This blgo entry will be somewhat hurried, as things have gotten slightly… complicated.

See, Joe is sick. Poor Joe. He has gotten one of those throat infections to which he is prone, and so has not been at work yesterday or today.

Silver lining : it does me that he’s available to hang out earlier than usual. Usually, he works till midnight, and so we (by which I mean tout la gang, Felicity included) only have a few hours to hang out on Tuesday night.

But sans work, Joe is free to hang out whenever Felicity is ready. Which is like… now.

So in order to not slow down the show, I am dashing off my blog entry in order to be ready for 7 o’clock.

One problem : I totally forgot to do laundry today. So, no clean pants. I will be forced to wear gym pants with suspenders for the evening. That seems like suitable penance.

Of course, if we decide to go out to eat, it’s a whole different story. No way would I be caught dead wearing that outside this apartment. I would have to do the “which of these is least dirty” dance (never pleasant) and go with that.

This is how sudden Febrezing happens. Not proud of it, but sometimes, exigencies demand.

Been sleeping a lot lately. Guess I am in one of those sleepy periods. Hardly a surprise after going a whole night without sleeping. My sleep cycle is all out of whack. It will take me a bit of time to get realigned.

It’s not an unhappy kind of sleep though. I am pretty cool with it so far. That’s how it usually is at first. When I get into these sleepy periods, I usually find it easy to handle for the first couple of days, but then I start to get really frustrated with it because I am missing time and want to be doing things and not just hibernating.

That’s when it starts to stress me out. And then is depresses me. This time, I think I will avoid that whole mess by just picking an arbitrary point where I just stop listening to the sleepiness and force myself to stay awake, using caffeine if necessary.

That way, I can sort out the actual organic need for sleep from the “just retreating from reality to press fast forward on life” kind of fake sleepiness, and get back some control over myself.

I have reached a period of being sick and tired of the usual bullshit in my stupid fucking life, and I am determined to put this discontent to good use.

Mood wise, I have been pretty good. Dunno if that is because of the increased Paxil dosage, or because I’ve turned the corner on my long term mood cycle, or what. I haven’t exactly been bouncing off the walls with joy (that’s for the manic depressives) but I have been feeling fairly good about life.

Psychologically, I feel like I have gotten in touch with a deep primal identity rage, the fundamental urge that screams “I AM ME!” into the void, and I am using that to counteract that overactive superego of mine.

It’s not something I have ever really connected with my life. I have always had a certain lack of self, which can be very handy sometimes when you want to get through life unbound by excessive ego demands. It definitely comes in handy when I want to understand others deeply, or when I want to be able to influence a situation towards a desired outcome even if it means seemingly not coming out on top.

My philosophy is, if I get what I want, I win. Other than that, I am fairly willing to let it seem like I have lost, because deep down, I know I didn’t, and I am laughing at the people who think otherwise.

But of course, this lack of self becomes incredibly toxic. In fact, I am not sure that the lack of self is not the primary cause of the depression. Somehow, it turns into the inability to maintain internal structure and external limits in one’s psyche, and leaves the depressive without a functional psychological immune system.

From there, decline is inevitable.

So connecting with this deep primal pre-rational self is incredibly important. It provides an injection of raw heat into the deathly chill of depression. A source for fighting back the darkness.

My new refrain is “KILL THE MACHINE”. It is primal rebellion, hot and hard and uninterested in being “reasonable”. I am going to destroy this overdeveloped superego of mine. Take it apart piece by piece until I can breathe free and grow strong.

The “being unrestrained by reasonableness” aspect is very important. The self needs what it needs and no amount of rational restraint is going to change that. Reason might modify the method, but the goals remain the same.

That… is not going to be easy for me. My parents trained me in this deceptive form of being “reasonable” (otherwise known as “having no needs of my own”) from a very early age. A lot of us latchkey kids of the 80’s got that message. Being a good kid meant going along with whatever our parents asked of us without complaint.

So the very idea of doing something I know is unreasonable and could not logically defend makes me feel quivery and weird inside. I am still learning the important of doing things just because I want to. Most of my life I simply do by default. I do it because it’s what I do. The idea of forming a wish for something then acting on it is still hard for me.

But the primal scream is there now. “Fuck you, I’m me!” it says. It is not afraid to do what it takes to make room for itself in this crazy old world. It will be hard for me, and I suspect I will go too far before I learn my limits, but this is the only road which leads to a stronger, healthier me.

And I will sacrifice a lot to get that.

I will also talk to you people again tomorrow.