Lots of stuff to gab about. Let’s start with the big one.

No thanks, I’ll just take the check

Got my check, finally.

Early this morning (okay…. ten minutes before 11 am…. I overslept) I called the 1-866 (line 1-800, but hipper) line for Social Services and told them my check had no materialized over the weekend and so we had to do the whole lost or stolen check tango. The dude on the phone, who thankfully spoke very clear English (I get socially anxious when I have to interpret accents in realtime) told me that he could start the process himself (and he did), but I had to come in to the office to sign a form and only then would they print the check for me.

Most parenthetical paragraph EVER! (w00t!)

This meant that my plan to get Joe to drop me off there on the way to work was no longer feasible. I would have arrived at like 3:45 pm and they close at 4 pm and I doubt they print checks that fast.

So I had to go knock on Joe’s door and ask him to drive me there like, soon. We got there at around 1:30 pm, and I went in to get things done. I ascertained that the check would indeed be available today, but not till 3 pm. So I went out to the parking lot and told Joe and Julian, who were waiting patiently, that there was no point in them hanging around. I would get home on my own. It’s only like, six blocks total.

And that is what happened. Got my check after 3, went to Money Mart to cash it, stopped off at the little convenience store in the mini-mall to get a few things, then got home around 4 pm.

Where did the sun go?

This was all accomplishes against a background of bleak depression. For some reason, the news that getting my check would be more complicated than I thought was just the trigger to get my mood to collapse like a melting ice sculpture. Never know which snowflake will start the avalanche, I guess.

Notice this frozen water theme I am developing here? It’s not repetition, it’s literature.

I am deliberately not trying to figure out what it “means” or why it happened or any of that bullshit. That crap is just mindless mental masturbation disguised as self-analysis. Why should it mean anything? Maybe it’s just random flux in my brain chemicals. Maybe it was the product of a psychological process so deep that it could only be described in grunts. Maybe it was just that I hadn’t had my psych meds yet. Who the fuck knows.

What is important is that I felt like crap, but I did the right thing anyhow. I did not let the fluctuations of my unstable mood keep me from getting things done. I am sick of being the captive of this stupid brain flux. I am going to develop character even if it kills me.

It could happen!

It’s not just A killing, it’s….

I was bored with the anime series I decided to watch after finishing episode 9 of Bones, so I checked my instant queue and saw that I had added critical darling The Killing at some point.

So I gave the premiere episode/pilot a shot.

It seems potentially interesting. I like the main character, the female detective. There is something extremely West Coast about her, which is appropriate as the show is set in Seattle. (I wonder if that means it was shot here?)

She just really seems like someone I might meet around her, and she has a quiet intensity about her that speaks to me, as well as a deep focus on what she is doing.

The show takes a broad view of telling murder stories. It shows not just the detectives but the victims as well, and plot threads started (from the audience’s point of view) independently from one another end up interweaving.

That explains why the critics love it. They go nuts for that kind of stuff.

The tone is very bleak, though, even to the point of doing that thing where the color pallet is shifted towards the darker tones, making it look like the sun never shines in Seattle.

Hopefully, they will get over that. CSI : NY tried that shit and it just made the show unrealistically unpleasant to watch. Sure, Seattle is rainy, but it doesn’t exist in constant low clouds and near-night.

Still, it’s just the pilot. The rules are different for pilots because they are meant to sell the show, so they have to be jam=packed with everything that is good about it.

I will reserve judgment till I watch an actual episode or two.

In darkest night…..

My mood is often dark lately. But an entirely new breed of dark than before. This is not the despairing dark of a locked-off soul. I feel like I can use my dark moods now. I can use their intensity and energy to bridge the gap between wanting to do something and doing it. I feel like I don’t have to lock everything away any more. I can let some of the darkness out and the world completely fails to end.

The struggle is far from over, of course. I am still nowhere near my goal of being as in sync with the world as I want to be. But I grow stronger every day, and with strength comes so much more. I am on the way to harnessing my emotions instead of ignoring and suppressing them, and that has to be way healthier.

I have such enormous energies within me, just looking for a use. The fires of creation burn bright within me, and a lot of my suffering comes from all the pain and effort of keeping my light under that bushel. My destiny lays, as always, with growing strong enough to use the strength I already have.

Someday I will walk confidently into the sunshine and never look back.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, early for me, anyhow.

First, an update from last night’s video : the psych meds issues had been resolved. I looked around and found an old bottle with a bunch of my meds in it, from before I got my pill box. So I am covered for another week or so, plenty of time for me to get to my therapists’ office and get prescribed more.

It’s a relief to be able to go back to worrying about my cheque, my health, my life, my prospects, and my anxieties.

Today. I have the prospect of going to a bag-stuffing party (fandom has such fun stuff in it) for Vcon. That’s where Vcon people get together to put together the swag bags people get along with their convention badges. You know, the one with your con book and other stuff in it.

I could go. I could totally go. Joe and Julian are going and I am welcome to tag along. And it might be a lot of fun. I love stuff like that. Simple little orderly tasks like that make me happy. Everyone takes one thing that has to go in and you just pass the bag down the line, everyone putting in their thing, and before you know it, you have stuffed a whack of bags.

I love that whole “many hands make light work” kind of thing. And it’s no small task. Vcon is not a big convention but it still gets hundreds of attendees. But I bet when everyone is chatting and doing their own very simple little task, the time just flies past and you have both had a good time and gotten something tangible done.

And that just never stops being amazing and wonderful to me. It is a perfect system in its own way. Things get done and people have fun doing them, with no stress or hassle and a system that practically runs itself.

That is quite honestly my ideal for all human endeavour. A relentless optimizer like myself, if I was king of the world, would not rest until every job is like that. People working together in efficient, elegant, nearly invisible systems that work so well that people can just relax, do their individual task in comfort and ease, and have faith that their work will be both effective and recognized. A system that is firmly on their side.

So this bag stuffing party is a possibility for me. But as usual, my social anxiety is resisting the idea. So I don’t know if I will go or not. And I don’t have super long to make up my mind, either, as the party starts at like 1 pm, so we would be leaving here no later than 12:30 pm. And it’s almost 9 am now.

And I need more SLEEP.

So I dunno if I will go. I don’t really feel up to it, but that’s not necessarily a prerequisite. It’s not like staying home all afternoon will be super fun. Either way, I will be going out to dinner with La Gang tonight anyhow, so it is not like this is my only chance to get out of the house. I would probably have a good time if I went. It is the sort of thing which is good for me to do to expand my comfort zone. But I shouldn’t put too much pressure on myself to go as that is counterproductive.

And so forth and so on. I will go or I won’t. Both are fine.

You know what? It’s complicated being me. I get so tired of being myself sometimes. No wonder I spend so much of my day pretending to be a fox. It is way easier.

Plus, online roleplaying is the only way to turn yourself entirely into a product of your own imagination, at least until we all live in VR or can change our bodies at will via nanotech. Even then, I would prefer text in a lot of ways. You have full control over your words, at least if you are as verbal as I. Text based roleplaying lets me write myself, which is, in a way, the dream of all writers. Overwrite the hand dealt you by the cold unfeeling hand of fate and turn yourself into a creature of your own design, with a persona ergonomically designed to fit your inner self perfectly.

Custom tailored personae, cut to fit. You don’t leave the store unless you are happy with your suit. All work guaranteed.

I do wonder, though, what life would be like if I did not have Fruvous to use as a very helpful disguise to wear at the nonstop masquerade ball that is online furry roleplaying. Would the lack of an outlet for my personality have driven me to go out into the world and meet and greet people and develop a wider social life? Or would I have just been even more miserable and alone and have ended up a permanent resident of a psych ward somewhere?

Hard to tell now because I have had/been Fruvous for so long that it is hard for me to remember what life was like before him. Not happier, that I can tell you. As him, and before him Farmboy, I developed socially at a pace far exceeding anything beforehand. It’s sad but true. Online RP was in many ways the perfect “safe” place for me to try out new things and basically do the sort of social experimentation and growth that normal people do in high school.

Feh… normal people. What do they know? Besides how to be happy, that is.

It’s far too late to go back, of course. The whole thing is deeply integrated into my social psyche now. If I couldn’t hang out with my furry friends online, I would go nuts. There is no way I could find a group of people as much like me anywhere else in the world. I would have to like, learn to relate and stuff.

Perish the thought.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

Still no check today, so I called up the welfare office and it turns out it was sent to our previous address.

This is actually potentially good news, in that we might be able to just swing by there this weekend and pick it up. Otherwise, there would be no way I could get it until at least Monday.

But we might not be able to, either. I have no idea what conditions back at Seafair are like now. They said they were going to do massive renovations, so for all I know, the mailboxes are in the back of someone’s truck by now.

So I dunno. I hope it’s there, but I am prepared for it not to be, because apparently the forces of nature and fate are not done fucking with me and stressing me out.

Perhaps this is destiny’s way of giving me a stress test. I have mentioned before how it feels like I have finally emerged from my shell, and the universe has responded by saying “There he is! Make a bunch of stuff happen to him!”. I went a long time with not a lot happening to me day by day. I hated it, and I am glad I escaped and became the kind of person things actually do happen to, but I do feel a tad shell shocked from time to time.

When I am really indulging my anthropomorphization of the universe, I fancy that the hands of fate have challenges waiting for me to help me grow stronger, and like in an RPG style video game, when I level up, the challenges get harder.

The lesson I truly need to learn is that I can overcome difficulties and I don’t have to collapse the moment things because hard or scary or complicated.

And every obstacle overcome goes to prove that. That is how you build emotional strength, and from that comes self-confidence and self-esteem. Once you accept that doing things that make you feel good about yourself is important enough to invest effort into, you can find your motivation to find the things you can do along those lines.

The key is to pick things that are not the normal things you do, but are not too much harder than your usual routine. For me, that is things like going out

Oh, and speaking of stress, my computer just crashed, shattering the relative calm that had settled over me as I blogged and chatted with my online friends. So now I got stress chemicals in my blood and I feel on edge again.

I think the social services guy I talked to on the phone could tell I was on edge from the tightly controlled panic in my voice, and it made him nervous too because I have strong projecting empathy.

There’s a lot of voltage in this persona of mine. I project my emotions with enormous force. I am not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with a certain kind of sensitivity coupled with a very strong desire to communicate. Both my mother and I have it.

And I do my best to use it responsibly, as hard as that is. The temptation is to just blast out every emotion with my loudspeakers turned up to 11 and let the world do what it wants with that. Lord knows, were I a less scrupulous person, I could easily use it to manipulate people.

But I am a very honest and responsible person, so I try to keep it on its leash. I don’t really have a choice… the empathy that may be a part of it also makes me keenly aware of the consequences of my actions on the emotions of others and, in effect, what I do to them comes back on me instantly.

That is why I love making people happy. Their happiness bounces right back at me, and I radiate it back to them, and when it is going good, a whole self-reinforcing standing wave of happiness forms.

And everybody feels warm and good.

My therapist and I have been talking about this, in a way. He said I tend to put the needs of others ahead of my own sometimes, and I had to agree. And I think I know why.

It has to do with that empathy stuff I was just talking about. Making other people happy creates this rich emotional feedback that is highly addictive and very overwhelming at times, in a joyful way. Compared to it, simply making myself happy seems like a small and feeble thing.

Of course, that is entirely wrongheaded. Making myself happy is the most important thing of all, and living off the emotions of others like a passive emotional vampire is a good way to find your soul starving to death.

The real challenge for me is selfishness. That is to say, doing things that benefit me at the expense of others. Sounds like a noble thing, right? Never doing anything selfish?

But a certain amount of selfishness is necessary in life. Sometimes you really do have to look out for number one and trust that others can take care of themselves. You have to do what is right for you, and follow your own path.

This is tricky for me because of that empathy. A less sensitive person will be blissfully unaware of the little upsets and annoyances that their self-actualization cause. But I won’t be. I have to make the deliberate decision to hurt others, if that is what is needed, to get myself healthy.

And I am not talking about going to the other extreme and becoming a coldhearted prick. I am talking about tiny little things, like the fact that making changes in your life always means upsetting the view of you that others have. Or asking for something you really need despite knowing that the question will be unexpected from you and the person maybe initially be confused.

It’s just way too easy to use other people’s emotions as a reason not to change.

But sometimes, you have to do what is right for you, and if upsets people, tough.

I am determined to build a bridge to happiness.

And I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

Life gets complicated sometimes.

I am sitting here in Denny’s because Joe has an appointment with HIS therapist in Vancouver at 11 pm. That makes it a little tricky for him to get me to MY therapist here in Richmond at noon. So the best we could do was get me to the Denny`s near my therapist at 10:30, where I can blog and enjoy a leisurely breakfast before strolling over to my therapist at 11:30.

Spendinh an hour in Denny`s in order to avoid having to get to my therapist by myself… sounds about right.

But I am not unaware of how another person`s priorities might beg to differ. After all, the same bus pass that will get me home could have gotten me there, and I could have avoided the need for Denny`s entirely and even gotten another hour of sleep in the comfort of my own home.

But I still need a running start at life. I still need that little bit of extra boost in order to get going. I can`t escape my own gravity well without it.

And I have always found coming home easier than getting there. Getting there, the unknown (aka “there”) is still before me and who knows when I will get to scurry home to my nest?

But coming home, the nest is the goal and every moment brings you closer to it. Even when delays and complications arise, I know that I will be home when it is all done, and I will be able to fall apart ad be myself at long last.

There is probably a metric shitload of insight into my problems in that last sentence up there.

I am a little stressed out right now because my all-important life-giving check has yet to arrive. It was supposed to arrive yesterday. Julian`s notice of direct deposit did. And we checked the mail on the way out today, and nope. No assistance cheeck. Damn it.

But I am not totally screwed, as my $75 tax return check from the Federal Gubmnt did show up. So I will not be broke. I had to borrow $20 from Joe in order to pay for Denny`s, and Money Mart will charge me a couple bux to cash my check, but that leaves me with $50 to play with until this whole thing gets sorted out for good.

Glad I finally got around to doing my taxex. That is the only reason that I am not in a far more tenuous position. So… yay me for finally getting around to doing my taxes six months late!

Better latent tban never, I guess.

Tomorrow, it will be exactly one week until the start of Vcon. Right now, honestly, I would rather not. That is completely normal for me. Before any occasion where I have to leave the nest, I will go through at lease one period where the ill part of me will have its little tantrum and kick and scream about how it doesn`t wanna go and how we could totally get away with skipping it and just stay home and wait for it all to be over.

But that road leads only to disappointment and self-loathing. If I missed Vcon for any reason that doesn`t involve hospitalization, I would hate myself for it forever and be beating myself up over it for years.

So, no. I choose life. I want to live life, not hide from it. I am fed up with waiting for life to come find me while at the same time fleeing from it as fast and as hard as I can,

It is never going to catch me. I am just too fast.

Well that is it for the on the road portion of today`s blog entry.

More from me later!

Well today sucked.

First, here’s the video. For once, it’s actually relevant to the blog entry.

Wow, don’t you love how accurately I have recreated the “shakycam” look of today’s hottest media?

The mystery of the missing message from my therapist has not yet been solved. The current theory is that he called the phone number for our previous place. But that is a long shot, because I gave him our current number and he wrote it down and everything. So unless he goofed, or maybe he had an old version of my contact info with him at home (he is sick, after all), the mystery doth remain.

I know Joe would have fessed up instantly if it had been him who listened to the message, deleted it, and then forgot to tell me. It’s still possible that Julian did it, but unlikely, as he is a very conscientious person and would have gone to great lengths to make absolutely sure I got the message.

He’d use skywriting, if that was necessary.

So I dunno where this message went. But it was a rather important one and I really, really wish I had gotten it before I embarked upon this epic damned journey.

But I must confess : some of the day’s distress was my own darn fault because I both forgot to take my morning medications at home and forgot to take them with me, so when I was sitting there in the waiting room of my therapists’ office finding out he was not coming in, I was at my most chemically unguarded state.

And the pills were at home, so I had to make the journey home without them, and I sure felt the difference. Everything seemed so much harder without Wellbutrin to buoy me up.

Luckily, after I got home, took the pills, and got a little rest, I felt two whole tons better and I am back to my perkier, happier, more interested in the world self.

I will just chalk up today as one of those days when the forces of nature and fate collude to fuck with me in a way that amuses them with how improbable it is, and ignore it.

Paying attention to it only encourages it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My pseudo-academic writing muscles are tired tonight, so I will go back to talking about myself.

One of the things that I have realized about my haunted head fairly recently is that entire negative events, or even sequences of events, can happen in the blink of an eye in here.

I can be completely alone when I do something mildly dumb (or even just sub-optimal) and my mind processes it almost exactly as if I had done said dumb thing in public, everyone had laughed at me, and I had slunk away in utter humiliation, all in the amount of time it takes a camera flash to go off.

My mind is very efficient at producing self-loathing.

It’s like I have this inner antagonist whose mortal enemy is my self-esteem. Silently, it waits for the slightest opportunity to strike like lightning and crush me. Things which would not even appear on a normal person’s self-esteem radar are brutal trauma to me even when there is nobody else there to see them, and it all happens so fast and so regularly that I am barely even conscious of it at all.

And there is nothing I can do to stop it, at least, not directly. By the time I am conscious of it, it has already happened. It is clearly not something which can be prevented by a simple, ferocious act of will. No matter how many times I scream “NO!” or “WRONG!” at this feeling in my head, it keeps coming back. Clearly adding energy to the system doesn’t work, or at least, doesn’t work on more than a superficial level.

It’s just not that easy. And wrestling with yourself rarely accomplished anything.

I am better off trying to figure out where this eyeblink assassin comes from, and where it might go.

Fundamentally, I think all of this kind of self-loathing springs from a corrupted self-defense mechanism. In response to trauma, the mind tries to figure out how to keep such things from happening in the future, and seeing as most human trauma in modern life comes from other humans, we attempt to model our tormentors in our head (humans are great at creating models of other humans in our heads) and it is these models that become our inner antagonists.

What causes these models to escape the bonds of their assigned role and become worse than the problem they were supposed to solve? I think it is the power of the emotions involved. Like with PTSD, certain emotionally traumatically experiences make so strong an impression on our minds and our memories that they become uncontrollable and overwhelm the mental muscles we would usually use to contain their effect, and suddenly the tail is wagging the dog. The mental model goes from being a tool for self-defense to a source of constant self-offense.

No wonder depression is associated with a lack of sense of safety. The depressed person is not safe within their own mind. No matter what they do to control the outside world, in their minds, they are still locked in the dark with a madman.

The question is now : what do we do about this inner assassin? Direct engagement doesn’t work. It is you and you are it… it is a part of you. Attack it, and you attack yourself. And while you can have some success burning out some of its tendrils with anger and will and concentration, sooner or later you will find it is embedded far too deeply for you to simply excise it. It is wrapped too tight around your most vital organs.

The only alternative is to make peace with it somehow. As demented and destructive as it has become, it is, in its own sick and twisted way, still trying to protect you, and if you can convince it that the coast is clear and the danger is gone now, it might well relax and disappear on its own.

This requires no self-delusion. You just have to keep reminding yourself that you are safe now. Whatever has traumatized you is long gone, even if it doesn’t always feel that way, and you are safe now. Repeat it like a mantra. You are in no danger.

The harder part is dealing with the trauma that caused this internal enemy to form in the first place. This is essentially what classical psychotherapy does. By getting back to the root of the problem, and releasing the emotion your demons were born to contain and protect you from, you can unplug these dark intruders from their power supply, and then they fade away.

I know how tempting it is to see this in black and white, battle of good versus evil terms and wants to just rip the heart out of these demons. And to a certain extent, that is perfectly healthy and in fact highly beneficial. Turning your latent rage on the real enemy, the enemy within, can be the solution for the problem of how to find the motivation to make the necessary changes in your life in order to be happy.

Rage is a great motivator. It can be just the energy source you need to fuel your recovery.

But like I have said, that only goes so far. You can battle your demons all you want, but at some point you are going to have to sit down and talk with them and listen to their concerns if you want to get anywhere.

So forget all my talk of assassins, tormentors, and other villains. Fight the battles you have to fight, the ones you have been putting off for far too long. Let those tensions resolve themselves.

But after the battle is over and the two sides have fought to exhaustion, try to make peace. Try to understand why the forces of self-destruction exist and how you can convince them that they are no longer needed.

Only then will you know true peace.

Notice how I starts off in the first person person then drifted to the second person infinitive?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.