What I Deserve

The Laptop
So, around my birthday, my bosses gave me a bonus/b-day present: A laptop. It's my first. I had been sort of shopping around for one, but wasn't sure I even wanted one, and when I was in a mood where I thought I was pretty sure, the abundance of choices kept sort of overwhelming me. I'm that way with any large purchases (erm, if I ever make large purchases at all, which I'm not certain I do any longer); I tend to decide to not buy shit by indecision. Which is, y'know, maybe not all a bad thing.

But then again, I sort of wonder if it is a reflection of something that's not the healthiest of mental attitudes. I think, in a way, I have carried my lower-middle class background with me maybe further than I really might have wanted, had I thought it through; and even sort of amplified it—that is, I oftentimes see myself and create myself as less-well-off than I used to be, back when I was growing up.

And this isn't, of course, just about the laptop. It's about my lack of desire, once I have a bit of a buffer, to buy any 'big'-ish items, and to some degree to by anything that I think of as potentially part of a permanent environment. I haven't yet bought a couch, or chairs. I tend to think in terms of things I could move by myself if I needed to if I furniture shop. I have a hard time not thinking that way. Part of it is habit, I know—this is just the way I have lived, so this is the way I will continue to live unless I make some explicit changes. Part of it is a more pervasive fear that I won't have enough money to survive someday...and this isn't a completely irrational fear. I haven't placed financial security on a very high level of priority in my life.

Deserving
I haven't used my laptop as much I thought I might have. I had an intuition that I wasn't really sure how often I'd use it—that's one of the reasons that I had been putting off buying it, I think. But then, once I had it, I found that I was barely using it at all. I used it to do stuff with my game, because I wanted to bring the laptop to the game and organize it that way. I did a little bit of writing at a cafe. But I didn't do a lot, and I didn't get into all of the new features of the damn thing—I made sure I knew how to turn the wireless on and off, how to check the battery, and that was about it. I made a small effort to put my music on it, but when I did that wrong, I just didn't bother any longer.

And I found myself deciding to not bring it with me when I was heading out to places where it might have been useful and/or fun to have. Part of this was not having a proper backpack to carry it in (I told myself—my current one actually works pretty well). But all of that stuff was just an excuse, I realized this morning. I think the central reason behind why I wasn't getting into it was sort of deeper: I didn't feel like I deserved it.

And, of course, in all sorts of ways, I don't. I was just doing my job (the bonus) and I just made it to year 36 (the birthday). Big freakin' deal.

But then, part of the problem with thinking this way is the notion of merit anyway. To a great degree, I have just been lucky in life. I'm lucky to be alive, really (preemie with a heart condition); I'm lucky to have had a great mom as I was growning up—as well as now that I'm an adult. Luck, luck, luck. Of course, we do make some of our own luck and all that—but the concept of merit is just so not-simple to me anymore, and I think that, not only have I stopped thinking that I 'deserve' various things, I also think that I've stopped thinking in terms of merit in general; which is a problem, really, because it tends to curb the amount of time and effort I spend figuring out what I want. And I tend to think that having some wants that are as-of-yet unfulfilled is one of the things around which happiness can live.

This is definitely throwing out the baby with the bathwater stuff, and I think I have to get a hold of it.

Yet Another Blind Spot
I didn't realize any of this consciously until this morning, when I was working out what I was going to do today—and I found myself actually thinking about not going down to the cafe I like because I didn't want to bring the laptop; which is really, really backward logic. I can bring it or not. But I know that it would help—I can write, I can type notes, I can work on my game, which are all things that I want to do this morning. So, somehow, if I'm not in the mood to bring the laptop, I'm somehow not in the mood to go out? Freakin' weird logic that I think is caused in part by my deep seeded views about what I deserve in life, what I have earned.

Some of this crap is simple white middle-class guilt, which is pretty lame, I know, but yet there it is, deeply ingrained in me. But a good deal of it isn't that, I think; a good deal of it comes from making judgments about myself of other sorts. For instance, I think that I am often too hard on myself regarding 'what I get done' in my life, where I'm at and the like. It's easy to forget the conscous choices that I have made regarding being the sort of person who has time and energy to do some thinking, to do some writing; the sort of person who examines and reexamines (again and again) his values. I could go on. There are all sorts of things that I like about myself, all sorts of decisions (some of them difficult to follow through on) that I've made that I feel proud of. But sometimes, sometimes I feel like I was only able to work that hard, only able to make those decisions, because I was just completely fucking lucky.

I recognize, intellectually, the problem with thinking this way; I see the fallacies involved. The main one, of course, is that causes are tricky things, and almost always we ought to talk about a bunch of correlative causes when we want to talk about a cause, or a series of causes. Causes are more like a web, and some of them might carry more weight, conceptually, than others, depending upon the context.

I know this. And yet, it's hard to incorporate it more deeply into my emotional life.

Appreciating What I Have
Another negative side effect of the way I've been thinking about what I deserve, I think, is that I may tend to not appreciate the things I have. Even if everything came to me from luck (it didn't), that shouldn't mean that I don't enjoy and appreciate what I have. That is, just because I have food on my table when others don't, doesn't mean that I ought not enjoy my food (or even, that I ought not eat unless everybody has food).

And this lack of appreciation actually helps fuel the feeling that I don't deserve stuff, really, because in some cases, not appreciating what I have means that I don't use it to the extent that others, who deserve it more (in my eyes), might use it. (And here I see another problem with my 'logic'--if I don't deserve anything because of an accident of birth, then nobody does; and that means not just the 'haves', but also the 'have nots'. You can't have a universe where it's all luck if it's not all luck for everybody, right?) For instance, I know there are people who write more, people who have it as a central goal, that they become writers, who don't have access to any sort of word processor—or at least don't have the easy access that I do. And the guilt I feel around not using my 'stuff' so much (whether it be smarts or a laptop)? Keeps me from using it, in turn.

To Do List
So what do I do? Well, I think I need to do a combination of recognizing the good things I do in my life, the hard work that I do, and of actually doing more along the lines of happy-making work. More writing on the things that interest me (feminism, race theory, gender theory); more taking care of my mental and physical health. A one-two punch of appreciation and allowing myself to be better motivated.

Sigh. I'm not sure why this feels so weighty, but I think it is. Maybe more later.


Filed under:
Therapy