Chronicle of the Quiet Rebel

I’ve just noticed how loquacious my blog postings have become lately. It’s not that I’m trying to wax philosophical, so much, but with everything that’s been happening lately I’ve relapsed into an overly pensive state of mind. If you think my posts are convoluted, you should see what’s going on inside my head.

A few weeks ago, I was in my weekly appointment with my psychiatrist. For the most part she just lets me talk and nods sympathetically; every once in a while she’ll offer some quiet observation, but it’s rare that she interjects into the one-sided conversations which, more often than not, amount to little more than hollow rivers of my subconscious spewing out of my mouth. Verbal diarrhea, I think they call it. I can’t shut up on a good day. Being in a small, comfortable room where I’m the undisputed center of attention for an hour affects me like mental crack.

At any rate, on this particular day my psychiatrist, sweet and quiet and barely older than myself, surprised me when she looked up from her notes to ask, “How do you think Jeremy deals with your rebellious streak?”

I stopped. I didn’t know I had one of those.

When I was young, my mom used to refer to me as a “quiet rebel,” someone who would smile sweetly until you left the room, and then rearrange your furniture while you were in the bathroom just to mess with your head. I like the term: it’s much more mysterious and romantic than simply calling me passive-aggressive. But I’ve never really thought of myself as a rebel. The word seems to imply a sense of antagonism that I’ve never really felt, a desire to make other people uncomfortable that I’m not aware of ever having had. I like other people, and I like being a productive member of society. I just don’t like being told what to do.

The older I get and the more I experience in life, the more conscious I get of the fact that we’re all just carbon-based life forms, that most of the people in charge aren’t any smarter than I am (and many cases are probably a little dumber), that tradition and dogmatic religion are artificial constructs designed to neatly package mores and morality so we don’t have to think for ourselves. That there are things that are universal, like love for our fellow man, and that these are the things that you have to search for; they don’t find you. Not while you’re watching TV in your boxer shorts, and not when you’re sitting in a church pew in your best Sunday dress. No preacher or political reformer is going to hand you a Bible or a Little Red Book with World Peace neatly hidden in a hole cut out of the pages inside. In my mind the realization of this isn’t rebellion. It’s just a willingness to go against the grain in the event that you realize that everyone else in life is wandering around as blindly as you are. The funny thing is that so few of us just cowboy up and open our eyes. Bumping into the sharp corners of metaphorical coffee tables is apparently much more fun, if slightly less spiritually rewarding.