On the Impossibility of the Moral

I am tonight writing a post as my mother scrambles to assist me for what she hopes to be the last time in a long time. I had a falling out with a friend who had lent her couch to me while I tried yet again to put it all together. I am writing about what hurts me most about my life. That is plainly how I let people down. Or that I hurt them, dismay them, even sometimes take advantage of them. How I do not stand on my own. How I cannot seem to stand on my own. I find that to be a great moral failing. 

Sometimes I feel that if I were more highly functioning I would not have to be the object of a certain brand of pity. I remember when I felt my shit don't stink. I remember corporate jobs with healthcare. I remember being stuck up. I remember pride, upbraiding the lousy one, the fool, the freeloader, the ingrate. I remember hoarding. I remember hearing someone's too sad story and being afraid that their woes might be communicable just by the telling. Looking down on people has a certain chemical advantage in the brain I wager. Being looked down on definitely rips at the soul.

It's not easy to hear that people have had it up to here. They tell me sometimes to write down my goals. They tell me that I should have gotten my degree by now.

So I have had to cultivate some sacred zone where it is o.k. to be me. Where I am not smarting from a moral injunction. Where Moses can't get at me. It's not always been about not having morals, it's been about having too many. I didn't seek help for the longest of times because I wanted to be self-reliant. I was the first in my class by most metrics. I believe I learned all the lessons, at least the upswing ones. The one's where you are striving to score higher than the others, to look better than the others, to speak better than the others, to think big thoughts, to have subtler taste, to maneuver socially, to self-deprecate while you status-seek.  Now the down-stroke lessons; to conceal hurt in laughter, to make a case for yourself, to regret, to finesse bitterness, to grovel, to keep walking with no wind at your back, to surrender. 

I wouldn't want to end this post without what I also know. That there is a power in a pill, that is the beginning of what is possible in being a good person. And I gladly will comply.