Come to think of it, I never did tell Doctor Costin about being depressed this week.

Oh well, can’t think of everything. It was not that big a deal anyhow, especially not compared to the lows of the previous week.

I guess I could have told him about being really sleepy, too. Technically, that might be therapeutically relevant, as increases (or decreases) in sleep can be a sign of mental illness getting worse.

Meh. Whatever. I’m getting better, not worse. I am positive about that.

Getting better might involve feeling worse from time to time, granted. But that doesn’t bother me any more.

I can feel things waking up and coming online deep inside my mind, where my scare little animal lives. Spring is coming to my little world just like it’s coming to the big world outside my window, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

And I know that’s going to fucking hurt, too. Like I said to Doc Costin today, it’s like waking up your hand after it falls asleep.

You know it’s going to hurt. Pins and needles and maybe even a cramp or two. But you do it anyway because it’s so terrifying to not be able to feel part of your body.

That’s where I am now. My campaign of directing my energies down to the very roots of my psyche is really picking up speed and it’s thawing me out down there at an accelerating pace as every bit of progress adds to the energy available for more.

Ain’t that somethin?

Best of all, I think I am finally starting to tap into the healing power of frustration. Like I have said a million times before, I am really fucking sick of this stupid little life of mine, but this time I am forcing myself to realize that there are things I can do about that.

I can make things better. I can fix things. I am not some helpless hopeless waif without power or agency. I’m an astoundingly intelligent and resourceful and competent grownup and there is nothing I can’t do if I just put my mind, soul, and will behind it

I am through with being scared to try. Try, get hurt, whine about it, then try again.

After all, I am fucking amazing. So why be scared? I am going to kick this mean old world’s ass until it likes it.

As far as I am concerned, I am owed the world, and I intend to collect. I have suffered in the shadows for a very long time and now I am going to come out swinging.

Don’t call it a comeback. I’ve been here for years.

Another rather bracing thing that came up during therapy was just how much of my life has been spent (wasted) staring at screens.

TV screens, computer screens, game console screens, now my tablet’s screen. The vast majority of my life has been experienced through a screen rather than, ya know, actually dealing with reality.

And that’s a horrifying thought. No wonder my world doesn’t seem real to me sometimes. So much of it isn’t, and hasn’t ever been!

At some point, probably about when I pulled myself out of that deep hole I fell into in my early 20’s, I fully adapted to this self-entertaining lifestyle where I do nothing but amuse myself without anything to show for it.

Well that’s not enough any more.

I want things. And nobody is going to come along and give them to me. I am going to have to go out there and get them.

And for once, I feel like that’s worth doing.

More after the break.

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That cold, black cloud is coming down

Love those vocal harmonies. So beautiful!

Anyhow, that’s just my melodramatic way of saying I feel depressed. And unwell. I feel like there is an evil spirit hovering over me and draining my life energy.

More specifically, I feel lethargic and out of sorts. I think maybe the sleep apnea was particularly bad during my last nap and it’s left me feeling oxygen depleted.

I should take another stab at getting a blood oxygen meter. I bought one for like $6 off of some Chinese site once and, big surprised, it did not work.

In fact, I am pretty sure they sent me a display version of the product, which was totally the right product on the outside but there was no electronic guts on the inside

Oh well. These days, if you pay that little for something, you know it’s a gamble. Maybe you will get what you ordered. Maybe you will get the sort of thing I got.

And maybe you’ll just get a card that says, “Stupid foreigner! You really think you get an air fryer for two dollars? We laugh at you! Ha ha ha! ”

Anyhow, I have been doing my little breathing exercises to try to get that blood oxygen level back up. Mostly doing the “maximum exhale”, where I do my best to push ALL the air out of my lungs.

That’s a pretty uncomfortable thing to do, but it usually works. Get the bad, used up air that I think accumulates in the bottom of my lungs out.

Like there is something wrong with my lungs that means I don’t quite clear all that de-oxygenated air out of my lungs when I exhale, and thus, it accumulates over time.

That’s my theory, anyhow. And presumably it gets even worse when I sleep.

Makes me wonder if I could get therapeutic benefit from just hanging upside down for a little while now and then.

Then the bad air would end up at the top of my lungs, where it is more easily exhaled.

Not sure how I would do that safely, though. Hmmm.

I need two big burly men to hold me by the ankles.

For a variety of reasons.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still feeling pretty sleepy. Guess I’m not caught up yet. Dammit.

As a result. having minor thinking issues. Nothing serious enough to be considered a symptom, just minor difficulty concentrating and/or staying focused.

Hey, did you know that cat and dog food would be perfectly fine for human consumption if they didn’t deliberately add a chemical to make it taste horrible and make us sick?

Why do they do that? Is the meat industry behind this? Or is it to maintain the distinction between humans and animals to make it clear to our messed up instincts that we are still definitely higher status than them and therefore what we do to them is OK?

Including grinding them up to make pet food?

Anyhow, where was I… oh right, trouble staying focused.

Of course, the real problem that always comes up when I have one of these sleepy periods is that my sleep is terrible.

I get around three or four hours of sleep at night, which sadly enough is still better than when I had no nightly sleep period at all, just naps.

So progress IS possible.

The rest of my sleep I get in naps of like an hour and a half at most that are scattered throughout the day at somewhat random times.

But like I have said here before, there is more to it than that. I think I retreat into sleep during the day when I can’t cope with even my sad and sordid sequestered reality any more and I need to hide in sleep.

When you’re asleep, you don’t have to deal with anything. You don’t have to cope. You are as close to dead as you can get without actually dying.

Death is too much of a commitment.

I mean, what if it turns out I don’t like being dead? Then what?

Besides, I don’t want to be dead. I want to be alive and having fun. There is so much of life I have yet to explore. I have so much to look forward to if I just let myself have hope.

I’m working on it.

Lately I have been thinking about levity. Effervescence. Lightness of being. Giving your soul a lighter than air quality so that your mood always rises up despite whatever life throws at you.

It’s an exciting notion, but also kinda scary. I guess to the old, sick, obsolete part of my mind, it seems to much like going “out of control”.

But healthy me is like, “So what?”. So I am out of control. So I might do things I don’t expect and lose some of that feeling of deadly predictability.

There are worse fates. Right now, everything is predictably bad. My soul is choked by this oppressive blanket of numbness that makes doing even the simplest of things nearly impossible because in order to do them, I would have to WAKE UP MORE.

And that is apparently not an option. Sheesh.

Well I am going to change all that. I keep pumping energy into the deepest layers of my psyche and doing my best to think gentle, loving, forgiving thoughts about myself in order to convince that scared little animal inside of me that it’s safe to come out now.

It’s okay, little fella. You can come play outside. The sun is warm and the ground is dry and the sky is blue and everything is waiting just for you!

It’s a wonderful world out there full of fun things to do and great experiences to have and maybe even a man or two to make your life even brighter.

So step outside, breathe the clean fresh air, and be free.

More after the break.

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The ultimate prosthesis

Let’s play, “what would Fru need in order to be functional?”.

Hopefully, this is the last time I will need to do this. More on that later.

Well, to start off, my “prosthetic” would have to be a person. My issues are way too complicated and nuanced to be solved by a mechanical device or app.

I think what I need the most is someone who can hold my hand while I do things in such a way that I feel grounded and safe, and thus remain calm.

I could do damned near anything just so long as I have some way to keep from panicking. My tendency to get freaked out over the tiniest thing is my greatest weakness and ultimately the main thing holding me back.

Which reminds me : Doctor Costin wants me to try that Xanax he prescribed me. Now where the heck did I put it?

Of course, any effective assistant of mine would have to not only help me not to panic but to keep me organized in order to prevent these exact situations.

I’d be able to just hand them things and they would tuck them away somewhere safe until I asked for them at a later date.

Seems simple enough, but to me, that would be miraculous.

And it would help with the first part too. I would be a lot less high strung and overwrought and thus prone to panic if I knew what what I needed would always be there when I needed it without my having to remember where I put it.

What else…. well massages sure would be nice but I am not sure that I could consider that to be an acceptable part of their duties.

Maybe if they were a licensed massage therapist, I would ask. But otherwise it would be rather creepy of me to demand it, n’est-ce pas?

And of course, standard assistant duty, they would have to keep my calendar so that I don’t have to worry about appointments, dates, gatherings, and so on.

Right now Julian does this for me, and I love him for it. 🙂

I hope this is the last time I make a list like this because I am trying to stop thinking of myself as so pathetic and helpless and encourage myself to realize that I can do things to help myself and improve my situation without anyone else’s help.

But realistically, there may be a limit to how far I can go with that. It could turn out that no matter how fiercely independent I learn to be, there’s some things I just can’t do.

And for those, I would still need my “prosthetic”.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

By mean ol Mister Sandman himself, no less.

I am having a very sleepy day. Seems like all I want to do is sleep.

Which made it rough to get to Wound Care today. Getting out of bed felt like climbing a frigging mountain. I kept drifting back into sleep for a second then having to yank myself back from the edge and wake up again.

And it just wouldn’t go away. I mean, it’s 4 pm now. It was 8 am when I (sorta) woke up. And I have slept twice since getting back from Wound Care.

And I am still really freaking tired!

As usual, I am trying, and failing, to be mellow and philosophical about it. It would be great to be able to just relax into the experience and savour the calm, peaceful, soothing nature of reality at this moment as a rare bit of freedom from my usual anxious and overwrought mode of being.

But I’ve got shit to do, man.

Not a lot of it, mind you. In fact, this blog is pretty much it in terms of responsibilities.

But being super sleepy makes that pretty stressful too.

Hell, I was so sleepy this morning that I kept almost falling asleep while the nurses were working on me.

And that would have been so embarrassing! How very rude of me. How declassee.

That’s French for “not classy”.

Then I had a few microsleeps when I stopped in the waiting room to rest my poor legs on the way back down to the car.

Falling asleep there would have been less acutely embarrassing but I would have still felt pretty guilty about making Julian wait, or worse, come up to find me.

Jesus, ever burp so hard it feels like it gave you whiplash?

Anyhow, where was I. Oh right. And I was originally going to go do some needed bloodwork after Wound Care but I was way too sleepy to even contemplate it.

I need to be awake and alert to deal with that frigging LifeLabs location, It’s very stiff and sterile and clinical there, and there is always a lineup, meaning you always have to do the whole “take a number and wait” thing, with the added bonus that you have to wait for your number to come up on a video screen like you’re an old lady watching to see if her Keno numbers get selected.

For those who dunno, Keno is basically automated Bingo.

Then, to top it all off, my plan of going directly to sleep when I got home from Wound Care had the kibosh put to it by the fact that the sheer effort it took to get from the car back to the apartment left me too keyed up to relax right away.

So I had to sit at the computer and fuck around for like twenty minutes while the adrenaline slowly left my system till I could finally relax again.

And I hate, hate, HATE that “tired and wired” state of mind where you are too wired to sleep but too sleepy to do much of anything at all.

Because sleepiness has given you a case of the rolling stupids and even simple things like watching a fucking YouTube video are beyond you.

It’s thirty seconds in and I have already lost track of the plot of this cat video.

And I think that’s the most stressful part of these sleepy periods : having to deal with reality when my brain just plain ain’t working for shit.

Very, very frustrating for a super cerebral dude who is used to having lots of brain CPU cycles on hand like me.

More after the break.

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Some unfamiliar tunes

Check out this bit of old OLD school metal :

Consider me to be headbanging slowly but emphatically throughout the song.

Seriously, like I said in the comments, this reminds me of Black Sabbath in the best possible way. And to think, I only clicked on the link because I loved the title “Stoned Back To The Bomb Age”.

In case you’re too young for the joke, that’s a pun on saying the US should “bomb them back to the stone age”, whoever the current “them” is.

The equally racist counter to that is, “So that would take them back to what, last Thursday? ha ha ha. ”

That kind of shit is why I do not miss the past that much.

But speaking of the past, Felicity turned us on to this track :

It is 100 percent a Christian song and it is fucking awesome. It is the best example I have come across yet to support my belief that faith based music does not have to suck. There’s no reason why it can’t be just as good as the mainstream stuff.

Except, perhaps, that the Christian music audience fears mainstream things. Hmm. And I suppose there is a certain amount of that perverse, “if it doesn’t hurt, it can’t be good for you” reversed logic at work too.

In fact, some sects, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, seem to have a morbid fear of people actually enjoying themselves.

This is what happens when a counter-decadence movement outlives the decadence it was reacting to in the first place.

It has to find fault in the world in order to continue to exist so if it is to survive, it must find new things to rail against. New things, previously thought harmless or even beneficial, must be declared to be decadent and worldly and, ya know, icky bad.

This illustrates a fundamental part of fundamentalist thought : preserving dogma and practices far beyond their rational justification.

Like Judaism and Islam forbidding pork. Which made total sense if you’re a desert people living before the advent of refrigeration.

Trichinosis is very nasty and so it was probably not worth the risk back then.

But now? We have, like, freezers and such. And yet, this bizarre belief is preserved not because it makes sense but because of “tradition”.

The important thing is that the beliefs and practices are not analyzed, justified, or subject to any kind of rational evaluation.

After all, once you start asking those questions, the sheer absurdity of a lot of traditional practices and restrictions will become evident and enormous chunks of various religions will crumble into dust immediately.

And if you are emotionally invested in those absurd beliefs, that would make you look and feel very foolish, and obviously we can’t have THAT.

Solution? Just say it’s “tradition”. and therefore does not have to make sense. You are doing it because your ancestors did it and for no other reason.

As someone (not me) once said, “Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.”

Brilliant. Could not have said it better myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No wonder I am usually so anti-histamine!

I ran out of antihistamines on Saturday and I am really feeling the effects today, Monday. I seem to have about a 24 hour grace period, give or take eight hours, between running out and becoming symptomatic.

But last night, I had an allergy attack, and ever since I have felt pretty “off”. Because it’s not enough that my allergies give me the usual sneezing and runny nose, oh no. That’s just the most overt problem.

It’s really a system wide thing that causes inflammation all through my body. And that can manifest as a lot of different things, from headache to nausea to joint pain.

My life is so much fun.

Oh well, For now, I have Aleve to alleviate ^[1] the inflammation and I am sure that Julian will get me more Reactine Complete soon.

At least I think that’s what I’ve been taking. The box is blue.

On the video game front, I am nearing the end of my time with Dragon Age : Inquisition. I am running out of sub-quests, side-quests, and other forms of generally dicking around, and have been forced to actually advance the main plot.

And I will have to do it again soon as once I have finished what there is to do in Frostback Basin, I will have more or less done everything worth doing in the game.

I will have drained it of almost every drop of content. Which is sort of impressive.

Plus I am, understandably, getting pretty burned out on it. So far I have played it for 123.6 hours according to Steam. By the time I am done, that will probably be more like 150 or so hours.

Not bad for a game that only cost me seven bucks.

I can always tell when I am getting burned out on a game and it will soon be time to retire it when playing it starts to feel less like playing a fun game and more like going to work at a pleasant but dull office.

Plus I have lost the will to loot. Normally, amassing, evaluating, and selling off most of the weapons and armor and such that I get in games is a major part of the fun.

What can I say, it does my greedy little mercantile heart good. I have a lot of middle class merchants in the French part of my DNA, and I love selling things.

So when I stop caring about the loot in a game, it means I am just about done with it.

And I already have my next game lined up, another golden oldie called Dragon’s Dogma that was released way back in 2012.

You know, the year the world ended.

I bought the game with my earnings from Salad, that app I told you about ages ago that lets you rent out your computer’s CPU and GPU when you’re not using it.

The earnings are tiny. I make around a buck a month. But then again, it’s for doing absolutely nothing besides installing it, so what the hell.

And the clever clogs at Salad HQ realized that what a lot of people wanted to do with their Salad earnings was buy games off Steam, so they just sell you the games themselves instead of making you get a virtual gift card.

By sheer coincidence, I will be playing Dragon’s Dogma right after its long awaited sequel, Dragon’s Dogma 2, was released on the 22nd of this month.

I suppose if I really, really love the original, I might wanna buy the sequel.

But I kind of have to fix that pesky “crashes my computer forcing me to reboot” problem I have with modern games on this PC first.

Time to get a new power supply for it, and hope that does the trick.

More after the break.

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I appear to have an IMDB page. One with nothing on it, but still. Weird.

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The road ahead

It’s still very hard for me to think about the future.

My mind really does not want to go there. It’s too scared of the answer. Scared that my future is that I don’t have one and that the rest of my life will consist of things getting worse and worse until I die an ignoble and ignominious death in a hospital bed with tubes going everywhere (yes, even there) and my mind twisted into a dense, tense knot of throbbing terror as I finally, at long last, fade away.

And all without having achieved a single thing with my life, not even the bare minimum of adulthood of employment and a relationship.

Just a dumb, dumb death after a dumb, dumb life. He died as he lived : a big fat loser.

And how I wish that vision of my nightmare future was enough to light a fire under my ass and make me wanna rush out into that big old world to life my life to the fullest and make my mark upon the world while I still have time.

But it isn’t. In fact, it’s not even close.

Because that’s not how people like me respond to challenge. Faint souls like myself respond by giving up and waiting for the end, basically.

We respond with despair. Not action. After all, giving up is a lot easier.

And we always do what’s easiest. Not best… just easier.

Path of least resistance my ass. The path of least resistance sucks.

Still, it’s good to get all my fears for the future out of my head and onto the page now and then. Articulating my pain can be very difficult but emotions expressed are emotions released and once I release the “bad” emotions, I can calm down enough about the subject to think about it more rationally and see things in perspective.

Right now, my prospects for the future look bleak.

But that can change.

I can change it.

And some day I will.

This, I predict.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Having trouble waking up after an afternoon nap. Took me a few minutes just to remember when, where, and who I was.

I had a fairly good grip on what I was. A human, probably, based on the fact that I woke up in a bed and not hanging from a tree.

As to why I was, really, does anyone know?

Actually, we know, we just don’t like the answer. There is something very deeply rooted in us that insists there must be some sort of reason for our existence and some sort of meaning to our lives.

But the fundamental existential truth is that there is no such thing. We weren’t put here for a reason (by who?) and we have no cosmic mission or purpose (for who?), we merely exist, just like the clouds in the sky, the fish in the sea, and that dog turd you almost stepped on in the parking lot.

Who the fuck walks their dog through a parking lot, anyway?

The fundamental existential conclusion is that there is no meaning to our lives except that which we give it ourselves. Within a creator to imbue us with their divine intentions, we are free to decide for ourselves what our lives mean and why we are here.

People don’t like that answer at all, though. It makes them feel cheated. And in a very real sense they were because our very strong social instincts tell us that we must have a role and a job in this big tribe we call life on Earth, and so we would rather think that we have a purpose and just don’t know it than face the fact that it just ain’t there.

Me, I am fine with a universe in which my existence has no intrinsic meaning. Honestly, I have been wondering why people thought there was a “meaning of life” ever since I was a little kid, and it took me a long time to come up with an answer.

It being my answer, it is based primarily on evolutionary psychology. We evolved to be members of small tribes in which we did, in fact, have a job and a role and a purpose.

But then agriculture happened, so towns happened, and groups too big to be a tribe happened, and then cities happened, so having to get along with throngs of total strangers happened, and eventually atheism happened, and suddenly the question of our purpose became an open ended one.

The last ingredient was expanding knowledge of the universe. With every major advance in our knowledge, our role in creation became smaller as our world became bigger and we stayed the same size.

Ironically, it’s stated quite well in this song about God.

That’s a take on religion that makes a certain amount of sense to me. It doesn’t cure me of being a nontheist, but that seems like a form of theism that is at least sustainable

I doubt anything can cure me of my lack of religious faith. Nothing logical, anyhow. Maybe when I am filled with terrible pain and death is coming for me and I am facing the grim grey void of nonexistence, the emotional appeal of theism will finally be strong enough to make me leave my logical mindset behind.

I wish I could do that now. And in a way, I am working on it. At the very least, I am trying to expand my logical mindset beyond mere logic so it can also encompass aspects of human existence that have nothing to do with knowledge or cognition.

I’ll let you know how that goes.

More after the break.

Thoughts on adrenaline

I apologize in advance if I end up just saying stuff I’ve said before. I did enough of that in part 1 today so I hate to do more of it, but this is what is on my mind right now and so this is what I’m gonna write about.

That is, after all, what this blog is all about.

Now then. Adrenaline. More specifically, the adrenalized state, otherwise known as the “fight, flight, or freeze” response

We all know that when we’re excited, whether it’s by lust, fear, or rage, we make bad decisions. And we all know that there are times when even the brightest amongst are functionally quite stupid.

I offer myself as a humble example.

But I don’t think people appreciate how deep the adrenaline effect goes. Adrenaline signals our brains to switch to a completely different modethan the one we use in our normal, every day lives.

We modern monkeys operate primarily on the slow circuit of the brain. This is the circuit that gives us reason, restraint, complex symbolic reasoning, and all the other higher brain functions that make us human.

This is, therefore, the part of the mind we consider “us”.

But adrenaline switches us to the fast circuit and it is all about NOW. It is optimized to make split-second “good enough” decisions rather than well considered ones, and most importantly, it immediately dumps out our immediate sense of the past and the future in order to make room for process the NOW.

The built in assumption of this fast circuit is that you are in some kind of life or death situation where all that matters is what is going on RIGHT NOW and to hell with the past and the future.

This immediately blocks all complex recall tasks. Hence your mind going blank before the big exam despite how much you’ve studied.

The fast circuit is also very sloppy in its reasoning because it’s all based on making sufficiently good decisions in realtime rather than better decisions at leisure.

See why I keep going on about not judging decisions made in the moment by the standards of our brains at rest?

That’s based on actual brain science.

It is almost like we are two different people in the same mind. There is slow circuit us,. often associated with lofty things like reason, logic, and the ego and superego, and then there is fast circuit us, whom we most likely associate with almost all the bad decisions we have ever made.

Judging one by the standards of the other makes no sense at all.

Now if only I knew how to stop doing it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Be what you are. Be like yourself.

Why is it such a painful thing to be self-conscious?

I think it is because there’s a kind of feedback loop involved. You’re trying to control yourself while also being the thing being controlled and that makes it impossible to be happy because it’s like you are biting your own tail.

Whereas we are at our happiest when we forget all that and just relax and be ourselves. Often, that takes doing something that fills our minds and souls to such an overwhelming degree that there is no room left for self-regard.

That could be anything, from a church service to rock climbing to singing in a band to playing video games all goddamned day.

You know. Just to pick some random examples.

Writing can do the trick too, at least for me. When I am sitting here tippity tap typing my words for the day, there is very little chance for me to be self-conscious.

I’m too wrapped up in what I am doing. Not quite to the extend that I am when I am playing video games, and it’s certainly not the same form of engagement, but it gets the job done anyhow.

This opens some fascinating new vistas for me. I tend to have a rather extreme view of what life outside the warm comforting realm of gaming is like. That it’s harsh and cold and I would feel vulnerable and self-conscious and my inner demons, no long distracted by gaming, would come and GET me.

Nothing good ever comes to GET you.

But if I simply broaden my perspective to include anything that could keep my mind busy enough to keep the bad voices suppressed, that could be all kinds of things.

Maybe even things that actually productive. Imagine that.

In fact, it’s even possible that if you include an attitude shift along with that perspective shift, you could turn anything at all into such an engrossing task simply by bringing yourself fully into the moment.

But, um, I think that’s for the advanced students. I’m a tyro now.

I have so much to learn. So much growing to do as a person. So many long dormant parts of me to activate and awaken and bring online.

But I truly believe I can change. I can change who I am and still be myself because I am the one making the changes, therefore they reflect me.

And what’s wrong with trying to perfect yourself? Things can always be better.

Hmmm. I’ve kind of veered far away from the original examination of self-consciousness I started out to do today.

So what else is new? Throughout the history of this blog, I have almost never ended up at the place I was heading for at the beginning.

And I’ve been doing this thing since 2011.

And I have arrived at what is probably the most important revelation I have had lately : there is life beyond video games for me.

I can get what I get from video games from other things if I just open my mind to the possibility of fully engaging with what I am doing.

And even if what I am doing is not all that engaging, that doesn’t mean I can’t also be doing other things in other tabs or windows to keep my mind busy.

For example, writing this blog is almost never the only thing I am doing at the time. I am almost always reading a webcomic or watching a YouTube video or otherwise occupying myself while I write and just jumping between the tabs whenever I need to in order to contain my ever-flowing mental energies.

There’s a lot of them.

So the way I do this blog is itself proof that I can keep myself occupied without video games, and I have been doing it without a problem for over a decade.

Now I am going to go lay down because I have a hell of a lot to think about.

More after the break.

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What can I do?

Quite a lot, actually.

But first I need to get over my reality aversion. Or, if not exactly get over it, find some way to work with it.

And towards that go. I will again remind myself that I don’t need to make some big, dramatic, irreversible leap into the void, necessarily.

I mean, it may come to that eventually. I may find that baby steps just aren’t getting the job done and the only effective cure is to fling myself from the parapets and hope I learn to fly on the way down.

But we are not there yet. For now, starting with baby steps seems like the best move.

And if it isn’t, who cares? I’m under no obligation to always do everything the best possible way to get the best possible result.

Especially not in realtime, which is, after all, where (and when) we live.

That’s why I keep going on about not judging our past realtime, split second decisions and actions by the standard of the calm and uninvolved present.

There will never be a time when my brilliant and agile mind will not be able to think of a better decision than whatever option I actually chose.

Ergo, pleasing that particular part of my mind is impossible, because if left to its own devices. it would set the bar so high at “there is only perfect, and failure” and clearly that is a wildly unreasonable standard for literally anything.

i keep coming back to the idea of just worrying about being me. I’ve been told “just be yourself” my entire life and until fairly recently that’s always struck me as insipid.

I mean, surely there’s a bit more to life than that.

But I think I get it now. Shifting the focus to just being yourself removes the possibility of investing your emotions in outcomes you cannot directly control.

The only thing you truly control is yourself.

So concentrate on doing that, instead.

As a jaded GenX type, it’s a little galling to realize a lot of the dipshit stuff morons have been mindlessly regurgitating to you for your whole life is actually true.

But luckily, I’ve a good enough sense of humour about myself to find that very amusing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is so very, um…. me.

Today’s the day I did my monthly banking. And that went fine. The people at VanCity are always very nice to me and are accommodating of my needs as a disabled person.

Mostly my need to sit down.

Walking bad. Standing much worse.

After I withdrew my cash, it was time for phase 2 of my monthly banking, the buying of that month’s prepaid credit card.

And that’s when our odyssey began because it turns out that our last source for the ones I have been using, ones provided by a company called Pay Power, have dried up. We went to four different places looking for one to no avail.

So I finally relented and got Julian to get me a card from Pay Power’s apparently triumphant rival called (I shit you not) the Joker Card.

And you have to admit that, as names for credit cards go, Joker’s wild.

So Julian kindly fetches me said card with my usual $500 on it and we go on to my weekly Doctor Chao appointment.

I get home, and the first thing I want to do is get my new credit card registered.

I have trusted an entirely new group or entity with the lion’s share of my monthly budget (the rest stays in cash) and I am very nervous about it.

So I get home, type in the URL for the website, and click Register New Card.

It immediately tells me that I am blocked.

Apparently, the website thinks I might be a hacker. Why, I have no idea. I am certainly not up to anything hinky, and none of the suggestions as to why it may have blocked me seem to apply to me.

Unless there is a “robot” on our network that I don’t know about.

If there was, I bet it would look like this :

I had no idea what to do about that, so I played Dragon Age : Inquisition for a while.

Luckily, when I got up and tried again, it loaded normally. Yay, finally I can register my card and things can go back to normal!

So I type in all the numbers, and it tells me that it “cannot process my request at this time”. And I am like, “motherfucker!”.

My hostility and suspicion explode and I am so pissed off. These fuckers have stolen my money and I want it BACK!

Seething with rage, I took a nap.

When I got back up, I tried inputting everything via Microsoft Edge instead of my usual Chrome, but that didn’t make a difference.

The website had said that if I kept getting that error message, I should call their Cardholder Services line at the number on the back of the card.

Everything on the back of the card is in letters way too small for me to read.

After fretting and fuming for a bit, it occurs to me to just Google the number. This works, and I call it up.

The very nice service rep (doing a pretty good job of suppressing her Quebecois accent) wanted me to read her some numbers from the back of the card.

I did my best but that was simply not gonna happen.

I really should invest in a magnifying glass.

Anyhow, she tells me I can read her the numbers on the front of the card instead, and i is while I am doing this that I notice that there’s a tiny bit of the sticker they use to cover up those numbers left on the card.

I remove it, and voila, a 6 becomes an 8.

Turns out I was typing in the wrong number this whole time!

I apologize to the service lady, end the call, and try the newly corrected number, and what do you know, everything works just fine.

So like I said, it’s a very “me” story because it involves a silly, simple mistake causing me to leap to a ridiculously negative conclusion and end up making a fool of myself.

But you know what? I’m under no obligation to be any more reasonable and/or sensible and/or “smart” than anyone else.

So I did a silly thing. So what? It could happen to anybody.

Thought possibly not as often…. 😛

More after the break.

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So I’m a doofus. So what?

All my life, I have been clueless, easily confused and/or overwhelmed, not tuned in to my environment, a maladroit and a klutz, and in general, I have kind of stumbled through life like a sleepwalking zombie.

And for almost all that time, I have been acutely ashamed of it. It was impossible for me not to notice all the problems and troubles I had that normal people did not, and how that made problems for those who loved me too, and so I felt inferior.

The fact that I was mentally superior to most people did not seem like sufficient compensation to me.

And this is about a lot more than just embarrassing myself, though that is bad enough. Subjectively, it makes my world very hazardous, and it means that at any moment, I could do something that causes me great pain and/or humiliation, and it all traces back to the same essential root cause :

I am pathologically internalized.

Almost all of my cerebral resources are dedicated to internal processes. as opposed to, say, processing sensory information.

Not hard to see why. When I was being raped at the age of 4, I fled to the only place available to me. namely deep into my own mind.

And I have been like a turtle in its shell ever since. It has given me extraordinary powers of insight and deduction and creativity, but left me semi-crippled in the world outside my skull – and I was like that way before my current neuromuscular issues.

No wonder I have always been so timid and afraid of the world. I’ve been trapped in a viscous cycle of reality being harsh to me because I am so withdrawn and then responding to that by withdrawing even further.

It also means my world has a big thick jagged line dividing what is In Here (in my inner world) and Out There (reality), and at any moment, I am ready to retreat into my shell and let everything Out There fall apart.

After all, why should I care? I’m safe In Here.

This is no way to live. There has to be some way to encourage my deeper self to go out into reality and stay there long enough to get some positive reinforcement and therefore some examples of there being things worth going Out There for.

Right now, as brutally sad as it is to say this, if it wasn’t for my friends and video games, and food I guess, reality would have precious little in it I cared about.

And that is one rotten attitude to have. Even I can see that.

But it’s not going to change until I change.

Time to become a god damned butterfly already.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still feeling pretty bummed out.

But like I told Doctor Costin during my Therapy Thursday session today, I feel like it’s all serving a purpose. That my metaconsciousness is processing some very deep and painful emotions that can be traced all the way back to my initial trauma of being raped by a stranger in a public shower stall when I was four years old, and that is some seriously heavy mojo, so no wonder things aren’t peachy keen up here on the conscious level where my usual “self” lives.

I can feel it churning away deep inside me. And I know it’s going to end. I already feel better than I did yesterday and yesterday I felt better than I did Tuesday, and so the trend is positive.

I just have to try to stay relaxed and let things unfold naturally without trying to interfere with or control the healing process.

I am slowly learning to accept that some things work better when I do nothing but sit on the sidelines and watch the parade go by.

I know that I am healing, despite the pain. Healing is often painful. But the fact that the cure often hurts worse than the disease is no argument against treatment.

Sometimes things have to get a lot worse before they get better. But it’s worth it because, well… they get better!

And there’s no way doing nothing is going to accomplish that.

And I have known for quite a while now that in order to become more sane, I was going to have to get a lot closer to being crazy.

That’s part of the deal. The path to sanity was always going to involve dealing with a lot of severe issues that my usual “ignore everything and play video games” lifestyle would usually leave undisturbed.

Before you can dispose of the toxic waste properly, you have to dig it up, and that is going to be a mighty disgusting and dangerous job.

But leaving it down there is not an option. It’s contaminating the ground water and making everybody sick. And that’s only going to get worse over time.

Time to dig deep and keep digging until it’s all gone.

Luckily, all I have to do is hold on and maintain. This is one time when my extreme passivity is actually a bonus.

That said, my role is not entirely behind the scenes. I am “doing something” in that I am sending my deep healing energies down to that poor scared little animal way down deep inside me, and encouraging myself to wake up and fight all the lethargy and lassitude that has built up over the decades of my mental illness.

It’s a tough to fight because being a lazy lump staring at screens will always be easier.

Not better, just easier.

And giving up will always bring instant and profound relief. Relief like that can be extremely addictive, almost like a drug.

Trust me on that.

But there is no giving up now. Now, it is actually easier to just let the healing process continue rather than go through all the hassle of trying to stop it.

Besides that, I am intensely curious as to where all this is going. I am totally invested in the plot and characters now. Every episode is like a revelation. And if I was to somehow interrupt it all, I would never know how it all ends.

And that would drive me crazy.

More after the break.

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Little known fact : there is a sequel to Farewell to Arms called And Fuck Legs, Too

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Pity the ingrate

Everybody says that one of the best ways to counter depression is with gratitude. You need to learn to feel grateful for all the little joys of life.

And I just can’t do it. And I’m not sure why.

Maybe my overdeveloped sense of irony is to blame. Gratitude like that is stupid and lame, suitable only for the empty-headed and vacuous who are also soothed by inane platitudes, oversimplified political messaging, and reality TV.

Or so that bitter, snarky, defensive part of me insists. I’m not sure I agree.

Overall, I would rather be happy. Like them.

And yet, when I try to imagine myself with an “attitude of gratitude” (gah). that rage and bitterness and contempt is all I feel.

I mean, gratitude for what? All the ways life ISN’T screwing me over? That is beyond insipid. Gratitude doesn’t work that way, at least not for me.

Even if you could manage to be grateful for literally everything that is not happening to you, you would burn out almost instantly.

And grateful to who? There is no entity deciding my fate. No “person” I have to thank for all the good things in my life.

Nor do I have anyone to blame for all the crappy stuff that has happened to me.

I am sure that this gratitude shit works for a lot of people. People who aren’t as bristling with rage and sarcasm as I am.

But it’s definitely not for me. I am grateful to and for the actual people in my life who help me. I am endlessly grateful for Joe and Julian for all the ways they have made living with my illnesses far, far easier.

I am grateful that I have a great friend like Felicity. Love you, dear. 🙂

And I am grateful for all my fluffy friends online. Critters like Ada, Niva, Coaldust, Sylver, Jetta, Windchaser, and the rest of the gang at Merriam’s on Tapestries MUCK give me a place where I feel like I can relax, fit in, and belong. Where I can make friends, hang out, get the positive attention I crave, and even have a little frisky fun once in a while.

I only wish I could function that well in the real world!

But that’s as far as my gratitude goes. It’s as evidence based as the rest of me, and I cannot fathom being any other way.

I can’t just manufacture gratitude.

The other great cure for depression supposedly is exercise, and I can’t do that, either.

Fuck this god damned life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still got the blues, although they at least have changed form.

Now, instead of being like an oppressive form of gravity pushing me down and keeping me there, it’s more like a pervasive melancholy that makes me sigh sadly now and then like I am awaiting my Gothic romance novel lover who is off at sea and overdue.

You know, I try to stay positive, but that’s hard to do in this gloomy castle next to the pitiless seas that roll endlessly against the rocky shore.

Hmmm. That was rather fun to write. Maybe I should try my hand at writing super dramatic bodice ripping historical romance novels.

There are worse ways to make a living.

Anyhow, I am still finding it hard to get out of bed. The urge to just stay there so I don’t have to deal with the world at all is strong, and I guess that’s a bad sign.

I honestly can’t tell if my depression is getting better or worse. It’s been such a constant in my life since my parents took me out of university waaaay back in 1992 or 1993 that I can’t perceive myself as something separate from it any more.

I can imagine it not being there as long as I don’t try to imagine how I got there. I can imagine myself full of life and energy and enthusiasm spending the working hours of the day doing creative things like writing, video editing, comment moderating, taking meetings with collaborators, and so on.

That all sounds pretty good to me. As a fantasy.

But if I try to actually imagine myself in that position, all the howling horrors of my depression leap into action and make me feel like I couldn’t take it, I’d be overwhelmed, I’d be terribly terribly exposed and vulnerable and trapped in scenarios where all I would want to do is run away and hide in this dank dark hole of mine, but I wouldn’t be able to.

Meaning I would be TRAPPED! Like a hack performer trapped in a spotlight when all he wants to do is run away from the booing and jeers of the crowd.

And all of that might happen. But I also might get over it.

After all, a lot of things are at their scariest and most unpleasant in the beginning. One of the most common and fatal mistakes of us Failure to Launch types is to judge entire things by just the sucky part at the beginning.

That’s a great way to fuck yourself out of a lot of things you would totally enjoy if you could just resist the urge to run for the hills the second things are less than peachy.

I am sure there is something in the layers of that about being a reactive type who responds to stimuli too strongly and runs themselves ragged.

But those are newborn thoughts not ready to face the world just yet.

I can relate.

And it’s not like I am going to have to jump straight from “current unsatisfying life” right to “busy all day doing grownup stuff”.

I mean, in a way, that would be nice, because it would mean that I am having outrageous success right out of the gate, and that would be most gratifying.

And you know what? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I’ve had success come easily to my for my whole life, after all.

And I am outrageously gifted. It would make sense!

Very improbable, though. So I would be able to add extra stimulation in the form of actual productive labour slowly, a little at a time.

But first I have to convince my deeper self that it’s safe to go out in the world.

And that ain’t gonna be easy.

More after the break.

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A life of leisure….

…is a myth.

Can’t be done. Is actually logically impossible if you think about it, because leisure is irrevocably defined relative to our labour and therefore if there is no labour, there can be no leisure, and it becomes something else entirely.

Something rather nasty, as it turns out.

It is exactly analogous to rest. You can’t rest forever. Rest is inherently about recovering from doing something, just like leisure.

The dream of unlimited leisure comes from how much we enjoy our leisure when it is a part of our busy lives. In that sense, it is as pure and simple as a child’s dream of having a mountain of candy.

But as many of us learned as children after overindulging after a night of trick-or-treating, too much of a good thing can in fact make you sick of it.

And from it.

It also stems from the “work bad, play good” model of life we all first internalized as “school bad, home good” as children.

This somewhat arbitrary division of life into “the good part” and “the part that sucks” stems from the highly unpleasant way we teach kids and continues on to color our attitudes towards work versus our home life.

To the point where we react like offended wolverines at the very thought of giving up one second of our off-work time for any reason.

Good thing most of us get over that when we have kids.

When leisure is overextended, it turns into decadence, and decadence is always profoundly dangerous, especially spiritually.

Decadence always comes from trying to meet spiritual and/or emotional needs via earthly means. Whether it’s eating because you’re lonely or drinking in bars to escape your depression or engaging in wild, impulsive, dangerous sex with strangers in order to feel alive, you are engaging in the addiction loop of treating the symptoms of the problem by distracting yourself from them rather than addressing them directly.

Often, this is because we don’t even know how to address them. We lack even a meaningful vocabulary for dealing with the needs money, spending, and consumerism simply can’t address.

I mean, a million dollar shopping spree on Rodeo Drive might make you feel better for a day or two, but in the end, you still end up cold and alone in your mansion and the fact that the bed cost more than most people make in a year doesn’t really fucking matter.

But rich people keep trying, and worse, they force their kids to try. All to live up to some crazy idea of “living the good life” and/or “being part of the leisure class”.

But there is no leisure class, people.

Just people driving themselves insane trying to play all day forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty down in the dumps lately.

No particular reason that I can think of. I just seem to have hit a low point in my mood cycle, assuming I have one.

As a result of this downer, it’s been taking me a really long time to get out of bed. I end up just laying there wanting to get up but lacking the motivation.

Then I will sit up, and stay like that a while, then sit on the edge of the bed for a spell, and only after I have done all that will I actually exit the comfort of my bed.

Which is pretty sad given that all I am going to do is sit at the computer and play video games for hours on end.

Lately, even that has seemed like a challenge, and I have to actively fight the urge to just stay in bed with my comforter and my tablet all day.

I guess I should be worried about that. After all, I’m a lifelong depressive with a history of suicidal ideation. Feeling this depressed is probably a sign of something or other going wrong and maybe I need some kind of treatment.

But that seems absurd to me. What kind of treatment? More drugs? I am not against the idea if it will help, but I am already on Paxil and Wellbutrin.

Not sure what they could add. Heroin?

But I know that’s the best I could get. It’s not like the likes of me could be admitted to a psychiatric facility for intensive therapy for a couple of months.

They need those beds for the serious crazies like the psychotics and those with borderline personality disorder and such.

Not us garden variety pathetic depressives.

Heck, I have never even attempted suicide. How boring can you get?

Whatever. This will pass, whatever it is. Nothing lasts forever, not even depression. Eventually I will feel better and go on with what I laughably call my “life”.

But if I still feel like this Thursday, I’ll talk to Doctor Costin about it during our usual therapy session. Who knows. maybe a med adjustment would actually help.

I doubt it. But then again, I am super depressed right now. So I am probably not the best person to be estimating the odds of something positive happening.

Eh, it’s probably just a buildup of emotional crud in my bloodstream. I have never managed to express my emotions in anything like realtime and so they build up over time until I finally get around to venting here, in this space.

So um, fuck my life. Fuck everything. Fuck everybody. Everything hurts, so everything can go fuck itself with a rusty razor blade. I hate my stupid fucking life.

I’m an unparalleled genius and a really sweet guy with loads of charisma and so very very much to contribute to the world but none of that matters because it’s all locked away behind a wall of mental illness and it will never see the light of day.

Nor will I.

I’m a pathetic son of a bitch who can’t get even the simplest aspects of being human right and who is stuck in a body that is falling apart and it’s only a matter of time before I am confided to a wheelchair or mobility scooter then to a bed and finally end up in a nice warm grave somewhere having done absolutely nothing with my time on Earth.

Well at least it won’t be much of a loss.

Sometimes I wish I could just burn all my pain away in a grand bonfire build on a ledge on the side of a mountain in the middle of a windless winter night.

But I can’t. All I can do is feel what I can, when I can, and try my best to learn to fly without knowing why.

That’s called faith. And I have never had any.

But I am willing to try.

More after the break.

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I feel somewhat better

Getting that negative stuff out of my head did, in fact. help with my depression.

Wow, it really IS anger turned inwards, isn’t it?

I feel like there is a lot more I could say – arguably, a lot more I SHOULD say – but I don’t have the energy to “go there” right now.

Plus, I don’t want to spoil the good mood I’m in because I finally got to see Joe again tonight, albeit only over Zoom.

That is honestly probably for the best because apparently, modern Covid is spreading like wildfire in Richmond Hospital despite everyone being masked and such, so I should probably stay the heck away from there for now.

I shall practice coughing into my inner elbow just in case. \

I also had my follow-up appointment with my eye doctor, Doctor Mackay, today. I was optimistic because the dark spot in my left eye’s visual field is completely gone, and all that remains of my previous ailment is some pretty heavy duty floaters.

Or so I thought. Until the nurse had me cover my right eye and try to read letter off a screen and I could barely even read them in the HUGE font.

So the vision in the left eye is definitely shittier than the vision in the right eye. Which means me and Doctor Mackay ain’t done yet.

In a bit less than a month, I will be seeing him at St. Paul’s again, whereupon he is going to laser whatever blood vessels in my eye still need sealing.

Oh. And despite my optimism, I did have to get a needle in the eye again. Sigh.

And it hurt. But not as much as the previous one did. So… progress?

Doctor Mackay applied the freezing stuff a bunch of times. That did the trick.

In fact, if he’s used just a tiny bit more, I might not have felt it at all.

But he’s a smart fella. He just darts in and gets it done when you’re not expected it. He’s in and out in a split second, so while it still hurts, it’s over quick.

I like this. Gives me a lot less time to dread it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.