i put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect, which i think is most of it. people always tell me, you don't have to be perfect, nobody's perfect, you can't expect to be perfect. but the thing is that I USED TO BE PERFECT. okay, obviously the objective parsing is that when i was younger i thought i was perfect because i was too cocksure to know the difference. but when i was younger, i would have come up with a better wording for that last sentence than "objective parsing" and "cocksure."
i guess part of the breakdown is that i now have this quantitative hobby, bridge, which i guess it's unrealistic to think i am going to be one of the top (say) 100 players in the country at in the 2.5 years i've been playing. i guess i've never really had such a measurable hobby before; i mean, i got really good at various board games quickly, but i didn't start playing them against people who had been playing for 20 years. there are no professional puerto rico players. (i guess i wouldn't bet money on that.)
but still, i really think that on some level, it's true that i used to be perfect. and i'm not anymore. emotionally i'm a lot more troubled by things, a lot less carefree. of course, this is part of maturing and becoming an adult, which has some upside, but i don't think it's really an upside that fits with my "core" personality, whatever that means. i think that fundamentally my skill set/personality/likes and dislikes suit a child more than an adult. i think that's why the transition to adulthood is so difficult.
i find myself thinking more and more of Plan B recently. during my last emotional breakdown, i was talking to laura and this idea of a Plan B came up, something you could do rather than kill yourself if you just wanted to get away from things. my Plan B is to become a farmer or a forest ranger or something like that. maybe i just need a job where i don't have to think about things, by which i really mean a lifestyle where i don't have to think about things. where there aren't mistakes to be made to care about so much.
but i don't think i'll ever really do Plan B. i don't know that i'm capable of not thinking about things anyway. i really, truly, honestly believe that the best solution is for me to be perfect again. i know that sounds naive and impossible, but i did it once and i can do it again. i really have devoted a great deal of thought to this.
but it scares me because i no longer have the confidence that that's possible. i've been through the wars, after all.