So, how have I been doing, anyhow?

After all, the last four or five entries have all been about education. And I have greatly enjoyed sharing my TED inspired thoughts with all you nice people.

But part of the laissez faire raison d’etre of this blog is a mission to track my emotional state in order to best expedite my recovery from decades of depression.

And relatedly, to give me a place to air my concerns and vent my emotions and in general talk out my feelings in order to better understand them.

You can’t get at the deep emotions with your surface emotions in the way, after all.

So have I been? Fairly decent, with occasional bouts of intense blah.

I feel like I am really grappling with my issues lately, which means I am not exactly happy all the time, but nevertheless feel that I am getting something done.

I have been revisiting one issues in depth and with clarity these last few days, and that is how my pent up ambitions, passions, desires, and what not tend to vent themselves internally in the form of a fairly extraordinary amount of inner turmoil.

In fact, in the last few days, it has become increasingly clear to me that my “normal” would be a normal person’s “overwhelmed”. The agitation of my inner sea leads to a stormy inner world in which small things get magnified far out of proportion and stability is, at best, a temporary condition.

In particular, there is a deep well of intense fear that rules my inner world. A terrible terror that can well up at any moment and sweep away any pretensions I might have about being in control

My external response to that has been, of course, to make sure my life does not stimulate that fear, and when realize that your entire life has been warped beyond recognition by your fears, you are looking your demon right in the eye.

And it is the eye of madness.

I have mentioned before how difficult but productive it is to get a good hard look at one’s insanity, and really recognize the ways in which you are not in control of your life. To realizes that there are choices you cannot make, no matter how smart they are, and paths you cannot take, no matter where they lead, because the disease is in control, not you.

That is how I feel when staring across the abyss at my fear. The fear is so intense and pervasive that until this point of clarity, I could not really see it for what it is. A fish doesn’t know it’s wet, and I didn’t know just how much latent emotion is dissolved into my primordial soup until now.

And I know there is a lot more than fear in there. There’s lust, and ambition, and passion, and anger, feelings of helplessness, sadness, and frustration.

I have lived for a long time suppressing nearly everything in a blind and ultimately futile attempt to control my world and my life.

And hey, it works. Getting absolutely nowhere in life and wasting my life on the Internet chatting and playing games and almost never going anywhere alone has worked wonders for keeping my fears so calm that most of the time I forget that they are even there and fool myself into thinking I am sort of normal for a while at least.

But the cost is just too fucking high. I am going to 40 on the 19th of this month and that is a great big hint that maybe I should get my life moving in some sort of direction.

And yet, nothing is going to happen if I just continue on with business as usual. I want to get a handle on this fear of mine that causes me to do very little of substance and when I do get into something that might lead somewhere, overwhelms me and forces me to go back to doing nothing.

But I cannot expect to accomplish that by putting pressure on myself. Pressure gets me nowhere. It only makes me feel worse about not doing anything while destroying the very motivation that would get me out of the trap I am in.

I need to learn to just accept things as they are and make peace with the life I have before I can move forward. That is the only way I will be able to find the kind of equilibrium I need in order to silence the choir of cackling demons inside me and find some peace.

That is a tough lesson to learn. My instinct is to throw myself into problems and grapple with them head on. This would be more or less the opposite of that.

It would mean, as I have said before, giving up the illusion of control and ceasing all inner struggle by resisting nothing. Just letting the emotions hit, and be felt, whatever they are. Suppress nothing. Let it all flow through you. After that, the emotions will be gone, but you will still be here.

That is the theory anyhow. Of course, all this Zen stuff will be supplemented and augmented by my marvelous drugs and the wonder that is therapy.

There is only so far you can go on your own, then you need help. That is something that last night’s OA meeting and their talk of a “higher power” has got me thinking about.

There has to be some way to gain the benefits of this belief in a higher power without having to short circuit your brain by believing something which is patently untrue just to placate your inner primate need for a powerful alpha figure.

Once more I return to the idea of an imaginary God that we believe in not because He is ‘real’ but because we want to believe in Him.

If God is just an idea, then He can never been disproven and He will be as real as love or freedom or any other of our ideas.

I think it could work.