The Healing Power of Self-Destruction
The other day I had a self-realization that I needed to destroy myself. A version of myself, anyway. A mote of my mind that insists on continuing to exist. This copy of myself isn’t real, he’s a fake, a fraud, a doppelganger who thinks he’s the real me, the one that should keep doing his thing. He dominates a lot of my habits and, as a result of these habits, I feel bad. The following information is not for the weak-willed, it requires some deep plunging into the depths of ourselves and a willingness to be relentless about our past.
Step 1. Create a List.
This list has to contain everything you did as a child and teenager. The list idea came to me when I thought about listing everything I used to do as a kid as a means to find better things to do in my free time. Surely, I was more creative as a child and could come up with a million different interesting things to do. The sad truth was that most of my first two decades of life were dominated by commercial enterprises. Toys, video games, TV shows, textbook publishers and State regulations, my life was planned out for me, both the fun parts and the mundane, all so someone could make a buck.
Step 2. Curate the List.
You can’t reject literally everything about your past, and some things were unavoidable, like your family, your geographic location, your language, and your gene expressions. Instead, I want you to pick out everything that can be backtracked to something commercial. After that you can list emotionally painful things you are hanging onto. Here’s some examples:
- I picked out the ninja turtles from my list. They were toys made to be sold for a profit. The company then made a cartoon show to push more toys and a movie to push even more toys. Were those things entertaining? Sure, most definitely, it was a good franchise that made a lot of money, but what did it do to me, really? Like, really? It made me want to fight, to be a ninja, it introduced me to martial arts and fighting as a cool thing. It made my toy playing violent. Maybe I was destined to have my play always be violent, but much of my subsequent play was violent and almost all the rest of my toys had something to do with violence. Is violence wrong, per se? I am not here to judge, but I can tell you that I didn’t learn about violence and fighting via my parents, I learned via toys, and that can’t possibly be virtuous. It’s one thing for the ancient Greeks to teach their sons to fight, because the survival of their city-state relied on it, it’s entirely different to brainwash kids into thinking being a ninja is cool (which coincidentally omits all the violent death).
- I also choose dinosaurs from my list. For some reason I liked dinosaurs, as most kids do. I had Definitely Dinosaur toys and later on Jurassic Park toys. I always wanted the Dino-Rider toys, but perhaps they were too rare for my well-off boomer parents to find. I thought dinosaurs looked cool, they were killing machines as far as I was concerned. But I didn’t really get much from them other than having a beast for my other toys to slay, or to practice the long held animal tradition of eating each other alive in a gory and torturous death. Like the ninja turtles, dinosaurs were another mechanism to get me to orient toward violence, which I was completely unaware of as an innocent angelic child. Mindless, stupid violence too, violence without virtue, without lessons of vice, good or bad, right or wrong; nothing but plain violence for entertainment. But corporations did that so they could make a profit. Some guy made a cool novel about genetically engineered dinosaurs and a publisher ate it up, then it got turned into a movie to make huge bucks, then some rural kid developed nightmares about being chased by a T-Rex because he was so desperate to see the film and consumed everything about it, including the novel.
I could go on with many more things, but my primary point, which I don’t want to be lost in the details, is for you to focus on the things that were foisted upon you that can be traced back to commercialism. So many of our tastes, desires, behaviors, and influences were from these things, which to an adult appear meaningless.
Step 3. Renounce your List Items.
Here is where the self-destruction starts. Now that you have a better idea of the things that influenced you as a young person you have to begin renouncing them. This means thinking about them and how they affected you, molded you, and then reject and renounce their influence on you. Those things never mattered, they were distractions and insidiously influential, and don’t forget, it was all so some company could make a buck. Is it that bad that a company wanted to make some money? Of course companies are going to do whatever they can to be profitable, but this your life we are talking about, your innocent childhood that was invaded and trashed. And as a teen, these companies wanted your attention so bad they made the funnest (I know it’s not a real word, but the grammatical -est seems appropriate to force here. Hey now, I’m a writer I can make words do what I want!) things ever for you to beg your parents for or spend your summer job money on, and what did those things do for you, ultimately? For me, I got addicted to video games to the point where I would see Tetris blocks falling down when I closed my eyes. They were a lot of fun, yes, that’s what they were supposed to be, but they also destroyed my desire to do work. Fun was way too fun compared to work.
Step 4. Acknowledge and Destroy.
To actually destroy your list you have to acknowledge each list item and say you no longer care about it, you no longer care for the memory. This particular point, to destroy the memory of the thing, came about when I realized when I daydreamed about my nostalgic childhood, I never daydreamed about playing with my toys or games or the shows that I watched, but what I was doing was wishing I could go back in time to correct things, to have more life, to escape, to be back in that “better” time. The toys and games and fun things were meaningless, or to be less harsh, not nearly as important as I always thought they were.
Like Marie Kondo instructs her tidyers, I want you to say things like “Thank you dinosaurs for being a thing in my life, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but now I let you go, now I stop caring about the memory of you, now I am ready to live again on my own terms with my own interests.” I’ve even done this with girls I had a crush on, “Thank you X for being attractive and wakening desire for you in me, which was pleasant but also painful as I pined for you from the shadows, but now I have to let the memory of you go, now I no longer care about those memories, I am moving on.”
Do this relentlessly for everything. Sometimes things will be genuinely difficult to let go, surprisingly so, and that means you have something more to dig into. Why would you allow something that ultimately didn’t care about you hold such power over you? I’m not telling you to destroy the memory of genuinely good things, like that fishing trip with friends or that first kiss, but to destroy the stuff that is chaff and unnecessary to your being. You don’t need to hang onto that stuff. It was weirdly difficult for me to renounce my Nintendo, but I’m glad I did it. It was difficult to say I no longer cared about Calvin and Hobbes, the memory of those comics, I mean, not the thing in itself, it exists, nothing I can do about that, but there is a memory-nostalgia feeling that surrounds my thoughts of Calvin and Hobbes, and good as the memory feels, it is no longer necessary for my future, especially because it only makes me want to relive the past. Not everything will do that, but some things might and that’s a clear sign to destroy it.
Step 5. Renounce Your Regrets.
My biggest regret was not learning to code as a teenager. I am currently learning to code, I want to be able to make programs and know how to code, even if I don’t get employment from it. But my regret regarding coding is a cope for not having enough money now. If I were doing well in a career I don’t think I’d have this regret. I am tired of living in a what if land of the mind, so I “renounce my regret of not learning to code earlier in life.” I no longer care that I didn’t do this. I did what I did as a kid and it’s done, it’s over, never to be repeated. I don’t need to keep the memory alive as if that thing in my life were still possible. I can’t repeat this mistake, if I really want to code I must soldier on today, I can’t fool myself into thinking I learned to code years ago and now I can do it, we all know how ridiculous that is, but we still do that to ourselves.
Your regrets are painful memories. But like some of your good memories of having lots of fun playing games they still need to be purged. They no longer help you, well, they never helped, and whatever you learned of them, however they formed who you are today, is already done so the memory can now be disposed of in a formal way.
Final Thoughts.
This is a formal way of destroying yourself. These memories you carry are very real, from real events, real things, real experiences, but now they are to be made unreal and eliminated from your existence. You are the one who holds these memories, you are now the one to dispose of them. Then the healing begins. And much healing you must do, reader.
Some of the things we renounce and expunge are difficult. I had to renounce my favorite professor. This is a guy I truly loved, his classes were incredible, he was amazing, very smart, very sharp, widely read and had a lot of entertaining stories. But there was a problem, he was so good it made me want to stick to my teaching program, which a decade later I now realize wasn’t the best program for me to be in, and I know I had doubts at the time, but this professor was so good and encouraging. Back then I had also decided I wanted to be a reader and I read heavily, often 5–6 books at a time, and meeting this professor made me want to 10x my reading. For the next decade reading took up most of my free time, to no profit or benefit to me or anyone else. You see, my professor’s reading made sense, he had history classes to teach and all of his reading was useful, but for me to read a lot of history, literature, and such became a pastime, an intellectually narcissistic indulgence, a fading and failing hope to one day do as my professor did. Ultimately, a delusion and a source of emotional pain. I have now destroyed that beloved professor in my mind. It’s nothing personal, you see, I have nothing against the man, he was merely excelling at his job, but I no longer have need of those good memories, and indeed it was painful to depart from them, but they were not doing me any good. If they were doing me good I would continue with them, but when I think back fondly on this professor and his classes (I took every single class of his I could) it makes me want to study history again, when I should be studying how to code.
You’re doing it wrong if there are things that aren’t genuinely difficult to say you no longer care about them. But you must let go, reader, you must destroy your memory-self to heal. You’ve given the thing a good last thinking and now it is time to be rid of it. I have found that I have healed quite a bit by following these simple steps. I know it works, and I suspected it would work because of how well Marie Kondo’s strategy of thanking things and then casting them into the flame, err, the garbage is. Cast into outer darkness your nostalgia and memories that no longer serve you. Heal up from those influences and become your new self, a version of you that isn’t so commercialized or carrying pain. This will help you reignite what interests are truly inborn and not the result of a good ad campaign, or not the result of the time and place you lived.
