I swear to Gosh, I had a really brilliant idea for an essay I was going to write tonight instead of what will be, alas, just the standard drivel. It was was cogent, it was fresh, it was something that had been riding around in my head for a long time without being expressed… in short, it was just the perfect kind of thing for me to write and feel good about writing. Piece of cake. I even had a rough outline sketched out in my head. It was going to be one sweet piece of writing. I was so stoked.

But like a million times before, I did not bother to write the idea down. I mean, an idea this great, how could I possibly forget it?

The answer is, of course, I did forget it. How? Easy. One word : summer.

There is just something about the summer that magnifies my already considerable absentmindedness and being kind of a flake in general. I go from slightly competent to practically needing a life assistant to remember to breathe. It is really quite pathetic.

And yet, it usually does not matter that much to me, because at the same time, I become more mellow and shock absorbent. This leads to me to a somewhat disturbing conclusion.

Some of my neurosis is actually functional. Being neurotic and worried and brutally self-conscious is actually how I keep myself vaguely together, and when I relax and stop being so hard on myself, everything just goes all to hell.

Clearly, this is not an acceptable situation. There must be a way of keeping my life together and remember to do things I am supposed to do without making myself miserable. That is clearly a really bad hedonic equation. Healthy people must be able to remember things without torturing themselves.

In fact, if I could depict my relationship with myself in a movie, it would be like one of those minimalist European torture flicks, with just two characters, the interrogator and his victim. I pretty much have treated myself, internally, with enormous brutality and callous inhumanity for a lot of my life. The movie would be very bloody and probably have to be released unrated.

And why not? I hate myself, so why not vent my hatred on its target? It makes a terrible kind of sense.

But of course, how can you not hate someone who treats you so brutally? When you are both torturer and victim, things get very complicated pretty fast.

Recovery, then, is about changing the nature of this relationship.

That means the torturer needs to find another way to vent his aggression, and the prisoner needs to walk out of that cell and face the world and learn to deal with it, instead of using the torturer as his excuse for hiding from the world.

And this, of course, is even harder than it sounds. Self-loathing is a hard habit to quit. It provides such instant and uncomplicated gratification of the aggressive urge. You do not need to find a target, justify it, risk retaliation or consequences, or even leave the cozy nest of your mind. You just hate on yourself and boom, instant satisfaction.

Of course, it is a very stupid thing to do. But it is like junk food. Everybody knows it is bad for you, but it provides instant gratification, so they keep on eating it anyhow.

Enough of the self-surgery though. How about an incredibly cute fox video?

I mean, isn’t he just the cutest thing ever? It is a tame fox, by the way, nothing wrong with him, just raised by people in an animal sanctuary, so he thinks he is people. Or more likely, that we are foxes. Very weird foxes.

I am so jealous of the guy holding the camera and playing with the fox. I have loved foxes all my life, and I would love to get that close to one and get to pet and play with it.

Actually, I am not sure I could handle it. It might be too much. I might get so excited I faint. I am not kidding… it is a definite possibility. I am the sort of person for whom getting too excited for my own good is a definite possibility.

I guess it is just how I am wired. Part of that overflowing, effervescent personality of mine that I slowly but surely learning to accept and let flow freely. Maybe I am just not the sort of person who is supposed to be in full control of himself all of the time. Maybe there is a lot to be said for thinking of self-control as something you apply now and then instead of constantly.

Self-control is a sometimes thing, not an all the time thing.

The problem with that is that I have to make peace with not knowing the outcome before I commit to something. Letting go of control means accepting that you do not know where all this will lead, and you cannot even guarantee that it will end well.

Maybe it will turn out that letting go of control was the stupidest thing you have ever done. I am not saying it is likely, but you cannot eliminate the possibility that one day, you will look back and say :I would have been better off staying depressed and miserable.”

But I have been thinking a lot about the idea of always trying to make the smart choice, and how that simple desire leads directly to the land of paranoia, neurosis, and self-destruction. Making stupid choices is everybody’s destiny.

Life, in fact, is a series of mistakes. That is just the way it is. Nobody has been, is, or ever will be able to live their entire lives without doing anything stupid. Even doing nothing can be stupid as hell. Think about it : if you were in the path of a speeding truck, doing nothing at all would be very stupid, would it not?

Guess I am getting tired of getting run over.

Well, the sun is shining as it slowly sets, giving us all those gorgeous colors for free. I have had a productive (if a trifle expensive) day. I went to do some shopping on my own and it went fine, no panic, no worries. I have napped pleasantly, and I am beating the heat with my tried and true method of constant hydration. I have an experiment working in my robot boulanger^[1] and that always makes me feel more productive. All in all, I feel up. Confident, relaxed, focused, calm.

Time to tackle the rough stuff.

Here’s the thing. I love my mother. I love her more than I love anyone else in the universe, hands down, no contest, nolo contendre, period, end of story. I think about her a dozen times a day and I miss her very much. A great deal of what is good in me came directly from her, in my opinion. My kindness, my sensitivity, my love of animals, my love of books and learning and feeding my brain, my strong intellect, my strong moral core…. all of these come, in whole or in part, from my mother.

And growing up with an angry, unstable, unpredictable father meant growing up in a household where there was very clearly the Good Parent, which was my mother, and the Bad Parent, which was my father.

And just as I am beginning to see that maybe things were not quite as black and white concerning my father as I have grown accustomed to thinking (though he still has a lot to answer for), I am beginning to, quite reluctantly and painfully, realize that my mother, though I love her desperately and completely, was not the perfect Good Parent either.

It hurts to type those words, it hurts to even admit they are mine, but the truth must come out, and sometimes, recovery is a lot more like performing surgery on oneself than it is a long rest on a comfy couch while you talk about your problems.

For one thing, my mother was very weak and passive. She was the Good Parent, but she never lifted a finger to protect us from my father’s verbal tirades. She would just hang her head and cry while he took his rage out on my sister Anne or my brother David. This is an educated, professional woman who spent her days teaching hundreds of people, but she was too weak and cowed at home to speak up and protect us from our father’s abuse.

And I find that hard to forgive. She claims he abused her too, but the thing is, he didn’t really. Or if he did, he did it when they were in private. A truer statement would be that he did not have to abuse her because she was meek and submissive to him and he had us kids to take it out on.

And what happened when they were finally alone in the house, just the two of them, no kids around? He started taking it out on her, and only then does she want a divorce.

But that is old news. What I really want to dig into with my scalpel tonight is how emotionally distant she was through most of my childhood.

Actually, not just emotionally distant. Emotionally absent. She just wasn’t there. Looking back, I think she suffered from depression just like I do. Certainly, if I was very depressed, I would seem emotionally absent to all those around me. That is what happens when you withdraw from the world as a defense. You leave behind everyone who loves you. You abandon them.

And she abandoned me. Emotionally speaking.

No wonder I have such a profound inner chill and feeling of hopelessness. My mother, who had been quite warmly present in an earlier part of my childhood, went back to work (after all, I was not planned, and why change your plans for a kid you never wanted anyhow?), became depressed at nights, and became a zombie, a robot, someone just going through the motions of life.

Makes me feel like one of those rats who are raised to view a wire mesh covered in fake fur with a heater inside as their mother.

And you know, they do not grow up normal either.

And to compound the problem, I became just like here. I withdrew into myself, went through the motions of life and school and so on, and became passive and cold and withdrawn and sad myself.

So instead of feeling I had a right to what I needed in order to be happy and healthy, and therefore set off in pursuit of it, I just went through my childhood alone and lonely, doing what little was expected of me and not a whole lot else.

If I tried to engage my mother emotionally… well, I might as well have been talking to a block of ice. She did not even reject me, not even passively. It was just… nothing. No reaction. She was too deep in her own fortress of ice and snow to react at all. My desperate need probably never even reached her. I was not even a blip on her radar. The thermometer showed no change at all.

And if you did not notice, a lot of those things I credit her for giving to me are intellectual, not emotional. Emotionally speaking, she gave me her own shy, depressive nature without giving me the warmth or strength to deal with the world.

Throw in the sexual abuse by my Dad before I was even kindergarten age (which admittedly she knew nothing about) and the whole taking me out of university thing, and all that brutal bullying, and it is no wonder I am such a cracked little egg.

At least I am healthy enough to feel sorry for myself now.

Mom, you just plain were not there for me.

Another dull summer day. My friends and I will be going to one of our favorite restaurants, ABC Country Kitchen, later on this evening. But for now, everything is quiet.

Well, on the outside, anyhow. On the inside, I am increasingly bored, restless, and dissatisfied with my life. It is a feeling that has been building in me for a long time, but only recently have I stopped suppressing it and treating it like it is the enemy, the monster inside me, the terrible thing which makes me miserable from time to time.

Because it is not a terrible thing at all. It is simply life trying to happen. Being tired of doing nothing with your life is not a terrible thing, it is a good thing, a natural thing, a normal thing.

Sure, it makes things less comfortable for me and the way I live right now.

But one of the truths I am struggling to bear is that sometimes, in order to get to a place of greater happiness, you have to go through the desert of unhappiness. There may not be (in fact, there probably is not) a smooth upward path which is easy, safe, and fun.

You may have to surrender your current safe, comfortable position with no guarantee that you will get it back should you fail, and set out for the higher ground anyhow.

That is my spiritual challenge right now. I am conservative by nature, used to avoiding risk and using my clever mind to keep things the same all the time rather than upset the applecart with change, especially the kind of change that cannot be quantified or predicted. I have held to a very intense and strict policy of never starting on a road unless I know exactly how long it is and where it will end, which sounds smart in a way, but only superficially.

Think about it at any depth, and you realize that this sets an impossibly high bar of predictability for life, and the only way to meet that standard is to do practically nothing.

And that is precisely what I have been doing for almost twenty years, my entire adult life. I eat, I sleep, I play video games, I chat online, I write 1000 words of nonsense a day, and I go out with friends a few times a week. That is my entire life, and it is, frankly, pathetic.

It is, at best, a fragment of a life, the outline of a life, a life without the actual life part. A life, technically, of unlimited leisure, but that only sounds good if you a) are working right now and do not exactly love your job and b) you take the issue of resources off the table.

When you take into the fact that I have $8K/year to live on, unlimited leisure begins to seem like what it really is, more like a very low security prison, where you can go wherever you like but you cannot really do anything. Like you are slightly out of phase with reality, and can see and hear what normal people do, and even walk among them, but you cannot truly touch anything.

You are not really there.

And for what crime do you suffer this fate? Being broken. Unworthy. Disabled.

It is hard for even minimum wage workers to understand what it is like in this kind of lifestyle limbo. We human beings are born to find out place in society, to find a job and do it and from that, we derive our sense of worthiness, our sense of being good in society’s eyes. Even if you hate your job with the white hot passion of a thousand suns, you are still getting that feeling from having a job and doing it.

You just don’t know it, because it is the water you swim in, a constant, a background noise.

And to be blocked from all of that by an invisible disability like mental illness is particularly harsh. The wall between you and the rest of the world is made of clear, invisible glass that nobody can see but that you can feel all the time, making you forever the outsider.

You meet a person, and what is the first thing they want to know?

“So what do you do?”

And what do I say? “Nothing, because I am a crazy person. Wait, where are you going?”

At least these days, I can say I am a writer, and that I am as yet unpublished. As long as they do not think to ask how hard I am trying to get published, I am covered,

Because that is just the thing. I have not written anything publishable in ages. It has been even longer since I actually sent something out to someone. I just lead this stupid life and wait to die.

It is just so much easier to let the days go by than to stand up, straighten up, and actually do things. I am just so damn limp. I live a flaccid life, all brain and no spine, just flapping in the current and yet, stuck to my rock like a barnacle, doing nothing, going nowhere.

At least a leaf caught in the wind ends up someplace new. I just flail about and go nowhere.

That is why I am letting this discomfort with my current position grow and spread. I have to allow myself to become uncomfortable before I will get the strength to pull my roots from this rock and open myself to the flower of the river and see where I end up.

I just get so god damned tired of watching my life pass like I am not even here. Months go by like a dream. Am I really here? Or do I just imagine that I am? Is this all just some dream, and one day I will wake up and find out I am someone totally different?

Bring it on.

Here we are again, at that special time of the day when I blab what is on my mind to you nice people, and imagine that you are listening to it all.

It has been a sleepy, sunny day for me. Spent most of it asleep with Zopiclone’s kind and gentle assistance, and that was pleasant enough. No big deal waking up feeling all sweaty and dehydrated and discombobulated and incoherent and in pain. Just nice normal waking, which is nice as a novelty but might take me some time to et used to it as a regular thing.

After all feeling like utter crap really puts a special kind of oomph into the start of your day. The kind of oomph, in fact, that represents the sound you make when you are hit directly in the solar plexus with a garment bag full of old coins.

Compared to that dramatic beginning, just waking up and feeling OK seems downright dull. I am so used to aking up being some sort of fight for survival as I drag myself through the mires of sleep to the shores of consciousness that I am not sure I can candle anything less traumatic any more.

Seriously though, Zopiclone has been giving me better quality sleep, and I am quite happy about that. Even now, I feel a nice soft healthy sleepiness making my eyes and my head heavy, and I nod as I type to nice people. After this night’s missive, I will go back to sleep, and hopefully shore up my mental resources a little more,

Or at least, get some good rest for a change.

The cheesy bacon bread that I told you about on Thursday turned out to be uniformly blah. I am guessing that my guesstimations regarding the quantities of bacon and cheese were WAY off. Or, and this is a real possibility, the recipe itself was very bland and blah. I have encountered countess cases, as a sometimes baker, of recipes that are apparently made for people with House of Usher type tastebuds, where tiny amounts of spices and so on produce cuisine just bursting with flavour.

Oh, and of course, the recipe called for a can of green chilies, so it might be that most of the flavour was supposed to come from them, and the cheese and bacon were meant to be a background accompaniment ot the chili flavour, and so by skipping the chilies, I threw the whole thing off.

Or whatever. It’s only bread. I will put on another loaf of something different and some time tonight, and we will see how well that one turns out. Even with its mildness, the bacon and cheese loaf was still pretty decent bread. I am not producing failed loaves any more.

It is just that some of them turn out how I hoped, and some do not. I am still having lots of fun with my bread machine and look forward to adding some more ingredients to my baker’s shelf so I can branch out to making things like ginger bread and carrot cake and so on.

Hmmm. Ginger carrot cake. I bet that would be good. Makes me hungry just thinking about it.

And speaking of thing which make you hungry, check out these extreme naughty iced confections that my friend Phil sent to me yesterday (warning, this pic is VERY MUCH NSFW) :

Can we switch. I wanted the Asian/Banana.

Now there is a visual. Is it wrong that looking at those makes me incredibly hungry> I want one of those right now. I have a feeling that one of those would really hit the spot when you get those deep, hot cravings for something cool and sweet in the summer.

I will stop before I get any more excited.

But still, that pushes my buttons so very well. And I have to wonder where the heck in the world you can buy a dipped (and dicked) cone like that. I am assuming it is either a very well established Pride event, or something even more completely awesome, at the Kanamana Matsure, a festival of the penis held evey year in Japan.

On the first Sunday in April of every year, the Kanayama shrine in Kawasaki in Japan because host to a festival where the phallus, or penis, is revered, and everywhere you go, you see penises carved out candy, wood, vegetables, stone, and who knows, maybe even ice cream,

Just imagine it. Cocks everywhere. I might well lose my mind. And everyone participates, even little children sucking on dick shaped lollipops. Now there is a sight to blow your Western mind.

I sometimes mock Japan for being so messed up, but I have to admit, sometimes they are fucked up in a most wonderful way. I think we give the phallus far too much power by making it this mysterious horrible thing that a grown woman is supposed to shriek at the sight of and avert her eyes, and that we protect our children from the very sight of, even though half of them have one right between their legs.

This convinces boys and men that they have some sort of dark and might god between their legs, when really it is just another part of their bodies and is no more remarkable than they eyebrow or their elbow, although it is, admittedly, a lot more fun to play with.

So I think every town should have a Penis Festival. And, six months to the day later, a Vagina Festival. All this body shame serves no purpose and we would be way ahead of the game if we simply jettisoned all of it and embraced the physical truths of selves, and learned to celebrate our genitals, and then maybe let them take their properly proportionate place in our lives.

So three cheers for penises and vaginas, huh people? They propagate the species, they help us eliminate waste, and you can have a hell of a lot of fun with them besides.

Give your genitals a hug today!

Today has been a nice quiet day.

I made some bread this afternoon. Cheese and bacon bread, which was supposed to have green chilies in it as well, but I would not have put them in there even if I had them, because apparently anything with capsacin in it freaking kills me now, and so I am avoiding that kind of thing entirely.

I mean seriously. Even something as mild as chipotle mayo nearly did me in last time I tempted fate. Ran through me like a runaway freight train on a downward grade. With a greased track.

Little old ladies eat chipotle mayo these days, but me? Nope. Might as well guzzle Drano. Damn.

And it was really tasty, too.

Oh well. The bread turned out OK, but I have a bad feeling that either some magical physics-defying process made all the cheese and bacon I put in there vanish, or said ingredients are not exactly evenly distributed throughout the loaf and I am going to find a huge lump of bacon and cheese in the middle when I get there.

See, I have just taken two slices off the right hand end of the loaf so far, and I swear to god, there was almost no cheese in either slice, and absolutely no bacon. None whatsoever.

Less bacon than in a kosher Caesar salad, folks.

So we shall see how things turn out. Admittedly, I was using torn up cheese slices instead of the grated old Monteray Jack that the recipe called for.

Plus, I did not have the six slices of bacon (drained and crumbled) that the recipe called for, but I did have a big ol Costco sized bag of real bacon bits from Hormel, and so I just had to make a guess that a slice of bacon would be around a tablespoon of bacon bits once processed.

So it is not like I have the right to expect picture perfect results when I have taken such rude liberties with the recipe. I mean, it was a recipe for Tex Mex Monteray Jack Bacon Bread With Green Chilies, and it has no Monteray Jack and no Chilies (my mother would be proud), so I guess I should be happy it turned out to be food at all.

Oh well, if it ends up being a little dull and a little poorly mixed, it is still food, and still tasty good, even if it is not quite what I had hoped for.

I think there is a lesson for us all in there some where.

Otherwise, quiet normal day. Spending too much time playing Facebook games, but darn it, they are so addictive. All kinds of little things to do, cities to plan, dragons to raise, gnomes to wrangle. It is such an effective absorber of all my excess mental energy that I just cannot resist it. All their little tricks to get me hooked work.

Well, inasmuch as they get me to play the games. They do not get me to spend money on the games, which is of course what they really want. But I have no money for such things.

Poverty is truly the greatest form of sales resistance.

Well, I suppose as long as I keep writing every day, I am at least exercising that writing muscle and keeping it toned. I suppose some day, I might even get it into my head to use it for something useful like writing a novel or some short stories or whatever.

Heck, there is even a million to one chance that if I do write something meaningful, I might actually show it to somebody who might wanna publish it somewhere.

Stranger things have happened, after all.

Tonight, I am going to implement my “sleeping during the night” program that I talked about yesterday. I am gong to take my Zopiclone as I am writing (just took it now, in fact), and hopefully by the time it kicks in fully, it will be dark out, I will be lying in bed waiting to sleep, and I will have a nice long sleep when it is dark and cool and nice.

I mean, what the heck, I have tried everything else, why not try something vaguely like what a normal person might do?

At this point, I am willing to give even normal life a shot. As weird as it is.

Hopefully, I will get some good deep refreshing sleep out of this. Not that I have been tired lately. If anything, I have been a little more “up” than usual. But I still worry about the quality of my sleep, and want to discover what sort of person I am when I am truly well rested, instead of jut sort of stringing along on mental stimulation all the time.

I was even a very good boy and took no naps this afternoon. That is one thing those Facebook games are good for, keeping me occupied so that I can resist the urge to make time fast-forward by napping.

Less naps also means better sleep, or so I am told, and I believe it. Got to save up all your sleepiness for the one big sleep, so that you can get lots of that deep down refreshing sleep that clears all the half-expressed thoughts and leftover emotions and raw uncollated memories out of the mind and lets you wake up with a clean, fresh consciousness with which to face the day.

Sounds nice, does it not? I cannot remember the last time I woke up actually feeling better than I did when I went to sleep. At best, I break even. I feel less sleepy and tired, but I also feel like crap, so it sort of evens out to a net zero.

At worst, I will just have a slightly different than usual nap. No big whoop.

Either way, you will all have to wait til Saturday for the results, because tomorrow is Science day and I have to talk about all this Higgs Boson hoopla.

Hope I understand it by then.

Well, that was a dumb idea.

I decided tonight that I would take a nap after supper and write when I got up. It seemed like a smart idea at the time and I mentally patted myself on the back for it.

Well, here it is, nearly 11 pm, and I am all addled by that deep intense sleep stuff, and I have only an hour or so before midnight in which to write the day’s blog entry and hence save the day.

Not all that big a deal, mental coherence issues aside, but I am at a loss as to what made me think this was a smart idea.

I think tomorrow, I will write before the nap. and save myself a lot of hassle.

Speaking of napping, took a Zopiclone today. They really do help. In fact, they are in some ways the ideal sleeping pill, because they do not make you go to sleep. They are not a knockout pill or an old school brick to the head style sleeping pill like Valium.

Instead, at least at the dosage I am taking, 7.5 mg a day, they just make sleep easier. When I take one, I can feel the soft, politely soothing effect in the back of my mind. It is quite pleasant, but hardly euphoric or overwhelming. I could ignore it if I really wanted to do so, if say something came up after taking the pill but before going to sleep. It would be uncomfortable but require no epic act of will.

What it does do, however, is make it easier for me to fall asleep (greatly appreciated, because it has taken me a long time to get to sleep for as long as I can remember) and make the quality of that sleep just a little bit better.

Today was a little weird because I took the pill in the morning, around about 9 in the morning to be precise, and tried to sleep then, but could not really get to sleep. I seem to have entered an almost healthy kind of cycle where I can’t sleep well while the sun is up. Sun goes down, I immediately start getting pretty sleepy. So maybe tomorrow, I take the pill after writing and just before the sun goes down, then we see what happens when the darkness falls.

Besides the darkness suing the horizon for damages and for keeping an unsafe falling place, of course.

Still, all in all, my mood is more up than down lately, and I am glad for that. I am getting into the swing of this emotional openness thing. Sure, I feel like crap sometimes. I feel sad for no reason, I feel bored and restless and frustrated, I feel hurt and confused and down on myself.

But at least I am feeling something. I went too long with that emotional volume knob turned way the hell down, and that leaves you alone in a sea of black cold clear syrup, like you are a subject on some sadistic sensory deprivation experiment, except the senses are not sight and smell and sound, but your sense of connection with others, your sense of reward from your actions, your sense of the potential for a positive future, or even the feel of warm sun on your skin.

It is a tragic case of maladaptive reaction, where something which works in the short term (suppressing one’s emotions to deal with painful ones) has far worse consequences in the long term (isolation, sadness, depression, suicide.)

Speaking of suicide, I watches a move called A Single Man today, with Colin Firth putting in a somewhat Michael Caine-ish performance as a gay college professor in 1962 L.A. who plans to commit suicide because he can no longer deal with the grief he feels eight months after his partner of sixteen years died in a car accident.

It struck me, while watching the movie, that to commit suicide because you see no point in going on living is to bet awfully heavily on you ability to predict the future. Like Kenny, a fresh-faced college student who seems stricken with the main character (played to fresh faced perfection by Nicholas Hoult), points out, “You never know. ”

And it’s true. Life can be very surprising, and you never know when something good might come your way and make you very glad you stuck around for it. Sure, maybe you can’t see and hope for the future. But maybe that has more to do with your vision being clouded by mental disease than any rational assessment of your future prospects. Maybe you have a mental defect that makes it impossible for you to be as rational as you like to think you are when it comes to thinks involving yourself and hour future.

Maybe you have, indeed, no idea what you are doing.

I think that provides enough reasonable doubt in order to spare yourself the death sentence, don’t you? Life in prison should be enough for your crimes. Hang in there, no matter how pointless it may seem, and keep working towards your parole.

Because you never know when things might just get a lot better. Or hell, just a bit better.

Or at least start sucking in an interesting new way, so you can sample and enjoy a different flavour of pain for a while. A change is as good as a rest, they say.

Or sit back in anticipation of good, hearty laughter at the ways the Universe comes up with to screw you over without you even having to lift a finger.

Whatever it takes to keep you in the game. Just do not think that you know so much about how the future will turn out that you can say, with total confidence (and it had better be total, because it’s final), that there is absolutely no point to remaining alive because only bad things can happen from this point on.

Seems like a pretty big bet to place on your diseased mind’s capacities to me.

Probably better just to assume you are too crazy to make those kinds of decisions yourself.

As I struggle to recover from decades of depression, I have realized that I do not truly know who I am. The depression has been my identity for so long that I do not really know who I am without it. And if I am to recover from this long, long illness, I will need to create and/or discover a solid and real identity upon which to base my life.

This means that not only do I need to know who I truly am, I need to free myself of who I am not. I have to rid myself of false ideas of who I am in order that the truth can fill the spaces left behind.

So tonight, I am going to introduce you to (some of) all the people I am not and will never be, no matter what I do, up to and including the day I die.

And once I have done so, we can see them for what they are, and then say goodbye to them forever.

I am not a calm person. I am, instead, a fairly excitable person. This is not a bad thing. In fact, a talent for enthusiasm, both having it and expressing it, is a rare thing in our blase society where everybody pretend to not really care about anything in particular and where getting too excited about anything is disdained as noisy boat-rocking by the disinterested and disengaged.

I have, in fact, an overflowing, effervescent personality, and instead of brutally shushing myself inside, I should be learning to harness all the steam power that comes from having such a strong, passionate, powerful personality.

So I am not a calm person. I can live with that.

I am not a competent and practical person. I just am not. This one hurts more to let go, because I deeply respect practical, competent people who can focus on the here and now and apply themselves in effective, direct way to the problems at hand. I want to be that sort of person so badly that I have excoriated myself quite harshly over the years for being such a goofy so and so (to put it very very mildly).

But as much as I admire practical, sensible people, I am just not that guy. My skills and strengths are of a different sort. That is not to say that I do not have good, strong, useful, life-applicable skills that valuable and valid on their own.

But I am just not a “master of reality”. I am not a masterful, competent person who is very good at dealing with the physical realities of life. I do my best, and I will always be the kind of person who keeps their eyes on the bottom line and who pays great attention to the pragmatic realities of a situation, but there is a big difference between being pragmatic and being practical.

So goodbye, practical me. You were never real in the first place, and I need to let you die, and learn to value other things in myself.

It is OK to be a goofy kind of guy. I help out in other ways.

I am not a neat and tidy person. And I never will be. I can learn to be a little better at cleaning up and keeping it clean, but I just will never be focused enough on the physical reality of my surroundings to truly care whether all my books are neatly filed away, or whether I can see all of the floor all of the time. I am just not that kind of person.

And that is fine. I have a lot of substantial virtues, and in the grand scheme of things, whether or not one makes the bed every night before sleeping in it or empties the wastepaper basket like clockwork once a fortnight is not an enormously important determinant of character. To beat myself over a lack of the fairly minor virtues of neatness and tidiness is pure self-bullying, and I am not prepared to put up with that kind of thing any more.

After all, Einstein was a great man without ever learning to keep his hair combed. So farewell, the neat and tidy person I will never be.

Get out of my way. I have thing I’ve got to do.

I am not a detail-oriented person. Relatedly, I will never be a person who is into the fine details of life. It is not that I do not care about them, I do. Small details can trip up big ideas, and I am all about the big ideas.

But I am a big picture person down to my core, and so I will always be looking at life from the telescope down, not from the microscope up. I will never be the person who does things perfectly. I will always be at best a B+ student because I am too focused on the larger picture to get straight A’s.

And that is fine. Other people can handle the small pictures that make up the big picture. They will always need someone like me to drive the bus while they work hard making sure it keeps going.

So goodbye, fine detail me. You might not notice the cracks in the pavement, but it is because you are always looking much further down the road.

I am not a stable person. This is another tough one, because I crave stability and reliability so much, but I just cannot generate it in myself. I am a complicated and multifaceted person who always has a lot going on in his head, with layers upon overlapping layers of thought and processing happening all at the same time, and that does not make for a rock solid personality of enormous endurance and stability. It instead makes for a colorful and warm person who has a vibrant charm that the more stable and boring normal people tend to lack.

So farewell, stable and reliable me. I will miss you most of all, Tin Man, but you were not to be. It does not mean I am a bad person, or a flake.

It just means that I vibrate on too many frequencies to be a single solitary note.

Instead, I am more of a charmingly baroque choir.

And those are a lot more fun anyhow, aren’t they?

That will be all for now. I am sure there are other false versions of myself waiting to be set free, but I think this is enough soul excavation for one evening.

Thanks for helping me dig.

Feeling weird lately. Not necessarily in a bad way, mind you. But still. Weird.

Like, I have no idea what the fuck is up with my appetite lately. It has gone completely berserk, going from completely nonexistent to “oh my god, I have a black hole in my stomach” at random intervals. All of today until my afternoon nap, I just could not seem to fill the void. Then I woke up from my afternoon nap with no appetite at all, which is also a problem seeing as I have to eat in order to keep my blood sugar up and not end up in the Very Bad Place, but compared to ridonkulous hunger levels, it is a lot less annoying.

In fact, honestly, I should have eaten by now. It is almost 8pm as I type these words, and that means I have not eaten in around seven hours and change. I honestly should not go more than six hours without eating, although that is a rule more seen in the breach than in the observance. So while I write, I will soon go gather some low challenge snacking foods.

It is hard to define “low challenge” in terms of foods for me. Functionally, it means that some foods seem harder to imagine eating when I have low appetite like this than others. An apple, for example, is low challenge. A peanut butter sandwich is medium challenge. Pot roast, which I normally love like it was family, is high challenge.

But I could not tell you exactly what makes a food “challenging”. You would have to ask my gut, because it totally has executive powers in this case. I think of a food and it either goes “GOD NO!” or “….OK”, or something in between.

Some combination of digestibility and flavour, I suppose.

OK, now I am munching on some BBQ peanuts. No carbs to speak of, but at least it will give me some proteins and fat to work on, and hopefully that will bootstrap my appetite somewhat.

That is another thing about lack of appetite. Sometimes, I have no appetite at all until I eat, then suddenly, I am ravenous. I figure that is either rising blood sugar, or giving the sour acid in my stomach something to work on, or a little of both.

It is nevertheless annoying. Eating is not supposed to make you hungrier. That is just plain wrong!

Emotionally speaking, for me, the road continues to be kind of rocky. I have a lot of moments when I cannot, for the the life of me, figure out why I do anything. Everything seems pointless and futile and absurd. The urge to do something crazy and extreme just to break the monotony and shatter the patterns that hold me down comes on strong at those times.

Thank goodness I am a fundamentally stable and sensible person, or I might do something wacky.

But I still have the feeling, deep down, that somehow this is all for the better. That I am experiencing these bad moments (and bad minutes, and bad hours) as part of a healing process by which I am both clearing my emotional backlog and learning to live in a more emotionally real way. Slowly easing that emotional volume knob upwards so I can get used to a higher intensity level, and thus increase the amount that I get out of life.

Of course, as I went into yesterday, that means both the good and the bad get stronger at the same time. So it means that I will feel both better and worse than before, at least until I learn to surf these bigger waves of emotion.

The sine wave of my mood state will increase in amplitude. That is a good thing overall. But the road to recovery is not a smooth and steady one.

It is, in fact, littered with painful, gross, weird, uncomfortable, and just plain unpleasant crap that you just have to climb over in order to get anywhere.

In that respect, it is much like physical recovery. If you end up in the hospital with a serious physical illness, then the chances are pretty good that you are going to go through a lot of pain and discomfort and grossness in order to get better.

Even if all you have to do is rest and convalesce, the chances are good that you will not feel “all better” any time soon, and there will be times when you feel worse and times when you feel better, and subjectively speaking, it will not be a smooth elegant upward curve to recovery.

It will trend upwards, certainly. But it will look less like a gently rolling hillside and more like a seismograph during an earthquake. Lots of ups and downs.

And I am learning to accept that. The desire for predictability, calmness, and a hyper-controlled environment can lead down a very dangerous and damning road to the kind of emotionally suppressive regime that leads to emotional starvation and soul death.

Better to let it in and feel it, and thus gain access to the sorts of deeply rewarding emotions that lead to catharsis and renewal.

The deal, such as it is, would be that by letting your emotional amplitude rise, you are trading increased intensity of negative emotion not just for increased intensity of positive emotions, which would seem to be a net zero equation, but for greater capacity to overcome negative emotions when they happen because you now have deeper emotional resources to draw from to cope.

Thus, you are actually far better off than before. The good stuff is more rewarding and the bad stuff is easier to cope with, and you are a stronger and happier person overall.

At least, that is the theory, and it is one I am perfectly willing to try to prove or disprove.

After all, depression has eaten my entire adult life, so it is not like I can get much worse.