Someday, advanced psychic metrics will allow us to measure how much emotional energy we've given to various themes and obsessions in our lives. In fact, we'll be able to plug into this measuring system the way we now check in on the activity managers of our computer processing units to see what's taking up our system's attention. Scarier still, other people will be able to measure this: our bosses while we work, our spouses while we make love to them….

But for now, we only have anecdotal evidence of this Emotional Energy Quotient (EEQ). We have to intuit it from behavior, from tell-tale signs left on the face and hands and belly. When I look at myself, both in the cross-section of any given moment and throughout my time on earth, I suspect that I've given more energy to 

ESCAPE!

than I have to anything else except possibly finding food, and even that has sometimes fallen under the umbrella of escape. I want so much to 

run away

from the curse

that I fear I've built my entire personality on trying to avoid it. 

Don'tbelikeyourfather Don'tbelikeyourfather

 Don'tbelikeyourfuckinfather Don'tbelikeyourfather

 Don'tbelikeyourfather Don'tbelikeyourfuckinfather 

The same damn mantra over and over, but there's nothing calming about it. It's simply an all-pervasive form of paranoia and panic. Avoiding being like my father is like avoiding a terrorist attack: the attacker only needs to be right once, and the victim only needs to be wrong once. 

So I ask myself how much of my personality has simply gotten stuck in the "fight or flight" mode of the runaway, the curse-escaper who feels he'll never actually be able to outrun it? How much of the nervous, easily knocked off-kilter disposition? How much of the gotta do something mentality that won't allow me to relax, because I'm perpetually afraid that if I stop working to not be like my father, I'll turn into him by default. 

Gotta do something. Gotta be something. Can't be a nobody, or my father's curse proves true—I'll be born to lose just like he was. Gotta run away from my anger and frustration, because if I succumb to them and lash out at the world, the curse proves true, too. 

I want to stop running. I really do, people. But if I stop and the curse catches me, then all the running I've done until now it for naught.