- My Parents: That if you work really hard, everything always works out.
Except, nah, it doesn't. You can be betrayed, or sabotaged, or stolen from, mother nature could strike, or so on. You could build the biggest, most sturdy house, but sheer dumb luck or mother nature's wrath or the government or some arsonist fucker could come by and completely fuck it up while you aren't there. Hell, perhaps even in spite of you
being there. You don't get to control what happens to you no matter what illusion you may drape over your eyes to make it appear as such, you can only control how you react and what you do. Both in good times, and bad times.
- Childhood: That sorrow, anger, and so on, are bad.
No. Not particularly. Sorrow and anger are perfectly healthy emotions, and they can get a lot of productive things done in the right hands. Sorrow can help someone stop to contemplate or express when something has harmed them to others, and anger can be used to express extreme dissatisfaction with an event or article. They're necessary emotions, and when expressed in a healthy manner, they won't harm you or anyone around you.
The only two emotions that I know are just completely awful in every respect are hatred and self-pity. There are no emotions more ugly than those. Hatred is to take anger and apply it so fiercely to something that you wish its destruction, and self-pity destroys you internally and makes you blame anything and everything other than the emotion itself.
- TV as a Child: That your emotions are most important, and anybody who tells you that what you're feeling is wrong, is nearly always some evil mustache-twirling robot-deploying sunday cartoon villain.
Nah fuck that. Logic and reason are the greatest thing mankind has. Logic and reason are what put us above the other animals and into our own category. That's not to say that emotions
aren't important, they are. It's just to put them in their rightful place, they aren't the be all and end all of human life, they're just a series of biochemical reactions in the brain that compel you toward certain activities which, in every case, can be explained scientifically. There is no magic to emotion, it's an evolved utilitarian tool. I love having them, and I would trade them for nothing in the universe, but emotions aren't capable of discerning complicated situations. They're just not. Look into a dark room and you'll feel a sense of foreboding. Hear something moving inside the room and you will feel fear. But if you struggle past that fear and turn on the light, it turns out, it was just your fucking cat going about the house at three in the morning.
If fear can be conquered, anger controlled, sorrow overcome, happiness kept calm, and excitement contained... Does that not imply that there are situations where such controls might be necessary? Situations you can discern through logically evaluating and reasonably assessing, perhaps?
I mean, I really wouldn't look much further than the flat earthers or the anti-vaxer crowds as to why "I feel" or "I believe" is inferior to "I logically discern" and "I reasonably discover."
- Up until a few months ago: "There are billions of fish in the sea!"
Y'know, it's fully possible that I
could feasibly find someone who will love me to the ends of my days. I'm a hopeless romantic, I dream about it sometimes, and it even reflects in some of my writing. Except, see, I don't really search for it anymore. I gave up after my last break-up, which was shortly after someone I had known and cared about for years put a knife in my back and left me to rot. Thing is, people will do whatever it is they do and convince themselves they're right about it. Ain't nothing going to change the self-righteous nature most people have.
That's not really a terrible thing, though. I think myself victim, but I'm sure others think the same of themselves, too, when on the opposite side. The feeling's the same, just the actions are different.
I figure if there's somebody out there who will one day eye me up and go "yeah, that's the one" they'll be thinking that based on what I'm doing. What I'm dreaming. What I'm building. They'll see "the writer" or "the guard" or something else along those lines. If I ever get someone to love, it'll be because they saw who I was and it appealed to them, not because I kept searching around blindly going "WHERE IS IT?!"
And, if there isn't anybody out there for me, if I'm truly doomed to a fate where the best I can do is to entertain someone for a few months before they move on and leave me behind... Then I should make the most of it, no? My life isn't defined by whether or not there's someone to cuddle with. My life is my own. I'll write stories and play games and exercise and kick ass at life, and enjoy it. No sense wasting it languishing in self-pity all my life, it's not like
that's particularly attractive anyway.