years or so and have since i was 14. in my mind, i have never visioned what i wanted to be other than to just be a good person and strive all that i can to be happy. everything has choices, and goals, and what not. but what they don’t tell you is that at some point you have to learn what you need to do and sacrifice to reach where you want to be. *hugs. see you sunday. i might get a 45-hour dj slot there too.

  2. For some reason, and maybe it’s the Av in your name….I’ve always seen you in a very fatherly way. But more so, the father who sits in his study smoking his pipe and drinking his bourbon. Surrounded by walls of books. The kids come in the evening to sit by your chair and be read a story. Then shuffled off to bed.

    (um…no…just for clarifications you did not have a cherry red nose or a long white beard nor a pillow gutt)

    1. Yeah… the whole british lord schtick. I can see that.

      1. LOL

        I bet you’ll love being a grandfather…

        😉

  3. In sociology my teacher defined depression as asking “Who am I?” I know exactly what you mean about the big, farmhouse families. Describes most of the families I grew up with as well. We were definetly the odd ones out in terms of size. I really want to have a big, happy, loving family. I feel fairly equipped to do that actually, unless I turn into either of my parents, which hopefully I won’t. I think I’ve landed enough between either of their personalities.
    Trying to create a new dream is an interesting and difficult propisition.I hope you come up with something beautiful.

  4. Interesting..

    First things first…

    Good luck. Good luck. Good luck… Creating yourself/discovering yourself/reimagining yourself–all are very difficult-yet different-activities… But they are very rewarding in the long term…

    My second thing to say is.. interesting.. your visions are so different than mine… I’ve never wanted to be either a benign patriarch or a sophisticated bachelor… in fact… now that I think about it.. I don’t think I ever had such a distinct vision of my life at all.. I knew that I wanted to be independent.. yet that I did want to have a family… and that I am fairly decent at being a teacher… but beyond that.. nothing was specified.. and I have generally held those three themes as structuring elements and allowed everything else in my life to snap into place along the way.. (and to break off if it didn’t turn out to work in the long term..).. also.. lots of stuff i’ve left undetermined… to be “filled” in whatever way it turns out to be.. (as long as it doesn’t conflict with the three functional themes…)

    Personally, I find it quite hard to come up with a coherent vision now in its entirety.. or rather.. if a vision is fairly specific.. then there is the danger over time that either you will never find a perfect fit to the vision.. or you will try to fit something in–that eventually shows discrepancies to the ideal vision and thus depresses you again.. (this is all generalized you.. not you, Avdi…)

    Of course.. this is just how my brain works.. it might be way different for you… and it is not like I don’t understand the concepts of “vision”… In my dissertation work, I have been thrashing around for the better part of 1.5 years.. trying to understand what I want to research, what the actual problems are, and how I am going to address these problems… In this process–I have found it fascinating how differently other people approach it.. (I’m in a dissertator group with 4 other grad students in my department).. and 2-3 of these students sort of wing it on the fly–they have an idea.. write a bit.. which generates issues–which they then go research–and then they write more.. wash rinse repeat…

    I just cannot do this.. I need to know the entire structure.. the theory..know my basic story have the vision of what I am going to do.. before I really get down to cranking this thing out… (of course.. research can change/alter/influence the details and even major points of this vision.. but I try to get enough of an idea beforehand that this doesn’t happen to too great an extent…)

    However.. one thing that is also me.. is that I have almost never ever applied “visions” to any situation that would involve other people.. perhaps I’m just not romantic enough.. but I have never believed that mixing idealistic notions with the nitty-gritty practices of relationships with concrete humans would end up good…

    but that’s just me again.. and now.. I’ll shut up…

    1. The Vision Thing

      Yeah, I know, this is an old-ass comment to be responding to.

      It occurs to me, re: having a distinct vision, that the need and/or capacity for it may be a function of personality type. Seems to me I’ve read that some of the Myers-Briggs types need a vision, and I think I might be one of those types (INTJ/INFJ).

      I agree that trying to cram other people into your own vision is a recipe for disaster. That’s why it’s probably more accurate to call it a self-image or something like that… it’s vision of myself and my relationship to others, rather than of how they fit into my life.

    2. The Vision Thing

      Yeah, I know, this is an old-ass comment to be responding to.

      It occurs to me, re: having a distinct vision, that the need and/or capacity for it may be a function of personality type. Seems to me I’ve read that some of the Myers-Briggs types need a vision, and I think I might be one of those types (INTJ/INFJ).

      I agree that trying to cram other people into your own vision is a recipe for disaster. That’s why it’s probably more accurate to call it a self-image or something like that… it’s vision of myself and my relationship to others, rather than of how they fit into my life.

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