And I’m not talking about the kind of present you get on Xmas morning.

I have been thinking about my relationship with time again lately, and how much I envy those with a very different one.

I am talking about the kind of people who don’t reflect on things. The people who just keep going forward and never look back. The people who learn from their mistakes without dwelling on them, and who can face the future boldly and without fear.

People who can live in the here and now.

That is, roughly, the exact opposite of me. I am always enveloped in the zone where overlearned lessons from the past meets unrealistic worries about the future overlap without ever truly being in the present.

It’s a non stop time warp.

I have talked before about why. Thinking types like myself need time to think things through and therefore hate situations where we have to make split-second decisions based on gut instinct.

Instinct is not our forte.

But I think this also connects with my thoughts about control. If you are always desperately trying to control outcomes, then you have to have time to think out a plan and use it to take control.

If, like me, your desire to control outcomes comes from a deep down mistrust of the universe, then the easy confidence of people who have faith in their own ability to cope with whatever life brings is not available to you.

On no level do you think everything will turn out for the best. Not without someone making sure it does, and seeing as you don’t trust anyone, that person has to be you.

Thus, the controlling person. It is a personality type which can lead to extraordinary power and success in the world when married to sufficient intelligence and drive. But it can create a serious problem.

Let’s call this problem the Micromanagement Paradox. The inability to believe that anything can be safe or good without you being in control of everything can lead to an inability to leave well enough alone. The individual in question becomes addicted to the feeling of control, the little spark of satisfaction that comes from making something “better”, and therefore constantly monitors, adjusts, nitpicks, and fiddles with things.

The result is that they very often end up breaking the system they worked so hard to build. The nervous, self-soothing habit of “adjusting” things ends up costing them the very thing they are trying to achieve.

This is especially true if some of the things they are trying to control are people.

But back to the subject.

This inability to live in the moment is very destructive. The very paranoia that fuels it is extremely draining. And the present moment is, in a very real sense, where we all live.

It is always now. Like the bumper sticker says, yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery, might as well live for today. If you can’t even relax and enjoy the moment while it lasts, then what is the point of all that control? You will never achieve a sense of safety that way.

You can only feel safe by relaxing your desire to control and to do that, you have to trust that things can work out fine without you having to control them.

Or at least, control them as much.

We return to my analogy of the police state. To the police state, the only way their citizens can be safe is if they are tightly controlled. If anything goes wrong, there is only one solution : tighter control.

So it is with the controlling kind of person. And remember, whether or not you are a controlling person has nothing to do with how much success you have had in your life.

In fact, your lack of success in life could be because you are too controlling. Instead of going out into situations you can’t control, you stay at home and do something you CAN control, and thus, can trust.

Like, say, writing a blog.

The prospect of living in the present terrifies me, and that is because of the implied lack of control. How can I trust that I will be okay if I am not constantly thinking about what comes next? Surely, the moment my guard is down, something terrible will happens and it will be all my fault.

Like I said before, it’s a superstition. A compulsion.

And it is impossible to feel safe when, deep down, you don’t even believe safety exists. You could be a billionaire surrounded by layer upon layer of the best security conceivable, crouched in a secret safe room that only you know exists, and you still would not feel safe because something always could go wrong.

So how does one overcome this repressive regime? How do you convince a rabid police state that they would have fewer rebellions if there were fewer rules and less control.

Because remember, this system does achieve its primary goal : safety. It is a rotten and miserable kind of safety, one that is arguably worse than anything that could happen without it, but it does deliver it.

So in order to overcome that system, you have to change priorities. Safety cannot be the primary goal of anyone’s life. Realistically speaking, it’s fairly easily achieved. Your rampant neuroses might tell you differently, but the truth of it is, you are likely quite safe and whatever enemy you are guarding against lost interest a long time ago, or never existed in the first place. And all that is keeping your oppressive regime going is its inability to recognize when its job is done.

Like those science fiction stories where people are living underground in a crushingly totalitarian society because the surface is radioactive from nuclear war. And then it turns out the radioactivity died out decades ago, and the powers that be suppressed the information because it was a threat to “stability”, in other words, their power.

The secret is to just open the door, take a deep breath, and realize you were free all along.

Then, figure out how to deal with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, that’s it. I have no reason to keep the silence any more. So now, I can explain what’s been going on.

You all know that I signed up for Stand Up For Mental Health a while back, and in early May, the class started.

It’s basically a program where people with mental health issues learn to do standup comedy as a way of dealing with their issues in a way that turns the bad things into good comedy.

I am a lifelong comedy nerd with mental health issues, and this seemed like the place for me.

All went well until the last class I attended, which was on June 2. In that class, the star of our story and the man behind Stand Up For Mental Health, David Granirer, didn’t quite keep people to schedule as he should, and so despite there being 11 people in class that day, we spent the first two (of three) hours on around three or four of them.

As a result, the last hour had to cover the remaining seven of us, and that made things just a wee bit rushed. The previous class, I had barely gotten to say anything at all, and then to be rushed (which always makes me terribly anxious) through no fault of my own, made me fairly upset.

And Felicity was disappointed as well.

So Felicity, in a long post to Facebook, expressed her disappointment with how things went. Her language was very mild, she named absolutely no names, and she assigned no blame.

I replied to that post in language that was a tad more…. direct.

In response, one of the other people in the course, whom I will call C, launched a very personal attack against Felicity, insulting her comedy and acting like she had just shot the Pope. At every turn, Felicity tried to de-escalate the issue, but C kept on attacking even after Felicity had clearly said ‘uncle’. She accused Felicity of taking her (C’s) turn, which was patently false, and

This was bad. It really hurt Felicity and made her very depressed. We talked about it that evening. She was crushed.

We had been told in our orientation that if we had a conflict with another student, we were to take it to David and he would deal with it. So that is what Felicity did.

It’s a sound and sensible policy, providing certain conditions are met.

But the next thing Felicity know is that people are mad at us for talking about the class in public, thus violating a rule that I am not sure we were ever told. The offense against Felicity was forgotten, and we were the ones in trouble.

Now I was really angry. So I emailed David about the whole situation and was quite blunt with him.

This goes back a few times, then I find out that he has decided it would be “best for everybody” if he transferred us to the next iteration of the program, which would start next January.

In effect, we were being kicked out of the course because he thought some people were “uncomfortable” with us there and and it would be “best” if we just never showed up again.

All for the crime of not knowing that we were not supposed to talk about the course on Facebook (something other students have surely done in the past without getting kicked out).

Needless to say, this made me extremely angry and I emailed David to that effect. I told him that he was betraying Felicity and I, two people with serious mental health, because it was easier to throw out the two big fat nerds than to actually deal with the problem.

I told him he was no liberal. In fact, he was handling the situation no better than any Fox News fan.

I stand by those words.

He was away for a while, so the next move didn’t take place till last Sunday. I got an email from David saying he wanted to talk to me on the phone. I emailed back saying (not for the first time) that the phone made me very anxious and I would prefer to keep it in email.

He emailed back and insisted that it had to be done over the phone. Three guesses as to why, and the first two are “because he was exploiting a known psychological weakness of mine for personal advantage. ”

I emailed back to say “Fine!” and named a timeframe.

He wanted to talk about what would go down today. Today was our last shot at pleading our case. We had agreed to apologize to the class for this whole ordeal, and Felicity and I fully planned to do this.

On the phone, I assured him that I was not planning to launch into an angry diatribe and that I was going to show up purely to apologize and nothing more.

This was true. That is all I had planned to do. Of course, someone of my skills can apologize in a way that nevertheless makes the truth of the situation crystal clear, but it is true I wanted only to apologize.

And that is how the conversation might have ended, had David not then asked about the things I had said in my email. I told him I still believed all those things to be true. He became agitated, and told me that I would not be welcome at today’s class. I told him I would be there anyhow, in the parking lot, waiting for Felicity in her car. . He said no, not even that.

What was he afraid of? That I would attack the class with my mind powers?

Then he hung up on me (so manly) and frantically called Felicity, saying that if she brought me there at all, he wouldn’t let her apologize to the class.

Even if all I did was sit in the car and wait.

Felicity says he sounded rattled and stressed out. Good.

So what went down today was that Felicity and I had lunch at the Denny’s nearest to the course, she went and apologized to the class while I waited in Denny’s, and then she came back, told me how it went, then we went home.

And what do you know…. most of the class didn’t have any problem with her at all.

So basically, Felicity and I got bullied by David. C presumably emailed him about how horrible we were and she’s a crazy person with Borderline Personality Disorder so presumably, she’s pretty scary, and as a result, he took it out on us when all we had done was unwittingly and with absolutely no malice break the rule about public posting on Facebook.

Clearly, this was all about him, not the group. He kicked us out because he couldn’t admit that he had mishandled the situation entirely so he decided to just make us go away.

But I don’t go away until I am done.

And I am far from done.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In order to overcome yourself, you must go under, Nietzsche said.

That’s how I feel lately. Like I am struggling to overcome myself and become more mature, stable, and strong, but the only way to do that is to keep delving deep into myself and bringing up big pieces of internal gunk, and letting them dry in the sun.

This means I am always going down to where it is dark and cold and hostile to life. Perhaps that’s all cyclical depression is, when you get down to it. Your mind trying to heal itself. And your instinct is to fight the process, because it keeps taking you to a terrible and painful place.

Which is ironic, because your best strategy is actually to simply stop fighting your own redemption. Go limp and let it happen.

And stop picking at the wounds, which I suppose is what I do here.

It all boils down to that deep, deep mistrust of life, the universe, and everything. It is that mistrust which makes people controlling. You don’t trust the universe and feel like it is waiting for an opportunity to crush you, so the only things you can trust are things you can control and thus make sure never hurt you.

This might well result in the archetypal Type-A controlling personality. But it can also go in the opposite direction and create a person who has no faith in their ability to exert control over their life the way a Type-A does, and instead tried to retreat as deeply as possibly into things they can control.

This retreat can be extremely self-destructive, but it serves its purpose of filling the person’s mind with safe things and blotting out the rest of harsh, cold, treacherous reality. In that way, our “flight” response turns inward in order to find its desired “safe” state, when it can deactivate.

But they never quite get there, those people. It never fully deactivates. They never feel fully safe. The persistent feeling that the universe is out to get them prevents this.

In this delusional structure, the rule is “never let your guard down”. Because that’s when they GET you. To support this structure, all negative events are interpreted as personal failures of some sort. That way, the perception of being in control, in this case in the form of being able to prevent the negative experience from happening again, is preserved, but at a terrible cost to the self-worth of the individual.

The result is not unlike a police state : no matter what happens, the response is to tighten security and increase vigilance. Clearly, the problem is that we have too lenient. Defenses have been allowed to go slack. We must be yet harsher.

The idea that it is the vigilance and harshness that is causing the problem simply does not compute. It might be recognized as potentially true in the abstract, but the entire foundation of the individual’s psyche says the opposite, and that is not an easy setting to change.

There are the things we think, and the things we feel, and then there are the deep down superstitions that keep us from being whole. The idea that the moment you let you guard down, the universe will GET you is one of those superstitions.

I call it a superstition because it is clearly not rationally supportable. The concept that the universe has any sort of attitude or intentions towards you is an unsupportable anthropomorphization. The universe is not a living entity, and therefore can’t have any more of an opinion about you than a rock does.

Humans, being such a social species, tend to see intention and agency everywhere. But the truth is, the universe just plain doesn’t give a shit about you.

Not because it chooses not to. Because it never could.

Because this deep suspicion of the universe is not rational or logical, in theory, one could simply tell oneself it isn’t true, and free yourself from it.

If you were a robot. But we are human beings, and superstitions operate on a level considerably below the rational. Not only that, but the truly deep and dangerous ones distort the psyche to the point where it will at least feel like if they are altered in any way, everything will fall apart.

And perhaps that is at least partially true. If superstition is all that keeps some mental structures intact, removal of that superstition would cause those structures to fall apart.

But here’s the thing : those are the structures that are killing you. Them collapsing might well be the best thing that could ever happen to you. It could be the one thing that lets you finally relax enough to fully deactivate your adrenalized state, and that in turn means your body can go out of defense mode, where anxiety, anger, and terror are never very far away and the body slows down healing processes in order to have all its resources at the ready at all times.

And that would be when the true healing begins.

Perhaps the secret to doing that is to simply repeat “I am safe” to yourself until it feels true.

Of course, first, you have to feel it’s safe to do so….

I know in my own case, I never feel totally safe. As I type, I am as safe as any modern person can be. By all rational assessments, I am in absolutely no danger of any sort, not even emotional. The worse thing that could happen is that I read a news story that is sort of sad.

But deep, deep down, I am still that scared little animal that somehow never reaches home. The panic never ends.

The best I can hope for is to keep it down to a single brightly burning ember. That’s where it is now.

But that ember never goes out.

I am safe, I am safe, I am safe, I am safe.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m feeling haunted today.

All this goddamned noise in my head from all the crazy shit I have swirling around in there. Ghosts, banshees, pltergeists, and revenants, all running around and screaming like the kids in a 60’s cartoon.

Were kids really that horrible back then? If so, then…. what the fuck, man.

I remember being taken to (dropped off at?) a few kiddie matinees when I was a wee tot. They were bedlam. Kids running around screaming, throwing their popcorn and soda all over the place, nobody but me paying attention to the movie. The noise level was such that it made it hard to hear the movie. It was total chaos.

I would sit in the front row all by myself, hunched down like a zoo animal hearing a big truck going by. I was in the front row so that I wouldn’t be surrounded on all sides by the madness, and I would just stare fixedly ahead at the screen until the madness was over and Emery, the owner-operator of the theater, would open the door into blessed summer sunshine, and I would be let loose from Pandemonium.

Come to think of it, even to this very day, I feel a sense of great relief when the movie theater door is opened. Granted, that doesn’t necessarily happen at your local EverythingPlex any more, but when it does, I feel like I just got out of jail, and that’s true no matter how much I loved the movie.

Fast forward to my days in elementary school, and I have more or less the same reaction to the chaos around me on the playground. So much noise, so much chaos. I would find someplace at least somewhat quiet, and stay there a lot of the time.

I was terribly shy as well, so even when I wasn’t being bullied, I was too timid to do a lot of things. Even getting up on the monkey bars so I could go hand-over-hand across the part that was like a horizontal ladder, which I totally could do and quite enjoyed doing, required a monumental fight against inner demons that I could neither understand nor explain to anyone else.

In fact, it honestly would not have occurred to be to seek help. I didn’t even grasp that I had a problem of the sort that people could help with. Life had, even at that young age, taught me that asking for help from anyone was always a losing proposition. I wouldn’t get the help I wanted, and I would come away feeling rejected, dejected, and depressed from having opened myself up to someone only to have them dump a dirty ashtray into me and close the lid.

I knew I was different from the other kids. That was made painfully obvious to me every school day. I didn’t know why they did what they did, and I had no friends that would have helped me learn, so I spent recess and lunchtime surrounded by kids but utterly alone amidst the chaos and cacophony.

It was the kiddie matinees all over again.

Later in life, I wondered why Emery put on those matinees. They were total nightmares for him. He was clearly frustrated by and scared of the kids, and I can’t blame him, because so was I. The cleanup must have been like cleaning up after an incontinent elephant, and as I recall, the ticket to get in was pretty cheap too.

My guess is, it was some kind of tradition held over from the days of the poodle skirt and malt shop, and if he had tried to stop doing it before it was time, he would have had an army of pitchfork-wielding parents at his doorstep (which, come to think of it, was only two doors and a street away from my doorstep) filled with the righteous fury know only to parents who suddenly have to take care of their children for two more hours a week.

This is what makes teacher’s strikes such tricky business.

Nevertheless, the matinees stopped very shortly after I experienced them. Couldn’t have been more than three years. And I trust you can see why.

Good riddance, if you ask me. Oy.

Then again, it was at one of those matinees that I got to see Star Wars in the theater like three times, so they weren’t all bad. But those times, I was with my siblings, and hence, insulated.

So I dunno. Maybe I was destined not to fit in. It would have taken a serious consciousness upgrade for me to have been able to see what was go on around me clearly and then move to make things how I wanted to be. I would have needed to be able to grasp that I was different, understand that difference, decide to learn to fake enough normalcy to get along and have friends, and essentially locked a big part of myself away.

Not sure that would have been the choice I would have made. But even if I had chosen the other path, the lone wolf elitist path, I would have at least been able to make some sort of peace with myself.

Instead, I was just a heavy, soggy bag of emotion and problems, impossible to respect and prone to biting the hand that feeds me without even realizing it, and so nobody wanted to (or could) deal with me.

But what can I say? For all my overweaning intelligence, I was just a kid. Locked away all alone in my own little world, I couldn’t do anything but struggle through every day. Always looking for something but somehow never reaching a conclusion. All my energy went into dragging myself through the quagmire of boredom and terror every day.

At that early an age, if there is nobody watching you and seeing that you are in trouble and intervening… it isn’t going to happen. And every child, no matter how unique and/or difficult, deserves to have someone like that in their lives.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sounds like a great chapter title, doesn’t it? Or maybe a sequel. Chipmunks 3 : The Conflict Within.

It’s mostly about Alvin’s cocaine addiction.

I’ve been experiencing a certain amount of inner conflict lately. My inner child is not getting along so well with my newly formed inner parent. I’m being very stubborn and unreasonable with myself.

Don’t worry, that’s not as crazy as it sounds.

It’s all because of that perennial conflict between “want to” and “should”. I have slipped into the “should” column lately, and once “should” mode kicks in, my inner child folds his little arms in front of his chest, pouts, and ignores the things he “should” do with a vengeance.

I swear, I was never this difficult when I was an actual child. Then again…. apart from gym and arts and crafts, nobody was trying to make me do anything I didn’t want to do.

And we all know how stubborn I was about those two subjects. So, hmm.

The first casualty of this inner war was my to-do list. I installed it on my main tablet (the big one) around a month ago, with an eye towards getting better at getting shit done. And it worked for a while.

But then the list filled up. And I stopped even trying to do any of the things on it. So now it just sits there.

I think I have turned the corner, though, and opened the door to doing more work on the self-discipline side of things. I don’t want to be the kind of person who lives a shitty life under shitty circumstances just because they are too lazy and/or stubborn to actually do any of the things that would make things better.

Things that are totally within my control, like how messy this room is, or how much I exercise, or how clean and neat I am personally. I have told myself that I didn’t have the strength to really face these sorts of things in the past, and it was true then. But I am stronger now, and ready to move into actually living life in the real world instead of just hiding from the world in my mental realms and letting everything go all to hell.

I’m in charge now. There is nobody around to blame for what I do. Sure, I still have psychological traumae, but those are wounds to be healed, not excuses to be deployed whenever anything threatens to disturb my freeze-dried inner universe.

I would say I have been nursing my wounds, but nursing sometimes heals things. I have been maintaining them.

After all, without them, I might have to face reality. Oh no, anything but that!

The thing is, I have never thought of myself as the kind of person who can’t face reality. I pride myself in my dedication to the truth, come what may, and that means not shying away from unpleasant truths, or living in denial.

And if you asked me about all this a year ago, I would have been able to spin a more than reasonable facsimile of that being true. I have all kinds of realistic, well thought out, pragmatic yet sympathetic opinions and observations about the world which I can deliver at the drop of a hat. I have vivid and accurate insights into things unseen by most, and I can totally convince people that I really have a good grip on things.

I can even convince myself, some of the time.

But when it comes to facing reality on an emotional and spiritual level, I have been a total coward. It’s easy for me to be realistic in the realm of the mind. I’m very comfortable in that realm, and I have pushed myself to see things as they really are for my entire life. I can say, truthfully, that there is no thought I won’t think, no realm I will not enter, no sacred ground where my mind fears to tread. Nothing escapes my analysis. I am determined to figure it all out.

That might mean I am being cold and cruel with myself, but it’s how I choose to live.

But all that is nothing but words if it never translates to actually doing anything. And that’s where emotion, spirit, and will come into play. And responsibility as well.

Growing up means accepting… not liking, but accepting…. that your time of being cared for and not having to worry about things is over and it will never, ever come back. Withdrawing from the world doesn’t alter this basic truth, and when you refuse to take responsibility for yourself because you’re not “ready”, it almost always means making someone else take responsibility for you instead.

And that’s not fair. After all, you wouldn’t want someone else doing that to you, would you?

And if you think “but that’s different!”, here’s the harsh truth : no it isn’t. It isn’t different at all. If you are old enough to vote, you have lost all rights to expect anyone to look after you. There is nobody who is “supposed” to be looking after you and your life any more. That phase of life ended when you became an adult.

Childhood ends. There’s nothing you can do about that. All you can do is make your adulthood more pleasant, or live, like I have, a sad pathetic life for twenty years rather than grow the fuck up.

And the older you get, the bigger a price you have to pay for clinging to childhood like it’s a right.

And that’s the kind of truth I have been burying myself in mental stimulation to avoid facing. I have been patting myself on the back for being some kind of fearless truth warrior while ignoring the truth that said back was turned away from the truth and that my eyes were squeezed shut.

Oh well. In order to go forward, your illusions must die, and the ones you love the most are the ones you need to kill most of all, because they are the ones keeping you from evolving out of your current problems.

You have to let go of your illusions and finally evolve. Only then can you be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.