So like I have already said, I lost my keys.

And I feel pretty bad about it. I tried to be upbeat about it – these things happen, after all – but once my high from the VFS orientation wore off, the sadness (and humiliation, and anger at myself) set in, and so that is what I am working on right now, emotionally speaking.

But I am not calling it depression, because it isn’t. Depression is a word with far too much baggage attached. I am sad, and sort of down on myself, but I know that I will work through it and get over it, just like I got over flaming out in Linguistics.

It’s just failure. It’s not the end of the world. I lived a life without failure for twenty years…. because you can’t fail if you don’t try.

But that’s way too high a cost. Now, I do things. I try. I invest. And if it crashes and burns, I will be bummed out about it for a while, for sure. But then I will get over it and move on. Tomorrow is another day and now you know what you did wrong, so you won’t do it again.

In life, there are but two things : success, and education.

Besides, I didn’t do anything particularly wrong. My one mistake was putting my pants on inside-out, which is admittedly a fairly silly thing to do. But they look pretty much the same inside out as they do right side in, and besides, I was quite sleepy as well as very excited and nervous about the orientation, so I was not in my proper frame of mind.

And I might still get the damn keys back. I have put in a report (or whatever) to the transit systems lost and found department. They are (of course) not open on weekends, so that’s all I could do. But I gave them a fairly detailed description of the keys, including the tag that says “FRUVOUS”, so if someone turned them in, they should be able to find them.

At first, I thought the first place I took my wallet out (which is when they would have fallen out) was our Skytrain station. But then I realized that no, it was in the bus that took me to the Skytrain station. The station is only 2 and a half blocks away, which I can walk, but I needed the psychological boost of getting there by bus. )

And that bus was a 405, and I know what time I got on, plus I would imagine the system knows the exact bus I was on when I used my bus pass, so… information wise, it’s a solid case. The only loose variables are A = Did I lose them on that bus, and B = if so, did anyone find them and turn them in?

So I think my odds of recovery are…. decent.

Nevertheless, I called up the building manager, went to his office on the third floor, filled out the form to get a replacement electronic key fob…. and paid him the $50 for it.

Ouch. That will be coming out of the education fund. I am pretty sure that most of that price is, shall we say, punitive. I mean, it’s just a little plastic thing with an RFID (or maybe near field) chip in it, plus the tiny tiny cost of encoding it for our apartment. I am pretty sure the rest of the $50 is a blend of cash grab and giving you a very good incentive to NOT lose the damned thing again.

According to our building manager, it will take three business days for my new fob to show up, so I will probably get it Wednesday. In the meantime, I will have to arrange with Julian to have him be here between 4:45 pm and 5:30 pm every day, as that it approximately when I will be getting back from school.

What a fun bit of extra stress and worry to add to my first week at VFS!

If my keys DO show up before Wednesday, I will see if I can cancel my request and get my money back. If not, I will offer to sell the fob to Joe for $25, as he doesn’t have one. He uses a clicker to get into the parking garage, and gets to the apartment by taking the stairs up to the third floor and then getting onto the elevator there.

So he has incentive to want his own fob, and buying it from me would save him $30.

Also, I thought this was a dreaded five week month, but I just counted weeks again, and I think I was wrong. It’s a regular four week month for us people on assistance, and if that’s the case, then my financial picture just got a whole lot sunnier. I might not even bother dipping into the education fund to get my $50 back.

So all in all, this whole debacle sucks, but it can be handled. And learning to overcome difficulties is way, way better than trying to avoid them at all costs. And every time I hang in there and solve these kinds of things instead of freaking out and giving up and making someone like poor put-upon Joe solve my problems, my confidence and my feeling of safety both strengthen and grow.

It’s all about looking for that positive ego input, and accepting that you will have to invest energy in going to get it. That you will have to do things that will be scary, hard, or worst of all, require hard work, and that the most dangerous addiction of all is to be addicted to giving up.

I can’t tell people where to find the inner resources to do those things. I found my drive in my incredible stubbornness and rebellious desire to not be controlled, contained, or restricted, and those in turn are driven by a deep well of primal rage.

For others, it might be some kind of soaring inspiration leading them to a better version of themselves, or maybe a promise to an old friend, or a lover that makes them want to be a better person. I don’t know. Everyone’s source will be different.

But it all starts with realizing, accepting, and believing in your own part in your own misery, and then vowing to change it.

It costs you some ego, but it opens up the world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been thinking a lot about persona lately. I think I have some ideas about what factors have been keeping me from finishing my personality development and overcoming social anxiety :

• 1) Social isolation. Duh.
• 2) My insistence on total honesty and/or authenticity. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to turn into a facile liar or anything, but I think that I would be best served learning to allow myself to be socially defined and confined a little bit. That could go a long way towards diminishing that deep sense of vulnerability that is the fundamental basis for social anxiety. Feeling less vulnerable means feeling more safe, and feeling more safe means less anxiety, and less anxiety means better decisions. Which leads to my next obstacle :
• 3) Trying to never make mistakes. Another of the foundations of social anxiety is a severe over-response to awkward moments. The socially anxious react to minor moments of awkwardness and disconnection as if they are enormous errors of life-wrecking trauma, and this robs them of their ability to handle the situation in the normal and adaptive way. Healthy people can shrug those moments off because they know they are not the end of the world. In fact, they know that such things are inevitable and that they happen to everyone.

  Thus, they can put these moments in their proper perspective. The socially anxious, on the other hand, because their perspective is so out of whack, can only react to them in the maladaptive way, which is to try to make sure they never, ever, ever happen again…. which, of course, leads to even further anxiety and even poorer decisions.

  The only hope is to get a grip on oneself and, with positive self-talk, bend oneself towards not just knowing that these reactions are insane and don’t line up with reality, but believing it.

• 4) A deep down sense of shame. Turns out you do not need religion to end up with one of those. You just need poisonously low self-esteem. Self-esteem so low that it approaches the theoretical minimum, where there is absolutely no negative statement about you that you will not believe. I spent a long long time thinking I was a toxic level of horrible, unwanted and unlovable, a burden to all who knew him and repulsive to all who might meet him. I felt like the world would be better off without me and that nobody would really mourn my passing. It would be more of a relief than a loss to people.

  And so forth and so on.

  But now I know that I am actually a heckuva guy.

  And every day, I get a little better at believing it, too.

• 5) Lack of role models. Looking back over my life, I realize that there weren’t a lot of fully socially complete people for me to learn from. My parents didn’t have friends. My siblings had friends but they did most of their socializing away from home. When I had friends, I was too socially freaked out around them to be able to learn from them.

  So what role models I had did not do me much good.

• 6) The wrong environment. During my most recent therapy appointment, my therapist asked me if there was another time when I had felt as alive and reborn as I do now. And the only time I could think of was my first time going to college. There, I had friends, I had classes, I was discovering the joys of philosophy, I lived with my brother, and overall I was a pretty happy dude.

  It was the right environment. I wouldn’t find that good an environment again until I met up with my current set of friends around a decade ago. And even that was not really the same, not because there’s anything wrong with Joe. Julian, and Felicity, but because it lacked the challenge of classes and university life.

  So it’s no wonder that I couldn’t get my life back on track until I went back to school. University was where I left off, and it’s where I picked back up again, more than twenty years later.

And I am sure there are many more. After all, I’m a deep and complicated guy, and therefore simple solutions don’t suit me.

I have also been struggling with that whole ego thing I keep talking about. The problem, in a nutshell, is : how does one develop an ego proportionate to one’s abilities when those abilities are, to be frank, quite extraordinary? Without going completely insane with delusions of grandeur and/or megalomania?

Surprisingly, the solution appears to be getting some actual, tangible ego boost. Like getting accepted at VFS, for instance. Now that there is something solid to support my ego, I have an anchor for my ego, and I no longer feel like I am going to go crazy if I try to actually develop an ego because now, my abilities are somewhat defined. So I can go to VFS feeling more secure than I have in a very long time because just by getting accepted, I am getting the validation I have needed for so long but were too ill to collect.

Monday could not come soon enough for me. I am actually a little disappointed that on the first day, we’re just going to be doing a sort of “getting to know each other” thing and not getting into actual classes. I wanna work, goddamn it. Give me homework! Assign me assignments! Make me learn stuff! DO IT NOW!

I’m so weird.

I’ve just reached the point in my life when I can fully understand that work and effort aren’t the enemy, they’re salvation. Like my therapist said, maybe all I have really been missing is challenge. I have never had it. I wasn’t challenged by school, and I was smarter than all my teachers. And because I was so socially isolated, life didn’t challenge me either.

Now I face a real challenge, a crazy intense year of education that will push me to my limits.

And all I can say to that is, “Finally!”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.