The Inner Critique

I did a good deed today. I went to my grandparents' home this afternoon, armed with a DVD, and I sat and watched it with them. In Spanish, with the English subtitles (because my Spanish is, sadly, not as good as I would hope it to be).

I came up with the idea to do this last night, in a bout of ill-advised self-righteous guilt, condemning the rest of my family for the way in which they treat my grandparents but not doing anything myself to make their lives a little bit better. Condemning my mother and sister and father for trying to get them to eat more healthily at 80+ years of age, for trying to get them to exercise, or even just get out of the house more, for trying to uproot them and change long-standing patterns and habits. My family does this out of love, but the simple answer is that my grandparents do not really want to change. Otherwise they would.

So the question is how to make them happy, and the simple answer to that is: just be there.

Hence the movie, and going to see them.

Of course, I feel guilty because I don't particularly want to spend time with them. I had no innate desire to hang around them. I wish I could see them as repositories of wisdom, elders with insight, to be admired and honored. Only: I don't. Folly of youth, I guess.

But what does it mean, to honor your elders, when they are so clearly fucked-up themselves? How do you do that, when they are patently insane, in that geriatric sort of way? It's one of the odder, and more difficult (in my opinion), of the commandments. Because if I listened to everything my elders said, then I would probably not drive a car. Ever.

But somehow, armed with the knowledge that they are not long for this world, I find it a little easier to show my grandparents a degree of patience, tolerance and love I would not ordinarily have for them. The previously difficult-to-swallow now rolls easily off my back, if I may mix my metaphors.

And in the midst of all this, I felt as if I had something... something good inside of me. Something real, and pure, a desire to do something genuinely right for the world. And that is an odd position for me, because normally I don't think of myself that way, and so this good felt, in fact, alien, foreign, not of me but bestowed to me as a gift to bring to other people. Of myself, I am nothing, just this selfish, pathetic little thing, but this good... this good is something better.

Maybe it's some residual Catholic guilt, there, a twinge of original sin. Or maybe it's because after the awful things that I've done in my past, I feel irredeemably stained and forsaken. I don't know; I just know that I have a difficult time thinking of myself as being a genuinely good person. Some inner critic is always present, pointing out everything that is wrong, questioning every kind gesture I might make, but also holding out some idealized sainthood as bait.

Deep down, that's what I've always wanted to be, of course: a saint. I've wanted to be good, noticeably good, genuinely good, but I've always fallen short of the ideal and therefore, I guess, figured that I must not be good at all. Sort of like wanting to be an Olympic athlete and giving up the sport entirely once realizing that no amount of training or determination will allow this to come true. Which begs the question of why one entered that sport in the first place.

I'm tired inside, so very tired of this struggle, that I don't even want to be good any more. I want to be selfish and I want to lie and I want to have whatever I want whenever I want it because what I want seems so bloody reasonable anyway, only... only I fear the critic inside, whom I presume to be (in reality) external critics, telling me that I have to continue, that I can't take time for myself or give something to me.

I want to be good without having to do anything.

Lately, the only thing that's been saving me has been this inkling that it's OK, that I'm alright, that I don't need to be better and I don't need to improve, because I'm loved and accepted as I am. Now and then I feel that in my prayers, feel like I'm alright and I don't need to worry, and that helps.

Because the rest of the time, I grind my bones into flour over this worry.

I'm really far from being very OK, mentally.