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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is that, do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps I have hypnotized myself into hypnotizing myself. Spooky!

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

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

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

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

What I really need is a grownup.

This is what happens when you end up raising yourself.

More after the break.

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All about brains

OK, hear me out.

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

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

Does injury somehow make the brain plural?

---

My favorite aunty

Aunty Histamine, that is.

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

Just another day in the life of a gimp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at least it is for me. Lately.

This morning was super rough. Woke up in a pool of sweat (presumably my own) and absolutely incoherent. For a few very long seconds, I knew nothing and thought nothing and could not have even told you my name.

Assuming I could still speak.

But then my consciousness booted up and I remembered what time of day it was and from there what day it was and from there the rest of the entity designated by the words “Michael John Bertrand” came back online.

But I still felt terrible. Like I have written here many times before, this hyper intense REM state sleep really beats the crap out of me. I wake up dizzy and incoherent and dehydrated and utterly disoriented and above all with my every brain circuit utterly frazzled and fried like I’m a mystic who just had a religious vision.

Which would be ironic, given my lifelong lack of any religion and my stubborn rational materialist point of view.

I still refuse to believe things just because if they were true it would make me feel better.

I recognize that this is quite probably a very stupid way to go through life. I have come to the conclusion that the human mind requires some degree of “faith” in something akin to “magic” in order to function.

You need to have something to fill in the gaps between what we need emotionally speaking and what the world is currently providing us.

Those gaps can get mighty wide sometimes. Trust me on that. And there I am, stuck on one side of the gap, unable to cross because I won’t accept things that don’t make sense to me.

Whereas normal people just fly across without even knowing it.

And that includes most current atheists too, I think. It doesn’t matter if you leave religious faith behind consciously for not making sense (how could it?), because the true payload of that faculty of self-balancing and a deep and unspoken sense that there is someone out there looking out for you has been delivered and installed.

And few people are so thoroughly atheistic as to be able to resist the urge to, for instance, when faced with some profound tragedy, say, “That kind of thing shouldn’t happen!”, or when good fortune comes our way to want someone to thank.

Not even I, and I am approximately as atheistic as it is possible to be. I have never had any religious indoctrination at all. I was raised by atheists in an atheist household.

And I am definitely not saying that it’s impossible to be religious and depressed at the same time, but I must point out that all four children of that household have mental health issues somewhere along the anxious/depressed spectrum.

I’m not saying a belief in God would have fixed that, but… maybe?

At the very least I might not have grown up feeling so goddamned alone and abandoned. It would have been nice to feel like someone out there was looking out for me, even if it was a made-up all-powerful imaginary friend.

I certainly didn’t have anyone real protecting me. Nobody protected me from jack shit. Like a lot of Gen X kids, I was left to fend for myself.

We’re a feral generation because of the self-absorbed Boomers who raised us. Their winning childrearing technique was to ignore their children completely while just assuming that we must be okay.

After all, if there was something wrong, we’d say something, right?

Note : Alienate and punish children for not being okay. Act like they just teleported in from Mars and took hostages should they ever say anything that suggests you should invest literally any more time or energy or love in them. Make it their responsibility to keep your selfish Boomer ass loving their children.

I mean, you can’t possibly expect us to actually raise you. That’s absurd.

We pay the bills and feed and clothe and shelter you. You know, the absolutely bare minimum amount of parenting you can legally get away with.

And now you want MORE?

How utterly selfish of you.

More after the break.

This is from a comic strip I keep seeing in my Instagram and Blue Sky feeds, and it’s not hard to see why.

The art could be better but the writing is as delightful as the little gator kid.

The world needs warm fuzzy vibes like this more than ever.

---

So what you’re saying…

I’d never seen this part at the beginning before. It comes across as her trying to counter the terrible impression she’s about to make ahead of time.

Too bad the world didn’t see it, for the most part.

Anyhow…. so what you’re saying, Madonna, is that you’re auctioning your pussy.

Wait, no, that’s too harsh. That would imply that a woman is ever, under any circumstances, obligated to have sex with a man.

You’re auctioning a chance at your pussy.

That’s what all this bullshit about wanting only rich dudes dating you boils down to. You’re so convinced of the market value of a ticket in your pussy raffle that you’re sure you can hold out for the highest bidder.

Not that I’m saying you’re a prostitute.

Prostitutes are more honest. You pay, you lay, every single time.

When ladies like you go off with whatever gent can “treat you like a princess” the best, that’s what you are saying. You’re saying that you are for sale.

Personality, intelligence, charm, good looks, sensitivity. sense of humour, and all the rest of that romantic bullshit doesn’t mean a thing to you.

He could be a demented toothless ogre with the IQ of a fencepost and open, weeping sores all over his body and as long as he bought you the most expensive gifts and took you to the fanciest places and thus flattered your ego, you’d fuck him silly.

Congratulations, you’re the dehumanized slab of fuckable meat worth the most money.

Wouldn’t Mom and Dad be proud.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

At least I think I’ve used that title before.

Anyhow, I was making my lunch in the kitchen just now when I realized I was in a fair bit of physical pain.

This is not unusual for me. My life involves a lot of pain. That is not news.

The novel part was that most of the pain was coming from my back, not my legs.

Specifically this area between my shoulder blades that has given me trouble before.For whatever reason, my back pain settles there some of the time.

The rest of the time it’s the lower back, but I am so used to that part of me hurting that if it stopped I think I’d faint from the sheer relief of it all.

But this other pain is new, and it has only occurred to me just now that it is one of those things that I should probably run past a medical professional at some point.

The thing is, I don’t have to. I have my muscle relaxant pills (cyclobenzaprine) and they have a pretty solid record when it comes to making my backpain go away.

They don’t always work. But almost always.

But it occurs to me that this pain may denote something going seriously wrong in my back, and that’s the kind of thing I should probably nip in the bud sooner, not later.

So I dunno. I guess I will make a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday.

Why do these things keep happening on long weekends? ^[1]

It’s like my body only really fucks up when it knows there will be someone around to drive me to the ER. ^[2]

Or maybe I am subconsciously picking up on the general party atmosphere of the weekend and that’s making my body want to gear up to have fun but I am a sickie and a recluse and terrified of the world so it just gets sick instead.

I have a lot of energies going nowhere within me. Recovery will therefore necessarily involve my finding someplace for them to go, and that, in turn, will end up creating a life for myself that is quite unlike my current malaise ridden existence, and that’s what I am afraid of at the core of it all.

The power of “changer danger” within me – the voice in me that tells me that life is trying to pry me from my nice cozy “safe” nest and I have to fight it with everything I’ve got – is still much stronger than my desire to make life better for myself.

So far, it’s been hard for me to counter that voice. The one that says we are better off not rocking the boat and staying exactly as we are right now because any real change will lead to total disaster.

You know. That asshole.

There’s a very strong element of the fear of the unknown in it. And that carries an undercurrent of that toxic belief that only that which I can control and/or predict is “safe”, ergo the unknown is inherently awful and wrong and can only lead to utter chaos.

This is nonsense, of course. But this is emotional reality we are dealing with here. Sense is by far not a requirement.

I keep coming back to conclusion that I need to learn to just ignore the fear when it comes for me. To listen to what it’s trying to tell me, but not let it stop me.

That would be a very wrenching transformation. Nothing would be the same after.

And that scares me back into inaction.

For now, at least.

More after the break.

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No way out

For whatever reason, I have an enormous phobia of being trapped.

Maybe it’s a side effect of having been trapped between “freeze” and “flight” modes for so very long.

For an animal in “flight” mode, safety lies in speed and maneuverability and unpredictability, and to be forced to stop moving – to be “trapped” – is the exact opposite of all three things and thus means a grisly death in the jaws of a predator.

For “freeze” though, things are different. When you freeze up, it’s because instead of fleeing the predator, now you’re hiding from it. In that mode, safety comes from immobility, concealment, and silence.

It’s not the total opposite of “flight” but it’s close.

From this you can safely deduce the existence of a “flight and freeze” pattern. If I expose myself to the big mean old world, it triggers a “flight” response which leads me to flee back into the “safety” and “comfort” of my hidey hole here in front of Mister Computer, where I “freeze”.

In my case, the pathology of this pattern has progressed to the point that no actual exposure to my “predators” is necessary. I only have to think about extending my tiny little worldlet by the merest of fractions and I run and hide with a vengeance.

They’ve got me whipped, that’s for sure.

And that’s not a tolerable situation. I don’t deserve to be stuck hiding from the world and whimpering because of a nigh all-encompassing fear of almost everything that has no basis in the world outside my mind at all.

Absolutely nobody is “coming to get me”.

My disguise is complete. I am flawlessly camouflaged. Almost nobody even knows I exist. And even fewer people actually care.

My “freeze” is very successful. I’ve pretty much got it mastered. I blend in so well that it’s difficult for me to “decloak” at all even if I want to.

Even if I really, really want to.

So once more I return to the idea of just learning to get the most out of my life as it is now. It would crush my spirit to give up like that but at least I would not be constantly spinning my wheels trying to get this bus moving when the fucking thing is up on blocks.

But I don’t seriously consider that an option. I have to keep trying, if only because I don’t know what to do with myself otherwise.

That’s what has kept me from true despair. I have that stubborn spark inside me that makes me restless inside and that restlessness makes true lassitude impossible.

Sure, I play video games all day and all night.

But at least I am doing something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But without the body swapping.

Today, I’ve been super busy, and the day ain’t over yet.

Here’s a rough itinerary :

10 am – Julian wakes me up to tell me we have Wound Care in fifteen minutes. He had to do this because once more, my high powered musclebound beast of a computer could not handle being a fucking alarm clock so the alarm I had set for 9:35 am never sounded and thus I did not have sufficient time to get ready. Julian called ahead to warn them we would be late.

And we were, by about ten minutes. And this saddened me because I hate ever being late for anything. I feel that punctuality is a virtue. Shows you respect people enough to get your shit together and get there on time.

Oh well, No real harm done. Just some rushing, which I also hate to do, and a certain amount of stress.

11 am – We’re back home and I do my usual Friday grocery shopping.

Online, of course. It feels like forever since I was able to do my own grocery shopping in person, right there in the supermarket. That feels like it belongs to some kinder, gentler. more merciful plane of reality where the people whose legs work live.

As I have mentioned before, my remaining budget for groceries is quite tight because of that whole fucking five week month bullshit. Today’s bill came to $61.20 once tax and tip and so on were added.

That leaves something like $65 left on the card for next week, Should be enough.

1 pm – Therapy time. Not a great session because I was sleepy. Grabbing 20 minutes of sleep after the groceries arrived at 12:18 am clearly did nothing to abate the rabid sleep hunger I already had just from doing Wound Care.

It was a gamble. Head I feel refreshed and eager and insightful for therapy, tails I am half asleep and don’t really get anything done.

I got tails.

As booby prizes go, he ain’t half bad.

2:30 pm – We get to Rosewood Manor on time for my weekly shower. I am really looking forward to it as, due to my error prone mind, it has been two or three weeks since my last shower.

This time I skipped the shy bravado (you know, the kind where you suffer in silence because you don’t want to bug anyone with your problems) and got Albert to take me to and from the shower room in a wheelchair.

The walk from the lobby to the shower room and back is just too long for my malfunctioning legs to handle. The previous time I had my shower at Rosewood, my legs were hurting bad by the time I made it from the lobby to the shower room, and the end of the trip back from the shower room to the lobby was me basically falling into one of the lobby chairs as my legs gave out on me.

So it’s wheelchairs for me for the foreseeable future. Might as well get used to them, I am probably going to need my own one day.

Then home again at 3:30 pm or so and a brief gaming session was followed by my sitting down to write these very words for you lovely people

After this, a nice long nap until 7:30 pm, when Julian will ask me whether I want anything from McD’s.

Of course I do! Big Mac meal, please!

Said meal will be consumed while teledining with Joe and Felicity and Julian, during which we will watch YouTube stuff and gab.

After that, I finish the day’s blogging, then another brief nap until I hang out on Zoom with Julian and Felicity at midnight.

All in all, a very busy day.

Man am I gonna need more sleep!

More after the break.

---

You’re not as alone as you feel

That’s a thought that popped into my head regarding a friend who is struggling with their depression but I didn’t quite get the chance to tell them so I am putting it here.

It’s a sentiment I need to remember. My own depression makes me feel so profoundly alone sometimes that it’s hard to remember that there are people in this world who truly love me and that it is the mental illness, not objective reality, that makes me feel so very alone and abandoned.

The fact that I can’t feel their love does not mean it is not there. It’s just not getting through. And that is brutally tragic, but it’s still a much better situation than if there truly was no love for you in this world.

All the love and acceptance and understanding that I have always craved is right there waiting for me on the other side of this wall of ice inside me.

And the wall is melting. It’s fading away. It can’t be broken down all at once like some glorious springtime dam burst – I am too “stable” for that.

It would take some kind of overwhelmingly profound ever that overpowers my “rational” mind to trigger something like that. Something from outside.

But barring something like that, it can only be an incremental process. That way, I have time to adjust to the long, deep change involved, as opposed to my instinctive response to overwhelming things which is to close down and withdraw.

Back into my turtle shell I go, possibly even deeper than ever before.

And for now, at least, I can’t help that. It’s too instinctual for me to be able to hold back via rational restraint.

It takes place on the level that takes over when reason fails me. That’s what “overwhelm” means, and I suppose that’s why being overwhelmed freaks me out so bad that it makes me shut down.

I am still far too emotionally dependent on being in a state of detached reason where I am able to rationally choose each move.

That puts an unconscionable and inefficient burden on the rational intellect. Instinct and “going with your gut” is a much better life strategy in most situations.

Hopefully it’s not too late for me to reprogram myself out of that crap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is one of those messages I want to give to young people.

Life is work, kids. Life takes effort. No matter what you want out of life – even if all you want is to eat Doritos and play Xbox – there is going to be a certain amount of effort involved in gaining and maintaining that lifestyle.

Note that I am not saying that life is nothing but work. Far from it. What I am saying is that even the most fecklessly hedonistic lifestyle will involve some effort.

You will have to do things you don’t want to do. Get used to the idea. Even billionaires have to do things they don’t feel like doing sometimes.

Even if all they need to do is yell for their assistants to do stuff.

The key thing to remember is that effort is not the enemy. And a big part of growing up it realizing and accepting that.

When you’re a kid in school, they make you do stuff you don’t want to do all the time. So do your parents and other authority figures. And so life becomes divided into two modes : the doing stuff you don’t want to do mode, which sucks and you hate it, and then there’s when you’re home or it’s the weekend or it’s summer, when you can do what you want and it’s awesome and you love it.

In such a situation, it makes sense to try to minimize effort, because almost everything in life comes to you without effort or investment so trying to get away with doing as little as possible has no negative consequences.

Worst thing that can happen is you have a messy bedroom. And parents who are pissed off at you for not doing your chores.

So hating work and effort and doing things you don’t want to do makes sense when you are a kid. But when you are an adult, everything changes.

Even if you’re still living with your parents and your Mom is still taking care of the house, unless they are very well off, you are still not going to be able to get everything you want without working for it.

Take dating. Dating takes money. You’re not going to get very far with a lot of people if all you can do with them is take a nice walk in the park.

But even if you’re incel AF and are fine with a completely solo sex life, you are still going to want things that are not free.

Like video games, or a car, or your own place to live where you don’t have to follow your parents’ room, or just the dignity of being employed.

And for all those things, you will need to leave home and get a job. And that means, at long last, growing up.

You’re on your own now. You’re responsible for yourself and your own wellbeing. Whether your life sucks or rocks is now up to you.

Maybe you’ve decided that effort is never worth it and therefore if something takes effort it’s inherently not worth doing.

That’s your choice. But look around you at the world. Note that billions of human beings seem to think all kinds of things are worth the effort.

Like having a job, for one.

Is it possible that they are getting things from life that are not visible from the sidelines? Could it be that they know something you don’t and you can only learn what they know by doing what they do? Might it even be possible that life is way better than it seems?

Because here’s the thing : I’m not trying to convince you that toiling away is wonderful.

All I am saying is that you could be having a hell of a lot more fun.

But you have to invest effort in life to get there.

It’s like there’s a million dollar check with your name on it, but you have to work at McD’s for a year in order to get it.

It would seem worth it then, wouldn’t it?

More after the break.

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All of the above

Unsurprisingly, I am more or less talking to myself in Part I.

Those are all things I wish I could send back in time to my younger, healthier self to maybe galvanize him (me) into getting his (my) life in gear.

It probably wouldn’t work, come to think of it. If I really wanted to tell my younger self something useful, I’d tell him not to let our parents take us out of UPEI.

That would have saved me the last 30 years of fucking depression.

I was thinking about that time period earlier today, and it occurred to me that even before their withdrew their financing, they acted like my brother and I were doing something wrong just by needing to go to college just like my sisters did before us and like we were promised our whole lives.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it because quite frankly I had been treated like an unwanted expense and made to feel guilty for existing for my whole life and so to me, that was perfectly normal.

But what occurred to me is that, looking back, we didn’t do anything wrong. They did. They fucked up by not saving up for the entirely predictable expense of sending me to college when I left high school.

And by not paying for my brother to go at all before then, which is one of many injustices my poor bro has suffered.

Male pattern baldness being another.

So yeah, my parents had tons of time to save up for mine and my brother’s inevitable college education but they just kind of forgot about my brother and me and then acted like it was our fault that we, ya know, needed things.

Fucking Boomers, am I right?

I mean, if they had deposited a dollar a day in the bank from the day I was born till my 18th birthday, they would have saved up $6570, which would have paid for four years tuition and a small bite of the other expenses.

Could have done the same for my brother Dave, too.

I am positive there were things we could done without to make that happen.

But no, somehow, they didn’t think that far ahead.

And that was apparently our fault somehow.

Really chaps your asshole, dunnit?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My PC continues to crash when I play certain games. Grr.

Its latest trick is to let me play Borderlands 3 or Morrowind for the exact amount of time it takes for me to get really into the game and forget it’s going to crash, then crash.

It’s… toying with me, isn’t it?

And like I’ve said before, it really feels like the universe is trying to force me to stop playing video games and do something productive with my life.

And I appreciate the effort but I have a lot of bad wiring – stuffed in wherever and all the same color – to untangled and sort before the logjam in my head clears and I can actually just decide to do that kind of thing.

I keep peeling away layers of mental malfunction by writing on this blog, but sometimes it feels like I’m trying to dig to the center of an infinite onion.

I’m not. I know that. I can easily feel the difference between my subjective reality of today and the subjective reality of even two weeks ago. I know that I am making progress in freeing my mind from its convoluted contortions so that some day soon I might actually be free of myself.

And that means being free of the fear.

Or maybe just not giving a shit about it any more. I dunno.

Lately I have been pondering whether it would be easier and better to just accept that anything useful I want to do will trigger a major dam-burst of pent up energy to immediately dump a bunch of anxiety into my brain and instead of letting that stop me, just going ahead and ignoring all the bullshit happening in my brain.

Just treat the anxiety like an annoying buzzing of my parietal lobe and do my best to tune it out so I can get shit done.

The important thing is to establish that it’s not in charge any more.

But I think it’s about more than that. Like I said when I was talking about indecision yesterday, the anxiety may just be a smokescreen for hiding and/or excusing the fact that my deeper child-self just does not want to grow up.

My greater and more conscious self does. It wants that very badly. The decades I have wasted doing jack shit with myself weigh heavily on me and I very much want to finally learn to fly and become an adult and build some kind of normal life for myself already.

But that’s my outer adult. My inner child wants none of that. Nuh-uh, no siree.

And I think that has to do with a feeling of exposure. That scared little animal at my core has been hiding deep, deep inside me ever since I was raped at the age of 4 and when try to imagine truly leaving the nest and learning to fly, I can feel it gasping and delving even deeper into my mind like a startled cockroach fleeing the light and trying to put as many layers of defenses and excuses between it and the harsh light of reality as it can.

And I don’t currently know how to put a stop to that. We’re talking about a very primal defense mechanism that has been there ever since a stranger’s cock shattered my life forever back in 1977 and that is burned into the very physical structure of my brain and forms the foundation of my entire psyche.

So I don’t know how to convince that scared little animal that it’s safe for it to come out of the shadows and be seen and loved and accepted.

The urge to run and hide is still so very strong. And it’s not exactly rational, so it’s not like it can be reasoned with or talked out of anything.

There has to be some way to get it the love and healing it needs.

I am open to suggestions.

More after the break.

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Just gimme money

So there I was, all ready to do my once a week ordering in tonight, which is a Wednesday night. But then my deep caution/paranoia kicked in, and I decided that I really should check the balance on my credit card first.

And it’s a good thing I did, because I’ve only got $127 left on there. And my grocery budget is $60/week, and there’s two weeks till next Deposit Day.

And groceries are the one thing I absolutely must pay for with the card because I order my groceries online.

If I couldn’t, I would have to go back to making up a grocery list and handing it to Julian so he can go shop for me in person, and that stresses us both out, I think.

I know I don’t miss it. Thank God that DoorDash does groceries now.

Then, because my financial paranoia had been activated, I counted my cash… and I came up $50 short. Should have had $190 in bills, had $140.

That triggered a full on panic attack. Patient readers know that my financial and emotional states are intimately linked and I was freaking out.

Luckily, I hadn’t dropped a $50 bill somewhere, it was just stuck to another bill. Phew!

Then I go to take my Wednesday night meds…. and there are my Wednesday morning meds sitting there pristine and untouched.

So apparently I completely spaced on taking my fistful o’ meds this morning.

It’s way too late for it now. All I can do is take those now surplus meds and find an empty pill bottle to stick them in and move on.

But this has not been a good day for me.

Of course, all the computer crashing didn’t do anything good for my nerves either.

Of the two crash test games. Borderlands 3 and Morrowind, Morrowind is the one that crashes fastest. Which is ironic given that it’s ancient.

I may try turning down the graphics settings. A galling thought, given what a monster Mister Computer is. but he’s a monster with a bad heart (power supply), so here we are.

It can be surprisingly stressful to be me.

Imagine if I actually had a life!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let us return to the subject of my internal struggles.

Mostly, I fight my own motivations. No matter how badly I want to go out and play with the other kids, the overwhelming majority of my force of will tells me to stay still and out of sight in order to stay “safe”.

Or if not “safe” (after all, I’m locked in here with my demons, for fuck’s sake) then at least in a low stimulus state where my intense anxieties are not activated.

Nor is anything else, for that matter. My torpor is static.

And that is, for me, what is “normal”. It’s not what is good for me by a long shot but it’s what I am used to and that has to be enough.

Mental illness is funny that way, Mine does not take my dreams, ambitions, desires, or preferences into account, let alone my long term wellbeing.

All that matter is being “safe”.

Why? Because I have been stuck in a “freeze” response for decades. I am like an animal hiding from predators that only exist in my head. The decades old programming in my head insists that the only way for me to be “safe” is to remain undetected.

Safe from what, though?

Because there’s nothing out there waiting to pounce. It is like I am quite literally afraid of nothing. I could (disability aside) walk amongst the everyday people of the world and be just as safe as everyone else. I don’t have to treat the rest of humanity as a threat.

I’m just fine whether I am in my womb/tomb or out in the world.

Tell that to my endocrine system, though. It still floods me with fear-charged adrenaline when I so much as ponder going outside my tiny safety zone.

I now have four tabs perpetually open for places that could really help me but with each of them, I walked up to the precipice of participation then balked and ran away.

Because I’m scared to death (almost literally) to leave my cruel but cozy nest here in my self-sealed Thermos of a life. No matter how badly I want to get out of this hole I’m in and finally become a grownup, that fear keeps me locked in place and stuck in a life of playing video games and unstructured blogging.

Well, unformatted, anyhow.

And it’s the video games that truly define my captivity. Whenever I think about finally getting around to jump starting my life, I think about having to leave video games behind for even an hour and a cold terror overwhelms me and I end up doing nothing.

They are not just a hobby, they are my security blanket. Most of my time is spend with their comfort within easy reach. They are my substitute for living.

And I know that my mental health journey will necessarily involve leaving them behind, at least for short periods. Even though the addiction, like all addictions, makes me feel like I will die of exposure if I leave its warmth.

And a fix is never more than a few clicks away.

To an addict like myself, there is nothing worse than having one’s supply cut off. To even imagine such a thing fills the pit of my stomach with ice and sends deathly chills through my entire bloodstream.

Goddamn over-aggressive parasympathetic system.

But I can conceive of a sort of umbilicus. A way to stay connected with my self-destructive self-soothing mechanism while also exploring the possibility of actually working for a living.

I just need a video game that I can multitask with web browsing. These are not hard to find, The world is full of web-based games.

Plus there are traditional PC games which could be multitasked. They just have to be turn based enough that I can alt-tab out of them into my browser without my losing anything or making the reentry too jarring.

This could be done.

It might be done.

But not right now. Right now, I need to lay down for a bit.

More after the break.

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On feeling sandbagged

I’ve had a very sleepy day.

To the point where, when I was woken up by my alarm at 8 am, it took me until 8:20 AM to even get out of bed.

That time period is pretty much a blur for me now. A stretch of non-time.

Then I managed to get up, eat breakfast, take my morning fistful o’ meds, hug my fluffy friends, and then crawl back into bed around 9:30 am, still super sleepy.

Luckily, Wound Care was not until 11:15 am, which meant leaving at 10:55 am, which meant I needed to be up at around 10:40 am in order to have fifteen minutes in which to get dressed et al.

My life is bound by the clock. I am more than fine with this.

I mean. SOMETHING has to give me some god damned structure. I am apparently incapable of doing it myself.

By myself, I am naught but goo.

I must cling to stronger entities for support, like a creeping vine.

Anyhow, I was awoken by my alarm at 10:40 am feeling terrible. I managed to get dressed okay, but the moment when I had to heave my bulk aloft and actually stand up felt like jumping out of an airplane.

Like, I understood the concept, but doing it felt immense.

But I managed. Luckily, I was so out of it that it did not occur to me that this was one of those circumstances when I maybe shouldn’t go until I was already on my feet and walking to my bedroom door and it was easier to just go.

Besides that, I am fairly sure that this is just sleep debt catching up with me and not a sign that I have caught a bug.

After all, I have no other symptoms besides sleepiness.

When we got back from Wound Care shortly before noon, I of course immediately went back to bed. In the hours since then I have been asleep more than I have been awake.

So it’s one of my sleepy days.

Oh well, it’s not like I had anything better to do anyway,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Included for reference only.

I was watching the Patrick Teahan video linked above when it occurred to me that maybe I am not as indecisive as I think I am.

Yes, I have now decided that I might not be indecisive. Or whatever.

What sparked this revelation was Patrick talking about someone having decision issues when it came to picking what to order in a restaurant.

I have never had that problem except in a very minor way when I have showed up at the restaurant super hungry and it makes everything look so good.

But most of the time, it’s no big deal. I look over the menu, pick something, order it an eat it, and all with almost never second guessing my choice.

I don’t really care if there was something I would have objectively enjoyed more. I ordered something I liked, ate it and enjoyed it, and that met the brief.

Mission accomplished. On to the next thing.

The question therefore becomes why I can’t be that decisive in other areas of my life. This “decide and move on” thing is clearly the best life strategy. Agonizing over even relatively minor decisions is a terrible way to live. So why can’t I change?

Let’s review what we know :

1. Indecision is bullshit. If you can’t decide, odds are that there is a bigger issue that is using the kind of mental fog that produces indecision as a cover. You have to ask yourself what will happen after you have decided. If you can answer that, you will probably find that it’s the real thing you’re avoiding dealing with.
2. Indecision stems from lack of id. Like with the Two Kirks. Without his id, Kirk was vacillating and indecisive. That’s because when the outcomes cannot be computed or predicted, the only way a decision can be reached is emotionally, by gut instinct or the mood of the moment. Awesome leaders like James T. Kirk synthesize intellect and instinct into something greater than their sum.
3. Indecision is rooted in fear. At the heart of torturous indecision is a very exaggerated and oversized fear of negative consequences. And this fear only gets worse over time because the nature of it prevents its conclusions from ever being tested. After all, if you never decide, there is never any chance for your fears to be disproven by the perfectly ordinary non-catastrophic consequences of your choice. This is how the con job in point 1 works. The worst phobias are always the ones that prevent you from finding out if what they tell you is true.
4. Indecision is all about me. The things I can’t decide on, to the point of utter paralysis, are always things directly involving myself. When I am not part of the equation, I can be extremely decisive and direct. I guess that’s because it bypasses that outsized fear of negative outcomes and turns the decision into a mere problem to be solved. And that, I can do.

I am sure there’s more points but I won’t think of them until later.

I can certainly say that my inability to get my life going towards emotional adulthood is not primarily an issue of indecision.

Sure, I could keep bullshitting myself by pretending it’s about not being able to choose from the billions of possibilities inherent in every moment, but I’d know it was a lie.

The truth is that said indecisiveness would just be a mask for my being too scared of life to leave my hermetically sealed video game based life.

Just the thought of going away from my PC gaming security blanket makes me feel like I’m about to break out in hives.

I have so much anxiety and fear in me and it just gets in the way of everything.

Maybe the real problem is that I need to get laid.

More after the break.

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Back to reality

Got rudely dumped back into the stupid real world by my computer crashing not just once but twice in the last hour.

And while playing a game as ancient as Morrowind, too. Though admittedly, I have all the graphical settings maxed.

Still. I need that new power supply. This shit is getting on my nerves.

I still haven’t finished Pathfinder : Kingmaker. I am quite close to the end but I hit yet another extremely difficult fight and after failing at it for like the sixth or seventh time I just ran out of gas.

I mean, I have already played the damned thing for only a pussy hair less than 250 hours. What more does it want from me, blood?

But I am not beaten yet. I am pretty sure the fight I am stuck on is optional, so if I restore a saved game from before I started it, I can avoid it.

Or I can turn down the difficulty level for that one fight. That would do serious damage to my pride but if it gets me to the end of the damned game it might be worth it.

Or I could outright cheat by downloading a save-game editor or the like. In a way, that would hurt my pride less than turning the difficulty down.

I guess because it would make me feel vaguely clever? Ha ha, you stupid game, you thought you had me but I hacked you instead?

Sort of sad but not as bad.

I have pretty much abandoned Fallout 2. It just can’t compete with modern games for me. And it’s not just in terms of graphics and sound.

It felt like the action routinely ground to a halt and I lost all plot momentum on a regular basis. I would get quests and have no idea how to pursue them.

Shames me to admit it but I guess I am used to more hand-holding and guidance from the game as to how I do whatever is next. I’m not equipped to figure it out on my own.

Not that I ever had much patience for that in the first place.

I want to DO STUFF, not sit here and think!

I do that enough on my own!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

From now on, I’m going to just… live.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten.

It’s very hard to articulate, but I will, of course, try.

The thought came to me after a long chain of other thoughts about childhood and innocence and how children see things as they are, without expectation or anticipation, because to them, every experience is brand new.

And I can remember when life was like that for me. Just barely.

In particular, I was thinking about how kids can meet one another and make friends far more easily than us adults precisely because they have such a low burden of expectation and trauma and so on.

They just want someone to play with.

That is, sadly, not how it tended to work out for me. I was too strange. I couldn’t connect with or relate to other kids my age.

But that innocent frame of mind is there for most kids, and it was while thinking about that blessed state that something inside of me just… relaxed.

I think maybe it was my returning to how a child sees things that did it. A large chunk of the edifice of unhealed trauma and frozen feeling just kind of fell away and suddenly I could see life like a child does, in terms purely of what would be fun to do in the immediate future, that catalyzed in my mind as, “Just live. ”

Forget all about expectations and humiliations and limitations and all the other garbage that I’m slowly smothering under and just concentrate on enjoying myself.

Like all my recent big revelations, it doesn’t sound like much when put into words. Perhaps that’s not a coincidence. I have been saying that my problems are emotional, not intellectual, for quite some time.

It would therefore make sense if the real work I have to do has to happen on a level way below what can be reached by words and rational thought.

I’d better hold on to that thought really tight because that could save me a hell of a lot of mental masturbation and slow and tedious intellectualization and let me get directly to the business of healing myself.

At least in theory. As I have expressed before, I am fairly skeptical of my ability to actually free myself from the surly bonds of intellectualization.

But I can at least loosen them enough for me to breathe.

Somewhere in this newly relaxed state also comes better self-esteem. After all, no matter what has come before or even where I am now, I am still a pretty amazing guy, and I should learn to enjoy that fact instead of depending on the world outside of my mind for all my validation and support.

The extra-cranial world can never provide enough “reward” to support my self-worth. Some of that has to come from within. There needs to be at least enough of this self-reward to support my going out into the world in pursuit of the other kind.

Otherwise. the symptoms of emotional starvation will prevent me from finding the very sustenance that would remedy it.

I think that today, I might have gotten a little glimpse of what life might be like if I wasn’t constantly wasting away on the inside from my unrewarding life.

And that glimpse gave me the most precious gift of all : hope. Hope that there really is all the emotional nutrients I need out there in the world and that I am actually capable of procuring them for myself instead of languishing in passivity.

Every day, the door to my cage opens a little bit more and my sorry soul gets a bit more sunshine and fresh air.

Maybe soon I will be strong enough to go out and play.

More after the break.

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The social debut of a fox

So like I have mentioned before, I am active on social media now.

It all started a few months ago when I started telling people (and myself, because I’m a people) that the only social media platform I am on is YouTube,

And I had said that something like a half dozen times before it really sank in to me that YouTube really doesn’t count.

I mean sure, I leave tons of comments on YouTube, and some of those comments do get replies now and then, but YouTube doesn’t have the kind of interconnectedness on an individual level where you follow specific people like Blue Sky or Instagram does.

Hence my reviving my long dormant Instagram account. I do not even remember when he heck I signed up for it or why. I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t feel like it, being heavily photo based, was not for me.

In all fairness, all I knew about it came from the media and stories about it making people feel horrible about themselves.

But now that I have gotten active on it, I can see that it is so much more than that. It might have started as photo based but now it’s just a particularly media rich social network. People post pictures, but also text comments, videos, random thoughts, political speech, and everything else under the sun.

It’s quite a rich milieu.

Still, I prefer Blue Sky. Like the entity formerly known as Twitter, it has other content but it’s still mostly a text based medium and that is where I am the most comfortable.

It’s in the world of words that I feel not just safe but competent and capable, and those are feelings in very short supply chez moi.

Also, Instagram, being irritatingly modern, tends to start playing videos the moment my mouse cursor passes over them, and that is very not cool for me.

NEVER AUTOPLAY ANYTHING. I cannot stress this enough.

But I keep going back to Instagram anyhow because it’s breathtakingly good at serving up the exact kind of content I like.

It’s… kind of creepy, in a way. But that’s the age we live in.

The age of computers using big data to predict us uncomfortably well.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is toxic to the soul to have to conceal who you really are.

We are born to express ourselves and our identity, and anything that interferes with that naturally creates a terrible tension between who we are on the inside and who it is safe to be on the outside.

This creates the exact kind of stress that shortens lifespans and worsens health outcomes. The feeling of constant danger as well as the cognitive dissonance of knowing who you really are but being forced by circumstance to pretend you are someone else gnaws away at one’s mental health and sense of identity and poisons one’s self-worth with guilt and self-loathing even if one is not consciously ashamed of who and what they are.

This situation is intolerable yet remains true of the daily lives of millions of people in all walks of life and in all corners of the globe.

We cannot truly call ourselves enlightened while this kind of thing is allowed to happen, and even backed by government force through the legal system. There are still many, many people in this day and age who think people deserve the harshest of penalties simply for being who they are rather than based on what they actually do.

But we know what all the hate is really about. It has nothing to do with the people supposedly being protected or anyone’s sense of real justice, oh no.

No, it’s about scapegoating. It’s about whatever group has been publicly identified as subhuman and monstrous and contemptable and that therefore can be the object of all your rage and frustration and hate to an unlimited amount and not only is this deemed acceptable by the dominant culture, it is celebrated as moral and good.

Remember, kids, there’s nothing wrong with hating a group of people to the point of frothing incoherence and an open willingness to commit acts of barbarous and sadistic acts of extreme torture and violence on said group as long as it’s the right group.

Get it right and you too can openly participate in absolute orgies of naked bloodthirsty slavering glee, knowing that not only will nobody think less of you for it, but many will happily join in out of eagerness to show they have the right hate too.

And because hate is just plain fun. Let’s not forget that.

The only caveat is that you have to do your research first. The designated hate target does change from time to time, and while the actual nature of the people in said group is absolutely irrelevant compared to the sheer joy of dumping excess rage on them, being caught displaying yesterday’s outrage is bound to be seen as a faux pas.

But don’t let that stop you. In fact, it should encourage you to hate them all the more, while it’s still in fashion.

In an atmosphere like that, is it any wonder that millions suffer in terrified silence, fearing for their very lives based on something about themselves that they didn’t choose and cannot ever change?

After all, not only is it not safe to be a member of today’s hate target, it is almost as dangerous to be seen showing anything sympathy to them whatsoever.

You don’t want people to think you’re one of them, do you? In fact, you will move heaven and Earth just to reassure people, in the most obsequious and toadying manner, that not only are you not one of them, you hate them even more than the socially required amount. By a lot!

So if one of them is being torn apart by an angry mob, absolutely nobody will ever come to their defense.

Not even the cops.

Thank God they’re not really human beings, right?

More after the break.

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Power to the people

Had a power outage here earlier.

Dunno how long it lasted because it happened while I was taking a nap. In fact I didn’t even know something was up till I went to turn on my bedside light and got nothing.

Click click. No light. Uh oh.

So I looked over at my computer and sure enough, absolutely none of the lights on the back of it were on and blinking.

That’s when I knew the truth ; I was in a blackout.

And I went through the usual stages of realizing just how fucked we are without electricity and sitting there wondering what the heck I am going to do with myself before accepting that all I could really do is go back to sleep.

I wasn’t completely boned. I have food that I keep here in the room with me and I could have had that in lieu of the microwaved baked potato and chicken strips dinner I had planned for myself earlier.

Turns out I didn’t need to do that, though, which is good, because while I would have been fed, I would not have gotten my Vitamin B12 for the day.

And at first, I thought I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep because this whole thing had me wound up and agitated. So I just lay there in the dark.

Then, just as I was about to drift off to sleep, the lights came back on.

And I was, of course, happy to have the power back… once I got over being annoyed that my sleep got interrupted.

Got up, started up Mister Computer, checked the time. I estimate that the power came back on at around 7:50 PM or so.

So I wasn’t even late for my dinner at 8 pm!

All in all, it wasn’t much of an adventure. All I did was lie there in bed. It was like my own miniature A la reserche de temps perdu. 

But what the heck, it was something different. Something besides my usual insular existence holed up and hiding from the big bad world I never had a chance to learn to handle before everything got taken away.

No wonder I “failed to launch”.

I had my power cut halfway to orbit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.