Stars, rusty automobile parts, chickens with weird accents…. point is, I got a lot going on under my hat.

Had an attack of free-floating anxiety recently, which manifested itself in an attack of my old enemy hypochondria. My traitorous mind seized upon my feeling a little weak and tired and out of sorts and inflated into a sure sign that I had finally just plain broken down and my neglect of myself was finally leading to me ending up in a far worse state, a state bad enough so that my life before it will seem like happy golden years by comparison.

My neuroses have quite a way with words.

I feel better today, and the whole thing seems kind of silly now. I can say that I am going through one of my sleepy phases and that always complicates life, but I am no sicker than usual, and that’s as close to “well” as I usually get.

But I know I don’t take good care of myself at all, and so that provides the nucleus for the neurosis. I never test my blood, I have untreated sleep apnea, I eat the wrong things sometimes, and of course, I get absolutely no exercise.

All things I want to change, but the beast that is my depression gets in the way. Once again, I just have to be patient and have faith that the process known as recovery will deliver me to my promised land eventually.

I have seen the mountaintop. But as is the way with mountains, it’s hard to tell how far away it is or whether or not you are actually getting any closer.

Sometimes it feels like I am gambling with my life, betting that my mental health problems can be fixed before my physicval health problems kill me. But I don’t see that I have much of a choice.

To be honest, I am just too crazy to take care of myself. It makes me wonder if I would quality for some sort of caretaker. But I don’t know. It’s not like I am physically incapable of doing the things that would improve my health.

The problem is all between my ears. Every day, I cling to sanity. And that clinging works, it is the main reason that I have not ended up in a hospital psych ward or ever attempted suicide. It might look like stasis from the outside, but on the inside, it is a day to day fight against the darkness inside me.

So I keep myself out of the psych ward and out of the emergency room, but the cost is that it is very hard for me to do anything which is outside my very very small comfort zone. Anything I try to do outside of just hanging around on the computer all day in one form or another activates my very potent anxieties and that sets the neurosis clock ticking down to the inevitable point where my escapist instincts compel me to abandon whatever it is and go back to my tiny island again.

Such is my life. The fear destroys everything but the hyper-familiar most of the time. It takes a lot of effort and a certain amount of luck for me to change anything about my life.

And it’s not even the reality of the fear. It’s the anticipation of it. Over and over again, the sort of thing that my anxieties tell me would be far too scary to do turns out to be fine. More than fine, I end up actually enjoying it. No big anxiety attack on the bus, no panic at White Spot, nothing. And I feel a lot better afterward, too.

But somehow, that contrary data does not counter the clearly erroneous fears. I feel like there is this huge reservoir of fear within me that is always seeking expression, and that what seems like progress in reducing the fear is simply a better method for controlling it.

I want to drain that swamp, not just hold it back.

And when I call it fear, I really mean just plain emotional energy. It is looking to come out in one form or another, and because I don’t let it out in the form of anger or sadness, fear is its default state.

I crave catharsis. But I don’t seek it. It has to find me somehow. At most, this desire to express all this raw emotion within me informs my subconscious decisions when I choose what to watch on Netflix, leading me to sometimes find the exact cathartic catalyst that I need in something I watch.

But usually, it is entirely up to chance. Like just waiting for an iceberg of emotion to snap off the glacier of my depression and float into warmer climes to melt away and release its burden of suppressed feelings.

It seems absurd to my forceful rational mind that this is something I cannot just choose to do. I can’t rationally decide to unleash all of my emotions at once and get the damned thing over with. I have to wait on this slow and unknowable, unpredictable internal process for however long it takes for the healing to complete.

My gigawatt bright rational mind just can’t stand the idea of leaving something so important in the hands of the mysterious and inscrutable forces of the darkness that is the right half of the brain. The very idea of trusting without knowing, otherwise known as “faith”, is alien to me. My powerful mind has always allowed me to know things, things that other people don’t know. Things which are mysteries to others are known by me. That is my primary defense mechanism.

But we are all doomed by our strengths. No matter how powerful the hammer, it will always be doomed by the things that just cannot be treated like nails. And then you have to adapt.

I don’t know how to develop faith.

I guess it is, by its nature, unknowable.

See you tomorrow, folks!