Well that was seriously fucking depressing. I don’t know what to do with all the anger and humiliation and self-loathing I am feeling right now. I hope I can calm myself down.

Well, when it doubt, blog it out.

I just came back from what turned out to be a very brief Ideology and Politics class. Brief, because it was only when I got there that I realized that I had completely forgotten to do the assignment due today.

I told the prof, and she said that well, that was all we were working on today so I might as well go home. I even offered to help the “odd man out” by peer reviewing HIS assignment, but the prof seemed to think that poor dude was better off hoping someone else would show up late than getting help from me.

I’m telling you, I am liking her less and less. She was totally unsympathetic to me. That’s fair enough but the way she talks, it makes her sound sweet and kind and apparently, no, not really.

And while it is mostly my fault for spacing out on an important assignment, I do think she takes around eight percent of the blame for not putting assignments up on the Moodle site for the class. All my other courses post assignments to their course sites, and that means that the first thing I see when I log onto the system are links to the courses that have assignments due.

My fatal mistake was assuming that list was complete. In a sense, I was betrayed by technology. I looked at the site, saw I had nothing due today, and went on my merry way, completely forgetting that there was something that doesn’t show up there.

Well, it won’t happen again. I have added a “Homework” list to the notes I keep via Google Keep, and the moment I am assigned something, I will put it THERE, and THAT will be my Bible for what I have due and when.

All because one prof doesn’t like using Moodle. Fuck.

The worst part of this, the absolutely worst part of it, is that I spent time last night working on an assignment for Creative Writing that isn’t due till tomorrow night.

I could totally have done this What Democracy Means To Me bullshit instead. But I forgot all about it. I remembered it as recently as Monday afternoon, but between then, I slipped into thinking I could trust Moodle and that, in a sense, erased my memory of the damned thing.

Part of me really wants to just drop the class. That would not be the sensible adult thing to do, but I could do it. I am taking a full courseload, I could afford to cut one loose. And then I wouldn’t have to go to school on Mondays and Wednesdays at all. I could just stay home and….. do what, exactly?

That’s the catch. I really don’t want to add two more purpose free days to my week. Imagine how depressed I got Monday when that class was canceled due to the prof being sick (a class where I no doubt would have been reminded about the assignment) and then multiply that by two times the number of weeks left in the semester.

So no, that’s not really an option. I will show up Monday and resume learning. I have no other choice.

I am not at risk of self-harm now, but I was on the way home from my humiliation. The idea of throwing myself down the stone steps in front of Kwantlen flashed through my mind a couple times as I left. Not because I wanted to die or even that I was looking for pain or punishment.

Just for something that would cut through the pain I felt inside and maybe give me a kind of time-out where I was temporarily free of expectation to do stuff or cope with anything but getting well.

I mean, nobody expects a guy who “tripped” down the stairs to worry about missed assignments, right?

It’s sick that a part of my mind is always thinking like that. Not the self-harm part, the schemey part. But not just manipulative and calculating, but warped, self-destructive, and utterly without honor or shame.

I can’t help it. Cowardice plus intelligence equals deviousness. The evil thought are always there.

But I don’t act on them. I, obviously, did not throw myself down the stairs of Kwantlen Richmond. That would have been an entirely different kind of blog entry. But the fact that the thought and the urge flashed through my mind says a lot about why I never feel entirely safe from myself.

Maybe it’s an illusion my depression creates to protect itself, this suicidal/self-harm ideation. Maybe I could let go of my iron self control and ruthless self-suppression and nothing bad would happen except I would feel a million times better and look back at how I was before and wonder what all the fuss was about.

But that’s not a risk I can afford to take. And it knows that.

Luckily, I think this assignment was only worth 3 percent of my final grade. So not that big a deal in the overall picture. I will do the assignment and hand it in, partly because getting some marks for it is preferable to getting none, but mostly as a good faith effort to show the professor that I am taking it seriously and care about getting my work done.

And that I am not completely mentally incompetent, I suppose.

Absentmindedness is such a debilitating flaw. I am learning to work around it with notes and reminders and alarms and such, but I have been this way for my whole life and having it trip me up over and over again, no matter how hard I try to keep it together, really wears a fella down over time.

Oh well. Today’s tragedy is tomorrow’s memory and the future’s anecdote.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, I have 40 minutes to spare, I am bored of video games, and I don’t feel like masturbating. So I guess I’ll blog.

Another class got canceled. That flu is really making the rounds. My Intro to Journalism prof has it, and so there goes another unit of my education.

You know you are a grownup when having a class get canceled makes you say “Boo!” instead of “Yay!”. I imagine a lot of my classmates are happy to have the extra free time. But not me.

To me, as we learned yesterday, a canceled class leads to depression. And yes, this cancellation depresses me. Not as bad as yesterday, because I had some warning beforehand (the prof warned us via email yesterday that this might happen) but still pretty bad.

And I am helpless against it. This is another one of those moments where I have to look my insanity in the face. Despite having been forewarned, despite my experiences yesterday, and despite knowing that I still have a class today (at 4), I still feel like there is this huge heavy weight bearing down on me, like gravity and air pressure has increased around me, and all I want to do is lay down, close my eyes, and wait for it to be over.

And that’s what I really want to talk about today, because I do that a lot.

I call it zeroing out, or bed diving. It’s what I do when my background stress level has risen to the point where I can’t handle it and I have to reduce stimulus levels to near zero in order to calm myself down.

Mostly, this manifests itself as tiredness. I start feeling sort of sleepy, and what do do when you are sleepy? You lay down and go to sleep.

But often I don’t sleep. Not really. Or if it is sleep, it is a form of sleep that is radically different from the usual kind. It is almost like self-hypnosis, or some kind of intense meditation. I relax and defocus my mind, and slowly turn down the volume on my cacophonous thoughts, and the next thing I know, it’s later.

In a way, it’s almost impressive. There are people who spend their entire lives trying to achieve something sort of like that, but way way better. If I could learn that trick, I would be a much healthier dude.

As is, I feel like all my zeroing out does for me is allow me to break even. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that I use this practice as a crutch, and it makes me reluctant to go anywhere or do anything where this release will not be within easy reach. And that’s a real problem.

Plus I am not sure it is a healthy practice in the long run. Responding to stress by shutting down, like a turtle withdrawing into his shell, is not exactly a winning strategy. Coming out of your shell and actually dealing with your problems is vastly preferable. Some problems just plain don’t go away when ignored.

And I am so sick and tired of hiding.

What got me onto this subject was that last Sunday, I actually caught myself in the act of craving a bed dive. As cognitive psychologists will tell you, catching yourself thinking the wrong thoughts (the ones you want to get rid of) is the first and most vital step in overcoming them. Once you have done it, you have a kind of snapshot of what the wrong thought looks like and feels like, and your superconscious mind can add it to its filters.

It’s kind of like a firewall, in reverse.

Some people don’t believe that cognitive psychology has anything to offer.This includes one of my psych profs. That sounds insane to me. Sure, it doesn’t work for everyone, but for us hyper cerebral types, it might well be the only thing that does work.

We do everything cognitively. We’re very good at that. Why not use that to deprogram yourself from the inside?

I think people get the wrong idea and think that you can’t deal with emotional issues by cognitive means. And they are right to the extent that the cognitive approach might not be the most efficient tool for some issues. But for me at least, thoughts and emotions are intimately and inextricably linked. I am simply not capable of deal with cognitive-free emotions.

I don’t know what to do with them.

Time for me to go to class. I will finish this when I am done.

(—)

And now I am back. Funny story. Sorry if you already read the short version on Facebook.

Either Daylight Savings Time happened and nobody told me, or I somehow managed to think I had class at 3, not 4, and so I went to school way early and sat down in class, wondering how I could possibly be late.

And there was only one seat left, which took me a while to find. And that was strange. I mean, it was logically impossible for a class I had attended twice to not have room for me, right?

But it was the right people and the right material, so…. right class. Right?

Wrong. As it turns out, because I was an hour early, I had come in on the last hour of the previous class, which just happened to be a different section of the exact same course.

I swear, life conspires to fuck with my head sometimes.

It took me a while to figure this out. I got my first hint of the solution when the professor started talking about running out of time. I looked at the clock. 3:30 pm. But doesn’t this course run from 4 to 7?

Eventually, it clicked. D’oh! So I ended up getting the last third of today’s class twice. The prof said I could leave once I came to the place where I had come in before, but I figured, what the heck.

I’ll just learn that section REALLY well!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.