Kierkegaard, Depression, Relationships, Ego

An Exploration of Self (or Non-Self)

*Please consider subscribing, going paid, and recommending. Thank you for reading!

Kierkegaard, as described in Becker’s The Denial of Death, writes of the “immediate” men, the “culturally normal” men, the “philistines.” And the “Inauthentic Men.” In other words: Weak, repressed men who deny their own intrinsic death, inner world, and who shallowly rely on all the externals for self-worth. Stupid, yawningly average, mediocre men.

And then there’s the “introvert,” a term used by Kierkegaard—a young, early-mid 19^th century, inheritance-having, wealthy, independent man with no drive for women, born 43 years before Freud—describing a sort of half-half man, which might be sort of where I land, if I’m fully honest with myself. Meaning: Part self-aware, part authentic, but never with quite enough balls to transcend the fearful ego and be An Individual Apart from the Crowd.

But, no. That isn’t true. Because, though I do want people to like me—a frustrating and dumb desire—the ultimate deeper truth is that I am wholeheartedly and totally Michael Mohr. Do I care what other people think of me? 100%. Will I allow that to dictate what I do, how I act or who I am? No. Well, maybe superficially to a degree. But not fundamentally. Don’t get me wrong: I’m deeply, woefully self-conscious and insecure, and I’m to some degree a people-pleaser. And yet: I set boundaries despite this. And I think independently. And I live my life the way I want to, mostly at least, despite what anyone else around me thinks, regardless of the fear, shame and guilt which I regularly feel, as if I were Catholic.

In other words: I am a man, according to our young Danish philosopher from so long ago. A person who has the intrinsic nature of self-courage, who thinks on his own and acts on his own and does things his way. Again, to a degree. Of course I grasp the notion—profoundly imperative—of community and adulthood. We don’t “do it alone,” as they say in A.A. We all need help. We all belong to a greater social fabric and connective network. Nothing exists in a vacuum; there are no total ciphers. I here think of Jung’s collective unconscious. Intuition. That deep inner knowing.

Britney and I have been fighting. I am an asshole. Or am I? Certainly I’m depressed. Two days ago I had one of the most awful days of my life, I think, or at least certainly up there in the Top Ten of Shittiest Days Ever. Problem is I was having this terrible, toxic day when Britney was returning from her four-day excursion with Amy and Katy—her old, good friends—for her “Bachelorette Fiesta” trip in Texas and Oklahoma. Lakeside house. Massages. Yoga. Drinking. Etc.

So she came back happy and I was dying inside. I picked her up at SB Airport around 10pm or a little before that. We’d decided she’d spend the night with me at Mom’s house. Mom was in the hospital overnight after her second revision knee surgery. I wanted to see B, of course, but I also had that little voice in the back of my mind saying, Dude. You’re angry, sad and depressed. Bad timing. And of course, yes, it was bad timing. I let it all out and she of course didn’t get it and everything was nasty and sludgy and bad. We talked a little but it was like drilling through concrete. Next morning I drove her early to work in Los Olivos. We barely talked on the 45 minute drive a la 154.

Tough stuff, Kid. I don’t know what the answers are, answer is, solution might be. We talked last night on the phone casually about ending our relationship. Of course it’s not actually casual; we do this as a protective screen, self-protection. I told her on the phone last night: We have different communication styles. And we compete about everything. And neither of us can fully let our guard down. I feel like when I’m vulnerable and honest with her sometimes I get sucker-punched. We both feel unseen and unheard. Old childhood wounds. Old shit.

My way of communication, I think—at least the direction—is a genuine attempt to understand her POV and to attempt to solve the problem. An attempt at finding some sort of resolution. On the flip side, her method seems to be immediate reaction, defense mechanisms, sarcasm, competition. Look: EYE compete, too, but I feel like I compete because she sets up a competitive cycle. If she were open and vulnerable and soft I think I’d mimic that. She’s more often like an emotional wrestler.

Then again: perhaps I’m totally full of shit. Perhaps I’m a hypocrite. Perhaps it’s actually ME that’s creating this cycle. Perhaps it’s both of us. Probably it’s the latter.

She did admit that underneath it all she’s scared, and she feels afraid of not being loved, that she isn’t good enough, that she won’t be able to make me happy.

And that is a real, solid admission. I honor her for that. It’s a true statement; not true as far as content, but true as far as being honest. That one feels real and I can relate to it. Yes. I am scared, too. Scared that she can’t see me, can’t hear me, doesn’t see what I need, can’t love me in the way I worry I need to be loved. Scared that I’m not good enough for her, that she deserves someone better, that I’m too much for her or for anyone, too intense, too needy, too broken, too emotional, too selfish, too weak.

In truth, though, I think we’re perfect for each other. I think we’re both just afraid. I think we both compete and get tangled up in our egos and precious defense mechanisms. Despite all my supposed self-awareness, I think I can’t quite see how I’m creating my own road-blocks. Britney clearly loves me, but the question is: Can I accept her love?

Now, some of this also of course makes me think: Is this just my own old selfish/insecure childhood bullshit? Little Michael kicking and screaming because “Mom” isn’t acknowledging me in the one specific way I want to be acknowledged? That’s a tough, tough lesson in life, isn’t it? That we often want a few very specific things from certain people in our lives—ideally and most often our parents—and that most of the time we will not get those things. Ever. At all. Now that is painful. But it’s life. It’s one of those myriad things one must unfortunately “accept.” One must say, Well, I don’t like it, but this is the way things are.

This is what I like about the book, The Denial of Death. Ultimately the thing we all mostly or entirely reject is the fact that we die. Every single one of us. In fact, especially in the West if you’re too direct and vulnerable and open about discussing death (particularly your own) people will laugh. They laugh out of a deep sense of dread, terror and fear, though they probably don’t know that themselves. They laugh because it’s such a serious, intense reality; so serious and intense, in fact, that they simply cannot face it at all. Thus enters the constant busyness, work, the sex and online dating, the social media, the news, the traveling, the drinking and drugs, etc etc etc. Whatever you can do to constantly distract yourself from What Life Is (which is a slow or fast or sudden crashing into the wall that is Death).

How painful to grasp that life is temporary, that Death patiently awaits us all, that nothing really matters in the end because you can’t take any of it with you. In The Denial of Death Becker writes (again harkening back to Kierkegaard) about the finite/infinite concept. We each of us have a finite physical body coupled—absurdly—with an infinite (one might say eternal) “symbolic self.” This means your inner psychological conception of yourself. Whatever “you” is. If you’re a Buddhist (or an Existentialist, read Camus or Sartre) you don’t believe there even IS a “self.” Self is an ego-construction created whole-cloth out of a societal need to join and be a part of something bigger than yourself. It’s a sort of strange merger of Individuality with Community. The idea is that there’s some inner “You” pulling the levers somewhere in your head, within your brain, a sort of Wizard of Oz behind the wall of consciousness.

The problem with the finite (limitations) versus the infinite (possibility) is that it creates an interior dualism which must consistently compete. Unless one veers so far off the trail that they arrive at psychopathy, a la serious personality disorders like Schizophrenia. That’s another thing altogether. But generally one is either totally tied to the limited (the physical), or else completely existing within the inner symbolic self, full of possibility. But many also live in-between these two, in the area known as “introversion.” This is a sort of half-half gray area wherein one is possessed of some possibility and self-awareness and some limitations, but in the end they fail as a fully formed man/human being (at least in Kierkegaard’s eyes).

Then there’s the whole depression angle, someone who’s ultimately weak because they fall back into the foundation of limitation too fully and completely. The schizophrenic veers too far into the land of possibility, embracing his inner symbolic self a la the mind and denying completely his physical limitations and physical death. (Sounds kind of nice, actually, if one could fully exist in this delusional state?) But the depressive, K claims, rushes the opposite direction: He falls too heavily into the limitations angle, thinking that he is completely limited, that life is pointless because we die, that nothing matters or has inherent meaning because it’s all buttressed by the physical realism of sickness, old age, death and decay. (So in this sense the depressive might possibly be called a realist of sorts, if one were to track towards cynicism.)

All of this leads us back to an assertion I made recently on Substack: All men—all people—are ultimately driven by their conscious and unconscious emotional desires and cravings and needs. A “real man” therefore is not the typical American Man, emotion-denying, sports-watching, clinically blasé person. No, because everything that individual (or non-individual, more often than not) does is driven, in the end, by their repressed unconscious drives. The courageous man, therefore, is not the man who denies, represses, rejects, shoves aside, but rather the man who leans into fear and faces his emotions head on, who looks into not away from The Abyss. Most average middleclass men are the classic Non-Lookers, the classic Immediate Men, the classic Inauthentic Men, and the cliché philistines.

I don’t know what will happen with Britney and me. I love her. I know that. I see a future with her. I see growing old with her. Etc. But in some ways she doesn’t understand me. Then again: Will anyone ever really fully ‘understand’ me? Probably not. Am I demanding too much from her? Am I too narcissistic and self-absorbed? Am I meant to simply be alone all my life, just sleeping with random women along the way? Am I more like my sister and my mom and my uncle than I want to admit? Am I becoming the thing I hate?

I don’t know. I don’t have any answers. I am on Day 4 of being back on 40mg of Prozac. (I should probably stop playing Self Psychiatrist with my meds.) So at least there’s that. The OCD was getting bad again. That didn’t help. Being in Lompoc is hard for me sometimes. I feel like all I’ve done since spring 2020 is WAIT. Wait for Covid to go away. Wait for my father to die. Now it’s waiting for us to leave (or flee) Lompoc. I’m sick of waiting. I want to GO. Movement, baby.

Yet we’re getting married in 5 weeks, and going to Morrocco in same. A month and one week. Very soon. Everything is happening. The train is moving. Then South America on November 25. It’s tough, man. Britney doesn’t want me to travel without her. How am I supposed to deal with that? I want to travel. She does, too. We’re both passionate about traveling. Yet we have different realities a la money and work. How does one solve this riddle?

Then there’s the depression, which is a whole other thing. And our moods. Our competitiveness. Etc. The depression is tough because she doesn’t understand it at all. Therefore she takes it personally and struggles with full empathy for me and trying to understand what it might be like to be depressed. So then I feel sorry for myself, feel resentful, feel victimized. I am not a victim; I know that. I’m just stating how I feel. I know that feelings aren’t real, tangible realities but simply ethereal, shifting cognitive phantasms. But still. It’s hard. Feelings are often not reliable. The whole Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) angle: Don’t buy into your thoughts; they’re unreliable, hollow, and are temporary.

Then again, thoughts and feelings can, other times, be signs to pay attention to. If you have persistent thoughts and feelings about something, it might be worth paying attention to. At least just to establish what the thought/feeling might be trying to tell you.

I don’t know anything. I want an interesting life. I’ve often had one. But sometimes, for most of us, the day-to-day bullshit routine is boring. Slow, dull, average, dumb. It’s hard when I hear of people traveling all over the world, to Africa and Asia etc. There I am, sitting in Lompoc. But that’s just where I am right now. Right now. By fall of 2024—next fall, in one year, 12 months—we’ll be gone. Chicago. I’ve already been in Lompoc since January, 8 months. So it’ll be 1.8 years there by the time we leave, only 7 months less than I lived in NYC for.

It’s just weird, man. But I guess that’s life. Weirdness. I never thought I’d actually live in NYC. I never thought I’d own a house. I never thought I’d have a cat. I never thought I’d take Prozac or any meds for my OCD. I never thought I’d get married. Or that my father would die when I was 40 and he only 77. Or that G would try to kill herself via car. Etc etc etc.

There are so many things I never thought I’d do or say or think or see. I never thought I’d walk 450 miles across northern Spain. And on and on. So I guess the lesson here is: Shit happens that we don’t expect. We keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, doing what we know how to do. Until the next thing happens. That’s life. That’s how it goes. We can’t anticipate the future, the next day let alone the next week or month or year. We do the best we can. We take the actions and let go of the results.

We push through the confusing, angering, glorious jungle that is this life. We chop away with our metaphorical machetes through the thickest cosmic jungles that are present, the spiritual tangles and vines and thick trees and brush in our way. Day by day we plow through, hoping to come to some greater understanding of self, of other, of love, of purpose. This is not an easy thing to maneuver. Life is tricky and transient and tortured and torpid. And yet it’s also a beautiful, sacrosanct symbol of energy, biology alive in the universe. The elements combined. Evolution. Time. Change. Movement.

I am lucky, man. Very lucky. I have a mind. A brain. Eyes to see. A heart to be open with. Love to give. If I can only let go of the way I think things “should” be. If only I could see the next horizon and move towards that. If only I could grasp what others are always trying to give me. Instead of constantly fighting that Which Is. Because I think the truth is, the reality is that I have everything I need right here and now. Within me.