It is way too freaking quiet here at Casa Del Nerdvana.

I wish I knew what made the difference between “pleasantly quiet” and “so quiet it creeps me out and makes me feel sad and isolated”.

I imagine it has nothing to do with the actual noise conditions and everything to do with my own ever-shifting internal emotional state. When I am already feeling lonely and vulnerable, the silence will amplify that. If I was feeling jangled and stressed, the silence would be soothing that.

But I don’t. I have felt small and vulnerable and weak lately, and that feeling of being overwhelmed and unable to cope with things keeps coming back, making me want to run away from everything forever.

Just keep running, keep fleeing, until I have left my old self behind and I am somewhere brand new where nobody knows me and I can start over from scratch, without history or context.

Decide who I am, like V did in V for Vendetta. He had to build himself back up from absolutely nothing except the roman numeral on his cell.

Perhaps that is why I love the classic amnesia timeline where our protagonist wakes up with no memory of who they are or how they got where they are or why there’s a dead body in the bathtub, and has to solve the mystery of their own identity as well as the murder of Bathtub Person.

I mean, talk about a journey of self-discovery. It’s practically the Platonic ideal of it. And no matter what they find out about themselves, they are free to disown it. That was the previous version of me, I am a different person now. I’m not that guy any more.

And the idea has a lot of appeal for me. Not that I would want to forget everything (but some things…. ), but I can imagine myself moving to some small town in the middle of nowhere and creating an entirely different past for myself, one in which I used to be competent and together and connected and I used to have a normal life with wife and kids and whatnot, it’s just that I am sick now.

That’s a life I could live with. Then I could at least pretend that there was some point to the first forty years of my life. All those years I spent at the mercy of depression and social anxiety, doing absolutely nothing with my life but hanging out online, playing video games, and reading books (just like I do now, but at least I have my videos and my blog), hiding away from the world and all the things that might have happened to make me a more whole, sane, connected, competent person… those years lie within me like an enormous block of ice that weighs me down, holds me back, and makes me want to run shrieking into the night.

And of course, that is just how they self-perpetuate, isn’t it? I can’t do anything because of all the nothing I have done before.

And it honestly makes me sick. I don’t want to be like this. I want to be strong and resilient and capable and together, not weak and fragile and incompetent and hopelessly scattered. There is a raging fire deep under all that paralyzing ice, and it is very tired of being denied.

When I think of all those lost years and all their possibilities, I just want to cry with grief. And that’s a good thing… tears wash away grief in time. They are the only thing that can melt all that ice inside me.

They are, in fact, what was frozen in the first place.

But even with the lowered dose of Paxil, mourning is still hard for me. It’s hard for me to stay sad and just deal with the emotion. I am far too good at escaping the situation via distraction and I don’t even need a computer or book or a TV to do it.

I just start thinking about stuff. Analyzing. Letting my voracious mind take over and start “figuring things out” and escaping into rationality instead of just staying with the moment and completing the grieving.

So I only heal in little spurts, quickly squeezed off. Maybe that is why my recovery is so slow. If I could just learn to restrain my urge to escape, I could get some serious emotional work done and rid myself of my burden.

Perhaps the lowered Paxil will help with that. I need that increased access to my emotions. Part of me, the crazy daredevil lunatic that lies underneath my sane and sensible facade, wants to just stop taking the Paxil and take whatever comes to just get it the fuck over with.

But in truth, I really am a sensible person who never does crazy things out of emotional need… or indeed do anything out of emotional need. One of the biggest of my recent realizations is that I have been so powerless and paralyzed by my mental health issues that I have simply lost the ability to do something simply because I want to do it, because it would make me happy.

And sure, poverty limits your options on the score (Go, full disability application, go!). But even the things that are perfectly within my means get ignored and neglected.

I have lost so much faith in my very agency in the world that I feel like I am completely powerless to meet any of my needs and that the best thing I can do is ignore them all and pretend they don’s exist, freeze them in ice so I can pretend they are not there, and go back to just letting the days go by.

Back to pretending I am happy because it’s not like crying ever got me any help anyhow. I was only allowed to be happy, or rather, content. Or whatever. As long as I faded into the background so my parents could pretend they never had me.

But that’s a whole other clusterfudge.