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.