It’s not easy.

I still don’t see a way to overcome that enormous mass of guilt and regret and bad social programming that surround the topic of my life and how it’s turned out.

Again and again, I return to the idea that if I wasn’t so “stable”, I might have fallen apart a long time ago and then actually gotten some proper help way back when I was young and it was not too late for me to get my life moving once I recovered.

But no, I am way too good for my own good at clinging like a barnacle to my dirty little grotto here and making sure absolutely nothing changes.

The games I’m playing change, but the wasting of my time on Earth remains the same.

And of course, I don’t attract nurturing and care because when I am around others, I act as if everything is peachy keen OK.

Even around my GP, for fuck’s sake.

And the truly sick part is that doing that makes me feel like everything is OK too. Kinda.

Dozens of times in my life, someone has asked me how I am or how I am doing and I want to be honest with them and tell them the truth but in that moment, every problem I have suddenly becomes too trivial to mention and I instead tell them I am fine.

That’s what they want to hear, anyhow. Nobody wants me to tell them the truth and dump all my problems and issues and bad bad programming on them.

I have at least finally gotten to the point where when my therapist Doctor Costin asks me how I am at the beginning of a session, I say I am “surviving”.

That’s still technically a positive answer but one that conveys a little taste of my unhappy and difficult life. Makes me at least a little vulnerable.

Mind you, this is my therapist we’re talking about here. In theory, he should be the person I am completely candid and unguarded with.

But the best I can do is not be cheerful with him, and to do my best to tell him about whatever “stuff” is going through my head that day, and try to get some relief that way.

And it does help. Having someone to talk to like that, where I am not worried about the consequences of what I say to them, is very valuable to me.

But I can’t help but wonder if I would do better with a younger, more energetic and ambitious therapist who was determined to get to the heart of my problems and who pushed me and pressed and asked all the right questions to get my emotions flowing.

I mean, clearly, what I am doing now ain’t working. I get relief in the form of emotional release from Doctor Costin but I am not getting any better via him either.

To be honest, I think I have him cowed. I have, unwittingly, convinced him that all he can do is listen to me go on and on because if he tries to get me to actually do stuff, I more or less “bite his head off” with my advanced communication skills.

And I don’t blame him for not being able to handle that kind of thing in me. As patients go, I am beyond hard to deal with, and I doubt many therapists would have the combination of toughness, intellect, and persistence to get through to me and actually make me see things in a new light.

And the man’s in his seventies. He doesn’t stand a chance. Nobody does.

And that, in turn, makes me realize just how alone I am in the world. How alone I have always been. It’s lonely as hell at the top of the intellectual food chain. Knowing that nobody out there can “handle” even a tenth of the real me makes me feel lonely and abandoned and helpless before my problems.

I can’t face my demons alone. But there’s nobody in this world who would be able to survive the radioactive atmosphere inside my mind long enough to help me.

So I will always be fighting alone. I have trouble even imagining what it would be like to have someone in my life who could truly join me in the fight.

I have my friends, and I adore them and treasure them and know that I would be a hell of a lot more crazy without them in my life.

But still, I fight my war all alone.

It’s all I can ever do.

More after the break.

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Alone in a crowd

Of course, the main reason I fight alone is because I don’t know how to let people into my inner world. That invisible wall of mine keeps everyone out and I have grave doubts about my ability to change that,

When you have had a mental defense up for your entire life, including some of your formative pre-school years, it arguably becomes an integral part of you that you can no more lower than you can open up your skin.

But that’s just plain unacceptable. I know in my soul that the warmth and acceptance and cherishing and love that I have craved for my entire life is out there beyond my wall and I will only get to have it if I learn to let it in.

That would require negotiating with that ancient part of me that was formed while I was being raped and that is quite sure it’s the only thing keeping me “safe” all these years.

Like I have said before, I don’t know how to convince it that everything is fine now and it can finally rest and relax and let my emotions flow clearly and naturally instead of forcing me to try to force myself into one mould or another.

I cannot make myself into someone I am not by sheer force of will.

It can’t happen. People don’t work like that. All I am doing is harming myself by trying to cram myself into absurdly irrational pre-ordained spaces which were conceived of when I was just a child and which therefore are far, far too small and limiting for me.

You have to know who you are before you can become who you want to be.

Until then, I will try letting it all hang out and thereby get some idea of who I really am when I am not trying to make myself into someone else.

The real me is a pretty amazing guy, all things considered.

I should get to know him better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It might be more than I can put into words.

I mean, how do you put the pain of being raped when you were 4 years old into words 47 years later? It’s the defining event of my life but despite the millions of words I have written in this space, I can’t possibly do it justice.

But I have to keep trying. Especially now that I know just how big the cost of keeping it suppressed has been. It feels like at least a third of me and all I could be are locked away with all that silent suffering, and I want that part of me back.

No wonder I have been an emotional cripple for so long. Able to make it through the day without too much pain and suffering, and that’s it. Helpless to help myself, doomed to at best tread water till the day I finally give up and drown in a pool of unshed tears.

How could nobody have noticed the drastic change in who I was and how I acted back then? Because I know I was but a ghost of my former self. I went from being a happy, precocious little charmer to being shy and scared and timid and hesitant.

The experience shattered me and nobody even noticed. Sigh.

I guess they didn’t want to know. They wanted to keep believing I was okay without ever checking to make sure I was because the real goal was to forget I was even there.

And I tried not to be. But try as I might, I just kept on existing.

How thoughtless and inconsiderate of me. I hadn’t even been invited into this world in the first place. I just barged into my family’s lives and then dared to have needs that seriously inconvenienced all around me.

And years later I was still there. Appalling.

No wonder I am plagued by the idea that everyone would be better off without me. That’s the exact message I got all through my childhood. It was the unwritten rule of my entire existence and it continued to crush me to this very day.

I can tell myself how unfair that was, and how I was a great kid who deserved so ,much better than what I got, and so forth and so on, and I can even make myself believe it for a little while.

But my unwelcome nature is bred into every joint and sinew of my existence. It was a message I got from birth and that’s not the kind of thing you can just shrug off.

Especially when I have done so little with myself. I have very little evidence to offer to prove that I actually do deserve to be alive and to take up space.

Just all that “potential” that I’ve never gotten to use.

I could do amazing things if I just had a mentor who could provide the kind of structure and goals I need to keep me motivated.

I’m too weak to create that for myself. On my own, I am limp and diffuse and vacillating and bereft of even the most basic level of motive force.

Abd that’s no accident. I think a major part of my retreat from reality has been to let reality become all foggy and misty and blurry in order to hide my pain from myself so I can keep going.

I would be a hell of a lot healthier if I wasn’t so good at suppressing things.

But I suppose that’s true for everybody.

Conversely to my “blurring”, I think the main thing keeping me from “getting my shit together” is that if I did so, I would have to deal with all that pain inside me, which would suddenly become all too real.

That’s why I have to take things so damned slow. If I go any faster, I will have to deal with all that pain.

The best that I can do is feel it a little at a time, all the time.

And that’s taking forever.

And I haven’t that much longer to live.

Guess I’ll just die, then.

More after the break.

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Fruvous in love

I’ve tried to imagine what that would be like.

As you know, I’ve never been. Everything I know about romantic love, I learned from TV.

I can imagine what early infatuation is like, at least. That, I have experienced a little, in furry virtual sense.

Most recently with Luke. But like always, I moved far too slow, and now someone else has his love, and I never see him any more.

I need to either become more forward when it comes to romance, or at least fall for someone who is.

Anyhow. Me in love.

It’s both easy to imagine and not. I can fantasize about being really into someone whom I think is wonderful and sexy and smart and all the things I want in a man. I can imagine showering him with affection in my effusive way and making sure he knows how much I love and treasure and desire him. I can imagine talking into the wee hours of the morning with such a man.

But that’s about where it stops. Because sooner or later, the infatuation fades, and reality returns, and…. they’re still there.

And I need my alone time. I need a lot of it, actually. I’m an introvert, after all, albeit one with some extroverted tendencies.

Well, nobody is ever all one thing, am I right?

So in a way, I can imagine myself dating someone a couple of times a week, but I have no idea where it would go from there.

I know I will want to get closer to him. But that doesn’t mean I can.

I know from self-exploration that I have some extremely heavy duty psychological defenses that nobody knows about because they’ve never been activated.

And that’s because I have never gotten all that close with anyone.

But I can easily see getting some poor dude caught up in my emotional volatility and ending up hurting him by, essentially, being a crazy bitch.

And I would hate that. I hate people like that. Have some restraint.

And my God, what if they blamed themselves?

That’s too horrifying to contemplate. I wish I hadn’t thought of it.

I guess I won’t know what a Fruvous in love is really like until it happens.

And God knows how that would ever come about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Haven’t talked about my smooth façade lately. So let’s do it.

What sparked this was a YouTube comment I left recently where, in my usual rambling (but entertaining) manner, I stumbled into talking about how I have all these problems and life has totally passed me by because of them, and yet, I never let my illness show when I am around others.

Around other people, I snap on my smooth façade , and for the most part, I seem calm, relaxed, confident, friendly, and affable.

And that makes sense around strangers. They don’t need to know how fucked up on the inside I am. But I am this way around my close friends too.

And they know better than anyone else in this dimension how weak and confused and hapless I am. So it’s not like I have them fooled.

Now as I always need to say when I discuss this topic, I am not just pretending to be a calmer and more put together version of myself, I actually feel that way.

I guess I got traumatized at too early an age for me to have developed a true “mask” so I learned to actually change who I am instead.

I’m so…. metamorphic.

It’s far from bulletproof. For example, it didn’t keep me from having a low grade panic attack (sometimes amping all the way up to full blown freakout) for the entire time I was in Kwantlen and VFS.

But it’s still there. I am sure I didn’t seem like I was freaking out when I was at those schools, although I imagine the more empathic people figured it out.

The question, as always, is why this façade exists and why I can’t imagine actually letting it drop and being “the real me” around other people at all.

I guess we all have a social mask we use to protect ourselves when dealing with others. It’s a basic part of being human. No reason I would be any different, I suppose.

Even though I often am.

Where the bullet really hit the bone is with my therapist, Doctor Costin. He is the one person in the world I should be able to drop the façade with and yet, I can only manage to partially disable it even with him.

The “real me” is that frightened critter crouching behind my invisible wall and he works very hard to make sure nobody ever sees him and how truly awful he is.

Well, how awful he thinks that he is, anyhow.

But that’s not the full picture of the “real me” at all. Not by a longshot. There is also that tremendous sea of untapped anger in me that just wants to scream bloody murder at the world for all the pain I have inside me.

And that’s another thing I don’t want to show the world, even though it would do me a hell of a lot of good to vent it all.

TO be honest, I’m afraid of what I might do if I let that monster out of its cage. I know that it’s my fault that it’s grown so huge and psychotic and powerful – I am the one who has suppressed nearly all of my anger all these years even though I arguably had a lot to be angry about.

But I feel like if I give in to that anger, I will lose my god damned mind. And I might not ever get it back.

Maybe that’s just an illusion that my depression uses to scare me aware from things that might threaten its control over me, but even so, I still have ot deal with it.

It would be nice if I could tap into that rage and turn it into the motivation to get my big fat butt out of this big fat rut and make some god damned changes in my life.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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I freaking love absolutely everything about this.

I love the music, the art style, the voice acting, the script, the fact that it’s cyber-noir, and even more than that, it’s furry!

I want more!

---

I hate time

Sort of. It’s complicated.

I’ve fallen back into the habit of feeling this stab of panic and shame every time I realize how much time has passed without me doing anything productive.

This is clearly one of the ways my depression beats up on me. It would be one thing if that feeling goaded me into frantic action like I was my go-getter of a sister Catherine.

But I ain’t like that. The goading just makes me retreat into myself even further, and I supposed in the end, that’s the point.

My depression’s real agenda is to keep me “safe” by keeping me in this tiny little coffin of a life, far away from the cold hard world that deep down I am sure I can’t handle.

Dunno why I feel that way. Taken at face value, there is nothing about an average “normal” life that I can’t do. I could work a job, pay bills, do dishes and laundry (or hire someone to do them), pay my rent on time, the works.

And yet, when I imagine going out to face that big old world out there, I shrivel up inside with existential terror and I can’t go forward at all.

Leaving me stuck where I am. Which is, again, the point.

At some point in my recovery, I am going to have to make a (metaphorical blood sacrifice. I am going to have to give up a little part of myself and I am going to have to do it willingly and deliberately even though I know it will really, really hurt.

Above all, I am going to have to walk through the fires of my fears and show them that they cannot keep me penned in any more.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Things other than play video games, eat, and blog, that is.

It’s insane (literally) how hard it is for me to expand my world even one teeny tiny bit.

Even just looking for work on FlexJobs feels like it’s beyond me at the moment, and that doesn’t even increase my social exposure at all.

That comes when I actually apply for something. Which I will totally do once I find something I am actually qualified to do.

So far, no comedy writer jobs on there.

Anyhow, it leaves me wondering why it is so hard for me to branch out. Where does this incredible fear that rises within me like a sirocco and leaves me feeling overwhelmed and lost when all I am doing is trying to solve my problems come from?

Several places, I think.

For one, there’s that huge part of me that is walled off and disconnected and that leaves me a lot less spiritual energy to do things than I should have at my disposal.

I think a lot of the feeling of being overwhelmed comes from. Whenever I try to get myself activated and energized to actually do something with myself, I hit that invisible wall I put up between me and the world when I was being raped at the age of 4, and the whole process grinds to a halt with an almost audible groaning sound.

Jesus, does that god damned wall have to go. But I know it’s not as easy as shouting, “Tear down the wall!” like Pink Floyd said.

After all, that wall has been there since I was 4 years old. I have no idea how to live without it. I don’t know what real life is like at all.

As I was telling Doctor Costin during Therapy Thursday today, the really amazing thing is that even just staying within the four filthy walls of this bedroom is not enough isolation for me.

Within that cage is another cage that cuts me off from my environment and my world and that renders me too numb to really feel the love people have for me.

Part of me refuses to believe that love is there. It’s scared to believe in it. As if the moment I believe that it’s really really there, it will disappear, leaving nothing but the sound of my inner demons laughing at me for being a sucker.

Those guys are such jerks.

And within that inner cage are, I imagine, even more cages, all the way down. After all, every retreat from reality creates a new, even smaller cage for you to retreat into, and then that cage becomes the next layer of reality you withdraw from, and so on and so on until you’re just a tiny little shred of humanity inside thousands of layers of cage.

This is what happens when your number one go-to move to deal with life is to pull your head and legs in like a turtle and withdraw still further from reality.

As coping mechanisms go, this is wildly maladaptive. Withdrawing into yourself and turning your back on the real world is downright toxic and if I could, I would simply disable my ability to do so in order to force myself to learn to cope with things.

But maybe all that would do is make me finally go completely catatonic as I give up on reality entirely and just wait to die.

That’s the fate I am constantly dodging. My escapism has no limiting factor except my will keeping it at bay on an active basis.

Part of me wants to flee from life entirely.

And that part of me is always there…. waiting.

More after the break.

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I wonder how far we are from young hipsters calling each other on land lines just because it makes communication feel more “authentic”.

---

About that money

You remember. The money that mysteriously vanished from my Joker prepaid credit card when a $7.60 transaction made my balance go down $72?

Yeah, it’s still not back.

And I called their toll free number again just to make absolutely sure that there was no way to get to talk to a person or dispute a charge that way.

And yup. It’s impossible. You can select “Dispute a charge” from the main phone menu, but it just dumps you right back to the main menu.

Also, to nitpick a bit, some of the menus have only one option, make them redundant. But that’s probably the sort of thing that only bug the crap out of me.

Anyhow, the phone was a bust so I had no choice but to go to the website and fill out a long and irritating form then email it to them as an attachment.

The email address bounced it back to me.

I might have typed it in wrong, but regardless, this is all seeming super shady.

Not that I can do anything about it right now. They still have my remaining ~$200 in their system and there’s no way to get it back out except by spending it.

And adding to the mysteriousness is that their competition, those PowerPay cards I used to get, just mysteriously vanished one day.

So I don’t really have a choice about using them. When deposit day rolls around in a bit less than two weeks, I will probably buy another one.

I guess I could try that Post Office one again, assuming I can unfuck my account with them. Or hell, maybe finally switch banks to one that offers Visa Debit and be done with the whole god damned issue.

I just want to be able to buy stuff online with the money in my bank account. That doesn’t sound like an unreasonable thing to want, does it?

I wonder if I could connect my bank account with PayPal. Assuming PayPal is still a thing and online retailers still accept it.

Anyhow, money is still gone and shit’s shady as hell. I want my $72 back.

Why is everything after my god damned money lately?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The microphone looks like ass but otherwise, pretty cool.

Pretty sure that one of the reasons I rarely got along with my fellow students, both as a child and as an adult, is that I give off a coldly alien vibe.

I’m weird. That’s what I am saying. And not just in a cute, wacky, nerdy way. Oh no.

I’m weird in a way that can chill people to the bone and leave them very confused by me because I don’t give them the signals they don’t even know they need.

It’s all very…. unarticulated.

It’s especially bizarre with me because on the surface, I am friendly, affable, easygoing, and sweet. My surface vibe is very personable and charming.

But underneath, I am cold as stone, and that dissonance makes most people just shake their head at me and decide I am too weird to deal with.

So they don’t. They pull back from me entirely and that’s where they are going to stay because approaching me is too weird and alienating and it’s not like I get in their face and demand they pay attention to me.

How could I? Until recently I did not even know why they pulled back from me and never dealt with me again.

Now I know. And that means I can try to do something about it.

But I am not sure what. Maybe one of those “social skills for aspies” courses would do me some good. Might teach me the extremely basic social skills everybody else learned in kindergarten but I did not.

Because I never went to kindergarten. It was determined that I didn’t “need” it.

And I didn’t need it intellectually. I was already way way ahead of my age when it came to book smarts.

But I sure could have used those social skills.

I suppose the real solution for my chilly vibe would be to abandon my position behind my invisible wall and actually be fully emotionally present for people.

I’m working on it.

At least I can get on well with my fellow nerds. A lot of them are pretty chilly too and luckily our individual windchill factors tend to cancel each other when we’re together.

Basically, we’re not even looking for the signals we’re not putting out. Most of us have no idea they even exist. Ours is a fundamentally intellectual realm and that’s the level at which we can relate to one another.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have emotions. It just means that our big brains are in the driver’s seat more times that not and we are more likely to follow our fascination than our emotional intuition.

Me, I’m doubly weird. A chilly intellectual with powerful empathy.

Doctor Hannibal Lecter, in other words.

Nerdsville aside, I would like to learn to get along better with “mundane” people and maybe even learn some of the things that they “know” and I do not.

I put quotes around “know” because this is clearly a radically different kind of knowledge from those “book smarts” I mentioned earlier.

This is the type of thing people know deep in their bones, in their guts. Things they know on such a deep level that it’s very hard for them to imagine what it is like to not know them and still have to navigate this crazy world of ours.

This guy gets it.

I like to think that if I had another chance to be around “normal” people, I would be able to control my anxiety enough to kind of soak up the vibe and open my mind to a new kind of understanding of the world.

That might only be possible with Ativan at first. But it’s doable.

And who knows, maybe then I could finally come in from the cold.

Because I am not just cold to others. I’m cold in here too. My retreat into icy intellectualism when I was raped came at a very heavy cost.

And I want my money back.

More after the break

---

The life of a spaz

I am so goddamned sick of spazzing out all the god damned time.

When I was getting my supper (baked potato and hot dogs!), I slipped while getting something out of the fridge, and reached out to grab the fridge door to steady myself.

Unfortunately, my hand landed on the little plastic compartment where we keep all out leftover packets of ketchup, plum sauce, soy sauce, and so on.

There’s got to be like 60-100 packets in there. It’s jam packed.

And, as I learned to my great dismay, it’s not actually attached to the fridge at all. I thought it was part of the fridge like the two crisper drawers, but nope.

So it came out of the fridge door and spilled its contents all over the floor.

And the best part is that I can’t clean that mess up myself. If I try to bend down that far, I will get super dizzy due to lack of oxygen to the brain because of how bad the circulation in the back of my legs is, or my legs will seize up and I will end up falling that way, or possibly both.

So I had no choice but to call Julian and warn him about what he will see when he comes home tonight.

It will be up to him to clean up my mess, and that sucks. I hate it. I want to be able to do things for myself.

Being dependent on others like I am now is quite alien to me. Nobody looked after me like that when I was a kid, at least that I remember.

Even before I was abandoned to do my own laundry and buy my own clothes, I got very little personal attention from anybody.

I got fed because Mom cooked meals for everybody. I had clean clothes because Mom did the laundry for everybody.

So I was looked after in a sort of institutional way.

And eventually even that ended. I had to buy my own clothes and do my own laundry and cook 2/3 of my own meals.

So you can see how I have been doing things for myself for a long time.

And I really miss that. I hate needing to get Julian to do things for me. It makes me feel guilty for imposing on him and being a burden on him.

Maybe I should try getting a wheelchair. Or crutches.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I know that it starts with anger.

I have spent decade upon decade taking out my frustrations on myself. They say that depression is anger turned inwards, and that’s certain true for me. I am my own tormentor and if I am ever to stop bullying and neglecting myself, I am going to have to learn to do something out with those angry emotions of mine.

And that’s a daunting prospect because of all the latent anger boiling just below the surface like molten lava that’s just waiting to burst out of the ground and form a caldera.

There’s so much of it and it wants to lash out at the world so bad and I don’t yet have the internal mechanisms necessary to redirect that into something less harmful.

I’m working on it. I am at least completely open to the idea that these these potent latent id energies can be turned into something positive, like happiness and optimism.

But making that transition is hard. Right now I have two modes : passive and numb, or angry and bitter. And neither of those are super helpful.

Although at least being angry and bitter helps vent those emotions some.

It’s a step in the right direction but not a solution unto itself.

And as attractive as the thought of turning rage into sunshine might be, I am still going to need to deal with it as anger before any of that can happen.

And that feels hopeless. But I know it’s not. I know, deep in my bones, that there is a way for me to find a way to get it all out of my system without violating my very high ethical standards for myself.

Maybe I should sign up for a really violent PVP battle arena game so I can vent my rage on total strangers in a socially acceptable fashion.

After all, it’s PVP. We’re all trying to murder one another. It’s cool.

I’ve never really been into that kind of thing before, largely because I play video games to escape my social anxiety, not to trigger it.

And multiplayer games trigger the hell out of it, sad to say.

Another possibility : picking some poor unsuspecting subReddit and using it as my personal stomping grounds where I give myself permission to be a total a-hole there.

Let’s see how long it takes for my sarcastic ass to get banned, shall we?

I suppose I could live with that as long as I stay within the broad moral framework of public discourse. So no personal attacks, no sadism, no abuse.

Just me expressing my unique thoughts and opinions in an honest way and then dealing with the inevitable fallout.

Knowing my luck, though, people would just ignore me like they ignore everything else that their minds can’t handle.

Being a visionary is hard.

---

Not sure if it’s just the heat or maybe something else, but I have been very tired and sleepy today. Barely made it out of bed to eat n’ write to you lovely folks.

I am a little worried it might be an attack of “something else” because I have noticed that there is little “catch” every time I go from exhaling to inhaling, and even worse, I feel a kind of bubbling feeling in my lungs at the same time.

And that’s pneumonia, folks. Or something a lot like it.

Plus my muscles are sore in weird, random places. And I have that “heavy” feeling and it’s getting hard to concentrate.

So you can bet your bippy that I’ll be keeping an eye on that and getting my overstuffed butt to the ER or the UC if things get worse.

I don’t want to make the triage nurse need to call in another nurse to verify that she really was seeing the blood oxygen reading she was seeing like I did before, many years ago now, when I landed in the hospital with pneumonia.

My blood sugar and blood pressure are normal now. My immune system should be able to handle this kind of thing.

If I end up with pneumonia again, I’m going to have to speak with the manager.

More after the break.

---

Doing a little better

The gunk in my lungs seems to be gone. Which is a relief. And I do not have any weird random muscle aches like I had earlier today.

But I am still quite tired.

And possibly depressed. I have been having a hard time getting out of bed lately, which is a classic sign of depression. A big part of me just wants to lay there and play games on my tablet in between naps.

But I am not going to let things fall apart like that. I’ve done far too much of that in my life. I’m going to keep getting out of bed to sit at Mister Computer till I get over this.

Besides, there’s no way I am going to blog from the tablet. Or chat with my fuzzy friends. Typing on a tablet sucks.

It distresses me that things have fallen this far, though. But I think it’s part and parcel with the ways I have been improving my mental health lately.

I have been waking up inside and trying to reach out into the world and find energy, and that means not living life on automatic mode any more, and that means it now takes a certain amount of energy and motivation to get out of bed.

Sad when what used to be the bare minimum now takes effort. But it is all worth it if it helps me get to a saner, stronger, happier state of mind.

Like I keep saying. odds are that in order to make it to sanity I am going to have to get a lot closer to being crazy. A lot of the bad machinery keeping me trapped and miserable and unable to deal with life was put in specifically to keep things stable.

Pathetic. But stable.

And now my mind has to learn to walk without crutches, and that’s always going to be rather wobbly at first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s looking like I might have to start over again in Pathfinder : Kingmaker.

Certain plot events have simply failed to happen. It’s gotten to the point where I have done every single quest available to me except for the kingdom building ones, and those are currently a tad beyond me.

I understand all the pieces on the board but that doesn’t mean I know how to play.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

And the worst part is that I don’t have a Treasurer for my kingdom and that is even more limiting than I thought it would be.

There are so many important tasks you can’t do without a Treasurer, including some that are key to keeping your citizens happy.

Hence what happened earlier today : they rioted. Destroyed my kingdom. Presumably lynched my incompetent self. But even if not, game over, man. Game over.

Sorry, but I am too lazy to go find that clip to link here.

I went back to a save game from about five hours of gameplay before the point where my barony collapsed and I am currently still trying to solve my Treasurer deficit, but everything I read online about how to do that seems to refer to characters I’ve never met and places I have never seen, and I have reached the limits of the current map.

There’s plenty of unexplored regions to the west of my barony but I am not allowed to go there yet. When I try, the game basically says, “You realize that you don’t really have a reason to cross that river yet, so you don’t. ”

Um, thanks for that. I am guessing I won’t get to go there until the next chapter of the game. Thanks for telling me what I think.

Geez game, bossy much? Next you’ll be telling me when to go to the bathroom.

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Fuckity fuck fuck fuck

It always feels like a death in the family.

When I lost some of my writing, that is. My computer crashed, and usually that is no big deal. I have my WordPress site set to back things up every five minutes, so usually the worst case scenario is that I lose five minutes of work.

But something must have gone wrong today. Perhaps it was having trouble logging in? I don’t know. But when I left after lunch, I had written 706 words.

After the reboot, only 286 remained, meaning I had lost 420 words.

Son of a bitch! Happy freaking Canada Day.

Life has really been fucking with me lately. I feel persecuted and put-upon. I am just trying to life my life and maybe gather up the wherewithal to try FlexJobs again.

After all, I paid them a whole $3 for a two week membership. Might as well use it.

Of course, I am facing the same ol’ problem as always : every job seems to require me to have training and/or experience I don’t got.

To the point where clearly there are a hell of a lot of HR people who have no idea what the term “entry level” means.

It means anyone can enter, Linda. Which means it can’t also require ten years of experience, a master’s degree in physics, and independent wealth for fuck’s sake.

I am sure I can find something if I just stick with it, though. Surely somewhere out there is some sort of call center or data entry or whatever work for me.

Even just an extra $50 a week would do me a world of good. At least I would finally be earning money and not just wasting away on disability, passive and pathetic.

Yeah, I know I shouldn’t think like that. But so fucking what. I do a lot of things I know I shouldn’t do. I am just trying to express my emotions over here, and figure out who the hell I really am.

And I am not going to be able to stop judging myself harshly until I find a way to end the pain that causes me to lash out (or is that lash in) at myself in the first place.

It always comes back to that big ol’ wound at the core of my being. I am doing what I can to open it up and clean it out so it can heal. I try to redirect my surplus energies into a powerful weapon against that thick cold invisible wall I live behind. I am working on opening up my heart to let the bad stuff out and let the good stuff in.

But it’s a slow process, and I get frustrated sometimes.

I know I need to lose this contempt for myself and how my life has turned out. The real emotion underneath – sorrow for all the years I’ve lost to my mental illness – is valid but it should not be used as another reason to hate myself.

I’ve been sick. Being sick sucks. It has stolen my entire adult life. If I hadn’t fallen deep into depression when my parents took me out of university so they could take early retirement, I might have been able to hang in there back in Summerside till I could get a job and my own place to live and have some kind of life instead of.. this sad life of mine.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all I do is play video games all day.

It’s tragic, but there’s nobody that can rescue me from it but myself and I am not currently up to the task.

I’d love to be able to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, set my cap to a jaunty angle, and go out and conquer that big big world out there, but I can’t.

There’s no solid ground to stand on inside me. Just an endless, silent sea of tears shed for something that happened 47 years ago.

Any time I try to get my poop in a group, it all falls apart again.

So all I can do is heal, and hope.

Maybe some day I’ll get to be a real person.

Maybe some day I’ll be real.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I finally got around to asking Julian if it would be helpful to him if I made a checklist of things to check on in order to keep me happily stocked with stuff.

So do I have…

1. Baby carrots or celery
2. Fruit, apples or oranges
3. Cans of pop in the fridge
4. 2L of pop in the fridge (I have such a soda habit)
5. Microwave popcorn in my cupboard
6. Bread, though that’s more of a communal thing

That should just about cover it. I might think of more items later.

What I would like to be able to avoid is running out of my essentials. I am a little ashamed to admit it, but when go to the fridge and what I want is not there, it has a deleterious effect on my mood.

It bums me out and makes me feel neglected, which I confess is a feeling that is never very far from the surface of my consciousness and is very easily triggered.

And it bugs me that I have to bug Julian to do and get these things for me. I really miss the level of independence I had before my legs went boom in the summer of ’22.

Like the lady sang…

I mean, I know it is impossible to be grateful for every single bad thing that is NOT happening to you. There’s way too many of them.

A functionally infinite number, basically.

So I am going to resist the urge to tell people to appreciate having legs that work just because mine don’t.

I mean, go ahead, appreciate that if you like, but don’t feel like you have to take on a greater burden of gratitude on my behalf.

Just stop and think of what it would be like to need to use a walker to get around now and then and maybe give your legs a nice rub for continuing to do their job.

That’s all I would ask of anyone.

---

I kept putting off suggesting that checklist to Julian because I was afraid he would find it insulting or inappropriate or even presumptuous on my part.

On the other paw, I need to have some sort of power over the care I get. Being passively helpless to even advocate for my own needs, let alone getting them met, is an awful like my “never ask for anything” childhood.

That’s why it was so hard to bring this up with Julian. My deeper programming insists that asking for anything will get me in big trouble, SO much more trouble than it is worth, and so my only choice is to mutely hope someone thinks of me eventually.

And that’s really sad.

And it’s no way to live. It smothers the soul to never be able to get what it wants or really take an activate part in its own standard of living at all.

You can’t live your life like a dog sitting under the dining room table hoping someone will eventually drop something.

Being perpetually broke is a big part of that passivity. Money is power, ergo poverty is helplessness, and that is very bad for your spiritual health.

That’s what middle class types don’t get about poverty. It eats away at your soul and makes you depressed and saps your will to do anything that takes effort, such as, say, looking for a job.

Job hunting is a really harsh process. Most of us are not cut out for that level of constant rejection, especially us sensitive artist types.

It would be far better to have a central government agency that has your resume on file and submits it for various jobs you are qualified for and only contacts you if you at least get through the first round of qualifications.

Kind of like having a Hollywood agent, but for everybody.

Imagine how awesome that would be for both employees AND employers.

A businessperson would be able to find a dozen qualified candidates for whatever job they needed to fill without having to do a single interview.

And we used to have that exact thing when I was a child. It was called Manpower and its job was to get you a job.

We need to bring that back!

More after the break.

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The problem with generation

So why can’t I generate my own tasks? Or set goals for myself, or follow my ambitions, or any other form of directed action towards a goal?

Why do I need some outside entity, like school, to give structure to my life?

It’s like I need something to adapt to. Without it, I am a boneless blob of protoplasm with no ability to act on my own.

And that’s just so wrong. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and yet I am stymied on the most basic of levels by this strange weakness of mine.

The glib, easy, and incomplete answer would be to say it’s because I had so little order imposed on me as a child that there was nothing for me to internalize.

But there’s definitely more to it than that. There’s also the fact that what I did internalize was the idea that I don’t count, I don’t matter, and I am not worth anyone’s time and effort or even inconvenience.

And the heartbreaking truth is that I still feel that way today. I neglect myself in the exact same way I was neglected as a child.

Ergo, anything I want or need is just not important enough for me to bother doing. That’s why I can’t set goals for myself and I live my life compulsively doing the same things.

Plus there’s the fact that there is this massive untreated psychological wound taking a huge amount of my mental resources and as a result, there is a part of me, a big part, that has been silently weeping for 47 years.

And I don’t know what to do about that. Psychological wounds are not the kind of thing one can think their way through.

All I can do is try to be good to myself and try to take away whatever is preventing my mind from healing itself properly so I can get that big part of myself back.

Maybe then I will have the strength to take myself seriously.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Specifically, how a charge of $7.60 made my card balance go from $385.50 to $306.67.

I don’t think you need to do the math yourself to see that this does not add up.

Or subtract up. Whatever.

The point is that around $80 of my money has vanished and I kind of want it back. And there’s the website showing me my transaction history like that last one makes any sense (or cents) at all.

It’s off by $78.87, and that’s um…. not acceptable.

That’s not a fucking rounding error.

The wildcard… wait, it’s a Joker card, they’re all wild…

The randomizing unknown factor is that this last transaction is marked as “pending”. I don’t know why that would be. It’s just a small charge from DoorDash for a Jamaican beef patty I ordered from 7-11.

It was OK.

7-11 food : it’s still better than nothing, right?

Anyhow, when I called the 1-800 number, I quickly figured out that the goddamned voice menu is specifically set up to dangle the idea of getting to talk to a human being in front of your nose but never actually give you that option.

Must save them a lot of money on phone support workers. Because now they don’t need any. There is literally no way to talk to one.

I will try again later, when my seething rage has subsided.

It might be that pressing 0 in the right place will trick it into letting me talk to an actual (and presumably very surprised) human being, in which case, ha-ha, I MADE the system give me what I want. So there!

Fair warning, I’m a fox, and we’re VERY CLEVER.

Don’t fuck with the trickster. We will fuck you up and laugh about it.

Oh, and the kicker : the phone menu told me that you can’t dispute charges marked as “pending”. Well isn’t that convenient.

Now, this could all be perfectly above board and temporary. It could be that when a charge is (maybe) disputed, they withhold a bunch of money in case some of it is needed to resolve the dispute.

The dispute, I remind you, over $7.60.

And therefore it might just be a weekend thing. It might be that when the next business day begins (Tuesday), the transaction will go through and everything will be fine.

But I am still mad, because for fuck’s sake, why does life keep fucking with my money?

Oh, and before I forget…

I found my wallet

The wallet has been recovered. Crisis over.

Well, that one, anyhow.

Turns out that when I took my glasses off and put them on my CPAP machine like I always do, for some reason I put my wallet too, like very NOT usual.

These are the tricks I play on myself constantly. And I have to admire its creativity. I hid my wallet in plain sight but someplace I would never think to look for it because like, why the fuck would it be there?

Next time, I will know to look for it there. Which means it won’t be there, it will be someplace even more fiendishly bizarre.

I only found it when I went to put on my glasses. So there was very little chance of my not discovering it eventually.

Once more, I find myself wishing I had an assistant so that we could work together to minimize the times when I am a total dumbass.

All the more reason to try to get some online work next time I have the wherewithal to go back to FlexJobs.

It would be so lovely to have some genuine accomplishments to use as evidence against my tendency to think I am worthless and useless and terrible.

I mean, at times, I get so god damned sick of myself.

More after the break.

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Wall of nausea

Speaking of which, I think I often feel like I am a horrible disgusting thing because that’s how I feel most of the time.

And that’s probably mostly physical. If I could once more stand up well enough to take showers, I am sure I would feel a lot less grotty.

I mean, my bed bath wipes are better than nothing but nothing beats a nice hot steamy shower to open up and flush out my pores.

And gods, do they need it. The wipes just can’t compare. I swear. I would pay $100 just to use one of those walk-in sit-down showers they have for seniors.

I’m only 51, mind you. But I am crippled far beyond my years.

Going back to how I feel about myself, I have known for a long time about how as human beings, we tend to unconsciously assume that if we FEEL bad, we ARE bad.

As if there was cosmic entity punishing us for our sins.

Like I said, it’s entirely unconscious, but extremely powerful, and I think it haunts the souls of everyone with any kind of long term chronic illness.

If a person is mentally healthy, the result is healthy self-pity. Why is this happening to me? they wonder. I don’t deserve this!

But if, like me, they are cuckoo in the coconut. with a very weak sense of self, they end up feeling like the way they feel is the way they are… and they feel awful.

And because, due to my high empathy levels, I have a mild problem telling where I end and others begin, I tend to also feel like everyone can easily see what a horrible sack of day old crap I am, and are horrified and repulsed by me, and angered beyond belief by the gall it must take to even think for one second I deserved to be around people.

Well okay, most of that is NOT physical. But it’s rooted in the physical feelings of being dirty and gross and awful.

And that leads into a whole other can of filthy worms where on a very sick level, I feel like it’s better to be dirty on the outside because when I am clean on the outside it throws just how dirty I am on the inside into sharp relief.

But that’s a tale for another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.