I have been surprised that readers of DailyKos have encouraged me to continue writing about manic depression [
http://www.dailykos.com/... ] and about my experiences in Brazil helping start an Internet access point for isolated Indians on a remote Atlantic peninsula.
] [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/12/125233/843 Now, it suddenly seems ridiculous to me that I am surprised, since I have accomplished many things successfully. I have written many op-ed pieces for newspapers, been published in professional journals, taught other lawyers, and spoken in two languages about law on the television and radio. When I worked for non-profits, the foundations increased my programs' budgets as the innovative projects became recognized successes. So, why the surprise if others like what I write as DailyKos? [
http://www.dailykos.com/... ] This is something I've struggled with all of my life.
I'm surprised because I've mostly felt defeated by my own inner psychology as associated with success. Whenever I aim to succeed, the endeavor ignites a firestorm of self-doubt and self-hate within me that only failure can extinguish. When I succeed in spite of the firestorm, I nonetheless feel a profound and depressed sense of failure, so that I fail inwardly even when I succeed outwardly.
A recent dream about attempting to crash my car reminded me of the day when I graduated magna cum laude from college, in the top 5% of my class, but spent the night in a state of agitated anguish, and I tried to crash my car.
When I succeed, I know my success is meaningless in light of all that the world requires of people with my abilities and education. When I succeed, I become grandiose, so I prepare to fail in the future even by succeeding in the present.
When I succeed, my victories arouse and inflame the spirit of my dead father, for whom success was even more painful than it is for me. My father confided to me that when he was ten years old and got all "A"s in school, his school principal called his home to congratulate his mother. She was not home and so she received only received a message that she was to report to the school. Furious that she should be required to go to the school because of something - whatever it was - that my father had done, my grandmother beat my father mercilessly for all of the trouble he had caused her, which taught my father just as much as he had learned by earning all "A"s in school. Among my father's favorite aphorisms was, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
My father learned to feel great ambivalence about success. He approached it as a patient would a vaccine that was just as medically likely to kill him as to cure him. People must work to succeed in life. My father had to desist from work lest he succeed in life. Consequently, my father worked but fitfully, so his attitude toward work (and his native intelligence) became his legacy and my principal inheritance.
It's not my native intelligence that I doubt, although defeats in life, going back being born into an alcoholic family, have made me doubt my own intelligence. Rather, I doubt my ability to vanquish the demons that haunt my successes, the demons that are reassured by my defeats. Nothing is self-evident about success to my way of thinking.
With this mindset, perhaps it is understandable that I view all of my accomplishments, past, present and future, as highly improbable. I'm surprised even to be alive after all the times my father and I have attempted committing suicide or spoken of our desire to do so. [ http://www.dailykos.com/... ] We have desired relief as much as success.
So, if DailyKos some readers like my writing and I am surprised that they like it, I can be forgiven for being surprised at my little successes, dependent as they are on so many things that cannot be taken for granted.
Now, with all of that unmitigated negativity off of my chest, I am liberated to return to something positive that might actually help other people: Imagine Indians having to pay $275.00 USD per month for a satellite Internet connection that is only 20% as powerful as the broadband connections that are available to wealthier people in the US for 90% less! [ http://www.dailykos.com/... ] It's not fair, but it's their only alternative until telephone and broadband connections become available, and that might take decades. Readers can help make Internet access possible for them by helping them with the monthly access fee until their new access point becomes self-sufficient.
my pitch to readers to help share the wonders of Internet access with Brazilian Indians on a remote Atlantic peninsula [ http://www.dailykos.com/... ] Please make a donation to the BrazilianPeninsulaProject@Yahoo.Com by visiting PayPal.Com.