And what would it mean if I was?

Those of you who only know me through my online persona might find the question baffling, or even amusing. Online, I am perky and funny and friendly to everyone. Me, antisocial?

But those who know the real me might at least get a glimmer of what I am talking about. In real life, I am a semi-recluse (or as I like to say, an “urban hermit”) who doesn’t exactly go out and paint the town red.

In fact, I barely paint one room light pink, and that’s only on New Year’s.

And it is easy to simply write it all off as agoraphobia and/or social anxiety and/or depression. (Complicated, but easy.) But as I ride that long dark road to recovery, I am beginning to wonder how much of that is, well…. me!

Maybe I am just not that friendly a fellow in the real world. The Internet is great for someone with the kind of social anxiety I have because it reduces the social stimulation down to pretty much its theoretical minimum. Talking in text, and through the mask of a persona that I created myself, reduces interaction intensity to the very low level that I can manage.

So I can be very friendly and silly and funny in that extremely low stimulation level environment. Mostly mental, takes place in the imagination (more or less), don’t have to be my real self and thus self-loathing is neatly dodged. It’s ideal.

And terrible, because it means I don’t have to learn to deal with reality.

My anxiety is so strong that it is very hard to me to figure out who I would be without it. I can’t see through it. It’s like this hyper dense magnetic field that distorts everything, even light, and makes my world blurry and unfocused.

Yeah, I know. My metaphors are weird.

But I am fairly sure that, if it all went away and my brain chemicals were normal and I could begin to think like a normal person, I would still not exactly be super outgoing or interested in “partying”.

Don’t get me wrong. I have been to parties and quite enjoyed myself, especially after drinking enough to keep the social anxiety at bay. I don’t have anything against parties or party attendance or people who love parties.

But to me, “partying” will always consist of finding someplace comfortable to sit and talking with people. Party animal I am not. And I am not very interested in small talk. I do it when necessary, and I grasp why it exists, but I am the sort of person who prefers to get right to the point without any unnecessary detours, so speaking of banal and inconsequential things bores me.

That is not exactly a pro-social sentiment.

See, the reason I have the terms pro-social and antisocial (that’s just how they are spelled, folks) burned deep into my mind is that I grew up in the era of pro-social kids’ cartoons.

In the late Seventies, moral crusaders managed to convince the FCC and the networks that the previous kind of cartoons taught all the wrong lessons, and cartoons and other children’s programming had to be “pro-social” as a result.

Usually, this was done by making the cartoons somewhat preachy, and led to the proliferation of “lesson” shows, where every episode had a moral lesson to teach.

Luckily, for most of it, I was too young to find that really fucking annoying. In fact, for most of that period, I found all those lessons soothing and in some cases even instructive. I came to expect them, and I can only assume that if I had come across something without an implicit moral, I would have been confused and possibly even angry.

In short, I was thoroughly indoctrinated.

In essence, these lessons boiled down to five main lessons, listed here in order of use.

1. Cooperation. It is always better to cooperate with others and do things together than to go it alone or fight with others. This is still, to me, a core lesson of what it is to be a human being. Cooperation is our strongest advantage.

2. Tolerance. This was most often formulated as “it’s okay to be different”. Another basic lesson of humanity, made more important with every increase in diversity.

3. Friendship. For some reason, they felt the need to keep telling us how awesome friendship was. I am pretty sure that you either know this firsthand or resent having it rubbed in your face.

4. Forethought. Think before you act. Don’t act purely on emotion. Use your head!

5. Safety. Don’t do dangerous things. Often connected to the previous lesson. My gosh, did I get a lot of safety lessons as a kid. I can’t entirely dismiss the idea that this made me the anxious adult I am now.

At the same time as I was having my mind marinated in universally acceptable moral lessons, the word “antisocial” became attached to the bad sort of person. Good people were pro-social. Cooperation and tolerance and so on. Bad people did bad things that hurt other people and made it hard to get along with one another.

So to me, to be antisocial is to be a bad person. But that’s a problem for someone like me. The whole vibe of the pro-social movement was not kind to introverts. And while you would think the whole “it’s okay to be different” message would be comforting to an oddball outcast like I was, but reality just didn’t match. As for forethought and safety, those came naturally to me.

I was never the kind of kid who did stupid stuff and got hurt.

As for cooperation, well, I was willing. The world was not.

And yet still, I would hate to be seen as antisocial. Part of me, I suspect, is still trying its hardest to live up to those excellent ideals instilled in me as a kid, and the fact that I don’t seem to be able to do it makes me feel like I am a bad person. An antisocial person.

Maybe I needed more episodes with the lesson “it’s okay to keep to yourself sometimes, too. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling better today.

The sunshine helps, I think. It boosts my mood. So does moving around more. It’s hard to convince myself that motion will make me fill better despite all the times it totally has, but that’s the depression talking.

And I don’t listen to that whiny bitch any more. Never tells me anything good anyway. It can shut the fuck up permanently.

I would stick its head under water and laugh at the bubble till it died if I knew how.

Therapy was good. I told my therapist about how depressed I have been lately, and why. The stuff I covered on Wednesday. Told him how writing it out helped, too.

Once more, thank you.

He was pretty appalled when I told him about how I had to shop for my own clothes. It really is appalling when you think about it. A lot of my childhood is appalling.

I made the “mistake” of saying that I thought some people had far worse parents than I. I have met a lot of people online with whom I would not swap. Parents that beat them, screamed insanity at them, belittled them, did everything they could to make sure their kid never thought, even for a second, that they were valued or loved.

But therapists do not like that kind of quantitative comparison. They hate to hear their patients say someone else had a worse childhood than themselves. To them, it sounds like you are minimizing your own pain.

And they are not wrong.

He also made the point that in some ways, neglect is worse than outright abuse. I’ve said as much here. Abuse at least gives you a relationship and an enemy. The person beating you is the Devil. You’ll kill them or get out or both. But when you are emotionally neglected like I was, there is no clear enemy.

My parents did fine on the basic level of parenting. I never went hungry. I had a birthday party every year. I got a winter jacket and boots when I needed them. Ditto school supplies.

And of course, my parents never told me they didn’t care about me, didn’t think I was worth anything, and wished I had never been born. To this day, I am sure they would deny ever even thinking those thoughts.

And I’d believe them.

But the thing is, it doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is how you act, and from a very early age, I was given the distinct impression that I was, at best, an afterthought.

I told my therapist that all my life, I have felt cared about, but not cared for. Caring about someone in a passive kind of way requires very little effort and absolutely no commitment.

The example I used was telling a friend that you had to move this weekend, and them saying “That sucks. Good luck with that. ”

They have definitely established that they care about you enough to be sad that you are doing to have to do something which sucks. But they are also not going to exert the tiniest bit of effort to actually help.

That is how it has been for me for my entire life. Teachers, parents, eve siblings sometimes. Everyone went on record as caring, but absolutely none of them were inclined to go even slightly out of their way to help me.

Couple that with the way my parents told me, both in words and in attitude, that I was never ever allowed to ask for anything, including help, and I was one abandoned kid.

But not in any ways that show, of course. Real abuse leaves no evidence.

So all through my childhood, I was terribly alone. Nobody was there for me. I had nobody I could rely on, nobody who had my back, nobody who was willing to do a damned thing to help the weird little fat kid.

You would think I would be able to go to my teachers, but nope. Their response was always the Platonic ideal of caring about but not caring for. They were technically sympathetic to my plight, but they made it clear they were not going to do anything about it. They just wanted me to go away.

That’s why I eventually gave up trying. It was really hard for me to ask for help in the first place with how my family had raised me. Having my head messed up by getting an answer that seemed sympathetic but didn’t actually help was too much.

I mean, what a trip to lay on a kid, right? From where I sit now, it was clear that they didn’t want to help me, but when I was elementary school age, I didn’t understand that. So I would go away from those encounters feeling like I had gotten what I wanted, but also knowing that I hadn’t, really.

Eventually, my cynicism caught up.

Looking back, I am amazed that I didn’t end up being a very bitter, angry, and possibly even dangerous person. I suppose the lack of a clear enemy helped with that. I had no idea I was being neglected as a kid.

However you are raised is normal to you.

It took a lot of years of adulthood for me to be able to articulate and understand what was wrong with my childhood. All the sort of surface things a kid could understand were there. I wasn’t beaten or verbally abused. I lived a normal middle class life. I had a roof overhead and food on the table and a place to lay my head.

I would not have been able to understand, let alone articulate, what was different about my childhood. And even if I had been able to do it, I probably would have blamed myself for it, like I did with everything else.

After all, I was the weird little fat kid who was way too smart for his own good. That meant there was something wrong with me, something that meant I would never fit in or be accepted.

Of course it was all my fault.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I question everything.

And Western culture says “Good! You should!”.

But you shouldn’t. You really, really shouldn’t.

Because that kind of questioning destroys faith and annihilates the possibility of feeling safe. If you question everything, absolutely everything, then there is no solid ground to stand on, no safe haven in the storm of life, no quiet place to lay your head and go to sleep.

It makes you afraid to truly believe anything at all. Even things you should believe in. You end up associating solid belief with being trapped or exposed (or both) and so the mind keeps moving, moving, moving and you can never truly rest.

People require faith. Why? Because their knowledge is finite. Faith covers the gaps. It doesn’t have to be faith in any deity, entity, or spirituality, but it has to be something.

That whole Socratic “know that you know nothing” thing can kill you if you take it too far. The human mind cannot withstand a true understanding of how little it knows versus all it does not without some kind of counterbalancing force.

Faith also drives motivation. Motivation hinges on belief that action leads to happiness, and there is only so rational such a belief can be. There has to be a solid core of belief that remains immune to the degradation of the intellect in order to keep things moving forward. Lack of such a core renders the individual wretchedly inert.

And what is the use of questions that keep you from “error” if they also leave you helpless and depressed? It’s easy to avoid life’s potholes if you aren’t moving.

The unexamined life might not be worth living, but to me, it’s 50/50 whether or not it’s happier.

Maybe it is worth it to make more stupid mistakes if it closes the gaping screaming gibbering hole in your soul. Maybe you need faith of some kind in order to make it over life’s potholes instead of getting stuck in them.

Maybe reason can give you directions, but only faith, at least in oneself, can give you horsepower.

That’s the trick, though, isn’t it? Faith in oneself. The questioning mind denies the possibility of faith and therefore requires proof before it believes in something.

But what proof can there be in a faithless person who finds themselves in the dank dark cage of depression? The illness itself makes it hard to be good enough to oneself to encourage any kind of belief in oneself. In general, it makes you treat yourself quite badly in many ways, and is therefore anathema to the sort of self-trust that leads to faith in oneself.

I mean, who could trust a person who treats you so badly?

Others find their faith externally. Faith in God, Allah, Yahweh, the Buddha, Ganesha, and so on fills all those nasty gaps in one’s spirit and allows a feeling of wholeness that will never be found in the land of universal questioning.

Even those who have abandoned the faith of their youth retain it within them. They simply disconnected it from the dogma that was needlessly attached to it by a religious organization with its own agenda.

The source is gone, but the shape of their faith, which is the shape of their gaps, remains, holding everything together.

And for them, questioning is liberating. For them, it is safe, because deep down they know that the important part of their faith remains and their questions can only free them of stifling dogma.

They don’t even have to keep believing in God.

And when you think of it, ruthless atheism requires faith as well. Specifically, faith that you can rip out all your false beliefs without mercy or consideration and just get by on whatever’s left.

That’s like thinking you can rip out all the parts of your car that you don’t like and get to work with whatever’s left.

In fact, Western nontheistic thought has an enormous blind spot when it comes to spiritual/emotional health. The underlying assumption is that if the soul doesn’t exist, neither does the spirit and therefore one can simply ignore the consequences of a headlong and heedless pursuit of the truth.

You know, because we are all rugged intellectuals who are too macho to admit some questions can hurt us.

And that is how I have lived my life. I have taken great pride in my ability to go right to the heart of the truth no matter what. In many ways, I see things more clearly than most people. I have developed and honed those perceptions over a lifetime, and in that way, my mind grows stronger constantly.

I learn. I think. I grow. I improve.

But what use is all that if there is no faith to propel me? The best engine in the world is useless without fuel. And the nourishment the soul needs cannot be found in the cold and barren world of questioning and smothered emotions.

So a lot of intellectual compatriots of mine are stuck in the same kind of dead end that I am. They only trust that which can be verified by reason, and to be frank, that is just plain not enough.

It’s like trying to live without eating. No matter what your philosophical objections to food are, you will starve without it. Even if you had a very experience with food and have every reason to mistrust it. Even if you now hate the food of your youth because it was forced down your throat and turned out to be not nearly as nutritious as you were told.

Even if all that uis true, you still have to go find food you like, or you will die.

Well a lot of us are dying inside from lack of spiritual food, and what’s more, a lot of those people refuse to even accept the idea that food might help, or even that food is a real thing that people actually need.

In many ways, faithlessness is as massively ignorant as any religious doctrine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry, no Interview with a Supervillain today. I am not happy with how the first part turned out, so I am going to give myself some time to regroup and rethink.

Basically, I feel like I got bogged down in backstory yesterday. I had not planned on going into such depth when explaining his early days, but the more I wrote, the more of it there was to write.

I guess I need to have a better sense of how long X amount of story will be and plan accordingly. I wanted to explain his origin and to get there, I felt I needed a backstory. But I didn’t expect his street gang leader days to take up the entire first part.

Ah well, to write is to learn. Perhaps I will take a crack at summarizing part 1 at the beginning of part 2, and if I can do that well enough, part 1 will become entirely unnecessary. Then SNIP.

Here in the world of nonfiction, things are going okay, I suppose. Still trying to figure out how to keep myself moving. The lesson of last Thursday, when I expended an enormous amount of creative energy and felt great, is still lingering in my mind. There must be a way to maintain that kind of energy output in a meaningful way. It would go a long way to reducing my stress level. You can’t hoard energy and all that.

A lot of depression’s sheer agony might well be the result of trapped energy. On a purely chemical level, it can’t be good to eat a lot of calories without spending most of them.

It’s increasingly clear to me that depression’s sense of lack of motivation/energy/willpower is an illusion, like so many others that depression creates in order to maintain itself.

When you think about it, feeling like you have no energy because of depression makes no sense. Depression is an illness of the mind. Bodily energy is contained in the body. There is no way that depression can actually destroy bodily energy. We depressives would, in one way, be better off if it could.

Instead, depression acts like friction. It resists movement. It blocks the path between intention and action. The energy is there. The desire is there. But depression gets in the way.

It does this, at least in part, by making you numb. Imagine trying to get up and walk around too soon after coming out of general anesthetic. Your body would feel very heavy and you would not achieve your goal.

That’s what depression is like. Only it doesn’t wear off.

So your bodily energy is trapped behind a barrier of psychic self-anesthetic. It’s there, and is trying hard to get expressed, but the depression is blocking it.

And the depressive person is caught in between. The pressure build up against the dam and there is no release. Hence, the ability of depression to make you feel like you are being squeezed between two heavy stones, or like you are ready to explode.

The conflict expresses itself in different ways.

The only solution is release, and that requires deprogramming yourself. You have to defy your depression and all its lies and do things your depression doesn’t want you to do. And you have to do this knowing that, at least at first, your depression will dig in its heels and scream and cry and do everything it can to stop you.

Still working on that one. Luckily, I am a naturally extremely stubborn person, so I have a deep well of bloody-minded resolve to call on in times like this.

Fuck you, depression. I am a rock, and you are nothing but noise and shadows. I don’t have to play your game.

So every day and in every way, I grind away at that stupid fucking dam. Progress is not linear in any reasonable timeframe. But the trend bends towards victory.

I often find myself thinking about opening up. There is so much pain and suffering in the world due to people keeping things bottled up inside themselves and then ended up trapped in a negative cycle by becoming addicted to the one thing that lets the pressure out for them.

Rage is the most obvious of the deadly releases. I know that one from my father. The pressure builds with no sane method od release, then comes out in a torrent of anger and accusation and martyrdom.

I used to have that problem myself. I would seem fine on the outside for a while then some tiny thing would set me off and suddenly I was a tower of anger, recrimination, feelings of abandonment, and lots and lots of tears.

Luckily for me, and the world I suppose, I realized what was happening and shut that shit down.

But perhaps I paid too high a price. It’s not like I learned to express my anger in a more helpful and constructive way. I just stopped expressing it entirely.

That is probably not good. At all.

Perhaps my life would have been better with the occasional meltdowns. It would have put a bit of a strain on those around me ever now and then, but at least it would have been an outlet.

Maybe the occasional flood is good for the land. I don’t know.

Then again, that’s probably how my father probably got started. Granted, his father was a sociopathic demon from hell’s worst neighborhood, so presumably his level of unexpressed rage makes mine seem like mild annoyance, but still.

Taking it out on your family is just plain wrong. Verbal abuse is still abuse. Adult don’t get to have temper tantrums.

And what strikes me most is the massive blind spot abusers have to build in order to justify their actions. They’re like an addict in that sense, I suppose. The addiction rules all, and anything which challenges it will be fought tooth and nail.

Because if the addict could see their addiction as others do, they might stop getting their fix.

And that absolutely cannot be allowed to happen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling decently good lately. Not as fun as indecently good, but it’s a lot less work.

Got some things done that had been hanging over my head for way too long. Like, for instance, cleaning the massive accumulation of 2L pop bottles that was taking over all our counter space.

All mine, of course. You have to rinse them out, or the recycling place won’t take them. Or at the very least, they will get really cranky with you. I can’t imagine it’s a fun job, so I can see why they would be cranky people.

And it would be much simpler if I just rinsed the damned things out the moment they are empty. But so far, I have not been able to instill this new habit into myself. So they build up.

Must have been at least fifty of the darn things. I drink around 7 of the things a week, so it builds up quick.

Yeah, I know, I have a habit. But it’s a harmless one. And God knows, you have to have a little satisfaction in life.

And it’s not like its a particularly heinous job. Add a little warm water, swish it around, dump it out, you’re done. I put some tunes on, took my snazzy Bluetooth external speaker with my to the kitchen, and got to work.

Twenty minutes later and I was done, and I could cross that off my list of things to do. That felt good. In fact, it felt extra good, because I really didn’t feel like doing it.

It took a real act of will to overcome my own laziness and get started. It would have been so much easier to do what I wanted to do at that time, which was to go take a nap.

But I had gone to the trouble of doing my blogging in the afternoon so there would be no chance of a “lack of time” excuse. And whether or not I feel like doing something has almost no relation to whether or not I will enjoy doing it.

Things are almost never as bad as my pouty, spoiled inner child would have me believe. Once you stop fighting yourself, you find most of the badness goes away. Stop kicking and screaming and get on with it, you will be a lot happier.

My sleep life has been more disturbed lately. No specific dreams remembered for me to transcribe (you’re welcome). But I have the very distinct feeling that things have been more stormy than usual in this haunted head of mine.

I am evicting ghosts as fast as I can. But it takes time.

Right now, I am pretty sleepy. This makes no sense, as I have had tons of sleep. But my body wants more, or at least, things it does. This is not the first times this has happened, but it’s probably the first time it’s happened in a while.

Maybe I have more dreaming to do. My dreams, they want me.

And sometimes, that really scares me. I don’t know if anyone else fears their dream world like I do. Probably they don’t even think about their dream life much. Sometimes they remember a dream and think “Well, that was weird!”. Maybe they tell a friend about it, maybe not. But it’s not something that has a huge effect on their life.

But when I get into this mental space, it feels like my dreams want to swallow me alive and never let go. Like they are exterting a terrible gravity over me. And it would be so easy to let go of my perch and let it take me back to the center.

But I have things to do.

After I am done blogging, I will still have a video to make. And then there;s supper, then this month’s BCSFA party. Then hanging out with Le Gang.

Really wish I had soem diet cola right about now. I could use some artificial energy.

Geez, I’m too mentally drained to even think of deep angsty stuff to overanalyze. I want more sleep, fucker. I’m not done yet.

Oh well. When I am done tippity tappity typing up this here blog entry, I will lay down for a bit. Hopefully I won’t fall asleep and sleep so long that I don’t have time to do a video before leaving for the evening’s adventures.

Then again, if that happens, I could just take video of tonight’s meeting and make that tonight’s video after some editing. You know, as a last ditch plan.

Hmmm. Last ditch. I bet that one comes from World War I. It would be the last moment when you can “ditch”, which back then meant getting out of your plane alive via parachuting.

On the other hand, it could have something to do with actual ditches. That’s the problem with this kind of “folk etymology”. It’s not hard to come up with a plausible sounding theory that people will readily accept and believe, even though it’s based on nothing but an intelligent guess.

Instead of, you know, facts and evidence and research and all that unsexy, unfun stuff.

Listened to a podcast about storytelling from an evolutionary point of view. What is the Darwinian advantage of storytelling? Why do we love stories so much?

Nonfiction is easy. It shares information. The tribe that shared knowledge this way has a huge advantage over ones that kept everything to themselves.

But that is less storytelling and more like education. What of fiction?

Here’s the problem with that question : fiction is a recent invention. For most of human history, there was no such thing as fiction because people had a far more flexible idea of reality.

If someone arrives in your village and tells tales of strange people and heroic deeds in some far off land, you have no reason to think they are lying, and if it’s a good story, you have an incentive to believe it.

And believing it does you no harm and makes the world seem like a more exciting sense, so why not believe?

And thus it is with all media.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.