Well, I have been rocking the positive vibe pretty hard lately, but sadly, this is the part of the cycle where I switch polarities and talk about the negative things in order to exorcise them from my soul.

For instance… it has occurred to me recently that I do not know what it is like to be truly close to someone. Not to the degree I see in others. People talk about feeling really close to their family or their friends, feeling like the people they love will always be there for them and vice versa, and feeling a closeness that I just do not understand.

And I know that I can’t blame my isolated childhood for all of that. A lot of it was me. I dealt with my pain by erecting a huge, thick, but see-through wall around myself and locking myself away. It was a wall of analysis, intellect, and logic, and it gave me a way to deal with the world but it came at a terrible price : I was very hard to reach.

I mean, that was the whole point of the wall : to keep out the people who wanted to hurt me. It’s quite the trick to be able to pull back from life and observe it with the detachment and calm of a Vulcan sociology.

Really, it’s all quite fascinating.

But the wall had to be invisible. That way, I could fool myself into forgetting that it was there. Wall? What wall? I’m right here in front of you. I don’t see a wall. Do you?

So there I was, behind that wall, and it made me both distant and clumsy. The isolated nature of my childhood did not help, but how much of that isolation came from my inability to open my heart to people and let them in? I had a number of people try to make friends with me when I was in elementary school, but it never worked out. I used to think that meant there was something wrong with those people, but I know the truth now.

I was the problem. I had my rigid little inner world and I simply could not just relax and feel people. I was always just looking at them across my invisible moat, and the connection they sought with me was just not there.

I feel bad for those people now. They must have wondered what they were doing wrong, and I assume they felt like I had rejected them. And I had, without knowing it. Some of them put a fair amount of effort into trying to connect with me, but I was just not capable of picking up the receiver.

Even with the friends I did eventually get in junior high, there was always those high, high walls between me and them. I was strange and awkward and wimpy and distant. I could never really relax with them. I was on the inside looking out.

How much of the social awkwardness of nerds can be traced to simply being too intellectual to connect? And could we, knowing this, come up with some kind of bridge for us to cross so we can finally understand what we are doing?

I am not sure what it was like to be around me back then. As now, I am quite comfortable in intellectual discussions of all types. I enjoyed talking about comics, D&D, television, and so forth.

But I was too locked away in my ice fortress to see the point in a lot of the things that my friends wanted to do. I understand it all now, although it is, perforce, a cold intellectual understanding. They were just being normal teens who wanted to go where the other teenagers went, and do what their instincts told them to do : learn to integrate with society, develop a separate identity from their parents, and maybe even give sex and romance a try.

But nerds and other intellectual types interpret instincts as noise, and filter them out. Only the products of the intellect can be trusted because they can be fulled understood and verified, unlike those murky sourceless mysterious instincts and purely emotional responses.

So we build our own cages, we nerds, and stay in them for the rest of our lives. Our approach yields far too many legit awards in terms of the all the fertile potentials of abstract thought. This big brawny brain of mine had a lot of power, especially in this modern world where the products of intellect are increasingly more important that products of muscle and money.

It’s just that intellect and creativity are not enough. You need spiritual health before you can be happy, and that involves a lot of what we are most uncomfortable with, namely dealing directly with our own emotions.

We fear that dark forest of emotion and instinct more than we fear all the bullies and loud extroverts in the world combined. What we especially fear is going in there without the blazing light of intellectual analysis and the protective armor of detachment to protect them.

To step into the darkness, the true deep darkness, is the scariest thing imaginable to us, and it is quite easy for us to convince ourselves that there is nothing in there that we need and therefore there is no reason we would ever go in there.

And in time, we can fool ourselves into forgetting it is even there, leaving us thinking “something is wrong, but I can’t imagine what it might be”.

It’s easy to find. Just look into the corner of your mind that you fear the most, and see the beast that has grown fat and strong from your neglect. Feel how it’s hand on your head has kept you from turning to look at it until now. See how it has been bullying you and getting away with it because you refuse to face the problem.

And when you have taken full measure of the beast, when you truly know it as much as it knows you, grab your sword and swing for its heart, because it is YOUR beast, you own it, it is part of you, and you can kill it any time you want.

And once it is dead, you will be free, and you can finally find out who you truly are.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

I just realized that I have been testing myself again.

I still feel bad when I “waste” a whole afternoon just playing video games and listening to podcasts. It still makes me feel like I have failed somehow. Like every day is a test, and if I don’t do enough, I flunk it.

It is a hard habit to break. I am still having trouble distinguishing unhappiness from failure. It is clear to me, if I examine my emotions, that spending the afternoon with video games and podcasts is not making me happy. I clearly want to be doing something more, something better. And yet, I feel trapped.

And the thing is, I can’t even claim that I do not know what else to do with my time, because I used to be a lot more active. As recently as six months ago, I was playing music on my synthesizer, making bread with by bread machine, playing games on the Wii, and even making a brand new video every day in addition to my blogging.

So what happened? I think it began with the unwise (and suspiciously self-destructive) that I would not do any videos while I was doing my NaNoWriMo writing. You know, so that I could concentrate more fully on my writing. Yeah right.

That was the beginning of the end, to be honest. The videos have not come back and NaNoWriMo was over 4 months ago. I have no real reason not to go back to making them except that special brand of paralytic laziness that comes with depression. Depression weighs you down and tells you that nothing is ever worth the effort and so the best thing is to simply invest as little effort into life as you can manage.

And this, despite the fact that I know I am happier when I am busy. I usually feel great during NaNoWriMo, when I am writing the 1667 words a day of novel sized fiction. Fiction is the hardest thing to write, but that is a good thing because that means it absorbs the most of my internal energies, leaving nothing behind to fuel my neuroses.

Video editing is also a pretty absorbing task. I generally had to put a lot more effort into the day’s video than the day’s blog entry. Video is this whole language of its own and writing in it can be very intense. It usually took up at least two hours of my afternoons, but it gave me something to do, something with a point to it, something with an output.

And yet, I don’t feel that all my reluctance to return to making them is depressive in basis. I think that I was getting tired of making videos and felt like it was time to move on to something more.

Not that I have the slightest idea what “more” could be. Going from writing to video was an obvious step up in intensity of commitment. I remember thinking that it was time that I moved to a medium that took advantage of more of my assets, namely my charisma and charm. I have a force of personality that I have never really tapped into. I wanted to make use of that.

But what comes after video? Nothing that can be done from my little world, I would imagine. Making YouTube videos is safe because I can do it from within my tiny comfort zone. But the next level, I feel, will not be so easy.

What I need is something more. Something to add to it to rekindle my interest in it and get me excited about making videos again. I need a new, fresh spark of some kind.

I will cogitate and brood over this notion and see what comes of it. Being artistically uninspired is a lot different than simply being lazy, and I think part of my dismantling of my self-destruct machinery is realizing this, and believing it.

Those are very different things, but one is necessary for the other to happen.

So video is out for the short term, until I come up with some crazy wacky idea that sparks my interest again. Another possibility is baking. I like baking, and it is something I can do at home here that would be a great way to invest effort into my own happiness.

After all, I have a huge bag of Splenda and lots of other baking supplies. I could make desserts for myself, and thus make it a highly rewarding activity. Right now, I pay for sugar free this n’ that. I could save myself a lot of money if I just made them myself, plus I would have the satisfaction that comes with making things. So on paper at least, it seems like a no-brainer.

I have even considered turning it into one of my wacky challenges by doing “30 desserts in 30 days”. That way I would cement it as a daily activity, and historically speaking, that has been a big boost to my motivation.

After all, by publicly declaring a challenge like that, you commit yourself to following through, otherwise, at least in mt case, I would feel like I had let people down, including myself.

And I the sort of person who takes commitments and responsibility very seriously. I am very faithful to my word and I strongly believe that if you are responsible for something or someone, you have to do your absolute best, regardless of whether or not acquiring this responsibility was your idea or not.

If you really cannot stand having said responsibility, then it is your responsibility to arrange for someone else to take the burden. Until then, you are stuck with it.

This, in part, explains why I am against abortion. Think about it.

Anyhow, turns out reprogramming your entire psyche is a lot of work. Quelle surprise. I am going to be discovering new bits of bad programming to remove for quite a while, I suspect.

But there is no going back now.

There is only victory, or death.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!
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