I am addicted to something which could drive me crazy, and has in the past.

It’s isolation. My depression compels me to hole up in my room most of the time. I have talked with my therapist about it, how my anxious nature (usually well hidden) causes me to seek up hyper-familiarity and hence very low physical stimulation levels.

It’s a very poor solution. Better to be out there in the sun, learning to find the joy in life. I am positive that is the key to good mental health : being willing and able to find and experience all the great things life has to offer. That’s what happy people do. And because they do this, they can maintain a positive attitude. Life gives them all they to keep doing, and then some. They never lack primal force.

So far, for me, that has been out of reach. And so I live in my cave, where I can keep all my stimulation mental and thus keep myself calm and in control.

It always comes down to control, doesn’t it?

But because I wallow in continuity to such a deep degree, my world does not feel real to me, and I don’t feel like I am truly a part of it. The mind automatically tunes out repeated stimuli. That’s why you never notice the feel of your clothes except when you first put them on. And so my hyper-familiar little cave doesn’t feel like it’s real, my mind tunes it out.

And when the only place where you physically connect with the world no longer feels real, neither does the rest of the world. I feel like there is a shell of numbness around me at all times, a shell I made myself, but that is slowly killing me as it cuts me off from the real world.

It’s a little like sensory deprivation. Perhaps that is why I have so vivid an imagination.

I guess the mind needs physical stimulation in order to maintain its grip on reality. That’s probably a big part of why I feel so much better after I have been out on my own for a while. Suddenly, the world is real!

Because when the world is not real, it is not stable. You constantly feel vulnerable because you are constantly on the edge of unreality and it scares the hell out of you. You end up feeling like you are just barely holding on to the edge and that it would only take a little push to drop you into the screaming void of insanity.

This is probably not actually true. I could probably let go and be perfectly fine after a period of adjustment. I don’t have to go around holding my guts in with both hands. Nothing bad will happen if I let go.

But I can’t, or at least, I can’t do it all at once. I have to slowly and carefully climb down the cliff face to more solid ground. And I never know when the waves of depression will leave me stranded up the cliff again.

Life’s funny like that.

My true enemy is always the void. The void manifests itself in many ways, but it all comes back to my demon, a demon called Nothing. Nothing happening in my life, nothing to do for most of the day, nothing to show for 41 years of life on Earth, nothing happening in the world of sex and romance. Nothing ever changing. No physical stimulation, no wellspring of positivity, no reality, no hope.

I have wrapped myself in the void in order to stay safe. I am like a Thermos, with a layer of vacuum between me and the outside world, and no matter how warm it is out there, I stay frozen by the cold of outer space.

And I am so very cold inside. I am losing my coldness over time (guess my Thermos leaks), but there is still far too much nothing inside me. I look inside myself and feel this enormous aching lack, a cold dead space where life should be.

One cannot live on mind alone. No matter how much the mind resents it, I am alive and incarnate and part of the living world, even though I can’t feel it. The icy chill of intellectualism is all well and good, and enormously powerful if applied correctly, but the best it can hope for is to be half of a life.

The other half can only come from life lived in realtime, exposed, without the distance needed to maintain objectivity or think things through before you can react. Only then can you take what you need to survive from life, the vital primal deep nutrition that makes the whole mental machine run.

That’s where hope lies. That’s where starvation ends. That’s where depression dies, and with it, all the mental machinations that make up your too-small cage. You are your own victim, and the only way out of this cage is to stop needing it.

So day by day, I spill my guts upon this page and lose a little bit of my darkness and with it, my pain. The process seems endless, and yet I can definitely say that I am different, healthier person than I was a year ago, or even a month ago.

So progress might be slow, but writ large across time, it is powerful indeed.

And maybe, just maybe, as my void diminishes, my inner world becomes a warmer, safer, more solid, more welcoming place, and I feel more comfortable in my own skin.

This is my life. These are my variables. This is my starting point, my eternal beginning. I am free to go wherever I like from here, but my journey has to start where I am, not where I want to be.

Longing for things to be different is a waste of time and energy that could be better used making them different.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had my little talk with this VFS guy named Daniel today.

Called at three o’clock, and he picked up. There goes my theory that he was screening me. Apparently, he did not get back to me on Friday because he didn’t have my number and I hadn’t left it in any of the three voice mails I left.

Um… I am pretty sure most voice mail systems have an option where you can tell it to dial the person who left a message. Plus, it’s in their files, and Patrick has it too.

Guess he didn’t want to talk to me all that bad.

Anyhow, I got in touch with him, and I made my pitch. Told him all about my blogging 365,000 words a year, plus writing four novels, plus writing a million words in 11 months, and so on. I told him how talented I am (he snorted…. in retrospect, that was a dumb thing to say, oh well) and how it’s my disability that has kept me out of the loop and all that.

He was not too impressed. Turns out he is not actually in charge of admitting, though, so my pitch was sort of wasted on him. He’s the one who deals with the disabled people for VFS, and he pretty much just repeated the party line that without a recent education or job history it would be “very hard” for the people in admissions to have enough faith in my ability to complete the intensive one year program to admit me.

My sentences are often quite long. Not always, though.

I asked him “If the course is so intense, then what difference will it make if I take a few writing courses? It won’t me anything like the VFS course!”.

He was silent for around three seconds, then his brain reset and he said “Look, I don’t know how I can make this any clearer… ” and went on with the talking points.

That’s when I knew it would be pointless to torment the guy any further and it certainly wouldn’t help me get into VFS if I crushed him with my powerful logic muscles, so I just apologized for being difficult and told him I would be back in time for the September session with the educational requirements met.

I can’t say I am surprised, it was an extreme long shot to begin with. I don’t feel too bad about it this time because it didn’t really cost me anything this time and I didn’t get my hopes up too high.

Still, after I got off the phone, I had a pretty major stress/depression/post-freakout type reaction. But I didn’t pay it much attention. There is a great power in being able to recognize what is happening in your body and detach from it. I felt bad, but I knew it was just chemicals and simply waited for things to go back to normal.

And sure enough, about an hour and a half later, everything was calmed down. I still feel the residue of disappointment and depression it left behind, and it will take a while before I get that taste out of my mouth, but the crisis portion of the event is over, and now I am just recovering from it.

Stupid chemicals. Always wrecking my shit.

What bugs me, though, is that if I had just thought to include my number in the messages I left on Friday, I would have done a way, way better job of “pitching” myself. I was ready on Friday. All my energies were aligned, I had my mojo workin’, I had all my arguments primed and ready, and I was in the right frame of mind to turn my charm all the way up.

But that seems to be the pattern with me. Nothing ever happens when I am ready for it.

Instead, today was a day where I slept really badly, spending a lot of time unable to wake up or go to sleep fully, and when I made the phone call, I was feeling very burnt out and fragmented and null.

So I was not exactly my brightest and warmest and most charming when I made that call. Instead, I am pretty sure I came across as pedantic and whiny.

Not that it really matters… I wasn’t talking to the decision-maker anyhow.

And I suspect I never will. I am sure that I have been marked ‘difficult’ somewhere, either in their files or just by word of mouth. So I somehow doubt I will get a chance to pitch myself to them in person, on the phone, or even by email.

I would love to do it in person. Then my charm and power of personality could really kick in. I am not above getting people to do what I want them to do by power of personality. Sometimes you get get what you want simply by leaving a powerful positive impression on people, getting them to both like and respect you, and therefore happy to do what you want.

Because you are now their alpha.

That is pretty much the secret of why some people waltz through life with apparent ease. The classic example would be very good-looking people. Their beauty has such a strong effect on people that it makes said people want to do what the beautiful person wants them to do purely to make the beautiful person happy.

It also happens with people who have very strong personalities, for the same reason.

I would even go so far as to say that these factors actually make someone more “real” than others. Because these people stick out from the background, they rise above the noise of everyday life, and we have strong instincts to obey people like that.

I think I have been that sort of person all my life without knowing it, and it is high time I put it to good use.

I have hidden my power away from the world for too long.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.