Did the Therapy Thursday thang.

I told Doctor Costin that I think the greater emotional bandwidth I am now experiencing due to the lowered Paxil dose is allowing me to be more confident and self-assured.

Turns out it’s hard to really believe in yourself when you’re numb.

And presumably this effect will grow as my mind learns to make use of the greater bandwidth in order to support my mood.

Not that I am happy all the time. That would be insipid. I want to feel everything. Sadness, anger, frustration, even grief. I want to feel it all.

Because what I really want to feel is alive.

Turns out it’s also hard to feel like you’re amongst the living when you’re numb.

I feel like things are starting to really flow in me. The emotions are moving around like water in your plumbing, and that is making it far easier for my mind to flush out the waste products of my overbearing mentation so that the inside of my mind feels nice and clean and fresh and I can think more clearly.

I have longed for this greater sense of flow for a long time without really being able to articulate it. All I can do is relate it to water : I was frozen by the Paxil and now I am starting to thaw out and that means my rivers are running high.

And that makes me feel so much healthier.

Right now, I’m a bit sleepy. I am going to need a nap when I am done blogging. That’s not unusual for me. Blogging uses up a lot of brain energy.

If you’re doing it right.

I’m start to feel more socially bold, too. Last night I actually logged in to Discord and even did a little voice chat with some European dudes who were playing Fortnite.

I didn’t know I would be logging into voice chat when I logged in to that server. It just started up. And I was tempted to immediately log right the fuck back out due to social panic but I stopped myself and hung around for a while before actually introducing myself to the Eurodudes.

They even invited me to play Fortnite with them but I’ve tried that game and it is way too chaotic and overwhelming for me.

There’s a reason I like turn based RPGs so much. I was never any good at multiplayer FPS games in the first place.

It’s hard to shoot straight when you’re battling social anxiety.

And Fortnite is an FPS where you can build like towers and castles and shit on the fly, so that is WAY beyond me.

And speaking of overwhelm, Discord still kinda freaks me out. Individually the different aspects of it are easy to comprehend but as a whole you have servers and channels and DMs and voice chat channels and messages coming in on all levels and it’s so hard to keep up.

So overall I think I might have lasted 45 minutes before the overwhelm got me and I had to log off and play video games while my anxiety levels returned to baseline.

I know I have no reason to get freaked out. I’m a lovable fellow with great social skills when I can get out of my own shadow enough to actually use them.

Maybe next time I will take a Xanax before trying to be more social. It might be just what I need to get some positive social interaction that can overwrite those ancient anxious tapes from my bullied and isolated childhood.

Repeat until believed : I am just as good as everybody else and I have nothing to be ashamed of so there’s no reason to freak out in social situations.

Yeah. That seems about right.

More after the break.

Yup, that tracks

I’ve been playing around with a tracker called Psycle and having a lot of fun.

A tracker is a very old school way to make music. When it’s on the screen, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was some weird programming language, and it kind of is.

But how it works is not important to our tale. Which is good because I have no idea how I would explain it.

The important thing is the nostalgia factor for yours truly because using a (far more primitive) tracker is how I first got into making sample-based music WAY WAY back in the early to mid 90’s. ^[1]

So messing around with one of these programs REALLY takes me back.

And the thing is, I had just been waxing nostalgic about the things that were so much easier to do in a tracker when I came across a mention of Psycle Tracker in a YouTube video (where else?) about freeware programs everyone should know about and I thought what the hell, this is obviously fate, so I grabbed the thing.

Dunno how much I will end up using it. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. It’s easy to imagine myself launching into this whole lengthy magnificent exploration of the whole world of sample based composing but we both know that ain’t likely.

And it’s not necessary either. It’s perfectly fine, I am telling myself, to just play around with something then stop when I get tired of it. Not everything has to be some grand epic achievement or else it means I suck.

That’s a classic example of rigging the system against yourself, because of course you will inevitably stop doing the thing at some point and if that means you instantly lose then the only way to win would be to keep doing it till the moment of your death.

And that seems like a bit much.

So who knows. Maybe I will dig deep, hook the program up to my ancient collection samples, get back into making music for fun, and have a whale of a time.

Or maybe by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten all about it.

And both of those outcomes are fine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time for me to get super pissed off about it being a five week month again.

The worst part is that I was right. Last night I got to thinking along the lines of, “Well, I have $120 leftover from last month (mostly due to Xmas money), and there hasn’t been a five week month in a while… ergo…. ”

So I asked Microsoft Co-Pilot to calculate the number of weeks between deposit day for this month (Jan 15) and deposit day for next mont (Feb 19) and sure enough, there are five weeks and a day between.

Meaning I am going to have to use my Xmas money to pay for my basic expenses on that last week. Son of a bitch.

There goes my Xmas gifts!

Good thing I still have that $200 on my Amazon.ca account from my sisters. The government can’t steal that at least. I still haven’t decided what I am going to get with it. Maybe just a whole bunch of books.

Actual, physical, real books. On paper and everything.

What can I say, I’m an old school bibliophile. I love books, not just the words in them.

Just did the calculation. I will have $155/week this month. Normally I have closer to $200/week. Le sigh.

Like I always say, it’s not like I’ll starve or get evicted or anything. I will be just fine. Depending on how expensive my groceries are in any given week, I might even be able to afford to order in now and then.

But this still pisses me off. It would be so simple for them to simply increase the non-shelter portion of the check by 25 percent in months like these in order to reflect the fact that we will have to live 25 percent more days on the money.

Makes sense, right? But we’re just a fairly limited number of helpless cripples, so what are we going to do about it?

No matter where you go, there are predators hunting the weak.

I think the worst part for me is the feeling of actually being ahead for once only to have that money snatched away by this five week bullshit.

It just seems so cruel. For me, disappointment is always far, far worse than mere deprival and this shit is as disappointing as substandard fuck.

To be honest, I should probably plot out the whole year in advance so I know when the five week months are coming way ahead of time and then they at least won’t come as a shock to my system.

But that sounds depressing. Or maybe irritating. You can never tell with me where that particular die will fall. Not any more, anyway.

It used to be depression each and every time. But as I have plodded down my long road to recovery, I have become more and more capable of anger and hence more capable of being in a bad mood.

It says something about my somnolent state that crankiness and irritability is actually a sign of progress because at least I’m frigging engaging in basic self-protection.

That’s what anger is for after all. Defense of self and others. To become angry, therefore, is to take an active role in defending your own wellbeing.

And I am still new to this whole “taking an active role in my own life” thing. For decades I have been all wrapped up in myself and withdrawn and completely disengaged from reality except as mitigated by my screens.

And you can’t row your own canoe when you’re like that. I’ve been locked in a rictus of passivity for so long that I find it hard to even imagine being truly alive again.

It’s so much easier to just keep drifting towards the grave.

Not better. Just easier.

More after the break.

A greater bandwidth

That’s what my emotions now have access to. Both frequency and amplitude have more room in which to operate, although it’s the amplitude that is more noticeable. 

My emotions are LOUDER. 

And it’s not all fun. I have a lot more “bad moments” lately. Moments when the sadness or anger or anxiety or emotional coldness seems to surge and I have to struggle to maintain my equilibrium. 

Although I dunno. Maybe equilibrium ain’t all it’s cracked up to me. Maybe I would be better off if I just let myself fall so various energies could sort themselves out instead of constantly rebalancing this house of cards I call my mind. 

But like all my talk about unleashing the flood within and seeing what still remains after the waters recede, it’s probably not going to happen. I don’t think I can just throw stability out the window in hopes of a brighter tomorrow. 

It’s more realistic to keep hacking away at my issues and waiting for that tipping point. 

And I can feel it coming on. This emotional awakening of mine from the lowered Paxil dose is loosening things up enough for me to feel more confident and self-assured or even downright cocky, and I am going to keep encouraging that in myself in hopes of eventually taking a huge ego trip to actual employment. 

And I’m taking you all with me! 

I did some poking around on FlexJobs recently but everything there, despite their ads, seems to require some form of experience and/or certification. 

Which is a huge bummer for someone like me. 

As an aside, I think we need a legal definition of “entry level” because a lot of employers out there seem to be extremely unclear on the concept. 

Anyhow, as usual, I was far too easily discouraged. If I had hung in there and kept looking, maybe I would have found something. 

But I didn’t even last half an hour. Le additional sigh. 

It’s gotten me back to thinking about needing to invent my own job. Which at this point in my life pretty much means becoming a YouTuber. 

Or maybe a Vtuber? That’s a YouTuber who makes videos with an avatar, either a 3D modeled one like for VRChat or just a serious of pictures in various expressions and poses to kind of get the idea across. 

It’s almost like paper puppetry but without the paper. 

I’m divided on that option. On one paw, it would make sense for me to start by using an avatar in order to kind of ease my way into things. 

And hey, I could get closer to actually being Fruvous! 

On the other hand, like I have said before, the product is my personality more than anything else and I can best express my irrepressible personality as myself and all my megawatt charismatic wonder. 

I suppose there’s no reason I can’t do both. Do furry and furry-adjacent stuff as a Fruvous avatar and everything else as lil ol me. I know I can make that work. 

Because you know what? I’m a star, baby. A great big shiny star. 

And stars gotta shine. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

I have some very high level empowerment to do.

The long dormant state of my spirit (id) and my feral childhood plus my early almost total withdrawal from reality has left me feeling utterly powerless and led to the unfounded feeling of being unable to make things better for myself.

Like, in any way. Even if it’s just a matter of moving a few things.

My disability has only magnified this issue because it gives me this rich well of excuses for not doing anything or going anywhere in my life.

And those work… up to a point. But they don’t really stand up to scrutiny. The fact that my legs don’t work right does limit my options – I’m not exactly going to sign up to be a longshoreman any time real soon – but it’s hardly a total life-crippling issue.

There’s still plenty of things I can do. I just have to do them sitting down.

So let me state this as my baseline for this discussion :

I am physically capable of all kinds of remote work jobs and there is no reason I can’t actively and energetically pursue such employment.

Or even volunteer. Honestly, I just need meaningful things to do. Something to make me feel good about myself and less like a drain on society and those around me.

I must remember : I make things better when I’m around.

My point is that my physical disability is no excuse for remaining so detached and withdrawn from the world that I can’t do even little things to help myself.

Like clean off my bed so I can flip the mattress and save myself from the tyranny of those spikes poking up from below from the bedsprings poking through.

My upper legs and hips are covered in punctures and scratches for those things. One look at that and someone would be forgiven for thinking that I have either been self-harming or subject to torture.

And the thing is, I know I can fix this problem. It will take some work to clear off my bed but it can mostly be done while sitting or even laying on the bed and I don’t have to do it all at once either.

So all that is really keeping me from doing it is this deep and deadly and destructive desire to hide from the world and spend as little time and energy on life outside my screens as possible.

But there’s something even deeper and more toxic than that going on. It’s a terrible fear – a dread, really – of leaving the warm but fetid bunker I have built in my mind for the cold and exposed real world, with its overstimulation and exposure and other people.

I feel like at some point I was supposed to develop this hard outer layer to my personality that would protect me like a wetsuit or a knight’s armor as I navigate the physical and social world out there, and it just never happened.

I guess I never had the stimulation that leads to growing one. We tend to only develop the defenses we need in order to cope and by staying out of the real world entirely I ensured I would never “need” to toughen up.

That’s not a normal way to live. Most other people, even some of my fellow failures to launch, will feel the impetus to go out and find their place in the world. Especially, of course, when they are young.

But not me. I just kept hiding. Never with any sort of plan. It’s not like I made a conscious choice to stay in my cubby hole of a life forever.

I just couldn’t do anything else. Or so I thought.

But now I wonder if there’s something I could do to give myself a chance to start climbing out of this rotten hole of mind to face the world at last.

I can do this. I can fix things. I can make things better.

So why don’t I?

More after the break.

It’s my responsibility

Part of the problem is definitely a fear of responsibility.

Taking responsibility for my own life and my own happiness sounds like a no-brainer. It’s one of the basic foundational virtues of modern society – self-reliance.

We are considered, by default, to be responsible for ourselves. That’s the hidden price of maximizing autonomy, freedom, and choice.

You have more options than ever, but you’re the one that has to choose among them.

But for me, self-reliance never fully arrived. There was that period when I first moved to this region in 1998 when I lived on my own in a bachelor apartment.

And I did fine once I was on welfare. Paid the rent, shopped for groceries once a month, hauled my laundry to the laundromat (ick), did the very minimal amount of cleaning needed when one lives in a closet, and got by thanks to, what else, the internet.

And I hope to go back to an expanded version of that some day. I know I have been amazingly lucky to have the awesome and supportive friends that I have, and there is definitely nothing wrong with them.

But ever since I moved out of said closet, I have had roommates, and ended up leaning pretty heavily on them for like, reality issues, and that’s not ideal.

I think I will need to live on my own for a while just to build up my confidence in myself and my ability to handle the real world.

Like I always say, I am perfectly capable of doing all the tasks involved in living on my own. So it’s just a matter of getting over myself first.

Not that I am expecting to strike out on my own any time soon. This is a medium term plan, for when I have my own earned income.

So I suppose I am only afraid of responsibility in the abstract. The idea of having to face that infinite corridor of infinite doors scares the hell out of me.

How could I possibly choose?

But realistically, our choices tend to be fairly limited by things like opportunity and location and vocation and such.

It’s still a pretty big corridor.

But a manageable one, I think.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have had this YouTube post from my man Patrick Teahan up in a tab for almost a week now because it’s given me a lot to think about and digest.

He says things like this :

” Many of us don’t have a reference point for what⁠ it looks like to be free of our trauma narrative that runs us.⁠ – Patrick Teahan “

And how. I have no solid recollection of mental health in me. I think that’s because, in the strictest sense, I have only truly been sane for the two years of my life when I was going to UPEI and the fours years of my life before I was raped.

And I suppose being a sane infant or toddler doesn’t count for much.

And that phrase, “trauma narrative”, is really resonating with me. I know that my personal narrative of neglect and isolation is not a healthy one. It is, in fact, quite toxic, and yet I don’t really know how to overcome it so I can replace it with something far more conducive to a healthy happy life.

I’ve been chipping away at it by reminding myself that I am, actually, magically delicious and one heck of a guy, and that while my life is unfulfilling it could be a lot worse.

I have a safe and stable home in which to try to become sane, with wonderful supportive friends without whom my life would be so much harder.

And I am grateful for all of that. I truly am.

Perhaps I can overcome the surfeit of bitterness that made me unable to be grateful for what I have before, and that could do me a heck of a lot of good.

I need an antidote for all those psychological toxins in my bloodstream.

I need a way out of needing a way out.

Patrick also says this about being the opposite of your trauma :

1. That it’s okay to be seen.⠀⁠

I have a lot of trouble with this. My maladaptation has been isolation for so long that I have lost my tolerance for real social exposure and as much as part of me craves attention another part of me wants to disappear underground forever.

Part of me hates feeling like I am invisible and another wishes I truly was.

2. That it’s safe to be you.⠀⁠

I don’t even know who that is. My total lack of emotional adolescence means that I went on almost no part of the journey of self-discovery we are meant to experience on our way to becoming our own authentic selves, in our teens and twenties, so all I can do when faced with the question of who I am is throw up my hands and say, “I dunno. ”

I have a version of me going that people seem to like and that might actually blossom into something healthy and useful in time.

It’s not the only person I could be – I contain multitudes – but it will do for now

3. That people want realness⁠ and not our false protective selves.⁠

I’m not so sure about that. It sounds good in theory and it’s what anyone wants from someone they care about, but in practice they might like the real me a lot less.

From where I stand now, it feels like the “real me” would be a lot angrier, pushier, more demanding, more domineering, and a lot more selfish and self-satisfied.

Maybe not a monster but way harder to deal with. That might not be the worst thing in the world if it leads to greater happiness for myself.

But at what cost?

More after the break.

So many winters

The image of my heart being buried under the snows of many winters popped into my head a little while ago.

It seems apt. It would explain why it’s taking so long to excavate myself. I didn’t get buried this deep in the permafrost overnight and I am not going to unbury myself overnight either, so I must be patient with myself.

But being patient sucks. I want freedom now, god damn it!

Fast forward into summer, let the flood come. Whoosh. Wash everything clean and let my poor frozen heart melt free of the icepack and dry in the sun.

But I guess that’s not in the cards either. Inasmuch as I have designed myself at all, I have made myself, the person you know and love, with stability in mind. The brief, such as it was, was, as always, to be able to just keep trudging forward no matter what.

Not that I ever get anywhere, of course. So in a way it’s an eternal treadmill, or maybe my very own hamster wheel. It satisfies my need for the feeling of progress without all that “things actually changing” nonsense.

Stability in motion, folks! Rolling monotony.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the image of myself as being strapped in and tied down to my current life, a la Clockwork Orange, and I think I can use it as a way to motivate myself to change in order to “escape”.

It really does feel like there’s a force like gravity that keeps me in this same magnetically locked and bonded position. When I try to resist, the forcefield surges with a menacing hum and I slam back down and get plastered to my seat like I am riding the Gravitron.

Only a lot less fun. I love the Gravitron. It’s my favorite ride.

I am tempted to call this mystical force something like my fear of change, and that’s correct as far as it goes but it does not go far. It’s a valid but incomplete answer.

I guess we’re basically back to the caterpillar and the fixed sense of self. To my mind, changing who I am is way too much like dying and I don’t have the kind of courage it takes to surrender all form to be remade anew yet.

So I am going to have to continues to creep up on change incrementally, passively awaiting the passing of some deep tipping point to change everything without me ever having to choose to change.

Death by natural causes, in effect.

I am a thing that changes.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks to the lowered dose of Paxil, my sexual response is waking up a bit more and I feel more capable of orgasm than before.

Yes, it’s going to be one of THOSE blog entries. The ones where I get uncomfortably intimate with my so-called sex life like I have no boundaries.

Which is not far from the truth, come to think of it. Generally speaking, if I don’t speak of certain topics openly, it’s because I don’t want to offend people or gross them out, not out of personal shyness.

I’m not saying I’m incapable of modesty or shyness, but my goalposts for revealing myself are way further apart than most people’s.

I’m just happy people are paying attention to me and listening to what I say.

To that end I’d answer almost any question.

Anyhow, lately, assuming I’ve not been overdoing it and draining my very limited batteries, I can at least have what I am calling a “mini-orgasm”.

It’s almost cute.

What happens is I get a modest surge of pleasure and I ejaculate some mostly clear liquid which I am assuming is prostate fluid.

It’s not much but at least it provides me some release without my necessarily having to wait like two or three weeks of not touching myself in order to build up enough – let’s say “pressure” – to have any eruption at all.

I usually continue to masturbate afterwards just to make sure that this was, indeed, all I am gonna get and to make sure I get as much balls emptying benefit as I can.

But not too long after I am all out of mojo and beginning to chafe, so I stop.

I know I will never get back the wild stallion of sexual impetus I had in my 20’s. Like a lot of old people, I look back at those days and sigh and wish I had been more self-confident and in control of myself and understood myself well enough to know what exactly I have going, sexually speaking, so I could use it to sow all the wild oats I could.

Youth is wasted on the young, and all that.

I know that a completely “normal” sexual response with others is probably not in the cards, at least not any time soon.

There’s a very strong chance that for me, sex will always be a performance. A sort of sexy show I put on to please a partner, which in turn pleases me, but maybe not to the point of cumming myself.

To my romantic side, this is heartbreakingly tragic. But despite my vulpine vampishness and extreme and joyous openness, there is a terrible conflict in me when it comes to sex with other men where I both want and fear it.

It even comes up when I am masturbating or otherwise browsing porn. I’ll be lusting away and suddenly I will have this strong fear/threat reaction like “this is wrong/bad!”.

Weird, I know. But I know from whence it comes. It’s a strange and terrible cocktail of societal programming and the fact that my first experience with male/male sex was being raped as a toddler.

So there’s a lot of dark and complicated shit going on way down deep in my sexuality.

Maybe if I was to meet the right fella and fall in love and get close enough to him that my barriers come down to the point where I actually felt completely safe with him, sex could be more than a performance for me.

It could be the mutuality I have always dreamed of. Two people sharing pleasure in a cosmic circuit where their pleasure gives you pleasure and vice versa until it all builds to a truly incredible moment of explosive connection.

Just my modest little fantasy.

More after the break.

I make things better

You know what? I make life more fun when I’m around.

After all, I’m funny, silly, warm, charismatic, and I put out a pretty happy vibe. It cheers people up to be around me, and that means more to me than I could possibly express.

All I want in life is to make people happy. A life spent spreading happiness would be like Heaven to me. I would feel like there was truly a reason for me to be alive then.

And it’s occurred to me, just now, that I do that. Maybe not on a global scale – yet – but in my own life, I liven up and ennoble the mood wherever I go, uplifting people with my large output of sun-shiny vibes.

And my lowered dose of Paxil is only making that effect stronger. Turns out that I am much more effective a vibrational influencer when I have access to more emotions.

Huh. Go figure.

And this trend is set to continue because my therapist and I are pondering when to do my next dosage lowering, from 30 mg (instead of the usual 40 mg) twice a week to 30 mg three times a week.

I’m excited for this experience to continue but I don’t think I am ready for it to be in my next month’s supply of blister packs, so it will probably be the month after.

So somewhere in March, the dosage will likely be stepped down.

Right now, I feel like I am still slowly attenuating to the lowered dosage. My mind still have to find places for the new emotions I am feeling, and that’s a painstaking process, so I am not in a huge rush.

Despite that insane kamikaze voice in my head saying, “GO COLD TURKEY! Rip off that fucking Band-aid and FLY!”

Followed by an insane cackle and an explosion.

Anyhow, back to my latest attempt to pump enough air into my ego for it to float.

The thing is, I’ve known objectively that people like having me around for a very long time but, like happens so often with me, somehow that knowledge never penetrated the layer of ice around my heart.

I knew it, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t believe.

It’s like how I have known for my entire life that I am academically gifted (to say the least) and yet somehow that never made me feel any better about myself.

It all came too easy, I guess.

But now I am finally ready to celebrate my general awesomeness. I’m an amazing dude and it’s time I learned to embrace and enjoy that without worried that it will somehow lead to delusions of grandeur or me turning into a raging arsehole.

I’m incredible. And a big part of that is being the sweet, nice, caring dude I am.

I won’t be giving that up for anything!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Watched a video about how to identify and address the toxic beliefs that are holding you back and fueling your mental health issues, and while the video itself was forgettable (seemed mostly to be an excuse for some lady to talk about herself, which is.. special), the idea itself seems good so I thought I would give it to go.

And I know that this is a good idea because my mind really doesn’t want to go there, and it’s making feel anxious and disoriented and a little dizzy, almost like vertigo, so I know I must be on the right track.

Let’s start with the more obvious toxic beliefs, like that I am something hideous, pathetic, repulsive, and unlovable.

I have no evidence to support such a radically incorrect belief. It stems entirely from a need to express the bitterness and anger I feel by turning them inward, and that, in turn, only makes me angrier and more bitter.

Ultimately it devolves down to the fact that I feel horrible and disgusting and unlovable. And that feeling is so deeply embedded in my self-image that changing it requires the psychological equivalent of open heart surgery to fix it.

And that’s a hard thing to have to do to yourself.

Another limiting belief of mine is that I am weak and incapable and incompetent.

My dyspraxia plays a big part in that. Also known as developmental co-ordination disorder, it’s just like dyslexia except instead of making it harder to learn to read, it mkes it harder to learn motor skills.

I’ve had that problem for my entire life. It’s why I am such a spaz when it comes to doing physical things. Combined with my poor eyesight (even in glasses), it definitely functions as a disability all on its own and leaves me in need of someone who is physically competent more often than I would care to admit.

This was made into a psychological issue by my siblings being impatient with me not being able to do certain simple things and making me feel bad about even trying to do things myself, let alone giving me the time and space and help I needed in order to laboriously learn to do things.

I sometimes wonder if there’s something wrong with my mirror neurons. Maybe too many of them are devoted to empathy instead of motor skill acquisition.

So unlike the belief in my horribleness, my feeling of helpless physical incompetence does have some basis in reality. I do have a lot of trouble with some things, especially things requiring fine motor control.

To be honest, I’ve never controlled a fine motor in my life. Like a Bentley or a Jag.

But acknowledging my limitations does not require me to hate myself over it. That’s entirely optional and hopefully avoidable in time.

I might want to pursue an official diagnosis, though. It might help me to qualify for additional assistance, such as occupational therapy.

Who know, maybe it’s partly fixable.

Another very toxic belief is that I am worthless. That I am nothing but a liability to the world and to those who love me and, well, you can guess where that leads.

The very bad place.

I know that people like me and value me and want me around. And I know that I am actually a phenomenally talented and capable individual who has an amazing amount to offer the world if I could just get out of my own way.

I know these things and yet I don’t feel them. All my despair and self-loathing has no basis in reality and yet the delusional beliefs remain because they are my only way of expressing certain difficult emotions in myself.

So ridding myself of these toxic beliefs requires finding a different, healthier, less self-destructive outlet for those feelings.

And I don’t know where to go for that.

More after the break.

Missing the point

My intuition is saying that there’s toxic beliefs that the above text comes nowhere near addressing. That there’s much deeper and more fundamental delusional beliefs that need to be addressed in order for me to finally clear the bone from my throat and heal.

Obviously, I don’t know what those are yet. But it’s a solid lead.

Come out with your hands up

It just occurred to me that for a lot of my life I have felt surrounded.

Like, as in, cop on a bullhorn shouting, “You’re completely surrounded! There’s no chance you will escape! So come out with your hands up!”

And here I am hunkered down in the one room of the house with no windows, assault rifle in my hands, nowhere near ready to surrender to the god damn cops.

Of course, there’s nobody out there. I’m not surrounded by anything but my own fears and the need to escape them.

And the only way to escape from your fears when they have you surrounded is to withdraw even further into yourself and essentially pretend they are not there.

And I have done this many times over and so I am many, many layers deep into myself. By “choosing” to remain cut off from the world and living in the world of screens, I am fleeing my own inner prosecution and things just keep getting worse and that only makes me withdraw even more.

It’s a terrible cycle. It “works” in that it makes it seem like the bad things have gone away when I am really just filling my mind with video games to displace them.

That’s like the definition of maladaptive.

Practically the entire world of media, as one, yells that I should face my fears and conquer them and I will feel so great and free afterwards.

No doubt this is true. But it doesn’t make it easier to actually do that.

It doesn’t pry the icy fingers of fear from my throat so that it no longer fears like if I face those fears I will die… or worse.

Right now it feels like defying that circuit of fears and aversions that surrounds me would be like tearing off one of my limbs.

And I know that it would probably be worth it.

But I’m scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I seem to be adjusting to my new orthopedic shoes fairly well. And they seem to be adjusting to me as well.

See, there’s a layer that is deliberately a bit squishy so that the shoes can conform to my feet as I wear them.

I still have no idea why I was so drastically uncomfortable that first day. It seems to have been a case of them being WAY too tight, but for the life of me I don’t know how “Jackie” managed to do them up that tight because I’m tugging on the Velcro straps pretty hard when I put them on (I’ve always preferred my shoes to be snug) and I am still not getting them that tight.

In fact, they feel slightly floppier than I would prefer, but that’s probably for the best as I want to make sure the circulation in my feet is not compromised.

Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to get the wound on my feet to heal.

One can only hope.

I had Wound Care this morning. It went well. Linda the Wound Clinician was there to sand down my foot callouses once more.

So I have that very faint burning sensation in my tootsies right now.

Also did the community shower thing today. Albert is back from vacation and that’s a relief because I really like him.

He does most of the talking, and I am fine with that. I am happy just to listen. I don’t always have to contribute to the conversation, especially with regular folk like Albert.

When I am with my nerdy friends it’s a different matter. There, I have to contribute because of the sheer joy I get from having people who can understand me in my life.

I did not have a lot of that growing up.

It’s one of the sad truths about being smart.

Let’s start with the top level one : being smart means living in a world run by and for idiots. Children. You are a giant among pygmies.

This doesn’t really bother me. I suppose I think that the world would be a much better place if I ran everything but I’m not about to become a supervillain over it.

I think my overall humanism and general (relative) humility keeps me from becoming a bitter misanthrope about the whole thing. I understand people for who and what they are and I love them all the more for their flaws and frailties and imperfections, so the fact that I see what are, to me, obvious solutions to the big problems does not bother me very much.

If I feel strongly about it, I can use my powerful voice to broadcast my solutions and try to maybe influence people to see things my way.

That’s how thing actually work in the real world. I am lucky in that my genius happens to encompass things like communication and oratory skills so there is a more than average chance of actually getting at least a few people to listen.

But most of my fellow genii don’t have that luxury, so they are left being Cassandra, knowing what should be done but unable to make anyone listen to them.

On a more personal level, as patient readers know, my “punishment” for finishing way, way ahead of my fellow students was nothing. I would have loved to have been given extra work to do because it would have kept me from being bored out of my mind.

Instead, I had to just sit there and zone out because I wasn’t allowed to just read.

And like the video says, I couldn’t relate to my fellow students because I was parsecs ahead of them intellectually. Their world and their activities had little appeal to me. They cared about actions figures and coloring. I cared about science and reading.

I doubt I would have put it this way at the time, but they were behaving like children.

And I was not. I was this creepy kid who was eerily self-possessed and calm and talked like an adult trapped in a child’s body and who must have seemed like an alien child.

What I really needed was a gifted kids’ program, but that was not in the cards.

More after the break.

Why so cold?

I think I need a thermometer for my room.

It’s the only way I will be able to definitely determine whether I am cold due to it being actually literally physically cold in here or due to something askew with my health.

Admittedly, the former is more likely. I have this enormous lovely window directly behind my computer desk and it is not thermally sealed because people just don’t do that kind of thing around here and thus cold air is constantly leaking in.

It’s geometrically worse when the wind is blowing hair and Bernoulli-effect-ing the warm air right the fuck out of here.

Luckily, you don’t get strong winds in winter around here.

Or at least we haven’t yet. Who knows what the future holds? We could lose our precious microclimate any day now.

In which case I’m going to brick up the fucking windows until Spring, because if I am this cold in January now, I would not survive the winter in the rest of Canada.

As is, there appears to be little I can do to address the problem. Even if I could buy thermal caulking or even just thermal tape around here, I am in no shape to be able to apply it around all the window panes.

And I just verified that I have my thermostat turned all the way up. Le sigh.

I could get a space heater. That might be a good use of that $200 still sitting on my Amazon.ca account. I am sure my sisters would like to know their gifts are helping to keep me warm in the winter.

Admittedly, in that completely irrational layer of the male mind that makes us do dumb shit, part of me feels like getting a space heater means that the coldness wins.

Look, I said it was irrational, didn’t I?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One of the things that came up during my Therapy Thursday today was my knowing that emotions do end.

Even the really bad ones.

The image I used was of swimming to the other side of an emotion. It’s ridiculously easy to fall into the trap of having a primitive “stop the presses” reaction to bad emotions coming our way, and when times are grim and survival is on the line, the ability to sideline those emotions and deal with them later so you can handle things is vital.

Indeed, civilization would be impossible without it.

The trick is with the “deal with them later” part. Because very often, we don’t. We just leave them on pause because we naively think we can avoid feeling the bad feelings forever without consequences.

Or, more likely, we don’t think about it at all. We pause the emotion and consider the problem to be solved merely because we made it disappear.

And that would be fine if it only happened once in a very great while. But of course we shortsightedly make it a near universal response to all unpleasant or inconvenient or otherwise unwanted emotions.

Like a baby, we think that if we can’t feel it any more, it must be gone forever.

But of course it isn’t. It’s still there in our minds, paused, waiting to be completed. And the personal energy and mental bandwidth cost of keeping all those emotions on pause grows and grows as more emotions are added to it over time.

Eventually the whole system collapses under its own weight and boom, you have depression and/or anxiety now.

And that’s where I am, and why I write for this blog every day. When I sit down to write, I am trying my best to take some of those paused emotions and take them off pause so I can finish feeling them and thus unburden myself.

And to do that, I’ve had to rid myself of the childish worry that a bad emotion will last forever just because we can’t see the other side of it.

I am in the grips of this delusion as I type these very words. I am scared that if I open the door to certain emotions, especially anger, the sheer power and volume of the resultant emotional eruption will destroy my mind and turn me into some kind of raving lunatic hellbent on destruction.

Because it feels that way. I can feel all that latent rage in me and it frightens me. Intellectually I know that I have to find an outlet for it all but emotionally I am so scared of what might happen that it remains unfelt and not dealt with.

A lot of badness, both active and passive, happened to me in my early life. Mostly it’s the pain of total isolation and unmet human social needs that weighs on me. I have decades of that shit built up in my mind and nowhere for it to go.

I’ve spent so many years ignoring that pain and pretending everything is okay just because I could make it through my painfully minimal day that it, too, scares me with what might happen if I let it loose.

Were I a more emotionally muscular fellow, I might be able to handle dealing with these potent feelings a little at a time.

I suppose that’s what I am doing with this blog, come to think of it. Dealing with my latent emotions 1K words at a time.

But I know that I need something bigger. Something that will help me give birth to really big emotions and therefore allow me to deal with all these latent emotions all at once or at least in larger quantities.

Because I want to be clean of them, and the only cure for emotions is to feel them.

More after the break.

Oh yeah, the apocalypse

Los Angeles is burning and it’s getting me down.

This is the first truly major international city to face the wrath of global warming, at least on this side of the world, and furthermore there’s a heck of a lot of rich people’s homes going up in flames, so this might end up getting the rich to truly pay attention to global warming instead of assuming they won’t suffer any of its consequences.

There’s crazy weather shit happening in other places too. Exactly as was predicted. We’ve seen this train coming down the tracks for my entire lifetime – and I am 51 – and yet very few of us felt motivated enough to really do anything about it.

And now, here it is, the exact thing that we knew would happen, and we have the gall to pretend like it’s a surprise.

People are going to start to want answers. They will want to know who to blame. And while it’s entirely possible to blame “everybody” because we’ve all known this was going to happen and we all “could” have done something about it, that kind of answer is unlikely to placate an angry torch-wielding mob.

All I can say is that if this isn’t enough to put global warming on the collective agenda, then nothing will be enough except the whole world being on fire.

I mean, Los Angeles is burning in January. That’s completely insane.

What the hell is next summer going to look like?

I can only assume that being a climate change denier will continue to become more and more dangerous, at first just politically but eventually physically as well.

I mean, I have been, somewhat unwillingly, been contemplating the humanitarian benefit of strategic assassinations ever since Luigi Mangione killed that CEO.

So much wealth and power is concentrated in the top these days that it is entirely possible that the lives saved by the death of certain key individuals would justify the loss of a single human life.

This is such an era of madness that one can make a utilitarian case for murder.

As for myself, my only instinct is to use my one and only move and just withdraw even further into myself. To stick my head in the sand and pretend nothing is happening and play my little video games until the fires, floods, and freezes make it to the door of this dirty old bedroom of mine.

But I won’t do that, of course. Even I cannot pretend that turtling up is a solution.

It’s possible that I could use my powers of communication – my voice – to help somehow. though I’m not sure how.

But things have got to change.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I was hanging out on Bluesky earlier, like I do, when I came across a post where a lady was complaining to “men” about the harassment she suffers on a daily basis.

So for balance (uh oh) I replied with a call to women to stop flipping out when men say no to sex.

Obviously not speaking for myself. If a lady offered me sex, she would have to be entirely without gaydar and probably secret quite ambivalent about sex in general.

I can relate.

No, I was basing my reply on some Reddit threads I have seen about the subject. Apparently some straight dudes (and presumably the occasional fag) have endured some quite catastrophic reactions to turning down a lady for sex.

And I get it. For some ladies, the patriarchy has left them so in conflict with themselves that it’s like crawling over hot coals just to get to the point where they are capable of saying yes to sex at all, and to be turned down at that point must be incredibly upsetting. Galling, even.

Because men are supposed to always want it and be ready willing and able to fuck any woman at any time and anywhere. Right?

Anyhow, I posted my little comment and that ignited a very unexpected massive shitstorm down on my poor head.

People were heaping abuse on me left and right and calling me all kinds of horrible things and wishing grievous harm on me and general being awful to me.

And I…was… LOVING IT!

It made me so happy! I finally managed to spark discussion and cause controversy and with what to me was a pretty innocuous equivalent statement.

I was accusing of belittling the original post (how?) and detracting from or even opposing the original post’s message (nope) and of being an incel (wrong on at least two levels) or an Andrew Tate follower (god no, that man is atrocious) and I was replying to each and every abusive comment in my usual inflammatory style and the whole time I was happier than a pig in oak barrel aged shit.

I must have been doing that for at least an hour, maybe more, before the shitstorm died down and I ran out of steam.

So it turns out that I do have a limit as to how much I can argue. Good to know.

And when I say “my usual inflammatory style”, I mean I was accusing people of the exact kind of hateful behaviour they presumably rag on the right wingers for doing and trying to burn me at the fucking stake and pricking their consciences (or maybe just being a prick) and pointing out to them that they were reacting to things I never said because, presumably, why let the facts get in the way of a good ol hatefest.

God was that fun. I was in full on trickster mode, mocking people’s hypocrisy, holding up a mirror to the monster inside them, and laughing at their rage.

Boy does that make me sound bad. Oh well.

I am still quite confident that I was (and am) in the right. They attacked me, after all. All I did was counter said attacks and maybe throw in one of my own here and there.

But I have a clear conscience because nothing I said in reply was even half as heinous as the shit they said to me, and my stuff was way more on point.

I got to witness first hand how people will deliberately misinterpret and project their own wishes onto an innocent (ish) person like me in order to twist things into whatever is the most fun to get mad about.

And I am more than happy to point that out each and every time it happens. I thrive in opposition to what I know to be wrong. The more they abused me, the more I reveled in it because clearly I had struck a nerve and now I was drilling down into it.

It’s mostly died down now. Which is good because if it was still going I probably would have dropped dead from exhaustion by now.

All in all, it’s been a very fun day.

I wonder how I can get myself in trouble again…. 🙂

More after the break.

Prepare to have your heart severely warmed.

Pixar has the magic Disney once had.

That’s why Disney had to buy it back from them.

Chip who now?

Turns out we have a Chipotle in the area!

And I am giving them a try tonight.

The menu immediately won me over when I checked them out on DoorDash because they have my beloved carnitas.

Basically Mexican pulled pork. It’s SO damned good.

They also have beef barbacoa, which is Spanish for BBQ beef. I keep seeing it on Mexican menus but I always end up ordering something else.

Like taco beef. God do I love taco flavoured ground beef.

So right now I am eating a burrito bowl from Chipotle. It’s got the carnitas, sour cream, red salsa, lettuce, black beans, corn, and for some reason green pepper.

I don’t recall asking for green pepper. It seems to have come with the lettuce. Good thing I like it.

And for an appetizer, I got chips n’ salsa. Both are quite good. I am impressed with how fresh everything is.

Patient readers know how much freshness means to me. The fresher the better, whether it’s produce or air.

So yeah, I think I’m a Chipotle guy now. Sorry Quesada, your stuff is good, but not THIS good. Plus Chipotle is a little cheaper.

There was some bullshit when the delivery arrived and I picked up my phone and it immediately died. I guess I thought I had put it back on its base but I hadn’t and so it did not recharge. Oopsie!

Oh, and Demon Hunger update : I just ate a big burrito bowl AND some chips and salsa and yet I am still fucking hungry.

I wish I could just hit up a buffet place and slay this beast.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Having a sleepy day so far.

As in. I have slept most of the hours of today except for the two hours I spent eating breakfast then going to Wound Care.

Whatever. I’m fine with it. It’s been decent quality sleep. Restful and untroubled. So it’s not been leaving me feeling terrible when I wake up.

I can live with large quantities of that sort of sleep. Eventually I will, as usual, become annoyed with how much of life I am missing out on, but for now I am content to snooze.

I’m currently facing a tough battle in Divinity : Original Sin. Not so tough that I can’t imagine winning it, but tough enough that I am going to have to really think about tactics and come up with ways to neutralize some of the enemies’ advantages.

I keep telling myself that all it takes is persistence, and that’s true. This isn’t the first difficult fight I’ve faced in the game and all it took to get past the previous ones was to try, try again and so that’s what I am doing.

But I have been falling back into wimpy habits in the game lately. Namely, when I hit a really tough fight, I don’t stay and persist till I overcome in, I go exploring and looking for an easier fight instead.

And that is very much loser behaviour. Sure, in an RPG like D:OS, I can always tell myself that I am just choosing to level up my heroes before tackling the tough fight again, and that might seem plausible, but I know myself and I know that’s not what I am really doing there.

What I’m really doing is wimping out and looking for the easy path. And there’s nothing wrong with a little of that – why make things harder for yourself if there’s an easier way – but to say that running away when faced with adversity is a way of life for me would be like Mount Everest is a little hard to lift.

It’s an understatement, is what I’m saying.

I’ve spent my entire adult life in full flight from even tiny amounts of adversity. On a subconscious level, I have been waiting for some kind of mystical magical path of literally zero resistance to open up to let me through to even the most basic level of adulthood for a very long time.

It ain’t coming. At some point, if I want to get anywhere in life, I am going to have to climb that stimulation gradient and endure my fears and learn to stay and fight for what I want instead of instantly caving in and running away all the god damned side.

I hate being so weak and gutless and spineless. I know how wrong it all is. It is definitely not a smart or wise or seemly way to live and yet I can’t seem to make myself knuckle down and change my wishy washy ways so I can get somewhere at last.

Because doing that will hurt. Overcoming oneself usually does. Facing my fears by focusing on what I want and actively pursuing it instead of drifting lonely as a cloud like I have doing for thirty fucking years will not be easy, and to the unworthy soul (like mine), if it’s not easy – REALLY easy – you just plain don’t do it.

And when I try to imagine what I would need to overcome my lassitude, I keep coming back to my lack of some spiritual substance I can use to comfort and steady myself as I brave the storm within to find safer ground.

Or at least more fun ground.

This substance could be called a lot of things. Courage. Character. Grit. Self-discipline. Belief in oneself. It could even be called faith.

Whatever it is, I don’t have it, and I feel its lack quite keenly. I can feel my soul trying to make the connection between desire and action and I can feel it attempting to draw on said mysterious substance and it just plain not being there.

The tank is empty. I’m not sure it’s ever been full.

All I can do is keep sending energy down to my deeper self to keep the thawing out of my ice torn and frostbitten soul and hope that my Spring will some day come.

Other than that, I feel utterly lost and alone. As usual.

So what the hell do I do now?

More after the break.

The wrong question

Come to think of it, I guess “what do I do now?” is the wrong question.

Wrong because there is nothing I can “do” to make myself healthier. Not in the usual way we think of “doing” things.

There isn’t a concrete and logical series of steps I can take in order to gather that mysterious substance unto myself or anything like that.

Things are not that sensible.

Everything that I need to “do” is entirely internal and spiritual and existential, and that’s somewhat of a stumbling block for me because I am not used to acting in that realm or even acknowledging its existence at all.

I’ve gotten better about that in recent years, but it’s still virgin territory for me and hence I tend to feel lost in the wilderness when I think about it.

I’m so used to using these mighty mental muscles to engulf and overwhelm problems that I have to keep reminding myself that there IS another way and I know what it is.

I mean, this “intellect first” approach to life is the whole reason why I have to write my emotions down in this blog in order to process them and find out what they are.

Only the act of articulating them can bring them close enough to the surface of my mind for them to make the therapeutic journey from the subconscious to the conscious.

It still strikes me as an ass-backwards way to have to go about things. Like having to translate something into Finnish and back before you understand it.

But it’s what I’ve got to work with, so work with it I shall.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.