Still not feeling all that great, although I do feel better than yesterday, which is something.

I guess I will just be eternally doomed to a light and dark cycle. Part of me thinks I just need to learn to accept that and that if I can just relax into the cycle and not try to fight it, I can reach a state where the ups and downs are not upsetting to me at all.

They are just the natural way of things, and the down periods will be soft quiet times and the up periods will be bright active times, and both are good.

That requires that “faith” stuff, though, and that is something I have yet to achieve. Faithlessness makes one a slave to the known and the knowable, and that is a far more profound limitation than us intellectual atheist types like to admit.

And I am not talking big F Faith in God or Jesus or any kind of established church. I am talking about the more simple faith of trust in the universe. Trust it not to be malign, and to even work out well sometimes.

Otherwise you will be crushed by the strain of the kind of pervasive paranoia that a view of the universe as malign and fraught with peril implies.

You have to at least believe that some kind of safety is at least possible before you can find the spirit and the strength to go forward in life.

You have to think that it is at least possible to move from your current position of relative safety (but not happiness) to another, even safer position, where you are not just surviving but truly happy.

I do not have such faith yet. Not deep down, where it counts. Even in my sad little life, I never feel truly safe. Even as I sit here and type, I am aware of a deep and terrible fear that lurks in my mind all the time and which could overwhelm me and make me feel like I want to run and hide in the deepest, darkest hole I can find and pull the hole in on top of me.

A fear which is so profound, it makes me want to disappear inside myself, hide like a turtle inside its shell, except inside that shell is another smaller shell, and so on till I am infinitely small inside.

And I suppose that is what I have done, metaphorically speaking. ^[1] A long time ago, I retreated deep deep withing myself, and now I am a bystander in life, watching it out the window and wishing I could be one of those real, valid people out there, but I am stuck inside this little fortress of mine and terrified of what will happen if I leave it.

I mean, will it even still be there if I need it again? What if the door locked behind me like in some sex farce and I am stuck outside my comfort zone, naked and exposed?

Since, my friend, you have revealed your deepest fears
I sentence you to be exposed before your peers!
TEAR DOWN THE WALL!
– Pink Floyd’s The Wall

I guess I would just have to get used to it somehow. Adjust. Adapt. Find a new way to live.

But I am nowhere near ready to tear down that wall of mine yet. I am barely ready to even imagine what it might be if it was gone.

Part of me wants to just throw myself into the pit, tear down the wall and throw away the bricks in a mad rush of spiritual ambition and sheer pent up insanity. Force myself to deal with it by burning all my bridges behind me, give myself no fallback position, and therefore no choice but to learn to deal with life exposed to the world.

But I am not sure if that is even possible. I would like to shed this suffocating layer of cold wet numbing cloth with which I have swaddled myself and stand naked and proud, finally able to dry out and feel the sun on my skin, and truly breathe free.

But it is hard to imagine. Truly imagine. I can imagine doing it, but then what? What do I do after the pleasure of freeing myself has worn off and I now have to deal with the world without my armor?

All I can think of is wanting very badly to go back to my deep dark hole. To put that suffocating suit right back on before I could even think of doing anything else. I just cannot conceive of life without it.

I mean, then I would have to actually learn to cope. Learn to deal with things in a way other than running away and hiding as quickly as I can.

I would have to face things head on, instead of sideways. Look my problems straight in the eye and deal with them, instead of only ever glimpsing them out of the corner of my eye as I try to sidle along without them noticing me.

So much fear inside me. And not just simple fear, but fear of fear, which tends towards maximal complexity as it self-references its away past the far horizon.

Who knows. maybe all this existential endoscopy does me more harm than good, and I would be best off if I just left all the higher questions on the side of the road and just tried to make a good life for myself somehow. Out of whatever I could get my hands on. Whatever came down the road.

But it is my nature to analyze and ponder and speculate. You cannot just give up on being deep. I already know too much to ever abandon it all for a happy-go-lucky life.

But it’s nice to think about.

Not doing so great today. In fact, frankly, I feel quite depressed.

Why? I have no fucking idea. Just the winds of fate and my unstable brain chemistry, I suppose. Perhaps I am going through another period of processing deep grief and long suppressed rage.

Or maybe I am just plain destined to go around and around in ever widening circles without ever being able to escape my inevitable return to his dark and fetid emotional state. I don’t know.

Maybe it is just a case of needing to vent the dark stuff now and then. I hope so.

There’s a few rogue factors in play right now. For one, I am still adjusting to the lowered Paxil dose, which means I feel things more strongly than on the higher dose and that means the lows are lower.

Unpleasant, but you cannot escape your past and your problems without feeling the things you kept yourself from feeling all these years. You pay that debt or you stay in jail. Period.

Having less Paxil in my system simply means that I will be paying that debt faster. Hopefully, I will even get to the point where I am paying it faster than I am accumulating it, and actually run at a surplus instead of a deficit.

And then, somewhere along the line, you might even live debt-free. That sounds like heaven to me right about now. More than heaven. Nirvana.

I have been thinking a lot about emotional instability lately. Specifically, about how a lack of emotional stability can rob a person of control over their life and ruin not just their own lives but the lives of the people they love and who love them because it makes the person unreliable, untrustworthy, and unable to even really be the same person from one day to the next.

And that is so incredibly difficult to convey to the outside world. It is impossible for someone who has not experienced it to comprehend what it is like to have one’s entire sense of self, the very bedrock upon which all else is rooted, constantly fluctuating.

And so they cannot understand why some things are so damned hard for you. Why you cling so hard to the wretched little island you have cobbled together from the flotsam and jetsam thrown clean of a storm tossed sea. Seemingly simple activities that might well lead you out of this cage are fraught with unseen peril because the slightest thing might rouse the angry giant within and send the delicate house of cards that is your fragile sense of self tumbling down.

And a basic truth of the human psyche is that loss of self is death to us naked beach apes. That is why people react to potential loss of status as if they were going to die. Why they fight like hell against things that offend their sense of self, including the prejudices that form the deep down root of their egos (Well, I am certainly better than THOSE PEOPLE…. ), even though objectively speaking, these people are no threat to them whatsoever.

And it’s why depression makes life so hard to live. It either causes or is caused by a terribly weak sense of self that leaves the inner life of the depressive subject to an extraordinary level of flux and makes us very reluctant to do anything which would jeopardize whatever small stability we achieve.

Hence the notorious and noxious conservatism of the depressed. We are terrified to do anything or trying anything outside of our shaky little worlds. Things that seem simple and easy are a source of great fear and anxiety to us, and we make up a million and ten reasons not to do things, but they are all just tissue thin justifications covering up the real answer :

New things scare us. They might bring the whole world down on our heads, not in objective reality, but in our reality, and that is the only reality in which we will ever live.

To be a depressive is to have your world dominated by your need to escape your terrible emotional burden. To keep that angry giant asleep. And such is your fear of your fears, such is your desire to keep that fragile stability you have achieved intact, that you will sacrifice absolutely anything, opportunities, friendships, your own life and potential, to keep the seas calm.

And because this all involves a fragile and threadbare sense of self that is constantly under threat, it really does feel like you are saving your own life when you do all the things it takes to keep your anxieties under control.

Even if that means having a life like mine, where I do very little every day, spend as much of it as I can asleep and then fritter away the rest on Internet chat and video games.

Sure, there are millions of things I could be doing to improve my situation. I have loads of potential. I have an amazing brain, buckets of creativity, a warm and likable personality, my own brand of personal charisma and charm, and one heck of a sense of humour.

There are countless applications for that sort of thing. But they all involve risking increasing the amount of flux inside me, they all amount to pushing against the walls of my universe, and so the idea that I cannot choose amongst them because there are too many is actually a facile lie.

The truth is, I can’t choose because they are all frightening, and they are all frightening because every single one of them would involve moving out of the safe space I have carved into my mind, this paralyzing spotlight which freezes me in its light and meager warmth because all around me seems dark and cold and dangerous and unknown.

And you can waste a lot of your life waiting for some magical “change that is not change” to come along and give you a way to leave your cell and take it with you at the same time.

But the truth is, there is no escape without facing your fears.

And for some of us, that is no escape at all.