Scripts and Structure

Scripts, we have scripts for everything. Even if you don't know it, you are cerebrally deep in them. The thing we do as humans that REALLY separates us from all else is how we come up with and tell stories about ourselves, why we are who we are, why they are how they are, and how we should be something other than what we currently are and how to be better than we are now. Now don't get me wrong, this stuff all has it's place but in my experience recently  this all goes out the window. I am not who I was simply because I have a brain chemical issue and there is no story or script to cover that.

I didn't get that way because my parents were mean to me.

I didn't get that way because they gave me math too early in school.

I didn't get that way because "Lurlene Bodeen" turned me down for prom.

I could go on ruminating forever, I could go to talk therapy and get so much better at talking about it, no one would ever socialize with me again. I could read books, watch Dr. Phil, get sickness, denial and recovery scripts to suit every occasion but still what I need to do isn't done because there is a simple chemical disorder that renders all of that moot. You can't shoot straight from a rocking canoe, you can't sort out deep psychology with damaged temporal lobes...

What does help is structure. Knowing that every day you ARE going to get up (on-time) and do the same thing if you have to crawl to do it. You just turn off the internal dialogue completely which in my case happens anyway and go do this thing. You can't run your whole life this way, but you can pick a few things even if small and just make a structure out of it, no scripts, no heroic self narration, just move to where you need to be and do what you need to do.

Maybe BF Skinner (fascist rat maze guy) had a point. What goes on in your mind, all the little narrations and stories are irrelevant, what matters is observable behavior. I'll sure buy this to a degree I hadn't before. Most of the time, what keeps you back may not be some trouble in your "life script" or any "self-narration" you do. Sometimes it's just bad electro-chemistry and as humans trying to overcome ourselves it serves us to just SHUT-UP inside, burn the script and go improv.

I don't know who here believes in god and who doesn't. I'm not even going to mention if I do, however I see very clearly now that this deity gave us a mirror image of ourselves in our minds, this is a blessing to a degree, but if you consult that mirror too often for "reasons", you fall into it and your whole life becomes a maze of mirrors of self-reflections you don't easily every get out of. You stare into the mirror as to what is wrong, you look into another mirror as to how to fix it, you look into another about how you should look like trying to fix this and you see that you are quite a stud for facing all these mirrors around you, but you are still in a house of mirrors, you are not running, you are not lifting, you are not improving...you are in a room with no walls talking to yourself when it isn't your "self" that is the problem.

Sometimes a wire is just loose, pick a few important things to do in the gym or otherwise, set up a structure to do them in, stop talking to yourself and take a long ride till you are out of the rough water...No matter how badly your car is running, you still have places to go or you will never leave where you are. </lecture mode>

--Bryce Lane (July 2010)
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