Yup. I’m going to talk about the death of Robin Williams again tonight.

First, we will get this out of the way :

That song speaks to me. Smokey is not the same sort of clown I am, but the basic feeling is pretty much the same.

I have heard that on the day when Robin killed himself, his wife had no idea anything was wrong. This does not surprise me in the slightest, because he was exactly the sort of person who would find it hard to share his problems with anyone.

Why? Because then he would have to stop being the Robin Williams we all knew and loved. He was addicted to being that person, the funny guy who made everyone laugh and who everyone loved. To admit he had a problem would be to drop that mask, and we clowns wear masks for a reason.

Our masks are the people we want to be. Underneath is the people we are. It is no surprise, then, that we prefer to keep the mask on and just keep being that person all the time. It’s so much easier than being who you really are.

I bet he thought of telling someone many times. He thought of telling him about the endless days when you feel like you are nothing and nobody and nobody needs you or even wants you around. Those are the days without warmth, where the delight you usually feel in entertaining others just doesn’t cut it any more because there is something wrong with the man behind the mask.

Something that is probably related to how much you ignore the man behind the mask because he’s so boring and serious and lame. Part of you knows that you really ought to pay more attention to the man behind the mask, but you just keep putting it off in favour of being the fun, funny, wacky version of your self that spreads joy and happiness wherever he goes.

So you carry on pretending the mask is the real you, while you rot away inside.

And it’s true that the mask is also a form of protection. If people don’t have access to the real you, they can’t hurt it. Anything they might say about you is really just about the mask, so who cares?

And that’s fine… as long as you don’t get confused about which is which. And you will get confused if you don’t have somewhere in your life to just be yourself, and the will to let that happen.

And all the time, the real you is crying out for attention and saying “But what about me? Where’s the love for me, the real person? When do I get to connect with people instead of the mask doing it all? When do I get to be as happy as I make other people? When are my needs met?”

But you just shove that voice to the back of your mind in favour of being this other persona of yours.

I know all this because I wear a mask too. In my case, the mask has a name : Fruvous. That’s the character I roleplay as in various Furry environments.

And he is definitely the person (well, fox) I want to be. He is gregarious, friendly, silly, affectionate, very funny, and almost completely without shame, shyness, or social anxiety.

He is an extrovert. He knows lots of people, but none of them all that deeply. He thrives on attention and withers without it. He is me sans issues.

I spend at least an hour a day as him. I have played him so long that doing so requires very little effort. And for the time I am roleplaying as him, I can pretend to be a far happier and more together version of myself.

And even in my own personal life, I find it hard to admit I am not okay. I was not allowed to not be okay in my childhood. I was just supposed to say I was fine so that people could go back to their lives and resume not thinking about me again.

But I wasn’t fine. I had so many problems as a kid. Looking back, I realize I was a very vulnerable and emotionally unstable kid. I really could have used some kind of psychological intervention when I was in elementary school.

And I had nobody to tell about my problems. I tried to tell teachers about the bullying and they just brushed me off. I couldn’t talk to my parents… they were the ones who wanted me to always be okay.

So to this day, I default to saying everything is fine. And the thing is, when you get into that habit, it seduces you into thinking everything really is okay. You internalize the dismissal of your needs and thus it becomes very difficult to take yourself seriously. And so your problems do not seek treatments.

They get brushed aside.

One of the hardest things for me when I first started going to one-on-one therapy was to shut down the mask. To just abandon my usual self-protection persona and be real and serious and direct with my therapist.

And it’s still a struggle. I know there have been times when I have diverted therapy into an intellectual discussion. Or deflected a genuine insight with a joke. It’s a hard habit to break. Being funny and/or interesting is just so much easier and so much more fun than being the real me.

But I drag myself back to the real pretty quickly.

Part of it is empathy. When you are very empathic, you don’t want to upset people or hurt them because that hurt immediately comes back at you on the empathic channel. You feel their pain, as well as the guilt for having caused it.

That makes it hard to stick up for yourself, and easy to put others’ needs above your own. Their needs seem so much more important to you.

So anyhow, I think I know a little of what Robin went through. I have felt cold and alone and miserable and I too have been the person nobody knows is sad at all, let alone feeling like a massive shadow is consuming them in darkness.

I bet that poor man felt like there was nobody he could talk to, and that there was only one way out of his pain.

I am still mad at him for committing such an act of violence on his loved ones.

But I understand, Robin. I understand.

That’s all from me today, folks. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

When a potted plant grows too large for its pot, it needs to be repotted. If it isn’t, the plant’s roots will continue to spread out and grow in search of the nutrients a growing plant needs, but with nowhere to go, the roots bunch up under the soil instead. If left unchecked, this can cause the roots to take up so much of the soil inside their pot that they displace the soil and cause the plant to no longer have enough soil to support its growth.

So the plant stops growing and goes into a semi-dormant state. This state is called being rootbound, and it can kill the plant if it goes on long enough.

I have talked about what happens to other people when there are no jobs and therefore no ability to grow into adulthood.

Today I will talk about what it’s done to me.

But first, today’s video.

Funny stuff! Now, back to angst.

I have been severely rootbound for a very long time. Failure to grow is never cost free. All that growth is still within you, bunching up inside you and causing you great pain and suffering. You must grow, or die inside.

I have not been growing.

As a result, I have become severely ingrown. I have all this potential growth within me just waiting to bloom, but I can’t grow like I want to grow precisely because of the pain inside me from all that stunted growth.

That’s a Catch-22 for you.

Just to remind you nice people of the facts : I am 41 years old and I have never had a job that supported me. My last regular employment of any sort was in the mid Nineties. In terms of growth, this is practically identical to have never had any sort of job. I have never supported myself. I have always relied on others.

I have never gone to work in the morning, or adjusted to office life, or had to tough it out to learn a physically demanding job. I therefore qualify as a parasite on the body politic. Said body is not particularly hurt by me, true, but it is nevertheless a very poor position for developing self-respect.

And it does not keep me from feeling incredibly guilty for being a burden on not just society but everyone around me as well. I have felt incompetent and helpless and worthless for as long as I can remember. I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life when I felt qualified to exist. Even when I was in college, it was my brother who took care of the practical details of life.

I think the abandonment I felt at an early age, and the abuse I got even earlier, broke something vital inside me. Some vital part of one’s psychological skeleton is missing in me, some important bit that provides a solid fulcrum for ones efforts in the big bad world.

And so I have never felt complete. I have never felt… sufficient. No matter how good I get at recognizing my considerable talents, the sense of insufficiency persists. Somehow it never adds up to a legitimate person.

I’m an amazing guy. And yet, I still kind of hate myself. It’s just… easier, I guess. Belief in self leads to action, after all.

And action leads to going into situations where I would have to make decisions in realtime and thus not be able to control the results as well as I do online.

It means leaving my entirely passive comfort zone. And that is something I still have trouble doing. There are so many variables in the real world.

Oh, getting back to my biography of pathos, I have also never been in a relationship, or even had good sex. Even third generation poor kids from broken homes with no education manage to get laid and married. Not me.

I have been too good at hiding from the world.

So here I am, 41 and falling apart and rootbound as ever. VFS was supposed to be my ticket to a bigger, better pot, but the world just does not like me enough to allow those kinds of things to happen to me.

There are things I could do to maybe make that dream come true in the long run. I know what those things are. And I just don’t do them.

And I couldn’t tell you why.

There is such a thing as being too adaptable. I have clearly adapted to this rootbound life far too well. If I was less adaptable, then I would have found my situation intolerable and acted to change it.

But it’s amazing what you can get used to, when you’re a wimp.

So every day, my roots get longer and the pressure in my pot increases. I am terrified that I will burst my pot open and ends up just a disorganized pile of dirt and twigs on the floor somewhere.

I feel like I am barely keeping things together as is.

I feel like I need somebody else to be my skeleton. I am just not capable of producing my own structure. The endless empty days have left me formless and helpless. Adaptable, and maladapted. Brilliant, and hopeless.

It’s thoughts like these that make me wonder why I even bother with anything. Nothing is really going to change. I am clearly missing some vital element that would keep me focused and together. Until I get whatever that is, I will remain a sad little puddle at the bottom of life’s well.

But do no worry, my friends. I will carry on, no matter what. Even if the only place I end up is an early grave and a life that never even got started, I will carry my torch onwards into the night.

Who knows… maybe one day I will find the key to unlock myself, and be able to leave this sad and pointless life behind me.

Until then, the struggle continues.

Today, I am going to blog before I do a video.

And when I do a video, it might be something without me in it.

Why? Because I am depressed.

This song expresses how I feel right about now.

That great and terrible sadness is still with me. It seems to have moved in with me for the time being. I am sure it will leave once I hear and understand what it is trying to tell me, or more likely, feel what it needs me to feel.

But I grow tired of its wearisome gravity pulling my mood down. It really does feel like there is something within me pushing down on my mood. I feel so very heavy inside, like I have ten feet of anchor chain wrapped around my shoulders.

Sometimes, it even feels like I’m falling.

I think this all started with my decision to start trying to emotionally detach myself from my current domicile before we move. The idea was that this would make the transition to the new place a little smoother than previous transitions. I thought that would be the smart, practical, forward thinking thing to do.

But in retrospect, that may have been a mistake. I think that is what unmoored my mood and set it floating, and with me, that is rarely a good thing.

Or maybe it is, who knows. Maybe my insistence on uniformity of mood come what may is exactly the thing that keeps me from getting anyplace in life. Maybe I need to look back at thoughts of learning to accept a higher amount of emotional variability in order to break free of the gravity well that has kept me in limbo for more or less my entire adult life.

I think that, at some point, I unconsciously invented a kind of mental mechanism designed to hold my mood to a slightly functional level where I am not particularly happy but I am also not particularly sad, and I can get through each day without danger from my depression as long as I keep my life very, very low stimulus.

And that is the curse of it, of course. Keeping your life to a very low amount of sensory stimulation and relying entirely on the mental stimulation of video games and online chat makes for a very lopsided and unhealthy lifestyle. Your soul starves while your mind grows bloated and distended, like someone who exercises only one arm.

Your world grows increasingly unreal and abstract and you start to feel like you don’t exist. That you are just as virtual as your life.

I think this phenomenon explains why I often feel a lot better after I have been out of the apartment on my own for a while. Exposing myself to the world like that might sometimes be stressful and put a lot of strain on my anxiety resistance, but it also gives me fresh stimulation from real world environments, and that acts against that feeling of unreality that is so corrosive to my mood.

It’s hard to be happy when you don’t even feel real. For me, at least.

Meanwhile, I quietly drown in unshed tears.

Oh, more depressing news from yesterday’s doctor’s appointment : they think I have something called an umbilical hernia. Apparently, that is the sort of thing that happens only to babies and fat people.

So it seems that the pressure of my unbelievable fatness on top of my guts has caused some of them to bulge out a bit. Such happy news. They did not seem to think that this was a huge deal, even though it seems kind of important to me.

In fact, it might explain a lot of my little digestive problems. Maybe if it was fixed, I would be able to digest things more smoothly, I would not get these soft blockages in my intestines, and I would have more room in my bladder.

They also think that my sleep apnea is putting a strain on my heart, which is also lovely news. I guess I should not be surprised, though. Sleep apnea is a serious medical condition and I have let it go completely untreated for like five years now while my CPAP machine gathers dust two feet from my bed.

Clearly, what I should do is go to my GP, confess my enormous burden of medical sin, and get him to get me back on track towards a course of treatment that might actually work for me.

The CPAP machine I have almost made it. I used it for many months, successfully fighting back my feeling that it was smothering me when it was doing the exact opposite. It was helping me breathe way better than usual.

But eventually I lost the fight and got so frustrated with the complications the machine brought to the simple act of sleeping that I gave up on it without telling anyone about it.

And so it sits there. In theory, I could just clean it, put it back together, reread the manual, and start using it again.

But I just… can’t. And I can’t explain why.

So I am not sure what the next step would be with my sleep apnea. Surgery, I guess. Or weight loss, like that is going to happen.

Wellm who knows. If I get into the habit of working out at the gym in the apartment building we are moving to, I might just lose weight, or at the very least, replace the fat with muscle and thus give myself a more demanding metabolism.

But right now, I just feel like I am falling apart and there is nothing I can do about it. I’m heading for the brick wall of an early fat guy death in squalor and agony and I lack the will or capacity to steer away.

So I will lay me down to sleep, and hope that whatever haunts me these days will leave me while I dream.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

In short : not good. Vis :

That’s the basic story. Apparently I have the sort of injury that causes me some pain but is not actually serious enough to, you know, do anything about. The doctors (junior and senior) basically told me to keep using that Voltaren and taking my Tylenol Artritis and to work on my quad muscles (big muscles on top of leg, between hip and knee) to strengthen them and thus strengthen the muscular support system for the knee. Makes sense to me.

But it irritates me to no end that I am once more in a medical gray area. I was really hoping for some kind of definitive answer and solution. It’s X, the treatment is Y, and that will fix it right up.

Instead, I get wishy washy bullshit and a big hunk of my time wasted.

One thing they did mention was putting a brace on the knee. That strikes me as potentially a good idea. If I had something on there that kept the knee from twisting, I could probably ditch the cane and go around more or less like normal.

If not a little better.

The part of the knee that they think is messed up is called the meniscus, which I thought was the name for the curve that forms on the top of a liquid.

Show what my home ec teacher knew. Oh well, I hated her anyhow. Child hating stuck up yuppie bitch.

Anyhoo, the meniscus is one of the smaller players in the upright locomotion game. The Wiki article on it says it helps spread the load where the tibia meets the fibia. Makes sense that we need it… this whole upright bipedal stance thing is a heck of a lot mopre complicated than it looks. We had to develop some fairly complex structures all over our bodies in order to make it work.

And apparently, I broke one of mine.

(WE INTERRUPT THIS DEPRESSING LOOK AT THE FRAGILITY OF THE BODY FOR THIS EVEN MORE DEPRESSING NEWS ABOUT THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE)

Holy fuck, I just heard the news…. Robin Williams is dead, and it looks like it was suicide. He was 63 years old.

Jesus, that is depressing. As if this day didn’t suck enough already. Some days it just rains shit and all you can do is cling to your little umbrella.

I was a very big fan of Robin Williams way back in the Eighties. I thought he was brilliant and funny and wacky and just an amazing person all round. If he was going to be on a show, I was going to watch it.

But it was more than his talent that appealed to me. I really identified with him. Something about his manic wit and kind nature really resonated with me and I used to think that I could be him and that we were, on a deep level, the same kind of person. I felt he and I would get along.

Well, okay, maybe not BE him. Maybe him at 75 percent speed.

So the news of his death really hits me hard. Him dying at 63 would be bad enough. But for him to commit suicide really feels like a stab in the heart. It suggests that he lost a battle with depression, and that’s the same fight that I fight each and every day of my life.

Not that I am making this all about me. Some people might say that the person who is hurt the most by this is Robin Williams, but I would disagree. Robin Williams is beyond all hurt or hope now. He escaped.

The people who are hurt the most by suicide are the people close to the deceased. They are the ones whose lives have been left torn open and bleeding by the violent removal of someone they knew and cared about. They are the ones left wondering if there was something they could have done.

They are the ones for whom the pain is just beginning.

That is why I consider suicide to be an incredibly selfish act of violence against everyone who knows and loves you. The fact that it is done by a person who knows full well that they won’t have to live with the consequences makes even worse.

(Felicity, I know you don’t agree. )

So yeah. If it really was suicide, I am pretty angry at Robin Williams for doing it. No matter what you are going through emotionally, there is no justification for the act of suicide, intractable pain/horrible incurable illness aside.

Whatever it is, it will end, and you will be glad you didn’t do it.

I came pretty close to suicide as a depressed teenager, and somewhat close when I first moved to this area and was living alone in a bachelor apartment and slid into the worst depression of my life.

Luckily, that time, I was usually too depressed to think about suicide. It works that way sometimes. Often what saves us sufferers is the lack of mental coherence necessary to think of doing it, let alone plan and execute it.

From the perspective of someone who came close to suicide himself, I completely understand how you get there. Depression negates everything good inside you and it can seem like the only way out of the trap before it negates you too is to die.

But for me, the knowledge of how badly it would hurt everybody I knew was enough to keep me from doing that. I just could not do that to people, especially my family. Imagine how bad it would be to have a son or brother commit suicide all the way on the other side of the country.

That is what makes me feel I have the right to judge. Fuck you for committing suicide, Robin Williams. Fuck you for that ultimately selfish act. Fuck you fo rdoing irreparable injury to those around you.

And what the hell, fuck you for how your suicide hurts me, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was really depressed this afternoon, and I don’t know why.

Actually, it’s happened two days in a row now. Halfway through lunch, I suddenly get very tired, a little nauseous, and extremely depressed. This cloud of ice cold mist fills my heart and I am incredibly sad and sleepy with no obvious cause.

Yesterday, I just chalked it up to the variations caused by Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I knew I was somewhat clogged up (the back pain was a telltale clue) and so I figured it was just my body being out of whack until the clog cleared.

And three trips to the bathroom in three hours later, it did.

And there was much rejoicing. (yaaay)

So to have it happen again today, when I am fairly obstruction free, leaves me back at square one without even half a clue.

Well, as the old saying goes, if it’s not bowels, it’s probably diabetes.

I have reason to be concerned there. I ran out of insulin Wednesday night, which means I should have gone next door to Shopper’s Drug Mart to pick up more on Thursday, but I was too lazy, and so I went a night sans insulin.

I could have used some old insulin I have in the fridge (it stays good for a surprisingly long time if kept refrigerated), but the old stuff is Novolin, the insulin formulation I started out on, and I use Levemir now for a reason.

With Levemir, I get way fewer blood sugar highs and lows. It’s a time-release insulin analogue, and so it provides a smoother, more even blood sugar level, and I really appreciate that.

I have to really fuck up with the not eating often enough to get the catastrophic lows I got before where I felt like I was dying.

I can be such a spaz.

So that is why I elected to skip a night rather than use that Novolin crap. I have had to skip one night before and it was not a huge deal.

But this time, methinks I didst fuck things up proper, verily.

I am guessing that my body has grown quite used to its nightly dose of insulin at roughly 11:30 pm, and not getting it really threw it off. It might take a while for me to build up that kind of natural rhythm again, and until then, I am going to have to deal with a certain amount of unpleasant variability.

That’s what I get for being too lazy to put some proper clothes on and go next door, I suppose.

So that’s another theory. It might be a blood sugar thing. But it might also be something else. If it’s not bowels or diabetes, it could be depression.

The process known as recovery is an intricate and deep operation, and its inner workings are not always accessible to the conscious mind. One never knows what its products will be or what work it will assign, or when.

So maybe the workings of my inner drive towards betterment just plain dumped a big bundle of sadness into my emotional processing queue. In order to move on, I have a bunch of sadness to feel. One does not get out of decades of depression without having to pay the price, and with depression, the price is almost always paid by feeling things that have been long suppressed.

It certainly feels like something just welled up from down below. A sadness not unlike grief. I have spoken before about how recovery can be a lot like a grieving process, although exactly who you are grieving is never made clear.

If I had to guess, I would have to say I am grieving the version of me I am leaving behind. Much like moving to a better apartment (or, for me, when I graduated from high school), the fact that you are going somewhere better does not erase the emotion attachment you have to where you are.

Even if you don’t even like where you are and are glad to see it go, you will still be sorry about what you are leaving behind because, good or bad, it was home.

And home is a mighty powerful concept in the human mind, especially for a mildly agoraphobic homebody like me. In my mind, home means safety. When I was being bullied both in school and out of it, home was the only place I was safe. That’s when the agoraphobia started, naturally enough. There really was a time in my life when it was justified.

So I have warm, sentimental feelings about every place I have ever lived. Even the fairly crappy ones. There are so many memories attached to places we have lived that it’s hard to let go sometimes.

Historically, I have not realized this truth until I had already left the place. But it seems absurd and somehow wrong to me to only appreciate things when they are gone. So I try to appreciate things in the present.

But it’s not easy. Taking things for granted is easy. Appreciating them while you have them is hard. We get all too easily become so consumed by the problems in front of us that it seems absolutely insane, not to mention counterproductive, to think about the problems we don’t have.

But right up until they said they were kicking us out, this place has been good to us. That’s why we have lived hear for seven years or more. And you can’t just walk away from seven years of history and never look back, at least if you’re me.

So maybe we should have a house-leaving party to bid adieu to the place that kept us for seven years.

But in order to keep it from being too depressing and melancholy, the party would then move to the new place and become a housewarming party.

Out with the old, in with the new!

That’s always been easier for me in theory than in practice.

Hey, maybe that’s why I was sad yesterday and today. I am grieving the fact that we have to pack up and move!

See how I brought it back to the topic? Classy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.