The whole entire world says you’re wrong
That’s a childish grouping of words, “whole entire world,” but repeated by kids often enough to land in the lexicon. My lexicon, anyway. How are you wrong?
How am I wrong? Well let’s look at what’s wrong about you or us, imaginary reader. When this feeling that the whole entire world has judged and found you guilty of a crime, you have to reckon with their judgment. How could they possibly be wrong about you? How could you possibly be innocent, or partially guilty, and worthy of absolution?
Let’s break it down. Once you have reached the venerable age of 15 or so, you likely began to place yourself psychologically on trial after trial. No one has to do this to you. You did it to yourself. You had the cognitive power to separate from your self-centered preoccupations momentarily, and project judges all around your bedroom, to see yourself on the witness stand, on trial for delusions that your primal needs were all that mattered. If you accepted the new-found culpability, you assimilated humility into your formerly super-self, and went on. I felt constant projections of judges around me during my mid-teen years. Of course, they stared down at me dispassionately from the walls next to the curtains. Sometimes they shook their heads. Sometimes they muttered, “You fool!” If you succeeded in integrating your critics into your personality without crushing depression moving into your bedroom permanently, then you’ve moved on with a hesitant or cautious optimism about your future, but you never really escaped your judges.
Anyway, compare that critical inner court with say, finding out in the last ten years of angsty hell in social media, and now with A.I., that nothing you thought was true, as opposed to nothing true at age 15. Now it’s not just puberty wracking you. It’s life.
Eventually, you have to defend your life. Write an apologia about your life. Or if you’re not a writer, no diversion into wordy things, your life is your bond. I had dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of real people jumping up in my shit, attacking my reputation, friendships, and integrity during the first BLM uprising. Blah-blah. I’m long over it. With all-y’all, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s no different with you. You might not have faced external witch trials (you may have lost family and friends anyway), but you’ve suffered incredibly with your internal high court around the bedroom of your adulthood. You have to justify yourself to court. They are all standing there waiting for your statement. And like Clint Eastwood said, “What’s it gonna be, punk? Do you feel lucky?”
Here’s my flagging advice, as my head flags in different directions: I don’t think you are going to work it out in your head. You can only work it out in the vicissitudes of your writing, or your actions, dangling that red thread of narrative discourse. Action is action, as in looking after your life in banal, work-a-day ways. But reading and writing are action, too. It’s that ballsy step out the upstairs window away from the outstretched admonitions and shushing of your judges, where you float on air, that will save you. Because once you start writing, writer, you will float. You don’t know that now, but you will. Guaranteed.