After all this time and all this progress, here I am again, back where I started.

With hours and hours to fill. Days stretching before me all the way to horizon, daring me to find a way to fill them. All that purposeless unstructured time and nobody to tell me what to do but me.

It’s a nightmare, really.

Moreso because of its deadly familiarity. It seems incomprehensible now, but this is how I wasted spent most of my adult life – and I am 43. And for 15 of those twenty or so years, I wasn’t even blogging. All I ever did was play video games and hang out online. For years.

From the point of view of the person I am now, this seems incomprehensible. I don’t know how I did it.

I guess I just didn’t know any better. It’s like when I founded the local furry community and we had that night out at the movies, and I felt this enormous relief because suddenly I knew what it was like to not be lonely any more. The relief was so profound I almost cried from the enormity of it. And with it, came the knowledge of just how lonely I had been, and that was almost as staggering.

Now I know just how unhappy I had been in my sluglike passive childish existence of video games and other time wasting bullshit. I have connected with the world via purpose and it has changed me for the better so profoundly that facing my previous “normal” existence now seems like a goddamned fucking nightmare.

A lot of that is because of the memories being trigger, though. A feeling of being back in the cage it took you so long to escape. Of course, that’s not true – I will escape again on the 29th. Guaranteed. But try telling that to the scared little animal deep inside my soul.

So here I sit, full of that nameless dread that has no source and no destination. I know I can find my way out of this morass.

But right now, I can’t feel it. So for the moment, it’s more of an article of faith than anything else.

And I have never been very good at faith.

I feel cold inside. Dead. That’s the depression, of course. Depression, at least to me, is more about the deadly chill inside that numbs as it destroys than it is about any kind of sadness or anxiety. Don’t get me wrong, social anxiety sucks and has caused me untold damage over the years as it diverts all my social inputs into its own stultifyingly confined yet maddeningly complex maze full of nothing but dead ends and negative conclusions.

But that’s anxiety. When I think depression, I think of paralytic numbness. Like I have said before, recovery for me is like waking up a foot that’s fallen asleep. Sure, it hurts – it hurts pretty bad. But that beats the hell out of the dead numb cold feeling it is replacing, and it feels so good to have life returning to the effected area that the pain is entirely justified.

Because deep down, you know that the numbness is wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. And the only way to cure the wrongness is to wake things up again, and work through the pain.

Sadly, a lot of people end up in the same position as I was in, too full of suppressed emotion to begin the thawing process. It takes therapy to cut down on the frozen emotions chilling your soul and let you start to come to life again. And there will be times you want to stop because it hurts so much.

But once you get a real taste for the results, namely feeling more alive and aware and healthy and whole, you know that no matter how often you stop, you will start again once you are ready.

It’s remarkably like taking a long and difficult shit, really.

I know I will make it to the other side of it. In fact, the fact that I am experiencing the depression of it right away is actually a really good sign. It means that I am ready to work through it right away instead of going into “dizzy and dim denial” mode, where I pretend everything is going to be just fine and don’t deal with the problem at all until I just can’t stand it any more.

I would rather burn through the garbage that’s in my way right away, and hopefully be able to enjoy my vacation, or at least, not resent it so much.

I am going to start writing my movie soon. That’s one way out. I am going to write three things in total, in reverse order of preference, which is how I always do things. So the movie first, then my Bob’s Burger episode, then the full package for my animated series Sam.

That means polishing up the script for the pilot, coming up with a season’s worth of plotlines, and various length of pitches. Then I will follow the method Victor taught us for getting our idea out there – it involves thoroughly abusing the free two week trial they offer for imbd Pro – and trying to get it made.

I truly believe that it could be a really great show. And very successful as well. It’s the sort of show that, by coming at familiar issues from an unusual – but still relatable – perspective can really touch people, as well as reach out to kids like Sam (and my inner child, of course) and make them maybe feel a little less alone in the world, as well as show the world that these kids exist and that they have their own set of problems too.

My odds, of course, are very low. But I am not exactly betting the farm on it either. It’s something to do over the break, and who knows, maybe it will be my ticket into show biz.

And if not, at least I had fun!

There, I got through my darkness and ended on a positive!

Yay for me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

After all this time and all this progress, here I am again, back where I started.

With hours and hours to fill. Days stretching before me all the way to horizon, daring me to find a way to fill them. All that purposeless unstructured time and nobody to tell me what to do but me.

It’s a nightmare, really.

Moreso because of its deadly familiarity. It seems incomprehensible now, but this is how I wasted spent most of my adult life – and I am 43. And for 15 of those twenty or so years, I wasn’t even blogging. All I ever did was play video games and hang out online. For years.

From the point of view of the person I am now, this seems incomprehensible. I don’t know how I did it.

I guess I just didn’t know any better. It’s like when I founded the local furry community and we had that night out at the movies, and I felt this enormous relief because suddenly I knew what it was like to not be lonely any more. The relief was so profound I almost cried from the enormity of it. And with it, came the knowledge of just how lonely I had been, and that was almost as staggering.

Now I know just how unhappy I had been in my sluglike passive childish existence of video games and other time wasting bullshit. I have connected with the world via purpose and it has changed me for the better so profoundly that facing my previous “normal” existence now seems like a goddamned fucking nightmare.

A lot of that is because of the memories being trigger, though. A feeling of being back in the cage it took you so long to escape. Of course, that’s not true – I will escape again on the 29th. Guaranteed. But try telling that to the scared little animal deep inside my soul.

So here I sit, full of that nameless dread that has no source and no destination. I know I can find my way out of this morass.

But right now, I can’t feel it. So for the moment, it’s more of an article of faith than anything else.

And I have never been very good at faith.

I feel cold inside. Dead. That’s the depression, of course. Depression, at least to me, is more about the deadly chill inside that numbs as it destroys than it is about any kind of sadness or anxiety. Don’t get me wrong, social anxiety sucks and has caused me untold damage over the years as it diverts all my social inputs into its own stultifyingly confined yet maddeningly complex maze full of nothing but dead ends and negative conclusions.

But that’s anxiety. When I think depression, I think of paralytic numbness. Like I have said before, recovery for me is like waking up a foot that’s fallen asleep. Sure, it hurts – it hurts pretty bad. But that beats the hell out of the dead numb cold feeling it is replacing, and it feels so good to have life returning to the effected area that the pain is entirely justified.

Because deep down, you know that the numbness is wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. And the only way to cure the wrongness is to wake things up again, and work through the pain.

Sadly, a lot of people end up in the same position as I was in, too full of suppressed emotion to begin the thawing process. It takes therapy to cut down on the frozen emotions chilling your soul and let you start to come to life again. And there will be times you want to stop because it hurts so much.

But once you get a real taste for the results, namely feeling more alive and aware and healthy and whole, you know that no matter how often you stop, you will start again once you are ready.

It’s remarkably like taking a long and difficult shit, really.

I know I will make it to the other side of it. In fact, the fact that I am experiencing the depression of it right away is actually a really good sign. It means that I am ready to work through it right away instead of going into “dizzy and dim denial” mode, where I pretend everything is going to be just fine and don’t deal with the problem at all until I just can’t stand it any more.

I would rather burn through the garbage that’s in my way right away, and hopefully be able to enjoy my vacation, or at least, not resent it so much.

I am going to start writing my movie soon. That’s one way out. I am going to write three things in total, in reverse order of preference, which is how I always do things. So the movie first, then my Bob’s Burger episode, then the full package for my animated series Sam.

That means polishing up the script for the pilot, coming up with a season’s worth of plotlines, and various length of pitches. Then I will follow the method Victor taught us for getting our idea out there – it involves thoroughly abusing the free two week trial they offer for imbd Pro – and trying to get it made.

I truly believe that it could be a really great show. And very successful as well. It’s the sort of show that, by coming at familiar issues from an unusual – but still relatable – perspective can really touch people, as well as reach out to kids like Sam (and my inner child, of course) and make them maybe feel a little less alone in the world, as well as show the world that these kids exist and that they have their own set of problems too.

My odds, of course, are very low. But I am not exactly betting the farm on it either. It’s something to do over the break, and who knows, maybe it will be my ticket into show biz.

And if not, at least I had fun!

There, I got through my darkness and ended on a positive!

Yay for me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.