Crashing on Taxes

Doing taxes tonight, with support from a friend. Certain activities have an immediate depressive effect on me - I become very sluggish, sullen, unwilling to put up with anything. I need my house mortgage statement - dark forces well up inside as I reach for a pile of paper. Suppressed rage, feeling hopeless, controlled. The absurdity of the questions on TurboTax galls me.

The feelings are so out of proportion to the stimulus that if this were not a common occurrance, I would question my sanity. I feel like a small child, angry and humiliated, being forced to do something I hate, having no say and no power. Obvious regression here - scenes of my mother standing tall over me, glaring down to watch as I erase the pencil marks from the wall. The sense of powerlessness and hatred are strong.

Why this task, and not another? In the past four months I have let go of so much resentment and bitterness towards the world. Yet some triggers linger. It is so clear in others - I see a friend go into a rage at an innocent statement, and he sputters incoherently and leaves angry. Only several days' distance allows him to see the strangeness of his own actions.

Our brains regularly misfunction, causing untold pain and destruction, yet we are so used to it, we don't even notice it. "Oh, he's just having a bad day." "She was so furious she threw dishes at him." "Yeah, he drinks a lot ever since his mother died." Like the cell phone, we know to expect signal loss and static, and we think nothing of it, but if our land phone did that, we would be furious.

We turn the wheel in the car left, and the car goes left. If it went right, even one percent of the time, the car would be totally unacceptable to us. Yet our minds desire to diet, but we eat the cake. We intend to be loving to our children, and wind up yelling at them. We want peace, yet we go to war. Something is wrong. Our minds are broken. We don't act consistently according to our own intent.

Actually, given that our minds are the byproduct of an unintelligent process of survival of the species, it is astounding that we can think at all. Logic came to our minds because we survived better than creatures that could not use logic. It is like learning that two plus two equals four through trial and error instead of through logic. No wonder that millions of years of instinctual living regularly interfere with this quirky new capability of the mind we call reason.

We are largely unfit for a world that demands us to be reasonable.