The language of slugs would be sluggish, and that’s how I feel right now.

I am going to stay calm about it, though, and remind myself that I know such things blow over eventually. It’s just a matter of waiting for it to blow over.

I will probably need more sleep before it does, though.

After a long but comfortable hiatus, I am back to putting together my portfolio. It’s impressive. I have forty short stories in it. And most of them are pretty damned good, if I say so myself.

It says something about depression that I keep having to remind myself that I might actually be good at this whole writing thing. If you asked me, I would say I was pretty good. But like I have said many times before, there’s a big difference between knowing the right answer and actually believing it.

And just like that, we are back to my problem with psychologically integrating my high IQ and whatnot. All I can say is that I am working on it. There are times when I feel like I am very smart and talented, and those periods are lasting a little longer every day.

The problem is that if I truly believed in myself like that, I would have to end up a great deal more egotistical. There’s just no way around it. Every bit of social and genetic programming I have tells me that if you are a highly intelligent and talented person, you should have a big ego. You should go around feeling like you are better than other people.

And I don’t like that. I am egalitarian to the core. So right now, I am trying to dream up a version of myself that is self-confident and who believes in himself, but also remembers that in many ways he is a goofy and clueless person and therefore should not get too carried away.

I am still in the unstable beginning of that process and it’s rough going. It makes me feel very unstable, and I hate that. But I have been a stable nothing for a long time.

There is no change without instability. To jump even the smallest of gaps, there has to be a moment when you don’t have both feet on the ground. And even that is a leap of faith.

Faith. That’s a whole kettle of fish itself. Maybe what people really get out of religion is the ability to have faith… to believe without need of proof. To believe first, before the question is even asked.

And sure, it’s easy for us intellectual atheist types to roll our eyes when that kind of belief causes people to bury their heads in the sand and deny evidence in order to preserve belief. But what else does that faith do for the person? What is it they are really protecting?

Maybe we atheists are secretly jealous of the meaning, purpose, and security the faithful draw from their ability to have faith in life and in themselves.

Maybe we wish we could do that too.

The thing is, I don’t know if it is possible for me to acquire faith at the age of 42. It certainly isn’t possible to get it via rational means. You can’t reason yourself into faith. Faith is a priori to reason. By its very nature, faith is deeply emotional and involves parts of the psyche far deeper than the glimmer on the surface of the water that is reason.

Yup. Water imagery.

For someone like me, the acquisition of faith would probably require some kind of emotional crisis, whether from without or from within, that melts down and breaks open the shiny bright structures of reason and lets the true self emerge, and rebuild things in a way that better suits it.

It seems absurd that it would take something that severe to truly heal me. But this exoskeleton built of logic and knowledge and powered by intellect has kept me going over the years, but it’s still a cage. It’s still too small a space to allow for any serious personal growth.

And lately I have become acutely aware of this. I long for escape. I wish I could just shed my skin like a snake so I could make room for the real, adult, fully realized version of me. I know that there is a strong and healthy version of me inside me, straining to get out, longing to be free.

But the path out goes directly into the dark heart of the forest, far away from the bright cold light of the known and the knowable. And that means a leap of faith is needed.

Reason and knowledge, at least how I practice it, is contiguous. It all fits together like nth-dimensional LEGO, and there is a great comfort to that. It makes you feel like you are in control and in command and that your mental armor has no chinks in it. You grow accustomed to that kind of inner life, and if you are wounded and unstable like me, you become highly dependent on it.

To go outside it seems impossible, or at least, unthinkable. You can even convince yourself that nothing exists outside this tight, fast, glittering world of yours.

But that just leaves you puzzled by how so much of your life just doesn’t make sense. The deep forest of emotion still exists even if you deny it completely.

so I have to take that leap out of the contiguous body of my internal model of the world and enter the realm of deep, primal emotion that lies beneath the surface of the waves.

Who would I be if I didn’t have this enormous intellect, I ask myself. Surely there is more to me than an outsized brain. What’s the rest of me like? Who am I really?

Exactly who am I as a human being, naked before the world without my armor?

I am determined to find out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have no particular idea of what I want to talk about, so it’s time to just open a vein and let it flow.

Today was a very sleepy day. I slept from 3 am to 11 am, had lunch at noon, then slept from 12:30 pm to 4 pm. That’s like… almost 12 hours of sleep. Half a day. And I still feel sort of tired.

There might be nothing wrong with that. That’s what I am trying to teach myself. Maybe the only problem is that I can’t simply accept that maybe that is what my mind and body needs, and if I stop fighting myself over it, everything will simply sort itself out.

Nietzsche was described as a man constantly at war with himself, using drugs and diet to try to fight the illnesses which plague him, and he lived many years as a profoundly sick and weakly person because of it.

I learned that lesson as part of learning to control my Irritable Bowel Syndrome. You can’t win against IBS if you tackle it head first and try to wrestle it into submission. That only adds energy to the system and you end up feeling a hell of a lot worse. That’s not a battle you can win.

You have to take the opposite approach, and let things run their course. And learn to listen to your body. It will tell you when things are going awry, and only then do you have the chance to head trouble off at the pass and keep yourself out of agony.

I suppose it’s a form of serenity. If I were a more aggressive person by nature, I am sure my road to recovery would have been far rockier. But I eventually (it took around four years) learned not to freak out when I started to feel ill, and when the bad stuff came down, to just relax and ride it out.

Maybe that is how I should look at sleep too. There’s no point in being upset about sleeping a lot. Maybe I need that extra sleep time to catch up on my dreaming. Maybe my body needs that extra sleeping time to clean house after all the naughty foods I ate over Xmas made a mess of the place. Maybe the very process of recovery means that sometimes, I have to sleep a lot in order to give my mind the time to process some of the deep hurt that lies within my tortured psyche and thus disentangle my knotted mind a little further.

I am just full of metaphors tonight. Hope you nice people are keeping up.

I keep coming back to the idea that one should live one’s life like an old time sailor. A sailor does not control the winds or the waves or a tide. He only controls his sails and his rudder. And yet, the boat gets where it wants to go.

So by just exerting the amount of control he has at his command, the sailor can triumph. The sailor knows that by adjusting to the circumstances beyond his control, he can prevail. Even if the storms come and knock his boat way off course and it looks like this might just be the end, he knows that if he can weather the storm, he will be able to get right back on course when it’s over.

It’s a very deep metaphor for life, I think. If I do say so myself. You don’t control the world. You don’t control what life throws at you. You don’t control your final destiny.

All you can do is steer.

But as it is when we drive, steering is enough to get us where we want to go.

Think about it. No driver controls the roads or the traffic. At any moment, any driver might have to adjust to sudden changes in circumstances. Even in city traffic, most of the time drivers have no choice what to do between intersections. Get on the highway and you have even fewer choices.

And yet billions of people get where they want to go every second of every day with those limited choices.

So life is a lot less like the individualistic ideal of self-made destiny and a lot more like a series of choices. You can’t always control the choices you have. But you always control what decisions you make.

But I am repeating myself. You get the general idea.

Other than sleepiness, today has been fine. Quiet and calm, like usual. That;s both the way I like and the way I really, really don’t. I look forward to the new semester, when my life will feel purposeful again.

I am really concentrating on my two word New Year’s resolution : stay busy! I am going to teach myself to develop little projects and goals until I am in a position where I have always something to do. That doesn’t mean I have to be a non stop dynamo of productivity. It just means that I have to look for ways to express the energy within myself until I am comfortably spent.

And that means clearing my mind of a lot of counterproductive ideas and poisonous fears. I have to stop listening to the part of me that always wants to run and hide from the world, and treats absolutely any increase in “exposure” to the world to be terrifying insanity.

Hiding is not safety, it’s death. The demons inside me are far deadlier than the terrors without. They just fool me into siding with them because they are so familiar.

And in that new semester, I am going to have Thursdays and Fridays off, and I will have to deal with that. Last semester, I had a class every day of the week. Spiffy. But I am not so lucky this time.

So I will have an extra two days a week to fill with… something. Video games and the Internet are not enough to keep my soul alive. I need more.

I need to stay busy!

I will talk to you people again tomorrow.