I keep thinking I’m not very well suited to the world. I'm not spontaneous enough, free enough, able just to go along with the prevailing, to accept life for what it is rather than what I would like it to be. I have myself as this precision instrument, so very precise that it is only fit for a particular environment. That environment is so far off that this instrument lies ruined in the corner of the tool shed.

From day to day I have that feeling. But sometimes I question it and realise it is a skewed analysis. There are crucial areas of life where I am fairly carefree and easy compared to others. Some of these areas include big aspects such as music, money and sex.

Music

With music I'm a broad-brush, open to being stimulated and interested. I have many different modes of appreciation to employ and can find something valuable in just about any music kind. This contrasts with the typical aficionado who defines his appraisal as much in terms of what he doesn't like than what he does.

Money

With money I'm a risk-taker. I'm not obsessed by it or unduly afraid of it. It doesn't dominate my life and dictate decisions so much as it seems to do with the majority. I think my relationship with money is healthy. I'm neither enslaved by it nor in thrall to it. It is for me a useful enabler, a tool I have grown to be appreciative of and respectful to. It is one of humanity's more clever inventions allowing for infinite dealings that would otherwise be impossible. Money is sophisticated and is essentially about human beings making agreements as to the material worth of goods and services such that they can be exchanged and employed as necessary. Apart from simply not having enough of it, money and me are just fine.

Sex

To use Reichian thinking, with sex I am potent in that I can engage it with the fullness of myself. For me, sex can be rather like with music: open to experience, not deviant or exploitative, but just able to partake fully in one of life's potentially more joyous experiences. This also seems to be unlike many people, women particularly, who have all kinds of security and emotional issues to consider with sex. This is not a criticism of women, just a fact of life due to the implications of pregnancy. Although it has to be said that the wide availability of birth control hasn't changed things as much as it might have. Centuries of ingrained values take a while to loosen their grip. Women needing to be more circumspect generates anxiety in men when possibilities for spontaneity and delight are replaced by concerns for rejection or manipulation. So, most aren't able to consider sex without having to wade through a series of complexes and so sacrificing the great orgiastic potency that Reich advocates.

Music, sex and money are among life's big deals. A healthy attitude in these areas makes for a pretty good score-card. And I feel I score quite high. But it does render me unusual and marginalised as a consequence. There are few suitable social groups easily identifiable which encompass my set of values (ones not inhabited by the terminally weird!), where I wouldn't feel so alien, where I wouldn't have to act so much with false personna. This impacts on my sense of identity and confidence such that characterising myself as a misfit seems appropriate.

But it's good just for a moment to remember that the picture is bigger. The incompatibility of others may say just as much about their bad attributes as it does my own, may even exonerate my own in some cases such as with music and money. So it's not so clever to condemn myself as this 'broken instrument' when in some ways I appear to be rather well appointed, in ways where many have deficits. Not so much me then is the prognosis here, more what has been visited upon me by circumstance; not just flaws in my personality but matters of circumstance also.