First the news : for my regular readers, predictably, I will not be blogging during Vcon. Tomorrow’s column will go out, but Saturday there will be no column, and Sunday is not looking too probable either.

That said, it is not impossible that there will be some sort of public internet terminals available at the hotel, and I will get bored or be awake at the wrong time and end up writing anyhow.

But as far as my plans go right now, I do not plan to blog on Saturday at all, and Sunday we will likely get back so late that writing a blog for Sunday will be a missed opportunity.

If you catch my drift.

Had my first therapy appointment in two weeks today. The doc was surprised and pleased when I wished him a Happy New Year. Well, I figure you should do little things to show some cultural awareness, and it’s the day after Yom Kippur after all. I am no expert but I know that it’s the Jewish New Year, and he told me he was taking Rosh Hoshannah off. That was the whole reason it had been two weeks since I had a session.

And so I figured, wish the guy Happy New Year. What can I say, I am a sucker for cheap karma. It cost me very little to think to do that, and in return, I got to see him be surprised and pleased at my thoughtfulness and cultural awareness.

Any way you slice it, that is a darn good deal. Part have me has never understood why the basic benefits of being a good person are so opaque to so many people. Be nice to people and they will like you. Basic thoughtfulness pays enormous benefits. And it feels good too.

Why is that so hard for people to understand?

It is like when I first got my hands on a copy of that famous manual, How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

I was quite excited to get it. I mean, who doesn’t want more friends and influence? And as I read the intro talking about how long the book has been around and how many people swear by it, I grew still more excited. Surely, this was powerful secret knowledge.

But I found, as I read, that everything in it seemed blindingly obvious to me. Things like listening to people more than you talk at them. Treating their concerns as important and trying to work out a deal where you both get what you want. Ask powerful people for their help instead of demanding what you want from them. Things like that.

My first thought was, what the hell is wrong with people that they need to be told these things? What bunch of sociopathic pricks need Dale Carnegie to tell them that they should treat other people like they matter? For whom is this a major revelation?

And obviously, a lot of people need to learn these thing from a book, because the book has been around by the 1940’s for crying out loud. Apparently, generation after generation of businessmen and tradesmen and professionals all need someone like Carnegie to tell them there are benefits to treating people who are NOT you as though they are also valid and worthwhile.

Gee, who would have thought, huh? And not to sound like a gender traitor here, but you know what I notice about all the people who need or have needed Carnegie’s help? Most of them are men!

See just what kind of low emotional and interpersonal intelligence morons men become in areas without enough women around to provide men examples of effective negotiation?

Anyhow, after reading the book, I was forced to conclude that I apparently have all the right instincts to win friends and influence people. Pretty much everything in there was something that I either already knew or could easily figure out with a moment’s thought.

Hopefully, if I ever make it out of my shell and into the world of entertainment, my apparently excellent instincts for dealing with people will serve me well amongst the deal makers and risk takers of Hollywood.

Well, Hollywood North.

Another interesting note from my session today : When the doctor asked me if I had missed the session we missed because of the High Holy Days, I had to honestly say that I did not, not really. It felt weird to say it, not just because it seemed sort of rude (Why no, I didn’t miss you at all. Why would I?) but because it had not occurred to me until right then that it was true.

I really did not miss my session last week. Previously, when the doc took time off and I had to go a week without a session, it really took a toll on me and I kind of resented it. But this time, I barely noticed. Certainly, I was not thinking “I wish had a session today” or feeling sad.

And that is a somewhat scary thing to realize when you are used to thinking of yourself as weak and dependent on others. It is like when a child first realizes they crossed the room without holding on to anything. Their world just changed, and that always contains an element of fear, even when, in objective analysis, what just happened was a very good thing indeed.

So I am choosing to see this as a good thing. I am more independent and self-contained now. I am still in a painful transition period as I become aware of things I do to sabotage myself and give them up one by one, forcing myself to learn new ways to cope.

And part of me will always want to fall back on the security and comfort of the known bad things. And it might even happen from time to time, and that is not the end of the world.

But like I have said before, there is nothing about my previous self that I want to keep. It all can go. I am determined to become the person I most want to be.

And whatever gets in the way of that can go.

No big ideas knocking down the door to get let out tonight, so I figured it was time for one of those personal reportage type entries.

Been having a sleepy day today, which is halfways decent. I had nothing planned for today, so sleeping for most of it is not that huge a deal. I am a little disappointed that I am still having to spend a day sleeping now and then despite the better sleep I am getting from Quetiapine, but I am not really surprised. I still do not quite have a normal sleep schedule. It is particularly hard for me to just pick a bedtime… my schedule varies too much. I know that regular habits are part of proper sleep hygiene, but I am just not a regular kind of person. I tend to improvise a lot, not out of preference exactly, but as a coping mechanism developed in response to my ever changing inner landscape. I have my routine, and I stick to that fairly well, which is something.

But going to sleep at the exact same time every day is a little beyond me at the moment. The best I can hope for is to go to sleep at roughly the same time each day. Like, within about a two hour window. That is about as regular as I can get, at least right now.

Part of me always long for order and regularity and predictability, and part of me always rebels against it. Makes for an intense plane of inner conflict.

Let’s see, what else… looking forward to going to V-con this weekend. It’s the local science fiction convention, and I always have a ball at those. It feels so good to hang out with my fellow nerds, the people I consider to be my people, my peers, my tribe. It is only three days out of 365, but for those magical three days, I enter a world in which we nerds are the majority and the so called “normal people” are the minority, and we can heal a little of the damage we all bear from the terrible things that happened to us in our collective childhoods.

I keep telling myself that it is high time I started volunteering at the con instead of just attending. I would love to be more a part of what is going on, and I am well beyond the stage where science fiction conventions are pure golden amazingness to me and the idea of missing even one second of it seems like pure madness. Sure, I still enjoy going to lots of panels and parties and such, but I could easily see myself spending a few hours working registration or doing security or helping with logistics or volunteering in the hospitality suite.

Of course, ham that I am, what I really want to do is be on panels. I totally intend to push for that if I ever get my shit together enough to become a published writer. Right now, I have not got the faintest wisp of credentials, so it would be sort of hard to argue my case as to why I should be on a panel more than any other random fan with a burning desire and a big mouth.

I mean, I am sure I would be totally awesome as a panelist, but I can’t exactly prove it, you know? Well, I did host That Trivia Thing for three or four years, and I am told I did well. (I don’t really remember it that well. Turns out that when I am “on” as a performer, I do not form memories that well. Is that spooky weird, or what? )

But that was ages ago now. And that was something me and my friends initiated ourselves. That would be the reasonable way to end up on panels, of course. Pick a topic and volunteer to host a panel well in advance of the date and then show up and do the damned thing. But that would require the exact combination of foresight, organization, bravery, and focus that I currently lack and which keeps me from doing all sort of things that would move me ahead in life.

But I must be patient and kind with myself, and resist the urge to excoriate myself for my flaws. That is distinctly counterproductive. Self-compassion is the key, and that involves something that I will find hardest of all : withholding judgement about myself. (Good observation, by the way, Spuug!)

On the Myers-Brigg scale, I am an INTJ, and that J stands for Judgement. My whole mind is geared towards making judgements about what I observe, and these judgements are ruthlessly, even clinically precise and unsentimental. My mind drives towards the truth without compassion or hesitation, always wanting to understand what is really going on, always striving for greater understanding. Nothing slows it down. It’s like a machine.

And that is cool and all. In many ways, it serves me extremely well. But it is not the sort of attitude one should take towards oneself. It is too cold, too inhuman, too unforgiving. It lacks compassion, gentleness, and forgiveness.

And I am only just beginning to understand how wrong that is. For most of my life, I have thought a ruthless search for the truth could be nothing but a good thing. It provides such profound insights. And there is no reason why there should be any connection between a ruthless search for the truth and any other sort of ruthlessly, right?

I mean, it’s still up to me what I do with the truth when I find it, right?

But I am now willing to entertain the notion that much good might be destroyed by such an unflichingly mechanical approach to the truth, and especially when applied to the self.

There is a great need in the world for forgiveness and understanding. And not just the cold understanding of the icy philosopher or psychologist, but the gentle understanding that includes forgiveness, patience, tolerance, and above all, mercy.

I do not know where this new path leads. But I sense the truth of it, and the need of it.

For now, that will need to be enough.

Been reading a fascinating and quite disturbing article about the deadly new street drug nicknamed “bath salts”.

So yes, brain science. I am intrigued by this drug because its horrible effects are so strikingly like a genuine, normally occurring psychopathology. It is like snorting psychosis, and I cannot help but wonder if by understanding this drug better, we might end up understanding psychotic pathologies better.

Plus, the article has a lot of interesting information about how different drugs work that I did not know before. (That is the problem with getting one’s information by grazing rather than pursuing knowledge more systematically. )

For instance, I did not know that what an amphetamine does is that it stimulates your brain cells to release their supply of dopamine, whereas a drug like cocaine raises your dopamine levels by keeping your brain cells from re-absorbing the dopamine after it has been released via what is know as “re-uptake”.

And suddenly, I know what re-uptake is, and hence, have a clue to what the Paxil, which is an SSRI, or Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, is doing for me. It is keeping my brain cells from sucking the serotonin back into themselves quite so fast, and so it’s raising my brain’s serotonin levels in a safe and controlled way, instead of just dumping a bunch of serotonin into my system and causing a lot more problems than it solves.

So now I know more about what is happening in my brain. Keen gear.

“Bath salts” are not keen gear at all. In fact, I am not sure why anyone would take them, given what I have learned from the article so far. The title of the article is The Drug That Never Dies, and that refers to the fact that people who have taken this drug continue to be agitated, paranoid, flushed, and hallucinating for as much as two weeks after initial dose.

There is no high in the world that is worth going through the hell of violent insanity, with the real danger of you being a threat to yourself and others and sometimes in truly horrifying ways. It seems to me to be about the worst experience you could have. Totally not worth it.

So I can only assume that as information about the drug spreads, demand will dwindle rapidly. I mean, sure, there are a lot of dumb people out there who are perfectly willing to ingest all kinds of dangerous chemicals in order to get high, but even pretty stupid people will be reluctant to do a drug that will give them the worst trip possible for weeks at a time.

Even the really young ones, who often have trouble believing bad things can happen to them.

The drug actually works like taking cocaine and meth at the same time. It both stimulates the release of dopamine and blocks re-uptake, which as the article says, is like turning the faucets on full in the sink while plugging the drain. No wonder its effects are so dramatic and horrible.

And the worst part is that something about the nastiest of the ingredients in “bath salts”, a chemical called MDPV (short for methylenedioxypyrovalerone), is that it binds to the parts of the brains cells it effects, which is why its effects can lasts so long.

I feel bad for this drug’s hapless victims. I can only speculate as to what kind of long term psychological effects it has on people. Spending days or even weeks in Hell cannot be healthy for a person’s psyche. These people have gone someplace that none of us ever want to go, and have seen things none of us ever want to see.

And quite possibly, have done things they will then have to live with once they recover from the drug’s effects. I am not sure what sort of counseling you can give these people. Especially since there is a very good chance that they have permanent brain damage. Talk about a mistake you live with for the rest of your life. What a total nightmare.

So like I said before, hopefully word about this shit’s bad effects will spread amongst the recreational drugs crowd and that will curb its use. There will always be people willing to try anything, and there is nothing you can do about that. But the drug world operates like any other branch of capitalism, and drugs compete with one another for the drug user’s dollar. So as long as there are safer highs (from like, literally every other drug out there… this shit makes meth look like decaf), that will limit the damage that “bath salts” can do. Hopefully.

Not that I am exactly fully conversant in drug lore or part of that culture at all. I mean, I am on a lot of drugs, but they are all boring prescription drugs for legitimate medical purposes. None of them could be considered “recreational”. And because I am on all these drugs, and am frankly not that strongly assembled upstairs in the first place, I am kind of reluctant to mess things up any further anyhow.

Plus, I am positive I have just the kind of weak, sensitive, and escapist mindset that would make me a prone candidate for addiction. Hell, I almost got addicted to gambling, and that is not even a drug. I am just glad I figured out that I liked gambling too much before it was too late.

So for me, the world of recreational drugs is basically marked Don’t Go There. I have enough problems keeping my marbles in without sending some recreational chemical in there to mess things up. Sure, it is always possible that a good acid trip might be just what my psyche needs to clean out the crap and deal with a whole lot of unresolved emotions all at once.

But it might also leave me way crazier than before, and that is the last thing in the world I need.

So I will stick with he drugs that make me saner.

They might not be as much fun, but they are a way better idea.

Thought I would share what is on my mind right now (that is what a blog is for, right?) and for a change, it is not stuff that is directly about myself. Like I have said before, I grow tired of navel gazing and trying to predict the future by pawing through my own entrails, and so I have decided the best therapy for now is to get the heck over myself and wander the broader pastures of thought for inspiration instead of trying to get fresh water from that muddy old well inside me.

Right now, I am ruminating on this article about the importance of self-compassion over self-esteem.

I got the link off Facebook, from of all people the Dalai Lama, and I am deeply interested in the subject because I have felt, intuitively, that there was something deeply wrong with our well-intentioned focus on self-esteem in mental health that has been ongoing for forty years or more.

It is not hard to see how it happened. You talk to people with mental health issues, you get a lot of people who do not like themselves very much. It is a very common symptom of society’s ills, and so the immediate response was to treat the symptom directly. Someone has poor self-esteem, give them praise and support. It is as simple as bandaging a wound.

But it was naively shallow, because it was attempting far before we had any deep understand of where self-esteem comes from. As often happens in medicine, treating the symptom does not cure the illness. So simply telling people how great they are does not help. This is mental illness, after all, and the kind of distorted thinking that leads a perfectly normal, competent person to think they are the scum of the Earth is not going to disappear just because you gave the person a pat on the back and reasoned with them.

This brings us to the article, which examines the growing scientific evidence that the self-esteem model is outdated and ineffectual compared to treatment based around self-compassion.

Self-compassion is a simple idea. It simply means being kind and compassionate and forgiving towards oneself. This is something I have been stressing to others for quite some time, and so it is highly gratifying to see that science has come along and proved me right on this.

For a long time, I have been asking my fellow depressives to imagine how they would treat another person who was in the exact same situations as them, with all the same problems, circumstances, weaknesses, strengths, and so on. Invariably, the answer is that they would treat that person with far more kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and support than they have ever given themselves. Somehow, the rules for them are different than the rules for everybody else. For them, the standards are impossibly harsh and brutal and impossible to achieve, thus stacking the deck against themselves and keeping them in a constant state of seemingly justified self-loathing and contempt.

Others, they can view in a more compassionate and balanced way.

In fact, you can get some very interesting and useful results by asking people to take all the horrible things they say and think about themselves, and imagine themselves saying them to someone else. Or even to imagine someone saying all those awful things TO them, and what they would think of that person for saying it. What a horrible person, right? So why is it fine to do to yourself what you would condemn in another?

This internal double-standard is a big part of the cognitive roots of depression, I think, and while merely confronting it might not yield immediate therapeutic results, I think it can begin the process of deep self-examination that yields deep and lasting benefit further down the road.

Back to self-esteem versus self-compassion. I do not quite buy the article’s trite and simplistic dismissal of self-esteem. To wit :

And of course you must be perfectly awesome in order to keep believing that you are—so you live in quiet terror of making mistakes, and feel devastated when you do. Your only defense is to refocus your attention on all the things you do well, mentally stroking your own ego until it has forgotten this horrible episode of unawesomeness and moved on to something more satisfying.

This strikes me as a uniquely American straw man argument. Sure, if you put it like that, it seems absurdly self-defeating. But nobody is putting it like that.

Regardless of that, I think the author, psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, makes some good points about self-compassion. The trick, to me, is to recognize that while positive self-esteem is the goal, approaching it as an issue of self-compassion might well prove to be a superior method.

The question remains the same, however : can this be taught? Can you move someone towards self-compassion directly, or is it, like self-esteem, something which can only come from the long and laborious route of traditional therapy, digging up past traumas and trying to resolve the emotions involved and thus relieve the patient’s mind (and soul?) of the strain of carrying them around.

Psychology is always looking for something faster than that, and who can blame them? But I am increasingly convinced that said quest is quixotic, and that the real solution is that tired old slowpoke workhorse of traditional therapy. If you can unpack the emotional baggage, then other things like self-compassion and self-esteem will recover as a result.

And if you try to skip the therapy and go straight for the self-esteem or self-compassion, you are, as I said earlier, treating the symptom and not the disease, and you will be left scratching your head as to why the person is still sick with pneumonia when you have given them the best cough suppressant around.

When you think about it, this doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success, does it?

It sucks, but it looks like old fashioned therapy is the only way.

Well, until someone invent a catharsis pill, anyhow.

OK, I swear to Dog, I am not gonna talk about sleep tonight. Anything but that.

I got a TON of science stuff for tomorrow, but that’s for tomorrow, so… hmmm. Must try to remember what I talked about before I talked about my sleep all the damned time.

Hmmm. Nothing coming to me. This might take a while.

Well, in the meantime, look at this cosplay.

Big Brother and Little Sister, from Bioshock

I am truly impressed at this cosplay job. I never got that far into Bioshock, but I recognize two of its most iconic and haunting creations, and I have to say that these cosplayers look exactly like the game, inasmuch as that is possible in the real world.

Being the worrywart that I am, I do wonder what the little girl is thinking. She is surely too young to understand the game and its deep anti-Objectivist message. Presumably, she would find the game far too scary and so she is going along with this purely to make whoever is in the Big Brother outfit (Daddy? Mommy? Weird Uncle?) happy.

And I am sure this will not end up costing her years of therapy when she finally gets curious when she is older and plays the game and finds out what she was a part of for an afternoon.

Sorta makes me want to play the game again, and see if I can make it further. Mainly it was technical issues that bogged me down before. If I got it again, I would get it for a console, and a legit copy, so that if I have problems I can bitch at somebody.

So where was I? Oh yeah, talking about things that are not my sleep pattern. Well, I has a short conversation with my friend, ex-roomie, and expectant father Ryan Hawe tonight. Turns out, medical imagining on their bundle of joy has been done, and the preliminary result is : it’s a girl!

Technically, the world will not know for sure until birth, but the 3D imaging (even babies are in 3D) today is very good, way better than those old blurry ultrasounds that could be a baby or could be a pointillist Rorschach test, so in all likelihood, it’s pink cigar time.

And so, congratulations, Ryan and Jenn! It’s a girl! Put away the concrete spray-wash furniture and floor drains, and break out the Kleenex and the sensation of not knowing what the hell is wrong now.

So that is one thing completely unrelated to sleep. Watch this while I think of another.

Oh, and fair warning, it is a cautionary PSA, and hence, scary as hell. We are talking nightmare fuel here, people. So buckle down, and view this PSA from Finland.

Amazing, isn’t it? It really gets the point across. It reminds me of another PSA from this side of the Atlantic in which little kids dressed as adults relate their parents’ hilarious stories of drunken excess. The tagline for that one was something like “If it doesn’t sound good to you, coming from them… how do you think it sounds to them, coming from you? ”

(I would love to link said PSA now, but I lack the search engine kung fu to find it with my fragmentary memory of it. Anyone else want to give it a shot?)

But obviously, the Finnish people wanted to hit a little harder. I think the piece is brilliant, although we would probably consider it too harsh over here. But from what I have heard, alcoholism is a really big problem in hard-drinking Finland, so for there, it is probably entirely justified. Something has to get through to people, and sometimes you have to really hit people hard just to get their attention.

And I remember just how scary drunk adults seemed when I was a kid. And that was just drunken strangers. I never saw my parents drunk and I cannot imagine how nightmarishly frightening that would be. Drunk people are erratic and impulsive and in a sense, temporarily insane. That is very frightening to a child, because every child knows in their heart that they are at the mercy of the adults around them, and so the idea of an out of control adult behaving in a weird and scary way is very disturbing to them.

So for crying out loud, folks, do not get drunk around your kids. If you do, give serious thought to the fact that you might have a drinking problem.

Because clearly, you are out of control.

Then again, maybe you just need a drink before bed into order to get to sleep. And speaking of sleep, let me tell you about my…. no, dammit! I said I wasn’t going to do it, and I won’t!

Quick, talk about something else. Oh hey,what about this brilliant move by the people at Capri Sun?

Here’s the scenario : a Redskins football player named Niles Paul loves him some Capri Sun, but complains that his teammates keep swiping his when he was not looking.

So what does Capri Sun do? Not only do they send him a case of Capri Sun sans straws and thus make pilferage futile (no straw, no way to drink from their little plastic pouches), but they send him a silver plated straw in a padded case so that he can still access his beverage of choice.

Absolute genius PR. Myself, I like Capri Sun more than I like their prime competitor, Sunny D, but that is not saying much, because I am a total juice purist. If there is anything besides fruit juice in it, I do not want it, and I was like that way before diabetes forced my hand.

And I resent these things that pretend to be fruit juice, but are basically Tang with a little orange juice added (I am looking at you, Sunny D!).

How dare you trick people into thinking you are healthy? Pigs.

Still, I applaud Capri Sun’s brilliant PR move.

And I would go on, but I guess I am out of juice for now.

Come back tomorrow, for SCIENCE!

Yup. More brooding about my sleep life. Sorry folks!

Today’s been nice. Still struggling with figuring out how my sleep works, but I feel like I am making some sort of progress. Learning to recognize when I have just plain run out of sleepiness, regardless of whether I actually feel I have “slept enough”, and so trying to nap is just a waste of time.

But it is rough going. This morning, I woke up shortly before noon with a full bladder. I was still very, very sleepy. So I said to myself “Well, I will just go pee, then have lunch, then go back to sleep. ”

After lunch, tho, I did not feel quite as tired. So I modified my plan, thinking “OK, I will just take care of a few things online, then go back to sleep. ”

But by 3:30 PM, I still was not very tired. I guess getting up and moving around to make lunch woke me up enough so that I was ready for the day, more or less.

And so really, I should have just shrugged my shoulders and found something useful to do when I was bored of being on the computer. But I am still getting used to this whole getting normal sleep thing, so for lack of a better plan, I laid down for a while.

And while I did not sleep, it was still pretty pleasant. I laid back, listened to MP3’s, and did some basic stretches to try and work the tension out of my back. It was one of those rare times when the warmth of the bed feels really good, and I don’t feel overheated or stifled. So it was very nice, even though sleep was never a possibility. Just stretching out and getting mellow.

But that gets boring, and so I ended up getting back up about an hour later. This means that, while I still felt compelled to lay down and try to fast-forward time, I did not feel like I could not leave the bed until I slept, which is the trap I have fallen into before.

I think I developed that compulsion to sleep when I lay down as a solution to the problem of insomnia that plagued me when I was a teenager. And like a lot of that kind of solution, it worked in the short term, and even in the medium term, but might have hidden unplanned consequences in the long term.

Stupid maladaptive coping mechanisms.

Anyhow, I think developing a space in my mind for lying down and reading for a bit, or just mellowing out for a while to rest my eyes and relax, but without feeling the need to sleep, will help me a lot in the long run. Gives me another option on what to do with myself.

That reminds me, have to call up and cancel my GameAccess.ca account. They are the people I have been renting Wii games via the mail from, and I can’t afford it any more.

Still, I have been pondering going back into my collection of games I own and seeing what I feel like playing again, or giving another shot if I never finished it before. Sad to say, but if playing Wii games keeps me awake and active and upright and helps me avoid the Nap Habit more, then it is a good thing.

Anything that keeps me out of bed and saving up my sleepiness for actual normal night time sleep is a good thing, even if it is just another form of wasting my life playing video games.

The harder issue around sleep and napping for me is the issue about using naps to zero out my anxiety level. Whenever I am about to do something that requires going away from my precious bed for too long, I feel a clutching of anxiety around my heart and part of me is always just counting the minutes till I can go back to my safe little world where I can nap the moment I feel sleepy or (more truthfully) when my anxiety level begins to rise.

So I will have to face this part of the problem if I want to develop a healthier relationship with sleep and the world in general. I have to stop using sleep as my escape from my escapes. Too anxious to handle even your usual deathly calm life? Take a nap, and escape reality altogether for a while.

Understandable, but not healthy, and something I hope to conquer. It will be a complicated dance between developing better habits and continuing my therapy so I can remove the emotions that form that sticky, solid, icy barrier of fear around my heart in the first place, and maybe even reach a place where I feel safe in this world.

It is hard to even imagine that, though I can if I really try. Somewhere deep in my childhood development, I lost all sense of the world as a safe place, and so there is always a part of me that is tense and nervous and worried and can therefore never, ever relax.

No wonder I have sleep issues.

And I am sure that if I can reach that place, and relax that psychic muscle that has been tensed for so very very long, then I will find true inner peace and be able to live my life without such an enormous burden draining my energy and leaving me in the cold and the dark and the fear.

Of course, easier said than done. Paranoia perpetuates itself by convincing you that the most dangerous thing that you can do is drop your guard. That’s just when the Universe will get you, right? At least, that is how it seems.

But you cannot possibly remain vigilant all the time without paying a terrible, terrible price. At some point, in order to be healthy, you have to relax, let your guard down, and trust the universe to not kill you while you are not paying attention.

And when you are deep down scared like me…. that is very hard to do.