Namely, my own.

Last Monday, I mentioned a few things about my readings in Overcoming Agoraphobia by Doctor Barry Goldstein, and said there would be more on that subject later. Well, it’s later now (though it won’t be now later…) and time to tackle the issue.

As I said on Monday, the book is not without its problems. It is written with housewives primarily in mind, which is quite bizarre because the book came out in 1987. When I first started reading it, I assumed it was from the late sixties to early seventies at the latest, because the focus and style seemed so old-fashioned. But then I got curious, and looked at the frontispiece. And yup, there it is. Published in 1987. Where the hell did Doctor Barry Goldstein spend the preceding fifteen years? Tupperware?

I suspect he took a long time writing the book, and only published it after he retired. Just a theory, but it does fit all the known facts.

Anyhow, its charmingly antique point of view aside, I am finding the book to be quite helpful and insightful. It gives me a good feeling just reading the words of someone who seems to understand what I am going through far better than anyone else ever has. Doctor Barry Goldstein seems to really get what it is like to be an agoraphobic like myself, and that is a good thing, because as he correctly observes, we agoraphobes tend to have extremely poor self-esteem and we need all the understand we can get.

He also correctly notes that we tend to carry around a great deal of self-loathing and guilt and regret. That certainly applies to me. The biggest burden to my recovery, in my opinion, is this vast reserve of self-loathing I have regarding having more or less spent my entire adult life (and I am almost 38) depressed, scared, hiding, and doing absolutely nothing with my life.

Intellectually^[1], I know that this was not by choice. I have been very sick for all that time, and for the first half of it, I didn’t even know it. I had no conception that I was mentally ill. I just thought I was a pathetic loser. Being diagnosed was a great step towards getting things together.

But not the only step. I am still stuck with the problems inherent in being too sick to do the things I need to do to get well, sometimes. I need some sort of badass advocate who will kick my ass when needed and pester me to remember to do things that my mind conveniently ‘forgets’ because dong them is scary or hard.

I need Samuel Jackson with a bullhorn and stompin’ boots.

Reading Overcoming Agoraphobia has also given me a clear idea of why all the group therapy I got did not help me very much. I felt just as neglected, ignored, and unimportant in group as I do in life. I would do my best to be a good group member, and getting me to play amateur therapist for others is ridiculously easy, but the truth is, I spend most of the time feeling bored and ignored and like nobody really cared.

I don’t quite fit the model in the book, though. Like for instance, while I have had panics outdoors, and thought I was going crazy or going to faint, my disease does not seem to include becoming scared to go certain places or do certain things based on a panic. The ladies discussed in the book go through a progression, where they have a panic say at the bank, and then avoid the bank… then the next one is at the supermarket, and they stop going there, and so on. I have never experienced that.

Why? Because I think my agoraphobia was first triggered when I was attacked by bullies on my way to elementary school, when I was too young to be very accustomed to going places on my own anyhow, and so I generalized my fear to “not being inside/home” very early in life.

All through my childhood, I hated walking to and fro school every day, and the reason, looking back, was my agoraphobia. I felt exposed and alone and in danger for the whole trip. I felt better when I got to school, because then I was indoors, in a familiar confined space. Classic agoraphobia.

A ride to school and back would have done wonders for my mood and confidence in school.

Bigger than this, though, is the discrepancy between Goldstein’s model of the origins of agoraphobia and my own life history. His patients tend towards a history of overprotective and/or overcritical and/or overdependent parents, and none of that applies to me. If anything, my parents were underprotective, uncritical, and had no use for me whatsoever.

I pretty much didn’t exist.

So I guess you can become agoraphobic via neglect as well.

Isn’t this fun. My computer doesn’t work!

As I recently blogged, this computer of mine, the one I do everything on, is having issues. It just refuses to execute anything. “Run” is no longer an option when you right-click an icon. And using the command prompt is not an option, nor is the “Run” command line from the Start menu. This is now a computer that does everything but run programs.

You know, just that little thing.

Luckily, my web browser, Firefox, somehow miraculously continues to work, so I am not entirely cut off. But I can’t run my email program (Thunderbird) or my chat client (MUCKClient), or any other program, and so I feel cut off at the knees, or worse, the brain.

(If you had to do without one of them….. )

The email, luckily again, I can get through the web. I just have the Gmail account now, and really I only use an email client like Thunderbird because I am an old stick-in-the-MUD Internet dinosaur who doesn’t like using webmail because he’s used to the speed of having your emails downloaded to your computer all at once and then browsing them at your leisure, instead of webmail’s having to reload the web page every time you delete a message or anything else.

This difference is probably minimal these days, especially with the bit pushing power like Google has behind Gmail, but what the heck, I’m an old-fashioned Internet grump who remembers when this was all farms and grass and USENET and we downloaded gigabytes of data at 300 baud, both ways, and we LIKED it!

Actually, no, it sucked, and we complained constantly. Then changed it. That’s how this shit works.

And hey…. you’re welcome.

But I still can’t find a decent web-based telnet client or (better) chat client, and so I cannot hang out with my online friends and do the virtual socializing that plays such a vital role in my emotional stability, and that, coupled with the almost worse fact of not being able to run Winamp and hence not having access to the music that helps KEEP ME FROM RIPPING PIECES OFF PASSERSBY AND CHEWING ON THEM has left my emotional equilibrium more than a tad perturbed.

It seems silly, from a certain lofty point of view, that something as simple as this can throw me off so badly. I mean, it’s just computer stuff. Big deal, right?

But that’s just the smug intellect and its delusion of self-sufficiency speaking. It’s easy for the selfish and self-centred mind to imagine that it is whole, complete unto itself, and therefore does not need anything to be happy. It just chooses to do things for its own entertainment. Right?

Wrong. Your brain needs things just like your body does, and I am not just talking carbs and oxygen. And this likely goes quintuple for us smarty pants intellectual types. I don’t know about the rest of you nerds, but this nerd is used to a very high level of very dense and rich mental stimulation, and having half or more of that cut off by a computer error, let alone a completely mysterious one like this one,

Woops! Update time. Managed to get chat client working via command prompt, hung around and whined for long enough to cause some nice person to tell me where to get the REG file to fix it, and luckily Internet Explorer works (I thought it wasn’t working, but I had forgotten how integreted it is with Windows Explorer now) and downloaded the new Firefox and now everything is back to normal, knock on wood.

It was interesting being back in the land of the command line interface again. It’s not the sort of thing one forgets when one spent so much time there in the 80’s and 90’s. So I didn’t have any huge problems once I managed to remember how to change into directories that have 8.3 filename incompatible names.

But still, it felt weird to be typing everything again. It’s been a long long time since I was a grumpy GUI resistor, clinging to DOS because I didn’t like having to switch between keyboard and mouse all the time.

And I still don’t. I still do a lot of my Windows stuff via the keyboard. It’s faster and simpler and more efficient. If they ever got rid of ALT-TAB, I would just have to shoot somebody.

So, crisis over. Thanks for being here with me, gentle readers. TTFN, Too Tight for Nookie!

Dear readers : I need help.

Suddenly, my computer won’t run any programs. At first, when I tried to run anything, it instead asked me what program I wanted to use to open the EXE file. Um, WINDOWS? You know… the OPERATING SYSTEM? Hello?

I thought, well, maybe the file association table is messed up, so I tried to find an association for EXE. There wasn’t any. I tried to create one, but that didn’t work. Turns out there is not “JUST RUN THE FUCKING THING!” option available in the file association creation wizard.

Now, whenever I try to run something, it spybot scans it instead. That’s the default option. And running EXE files just plain doesn’t seem to be on the menu.

What the hell do I do now? I’m just lucky that Firefox seems to get past the problem somehow, otherwise I would be completely hosed right now.

How do I get out of this? I’m running XP, btw.

Dear second graffitist : I heart you so damn much.

Oh yeah, what if I WANT to tell you what to do?

Ah, irony. The Generation X addiction that can never die, at least for us.

Another blah day, with more blah deep sweaty sleepy and blah blah feeling out of sorts and blah, blah, blah.

I really hate my stupid life sometimes.

Gone a tad further on the game trading front. Signed up for an account on the “named by three twee tards” game trading site Goozex and told them I had Zelda : Twilight Princess to offer, and instantly, it spit out the name and address of someone who wants the game in Ontario who wants the game. So now I just have to go next door to the postal outlet in the Shopper’s Drug Mart in the strip mall next door, and stick the game in a bubble envelope, and ship it off. When it is confirmed to have arrived, or possibly just when I confirm that I sent it, I will get 600 Goozex points which I can then spend on whatever other game another user is offering, and thus, the stream of trade is propagated.

If this all works out for me, I will likely just buy the envelopes and postage in advance, so I can do more trades from home, rather than have to go buy the stuff next door each time. If I have the stuff at home, I can just put it all together here in the apartment and then just stick it in any old mailbox I happen to pass on my weekly peregrinations.

Here’s the pathetic and sad part of the story : right after I committed to send the game off, I had a panic attack at the enormity of my commitment! Oh no, now I had to go OUTSIDE by MYSELF, and SPEND MONEY, and BUY POSTAGE, and in general DO SOMETHING I HAVE NEVER DONE BEFORE! Oh the TERROR!

I even felt a very strong urge to cancel the whole thing as too hard, too complicated, too much for me to handle. Luckily, I managed to fight that urge down as pathetic and unworthy and unhealthy. I am sick and tired of leading such a sad and pathetic life simply because I lack the will and the courage to fight my fears. I am tired of being so limited by my illness. I want to get my shit together and become a more complete and whole person. This sort of thing is a good first step. It’s just next door, I need to go Shopper’s anyhow for a few things (like picking up the form to get my missing Optimum card replaced, getting some deodorant… ), it will be over before I know it, and I will have the satisfaction of having expanded my world a little bit and, of course, eventually get a new game out of the deal too.

Not sure what I will get. Probably Super Mario Galaxy 2. I am guessing that once you factor in the envelope, postage, and the website’s fee, I will be getting a new game for something like five bucks. Not bad.

Speaking of my irrational and bathetic fear-based lifestyle, I am reading a book called Overcoming Agoraphobia and it’s turning out to be full of valuable insights into my condition.

I actually bought the book ages ago, but I didn’t read it then, because right off the bat it assumes that all agoraphobics are scared housewives whose husbands are tired of having to do the grocery shopping themselves. That really put me off and I just shoved the book back on my bookshelf. But recently, I decided to give it another shot, prepared to at least figure out if it had anything at all to offer a single gay man with the same condition.

And it does. I don’t quite fit its model of agoraphobia, but there is still enough meat on its bones to make it a very good thing for me to read. The author, Doctor Barry Goldstein, really seems to understand a lot of where I am coming from. The isolation, the lack of the ability to connect with others even though you desperately want to, the social fear, the way it controls your whole life.

I think the difference between me and the ladies in the book he treats is that, not being a good looking woman but rather a big fat ugly man, I never had anyone to cling to for security like a husband. Or parents, honestly. The agoraphobes in the book all had overprotective and/or overcritical and/or overdependent parents. I had parents who barely knew I was alive.

More on this later. Won’t that be fun?

Although with how I feel right now, it’s more of a short-bus special than the good kind of special.

Don’t worry, nothing new and exciting has happened, just the usual deep intense sleep where I wake up with the sheets soaked in sweat (seriously, today it was almost a lake) that leaves me feeling all fried and tired and disconnected from reality and out of phase and blah blah blah. Whatever. I bore myself with my own pain.

I had one of those dreams where I wake up in the hospital with tubes and wires stuck in me everywhere and under restraint again. Those, to put it mildly, are VERY VERY BAD. They are the worst kind of nightmare because they represent my worst fears (being helpless and immobile and completely dependent on others) and they are too fucking plausible. With my various health issues, it’s entirely possible that I could go to sleep and wake up in the hospital in bad shape. I could lay down for a normal nap, and suffer a horrible blood sugar crash, and a roomie discovers me in a bad bad way and dials 911, and boom, there I am, in my worst fucking nightmare.

Screw you, Fringe, for keep having this happen to Olivia (and Fauxlivia) and thus keeping this thought alive and twitching in the already cluttered minefield of fear and neurosis that I call my mind.

Been looking to trade Wii games with someone, as I can’t afford a new Wii game this month and well, I am between games now. I beat Okami (awesome freaking game, loved everything about it except for the Mother Fucking Konohana Shuffle), and so I am officially without a new game to play. Although, as a testament to how made of industrial strength awesome the game is, I am now going through it a second time and quite enjoying myself in the process. It’s not as good as a new game, but it’ll do for now.

I want to trade one on one because that will get me way more value than going to some place like Gamestop which will only give me a pittance on trade-ins. At a place like that, I would probably have to trade in every single one of my games to get one new game. With a one on one trade, I might well get… well, a one to one trade, a game for a game.

It just makes sense.

However, the entry I posted to the Vancouver livejournal community got absolutely no response, and I was thinking of trying the vancouver craigslist next, but for some reason, I just decided to Google “trading wii games” or somesuch and found this potentially intriguing site which promises to make the whole thing easy.

It’s a site called Goozex (seriously, does nobody say these stupid website names out loud before naming them? It sounds like a porn site for German people who REALLY enjoyed The Blob) Basically, you tell them what you want and what you have, and they find a trading partner for you. It all works through the mail, and for their part in it, Goozex charges you $1.99, so in essence, you get a new game for two dollars plus the postage to send your game to your trading partner.

Not bad! I mean, I am pondering the whole trust thing, where I have to stick one of my beloved games in the mail and just trust that my trade partner will do the same thing, but I will probably eventually decide to go for it. I have a postal outlet next door, and so mailing stuff off is super easy.

I probably won’t risk my favorite games the first time though!

Well, time for me to wash all that damn flop sweat off my filthy body and go off to good old ABC Country Kitchen with my friends for dinner. I think I will skip the burgers and go for the pot roast straight up tonight.

Because I loves me some pot roast. I just love super-rich beef dishes like that, especially with some taters and some good veggies. Steaks are great, but give me pot roast and I am a happy carnivore.

Until the next time I am too tired and fried to think of an actual article to write, let alone write one, and so I just yammer at you nice folks about my thrilling action packed life, this is your humble genius writer, signing off. Please remember, only you can prevent forest fires. No pressure.

Remember your parents’ friends?

I don’t. Mine didn’t have any.

Isn’t that odd? I am totally serious. For my entire childhood, from birth to college, neither of my parents had any friends at all. Nobody they went to dinner with now and then, nobody who came over for dinner and board games, no other couples or families that we did family activities with. Nobody who came over for the occasional back yard barbecue or outing to a park or the movies. Nothing. ^[1]

And the really unusual thing about it is that I was well into my twenties before I realized just how weird that was. Parents with no friends at all. Neither of them.

Looking back, it’s not that surprising that it took me a long time to figure out the strange nature of my parents’ social life. After all, no matter how strange your household is when you are a kid, it’s normal to you. As far as you know, everyone’s family is like that. It’s not until we go to school and begin comparing notes with our friends that we get some sort of clue about the weird things and the normal things about the way our family does things.

Alas, I too had no friends to speak of all through my childhood, and the ones I did occasionally have were generally not very good to me and we didn’t exactly have long heart to heart talks, so I never had much basis for comparison but my beloved television.

Given my parents’ lack of friends, I suppose it’s not that surprising that I never learned how to make friends either. My older siblings had friends, but they lived in a world different than my own. Their friends were never over all that often, but when they did have friends over, I would often somewhat pathetically try to include myself in what they were doing and try to get some friendship by proxy.

The thing is, it’s not like my parents were curmudgeonly recluses. Both had jobs that brought them into contact with lots of people. My mother was a teach, an adult educator, and so her work brought her into contact with dozens of students, other teachers, administrators, and so forth. And my father was a provincial civil servant, whose various jobs in the government of Prince Edward Island over the years, as well as being quite active in the community, caused him to come into the acquaintance of half the province.

But that’s as far as it went with my parents. Acquaintance. They were the sort of people who could not walk through a busy mall without meeting and chatting with a dozen people they knew through their work, and yet none of those people ever so much as came over for a drink.

I know why, I suppose. It’s because my mother, like me, is painfully shy and sensitive. Like me, she is only comfortable socially when she has a role to fulfill or a job to do. Hence, she is comfortable when being a teacher because that is a defined role with known expectations, not the unstable and chaotic world of purely interpersonal interpersonal interactions.

Likewise, I am quite comfortable doing customer service jobs. I was a clerk at my uncle’s shop for years and was pretty good at it, in my own humble opinion. This, despite my otherwise quite intense and at times crushingly crippling social phobia/agoraphobia. It sounds contradictory, but to me, it makes perfect sense. At work, behind that counter, I was a clerk, with a role I understood and could do. None of it was very hard. So I was calm, confident, pleasant, helpful, and in general, happy.

On the other hand, on the walk to and from work, I was a nervous social-phobic wreck, feeling like every person who passed me on the street hated me and wanted me gone.

So I am the shy child of a shy mother. Even if my father had wanted to make friends and have them over, I doubt my mother would have allowed it. She’s no more comfortable with strangers than I am.

Mom, I got a lot of wonderful traits from you. I consider you the source of what I like best in myself.

But I got some bad stuff too.

The last few days have been quite trying. Yesterday, I had one of my sleepy days. Did very little but sleep for the whole day. Those days don’t get me down like they used to, but they are still very draining and somewhat of an ordeal.

Because this is not normal sleep, this is amazingly deep and intensely dream-filled sleep. It’s like high-density sleep, and while I am in the throes of this process, sleep does not refresh me, it drains me. When I manage to wake up long enough to pee and eat a meal and so on, I am like a zombie, barely able to coordinate my limbs in nonfatal ways, let along actually coherently think. And when I can’t think clearly, there’s a real danger of my becoming stressed and depressed and freaked out. I rely (far too) heavily on my ability to think clearly and rationally as a vital part of my emotional coping, thinking my way through problems and trying to figure out what is really going on, and when that is compromised, I feel cut off, confused, frightened, and abandoned to chaos.

I have a deep intuition that, while having a very strong and agile mind like I do has a lot of benefits, this rigid insistence on clarity and logic is not without its problems, and a more rounded and balanced approach to life would lead to my gaining a little trust in the universe and therefore enable me to ease up on the paranoia, fear, and insistence on vigilance that underlies my usual relaxed and easygoing demeanor.

Because if you are truly without faith, if you have absolutely no sense of safety or security in the world and therefore you believe that you can only trust that which is known or knowable, then you have no choice but to maintain a hostile attitude towards the world, and that is very very damaging to your psyche. You are in a constant state of stress, like a shellshocked Vietnam vet, and you are wracked by doubt and worry about nearly everything, because deep down, you feel like reality, the world, will stab you in the back the minute you turn your back on it. Metaphorically speaking.

It’s not a healthy way to live, and it’s only recently occurred to me with clarity that this is what separates normal people from people like me. Somewhere deep in their psyche, they have a sense of safety and wholeness and faith that carries them through life and helps them through rough spots. To them, it’s so basic in their psyche that they are never aware of it except, perhaps, in times of great trouble. But it acts as a buffer, a blanket, a refuge. All I have is the poor substitute of a very bright and sharp mind.

And people like me say pretty things about how you’re better off without faith because it’s better to build your castle on a solid foundation of truth and fact than the shifting sands of faith or religion, but to be honest, it’s sour grapes. Having no sense that things will be OK is a cold and deadly thing, and feeling clever is no substitute for feeling safe.

So after yesterday’s megasleep peak, today I get the trough of the opposite extremely, being unable to sleep at all, more or less. In the last 24 hours I have had roughly four hours of very light, very brief, very uncomfortable sleep. I wake up feeling pretty much exactly like I did before I went to sleep, and in general I feel restless, tense, and irritable. When is the part when I get to feel good?

In general, I have been feeling rather off lately. I have been getting certain minor symptoms that suggest that whatever it is that happens to me now and then that makes everything worse and generally leads to bad things until the fever breaks is happening to me now. It feels like some sort of mysterious toxin builds up in my bloodstream, and until it works its way through me, I am in danger of becoming ill at any moment, and especially if I am not careful with what and how I eat, and staying hydrated, and so on.

Ironically, these periods are often punctuated by brief periods where I feel energized and excited and become somewhat more active than usual. You know, just to make the illness stand out in sharp relief.

One thing is for sure : it sure as fuck ain’t easy being me.

Anyone want to swap for a while?

God damn it, they did it again.

First these assholes managed to almost make me forget all the bullshit about Duke Nukem Forever being the biggest vaporware joke in the world with this completely awesome, hip, funny trailer.

And now…. well just watch this.

Damn you, you assholes, how dare you make me love you even more?