There’s been a lot of fear in my life for someone whose life has been relatively without danger.

Well, there was the bullying. I guess that’s where I learned fear, real fear. As you all know (quite well) by now, I was severely bullied in elementary school. I lived in fear of my classmates, every single one of them, because none of them were safe to be around from my point of view. Even the ones who seemed really nice, and there were some, were a source of danger because trying to interact with them always ended up in confusion and awkwardness.

And for some reason, I always blamed myself for that. I had this desperate desire to connect others because I was so lonely. Mp friends, no attention at home, teachers that barely tolerated me…. damned right I was lonely.

And somehow, this desperate desire to connect caused me to always blame myself and feel like there was something wrong with me when the lack of connection and awkwardness punished me once again for trying to relate.

It hurt so bad. I wanted to reach out to people and be included, but instead, this enormous gulf between me and them opened up and made me feel lonelier than ever. Made me feel like I was disgusting alien insect who should just scuttle back into the darkness where I belonged.

Perhaps it’s thing drive to connect that kept me from embracing the solitary life like so many before me. A lot of people in the position I was in simply say “Well then, people suck. Fuck people. ” and retreat into some intellectual pursuit like science or art or building things or programming. They make peace with their lone star status and, in effect, stop trying, and maybe even stop caring about it.

But I don’t feel like that was ever in the cards for me. I could stop trying, but I could not stop caring. Even as I type this, I desperately want people’s affection and approval. I want to feel the warmth of human connection, whether it’s through cuddling or applause. I want to make people happy, and see that happiness in their faces, and know I put it there.

And there is no chance of that ever going away, although if somehow my loneliness was pierced and destroyed, I can only assume it would grow a lot less acute.

Right now, I am a starving man. A thirsty dog. My life currently gives me barely enough to survive. That’s not the fault of anyone in my life, I assure you. It’s because the need is so massive that it would take more than what my life current offers to make a serious dent in it.

And I am so very numb all that time that what light and warmth is in my life is barely felt.

Loneliness eats away at you, I guess. Human beings have a lot of social needs, and I have spent my entire life, since my very first day of school, meeting almost none of them. No status, no friendship, no peer acceptance, no romance.

Just TV, video games, and books.

But maybe it was there all along and I just couldn’t feel it. I will freely admit that maybe I have a busted antenna when it comes to receiving positive social stimuli. Maybe all those years of childhood terror and loneliness caused some very vital part of my emotional/social equipment to atrophy and that’s why it seems to me now that it would take something pretty amazing to penetrate all that ice around my heart.

And yet, I feel like it’s definitely possible. I have a very strong feeling that the right person or circumstance (or both) could crack the ice and let the sun shine in to my cold and lonely heart.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what that magic key to my ice palace might be. The right sort of peer group, perhaps, or community. Or the right man who can put up with my eccentricities long enough for me to grow to trust them and open up to them. Let them see the pain beneath the smile, and see if they stick around.

If you can survive exposure to my radioactive core, then maybe I can trust that you won’t run away when things stop being light and fun and silly and cuddly. I have a terrible fear that nobody could love me if they really got to know me, if they got too close to me.

I understand a lot of people feel the same. We’re such a fucked up society.

The right person could prove me wrong. That would mean a lot to me. So would an environment where I feel like I can help out and be part of everything, instead of feeling like a clumsy and unwanted burden.

I have a lot of magic in me. I can do amazing things. Things that are unaffected by my weird eyesight and general clumsiness. I could be a real asset… somewhere.

The trick is that they have to be willing to see past my twenty year gap in job history and recognize that I have a lot of talent just waiting to find a use and make them proud (and money).

Volunteering has been mentioned as a cure for my condition. And I am sure it is. I can imagine that if I volunteered somewhere, it would go a long way towards my feeling less useless and more like there is some kind of point to my life besides consuming food and media till the day I die.

But I would have to get over a mountain of social anxiety in order to get there. A very deep part of me would be terrified that whatever the organization was, I would just end up getting rejected and excluded and that would lead to me feeling incompetent and unwelcome all over again.

Only worse, because now I have more proof.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is what I was going to write today before a story happened instead. It’s a topic that has gotten bumped that way at leasy three times, so I figured, what the hell, I wrote the story crazy early in the morning, I can do another blog entry.

But first, the absolutely mandatory Iron Maiden link :

There. Now we can continue.

I’ve been watching a true-crime show (you’d think I would learn) called, misleadingly, Your Worst Nightmare lately. It’s pretty much like most other true-crime shows except that the production values for the reenactments are quite excellent for TV. Well acted, shot on film, good likenesses, and so on.

And yup, I am finding it depressing, like with the Forensic Files. And that is mostly due to the high quality reenactments. They are like made-for-TV horror movies, and knowing that this all happened in the real world is really depressing.

But I am not here to talk about that today. Instead, I want to talk about danger.

Being part horror movie, the episodes have had people in mortal (and fatal) danger at the hands of another human being. And when I watch these things, I feel for the people in danger (hence the depressing) but I don’t identify with them.

I’ve never screamed in fear, I have never seriously though I was going to die, and honestly, I know that I can handle myself quite well in a physical struggle.

And I know this because I was savaged by bullying growing up, and that brought out the savage in me. There is a side of me that sleeps most of the time that is fully capable of meeting violence with violence and which is very confident on that score because it knows that my particularly high voltage mind makes me very dangerous indeed.

I don’t like this side of me, and luckily, the conditions for summoning the demon are almost never met. I am a fairly calm fellow most of the time, anxieties aside, and in control of myself. The sorts of situations that bring that side to the fore are exceedingly rare in the lives of the average citizen. I doubt they will occur in my lifetime.

But that doesn’t make the beast go away. And it doesn’t go away for a very simple reason :

I need it.

Phew, that was not easy to confess. I feel a little dizzy now.

But yes, I need that savage side in order to feel safe. I know that, at least in extreme situations, that my brute side will come out and I will be able to fight off the enemy and emerge victorious from any battle.

Or if not, I will at least make the enemy regret having fucked with the wrong guy.

So while I don’t like my savage side, and it doesn’t fit in at all with the sort of person I want to see myself as, there is no point in disapproving of it any more. To do so would be downright disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical.

I need my monster. And he needs me.

I’ve never been physically afraid of people. They’re just people, after all. Even as a little kid, I couldn’t see why people on TV would get all freaked out and scream just because some idiot with a knife and a mask pops up. It’s just a person! Pick up something heavy and/or jagged and defend yourself!

Perhaps that says something deep about just how disconnected from mainstream humanity I am. Or perhaps it is merely the arrogance of someone who has never fought for his very life.

But I do know this : I mourn the humanity and civilization I lost when the beast was forced into life by circumstance. I know deep down in my gut that other people are better adjusted to society precisely because they were not cast into savagery against their will at a young age.

Maybe the beast keeps me safe…. from dangers extremely unlikely to recur.

But maybe it’s what keeps me from feeling safe, too.

I still will talk to you again tomorrow, nice people!

Came across this interesting little musical number today :

It’s a song about what it’s like to be The Flash, the DC universe’s super speedster. The idea is that being The Flash, someone who goes super fast on every level and therefore for whom time as we know it passes incredibly slow.

I can relate.

Obviously I am no superhuman supercomputer like The Flash, but I have, in most instances, a higher than average mental speed, and I have had lots and lots of experiences where I felt like I could not believe how slow everything was going.

I mean, don’t people even THINK?

Being the sort of person who is unreasonably reasonable, I can usually calm myself down by telling myself that these people are doing the best they can, and it’s my problem to deal with if it seems like things are going too slow.

They are going fast enough for everyone else, Mister Speedymind.

There are some advantages to thinking faster than most people. Works wonders in arguments, obviously. I may have formed my countering argument before you even stop talking. Thus I give the appearance of great sagacity when really, I’m just quick.

It’s good, though, that I don’t just think fast, I think deep. That slows things down a lot compared to what it would be like if I was a shallow rapid thinker. That would be…. a nightmare.

But I have expanded my mind many times, and I learned at an early age that one powerful cure for boredom was to think about things as deeply and thoroughly as I can.

Thus I whiled away all the time spent waiting for the next bell because I had done the work that was supposed to keep me busy for the rest of the period in like, five minutes. I spent a lot of time in what used to be considered a mystic or even holy frame of mind, when I wasn’t thinking about anything, but then again, I was thinking about everything.

And the thing is, I had to solve the problem of boredom. True boredom is very painful to people like me, and what’s worse, we’re quite prone to it. Young people feel boredom more acutely than adults because their have a far narrower sense of time, and so a bored me in class in elementary school was in desperate need of escape.

And they wouldn’t let me read. Seriously. Maybe they secretly thought I deserved to be bored for doing my work so fast and, admittedly, with an air of contempt.

Well, how would you feel if you have to do a ridiculously easy test? Stuff that was so easy, it was an insult to your intelligence? Looking back, I wish I had not been quite so open about it, but honestly… that’s the normal reaction.

I supposed rapid boredom also explains my habit, as a wee one, of wandering away from my parents. They would be talking about adult stuff that I could not have cared less about if I had a degree in Apathy from Whatever University, and I would get bored, and wander off seeking mental stimulation.

It really felt like if I didn’t, I would die or go crazy.

Of course, I couldn’t see it from my poor parents’ point of view when I was that young. They must have been freaking out when they realized I was gone. I certainly would have been! It’s every parent’s worst nightmare to lose their child, and I feel bad now for what I put them through.

But at the time, I was like… what? What’s the big deal? I was bored.

Because of course, I knew I was safe.

I suppose it’s a matter of clock speed, or sampling rate. Our minds sense time by dividing it into equal numbers of mental CPU cycles. The faster you think, the faster you go through that many cycles, and subjective time slows waaaay down.

Luckily, the same function (differing sense of time) that made boredom so intolerable as a kid makes it way easier to deal with now that I am two score and two years old. I get bored way, way slower now. Usually, if there is time when I am away from the Net and therefore from my source of constant mental stimulation, I end up just enjoying the extra time in which to process and digest all the stuff I am constantly cramming into this brain of mine.

When I went to therapy yesterday, I had both a book and my tablets in my bag. Didn’t touch either of them. Just enjoyed the calm and quiet of waiting for and taking the bus.

Clearly, my habits and compulsions that make me grab all the mental stimulation I can handle have not actually kept pace with the changing reality of how much I actually need, or even want.

Sometimes, doing nothing but staring off into space makes for a refreshing change, and simple boredom a novelty. Especially in this oh so stimulating age.

Luckily (or perhaps not), my mind grows deeper and a little slower with age. I am able to go deeper and deeper into understanding things thanks to this increase in mind space, and I love that.

I always want to go deeper. Take things to the next level. Understand more of the game of games, the big picture, the big wheel inside which all the little cogs run.

I am still trying to understand everything, and will continue to do so till the day I die.

Knowledge, to me, is only a means toward that end. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an intellectual, and intellectuals love to learn. But to me, knowledge is merely the rough ore of the understanding I seek, to be cracked, smelted, purified, and integrated into that big picture that I have been painting for so long.

Sometimes, I feel so very small compared to this mind of mine. A tiny little man dwarfed by a massive supercomputer.

I shudder to think of what that means for my tiny little soul.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had one of those moments when I lock eyes with my insanity today, during therapy.

It happened when I realized, not for the first time but definitely for the most intense, that there are so many thing I know about myself but do not actually believe.

Of course, most of them are positive.

You all know the story. I’m crazy smart, never had to try hard in school at all. I have a lot of creative talent and an imagination so vibrant it makes Technicolor seem like low rez black and white. I have a penetrating and insightful mind with extraordinary understanding of how things really work and what things really are. Plus I am a genuinely nice fellow who sincerely wants to help people and make everyone happier.

Even grumpy people!

And even as I was typing out that litany list, I was making a “wanky wanky” motion in my mind. My mind was using my overdeveloped sense of irony to disarm and deflect any potential ego boost I might get from the fact that I am, in many ways, extraordinary.

Like I said on Monday, somehow, it’s never enough. I have to acknowledge the truth of those positive things about myself because the evidence for them is too strong to ignore.

But I don’t believe them. Not really. I acknowledge the truth of them if pressed, but the emotion is simply missing. They don’t feel true, and even if they are true, they don’t matter. Not really.

Why? As my therapist quite adroitly, because if they were true, they would come into conflict with the negative emotions I talked about on Monday, and that message of worthlessness and pointlessness and existential guilt is (or rather, has been) far stronger than mere reality.

And it’s true that those assets have not been a lot of use to me yet. But that just leads into the Catch 22 of the fact that I don;t get rewarded for them because I don’t do anything to get my art in front of more eyeballs (or in more ears, or whatever), and the reason I don’t do that is I don’t have the confidence to do so, confidence that I could only get by having some success with my art…. you know, that old pile o’junk.

And for now, I just don’t want to run in that mousewheel at all.

Over and over again, I feel like my mental illness has a physical presence in the subjective realm of my mindscape. It’s have and thick and terribly, deathly cold. It flows back and forth in my mind like a very thick and heavy fluid, like it’s ice-cold corn syrup oozing back and forth in there, chilling and polluting all it touches.

The good news is that the process of recovery, of mental healing, reduces its mass over time. I get rid of that bullshit, spreading it onto the page with my words and leaving it to dry out, melt, and evaporate.

It’s slow like glaciation, but just as inevitable.

Another thing that popped up in therapy today was the idea that I am trying to bring the two extremes of my personality, represented by psychotic egotism on one end of the scale and total nihilistic depression on the other, together into a single balanced whole that will be far greater than the sum of its broken parts.

I have realized that I was trying to close a massive psychic wound before, but until today, I didn’t realize what the forces keeping that wound open were. I have been pulled in two directions (at least) for a long long time.

And it has largely been fear of the raving lunatic egotist in me that has kept me clinging so hard to its equidistant position on the opposite side of the scale. There have been times when I felt like I must be the smartest person who has ever lived and that I was some sort of god of the mind, to the point of feeling so powerful it was clearly lunacy.

And those moments scared me so badly and so deeply that I suppressed that feeling with maximum force, and in a sense, returned to my usual level of self-contempt with a hearty sigh of relief.

As those my self-loathing is any more rational. But hey, it’s at least familiar. And one of the deepest delusions of depression is that there is somehow safety in the negative, that if you think bad things about yourself, the universe will somehow recognize that you are already hurting and leave you alone.

Hurting yourself to stay safe is a particularly elegant form of delusional self-destruction. It leads to actually fearing happiness, as if being happy makes you a beacon to all misfortunes seeking a target.

After all, if you’re happy, you might let down your guard, and that’s when life will get you.

Of course, when I tried to explain this action of bringing the two extremes together to form a greater whole to my therapist, it came across as a tad mystic and opaque. It was pretty hard to explain to him what I meant by it all. And that made me realize something else, something that does not fit well into my hyperverbal mind.

I realized that no matter how eloquent I am, no matter how intricate my understanding of myself and the world, no matter how much time I spend in both my forms of therapy, there can still be things within me which are just too subjective, deep, and subverbal to be explained to another.

And the fact that I really don’t want to admit that to myself and that a big part of me stubbornly insists that there are only things I haven’t articulated and communicated yet speaks very eloquently of my own deep left-brained bias towards that which exists within the light of reason and mistrust of all that happens in the dark recesses of the mind.

Like, say, that entire other lobe of the fucking brain.

That’s a very me way of looking at things, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling old today. Bleh.

My eyesight is definitely getting worse. It’s getting harder and harder to read text on the TV screen. Even reading text on the monitor, which is never more than two feet from my face when I use it, is getting tricky sometimes.

So, it’s time to go see the eye doctor again. Not looking forward to that. They tend to treat people on assistance like shit. They do not take us seriously and honestly don’t really want us there because they don’t make as much money on us.

Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.

But eye appointments have always been tricky for me. Even my first one, when I was in Grade 1, was hard on me, because I have a very precise sense of language and the doctor is always saying “Do you like it better like this, or like this?”

And I am stuck saying “Well one is darker and one is sharper…. ” and that is totally not what they are looking for. They want a bunch of subjective snap decisions and I am not very good at those.

And you don’t get far in an eye exam saying “I dunno!” a lot.

Plus they rely heavily on that classic eye chart, which is text, and I think possibly that I have specialized, eye wise, in reading text. So the results might not be accurate.

In general, I feel like I have dealt with my poor vision by learning to force my eyes to focus. If I don’t do that, everything looks dull and blurry. Even with my glasses on.

I suspect that I have a very long term case of lazy eye. Long term as in, since that first eye appointment. I think I had one eye focusing better than the other and it was misdiagnosed as myopia.

And since then, I have been masking that from the world and from myself by forcing my eyes to focus.

It’s just a theory, though. Could be way off base.

More worrisome(because, of course, I’ve had poor eyesight for my whole life) is my hearing. That seems to be deteriorating as well lately. And I seem to be losing it at the low end, which surprises me. I always thought the high end went first.

But I find it harder and harder to make out low sounds. I have a bunch of samples of the type I used to make music that are now too low for me to hear reliably. Even with the headphones on.

And some of my mp3s have starting to sound… strange. Like someone ran them through a low-pass filter and filtered out the low end of the song. Basslines sound incomplete, like there’s notes missing.

So far, it’s no big deal. But I don’t like the way that this is going.

So I guess it’s time to see my GP as well. It could me just the usual sinus mess that is causing this. Fluid in the ear. But that usually causes the occasional annoying high pitched noise in my ear that lasts for maybe five seconds and is gone. It has never attacked the low end at all, as far as I know.

And ears are a lot harder to deal with than eyes. We have correcting vision pretty much down pat by now. But you can’t get a pair of glasses for your ears.

None worth wearing, anyhow.

So it might be that I will have to decide when it is time for a hearing aid. Right now, the occasional inability to understand low speech or low music is not much of a problem.

But if I start needing people to shout before I can understand what they are saying, I will have no choice but to get a hearing aid. Or deal with the world through text entirely.

That would suck. Hard to deal with people on the street that way, you know? What do you do, hand them a pen and paper?

But what has me very worried is my breathing. I have been having episodes of shortness of breath lately. Times when I have to apply my breathing techniques (holding my breath, breathing fast, forcing all the air from my lungs) with considerable vigor in order to get things back to something like normal.

It has to be the sleep apnea. It kind of doesn’t go away when ignored. The sleep apnea must be reducing my lung capacity like it did with a friend of mine. I need to get back on CPAP, or maybe tell my GP that CPAP doesn’t work for me and see what comes next.

I suspect it will be surgical.

Or maybe they have new gear that is way, way better than my CPAP machine. Lighter mask, quieter operation. I saw a video on YouTube of a gizmo that supposedly does everything a CPAP machine does but is just a little rechargeable doohickey that looks like that thing that Bajorans have on their nose and just sits on your nose, wirelessly.

I could live with that, I think. It wouldn’t be covering my face and making me feel (quite irrationally) like I am being smothered. I am sure I could get used to it being there as I slept, as long as it was attached firmly enough that I can move around in bed without it falling off.

The big barrier to telling all this to my GP is, of course, that I would have to admit to my GP that I have been letting my CPAP machine gather dust for like five years now. Not an easy thing to admit.

My therapist, at least, would understand how that can happen with my particular strain of depression. I deal with whatever I can deal with, and everything else gets ignored. That way, I can keep going.

And for some reason, I absolutely have to keep going. My life might not be much, but I have to keep doing it.

I feel like if I was to stop…. I’d die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know I’ll explain that.

What I mean by “I don’t know how to be enough” is that I don’t know what it is like to feel like you are a whole and decent person. I have had a vast and terrible sense of insufficiency and inadequacy for my entire life, more or less, and I can’t imagine what it is like to live my life without it there.

All my life, I have felt like there is something abjectly wrong with me and because of this flaw, I can never actually hold my own in society. I have no choice but to hope someone takes pity on me and helps me despite my pathetic nature, and that leaves me in a perpetual state of unworthy gratitude.

It is one thing to feel helpless. It is another thing entirely to feel like you don’t even deserve that help. That you are not worth helping, and that anyone who helps you is therefore taking on more than they can possibly handle and you should feel ashamed for how much damage you are doing to them.

And, of course, incredibly grateful that anyone ever helps you, unworthy as you are.

I feel like that’s my role in the world. Obviously, this is because that was my role in my family, as it seemed to me. I cannot honestly tell you how much of that was based on the reality of how I was treated and how much of it was the product of my rather broken mind, but I can tell you that was sure how I felt.

When you can’t ask for things, hope and gratitude are all that you have left.

I am not sure where the feeling that I could never be self sufficient came from, though. It’s not like I lacked the skills. Between looking after myself as a kid and learning a lot of things the hard way when I was in college, I have had all the basics covered for quite a while.

I suppose it’s the depression talking. It makes me feel so very weak and incapable. But even in college, my brother did most of the actual housework.

I am still ashamed of that. I had no excuse for that. But it’s the role I slipped into because it was the role I was used to. Like I have said here before, nobody wanted to take the time to teach me to do things the way they wanted them done, so I never had a lot of chores.

I did dishes. That was about it.

I guess the machine had been built years before I was ever born, and nobody felt like it was worth their time to make a space for me so I could help maintain it.

Nobody was keen to make room for me at all, come to think of it. No wonder I felt unwelcome. All my life I’ve been an afterthought at best, a nuisance most of the time, a resented burden at worst.

Or so it seemed to me.

Now I will admit, I was a clumsy kid who did not learn physical things quickly. And because of this, I was usually quite scared during the process. It would have taken effort and patience and time to teach me these things.

And those are three things people have never been willing to spare me. Easier to just ignore me. It’s not like I’d insist people paid attention to me.

And of course, when you feel like you have to learn a skill fast or people will lose interest and give up on you, that makes you all the more freaked out when someone tries and the less likely you will be able to beat the clock at all.

So given all that, I guess it’s no surprise that I feel so incapable. When it comes to the business of life, I truly feel like I can’t do it and any attempt to do it will only end up creating a potentially disaster-level mess someone else will end up having to fix and I will end up wishing I had never even tried.

That is the rape that is always cued up in my head on that subject, ready to play.

I do feel like I may have some minor learning disability when it comes to learning the physical. It’s very hard for me. I pretty much just have to keep trying by myself till I get it. I have a very poor track record when it comes to learning from explanations offered by others.

That’s how I learned to ride a bike. A lot of people tried to help, but they ended up just making me super anxious for reasons that should now be obvious, and it was only after they all left that I was able to figure it out on my own.

And for that, you need the freedom to fail. You have to feel like it’s safe to get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right. And I can’t recall ever feeling that way when anyone else was around.

Pop culture is filled with images of parents teacher their children to ride a bake. The implication is that the parent sticks with them over a long period of time. first with the training wheels, then eventually without.

I can’t imagine having anyone like that in my life. Nobody has ever had that kind of patience and tolerance with me. Maybe if someone had, I would have been able to calm down enough to learn these things and gained the confidence that brings.

But right now, honestly, I just plain feel like I can’t do it. My best hope is that I can use my other skills to someday be able to play someone to take care of me rather than relying on the kindness of others.

Maybe then I will finally feel like a decent and worthy human being, instead of a parasite.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Remember, the only difference between hitting rock bottom and hitting the wall is gravity.

Okay, so that doesn’t make sense. The point is, I realized today that hitting the wall saved my life once, in a very real sense, and it is around time it did it again.

I have told you lovely, lovely people before about the period in my early twenties where I got into a very, very bad mental and physical state. Irritable Bowel Syndrome had hit me hard and, unlike other times, it stuck around.

All my life, I’d had “nervous stomach” incidents. Times when, for no apparently reason, I would get really nauseous and my guts would be churning and I would spend some time in Bathroom Hell.

It’s as bad as it sounds.

But these episodes were quite infrequent – maybe two or three a year – and I felt a lot better afterwards (yay endorphins) – so I never told anyone about it and just went bop bop bopping along again.

Ah, the resilience (and amnesia) of youth.

But after my college education was defunded, I went into a very bad doom spiral. The fact that I was unable to see what was wrong and continued to pretend like everything was a-okay made things a lot worse.

I wasn’t allowed to be anything but OK, or so I thought.

So after some very bad IBS attacks, I was a dehydrated, malnourished, anxious, hypoglycemic, hypochondriac mess. My days were miserable. I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch in the living room of my childhood home with the TV on, sometimes watching it, a lot of the times in too much pain for it to be anything but flashing lights and noise to me.

And this lasted for a long time. But eventually, I hit the wall. I got well and truly sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I got to the point where the cornered rat turns and fights. I was determined to get myself out of that hole.

So I forced myself to hydrate. My stomach didn’t like that one bit, but I didn’t care. I kept drinking as much water as I could handle, and eventually that got me to the point where I could eat.

Once I could eat, I recovered quickly, and before long I was physically healthy again. (Still depressed and unaware of it, but the physical side was working anyhow. )

And I think that’s where I am right now. I have been ill and depressed and a mess for a long long time now, and it’s high time I finally turn and attack my problems head on.

Starting with the physical. Physically, I am once more a big ole mess. My sleep apnea is untreated, I don’t ever check my blood sugar, and I eat like a moron.

At least some of that shit has got to stop.

It came over me like a revelation : I could be happier. I could feel a hell of a lot better than I do right now. There are things within my control that I can do to enjoy every moment of life more.

Now, for a normal person, this revelation might come across as one hundred percent DUH. But for a depressive, that’s a very difficult thought to think. Depression strangles hope. It makes it seem like the best you can hope for is things not getting worse, even though you are sure they will.

So you just stop thinking about the future and concentrate on making it through the present with a minimum of pain.

And then you look around and twenty years of your life are gone.

So the fact that I can now not just think things can get better, but believe it. It was always possible to imagine life getting better via some external agency like winning the lottery.

But now I think I can do it myself, and in fact, it now seems ridiculously simple. All I have to do is treat myself a little better, and I will feel better. And I am perfectly capable of taking steps to make things better.

The answer came to me through salad.

See, I have known for a while now that leaf greens make my stomach feel better. They give the acid something it can really sink its teeth into (cellulose) and that soothes my stomach really nicely.

And yet, the fog of depression was so thick that it was only recently that I realized that this was actually important.

If I eat more leafy greens, I will enjoy that better feeling more often. I will be in less pain, and that will make me happier. It sounds retarded when I put it into words, but that is nub of my recent revelation.

And to think, it all started when Joe bought a head of lettuce.

So tonight, when we go to ABC Country Kitchen for supper, I will see what kind of salads they have. Whatever I order, it’s going to have a lot of protein to go with the carbs, and will ideally have other vegetables as well.

It might end up costing me slightly more than my usual Greasy Thing And Fries, but how can you put a price on feeling a whole lot better? It’s going to be a rough month for me (hello, five week month!) but money spent on health is money well spent.

The sleep apnea and diabetes are bigger hills to climb, but the shitty diet is something I can tackle right now without a whole lot of effort.

And you know, baby steps. I am not going to suddenly change my entire diet. I am not planning on eliminating anything. I just plan to add more good things.

So my plan is actually to eat more. You really can eat more and weigh less, if you add the right things to your diet. Better nutrition doesn’t have to be a contest of wills.

It can be as simple as eating a salad before your gloriously decadent main course.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.