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.