I confess that I believe in curses.

For my entire life, I have not been allowed to do anything constructive. If there is one person who is a regular part of my life, that one person will find a way to stop anything I attempt to accomplish.

When I was a child, I loved to read. I challenged myself constantly to push through huge, wordy tomes that someone my age at the time probably shouldn’t have worked up to yet. There were two ways I could finish a book: always read, no matter what, and never do anything else any time I could help it, or find a place to hide. Because be they family, other kids, or even teachers during reading time, everybody incessantly interrupted my reading.

As a young adult, I went through alternating period of working multiple jobs and being unemployed to study. Whenever I started working, everybody I knew constantly put me down and said that the only way I’d ever earn enough is if I stopped, studied, and prepared for college. Then when I stopped to study and prepare for college, I was told that because I wasn’t earning, I was a b**. I’d be put down until I stopped and started working all the time again.

When I found my first good job, salaried, comfortably challenging duties, my then-wife wanted to go to work to teach. So, life was miserable until I gave in to move with her so she could teach. I went to college, finally. She quit her job as a teacher so she could actively interrupt my studies constantly or passively allow environmental influences to do the same. The more successful I got, the better my grades, the harder the classes, the more my life was made a living hell.

She left and took the kids, was awarded custody without any kind of hearing whatsoever, and I had a nervous breakdown. Funny thing about that first decent job ever and going to college. I was really trying to be a good dad. Somebody had to step in to stop it; that time the state.

Since then, I’ve done lots. I had a stint in acting, until relatives and friends incessantly criticized me until my choices were isolation or quitting for a more “normal” job. I’ve become a pretty good programmer and have even developed the math and algorithms necessary for a program to ask questions, find answers, judge how good the answers are, derive new questions from those, and repeat the process to make decisions.

Funny thing about that programming. My current significant other won’t let me finish a project. Ever. My coding goes in waves such that I start off relearning a bunch of stuff and getting familiar with my own code again, I make some progress, and then I have to stop. And I’m not allowed to get started again until I forget a bunch of stuff.

It has even been this way with simple jobs. I’m not an overly proud person. When I saw that life just says no to my doing anything I feel is worthwhile, I tried the minimum wage grind again. Funny how as soon as I started getting lots of pats on the back and talk about promotion and raise, my alarm clock mysteriously kept getting reset, my uniform mysteriously vanished from where I laid it out the night before, and I started hearing about vaguely described people who match descriptions of friends of family coming in to ask after me too often as if my place of work was a hang out.

I could go on. And on. And on. I’ve been a programmer, researcher, actor, cook, technician, and on and on the list goes. Always with great success until somebody decides to interfere. And always with great failure when that interference comes.

This is the only thing in my life that has remained constant. Different places, people, career paths, schedules, life philosophies, and even religious and political persuasions have been tried all in hope of finding one thing, anything that I would simply be allowed to do. Nope.

I’m cursed.

So I came up with an experiment to test the curse. I’m giving up. Now I only hope that the curse takes the bait and somebody interferes.