Man I feel random lately.

The thing about being brutalized is that it makes you a brute. When I was savagely bullied in school, it brought out the savage in me. There is a very very angry animal inside me that is permanently in cornered rat mode. Just full on psucho rage that is willing to tear apart any motherfucker who so much as looks at me the wrong way.

I call it blackout rage. Luckily, not being a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, that rage is buried deep deep inside me and is quite unlikely to come out in normal, civilized situations.

But it is always there. I can always feel it. It is the part of me that is paranoid, mistrustful, overemotional, and ready to snap like a dry twig if the wrong things happen. It is the part of me that drives the eternal vigilance of the eye that is trying to see all directions at the same time, the part that drives the deep primal fear of people that is the hot running engine of my social anxiety. It is the part that pushes the constant low level adrenal response that makes it so that I can never truly relax inside. How I never truly feel safe, even when alone in my room with nobody around.

There is no such thing as a lack of anxiety. There is only the option of minimizing it. That psychotic rat inside me neber truly sleeps. It is too scared and too angry and in general just too fucking freaked out to sleep.

Who knows, maybe that is what keeps my precuneus so damned busy too. A deep sense of terror and rage (otherwise known as “flight” and “fight”) drives my brain to constantly be looking for patterns, figuring things out, analyzing, judging, inferencing, and so on in order to better understand the world and thus be safer in it.

It is like a deep, deep wound that never stops hurting and the pain is such that it drives you insane.

But I have hope. The further I go in the recovery process, the closer I get to that primal wound and thus the closer I get to healing it. I am slowly dismantling all the mental machinery I have built in order to contain the pain, and eventually, I will get to the pain itself.

And all because some idiots in my elementary school savaged me for being vulnerable and weird.

I have also been thinking about the idea of judging people. Part of liberal thought is the idea that you should not judge people, and I had a whole lot of trouble with this idea when I was younger because I could not imagine how that was possible.

After all, I’m an INTJ, and that J stands for Judgment. I analyze therefore I am. I can no more refrain from judging people (and everything else) than I can sneeze with my eyes open or lick my own elbow.

The problem, as it often is, was with definitions. I thought that refraining from judgment meant, basically, not even thinking about the person or situation. That is what it would take with how my brain is rigged. I think, I analyze, I assign value, I fit new data into my existing mental structure (or change the structure when it does not fit) and I do not really have any control over that.

I guess some people can just have faith in people and therefore feel no need to subject them to the sort of mental X-ray machine that I do, but I lost the option of having blind trust in people a long, long time ago.

Instead, I figure people out. I use my powerful analytical abilities to get inside people’s heads and see what is going on in there, and based on that I can define my relationship to them.

To some, that seems like a horrifying invasion of privacy. I know my sister Anne did. That is how I learned that not everyone thinks like I do and what is obvious to me about someone’s inner workings is not obvious to others, and I definitely need to keep my analyses to myself in most situations.

There’s a big difference between knowing the Emperor has no clothes and mentioning how oddly shaped the royal wang is.

And so with the over-broad definition of judgment in mind, I did not think it was possible for me to refrain from judging people. But that is not how “judge” is being used in that context. In that context, it is more about what you do with your evaluations than the evaluations themselves.

If you then use said evaluations to cut people down and make yourself feel superior, if you use them basically to decide a person’s worth and place in the social hierarchy relative to you, then you are indeed going from judging people to being judgmental about them.

I don’t do that, as a rule. My deep perceptions of people have instead been the engine driving my pursuit of greater compassion and the humanist endevour. Once you realize just how fragile and confused and vulnerable most people are, once you have looked behind enough masks to know that it is very rare to find an actual monster there, you begin to forgive people for being merely human and not the incarnations of our ideals that we want them to be.

And it is this understanding of naked humanity that unites us all. No matter the culture, race, religion, skin tone. or political allegiance, we are all just naked beach apes stumbling blindly in the dark, dealing with all the consequences of being the only animal that knows it’s going to die.

To understand is to forgive. I understand why my bullies did what they did, and how it made sense from their point of view. That does not mean I approve or think I deserved it, but I know too much to see things as starkly black and white.

Well those are my thoughts for today. Seeya tomorrow folks!

No real idea what to write about tonight, so this blog is going to be freestyle.

I believe I have officially had too much caffeine now. I have had a lot of Diet Coke in the last two days and it is catching up to me. I had some with yesterday’s lunch, yesterday’s dinner, today’s lunch, and today’s dinner, and now I feel all twitchy and trembling and I believe I have started to very gently and subtly vibrate.

So no caff for me for at least 24 hours. My slacked metabolism just can’t take it. Prudence dictates a cooling off period before I end up with heart palpitations or something.

Still wrestling my demons, and kicking their asses. Today I had a fruitful revelation. Turns out that with the rock of hating myself for “doing nothing” removed, I could finally see what was slithering around underneath : I am just plain bored.

That is the real issue with my restless afternoons. Playing video games and listening to podcasts is great for a while, but the truth is, it is just not enough, and I can see that clearly now.

I also can see that I have been, in a sense, holding my own head down for a long time. So deep was my emotional conviction that life held nothing for me that I put very severe blinkers on myself so that I would not look out of my cage and be tormented by visions of things I could never have.

It was like some kind of perverse and inverted form of Buddhism, where I decided it was easier to just cut off all desires rather than to actually have to pursue them. It seems downright inhuman (and inhumane) now. Everybody has desires. Having a desire one cannot immediately fulfill is not the worst thing in the world. Not when the alternative is the kind of soul-deadening, self-destroying ligation of all my heart’s desires.

That is how deep the anti-action bias has sunk its roots into my living soul. Even now, just talking (typing) about this subject, I can hear a little voice inside me saying “But if I want things, that will mean I’ll have to DO things. ”

First of all, not necessarily. You could just enjoy wanting it and dreaming about it. That’s a lot healthier than smothering the desire in its cradle.

But secondly and more importantly, so you end up doing things. So what? The anti-action bias, that malfunction of one’s hide response, says that only when we are hidden and immobile are we safe, and therefore all action means danger. It is the drive that makes the deer freeze in the headlights of a car.

And we all know how well that works out for the deer.

I just have to repeat to myself the heretical thought that I want to do things. I want to be more active. I want to move and act and do and seek and explore and do all the other things that my stunned deer response has denied me.

Now the anti-action bias in me is really screaming. I have been chipping away at its defenses for a long time, getting halfway closer, then halfway again, and so on in a Xeno’s Paradox way.

And all the time, it has remained fairly quiet, because no matter how thin the wall protecting it got, I never actually quite got around to actually, you know, doing active things. Its empire was secure. All the therapy in the world would do is make me realize a bunch of things I should be doing, and when that word is in the equation, the depression always wins.

Should equals pressure equals anxiety equals aversion attachment equals victory for the bad guys.

But unlike in Xeno’s paradox or one of those equations where X approached a number but can never reach it, in this case when I get close enough, I can leap the gap. Like a synapse firing when enough charge accumulates, I can complete the circuit and free myself from this cycle.

Of course, I have to keep reminding myself to take things slow. My natural proclivities always makes me want to rush into things on a big wave of enthusiasm and reach for the stars, and that is a wonderful thing and something I am learning to really value in myself, but lasting progress comes a little at a time.

One day, I will harness those waves of enthusiasm and run a whole empire on its hydroelectric power. But for now, I have to pour my energies into making slow, steady progress in opening myself up inside and letting all the bad air out so clean, fresh air can replace it.

I will emerge from the wreckage of the old machine in my own due time. Trying to rush it would just set off that whole pressure chain again. For now, I am content to simply let the process happen, and I will do my best to not go crazy and want to do everything right now at the same time.

That kind of thing is what has kept me in. I will not go down that road any more.

Spending an afternoon “doing nothing” is fine. It’s not nothing, I am doing many things. There is no such thing as ‘doing nothing’ unless you are in a very deep coma. Even in sleep, we dream.

But if the real issue is being unhappy (and it is), the question becomes what to do to be less bored. Like I have said before, I need more stations. There’s the bed, and the big computer, and that’s it.

Even getting back into playing games on the Wii would be an improvement, because at least I would be out of bed, out of my bedroom, and doing something a little more active than just lounging around.

So it doesn’t have to be me charging out into the world and never looking back. That is just not going to happen. It will be a slow and easy, no-pressure, natural expansion of my comfort zone.

One must walk before they can run, and crawl before they can walk.

But I’m in this for the long haul, so… no rush. I will get there when I get there, and the there I get to might well look nothing like the one I set out to find.

And that’s fine.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!