Feeling Paranoid I’m the Only One…

Feelings.  Can’t live with them, can’t smother them into annihilation.  The main problem with these incredibly irrational moods, stupid thoughts and crazy impulses that we group in the “emotions” category is that the damn things are so often spot-on right – in their own knotted-up, backward way, of course.

For example, I’m going to try to think of the most irrational emotion I can think of – paranoia is usually pretty irrational, right? What, am I the only one who occasionally feels like the world is whispering behind my back, plotting to put me in my place, or at minimum, thinking wrongly of me? 

It doesn’t matter that I know I have to “get over it” because the fact is that everyone thinks wrongly about everyone else all the time anyway – that is, when they aren’t entirely wrapped up thinking exclusively about themselves.  Yes, today people are just too bleeding busy and self-absorbed even to talk about you behind your back with any passion.  And when others do decide to spend a nanosecond deciphering your flaws, they rarely do it in any kind of original or scientific fashion.

Anyway, if life has taught me one thing it’s that even on those rare occasions when people do take the time to think qualitatively badly of you, it turns out it isn’t really you they see at all anyway, but themselves all over again. Isn’t that the story these days on the human psyche: that no one knows another, we only see what we look for, all is filtered through self? Like what they say about dreams – that every character is really you – everyone you encounter in the world is really a reflection of that amorphous quagmire called your “self.” 

That’s why it’s really so irrational to be paranoid about what others think of you, because it’s all one big bloody illusion anyway, and why don’t I just get on with living my illusion and letting you live yours?  I don’t know about you, but I really need to work on making my illusion over here a lot more comfortable and less effort to maintain, which I might do better if I spent less time feeling paranoid about other people.

But twisted and tormented as it may be, even an emotion as apparently irrational as paranoia makes perfect, beautiful sense, and really no one would ever want to lose the corner of the human palette, the emotional “color,” if you will, of paranoia.  Sure, it could destroy ya, but like all of these backward human emotions, paranoia has a super-important lesson to impart.  If only you learn to listen, your own personal paranoia can teach you something important, too, like what mine taught me:

There’s really only one person in this world that you can count on to think badly of you in any kind of truthful way.  Only one saboteur is singularly devoted to watching each moment of your systematic demise.  That person, my friend, is your own one and only self,  the only perfect enemy and true foe any of us can expect in this mean, selfish world.

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