After all, it’s what I’m good at.

It’s a shocking thing to realize you’ve spent your whole life curled up into a ball with your back turned to the world as you tried hard to ignore brutal reality in favour of screens.

Like I am just waiting for reality to go away and leave me to my pain.

And because of the trauma that put me into this fixed position, I became extremely passive. I guess you could say that I dealt with being raped by going limp and waiting for it to be over.

I assume I’m not the only one to do that in that situation.

And I have spent the rest of my life doing the same thing. I have felt so powerless for most of my life that it would never have occurred to me that I was supposed to be steering this life of mine all this time.

But it’s clear to me now that much of that powerless is delusional. I have all kinds of power that I have never tapped into. If anything, I have actively (if subconsciously) dodged thinking about the true extent of my abilities in any but the most theoretical of ways for a very long time.

Them : But Mister Bertrand, you’re actually powerful beyond all mortal ken.
Me : I guess. Can I go back to crouching in filth now?

So why do I deny the truth of my own extraordinary abilities?

I think it has a lot to do with not wanting to take responsibility for them. After all, if I truly “owned” my incredible faculties, then I would be obliged to do something with them and that would take me out of my “safe” position of cringing in the dark.

And that would be the worst thing possible, at least according to that tiny child inside me that left the world behind in order to escape the unthinkable thing happening to him.

He’s still hiding deep inside me. That scared little animal at the heart of my psyche fears exposure most of all because he associates concealment with safety and discovery with terrible things happening to him.

Many, many bullying incidents taught him that, as well as an emotionally cold and distant and disdainful home life.

Obviously, accepting one’s true power as well as one’s limitations is a key part of growing up, and I’ve been afraid to do that as well.

Once more we come face to face with my “failure to launch” and that deep conviction that adult life would destroy me.

Or maybe just change me into something unrecognizable, which is worse.

Normal people don’t even think about this shit. They just go on to the next thing their instincts tell them to do without even knowing that is what they are doing.

They’re just doing what feels right and/or makes sense at the time, without the kind of overbearing metaconscious awareness that cripples the likes of me.

They have innocence, at least for a while. And it protects.

But me, I knew far too much far too soon. I couldn’t just innocently do normal kid things for the usual kid reasons because I “knew better”.

Sometimes having perspective can be downright toxic to your wellbeing.

I guess you could call it cosmic self-consciousness. At no point could I let my guard down and believe or do the things kids normally do.

My paranoia ran far too deep. Any sense of control over my existence I felt (and feel) is entirely dependent on tackling things with my over-muscled brain and trying to understand and anticipate everything.

It all seems so futile to me now. But it’s still all I’ve got.

It’s going to take a hell of a lot of growth to get over that.

More after the break.

---

Failure to launch indeed

Gave masturbation a try.

As usual, it was a lot of fun, and it felt good to fire up my engines and run them for a bit. But sadly, as is alas also usual, I didn’t get anywhere near takeoff.

And that is always a bummer. I don’t know how it works for females of our species but for us men when we don’t get where we’re trying to go, we die a little inside.

What isn’t usual is that this time, that punctured finale came with a tidal surge of pure black depression. A wave of sadness flooded my mind and for around ten minutes I was feeling pretty bad.

The fact that I also developed a sick headache – the kind that comes with nausea – at almost the same time did not help at all.

But the depression came first. Pun intended, I guess.

That raises the stakes on my little erotic excursions considerably. Frustration is one thing – I have gotten somewhat used to that.

But being punished for my aborted orbital mission with black dog depression is a new wrinkle and one I very much wish to iron out.

Luckily, the flood waters receded after around ten minutes and I was left just feeling a little sick and a little bit, um, sore.

I pretty much have to completely abstain for weeks at a time in order to have any really good chance at reaching blastoff.

And way back when Paxil was pretty much completely nullifying my libido (the first few years after starting it) that was not a problem. Don’t want it, don’t get it, it’s all good.

The problem came when my libido returned but orgasm did not. Dammit.

I figure it must have something to do with the way Paxil dampens one’s emotions in general. That’s how it keeps people with social anxiety/Avoidant like myself from freaking out so much but it also keeps me from having other emotional extremes.

Jesus, what if the numbness I have been blaming on the depression has actually been the fault of my antidepressant?

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants?

Good thing Doctor Costin has me slowly reducing the dose then, I guess.

Sure would be nice to feel things strongly again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this whole idea of elevating your own mood.

The very concept of being able to do things that make you feel better for longer than the thing itself lasts is alien to my excessively introverted mind.

All I know how to do is keep my mind too stimulated and busy for me to be sad. While I am blogging or playing a video game, I’m not depressed and I don’t hate myself.

Maybe because I am actually using a substantial fraction of my energies by doing a task and that leaves precious little room for my dark ruminations.

Either way, I guess you could say I self-medicate with video games. And like all non-prescription ways of treating the chemical imbalance in the head of a depressive, it has become a paralyzing addiction.

Could be worse. I could have taken up drinking.

Anyhow, back to the supposed topic.

Of course, I know that other people do things to make themselves feel better all the time. It’s one of the most basic forms of taking care of your own mental health, Or, put less cerebrally, making life not suck so much.

So the fact that the concept is alien to me personally is just plain weird.

Somehow, my mental malfunctions make it seem beyond impossible for me to take responsibility for my own mood.

I guess I have deeply internalized the idea of my mood being a thing that fluctuates all on itself own, and all I can do is deal with wherever it goes.

Like it’s the weather.

To be honest I do not take responsibility for much in my life. I am stuck in that “helpless and hopeless” mode of just reacting to whatever happens to me (mostly nothing) and doing next to nothing to actually pilot my own vessel.

It scares me to even think of taking full responsibility for my own fate because that would me the horrible mess I have made of my life is all my fault and I don’t think I could survive the spike in self-hatred that would trigger.

I mean, obviously it’s my fault, or at the very least, my responsibility, because who else’s fault could it be?

I don’t even have a boss or a parent to influence and control me.

It’s all me, baby!

But knowing it’s my fault and actually taking on the responsibility for the sad state of my wasted fucking life are two radically different things.

They shouldn’t be, but they are.

I guess I’ve lived my life like I am a helpless leaf in the wind. Which must be a spiritual issues on some level. Some part of me is bone-chillingly scared of taking control and that’s why my strength and energy seem to just fade away when I try to get going.

I feel weak in spirit. Like my soul has a fatal flaw, or maybe just a terrible disease. Something at my core sinks me far faster than I can bail and swamps my boat any time I try to get anywhere.

If I could only plug that metaphorical leak, I might be able to get somewhere in life. But I am clinging to my current life with too much of a death-grip for that, I guess.

If only I didn’t feel so very alone all the time. If only I could make myself believe both that I can be helped and that help is available.

But that will take a lot more thawing out on my part.

And the ice gets denser and colder as I get closer to the heart of things.

But the fire is getting hotter too.

Spring WILL come.

More after the break.

---

The paralysis of helplessness

At some point, I guess I just kind of gave up on life.

Must have been when I was crawling out of that deep dark hole I fell into when I was in my early 20’s and my parents took me out of college and made me move back home.

The version of me that emerged from the rubble of that total breakdown was built to survive what was the current conditions at the time but nothing more.

So I can watch TV, play video games, and read, and keep myself from going utterly insane that way.

Those were the resources I had at my disposal back then.

Clearly I need to reconstitute myself again. Only hopefully without having a total nervous breakdown that leaves me malnourished and dehydrated and miserable on the couch for four months this time.

Although I dunno. Might be worth it.

I don’t think I could let myself completely fall apart again. I would be far too scared that I would not be able to put myself back together again.

But it may come to that anyway. I’ve spoken before in this spot about how the path to greater sanity might take me a lot closer to insanity than my current static safety system would normally allow, and that is why.

Sometimes the only way to remake yourself in the needed way is to first shatter yourself into a million pieces and make the new you out of those.

And I hate that idea. It seems like such a waste of existing human potential. And if that’s the only way to get better, the case for going on exactly right now gets much much stronger because at least I won’t get worse.

But I need to grow. I need to change. And that change may have to be radical, not incremental. At the very least, I may need to let go of everything I think I know about myself in order to make way for the new me to be born.

Death to the false self, and all that.

Too bad I am too old, sick, and poor to go backpacking across Europe or to go climb Machu Pichu or whatever.

That seems to be what other, healthier people do in order to “find themselves” and presumably build a solid foundation for their lives as adults.

I’ve built my house on shifting sands and then wondered why I am so unstable.

I have so much I have to unlearn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Starring Run DMC and Rock and Hyde!

Just kidding. It’s about being so damned avoidant.

I’ve been making little attempts to reverse that avoidance by deliberately forcing myself to stay with things that normally make me retreat or run away.

Like those five tabs for various ways that I might find remote work that have been taking up space in my browser forever.

And no wonder, when even looking at the tabs fills me with guilt and self-loathing that makes me immediately flee into some distraction or another to escape my own inner wrath and persecution.

Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem.

And because of the nature of this self-excoriation, I have of course been blaming myself for it and hating myself for being too weak to resist it and do the thing I want to and/or should do anyhow.

And that’s insane. It’s like an entirely internal version of a kind of prisoner’s syndrome, where the prisoner finds it far easier to blame themselves for the abuse they are suffering from their jailors than to blame the jailors themselves.

Because when you are truly beaten down, the idea of rebelling is far too scary to contemplate. Directing the anger towards the right target means confronting the very demons who control your life and have the power to punish you, or worse, even if that confrontation is entirely in your head.

It’s far easier to direct the blame inward.

And yes, this observation has vast political implications.

But I don’t want to go there right now.

So to free myself from this self-flagellating cycle of internalized abuse would require me to essentially confront my inner prosecutors and deny them their power and authority over me and reject their corrupt and sadistic rule.

Sounds good, right? But it’s a lot to ask of oneself.

Because the way down dirty truth of it is that even these demons of mine serve my real agenda, which is to give myself ample reason to continue to not grow up.

Without these tormentors, there would be nothing keeping me from finally growing and rising and becoming a genuine actual certified grownup, and deep down I am convinced that this means utter annihiliation somehow, so it must be avoided at all costs.

And boy are there a lot of costs.

It’s a crying shame to be so at war with one’s own growth. Cue my usual routine about how every time a butterfly is born, a caterpillar dies. With a fixed sense of self, any significant change really does seem like death because it does mean the death of ourselves as we currently conceive of ourselves.

But it is only the false self that dies. The true self can only die when we die. The real me – the person I have been since I was born, the one that has always answered to my name – is as green and eternal as the springtime.

And not just because my birthday is in May.

So I should let myself grow up already. Get the hell out of my own way, beat my inner prosecutor to death with a fucking shovel, and allow myself to soar up into the sky like the majestic fabulous scintillating wonder I am.

Emphasis on should. There’s a hell of a lot of things I should do and I never do them because of that avoidant shit I talked about in the beginning.

Clearly the fascist government within has to fall, and as to what will replace it, I guess we will just see what springs up when its gone.

Maybe then my long dormant seeds of adulthood will finally sprout and grow.

More after the break.

---

Coming out of hiding

One of the biggest struggles in my therapeutic journey is to overcome that urge to hide from everything and everyone.

I talked yesterday about how that came about. A childhood full of being resented just for being born, where it seemed like everyone was always at least a little angry with me, taught me that existing out loud meant danger and I was only truly, truly safe when I was alone in my room.

He typed while sitting alone in his room like usual. Sigh.

That brought up a rather large morsel of my loneliness and pain.

Good. The more of that shit I process, the better off I will be. It might not be fun while it’s happening – kind of feels like I swallowed a big lump of ice and it’s stuck right over my torn and tattered heart and melting very slowly – but when it’s gone, I will be all the lighter and happier for having rid myself of it.

Anyhow, where was I? Right, coming out of hiding.

It’s going to be very hard to convince myself that it’s safe to be seen. I have fled the light like a startled cockroach for my entire life.

In my early life, people meant danger. That is the brutal and terrible lesson etched deep into my soul starting from when I was raped and continuing all through school as I got bullied and neglected and socially ostracized.

All that did was drive me even further into myself. And along the way learn to remain retracted from reality into the comfortable confines of my own mind as much as I can.

The fact that school was easier than your average fuck for me did not help either. So much time spent just sitting there, bored out of my gourd because I had finished the school work in a couple of minutes while the rest of the students took twenty or more is absolutely staggering to think about.

Not to mention sitting through the teacher repeating everything so that it hopefully got through to even the slow kids.

Yeah, I know that, teach. I heard you the first time. I was right here.

So even while the teacher was teaching, I was mostly zoned out.

No wonder I grew up seeing my enormous IQ as a burden not a gift.

And I still kind of feel the same way. I mean, at the present moment, my prodigious intellect isn’t doing me much good.

Doesn’t matter how much brains you got if they’re all crazy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There has to be a comfortable middle gear between “ambitionless drifting” and “hating myself for being an ambitionless drifter”.

Once more I attack my crisis mentality. Like I’ve said before, I live my life like I’m in a fucking bomb shelter. As if there are hordes of radioactive mutant zombies hunting me and I can only stay “safe” by coming as close as I can to not existing at all.

Which doesn’t work, by the way. I spent my whole childhood doing that. On a deep level, I knew (without being able to articulate it) that everybody in my family seemed to be kind of mad at me all the time and that this anger could flare up at any second over practically anything that reminded people I was there, so my only “safety” (on the emotional level) was if nobody noticed me.

At the same time, I was desperate for attention. Starving for it, even. Kids need attention paid to them in order to feel validated and appreciated, and that does not change just because I was an unwanted kid.

I didn’t ask to be an odds-defying miracle baby. It’s not my fault that I was somehow conceived despite my mother having her tubes tied.

But you have to admit, that was a pretty neat trick.

Anyhow, my point – yes I have one – was to bring up the subject of this crisis mentality of mine. It’s this persistent notion that I am in terrible danger and that I really should be facing reality and getting on with life but I am not and that means I totally SUCK and am a LOSER etc. that I am hiding from when I play video games all day.

It’s a monster of my own devising, a mere sock puppet for my depression, but it’s kept me in check for 30 fucking years .

And I keep trying to address it. I tell myself that whether I am acting to better myself or just fucking around, it’s OK. I am okay. Whatever happens, it’s fine.

But that doesn’t work for me. And this is where all my frustrated energies and ambitions come into the picture.

Because of all that pent up life force and drive, I am restless and angry deep inside. There is that eternal spark deep inside me that I call my “pilot light” which on the one hand keeps me from surrendering to despair but on the other hand it makes me restless and hungry for stimulation all the time.

And that drive wants to DO THINGS. Important things. Meaningful things. Things that carry some goddamned weight in the real world.

Things that prove I am not completely worthless, a net drain on the world.

Because if I truly am a living liability, then the world would be better off without me.

And we don’t want to go there.

But that’s what my neglected and resented childhood taught me : that I made the world a worse place just by being born and that I was not welcome in this world and that the world would be a better place if I crawled off and died quietly somewhere.

And I know that’s all a lie produced by mental illness, but that’s my higher mind talking. The mind with all that intelligence and creativity and other flashy stuff.

The deeper self, the inner child, still carries the burden of all that neglect and resentment and still feels like I make life worse just by living, let alone taking up resources that should go to someone more worthwhile.

Defined as “literally anybody but me”.

That’s what fuels my endless self-persecution and it is that demon of self-loathing that I am fleeing by remaining buried in my distractions.

If I could only learn the love myself, that demon would die. I need to somehow give that deeper self permission to be alive, and the right to be loved and appreciated.

I still don’t feel welcome anywhere. Part of me is always ready to run and hide.

And that’s no good.

More after the break.

---

The storm is over

The storm is over
The war has ended
The wolves have stopped howling
And can now be befriended

The demons were banished
The ghosts are asleep
The enemy vanished
With nary a peep

The party concluded
The guests all went home
The house is vacated
And I am alone

Everything’s peaceful
Nothing to escape
I have nothing but freedom
So why don’t I feel safe?

---

I feel better now

There, I finally wrote some decent poetry. I feel better now.

And to answer my final question there, I don’t think I know how to feel safe. I have been in this state of cowering and cringing for as long as I can remember.

I know that I was a happy kid before the rape. I was bright and cute and effortlessly charming and therefore had a tendency to be the center of attention wherever I went and led quite a happy life.

But it’s hard for me to remember that. Not just because it all took place before I was 4 years of age, but because it’s kind of painful to remember what I lost.

To imagine the shining innocence that was shredded and scattered to the wind by my rapist, forever shattering my consciousness and turning me from that bright and shining kid into the fragile nervous wreck you know and love hurts like a bitch.

Like I like to say, I lost my innocence so young I don’t remember it.

But that’s not true. I do remember it. I remember what it was like to feel warm and loved and connected to the world.

And as much as it burns to think about it now, I have to make myself do it, because that’ where the uncorrupted copy of my personality lies dormant and if I am to become even a shadow of the person I was supposed to be, I will have to restore from backup.

No matter how old a backup it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I voted in the provincial election today.

And for once, my voting was fully informed.

You see, one of the local papers (I want to say… the Vancouver Sun?) put out a very excellent article containing a one paragraph summary of the three major parties positions on 15 key issues.

That’s 45 paragraphs total. It was quite a detailed read.

And I love, love, love that the fucking BC Liberals were not included in that article because they are just plain not a major party any more.

For decades, they were the center-right party in BC. But over the years they drifted increasingly to the right, no doubt due to the influence of the by the cunts, for the cunts right wing lunatics from down south.

Come on, join the driveling lunacy! It’s fun! You get to be all mad and stuff! And you get to say just the absolute worst things you can think of and get patted on the back and told you’re a patriot and a good Christian for it!

Every day, I wake up and ask myself – who would Jesus hate?

Ahem. Now where was I?

Oh right, the BC Liberals. As they drank gallons of the lunatic right’s Kool-Aid, they basically became the new Conservative party, leaving the actual provincial Conservatives with nothing to campaign on except, “What they said. Only meaner. ”

Remember, modern conservatism is always, at its heart, bullying.

As they became all things to no people, they lost their entire raison d’etre and failed in their important role of letting conservative yuppies pretend they have not sold out.

So they had their Election of Doom, where nobody fucking voted for them. And the already heavily left coast province I live in officially shifted to the left.

Now the three major parties are the mainstream left party, the BC NDP, and the further left people, the Green Party, and the surprisingly scrappy BC Conservatives, who have now cornered the market on frothing lunacy.

If I was them, I’d sell, because that brand of conservatism is dying fast as the actual non-yahoo conservatives remember that they want sane, sensible, responsible government and the frothy types alienate the entire modern movable middle by behaving like people no decent person would want to be associated with.

And the sub-lunatic right absolutely must think of themselves as decent people. Solid. Respectable. Reliable. The “right” kind of person.

And the right kind of people don’t take a shit in Congress.

Well, not in any but the most metaphorical sense, anyhow.

So… I voted. Right… that’s what I was talking about.

And I was able to vote over the phone, which was awesome. I had no faith that wherever our polling place was would have a distance between parking lot and voting booth that I could handle.

And of course, I would have had to wait in line, which is impossible for me.

So I did it over the phone. And there was a bit of a struggle because the first lady I talked to both had a fairly think East Indian accent and I had to strain to hear her over the usual cacophony of a call center.

There has to be a way to design one of those so that the conversations do not overlap so much. But I suppose that would cost more money.

Anyhow, so she got the usual deets – name, birthday, address, oh and the ID number on my “driver’s license”, AKA my BC ID.

She also got me to verbally certify that I did, indeed, have a disability or medical condition that kept me from being able to vote in person

As opposed to just being too fucking lazy, which is not a disability. Yet.

I actually had to do that three times. I guess they want to be absolutely sure. Then a different lady read the names of the candidates to me, I told her my vote (BC NDP), then a third lady came on the line to verify that this was, indeed. my vote before she cast my ballot for me.

And then we were done!

More after the break.

---

Sometimes there’s pain

Sometimes, my rock-strewn path to victory involves a lot of pain.

Growth often does. Rebirth doubly so. And I feel like I am working up/towards a very painful and bloody rebirth indeed.

Real change has to hurt. Not for some “you need to earn it!” punitive ethos, but because the hardest thing to change is yourself because it involves changing the very foundation of what and who you are and how you see the world and experience life.

That foundation is you.

In case I hadn’t made that clear.

So to change that requires something akin to performing surgery on yourself. The thing doing the cutting is itself part of what’s being cut. And odds are the existing structure of your psyche, however dysfunctional, will violently resist this change via the mechanisms that keep our minds intact and stable in the first place.

And that’s where the pain comes in. The existing structure of the mind is saying, “Ouch!” in very clear and unambiguous language.

Pain is nature’s way of saying, “Hey! Don’t do that!”

But I don’t care about the pain. It’s not like it would be keeping me from doing anything important. If it means I have to lie in bed and work my way through the suffering involved in getting rid of the bad and letting in the good, so be it.

Sometimes it does feel like surgery without anesthetic. Other times it feels more like dialysis. Like my mind is slowly clearing out toxins that have been in my bloodstream for so long that my body thinks it’s normal for them to be there.

The simplest definition of “normal”, after all, is “what you’re used to”.

Other times there’s a kind of thrill to it, or even a sense of adventure. Things are changing and growing and getting better, and it’s all so terribly exciting.

Wish it was like that more often, to be honest.

Well, maybe I will be strong enough for that some day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow;

Sadness : I woke up sick today.

And that’s never fun. I knew I was sick before I even opened my eyes. My head hurt, my nose was running, my throat was scratchy and raw, and so were my lungs.

Oh, and my muscles ached.

Of course. That’s what they do.

So no Wound Care or shower for me today, and that always leaves me sad. I didn’t want to stay home. I’ve come to enjoy my busy Fridays, what with Wound Care and showering at Rosewood and ordering my groceries.

Like I always say, I am happiest when I am busy. Which is why I favour video games that can absorb my entire attention.

Like the open world richly detailed RPGs I clearly favour. Ones with lots of quests to do and a deep storyline to become absorbed in.

Imagine what I could accomplish if I could bring that kind of concentration and energy and drive to something that is actually productive.

I need a video game that submits my writing to agencies when I level up. Or something.

Or to somehow convince myself to treat life like a game instead of taking everything so seriously that I am paralyzed by indecision.

Something along those lines, anyhow.

I did get my grocery “shopping” done. That, thank goodness, is something I can still do even when I am sick.

But I hit a frustrating but not entirely unfamiliar roadblock : when I went to pay for my purchases, DoorDash said insufficient funds.

And I was like, bullshit, I have at least 65 bucks on the card and my total is around 62 so I should be in the clear.

But the credit card companies pull this shit on me sometimes. It’s like the last $10 in my account are held in reserve or some shit, so I can’t spend it.

So I went from feeling all smooth and confident because of how well I had piloted my tiny little financial boat through the waters of a five week FUCKING month to being super irritated at having to take things OUT of my virtual shopping cart until it believes I have enough to pay for them.

Very annoying, and a little insulting. The result is that I may run out of a few things before the end of the week and have to hope my rapidly dwindling cash supply can cover Julian going to pick me up a few things.

Poverty never runs out of fresh indignities. Nor does disability.

And I deserve more than this sad little life of mine. I need more money, obviously, in order to make me feel empowered to truly be part of the civilized world instead of limping along near the bottom of the heap.

But I also need some form of employment. I mean, if someone offered to just bankroll me into the middle class I wouldn’t turn it down, but it would be far better for me to get a job using my outrageous talents to make wonderful things.

And maybe even make the world a better place. Who knows.

I still haven’t found my good webcam. I am starting to think it’s gone forever, which means I will have to buy a new one.

That would make the old one show up. But the joke would be on them because my computer can totally handle input from more than one webcam at a time.

Then I could record myself from two angles and be able to cut to the side angle when editing in order to create visual interest in my talking head videos.

The one I can’t find is so damned good, though. Excellent audio, crystal clear video that runs smooth as glass, gets along with my video editing program.

I guess I am going to have to just keep cleaning till I find the fucking thing.

Somehow, I will survive.

More after the break.

---

This made me LOL more than once.

I wish I could embed Instagram clips like I do with YouTube clips.

There’s probably a widget for WordPress that does it but I am too lazy to go look right now, so meh.

Oh, and there’s this, because sometimes Jim Carrey is actually awesome.

That’s the mode he’s in lately, and I must say, I really like it.

I hope being really raw and honest doesn’t go out of style any time soon.

Because I’m good at that.

Oh, and because I must do things in threes :

Our new fave kittycat song!

It’s clearly made with love and care and that means a lot to me.

Being funny is serious business!

---

The other end

Well, here I am at the other end of another day.

I feel better than I did this morning. That awful feeling of malaise is gone and the headache is mostly gone, as is the raw feeling in my throat and lungs.

I kind of feel like I am waiting to be reborn. And that maybe I have been waiting for that for a really long time.

Since I was 4, in fact.

I’d like to be able to believe that the last 30 years of my life were not a waste of time but a long and necessary developmental stage, like it was 30 years in a cocoon.

That’s the most positive spin I can think of for all the time I have spent hidden from the world entertaining myself instead of living life.

And it’s not like I’ve been dead or asleep. I might be stuck in my emotional infancy but I have continued to absorb new info and digest it and add it to my mental model of reality and think and connect and deduce and observe.

So I may not have grown up but I have become deeper and wiser and smarter over the years. I have developed an unprecedented level of insight and a certain kind of secular spirituality that the world desperately needs, and maybe none of that would have been possible for me if I’d had a normal life.

A lot of poets and ideologues and visionaries had weird lives.

Maybe I’m no different from that.

Maybe I’m the good kind of special after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wonder if I could cynically pedal my most cynical and bitter observations as an antidote to corporate indoctrination to the young people of today.

It worked for George Carlin, after all. He spoke the hard and bitter truth to people and now he’s a saint to the young and idealistic.

Especially now that he’s dead, and can’t fuck up his legacy by turning anti-trans.

That would have been a bitter betrayal of his 70’s roots.

And maybe I could take his place as the bitter, angry guy who speaks truths that people don’t want to hear but need to hear. Truths that both set you free and piss you off. Truths that only a Gen X guru like me can discern and then share with those of later generations who are too idealistic and/or indoctrinated to see.

Because it’s occurred to me that the later generations did not have the benefit of Generation X’s thick layers of sales resistance and carefully cultured precision apathy to protect them from all the hypnotic noise the corporate media produces.

I think I could be, as Scott Adams used to say, a “ray of bitter sunshine” to them.

I could speak unto them about our delusions of democracy, the coming environmental apocalypse, the idea that nobody who is employed is truly free, the people who own you and are perfectly willing to sacrifice you for their profit, the futility of modern education, and lots of other dark, harsh things.

All true, and a clarion call to get pissed off and demand change.

Yeah, I could do that.

I wouldn’t want to get trapped in an angry persona. But I suppose I could do it if the money was good.

I’d love to get on that ever so profitable public speaking circuit. Get paid to come and talk to rooms full of people who paid to hear you in person.

I would enjoy that very much.

I will think about it.

---

The strangest feeling just washed over me.

It felt like someone dumped a bucket of ice water over my head and now I feel bizarrely cold and disjointed.

Honestly, I should probably quit typing and go lay down.

But not before I make my words.

The coldness is only on the surface. Only my skin feels cold. The rest of me is as hot as ever. And that is pretty weird too.

Plus I have a nauseous headache. Hopefully that’s just sinus pressure and cleaning out my ears will help with that.

As for the rest of it, though, I dunno. It doesn’t fit the profile of any kind of attack I am aware of, although I suppose it could be some sort of circulatory issue.

One that interferes with the blood reaching my skin alone

That doesn’t sound right, does it?

Could be neurological too. Though it seems too widespread for that. It’s not like there’s one nerve bundle that goes through all your skin.

I wonder where the tactile nexus for the brain is?

Regardless of cause, I feel unwell. And I was feeling pretty good up until that point. Now I am both nauseous and falling asleep, which is a bad combination.

Good thing I never sleep on my back. Nobody wants to die from aspirated vomit.

I will probably be just fine. None of this is new to me except its sudden onset. Well, and the weird chill that came with it.

---

Just had to make a run to the bathroom. Emphasis on had to. Apparently the contents of my lower intestines got liquified somehow.

I don’t fucking know WTF. I rarely do. All I can do is lay down and possibly take a nap and hope whatever this is passes through and out of me soon.

Maybe when I wake up, I will tell you all how therapy went today.

Why is my life like this?

More after the break.

---

Therapy post mortem

Well, post session, anyhow.

I’m pretty sure I’m not dead.

Today’s session went quite well. I was in a pretty good mood and I managed to spool out quite a bit of what my brain has been up to lately.

I told him about realizing that I have been helplessly crouched down with my back to the world silently waiting for the nightmare to end for my whole life.

Ever since that was my escape from the world when I was being raped at the age of 4.

And that’s been my response to stress ever since then. At the slightest hint of something I don’t feel like I can handle, I turtle up and withdraw from reality and keep withdrawing until I’m not scared any more, basically.

Hence my being so deeply withdrawn from reality. Ever time I feel overwhelmed I go deeper in, and I only come back very, very slowly and cautiously.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before, but that’s no way to live.

Talking about this has me quite verklempt. That’s a good sign.

I also told him, in very general terms, about how I went back on VRchat recently and made an attempt to socialize.

It’s so much harder in realtime voice. In text, I don’t have to fight to be heard and I can always get everything out because nobody can interrupt me.

I had actually forgotten the feeling of being small and ignored and powerless that I used to feel at the dinner table when I was a kid.

But I will return to the chat, this time after taking a Xanax to make my social anxiety more manageable so I can get me some sweet, sweet positive human interaction.

While pretending to be some kind of furry critter.

I was a super adorable otter with glasses for a while then, after forgetting how I found Mister Otta, I eventually found a very cute cartoon grey wolf form.

Once I figure out more of how everything works, I will go looking for a fox avatar.

Overall it was a pretty good social exposure exercise. I am glad I did it. I had some fun even if I could not really get into any of the conversations.

I am confident that I will get there. I’m a bright, funny, charming, charismatic dude when I can get out of my own way.

And when in doubt, I just need to remember that I am Fruvous and he is me.

And we are fabulous.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m such a strange critter.

Both unworldly and otherworldly and more than passing strange, I’ve always been both alien and alienated. Never really fitting in anywhere and hence forced to be a kind of world unto myself most of the time.

To the point where I worry that I can’t actually get any closer to people at all. That the fortress I build to keep the world at bay when I was raped as a toddler cannot, in fact, open its doors to the world or anyone in it and ergo I am forever doomed to be the sort of weirdo that uses the word “ergo” in casual conversation.

Which is what this is, I suppose. It certainly isn’t formal.

I am a naturally informal kind of dude.

I know that I have the potential to be different. I feel like if I had not had my world shattered by a stranger’s penis as a small child, I would have grown up to be a highly social and gregarious person with a wide group of friends and, to be honest, probably a pretty colorful love life.

I’d have made a heck of a good salesman as long as I was not expected to do the “hard sell” at all.

Where I come from, that shit does not fly, nor would it with I.

But as has always been the case with me, the potential is unquestionable. I have always had enormous reservoirs of untapped potential on so very many levels. Intellectual, creative, personal, performative, you name it.

Well, maybe not athletic.

The question is whether or not I can actually tap into all that potential, and at this point in life, it is looking like the answer is no.

Not by myself, anyhow. And yet I lack the capacity to obtain the sort of help I would need either. So the answer really is no.

For now, at least. I continue to hack away at the rock hard ice crystal, clear as glass, that encases my heart, and every day I get a little closer to being able to feel the light and love of the world on my cold and fractured soul.

But part of that liberation process is venting all the bad stuff. It’s like I have to let the bad stuff out in order to let the good stuff in, which I guess makes sense.

Metaphorically speaking, at least.

And I gave so much that needs to come out, and doing it through words like this is, quite frankly, doing it the hard way, but it’s the only way I have.

I have a thousand winters’ worth of frigid, rigid, uncompromising and unpromising solitude to overcome and I don’t even know where to start.

Once again I bemoan my lack of a capacity for transformation. All I can do is keep beavering away in hopes that some day I will reach some spiritual tipping point and things will finally slide into place.

Because if this slow, incremental progress is all I can ever hope for, I am not at all hopeful about living long enough to taste sanity.

And in all of this, I feel very very much alone. I know that is not technically true in any literal, objective sense, but it’s emotionally true for me nevertheless.

And it’s all because of that wall I put up 47 years ago to keep the evil world out when I was being violated in a way I couldn’t even understand let alone put into words.

People can’t really get close to me and I can’t get close to them either.

This fucking wall of mine gets in the way.

And it’s taking a long ol’ time to tear it down.

More after the break.

---

Pity the sleepwalker

Pity the sleepwalker
who cannot rest
and cannot wake

Who wanders eternally
through endless doorless halls
bumping into walls
taking enormous falls

as lost as a cloud in fog

---

I swear I had a lot more to add to that ten minutes ago.

Anyhow, my point is, I am feeling half-asleep and lost at sea. All alone in this world due to that stupid wall in my head that keeps me from feeling almost everything.

All that’s left of me is a very childlike consciousness that is utterly innocent of this world because he’s spent so little time in it.

I see so much but have done so little.

It’s almost obscene, really. To have someone who has developed so massively in one way – intellectually – but has nothing but a palsied and feeble soul to steer it with.

No wonder I often feel like I am not really here. Like I have said here before, it feels like either I am not real, or the world isn’t, and my unreality is far less scary.

I’d rather be a ghost in a world of men than a man in a world of ghosts.

And I know the problem is me either way. Something deep and terrible is broken inside me and it’s left me in this absurd position of being a wounded wizard with vast cosmic powers at my command but too weak a will to use them.

I feel so sick sometimes. Like I’ve been poisoned and it’s made everything in me toxic and all I can do is bide my time until the toxin passes from me naturally.

And I feel so weak. Like I have a bad case of detached id. At some level, the body and mind and soul need to be able to either generate all their own energies or be able to open up to take in the energies of the world and all that’s in it.

Somehow, there needs to be more. But I feel so feeble and helpless. Like I’m a turtle on its back, or a child trying to climb up on something but it’s just too tall.

Or like I am trying to grab on to something but I just can’t quite reach it.

Maybe it’s an emotional problem. Maybe it’s physical. Maybe it’s spiritual.

It’s probably all three, to be honest.

And I don’t know where to find the strength to rise.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

WARNING : This is going to get pretty dark.

Time for one of my “well, duh!” revelations : I can alter my own mood. I can do things to make myself feel better. I can cheer myself up.

At least in theory.

I’ve been living my life like I have no control over anything. My compulsive video game playing stems from that sense of helplessness. On some deep and terrible level, I decided a very long time ago that I have absolutely no power to make my life better whatsoever so all I can do is cling to my distractions and use them to hide from the world and pretend like I’m some kind of person.

Even though I don’t feel like one most of the time.

In my life – especially my early life – I’ve never had much power to do stuff, or so my depressed and febrile mind told me.

I mean, sure, I didn’t have much money as a kid but that didn’t keep me from taking a walk or a ride on my bike. There was a lot of things in my world that might have made me feel better, but they all involved going out of the house and being “exposed” and my extreme agoraphobia wouldn’t allow that.

So TV was my friend. And tutor, and life coach, and surrogate family.

At least the Huxtables and the Keatons and the gang at Cheers had time for me. They made room for me at the table. I didn’t feel like they wished I wasn’t there.

Sure, I couldn’t converse with them, but I was used to that from my real family.

But here’s the real dark and dirty underbelly of my passivity : what other thing happened to me where I was absolutely helpless and all I could do was burrow deep into my mind and wait for it to be over?

Yup. When I was raped at the tender age of 4.

And I have been cringing and flinching and cowering away from that big bad world that hurt me in such a terrible way when I was barely up off the ground ever since.

That’s how I respond to fear and stress. I curl up into a ball and play video games until it is over. Like I have no power at all.

Because I didn’t, back then.

And that’s why so much of me is asleep. And I don’t mean asleep like a kitten napping…

No, I’m talking about the “my hand is asleep” kind of sleep. The kind that is fundamentally alarming because our bodies know what sensations should be coming in and panic occurs when those inputs are not there.

I only noticed recently how much my attempts to rouse and motivate myself runs smack dab into this “asleep” feeling, like pins and needles of the mind.

And I feel now that I am conscious of this, it adds a new dimension to my internal struggles. I feel like this cuts my problem down to size and gives me a fairly basic target for my efforts.

I have to wake myself the fuck up, pronto.

But that deep part of me doesn’t want to wake up. It feels that waking up can only lead to pain and horror and violation. It’s been hiding out deep inside me and keeping me in this semi-comatose state specifically to avoid the monster that is the real world.

And I am not going to get better until I convince that shattered child deep inside me that it’s safe to come out now.

I mean, it is. Safe, that is.

But can you blame him for not believing it?

More after the break.

---

Why is it called “root beer”? What root tastes like that?

Maybe it’s the beer that roots drink.

---

My cower power

It’s strange to imagine that I have been internally cringing for my entire life.

But it makes sense. My trauma response was to withdraw from reality to a frightening degree and abandon or circumscribe any thoughts, ideas, or emotions that would lead to greater commitment to the real world.

Only my interior world was “safe”. Reality was at all times to be brutally minimized. Hence my long term unhealthily intimate relationship with screens.

Put your ass in front of a screen and it becomes your reality. A safe, comforting, enclosed reality that I control and that begs me to lose myself in it.

Because when you lose yourself, you don’t have to be yourself.

And I don’t like being myself.

That’s the brutal tragedy of it all. Deep down, I can’t stand being me, or rather, the person I have become. I have yet to fully tame the wild hurricanes of self-loathing and the whirlwinds of self-negation and the thunderbolts of searing self-judgment.

Hmm. Air imagery. Interesting.

And the thing is, I know that I have absolutely no sane reason to hate myself. By all external measures, I’m an amazing dude, at least in potential.

I have so much intelligence and insight and creativity to share with the world, as well as being a really nice guy when you get to know me.

Oh, and I’m funny AF.

The main weapon my self-hate uses to torment me is everything that falls under the category of being a “loser”.

Never had a job, a boyfriend, been self-sufficient, yada yada yada.

But like I was talking about yesterday, that requires that I judge myself by the standards of normal, healthy people who did not have to practically reconstruct themselves from nothing after a total nervous breakdown in their early 20s.

But that’s not fair and it’s not right. I’ve been very ill. I still am. All I can do is fumble my way towards greater mental health the best that I can.

What I really need is extensive psychotherapy, perhaps in an institutional setting.

Or a really good job I can do remotely. Something that I could take pride in.

There are so many wonderful things I could be doing.

But I have to build my own road to get there.

And I don’t even own a bulldozer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what this auto-therapeutic journaling journey feels like sometimes.

The image I have used before, though grisly, still applies : it feels like I am a soldier with a gut full of shrapnel who is forced by circumstances to remove it all himself.

And every little piece of jagged metal removed does make me feel better, and enables my mind to heal itself just a little bit more, but there are moments when I nevertheless want to give up and just die quietly rather than keep doing it.

But I soldier on, as I must. True despair is alien to me. I have to keep moving. That stubborn unquenchable spark that acts as my pilot light will allow no less.

So I am restless. I have always craved mental stimulation in large quantities and of course, that’s something that my life of video games and the internet can deliver.

It’s things like purpose, direction, a sense of accomplishment, things to be proud of, a position in the community, or even some good ol fashioned fucking it can’t do.

Well, it can probably do that last thing via hookup apps, but meh.

Of course, when I speak of “it” I really mean “me”. I can’t provide those things for myself because I am still too dang crazy. I can’t stand the thought of stepping away from my entombment in games and YouTube for even a short period of time.

And maybe that’s the problem : thinking about it. I know that my mind is extremely unreliable when it comes to predicting how much something is going to suck and I have no reason to think it’s any more right about this than anything else.

Maybe that’s just the little fear that covers up a much bigger fear of the real world, then.

It’s that “failure to launch” thing again. Somehow, my fellow flightless birds and I become convinced that we cannot handle the real world and that if we were ejected into it by circumstances, we would die. It would destroy us.

But is that just a symptom of a fixed sense of self? To the caterpillar, the transformation into a butterfly might well seem like dying, and worse, being replaced by something entirely new and alien to its current form.

But that’s a word for that : maturation. Growing up. Our entire journey from conception to adulthood is one long radical transformation from zygote to taxpayer.

And yet we have no doubt that we are the same person all the way through.

Why is that, do you think?

And what happened to my unfeathered cohort and I along the way that interrupted that process and left us stranded on the precipice of maturity convinced that if we make that leap we will not fly, we will die?

Perhaps what the vast majority of humanity has that we don’t is full and unconscious access to their instincts and drives. They don’t question why they would do what their developmental programming tells them to do, they just do it.

But I’ve always wanted to know why, and rejected anything whose justification I could not see. And I think that is ultimately what has doomed me.

Sometimes if feels like I am under the influence of a powerful magic spell that keeps me in a trance and compels me to live as I live and do as I do.

And of course, the person casting the spell is also me.

Perhaps I have hypnotized myself into hypnotizing myself. Spooky!

But the truth is that I am terrified of what happens when this spell ends and I have to wake up and face reality.

It all seems so frighteningly intense and overwhelming and “real”.

I can’t imagine how I could possibly handle all that.

Not without someone to hold my hand and help me stay calm and centered and confident. Someone who can catch me if I fall and support me if I stumble and guide me when I once more get lost in the dark.

What I really need is a grownup.

This is what happens when you end up raising yourself.

More after the break.

---

All about brains

OK, hear me out.

We all agree that we only have one brain, right?

And yet, if someone is killed via a gunshot wound to the head, we say it “blew their brains out”, not their brain.

Does injury somehow make the brain plural?

---

My favorite aunty

Aunty Histamine, that is.

I really need to get back on the antihistamines. Not only do they keep the sniffles and sneezes at bay, they block all my other allergy symptoms too, like sinus headaches, itchy palate, and a general inflammatory feeling throughout my body, sometimes accompanied by muscle aches.

Just another day in the life of a gimp.

Which reminds me : I think I have fallen back into the habit of judging myself like a normal person again.

Hence thinking of myself as a “loser” with all that entails.

There’s some truth to that. I have lost out on life, that’s for sure. I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and so forth.

But it’s not my fault. I’ve been quite ill. Mentally and, increasingly, physically.

And, arguably, the system hasn’t been all that successful in treating me. I talk to Doctor Costin once a week, and that helps, but I have him more or less cowed now so mostly he just listens to me drone on and on for 50 minutes.

And that does help but it doesn’t get me closer to sane.

It’s mostly been up to me. Hence this journal of mine. The whole point of this daily practice of mine is to remove that shrapnel I mentioned in part 1 and slowly work my way towards a normal life.

What I could really use is a therapist with balls of steel who maybe doesn’t like me that much and so is willing to push me and prod me and challenge me in order to force me to grow and mature.

Or maybe all I really need is a nice long cuddle. I don’t know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.