It’s entirely foreign to me. So much so that I feel like a space alien even talking about it.

I’ve never been in love, or been in a relationship. I’ve barely even dated. Just a few dates a long time ago.

Same with sex. I’ve had it, but it was an even longer time ago.

And it wasn’t all that great, either. Presumably if I had remained sexually active for long enough, I would have gotten the hang of it, or better yet, met someone who definitely knew what they were doing and could teach me.

But it was more two or more people who have no idea what they are doing fumbling around. Which is, I suppose, what a lot of people’s early sex lives were like.

Looking back through the lens of my current wisdom, I can see that all the times I was trying to get it on with other dudes, I was having a low grade panic attack. The kind I had pretty much constantly at Kwantlen and VFS.

The kind I thought was perfectly normal until fairly recently.

And there are complicated psychological reasons for that. I don’t feel like going through them right now, though maybe I will do so soon.

There’s a lot of crazy bundled up in there.

Suffice it to say that being raped at the age of 4 fucks you up in a lot of ways and makes having actual normal, consensual sex a pretty complicated endeavour.

For me, despite being 51 years old (very), I have no idea if I am even capable of true romantic love. To me, it’s entirely possible that the best I can hope for is to be really, really fond of somebody.

To be in like with them, basically.

And that could seem a lot like love to the outside observer. I would dote on and adore this person, and shower them with love and affection. We could spend lots of time cuddling and canoodling and cohabiting.

But deep down, I wouldn’t really let them in. We wouldn’t truly connect. There is something akin to a shark cage inside me and nothing can breach that. It’s my final defense against a cold cruel world that never let me in.

But who knows. Maybe the right fella could change all that. Maybe with him, I would be able to truly relax and feel safe and loved and secure because for once in my life I am not constantly and anxiously waiting for my love object to reject and abandon me.

I guess I don’t expect anyone to pay attention to me for very long, no matter how hard I try to be pleasant and funny and cute and lovable.

I know that everyone always has more important things to do than be with me. I grok that I am nobody’s trop priority. I know that being around me can be draining. I know it can be hard to be my audience.

I guess, then, that on some level, I find it hard to imagine anyone wanting to be around me enough to actually date me, let alone be in a relationship with me.

And I am used to having loads and loads of alone time. I might find that I still need that no matter how in love I am.

After all, if life’s a performance, I am going to need a lot of time to recharge between shows. I put my everything into my little act, and that’s inherently a limited thing.

Then again, maybe I would finally learn to just be myself. No show, no dazzle, no sparkling wit, no borrowed bonhomie, just… me.

Maybe we could meet the real me together.

More after the break.

---

The lord of illusion

I really don’t know where I end and “performance” begins.

Mostly, I ignore the whole issue by just assuming that they’re continuous. My “show” is an expression of who I truly am. I am not faking anything. I am, in fact, expressing the heck out of myself.

I just happen to be a naturally showy and flamboyant dude.

But that idea I expressed at the end of part 1 – the idea of being just me, no razzle dazzle, just the being at my core – the wearer of masks, the illusionist, the imagineer, the man behind the curtain – the thought of that makes my heart go cold.

So there’s clearly something hiding backstage and using all the costume changes and set fly-ins and such to distract people into not looking for anything deeper.

After all, I’m showing you too much to be holding anything back. Right?

Not quite. And that’s where this all gets sticky.

The fact that I wish I truly was the person I pretend to be and leave my “real” self behind is a pretty bad sign, honestly.

It’s perfectly emblematic of my profound weakness of self. I’d rather be a product of my own imagination than the real person I am stuck being.

The real me is boring and ugly and broken and sad. It’s hard to be him. He’s taken a lot of damage over the years from all that frustrated growth potential and his inability to truly deal with the real world.

And now, of course, the physical form is breaking down too. It’s hard to get my feet planted firmly on the ground when I’m standing on shifting sands and I never know what is going to go wrong next.

I want to build a sense of stability and identity but my world is so chaotic on the inside that I feel like I am trying to tap-dance on teacups just to stay alive.

I want to start over. I want to reboot myself. I want to start a brand new playthrough so I can use what I know now to do way better this time through.

But that’s not possible. I have only one save game and this is it. And I would love to be able to boldly declare myself reborn and psychologically section off my past to leave it all behind and stride purposefully into a brand new day.

But I can’t. Whatever it is I would need to do that is just plain not here. I don’t have it in me. Instead I wander endlessly in this castle of shadows I call a mind, not even really looking for anything any more, just afraid of what would happen if I stopped.

I wand to be strong. I want to stand on solid ground. I want to be able to face the world and deal with it instead of hiding inside myself all the time.

But I don’t know how to make that happen.

I know a lot of things that would work for other people, but not me. Smart, positive, effective sounding things that would totally work… if I was much healthier than I am.

But I can’t even start the process. It’s like I am trying to fill a bucket with no bottom. Everything falls through.

And I don’t know WTF yu do about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I’m in a very uncomfortable situation.

Last Friday, my pharmacist Simon called me to tell me my next set of a month’s worth of blister packed meds was ready. Keen. Time for us to go visit.

But we forgot. There was a lot going on that day, though ironically not for me.

And worse, we didn’t think of it Saturday either. Pickup would still have been possible because the Medicine Shoppe is open between 10 am and 2 pm on Saturdays.

But nope. No problem, I wouldn’t actually run out until Monday anyhow.

Well today is Monday and it is also the inaugural Truth and Reconciliation Day here in Canada and that’s a stat fucking holiday so, no drugs for me today either.

Wow, it’s a good thing nobody needs their meds to stay alive or anything.

So I am going to go a whole 24 hours completely unmedicated and I am not happy about that. I am doing my best not to freak out about it because obviously that would only make things worse, but I am very very worried nonetheless.

By all sane measurements, this is not good. I am especially worried about missing my blood pressure medications because you’re really, really not supposed to go off those suddenly. Terrible imbalances can occur.

So I am doing my best to stay mellow. I have taken a muscle relaxant (the ominous sounding cyclobenzaprine) and a fast acting anti-anxiety pill (the downright magical sounding alprazolam), which are two “as needed” drugs that I therefore still have in bottles, and hopefully they will keep me on an even keel emotionally.

Or they will wipe me out completely, which would be somewhat humorous. I take the two together and sleep for like a day.

Well at least my meds would be ready when I woke up!

---

Whatever happens, happens

Still trying to stop trying to control outcomes and just relax.

I know I need to chill the fuck out. I know I take things too seriously. I know that I am tormented by an excess of nervous energy I can’t seem to discharge.

I know I’d be a lot happier if I could keep myself busy, etc.

I think this is why I keep returning to nihilism : nihilism negates nervousness. Nihilism is like the opposite of taking things too seriously. Nihilism says that you can stop worrying about everything because none of it matters anyway…. so just chill.

I feel like I am all tied up in knots on the inside, and that somewhere in there is a little bow that if I pull it the right way the whole thing will unravel like a cheap sweater and I will collapse like a puppet with its strings cut into a puddle of bliss.

But it’s probably more like one of those tricky knots where you can’t loosen one part without tightening another.

If only I could find within me a source of strength and focus and calm instead of constantly riding the ragged razor’s edge of anxiety feeling like this old plane of mine could shake itself to pieces at any moment.

I feel like there’s this terrible fading away that happens when I try to pull myself together. Like my energies start up then cut out like I have popped a very weak and insufficient fuse and can’t take the power.

Perhaps I am more than even I can handle. But it’s far too late for me to learn to be less than I am. I have grown into this monolithic mental magician through no conscious effort of my own. It’s more like there’s a “get smarter” program running in the background of my mind and I don’t know how to turn it off.

Nor do I want to. Not really.

But what good is all this mental muscle if I don’t have the heart to use it? It’s just all this potential left to rot on the vine because I am too weak and cowardly to use it.

I can only hope that I find my strength one day.

Until then, I rot in the shadows, like always,

More after the break.

In a tizzy over dizzy

I’m all dizzy and hot again.

Woke up from a nap feeling that way and I have been trying to claw my way back to some semblance of equanimity ever since.

Made going to the kitchen to nuke my order from Donair Dude from last Saturday tricky. But sad to say, I suppose I’m getting good at making the trip in various states of debility.

The dizzy/hot thing definitely feels like it could be overheating related, which in turn would suggest it has to do with dehydration.

I will see if hydration helps.

The other possibility is that it’s sinus related. I was sneezing a fair bit earlier. Could be that my sinuses are full and that makes them back up into my ear canals via the eustachian tubes and thence unto my inner ears.

Knowing my luck, it’s both.

Emotionally, I’ve been feeling rough and raw and low-key angry all day. I’m in the mood to glower in darkness thinking brooding, gloomy, vaguely emo thoughts.

But like all things, this too shall pass. I will feel better after some more sleep, I imagine. Or I at least I will feel different.

A change is as good as a rest, after all. Or so they say.

I wish I knew how to make myself feel better. There are potential solutions but none of them are viable because I don’t have the wherewithal to pursue them.

Get more, better sleep. Sure. Move around more. Fantastic, I’ll get right on that. Eat a more balanced diet. What the hell, live a little.

All of these things would no doubt work, and none of them are going to happen any time soon. It’s just not in the cards. The center does not hold.

And I die a little bit all the time, without even noticing.

I guess it’s not important anyway.

I won’t be doing anywhere any time soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We’ve never really gotten along.

Even when I was a little kid, it took me a long time to fall asleep. I have plenty of memories of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling trying to fall asleep.

Number one rule of sleep : stop trying! Sleep is not something you make happen, it’s something you let happen. You have to get rid of whatever is keeping you awake then just let the natural process of nodding off take over.

Maybe that’s part of my problem. My overactive mind has trouble letting go of “control”. On a deep level, I feel like I am only safe when I am awake and aware and using this big bad brain of mine to calculate and predict and all the crap.

Being raped when I was four really did a number on me. It forever ruptured my sense of safety and made me deeply paranoid on a very intellectual level.

I just don’t trust the world not to sneak up on me to hurt me when I’m not watching .

So I always have to be watching. Even when I am asleep there is a part of me that is awake and watching.

So my sleep tends to kind of suck. The idea of getting actual, deep, restful sleep where I wake up feeling rested and refreshed remains mostly theoretical to me.

It’s happened but very, very rarely, and seemingly at total random. Presumably something I did before set the neurochemical stage just right, or something.

Or maybe I just managed to do enough to exhaust myself and drain off all the excess energy that usually powers this megawatt mind of mine so that I could finally get some god damned rest.

Like I have said before, I know in my soul that I am happiest when I am busy, but I lack the ability to make myself truly busy

All I know how to do is keep myself occupied. Like I have made a home for myself in life’s waiting room and I’ve been waiting for something or someone to start me off in life for so long that most of the time I forget that I am even waiting for something.

I know that I can’t do this alone. I need someone to hold my hand and anchor me and help me say calm and focused and grounded so that my neuroses do not carry me away from what I want in life.

So yeah. I can’t do it alone.

But I have always been alone. I don’t really know how to do things with others because there’s never been any others to do anything with.

I am always alone. I got myself through school. I had no support from my family, my teachers, or my classmates.

But I don’t know how to exit my mental illness alone. I am increasingly sure that it will involve finally learning to connect with other people and the human race in general, and I am scared of all that.

The truth is that I am socially retarded. I completely bypassed so many developmental stages that I am still way, way behind the other kids when it comes to connecting with others and learning to just plain get along.

I don’t want to be alone. This sealed off world of mine is awfully cold and lonely. I long for some kind of real connection with another to end this death march through the Midnight Tundra of my inner world so that I can finally come home.

But I know the world outside my skull is not to blame. Not really.

The problem is that in order to let someone in, you have to open your heart to the world. and let life in.

You have to forego the cold comforts if icy intellectualism and embrace being emotionally real and present.

You have to be here now.

And I’ve never been able to do that.

More after the break.

---

Meanwhile, back at the topic

Oh right, sleep.

What got me thinking about my relationship with sleep was my inability to change my basic sleeping pattern despite my rather bold declaration a little way back that I was going to stop napping so much.

Um, no. That resolution lasted about as long as my hypomanic phase and that was all. One cannot change the habits formed over decades of repetition by fiat alone.

So I still have a segmented day where I am awake for a period then nap. or sometimes vice versa, and it’s all bracketed by meals.

So in the morning I will get up whenever, and at 8 am I have my breakfast while hanging out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries MUCK.

It’s a way to have breakfast with friends every morning. An admittedly rather attenuated way, but that’s the form of social stimulation I can handle.

Namely, completely mitigated by screens. Sigh.

After breakfast I go back to sleep. That usually ends up being at around 10 am, but my energy levels vary and my active period could only last till 9 or keep on chugging until noon or even 1 pm.

Then there’s unstructured time till 4 pm, which is when I do lunch n’ blog, then go to sleep again, then at 8 pm it’s supper n’ blog, then nap yet again, and then get up by midnight to either Zoom with Julian and Felicity or hanging out with Julian and watching an episode of Colbert we recorded via PVR.

That’s my life. After each sleep period there is usually a time of wakefulness during which I play my video games until the next break.

Occasionally I loiter playing games for too long and need to take a nap in the hour or so before a blogging session instead.

But the pattern remains true. I nap a LOT. And I know why – it’s because I hide in sleep. I take naps to escape reality and give my anxiety level time to fall back to zero so I can get up and make it through another active period.

The idea of having to stay awake for longer than that, perhaps understandably, scares me terribly. It makes me feel like I would be “trapped” in wakefulness without the ability to retreat into sleep when things get too intense and/or stimulating.

Which is exactly how normal, healthy people live. They stay awake all day and part of the night, then sleep eight hours in a row except for sometimes getting up to pee.

That seems incomprehensibly horrific to me. I need my hidey hole of sleep to disappear into in order to function at all.

And I know how bloody unhealthy that is. That’s not how humans are meant to function. That’s why most people do not live like I do.

And I know that this need for a ready escape route stems from a fundamental weakness of character. Were I a stronger, healthier, more robust specimen, I would not need to run and hide in sleep so much. I would be able to live a normal life.

But I can’t change that via fiat either.

Maybe it would all sort itself out were I physically healthier.

But I don’t seem to be able to manage that, either.

I’m too sick to make myself well.

And ain’t that a kick in the nards?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I seem to be near the bottom of my long mood cycle right now.

I can tell because the nihilistic thoughts are creeping in. Thoughts like “I hate my life” and “fuck everything forever” and my personal fave, “everything is stupid and nothing matters”, which I swear I’m going to put on a T-shirt some day.

The edgy teen crowd will love it.

Generally speaking, this lower limit of the sine wave of my mood happens when enough frustrations and unexpressed anger has accumulated in my nervous system to start being really burdensome and it drags my mood down till it reaches a very low-key kind of crisis and that discharges enough of this dark energy to make me feel better.

In a way, I kind of wish it led to something more dramatic, like a nervous breakdown or a big confrontation or warrants for my arrest.

At least then it might actually resolve some of my inner conflict and make me substantially more whole instead of making progress drop by infinitesimal drop.

But I am just too goddamned stable. My mind is programmed to always keep me on an even keel no matter what in order to better facilitate this dead end video game based lifestyle of mine, and that means catastrophic change is just not in the cards for me.

I can’t just surrender myself to the chaos within and let whatever happens, happen. That’s asking too much of my belabored psyche. There is no way that I could trust that such a step would not end up harming me or others.

And that’s very important to me. I can’t absolve myself of responsibility for the consequences of my actions, even if I might be better off if I could.

It could very well be that mentally healthy people have a limit to how much responsibility they take for their part in things and everything outside that limit is somebody else’s job and not their problem.

And it’s only developmentally stunted weirdoes like me who try to live entirely by principle, without any little island of mercy carved out in which to be human and put my own emotional wellbeing first.

And that’s a cold and stringent way to live, without any forgiveness for myself, and I know that I would be a lot better off living a warmer and more human life, but this icy, brutal, strict ethos is all I know.

When I try to imagine what lies outside that way of living, all that comes to mind is my adopting a FEBM (Fuck Everybody But Me) lifestyle of selfish self-gratification without any thought to the consequences to others.

All that would matter was what I could get away with.

No consequences for me? Then I fail to see a problem.

Obviously that’s just my mind’s way of going to the opposite extreme, and sanity, as always, lies somewhere between those poles.

And that happy medium is far more difficult for me to achieve. I seem to be naturally drawn to one extreme or another.

All I can do is do my best to keep healing and growing and letting my mind and my soul expand with all the parts of me that have been dormant for so long

And sooner or later that is going to require a loss of “control”. And that, in turn, requires something I sorely lack : faith.

Faith that I can do that and it will be okay. Things will get better for me. I won’t end up in jail or my grave. I will be fine, or something like it.

I have no reason to believe that. I live life on the high wire with no safety net. There has never been anyone to catch me if I fall.

I am not sure there even could be such an individual. I am a lot to handle and not even my therapist can handle the true unfiltered me.

I am downright megalithic.

And nobody knows what to do with a guy like that.

Least of all me.

More after the break.

---

More DoorDash follies

Until further notice, I will not be ordering in on Saturday night any more.

That’s because apparently our building’s buzzer system is completely broken, neither me nor any other resident of Manhattan Towers let someone in the building without physically going down the lobby and opening the door.

So for the second Saturday in a row, my meal is sitting outside the door to the building and I am helpless to go get it.

And this time, I can’t complain to DoorDash and get a refund because this time the driver definitely did not do anything wrong.

He got it as close to me as he could.

And I am not the type of person to lie about a thing like that.

Or nearly anything else, for that matter.

I actually called Julian to see if he could come home from playing board games at Joe’s parents’ place long enough to bring it to me, but he understandably said no.

It was a pretty big ask.

I’m going to have to complain to someone about the buzzer system, though. I need that thing. What if I had an emergency and had to let the EMTs in?

And I can’t be the only person in this 120+ unit apartment building who uses the buzzer. Admittedly, not many of them would have it hooked up to a landline, but that’s neither here nor there.

This whole thing has me kind of bummed out. I was really looking forward to having a nice treat tonight only to have it snatched away by cruel fate.

And as patient readers know, I don’t handle disappointment well. So I am probably going to be sad for a while.

But I’ll bounce back eventually.

Julian will pick up the meal for me whenever he gets home and I’ll have him stick it in the fridge and I will heat it up and eat it Monday night.

By then, this will just be another lesson learned the hard way.

And that’s better than learning nothing at all.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

The real one, not the Golden Earring song.

I had one of my “reality moments” today, and it was a pretty big one.

I’ve been having my usual trouble regarding what game I want to acquire next. I have a slot open now that I have finished Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey and all its DLC.

There’s a bunch more I could do in the game. I could finish killing all the members of of the Cult of Cosmos so I can find out who the mysterious leader known only as “the Ghost” really is, and then kill him or her.

And I am not incurious about who it is. But I am totally burned out on that game now, The only way I would keep playing it now is if there were cash prizes.

But anyhoo, whilst in the throes of indecision’s agonies, I decided it was time that I tried the fourth Elder Scrolls game, Elder Scrolls : Oblivion.

So I bring up the page on Steam where I would download and install it, and I am about to do that when a little factoid commandeered my attention.

Not only had I played the game before, but I had played it for 444.12 hours.

And yet, I had no memory of the game at all. Zero, nothing, nada. And yet I had played for the equivalent of eighteen and a half days.

What the FUUUUUCK?

Eventually I started to remember the game, thank God. I think I had forgotten it because it’s enough like Skyrim that the two kind of blended together in my mind.

But I was totally in a reality conflict for a few long minutes there. What I was staring at seemed patently impossible.

Who was this strange person who had played this game for so long under my name?

If this was a movie, that would be a pretty nifty way to reveal to the protagonist that he had multiple personalities.

It’s hard to describe that feeling of broken reality. i mean, terror is definitely in there, because what could be more frightening that things not making sense any more?

And confusion, of course. But I think at its core it’s about a very nasty form of cognitive dissonance as two versions of reality clash violently in your head.

You have two mutually exclusive beliefs on the most massive of scales, and that makes our puny human minds hurt!

And I suppose I am more prone to these moments than the average Joe or Josephine because my absentmindedness makes the misfiling of biographical memory all too easy. Especially at my age.

By this point in life, I think your memory banks are full and therefore nothing new can come in without something else going out.

Kind of like a packed night club. Nobody gets in until somebody leaves.

I’m also more prone to these “reality moments” because of how much time I spend in my head and therefore not really interacting with reality much at all.

I wish I knew how to stop that. I want to spend more time in the real world in order to tether myself to something more solid and reliable than my fluctuating mental state.

Trust me, ye ascetics, you do not wish to leave the material world behind and become a being of pure thought.

You think it will be Nirvana, but trust me, it’s a lot more like Gehenna.

I think the only way I will be able to stay out of my head is if my surroundings become a great deal more pleasant.

Right now, when I stick my head out of my turtle shell, all I see is my shitty filthy trash filled bedroom, and that sends me right back into my shell.

But I am slowly cleaning the place up. Perhaps eventually my surroundings will at least be inoffensive to me.

What I really need is a couple of weeks in a good clean hotel room. That would give me time to gather my strength for tackling the big cleanup back home.

Some day I will be able to afford to have someone come in twice a week o clean up my living space and make it more livable.

Until then, it’s all up to me.

So what else is new?

More after the break.

---

Oh yeah, the crashing

I swear, it’s like the universe is forcing me to play video games less.

And it does this by crashing my effing computer after something like 20 to 30 minutes of play. Or less, in the case of Pathfinder : Kingmaker.

That’s the one that REALLY pisses me off because I am so close to finally finishing the god damned thing…. after 248 hours of gameplay!

But the fucking thing crashes before I can even finish one battle.

I might see what turning down the graphics settings will do. It might help. I am chagrined to have to do it, but at this point, whatever lets me finish is gold.

If I do manage to finish the fucking thing, that will put extra pressure on me to find my next game as I will only have Fallout 2 left to play.

And I’m enjoying it but it’s pretty ancient. It can’t really carry the load of my gaming habits all by itself. So I will need to find something else.

I’ve reinstalled a game I acquired long ago called Trials of Fire. It’s quite good but it’s really frigging hard. That’s why I haven’t played it that much.

I might have to do the unthinkable and start off playing in Easy mode.

No… my pride will not allow it.

Oh, and another mystery : at some point I acquired Borderlands 3. And then promptly forgot I had it.

Installed it. It said I’ve already played for 3.4 hours. I started it up and did not recognize the intro, but bits and pieces are coming back to me now.

Of course, it fucking crashes too. Argh.

Next month I have GOT to get a better power supply.

Hopefully that will fix it. If not, I am going to have to get spuug over to take a look at the graphics card because its fans never seem to turn on any more.

Maybe there’s a setting somewhere that’s gone askew. I dunno.

If this keeps up I might actually have to be more social and productive online.

What? It could happen!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am nowhere on the autism spectrum, as far as I know, but it has occurred to me lately that I have had a number of odd sensory experiences.

Like the one I have told you about once before, where one of the fluorescent lights in my elementary school classroom was flickering randomly and for some weird reason this caused a bizarre pressure to build up in my head that froze me in place like I was under a spell so all I could do was stare as some uncanny force filled my mind.

Luckily, the teacher (a substitute) noticed my plight and turned that row of lights off and I blinked a whole bunch of times and sort of came back to myself like I had been astral projecting and just came back to my body.

I must admit, I am scientifically curious as to what would have happened had she not intervened. The most likely result would have been a seizure of some sort and a quick trip to the hospital, which was only half a block away.

But who knows. Maybe it would unlocked my hidden superpowers, and she was actually working for villains of the future whom I had defeated who wanted to keep me from ever unlocking the mightiness inside me!

Probably not. But it’s fun to think about.

And then there was another day when a fan in an air conditioner was emitting a very high pitched squeaking sound as it rotated and apparently I was the only one could hear it and it too sort of filled my mind, but without the dire hypnosis this time.

It made it very hard to concentrate on anything, though.

Luckily, it was an air conditioner hanging out of someone’s office window downtown, so I could just get away from it and calm down.

But squeaking speaking of high pitched noises, I’ve always been sensitive to them. Certain high frequencies have the “nails on the chalkboard” effect on my nerves and so I involuntarily end up hating any source of them.

Like certain singers or musical instruments. Or songs.

I can only assume that my nerve jangling response covers a wider band of frequencies than most people’s because things bother me that don’t bother anyone else.

That squeaky air conditioner is just one example.

Then there’s the things everyone but me seems to like to eat and I can’t stand them.

Like blueberries. They taste like used coffee grounds to me. Dunno why.

Or how certain barbeque sauces taste like ashes to me. I guess my palate is not fooled by whatever fake “smoky” flavour these sauces contain.

Or ham. God, how ham nauseates me. Something about that combination of sweetness and meatness utterly turns my stomach.

I don’t even like the smell of it. Gack.

But the main issue between me and my senses is my lack of using them. I was just talking about this with my therapist today. How I have been so powerfully withdrawn into myself that I have been scarcely aware of my environment even when it’s new and how have lived in this sort of nest in my mind where it’s just me and the magnificent toy that is my amazing brain.

So I don’t experience the world of the senses very much. I spend most of my time in this same little room of mine and absorbed into the world of my computer and the Internet, and so I get very little sensory stimulus at all.

And, sadly, that’s how I like it. Sensory stimulation always activates my anxiety, especially outdoors, and makes me long to be inside someplace safe again.

I’m trying hard to unlearn this awful way of thinking so I can open my mind to the idea that there are good thing out there in the world, things that are well worth the cost of going to get them, and so I am free to go out and play with the other kids.

And this time, they may even like me.

More after the break.

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The eventual pasta

I’m finally getting around to eating the pasta from last Saturday night.

Don’t worry, it’s been in the fridge since then. I meant to eat it last night but I forgot until I was already nuking myself some chicken strips.

These days, the two most magical words in the freezer aisle are “fully cooked”.

Fantastic. That means that all I have to do is nuke them till they have thawed out and heated up, and that usually only takes 2 minutes.

And that means I don’t have to stand up for long in the kitchen.

Which is good, because I can’t.

I eventually figured out that I don’t have a choice but to eat the stuff and take my chances on pasta Alfredo that sat out in front of the building for a couple of hours because the alternative was to throw it out and I could not bring myself to do that.

Might seem like insufficient reason to risk food poisoning, but here we are anyhow.

Heating the pasta up was a pain. Had to dump it out of its metal container on to a plate, heat it up in the microwave, then ladle it back into the thing and put the thing back into the pizza box it all arrived in.

That was the only way in Hell I’d be able to carry my food from the kitchen to the bedroom and my seat in front of Mister Computer.

Needing to use a walker means never being able to actually carry anything because you need at least one and often two hands on the walker to get anywhere.

This time, I was able to balance the pizza box on the walker and then keep it balanced there with one hand while I awkwardly walkered back here.

Such is the life of a gimp like me.

It’s a good thing I’m cute.

Really helps to take the edge off.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

/

I feel tired. But in an unusual way.

It feels like I am sagging all over. Like I’m a half-inflated balloon. When I went to get my lunch just now, it felt like my muscles were just hanging off my bones and that made it trickier than usual to stay upright and put my lunch together.

I felt somewhat dizzy too. Not nearly as bad as it has been in the past, but it didn’t help.

I’ve felt like this ever since I woke from a nap at around 4:05 pm. Just getting up to turn the stupid alarm clock app off on Mister Computer felt like a long haul.

Then I had to sit there just kind of zoned out for around fifteen minutes as I gathered the strength to go get my food.

Now this is probably nothing. I am probably just dehydrated. It’s easy for that to creep up on me, especially if my sleep has been extra sweaty.

Then I get to wake up dehydrated. Fun.

Additionally, it could be sleep debt coming due as well. I have a dim but present feeling like I slept particularly deeply this afternoon, and if so, I am going to want to get back to sleep as soon as possible in order to take full advantage of this rare window in the sturm und drang inside my head to get all the REM sleep I can!

Because yeah, my sleep still kind of sucks.

At least I am able to get a solid four contiguous hours a night now. I have put the days of not being able to sleep more than one and a half hours behind me, at least for now.

And I definitely intuit that this blessed evolution of my sleep cycle had something to do with a reduction noise and chaos in my head.

It’s still a far cry from a normal eight hours a night of sleep but it’s a heck of a lot better than the previous benighted era.

One must celebrate one’s triumphs, no mater how small.

You need to validate and encourage yourself.

And that can be very hard when your self-esteem is abysmally low, because in that state, you don’t value your own opinion enough to self-validate.

It’s like, oh great, I have the support of THAT idiot. Yippie.

But I am trying, Doctor Scott^[1], I’m trying.

Speaking of poor Doctor Scott, his videos have been triggering that strange rage response in me that I first observed when I joined an online mental health mutual support community a few years back.

It’s like when the things I am seeing and reading cross some invisible line inside me they set off my deep anger in a somewhat explosive way.

Quite out of character for me. Moreso than is healthy, in fact.

Consequently, the comments section on Doctor Scott’s vids have received some blisteringly bitter and angry posts from me.

It’s OK, though, because his vids get way too many comments for him to possibly read them all, and even if he did, he’s a board certified psychologist, I am sure he is quite accustomed to having “patients” lash out at him reactively.

Even a sometimes cold fish like me can be triggered when someone is poking around in my psyche’s innards.

And it’s good for me to get that stuff out of my system. They say depression is anger turned inwards, ergo getting that anger out reduces depression.

I have a lot of emotions chained up by “reason” and “logic” inside me and I am going to have to unchain and experience them all if I want to be well.

And I do.

More after the break.

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I feel so sore

OK, I’m going to just blab this out here in order to get it out of my head :

What I am most afraid of is that this is my new normal.

That my mysterious ailment has progressed and taken yet another big chunk of my vitality and ability away and now I am going to feel like this – sore and weak and dizzy – until my mystery ailment decides to get even worse and then it’s the hospital bed and the god damned tubes everywhere for me.

This is not a prediction or a diagnosis. I am not saying that this is definitely what is happening or is going to happen. For all I know, this will just be one of my attacks of health weirdness that will pass in a day or two.

Of course, some of those attacks leave me weaker than before. 🙁

Oh well, Just another day in the slow roast Hell that is my life. I am sure that I will feel better soon, but as to my ultimate fate, who knows?

Not my doctor, that’s for sure.

All I can do is keep plugging along trying to fix my head so that I can also fix my body, although I am willing to entertain the notion of doing it the other way around.

I mean, I know what I need to do : move more. Exercise. Exit this state of cozy torpor and stand up and get moving.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. I can’t stand up for very long.

And I have no philosophical objection to moving around more. No doubt I would feel a lot better. Happier, less stressed, more alive. All that good stuff.

But right now I feel like someone waking up on Sunday morning and thinking of all the reasons they have to get out of bed. They’ll get a tasty breakfast, play with and groom the dog, maybe do a crossword puzzle. All things they’ll enjoy.

But they just can’t bring themselves to breach that lovely envelope of warmth and face the colder, more demanding world out there when it’s so nice in here.

I’ll have to find the motivation to do it some day.

But not just yet,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

OK, I guess I am ready to discuss it now.

Plus I have no other ideas, so this is it.

Here is the vid :

Now to start off, you must ignore a whole section of that video because he goes off talking about dysthymics that are hard working and reliable and excellent in their field but find there to be no joy in it for them.

That’s clearly not me. I never got a chance to do that. My illness took me before I could even get my first job.

And I was never the one my parents could rely on because they never gave me any responsibility, or anything else for that matter.

I guess they could rely on me to stay invisible. Never ask for anything, stay in my room most of the time, rarely even watch TV with them.

Because I was dead inside.

Now for the rest of it.

He talks a lot about learning to generate your own joy, and that jibes with my own observations about it seems like healthy people have a faculty inside them that generates the right emotional input to keep their mood from going below a certain level.

So far so good.

But when I try to apply this to myself, I hit a dead stop. My brain screeches to a halt. I literally cannot imaging pleasure coming from inside me.

So like Doctor K says, I rely entirely on external stimuli, and in my case that’s video games, and to a lesser extent food.

I’ve cooled out on food for the most part. I eat, obviously, and the foods I eat are ones I like, but I don’t think about food or plan my life around food and I certainly don’t use food to improve my mood.

That’s a dead end street. Emphasis on dead.

I can’t even imagine pigging out like I used to now. I know where that leads and it leads to feeling ill for a much longer time than it made me feel good.

But video games are my doom still. They are my “dominant other” and I rely on them almost exclusively for my emotional needs for :

1. A safe and acceptable level of stimulation
2. A sense of accomplishment and, god help me, productivity
3. An outlet for my intellectual energies
4. Something to occupy my time
5. An escape from having to be me

And pretty much everything else, too.

Or at least the needs I recognize and experience. As we all know, I have ruthlessly suppressed every goddamned emotion that did not fit in my addictive lifestyle and that is a lot of freaking emotions.

I don’t even feel horny any more. All I feel is a certain tightness in my balls that suggests I should at least try to masturbate to get some relief.

Then again, I suppose there’s nothing in my life to MAKE me horny.

There I am, putting all the onus on an exterior source of pleasure again.

That’s really where the bullet hits the bone. I can only see the world through the lens of a perpetual need for external stimuli to keep my mood afloat.

The idea of being able to be OK just on my own, unstimulated, seems utterly foreign to me. Alien. Like it comes from a very different universe than my own.

And I’m sorry, Doctor K, but I don’t rely on external things to make me happy. Maybe this is the depressed Gen X in me, but I don’t believe in “happy”.

Nothing can make me happy. At least not yet. Even if I am enjoying myself greatly, that layer of ice around my heart never melts and I am, at best, okay.

And that’s all I really want out of life. Contentment. Fulfillment. I just want to feel okay instead of feeling like I am always fighting oblivion and barely producing enough thrust to keep myself out of the black hole at my core.

And you want me to somehow generate my joy internally?

That’s not in the cards.

At least, not yet.

More after the break.

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Cancel it out

That’s what I am trying to do with the negative thinking displayed above.

And it’s not easy. It’s like there’s a massive flywheel in me that’s been spinning in one direction with enormous force for a very long time and I am trying to get it to spin in the opposite direction now.

And that means that the first thing I have to do is kill all the momentum going the wrong direction and that means applying an opposing force.

I don’t have it in me yet to stop the wheel all at once. I can’t just slam on the brakes and have it grind to a halt in a shower of sparks.

Instead, I have to apply little bits of opposing force that slow down the wheel just a little each time. Eventually, I may be able to stop it and then start it spinning positive.

Until then, I feel kind of like I find pockets of negativity in my mind when I do things like write here and by writing them out, I excise them.

I can let go out those emotions now. They have been transmitted.

Other times, it’s more like grinding the barnacles off a ship’s hull. The negative thoughts and attitudes stick out from my actual natural mind and so, with a small concentration of will backed by my massive rage battery, I can grind them down to nothing.

And that feels good. Like a hot shower when you’re really dirty. You can feel all the sweat and grime and nastiness just melt and slide off you and down the drain.

Like I keep saying, it’s a slow process. Perhaps I am too cowardly and/or cautious to make the big moves I really need. Maybe I don’t have the strength yet. Maybe I have not built up enough frustration and rage yet.

Still can’t get mad and stay mad. I’m just too naturally mellow.

But I will grind my way out of here sooner or later.

If I live long enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling very sleepy and derpy today.

Must be one of my sleep days when my sleep debt comes due and my brain wisely makes me shut the fuck down so it can get some maintenance work done.

I was going to comment on this Healthy Gamer (with Doctor K) vid, which is all about dysthymic depression (hello!). I had this whole set of comments I was going to make relating the content to myself, but meh.

Maybe later. Maybe not. Whatever. I am too tired to think about it.

Let’s see what I can remember. He talked about dysthymic depressives like myself not having depressive episodes per se but feeling kind of rotten all the time.

That syncs with my observations. There are bad days and better days with my depression, but I don’t have episodes where it gets far far worse like people with major depressive disorder (MDD) do.

Instead I cling to the baseline. The amplitude of the waveform of my mood is quite low. Never very high but also never very low either.

That is changing as I tear down that wall inside me and open myself to the full range of human emotion. That baseline shit comes at the cost of muting all your emotions, good or bad, in order to create that artificial calm.

The concept is that this omnipresent muting is worth it because it keeps you out of the severe lows and thus keeps you “safe” from things like self-harm.

That’s well worth eliminating the highs as well and thus living a sad but stable life doing not much of anything.

Or so the reasoning goes.

But there are worse things than being really depressed. I am more than willing to risk serious lows in order to destroy that wall of numbness inside myself and find out what it’s like to really feel something.

I want to feel everything. Everything there is to feel. The entire smorgasbord of human emotion, from anger to zealotry.

And I am pretty sure that I am very well armed against self-harm. I know that no matter how bad I feel, it’s only temporary. If I hang in there until it passes, I will be happy that I didn’t do anything permanent to myself.

And what the hell. I’d rather feel bad than feel nothing. Pain and sadness suck but at least they tell me that I am alive, god dammit.

I have not felt truly alive for a very long time. All that “stability” came at the cost of being dead inside for thirty fucking years.

Thirty years I won’t ever get back. And that hurts so bad. All that time alive and in my prime wasted playing video games and blogging and nothing much else.

I could have completed a college degree and maybe a masters in psychology and gone into private practice somewhere and really helped people while living a comfortably middle class life.

At the end of the day, that’s all I really want. A comfortable middle class life. One like my childhood back in good ol’ Summerside, Prince Edward Island.

More than that would be nice. But even then, my aspirations remain middle class.

Just middle class with nicer stuff.

That’s probably how I would live even if I was rich. I don’t want a mansion or a castle or a huge penthouse apartment someplace chic.

I just want a cozy middle class house that I can share with my Man of Life which we would turn into our own cozy little nest to make our home.

Something in a nice, quiet, leafy neighborhood. Like the one I grew up in.

I guess we really do return “home” after all. Even is we have to build it ourselves.

More after the break.

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Beat up and beat down

That’s how I am feeling right now.

Going to the kitchen to make supper was a real slog. I’m so body-tired right now. And yet, mostly all I have done is sleepy.

Starting to worry that I have something viral.

You know, like a funny meme, or bad news about Trump.

Ha ha. But seriously, I might have some kind of bug. A flu, or the like. The telltale signs are that I feel sore all over, and like my energy is being drained away by something.

My throat also feels a little swollen and sore, and weirdly enough, so does the area just inside my ears.

That’s a new one.

So the evidence is pretty strong that I have caught something nasty. Yay.

I will, of course, continue to monitor the situation in case things take a turn for the worst and I need to get to the good ol ER or whatnot.

God, even just getting up to get water from the ensuite leaves me breathing hard and feeling like I just ran up a hill and down again.

But it had to be done. Dehydration is a bitch at any time but it’s especially bad when your body is trying to fight something off.

I hope I don’t end up in the hospital again. This time I won’t even have my tablet to keep me entertained because I still have not gotten around to buying the new battery for it.

I’ve been putting it off partly because of the expense ($35 CDN or so) but mostly because I suspect I am actually better off without it.

I sleep better without it. No more lying down to sleep and immediately picking up the tablet to play games until I am sleepy enough to actually sleep.

Yeah, that doesn’t work. I just end up overstimulated and that drags me away from sleep, not to it.

I am much better off listening to a podcast or a YouTube video in the dark before I go to sleep. That drops the stimulation level down to just my ears and my mind, and it is way easier to go to sleep from there.

I suppose I could get the new battery and then just stick the damn thing in the closet by the door where we keep our jackets.

That way it could be there when I am definitely going to need a smaller version of Mister Computer here (Computer Junior) somewhere, but I won’t be tempted to use it all the damned time any more.

Besides, a lot of those games were really stupid.

I miss doing crosswords on it, though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My health is maybe getting worse?

I dunno. So many things happen to me that seem bad but then they pass and I feel silly for having gotten all worked up and worried about it.

But(t) twice in the last 24 hours, I have felt the need to defecate but when I stood up to go do so, something shifted and the need became VERY VERY URGENT.

As in, the main event started happening before I had found my seat.

In other words, I started pooping immediately and had to make a dash to the toilet to prevent something very nasty from happening.

I’ve never really been good at euphemism.

And another thing : the same sort of thing happens with urine too. I feel my bladder is full and my receptacle is full so I have to go to the ensuite to have a civilized pee.

And when I stand up or move, the urine sloshes against my urinary sphincter and a little bit leaks out.

And that seems to be getting worse too. A few times recently it’s been more than just a little pee. It’s been more like a squirt of it.

Thank God I was wearing pants both times.

I’d rather wet myself a little than pee on the floor. 🙁

These eliminatory misfires have me quite worried that something spinal is going wrong. I was, after all, instructed to go to the ER if I experience incontinence or an inability to pee, and I am coming close to the incontinence on two fronts.

And yet, I don’t really wanna go to the ER. It’s super boring and stressful and my symptoms are nebulous enough that I am positive my issue would score very, very low on the triage scoreboard and so it would take forever for them to get to me.

And of course, like I always bring up in these situations, there is the lurking socially anxious fear of going to the ER and enduring the entire process only to be told they could find nothing wrong with me and I just wasted everybody’s time.

And I get the whole “better safe that sorry” thing and I know whatever medical person was dealing with me would tell me that I did the right thing in coming in, but that would not make a lick of difference to my socially anxious self.

I would still feel horribly guilty and embarrassed.

So I am in my usual position of hesitation where I know I probably should go but I am not ready to go yet and all I can do is wait and see if things get bad enough to motivate me to go to the ER or UC.

I sure hope that the fecal half of the issue is just some passing thing. A bug, or a touch of food poisoning, or just a weird reaction to something.

The urinary part is bad but not “poop yourself in public” bad.

I could also make an appointment with my GP, Doctor Chao. But that would involve a delay of at least a week and that’s too long to wait.

And even then, it would be a freaking phone appointment.

As far as I can tell, I don’t have any other symptoms of note. I don’t feel sickly and my appetite is fine and my insides are being pretty quiet.

But I am on alert anyhow. Things can get far worse quite fast and I may have to do another dash to the toilet

And that’s not easy with legs like mine.

I just want to make it through doing Denny’s.

I can fall apart after that.

More after the break.

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Not falling apart yet

Back from Denny’s. So far so good.

One thing I forgot to mention earlier was that I have also been experiencing mild pain when I defecate.

It sort of feels like I am pushing out something rough and spiky. As if my feces had fragments of walnut shell or somesuch in it.

Pretty sure it doesn’t, though.

And then afterward there is a lingering burning sensation in both the rectal and perianal regions. It’s quite unpleasant.

But I must stress that this is mild pain. These are fairly faint sensations.

Trust me, if it hurt a lot, there would be no question as to going to the ER. I’ve been in that situation, though with urination not defecation, and you wanna bet I hit the ER.

God, that was horrid.

So add that to the running tally of ways my body is being weird.

It’s so hard to find an island of peace and calm where I can center and ground myself when I never know what is going to go wrong next.

I am trying to convince my deeper self that I am safe and it can let down its guard and let me relax and just live my life without all these neurotic second guessing and futile attempts to exert absolutely control over outcomes.

That’s not possible. There are too many variables that you can neither predict or control. And if you take trying to control outcomes too far, you end up with a life like mine which is toxic to the soul and a miserable little cage to live in, but it’s predictable.

Far better to work on getting used to handling the unexpected.

I mean, don’t stop me if you’ve heard this, but you can’t control the world. All you can control is how you react to it.

I will never be a person who likes surprises in the real world. That’s a fundamental part of my temperament.

But surprises don’t have to be utterly devastating events that leave me shocked and reeling like a bomb just went off next door either.

Plan A is no surprises. But there has to be a robust and flexible plan B, and that plan B has to be to rise to the occasion and deal with the situation with strength, intelligence, and maturity so that the new problem is handled, not just fled from.

That’s the only plan that makes practical sense. After all, having only one plan with no contingencies is extremely shortsighted and inefficient.

And I am all about efficiency.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.