THE DISASTER PARADOX

Ranger Jesse, 11th - New York City
My psychoanalyst’s office is high uptown which makes driving inefficient. Uptown people are not interested in public transportation therefore have the most incessant traffic in their streets. Despite the fact that I own a car and do not regularly take the subway, I disregarded this fact when I made the down payment on my first session with Dr. Alsheikh. Now, every Wednesday, I leave my house, instinctively reach for my car keys, force my hand away from the key table and remind myself that in 5 minutes I will most likely be sat across from a debased post-pregnancy teen mom on her way to night school and begged by a sophomoric “up and coming” musician for a dollar to repay them for their “performance.”

This evening, after a break dancer’s foot almost broke my nose on the ride up, Dr. Alsheikh apologized for not having finished watering his window nook aloe vera plants before I arrived. He asked me how the start of my week had been— purposefully allowing me to choose whether or not to bring up my sister’s wedding from last weekend. I had been dreading it since Eve first announced her engagement at Thanksgiving and had been taking up much of my time with Dr. Alsheikh complaining about it. It’s not that I don’t like Eve, it's just that having shallow conversations with relatives or, even worse, bringing up significant topics and receiving cursory responses, or misunderstandings, about the basic concepts behind my inquiries is actually painful. I find myself dumbing myself down in all conversations. Trivializing is such an inherent part of my life that I unconsciously make even my personal writing palatable.

This isn’t going anywhere, yet I’ve made an effort to make it simple enough for my nonexistent reader to be able to digest. Ever since I was a teenager I have experienced this deep-seated awareness that my intelligence, or complexity, or perceptivity— however you want to frame it— has made my life utterly unenjoyable. I feel that I am thoroughly capable and much more clever than most people, but as a consequence of my superior consciousness, others cannot understand me. I leave conversations, on the one hand, feeling lonely and unlikeable but, on the other, pleased because the presence of this very feeling pretty much verifies my intellect. Dr. Alsheikh once compared my mother’s intelligence to the current of a wave— something that is there, governing her actions, which I objectively understand to be smart and correct, but just not something that I have ever tangibly perceived.

Although I granted him several validating nods as he said this, I couldn’t escape the thought that most people’s substance is so absent that comparing them to an intricate body of water is ridiculous. I might be an entire complicated ocean, but my mother, the uncle I spent 20 minutes with last weekend explaining the three branches of the U.S government to, or the wasted single mom on the R train are just whitecaps. Throughout my whole life I have alienated myself by being so egotistical. I have always been aware of why my life is so miserable but have never been able to change it. Dr. Alsheikh and I had to name this phenomenon because it came up so often— the disaster paradox was what we landed on. The day I labeled it I had made a joke about how I was sure the unabomber struggled with this exact issue and that I could’ve turned out much worse. I said I was basically the evil genius archetype and Dr. Alsheikh noted that I had caused absolutely zero culturally significant disasters and, voila, the disaster paradox was born.

The disaster paradox is that the more depth and intelligence you are aware of in yourself, the more isolated and self-disgusted you become. Despite my belief in the paradox, I noticed that most extremely smart people eventually find partners or best friends who, I assume, they genuinely connect with, but I never have. And it isn’t a physical issue, I am a pretty conventionally attractive guy and have had several girlfriends. I met my last girlfriend Rachel during a work trip in Boston. She had a fairly high up job at this kind of revolutionary genome-editing company that basically claimed to be able to target and change specific parts of DNA. We got along well and she eventually moved in with me. She was very much in love with me which, at first, made me think she was an absolute idiot.

Before this relationship, I had come to the conclusion that the people who actually believed that they had grasped me were even stupider than the people who were self-aware enough to simply accept their defeat. But as our relationship continued I learned just how qualified Rachel was to be my girlfriend. She worked in biotech so I automatically assumed that she was smart, but still some sort of emotionally unintelligent philistine. I quickly learned that she also majored in philosophy and wrote her thesis on Hegel or Heidegger— I can’t remember— just some convoluted philosophical mind that had to be more difficult to understand than mine. If anyone was ever going to be able to untangle my intricacies, it would have been her. For the first time, I considered that I was the problem. At first I was simply insecure that I might be unable to authentically represent myself— that vulnerable communication was something even the brightest minds can have trouble with. But the longer I stayed with her, the more worried I became that I might have no depth at all. I mean, what are ideas that no one else can comprehend? What are feelings that no other can touch?

When I explained this realization to Dr. Alsheikh, he compared me to a Bonsai tree he had seen in Kyoto last summer. He told me a story about how, in the beginning of his Ginkaku-ji Temple tour, Bonsai’s leaves and their mossy trunks were what interested him the most. As he was admiring the apex of a shorter tree, his tour guide pulled him aside to tell him a folk story about the roots of Bonsai trees. As he listened to the tale, Dr. Alsheikh began to notice the beautiful thick roots that sprawled over the garden’s floor that he had overlooked when he had been distracted by the leaves. He probably ended up using the anecdote as a metaphor to help prove my profundity, but I totally blacked out and couldn’t tell you for sure.

​Whenever Dr. Alsheikh compares my life to that of a plants I get totally distracted. I begin to visualize the most vivid scenes where he’s meticulously caring for his own plants— like setting timers so that he can water them at the most effective times. Sometimes the visions become kind of Dionysian and disgusting and I conceive images of him caressing the plants or doing strange rituals to make them supernaturally strong and capable and thus able to form a relationship with him. “My week was alright,” I responded to Dr. Alsheikh’s question. I decided that today I am too tired to explain that I am once again beginning to doubt that behind all my green appendage, I haven’t any roots at all.