I find myself wondering…is the coronavirus going to shine a light on people's character flaws?
Wait, let me start like this—do you ever thing about your character flaws? My friend the social worker talks often about 'awareness' being half the battle. It's not easy to change if you don't know where you're starting from.
I'm thinking awareness is not an easy thing. Or a common thing. I don't know about you, but when my flaws present themselves to the gleaming light of awareness, my response is to ignore them. Compartmentalize them. Hide them with a handy distraction. I'll just concede that I am terrible with criticism. (Well, the problem is a deeply ingrained belief in the Fallacy of Being Right.)
Intellectually, I am capable of embracing my awareness. Emotionally, I'm a baby. The real problem is that when it comes to maturity, I've had a failure to thrive. I've been stuck, at a very young age, between two and nine, my whole life. That's a long time.
My mom likes to tell a story about my birthday. She said when I was born and the doctor showed me to her, I had a look on my face. That made it clear I was not happy with this birth thing, I was perfectly comfortable where I was, why can't we just slip me back in and leave it at that. Serious! She must have told me that story a thousand times.
Life as a baby. Does it get any better than that? Who wouldn't want to be in that state, constant attention, every need supplied in a mostly timely fashion? I mean, who wouldn't want to be King Baby?
Every heard that term before? It's often referred to as a syndrome. It's used by a certain segment of the 12-step approach. Here's a few words on King Baby by in Psychology Today article by Andrea Mathews LPC, NCC. 2011:
"Big Babies require that you be there for them at all times when they need you, but they want you to go away when responsibility comes into the picture in any way. They are quite often very bad with money. And not so good with work ethic either. They tend to insist that you drop everything and come running whenever anything that requires their adult attention comes up. They need for you to attend to this thing to which they refuse to attend. And if you don't, they may break all the way down and throw a two-year-old temper tantrum."
Like lookin' in a mirror.
For real! They should put my picture next to any reference to Kind Baby.
Mathews' words address what I'm talking about right now: flaws. In people. And our awareness of them.
With the concept of King Baby, I have a method to bundle my flaws. Oh, there's a juicy twenty-first century jingoism for ya. Bundle. I can take a substantial subset of my flaws and bundle them under King Baby. With the expectation that addressing the bundle will be as effective as addressing flaws individually, making the whole process much more efficient. I'm running out of time. I got to clear the character flaws, like, yesterday.
And, if I am understanding my subconscious correctly, it's time for billy to quit phuckin' around. Yeah, yeah, I could put the whole thing through unkillbilly's Overly Complex Turbo Charged Process Decomposition Analysis. Get to the roots of things. Get therapy, get recovery, get a real life!
Or.
I could just lop off the bundle. Take care of King Baby by tossing it out with the bathwater. Rip the muthuphucku right off my body of flaws. Just start. Right now.
Oh, the temptation to analyze. Only problem is…
I ain't got time to analyze. And I'm beginning to think the starting point is no longer under my control, anyway. This pandemic thing pretty much puts the writing on the wall. It's like I've said, for years now, that the collapse of civilization is already under way, that it defies our attempt to comprehend it by moving in ultra-slow motion. It's going so slow, we can't see it. Only now, we have this little accelerator, a virus, to make the world…different. If ever there was an inflection point, this is it. If ever there was a time to address and disposition you character flaws, now is the time to do it. You got, what, a week? Maybe two? Then the collapse will really accelerate, and there won't be time. Everyone will be dying, our darling system of value, money, will die an excruciating death and the men will be separated from the proverbial boys.
And King Baby.
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