Purposeless
By: Chris Vicari
Tags: Therapy, Mental Health, Purpose, Childhood Trauma

If I dive back through the years and try to remember what I felt as a child, I recall general excitement and anticipation to see what life would be like, mixed with a perpetual knowledge that I was not good enough. While I wanted to take part in the world, I was terrified from a very young age that people would figure out that I was unintelligent, unschooled, lacking in the areas that everyone else had developed.

This was because my parents “homeschooled” me. I put that in quotation marks because the only semblance it bore to school was the letters in the word. There were no schoolbooks, no tests, no friends, no neighbors, no birthday parties, no sleepovers, no school events, no career days, no guidance. My parents said the words “public school” as if they were filthy words imbued with evil, topped only by the word “society.” They wanted me to be different, better, and they were terrified that the purity of our family would be sullied by the world. Society would only infect me with evil, because society was nothing but evil.

Consequently, I grew up believing that there was something big and important out there that I was meant to accomplish.

No, “accomplish” isn’t the right word. It was meant to happen to me. “Encounter” is a better word. I believed that if I just waited patiently, something would happen that would take me out of the life I was living and catapult me into the life I was meant to live. I was intended by God to be important. All I had to do was wait, and keep myself away from everything impure.

Well, you can imagine the results of that experiment. I grew up unbelievably naïve about almost everything, and scared of my own shadow.

My saving grace was that I read voraciously. I read everything I could get my hands on, and somehow, books saved me. They taught me when I wasn’t being taught. I didn’t learn things that a traditional education would have taught me, of course, because I didn’t have access to those kinds of books. I don’t know if Taiwan is actually a country, I double check 2+2 on my calculator, and I couldn’t point out the adverb in this sentence if my life depended on it. Does it even have an adverb in it? See, dead.

But I learned emotional intelligence. I learned how to comport myself. I learned how humans behave, and I imitated it. I learned how people handle different things, what sets certain types of people off, and how to help when someone is in emotional pain. I can read people like…well, like a book.

And that is how I maneuvered my way through life without giving away the fact that I am profoundly fucked up and don’t know how to human. Today, I can read a room like nobody’s business and immediately find the spot in it where I am the least likely to be questioned, examined, or included. If evading personal questions were a sport, I would have gone to the Olympics and won the gold.

But the main problem, the one certainty that has always hounded me throughout my existence is a faceless but resolute sense of purposelessness. The Big Important Thing that was supposed to find me never did. And now I have no idea whatsoever what I’m supposed to do with my life.

Not to mention, I use the passive for everything when I talk about myself. What I’m supposed to do? How about what I want to do?

But I haven’t the foggiest idea what I want to do. I’ve spent my entire life avoiding asking myself that question, and I am just now discovering why.

From growing up the way I did, I had internalized the fact that it didn’t matter what I wanted because I wasn’t going to get it anyway. It didn’t matter if I wanted to go to school and learn things, because my parents wouldn’t send me. It didn’t matter if I liked to sing and wanted to learn music, because I wouldn’t get to. It didn’t matter if I wanted to make friends, because we wouldn’t ever settle anywhere long enough or even live anywhere near other families. So I stopped wanting. I unconsciously taught myself how not to desire something, how to preemptively feel the sting of disappointment and use it to avoid wanting anything but whatever someone else wanted, so that I wouldn’t have to feel real disappointment. How to put my parents’ thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs before my own, and take some sort of minute pleasure in making them feel good.

And now, I am purposeless. I am staring down middle age, hate my job and have no marketable skills, see nothing but the same routine blank grayness stretching out in front of me for the rest of my life, and I am utterly terrified that I have come full circle. Have I left the productive, engaging, exciting decade of my life behind, years in which the Big Important Thing could potentially have found me, and reentered the purposeless void of my youth?

I don’t know.