I have figured out one of the ways in which I am far too hard on myself.

Yesterday, I went to Safeway to pick up a few things. When I got to the checkout, the following conversation happened.

Cashier : How are you doing today?

Me : I’m doing okay.

Cashier : Your total is X.

Me (referencing the fact that I was paying entirely in coins) : You can tell it’s the end of the month when you are paying with the stuff from your piggy bank.

Cashier : Yup. Here’s your change.

Perfectly normal conversation, right?

But not inside my head. After that brief exchange, I felt like I had failed. I felt embarrassed and like I had done something wrong, and that the cashier now thought I was a total loser.

And even after getting home, realizing this, and essentially internally yelling “That was a perfectly normal conversation with someone you don’t even know! You didn’t fail anything!” at myself, I still feel the same way.

And if that is how a minor conversation with a cashier goes, no wonder I am so fucking shy. With the emotional stakes so high, how could I not be?

And what, exactly, did I fail to do? Make the clearly overworked and tired cashier laugh? Convince him that I was brilliant and hilarious and fun to be around? What exactly was I looking for? What response would have made me happy?

I have been thinking about it a lot since the incident in question, and I have some potential answers.

I think it all boils down to connection. I am emotionally naive enough to look to connect with people whenever I talk to them. And I am so desperate to connect that I look for that connection in all the wrong places.

I don’t have a mode where I just don’t care if I connect. The desperation precludes that. This turns every conversation, no matter how casual, into a kind of life or death situation with the stakes, and the odds, so high that failure is virtually guaranteed. I am desperate to see my light reflected off others because that is the only way I can feel the warmth that I generate for others.

And when it doesn’t happen, I feel a crushing sense of failure, as though I have been rejected yet again.

And all this from what to a more mentally well person would be a perfectly normal conversation of zero emotional impact. The implications of this are positively staggering. My sadness and desperation have led me to be so crazed for connection that a lot of weird and negative shit happens in my head from every single normal interaction.

Obviously, this is part of what makes me try so hard to be funny and interesting and entertaining, but standards that high, while providing the motivation to strive for improvement on a radically deep level, fail more than they succeed because I so rarely get the kind of reinforcement that I need and so I end up not with achievement and success but with misery and despair.

Even when I am at my most socially comfortable, which is when I am hanging out with my friends, the ghost of this misery is there, judging every attempted joke, every conversational assay, every moment of attention by a set of standards nearly impossible to meet and dragging my mood down with it at every turn.

This is obviously not a healthy way to relate to people, but it’s all I know. I guess being the youngest of four and fairly ignored and neglected as a child made me internalize the idea that the only way to get and sustain attention was to be funny and/or interesting, and that if I didn’t maintain someone’s interest in me, it was because I had failed.

It was all my fault. I wasn’t interesting enough or pleasant enough to be worth anyone’s attention. It is a classic case of someone assuming responsibility for something because that makes them feel like they have some control over it.

Which is fine…. if the thing is actually their fault and within their control. But when it is something that they cannot control, it becomes a fast train to insanity.

All my life, I now realize, I was trying to become something that people wanted. I have lived with the burden of trying to become attention-worthy for my entire life. I used what natural tools I had, charm and wit and personality, but my desperation and social awkwardness came through anyhow and alienated me from people.

I am like that sad kid who tries to learn magic tricks so he can meet people. It seems like a solution, but in reality, the problem is one of fundamentally being too emotionally closed off and too socially inept to really relate to and connect with others, and that cannot be overcome by tricks or wit.

It takes real emotional growth on a level with which we neurotic icebound intellectual types are not at all comfortable. It means being able to truly let down your defenses and deal with people in realtime, without the protective barrier of a detached point of view always getting in the way.

It takes calming down inside enough to be human again, and that is not easily achieved. It requires a very deep form of healing before one can trust the world and trust themselves enough to come out of one’s shell and open up again.

It is far easier to keep stumbling along, getting hurt by our own defenses and blaming it on other things, and just making is through the day in a way that works, but makes you feel like you are drowning inside yourself.

I have a lot of memories of isolation and loneliness and sadness to deal with inside me. The disease, while diminished, is still active and still preventing me from curing it.

But every day, I get a little stronger, and the more ghosts I can confront, the sooner I will be free.

But only when I am ready to be free.

There’s nobody to push this little bird out of the nest and make it fly.

Nobody but me, of course.

See you tomorrow, folks!

First, a cotton candy machine update.

Today, I got my meaty paws on some sugar free hard candy, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. Shoppers Drug Mart really let me down by having absolutely nothing for me. Not one single form of sugar free hard candy remains at our local Shoppers. I used to be able to get both sugarless Werther’s and sugarless Campinos there, as well as sugar free scotch mints (I miss them so), and now they have nothing.

I am very disappointed in them. I bet if it was GLUTEN free candy, they’d be all over that shit.

So I had to go to Safeway, and despite having, in general, way less varieties of hard candy than Shopper’s, they did have the sugar free version of the original Werther’s Originals, and that’s what I got.

Luckily, I am going to Costco tomorrow, and I will likely be able to find something there. At the very least, I think they will have one of those throw-pillow sized bags of sugar free Jolly Ranchers.

Werther’s in hand, I was able to try out my new toy that makes food, and it worked perfectly. Did exactly what it was supposed to do. And Werther’s flavoured cotton candy is pretty good. I am normally not that into Werther’s, I find them a little boring, but as cotton candy? Faboo.

One last little note : in French, cotton candy is Barbe A Papa, which literally translates into Father’s Beard, although if you are the super Catholic kind of French, it translates as God’s Beard.

So I have now heard it called Father’s Beard, God’s Beard, Candy Floss (total stripper name) , Fairy Floss (the British are adorable), and Cotton Candy. I am sure there must be more out there.

None of them are what you would call dignified and they all have issues (especially the beardy ones), but I figure cotton candy is more or less the best of the lot.

Oh, and one more thing : my body is very confused right now, because I just ate a whole bunch of extremely sugary tasting cotton candy and so my taste buds are telling my body “holy shit, brace for sugar!”, but of course, it’s not coming.

This often happens when I eat sugar free stuff. My body will sort things out soon.

Now, to boredom. I have been really thinking about how much of my life has been complicated by my low boredom threshold.

I get bored easily. I need a lot of mental stimulation to be happy. Specifically, what I need is variety. I have a seemingly limitless capacity to mentally encompass a lot of varieties of an item, and I grow restless and irritated with what, for a less easily bored person, would be a perfectly adequate number of options.

That’s why I have almost 4000 mp3’s, and I still crave more. That is four thousand songs, hundreds of hours of content, and yet there are still times when I don’t feel like listening to literally any of it and I get bored and frustrated.

It’s also why I have hundreds of books. My goal, since I was a child, was to have enough of all my favorite media so that I would never face having nothing to read (or whatever) because by the time I reach the end of the collection, the beginning of it seems new again.

It’s a noble (if somewhat passive) goal, but it has proven very hard to achieve. This big old brain of my just plain retains too much of what I experience for things to “freshen” fast enough. It takes a lot of time before I can go back to something and enjoy it. Until then, it will almost gross to me.

And that’s a minor thing compared to my low boredom threshold leading to my trouble focusing. It’s very hard for me to focus on just one thing. I am always multitasking. Right now I am writing for my blog, but I am also chatting with my furry friends online. If I didn’t have that other thing going, I would find it very hard to concentrate on blogging.

That accounts for a lot of how I feel about my mp3 collection. Not only is music inherently awesome and a big part of consciousness, but I can play some mp3’s and give my brain the level of distraction needed in order for me to focus.

Clearly, boredom can be defined simply as a lack of occupation for your mental faculties, and the more mental you are (hah), the more faculties you have and the harder it is to keep them busy.

That’s why I become highly devoted to anything which can keep my brain occupied. For example, games like Hearthstone. The complexities and strategies of the Collectible Card Game type games are more than enough to keep my capacious and rapacious brain busy.

In fact, during a really good match, it even mutes the nearly constant buzzing of my busy mind-hive that is always searching, thinking, processing, and digesting things.

Now I know that I have likely derived a lot of benefit from this restless and hungry mind of mine. The restlessness powers the rest of it and it is what keeps me searching for answers and insights while maintaining a very high intellectual standard.

So in a sense, it is both a function of and a cause of why I am so smart, and not just CPU smart but deep insight smart.

But when I think about the constant complex and chaotic symphony playing inside me, and how noisy the inside of my skull has always been, and how tiring it can be to have a mind like a shark, always moving, never resting…

All I can think about is how nice it would be to be able to press mute now and then and just relax.

But no. Not even in sleep does my mind rest. Even my dreams have me searching, wandering, unable to stop looking for what I know I will never find.

Talk to you tomorrow, nice people!