FULL AND LESS OF HOPE

Warning: potential trigger(s) ahead

While it’s true that I’m both girl/non-girl and boy/non-boy… and that I have four, sometimes five others who usually only make themselves known to me… it’s also true that I’m often of multiple minds.

No, this isn’t schizophrenia. Geez, why does everyone always jump right to physio/psycho diagnoses, as if that were the only way to explain—or non-explain—the mysteries of individual hotchpotchery? I think I’ve written enough at this point to demonstrate that of all my nonconformity, my thoughts gyrate to their own scrolling soundtrack.

All of which is merely to say I am currently of four minds, none of which has anything to do with my gender dys-or phoria. Rather, they’re about my fluctuating sense of self/non-self, a concept my fingers just now made up as they hit the keys.

I hope that doesn’t make me of five minds. If’n I was an engineer comedian ala Don McMillan, I’d do this all up in wonderful Venn diagrams. Maybe I’ll give it a try. I mean what the hell, I have a delete key…

Here’s the deal, Sparky: one of my minds groks that I’ve created something no one else ever has. Whoopie for me (says mind #2, rolling its mental eyes). I’ve invested over half my life deconstructing, developing, and refining the myriad processes-within-processes methodology I call Ghostwriting Professional Designation Program.

Thus making it my life’s work. A something to be proud of, an accomplishment that should, and often does, nudge my psyche toward a robust sense of self. Yay GPDP. I done did something good.

But as my second mind so clearly (if silently) articulated above, so the dumbasfuck what? I mean, really. If’n I die before I wake, as the childhood poem goes, who will know or care? It’s an obscure achievement in a typically misconstrued discipline with a mass appeal to mostly no one except those fantasculous few whose brains wave on a frequency similar to mine. More than I can count on all hands and feet, fewer than would fill a college-freshman lecture hall.

Reducing the wonderous of it all to dust mites dancing in the sunlight. Non-material. Imperceptible. Not-the-least consequential.

Thereby bringing me to my third mind, the one that, damnit, slavishly believes with the firmest of baseless conviction that said stroke of genius (or “mostly persistence” as defined by Calvin Coolidge) fucking well deserves to generate significant financial return!

That’s the mind my mother labeled “vivid imagination,” and my father reduced to “Who the hell do you think you are?” It’s never taken the lead position; I can’t imagine why.

And so I arrive at Mind No. 4, overwhelmed by the maths involved in pursuing global success and always ready to lead me down the funerial path to what the fuck, I’m too tired, just forget the whole thing. Dumbasfuck. Sorry to disturb. Not worth talking about. Flumes of fantasy. Stupid to have even considered. Good day to disassociate.

If’n I truly let my fourth mind take hold, I’d blow gobs of time in therapists’ offices, igniting yet another round of fury over today’s script-constricted healthcare system—with the upside of shaking me out of my doldrums and kicking me back to square one, albeit without passing Go, without collecting $200.

My hope for this Turtle was that barfing it out would somehow magically integrate my non-Venn-inis, and show me the way to my true sensed-self path. Didn’t happen.

Maybe I need to follow my fifth mind, punt life as it is, and fall back on my old pipe dream. To paraphrase Harvey Feirstein, with this broken torso and this retentionally challenged noggin, I can always fail as a sit-down comic.

P.S. to those who know who you are: I have neither date nor intention. Please don’t fret.