Chicken or Egg: the Framework of Inadequacy

Scary, violent, anxious thoughts are comforting in the same way it comforted me as a child to imagine fighting bad people at school. But because I know that the latter is childish, I imagine these violent things so I'm allowed to be a victim of it. It gives me somewhere to run away to that isn't shameful. If I am a victim of extreme imaginative fear, I don't need to confront what truly scares me: the real world. Socialization. The judgment of others. Responsibility. That's why the violent thoughts are preceded by and perpetuate feelings of weakness and shame. It's the same reason I ran away to imagine myself as a Superhero as a kid. To have some false confidence or a false understanding of the world I live in. Or to ignore the need to understand what's difficult to understand. 

So, is the lack of understanding due to my cognitive difficulties or are the cognitive difficulties caused by my belief and anxieties about being weak and stupid? 

Maybe the anxieties led to real cognitive problems caused by avoidance of education and socialization. And self-harm through headbanging, alcohol abuse, marijuana abuse, and psychedelic abuse. 

Something about this reminds me of childhood. Being made to feel weak, ignored, stupid. Is it possible that I internalized this belief at such a young age that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy? That would explain my intense struggle with proper self-reflection, knowing that I was always missing something. Always something missing that I needed to find. Could the sole cause of my frustration be a false self-belief? What would also explain that, is if I did have cognitive difficulties and became aware of that fact, and I became hyperaware and anxious as a result. In order to improve my brain's ability, I needed to have a profound motivator, which would've been incredible anxiety. Or maybe I mistook poor socialization for poor intellect. Still a lot of questions needing answers. 

How I feel right now: the cognitive difficulties were real, but exacerbated by the awareness and criticism of those struggles. I now have a framework built around being weak, stupid, and shameful. I managed to repress those thoughts during high school but they returned in college largely due to psychedelic use. On the same token, I also feel shame for accomplishments. I feel like a fraud, a cheater, or arrogant. Is that a sign that the framework does more heavy lifting than the cognitive difficulties, or a sign that I feel insecure in the face of people who naturally achieve more than me, and I don't wish to be that way or to make another feel the way I do about my own intelligence? But I also deeply do want to be that person who achieves, which, in my framework, would require someone opposite me to be put down. This would explain why I'm very submissive in friendships in which I feel the other person is smarter than me. I do not wish to make them feel insecure, but I want to still hold onto the quiet belief that I may be as intelligent as they are, or possibly moreso. If this is a delusion, it would explain why I'm so scared to speak even with close friends and why I require emotional reliance and support to do so. 

It's possible that so much of my mental energy is wrapped up in maintaining this framework that it creates and perpetuates the very issue it was meant to address. 

I read that sentence 4 or 5 times before acknowledging what I was doing and trying to find an answer for it. The conclusion I quickly came to was that I was not correctly processing what I was reading, but that act of reading was almost compulsive. I looked up "compulsive rereading" and ran into OCD. Could it have been anxious response to what I was reading or was it a genuine, automatic attempt by my brain to understand what I was reading? As I was reading, I was also trying to remember the second sentence I was going to write which I had forgotten, perhaps also causing anxiety, perpetuating compulsive rereading. I was also wondering if what I had written was honest and accurate. Something felt wrong about it and I wanted to find out what. 

The chicken or the egg: framework of inadequacy or cognitive difficulties 

• Original cognitive difficulties -> awareness -> anxiety -> increased difficulties 

OR

• Early messages of inadequacy -> anxiety/ avoidance -> development of cognitive difficulties

Not only might these violent anxieties and fears be a product of my insecurity, but the "complexity" of my mind might have been created purely to avoid facing my mediocrity. My relationship with uncertainty, my inability to comprehend disguised as "epistemic humility". I disguise myself as an intelligent individual, then tell people I'm not, so I don't have the face the truth that I actually am not. But I still want to carry myself as an intellectual without the reflection of the word showing me my mediocrity, my lack of uniqueness, or interesting self. I was in a good mood for a little bit at work, but I still felt unable to speak and think properly. Maybe the framework is embedded so much so that I "try" to socialize and work well within it, which limits my abilities and increases my cognitive load. I still find myself incredibly self-conscious, highly monitoring myself in order to maintain my "good mood". The question: was I really in a good, comfortable mood, or was it only good relative to what I'm used to? And the same reason I collapse into anxious and depressive thought and feeling is the reason I felt unable to think and speak even when in a relatively good mood. The framework does not allow freedom of thought and action, and when I try to use freedom of thought and action within the framework, I inevitably fail and am ready to notice my failure. Noticing the failure reinforces the framework. The failure may or may not be caused by the framework, but it is the reason it is deemed as a failure, and why the failure creates such a great internal conflict. I feel aware that my brain is awfully loose, lacking knowledge, processing speed, strong memory, and complex reasoning. If this is true, and if I were to let go of this framework, how would I cope with constantly making a fool of myself, embarrassing myself due to lack of awareness, and failing to establish strong connections with other, "normal" individuals? It's true that the "framework of inadequacy" does not help with these problems either. It makes the most sense to let it go, or to acknowledge the fundamental truths but to synthesize it with experience and the rocky, uncertain adventure of life. But what if I have a lack of motivation to truly experience things in life due to my cognitive limitations? What if the framework also allows me to ignore that I simply don't want to experience and learn about life? What if I am ignorant of other people and rude, dismissive for that reason? Self-focused, driven by desire or fear more than intellect. Or is that the depression that seems to be a part of the framework? Overwhelming fear that all of this is pointless and far more simple than as portrayed due to my own intellectual mediocrity. If someone else struggles cognitively, and I were to explain this to them, they may see through the framework and relate to or understand the underlying cognitive struggles. They may pity me as a result of my inability to cope in a healthy manner, as it has resulted in an unnecessarily complex, isolated framework that fuels depression and anxiety, creating feelings of shame and weakness in the face of my seen mediocrity. Is this all a work of fiction? 

Does the framework rely on perceived ideals? Ideal vs authentic intelligence, I am inevitably unable to meet the ideal, though I perceive others as meeting that ideal or being judges on behalf of it. More accurately, the framework relies on fluid, authentic comfortability using intellect to reason, make decisions, and engage socially. However, because that relies on my perception of others, and the feeling I feel in contrast to the perception, it becomes unreliable. I will not feel the same feeling when I am fluid and comfortable as I do when I see others that way. When I do feel fluid and comfortable, I then become aware of it, and it becomes my responsibility to coddle or help those who I notice to have anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. This need to "save" pulls me back into a desire to understand their thoughts through introspection, rather than communication. Or I think of communicating and doubt my ability to do so. Also, once I become aware that I am fluid and comfortable, I then wish to maintain it, presumably by using my framework. I attempt to integrate the confident feeling into my framework which wholly rejects the confidence. Intellectually, I understand the fluidity of identity, being confident one moment and insecure the next, or even both at the same time, but that understanding may be incompatible with the "framework of inadequacy". The attempt to integrate the confidence creates a tension or a cognitive dissonance that interferes with the confidence and fluidity, pulling me back into the framework. 

It's not only to say something stupid, but to say it and to be uncertain of whether it is stupid or not, with the only evidence being the reaction of others. This seems like a natural attempt at self-expression, followed by a cognitive failure or lack of knowledge, and then a natural attempt at social awareness to compensate for lack of cognition or knowledge. Uncertainty lies in both self and social awareness, but immediate intuition based on social reactions suggests that a mistake was made. This is taken as fact instead of an avenue to explore due to the possibility of self-expression being inadequate due to cognitive difficulties. What would compound this is if the person has memory problems, which would make it undesirable to explore the uncertainty, as it would seem unproductive and burdensome. Similarly, if they have difficulty reasoning and struggle to understand basic components of the explanation. Or, if they have processing difficulties, and require more time than most to receive, understand, and ask questions. It is ultimately easier for the person to assume inadequacy rather than pursue truths within a social group. However, they would never be certain of this due to lack of exploration. On the same token, this lack of exploration allows them to maintain a comfortable belief of the self as someone with high intelligence. However, their consistent inability to prove this causes them to feel inadequate in social situations and beyond adequate in isolation, never truly knowing which is the truth. Attempting to bridge the gap between these two, they explore different ways of thinking: duality being one. "I either am highly intelligent or I am not intelligent whatsoever." This duality is explored both in isolation and during socialization, slightly bridging the gap, but creating a state of constant bipolarization and uncertainty. These dual states begin to overlap and clash causing tension. Realizing this does not work, they attempt a synthesis. To recognize that identity and consciousness are fluid and at any moment one could be many different things. However, this only expands to recognize that at any given moment they may be considered intelligent or not, which just introduces a duality within choice. To broaden the synthesis, we need to recognize that there are many cognitive skills: i.e. complex reasoning, memory, processing speeds, language construction. So a person can be intelligent in different ways. However, a simple calculus would suggest that if we could break down each cognitive skill and measure each, we would be able to determine who more intelligent individuals are, which again reinforces the duality. So let's consider emotional integration. Clearly, it creates a deep conflict to suggest that an individual is not intelligent and therefore has less worth due to their ability to live less of a full, varied life (i.e. through financial freedom, stronger emotional bonds, greater engagement with art and creativity), so it would benefit us emotionally not to believe that we are less intelligent or to devalue the importance of intelligence. However, this is a slippery slope that can guide us into a rejection and dismissal of that which we do not understand or which shows a reflection of us that we don't want to accept or believe. We live in our comfortable, small corner of the world fighting the potentially beautiful aspects of life simply because we don't comprehend them, and we live in blissful ignorance of that fact. So, it seems the best answer, based on the attempt of synthesis (and possibly my framework), is to find a way to understand your intellectual potential and limitations and to live maximally within that area. Is this possible? If so, how do we do it? The only answer is exploration. But, as stated before, the desire to explore can also be hindered by cognitive difficulties, though this alone can not be evidence of cognitive difficulties. Also true, the ability to know whether or not you grasp a concept can be affected by cognitive difficulties. But uncertainty itself is universal, so uncertainty alone can not be reliable evidence. Cognitive difficulties can affect how we perceive social reaction, so social reaction alone is not evidence. These three pieces of evidence: diminished motivation to explore intellectually, conceptual uncertainty, and social reaction are not reliable because they can be heavily distorted and manipulated by the affects of believing oneself to be inadequate and the resulting anxiety that comes from that. 

I feel like that really fell apart towards the end. I'm tired, I'm going to try and sleep now. 

I rely on my life having inherent worth. If I am living, I must be worthy of it. But I'm barely living, and not nearly to the extent that an intelligent person lives. I struggle to speak, think, and act. If life as a human is special due to these qualities, then I am barely human. Do I pass along these qualities to an undeserving child? Do I live only to hurt and fail due to my incompetence? Or do I accept my circumstance and allow myself to die as I should? Young and alone. Before I hurt anybody else. I can not experience joy without hurting another. I can not experience sophisticated joy. I can not experience sophisticated sadness. I am a void that breeds lack and despair.

I'm okay. There's a lingering unsettling feeling. Not making someone laugh leads to feeling rejected.