All I Have to Give

Attention all disaffected youth: heed my pitiful example

I want to look a schizoid teen in the eye and tell you how to be the best version of you; because no one ever told me who I was, or what I could become. I didn’t know I had a gift I needed to share with the world.

What does it mean to be a schizoid? You hold your own self in no special regard. You are a keen and sensitive observer of other people. You change shape for the situation. You meet the forces of reality with their imagined opposites. You send these contradictions into the world and watch an audience react. You create.

All I ever enjoyed was telling jokes and combining words in a way that sounded nothing like my peers. There is no reason you can’t orient an entire life around this ability. You need to orient it around something. You can develop confidence and aesthetic preferences, and the gift will open every type of door for you. Every day not spent honing and sharing the gift will be suffering, and you won’t understand why.

Never let anyone make you feel smart. You know how to lie and feel your way through a situation, and some people mistake that for intelligence. That’s part of the gift, but don’t get confused. Intelligence is common and of low value in the modern world; they teach that stuff to computers. You will suffer if you try to be smart, and you won’t understand why. Remember that smart people never teach anything to anyone until they get paid. You are a soul, not a body, or even a mind. You are a creator, not a bean-counter, or even a salesman.

Never let anyone make you feel stupid. You don’t need to understand everything to make a joke or share your thoughts. My dad has low self-esteem. He’s the strongest, most practical and disciplined man I know, and he still feels like shit half the time at 70. He came from a violent and emotionally repressed environment, and he created a kinder world for his kids. He saw his youngest boy reading books and figured there wasn’t much to teach him. My dad feels stupid, but I still learned a lot from him.

Never let anyone make you feel crazy. Life is going to pummel the mind. You will have regrets aplenty soon enough; don’t waste time on their evaluation. Don’t let anyone scare you into silence, but don’t become obsessed with proving an abstract spiritual or mathematic point they are too dull or disinterested to understand.

Never let anyone make you feel ashamed. The extreme sensitivity that sometimes makes life agony is not a weakness to be hidden. This is the essence of the gift. Become interested in everything that makes you uncomfortable. Tension and uncertainty exist to hone the gift. It’s material for creation—not suffering—once you understand.

You are a natural liar, so learn the value of honesty. It’s not easy for an artist to reveal his influences, but watch what happens when you appraise the comrades and mystify an audience. Your comrades work in concert, and the mystification is multiplied. The more mystified have no choice but to become your comrade. You lie to get away with telling the truth. This is the clown’s prerogative.

You may feel you don’t really have opinions or a personality, but you will. The mind takes the shape of everything it eats. This means your experiences, the people you talk to, the books you read, and the things you tell yourself. You won’t know how it all fits together for many years. You feed on slop and that’s what you become. Take every opportunity to broaden your horizon.

You need to think of the gift as something that doesn’t just belong to you. Selfish pursuits will not suffice to draw you into the world. You feel alienated by what seems to motivate other people. If you are going to have ambition it needs to be in service of something higher than your own self.

You don’t know how to plan ahead because you don’t know how to look back. Leave a trail of success and failure. Think about what worked, what didn’t, and why. Some memories are still going to hurt. Speak if there is something to say, act if there is something to do, or else let it rest. Always try to point your mind at the world, and not uselessly at yourself.

Life is going to pummel the body. I had at least two concussions as a teen. One playing football, and another getting beat up. Winning a fight is never as satisfying as you imagine, but try it out a few times for confirmation. A sensitive man can’t go around feeling he’s a saint or a victim all the time; sometimes you are the bad guy.

I played a lot of sports as a kid, but I should have been playing guitar and being a thespian too. I had fun doing almost anything as a teen and this was a big problem. It was fun to hang out and talk, and it was fun to sit alone and think. I didn’t always see the pressing need to expand my horizon. I thought I was expanding my horizon by listening to music and playing on the computer. I never knew anyone who lived for art, so it didn’t seem like a real pursuit.

Why do you need to live for art? It’s not to make money, or even really to get laid. You need to develop the ability to understand and express your own emotions in order to manage basic life tasks that come naturally to a more settled mind. You feel so intensely sometimes that you don’t know what you feel or why. Your subjective experience seems so different from other people that you don’t always see the point of letting them in. You are such a mental chameleon that you can become detached from your own emotions. You need to proactively attack these problems with art, or you will become entombed in the mind and suffer.

You need a few sympathetic ears. When something intense happens some of your thoughts and feelings will be crazy and distorted, and some will be healthy and normal. You need to talk to someone to figure out which is what. You need someone to listen and be interested in what you’re saying more than you need advice. Tell a sympathetic ear something you know is crazy and watch them say, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’ It won’t happen every time, but it happens enough to leave an impression. It’s hard for you to trust other people because you don’t really trust yourself, but if you keep it all inside a black cloud will descend and obscure everything. It’s going to feel like no one ever cared about you, but the truth is you never cared for anyone enough to let them in.

Emotional blows hurt so bad because they seem to attack the soul. You don’t know how precious a soul really is; there is only one person who can attack it. The soul is protected by sharing, and destroyed by hiding. Unlike the mind and body, you can hide a long time and the soul comes right back once you step out from behind the hedge. This is what it means to be alive and create. Someone tried to attack your soul, they missed, and now you’re gloating.

When I was 17 I took some physical and emotional blows in rapid succession from different directions. A little heartbreak and embarrassment felt so horrible. I needed to disassociate from that stupid body and those crazy feelings, and retreat into my perfect mind. Just for a little while until the suffering ends. I didn’t want to let them see me suffer. I didn’t know the entire world would become bland and remote. It happened slower than I could notice and faster than I could imagine. It takes an outside force to come back once you retreat into the mind. Fifteen years later a combination of personal and international disaster shocked me into awareness of all I had pretended to avoid. I looked in the mirror and saw the gift had withered, unhoned and unshared. You don’t have the capacity at 17 to understand that feeling. So maybe I don’t have a great novel in me anymore. Maybe all I have to give is this: don’t end up like me. Know and value your own self, because no one else can do it for you. Share the gift with the world, or suffer. There is no other way.