Patient readers with very, very good memories will remember that I have talked about this concept before. Usually, I phrase it as “would you rather be right, or happy?”, and that’s a phrase which, while elegant and efficient, makes no goddamned sense to anyone fortunate enough to live outside my skull.

And that’s most of you.

So tonight, I thought I’d try to illustrate my point with some examples.

First, a small example. Say a person thinks that absolutely nobody loves them. Then, they get incontrovertible evidence that someone absolutely does love them, and loves them a lot. How will they react?

If they are emotionally healthy, it will make them feel better.

But if depression has its thumb on the scale, what will happen is that the person will our a lot of energy into negating this attempt of life’s to suggest they are wrong. Depression is a lot like inertia. It resists change. In fact, it persists precisely because it gets so good at suppressing input that might undermine it, and it will use the most intellectually honest means to do so for it has no shame.

So what happens is that depression’s evil immune system will negate the input by hook or by crook. ^[1] The result of this attack is that instead of getting the full benefit of the positive emotional input, all the depressive gets is the cold comfort of knowing they were “right” that nobody loves them and that once more, they have triumphed over the forces of hope, love, and change.

That’s what I mean when I talk about being right versus being happy. If our imaginary depressive accepted the positive emotional input of someone demonstrating definite, sincere love for them, they would be a happier person who felt a lot better about themselves. And all it would cost them is admitting they were wrong and adjusting their world view accordingly. Seems like a small price to pay, doesn’t it?

I mean, if the choices are cake or death, who would choose death?

But as we know both from our own lives and the extensive research on the subject, people do not change their worldviews based on evidence very often. Our worldview is the rock upon which we build our sense of reality, and the human mind’s default setting is to maintain stability no matter what.

Ergo, changing our worldview is usually too big a change. The deeper the belief, the stronger the resistance, because the deeper the belief, the greater the number of other beliefs that would also have to change because they are built upon that original belief.

And this is depression’s greatest ally. It uses this resistance to remain dominant. It sinks its tentacles deep into the depressive’s world-view and insures that in order to truly attack it on a cognitive level, the depressive would have to admit that they have been dead wrong on a lot of things (and what’s worse, a lot of other people whom you hate were right about those things) and the self-stabilizing principle of the mind does the rest.

I consider myself lucky because while my depression has forced a lot of crazy beliefs on me due to its ability to cut me off from positive emotional input, I have never embraced a pessimistic or cynical world view. I have stubbornly refused to embrace the all too easy route of declaring the world to be a shitty place full of shitty people who have it out for me personally because I suck.

I have believed that I suck – I still do sometimes. But I have never believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world.

In fact, my attitude has always been one of a finely tuned and robust neutrality. Both pessimism and optimism make too many unsupportable assumptions that rest on the absurd notion that the universe has a fundamental disposition towards you as an individual and people in general.

That can’t be true, because the universe is not a sensate entity and therefore cannot have a disposition towards anything. It has no more of an opinion on what happens to you than a rock does.

It simply is.

So while I sometimes believe logically unsupportable things about myself, like that everyone hates me and wishes I would just go away for good and stop bothering them and being a burden on them, I at least leave the universe out of it.

This worldview inertia makes a purely cognitive approach to curing depression ineffective. The depressive knows, at least on some level, that their depressive beliefs are not backed up with a lot of evidence. So rejecting the wrong thoughts and replacing them with the good thoughts is not going to cut it alone.

In fact, it can leave the depressive confused and scared as they become trapped between what they feel is real and what they know is true.

Trust me, I have been there. That’s when you truly know you are crazy.

The real cure for depression does not, therefore, lie with attacking its underlying assumptions, except possibly at key moments when the depressive is receptive. Depressives believe what they believe because they have no choice. It’s what the bad chemicals in their mind force them to believe.

In other words, it is no mere error of thought.

Instead, depression has to be attacking the fundamental traumae that are causing the chemical imbalance in the first place. That’s what therapy is for. Therapy works. It works very slowly and follows a very crooked trajectory, but it works.

People don’t like to hear that. They want something faster and less invasive and uncomfortable. Therapy sheds light into the places people least want to see in themselves, and people are understandably leery of that.

But it’s the only thing that works.

At least until we invent a drug that induces catharsis by forcing suppressed memories to the surface and making you relive past traumas so you can get over them,

And even then, who would want to take it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Western thought tends to dismiss intuition as irrational and unreliable. It lumps it in with all the “lower” mental; faculties, like emotion and instinct. Intuition is, after all,just a feeling. If it was more than a feeling, in other words, if it was something we could explain in a logically coherent manner, then it would cease to be an intuition, at least by Western rules.

It’s all part of the antagonistic dualism that infects Western thought. The whole “reason good, feelings bad” notion of intellectual idealism where we are supposed to be trying to transcend earthly matters and striving for some kind of Olympian detachment.

This is, of course, a ludicrous idea on many levels. We can no more transcend the flesh than we can split atoms with our minds. We are bodies with minds and vice versa. What we think of as our minds are products of the flesh and the two can no more be separated than an object and its shadow.

Transcendental thought seems to believe that if the object tries hard enough, it can become all shadow.

Myself, I have always resisted these petty dualisms. Who says it has to be A or B? Maybe its both.  Maybe it’s neither. Maybe light is both a wave and a particle. Maybe its made of waves of particles. Maybe it’s a third thing that we haven’t even thought of yet.

In short, maybe we have no idea what the fuck it is.

So for me, reason and intuition are not at all opposites, let alone antagonistic ones. Neither could function without the other. Reason is a very powerful tool, especially when bolstered by the scientific method, or at least rational inquiry.

But mighty Dame Reason would be useless without intuition. Reason is a product of the conscious mind, and the conscious mind is merely the interface for the power supercomputer that is our mind. Everything else is intuition.

My own mental processes are definitely a seamless integration of reason ad intuition. In general, it is usually a matter of intuition leading and reason verifying.

Take my creative process. The primary process is the deep listening I wrote about before. My mind blanks out n order to let my creativity have all te room it needs to create, and then the solution forms in my mind and I “see” it.

But that’s only half the process, because the solution doesn’t come to me as words. It is up to my conscious mind to take that raw creative substance and articulate it. Without that, it would just be an idea that streaks through my mind like a million others, without form or purpose.

And it is the conscious mind that submits the request (so to speak) in the first place. It’s the conscious mind that says “Think of something here” or “how can we connect these two things” or “what would be a funny way to say this”.

And of course, all this is happening at the speed of thought and I am only slightly aware that it is happening at the time.

This artificial wall between reason and intuition has done a lot of damage over the years. That’s what happens when you have people pursuing this mad dream of the ego’s of doing away with the rest of the mind so it can be “free”, and then judging themselves for not be able to achieve it.

Worse still are those who believe they have achieved it. Those are the people who will convince themselves that their basest emotions somehow represent the highest of ideals, and that requires a shockingly intellectually compromised mind where reason’s only job is to come up with justifications for what the id has decided to do, unfettered.

And the thing is, in all probability this is a highly intelligent and articulate person and therefore can convince people with less mental muscle that these base and twisted actions are full justified and the right thing to do.

Andif they can convince others, they can convince themselves as well.

It is something I must guard against, both in my self and in others. That’s part of why I pursue the truth so relentlessly. It would be so easy to fall into the trap of dominating other people intellectually in order to get my oral retentive needs catered to.

But I refuse to abandon my intellectual integrity, because without that, I would be just another animal grubbing about in the shitpile of life.

So I suppose I have my own form of rationalist idealism. It has a lot less to do with suppression of emotion than it does with letting our powers of reason modify our emotional state. To me, to be truly human is to be able to choose not to believe everything that our emotions tell us.

Because emotions lie. That’s one of the things the rationalists got right. Emotions will tell you something is true because it feels true, evidence be damned.

That;s why it is so hard – and so important – to keep an open mind. To be prepared to change how you feel about something based on new information, rather than deny the information because it upsets you and making up reasons for it after the thought.

An illustrative case : a man is accused of rape and arrested. The news reports on it extensively all the way up to the court date. Public outrage is high and the man’s family, associates, and life are threatened constantly.

Then the trial begins and the case is immediately thrown out for lack of evidence, lack of merit, and lack of anything else that would merit prosecution. There is absolutely no evidence he did the crime and the whole thing is based on rumours that got out of control. The man is not, nor has he ever been, a rapist.

But that’s not how the public will see it. They have invested a lot of hate in this innopcent man and they gave really enjoyed dumping their rage and frustration on him.

To put it plainly, they do not want him to be innocent. Him being guilty is a lot more fun and him being innocent means they have change their emotions and they don’t want to do that. They want to keep believing that the cops caught the guy that did it and he will be punished by the state in their stead.

So to the public, he is not an innocent man. He’s a man who got away with rape. And that will be how people in that region see him for the rest of his life.

At the same time, the real rapist walks the streets, free to rape again, because the justice system knows that the people have no patience for starting over from scratch and so they too will keep on thinking they know who do it rather than look for the real perp.

All because people don’t like having to change their minds.

Everyone except us humans, of course.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I keep feeling like my life is spiraling out of control.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, in the long run. I’ve come to the conclusion that I have some serious “trying to control outcomes” issues, and maybe realizing that I am not in control of my life opens up a path to forgiving myself for said life.

It’s a work in progress.

I had today all planned out. I was going to get up, eat lunch, retrieve my check from our mailbox, take the bus to my bank, cash the check, do some grocery shopping, and then take a taxi home.

It’s only a five block trip, but I planned to buy frozen foods.

Oh, and I am very lazy.

Now, class, let us examine my plan for today and try to determine the probable cause of it failing and crashing my mood along with it.

Obviously, I got up. I ate lunch – that’s a fairly good bet on any day. I will volunteer that did no grocery shopping and hence did not take a taxi for any reason. I also didn’t get on a bus to go anywhere at all.

That leaves the retrieval of the check. That is our failure point. I went to get the check and it was not there. That brought the whole thing to a screeching halt, and took my mood down with it.

Because I was so up for this small adventure. I had eaten lunch, got myself dressed and put together, put my winter clothes on, grabbed the mail key, and headed out into the world to get some stuff done.

The check’s absence was so unexpected and random and arbitrary that it kicked the feet out from me. I still haven’t recovered and it’s been half a day. I really don’t handle the unexpected very well. Not when it comes out of nowhere like my lack of check.

I am worried that it has been stolen. That’s not just the depression talking. The check, if it arrived,  would have made it there Wednesday, and here I was not bothering to go get it until Saturday afternoon. That’s three whole days it sat there, and I have had a check stolen before, so I know that shit happens.

Now don’t worry, patient readers. Even if it did get stolen, there is no chance I will end up homeless because of it. Worst case scenario, I might end up having to fill out a form and go through some bureaucratic hoops to get my $$$.

Otherwise, it might be that all I have to do is call the welfare office and get some bit of administrivial machinery unstuck. It happens from time to time. Or it might be that the check will show up Monday, problem solved.

So while the missing check is a very annoying problem and somewhat devastating to me because of my own personal infirmities but in the long run it will not matter much.

But it still made my brain train derail. After days of depression, I was finally “up” and feeling good, and then the plug got pulled by this random fucking thing.

I really wish I didn’t take things like this so hard. But I do.

I haven’t used the booster doses of my antidepressants yet. My therapist prescribed them for me because my mood was so poor. The idea was that I would have some extra doses for days when I really wasn’t feeling well.

I have been a little reluctant to use them for reasons that are probably highly irrational. Like, I don’t want to take the extra Paxil because Paxil acts like an anesthetic for your emotions and I already feel way too numb.

I know that’s wrong, but so far, that hasn’t changed anything.

As for the extra Wellbutrin, I am worried that I will end up anxious. That’s what happens when you have more energy but the psychic machinery is not there to let that energy turn into a higher activity level.

I learned that from what happened to Felicity when she tried Wellbutrin.

That’s not really rational either. I mean, it’s a possibility, but it’s also possible that by boosting both the Paxil (anti-anxiety) and the Wellbutrin (energy unlocking), the two will balance each other out and I will ends up a happier and more focused and alive person.

That sounds so good. I have been feeling like I was one of the living dead lately, and not one that is keeping well at all.

I guess that it was happens when the depression gets bad enough. Being locked within yourself in a deep dark dungeon far from the light of the sun can do that to a person. Normal people have no idea how good they have it and how much their normalcy is underpinned by a stream of stimuli that keeps them together.

For us unlucky depressives, it can be like living in an eternal eclipse that is centered on you and nobody else. Other people are clearly fully alive and walk in the sunshine without giving it a second thought. And when you try to tell them what it is like to be you, they don’t understand. How could they? The sun has always shone on them.

I know the warmth and light is still there. After all, the sun never stops shining, even in the darkest of nights when the wolves of the mind prowl and our inner demons grow restless and yank at their chains.

Even then, the sun still shines on the other side of the world, and all we have to do is wait and it will come back again.

It’s just so hard to keep believe something when you don’t feel it. In the inner darkness of depression, the thought that all the light and love we need is out there beyond our reach is more painful than the finality of utter despair.

And so we choose to be believe that the light isn’t there.

Or at least, not there for the likes of us.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had therapy today.

I feel much better now.

Guess I just needed to talk to someone about it all. I love you, patient reader, but there are some things that require the active participation of another, and for me, therapy is definitely one of those things.

Heck, therapy is what got me to where I am today, only two months away from having a degree from VFS and hence, at long last, something to show for my time on Earth.

Even if I never get work related to my VFS training (a sad but very real possibility), I will have that certificate on the wall proving I was good enough to get into and pass one of the most prestigious and advanced TV writing courses in the world.

And nobody can take that away from me.

The sheer relief I got out of today’s therapy session really made me appreciate therapy and make me more determined to make sure I don’t have to skip a week ever again. I mean, I was on the ragged edge of madness all the way up until 1 PM this afternoon. I felt very cold and numb and quite frankly miserable.

But that’s not the dangerous part. After all, sadness is not a dangerous emotion by itself.

The dangerous part comes when the flip switches and I begin to feel restless and anxious and trapped in my own skin. That’s when I start to feel really crazy and start to worry that I might do something crazy just to shatter the deadly silence inside me.

The mind knows it is supposed to be feeling things. Thing from the world, not just things from its own complex processes. It knows it just like your foot knows it is supposed to feeling things and cries out in panic when your foot falls asleep.

That might have been too metaphorical even for me. Sorry.

My point is that when the depression gets bad enough, it starts occluding emotional input from the environment to such an extent that parts of your mind experience the same sort of feeling of wrongness you get if input from one of your senses was suddenly cut off.

And over time, that sense of lack – that feeling that you are straining to hear a noise that is not there and yet you can’t stop – can build like white noise of the mind until it roars like a waterfall of excruciating silence.

And that’s when I start to feel not just crazy but crazed. Like a monster in a cage, I rage inside, but nothing makes it out into the world because I don’t want to hurt anyone.

My recent realization that my therapist probably can take whatever I can dish out probably helped contribute to the efficiency of today’s session.

And if he can’t handle it, he will just have to refer me to someone who can.

I am not exactly an easy patient. I express myself in ways that are deep and emotional and which, when I am doing it right, express the deep pain I feel in a way that really transfers some of the emotional substance of it.

That is not easy to take, I would imagine.

On the other hand, I do not resist therapy. That would be pointless. I am not the sort of person who gets mad when poked in a sensitive spot (so to speak). Those sensitive spots are the whole point of therapy. That’s where the pain lies – the psychological equivalent of your GP poking and prodding to see where it hurts.

Time and time again, I have impressed my therapist with my mature and insightful attitude towards my own recovery. Many times he has looked at me, impressed and bemused, and said “You know, it takes most people a long time to come to that realization. ”

I’m not most people.

I know what therapy is, what is does, what is involved in the process, and what I want out of it.  I am perfectly willing and able to open myself up completely (or well, to the best of my ability) and go down into the deep dark depths in search of catharsis.

Perhaps that means I have a somewhat broken sense of boundaries. I can’t rule that out. I know my deeply cerebral mindset is quite bizarre. It leads to thinking of others as minds first. Minds that happen to come with bodies, faces, and so on.

But in a way, it is like I am some sort of black box alien brain trying to communicate with the world across interstellar void, and other people’s minds are islands in the darkness between me and others. Everything else is a dim and unsatisfying background blur compared to this sense of mental connection with others.

There are people who would be quite rightfully horrified if they knew how deep into their minds I had gone. But I can’t help it. It’s how I see the world.

There’s those boundaries again. To me, they don’t exist, or at least, don’t matter. I pass through them as easily as I step out of the social matrix as well. Perhaps I would be better connected with the world if I allowed the walls of most people’s reality to bind me.

But that’s part of how I see the world too. I can (and do) behave discreetly towards others. I am long past the point where I blurt out people’s deepest secrets like they are something that should be obvious to all. So, as far as I know, I behave as though I don’t know these things. And that’s the best I can do.

I can’t help but see but I don’t have to look. If you catch my drift.

So instead of the normal sorts of boundaries, I have discretion. And part of that is the discretion of knowing that for the most part, let nobody know how deep into their mind my perceptions and deductions have taken me.

Damn, I should have been a therapist.

Guess I will have to settle for being a brilliant writer instead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Midnight, in this case, being like the Death card in a pack of Tarot cards : not literal physical death but merely big change in your life, the kind that changes who you are and thus is easily mistaken by your current identity for a more corporeal death.

It’s the Death that means Transformation, and hopefully, Transcendence.

I have written about a need for transformation in this space before. I have a very strong feeling that what I need is some kind of transformative event, good or bad (but hopefully good), that pushes me to a high mental state while burning up a lot of the old garbage that is piling up inside my mind.

I can’t do it myself. That much is clear. At the very least I can’t do it consciously. My instincts towards maintaining equilibrium are too swift and too strong. That stems from dealing with my own deep mental instability for so long.

Hence my ability to just keep going in life. I never totally fall apart. I never have any sort of crisis. I never wind up in the wacky ward because I simply could not cope.

Nope, I just keep plodding along at a subsistence level.

I don’t know what it will be life when I enter the world of working for a living. I will have to find a way to cope somehow. School isn’t easy but it’s only 15-20 hours a week. The real world is a 9 to 5 proposition and I have never had to keep my poop in a group for that long since I left high school.

But then again, if I am working in my field (please please please), I will presumably be having at least a little fun. I am pretty sure that I could handle being in the writer’s room gor a TV show. All you are expected to contribute at first is ideas, and I have tons of those.

And I don’t fear pressure. In fact, I am kind of looking forward to it, because it will keep me from getting bored. I could use a strong motivation to stay focused and together, and of course, whatever burns off my excess of mental energy is good for my mood.

And ya know, there’s always cocaine. Ha ha ha.

Still, I have felt so low and nonfunctional lately that it has me worried. I am clearly running a fairly nasty deficit when it comes to energy gained versus energy generated (or accessed). Some vital form of momentum has been lost and I don’t know how to get it back. I feel so cold and dead inside, and so very very tired that I feel like I could sleep for a year and still be good for a nap.

In fact, that sounds pretty good to me right now. Wake me up when Trump is impeached.

More seriously, though, I wonder what I can do to boost input enough to match output.

Certainly, I could stop eating the bad stuff. That’s probably a big contributor to feeling ill. But when I go a while without having something naughty and sugary, I get this empty and slightly crazed feeling. I suppose that’s simply my endocrine system trying to make me eat the bad thing rather than crack open the fat reserves for energy.

Well fuck THAT. Learn to make better use of the healthy carbs, dammit.

The bigger problem is the lack of reward stimulus. That’s a hard thing to replace. Then ature of our minds is that we hone in on sources of reward stimulus and then fixate upon them. In other words, we do what we find rewarding and we do it in the way that generates the maximum amount of reward, over and over again.

And when reward level drops, cravings kick in. That’s as true for playing World of Warcraft as it is for crack or heroin. The mind has fixated upon an experience which satisfies this need for reward stimulus and refuses to believe that anything else could even come close to providing the same level of reward stimulus.

That’s how fixation works. It doesn’t merely focus on its target, it excludes everything else. And it’s not just the obvious addictions. It works that way with sexual fixation as well,  as well as those fixations we refer to as “tastes”.

And of course, exercise would probably make me feel better. Especially exercise that doesn’t come with foot pain.

I need to go see my GP some time soon. Maybe I will ask about orthopedic shoes when I am there. It must be possible for someone as fat as me to walk without pain. To experience the unbelievable luxury of arch support  for more than a day without having to go through a pack of Doctor Scholl’s a week.

I can’t afford that. It would be lovely to start every day by putting a brand new, ultra tough set of insoles into my shoes so that I might actually walk without pain.

Maybe even for the entire day!

But that would run me at least $30/week which I can ill afford. Someday, perhaps, when I finally get to enjoy the miracle known as “employment”, I will be able to do it.

And if I am really lucky, I will some day be able to afford custom shoes built for my heavy self which will provide a comfortable fit for years to come.

I would be willing to pay quite a lot for that.

Of course, a home gym would help too. That’s another materialistic dream of mine. My own Universal style gym so I can lift weights to my heart’s content, as well as a few good machines for cardio, like an exercise bike or a rowing machine or one of those ski things.

Actually, maybe not the ski thing, Those frighten me.

Oh, and maybe some free weights as well, for small muscle exercises and your more casual, “working a muscle while watching TV” type workouts.

Honestly, my main worry would be making sure I don’t overdo it.

But all of this must wait. I have one more term of VFS to go and then I will launch myself into the world with a degree from a highly respected school and a brightly burning desire to make it into the TV industry any way I can.

Even if I have to sweep the goddamned floors.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My mood is… not good.

I found myself feeling utterly lost in class today. Like I was completely alone, even though I was in a small room with six other people.

It didn’t help that I fucked up again. I am so fucking sick of myself. As is often the case, I leaped to an erroneous conclusion with my usual perverse agility. I was not sure what the assignment was for my TV Pilot 2 class over the weekend, but I did an outline for a couple more episodes of my show Sam just in case.

But when I posted it to the class forum Monday night, I found out that none of my fellow students had posted theirs. So I figured I must be wrong about the assignment, and dismissed it from my mind.

Aaaand that was dumb, because it turns out I was right about the assignment, it was just that none of my fellow students had posted theirs yet when I posted mine. Mine was six hours late, but theirs were…. much later.

So I showed up at class today to find out that everyone had read everyone else’s outlines for the next episode, including mine, and I hadn’t read any of theirs.

This launched me into the cold panic that has become all too familiar lately. Once more I had screwed up and let other people down. My life is a never ending stream of humiliations and I don’t feel like I have the power to stop them because whenever I remember one thing, I forget another, and I just can’t get ahead.

I try so hard to get my shit together but it just doesn’t work.

Reference : the first verse of this song.

Band name mostly coincidental.

I did get a little bit of positive human input, though. The episode of Sam I was dreading having other people read because I was convinced it was horrible turned out to be the one that everyone loved. Go figure.

I must have some kind of talent. I just don’t quite know how to use it yet.

In general, I have been feeling craptacular lately. I really feel like my depression has gotten worse as of late and I am wondering why.

As patient readers know, I tend to end up in a bad mood at the end of a term at school. I think it comes from a form of mental exhaustion. Too much putting out more mental energy than I generate until my mind is in deep dark debt.

And speaking of the deep dark, it might be seasonal too. I haven’t found my SAD therapy unit yet, nor have I gotten around to getting some full spectrum bulbs for my lamps. So the possibility that sunshine would improve my mood remains.

It does seem like I feel better on sunny days. It’s anecdotal but compelling. My vision of paradise is full of spring sunshine on cool green grass. It’s a vision that captures, in the deep symbols of my mind, a feeling of being happy and safe and free and life being a wonderful thing filled with simple joy.

Pretty sure I am not a grownup in that vision.

I get so tired of correcting my negative thoughts. I suppose that illustrates the folly of a purely cognitive approach to curing myself. I can correct the thought but the underlying emotion doesn’t really change.

That icicle-sharp wind keeps blowing through my soul regardless.

I found myself staring at the number for the local suicide hotline on a poster at school today. I was not considering self-harm. I don’t go there any more except in very brief spurts which I quickly reject and correct.

But I thought it might be nice to have someone I can talk to whenever I want. Someone who is not connected to my life at all so I can just dump my depression on them without feeling bad about it.

After all, it’s what they are there for. It’s not just for people actively considering suicide. It’s also for us people who really need someone to talk to.

And what the hell, if they can’t stand the effects of my unshielded reactor core and end up super depressed, they can always talk to each other.

My depression is probably not as toxic as I think it is. But someone like me has to be careful because I have extremely potent powers of communication and I am very good at expressing how I feel in words.

That’s what makes me so deadly. In my desperate animal-level need to communicate how I feel, I can give people far more than they are able to handle.

Hell, there’s been times I depressed my therapist. That arctic chill of mine is potent stuff. And I am too damned empathic – and moral – to be okay with destroying someone else in order to let the chill winds out of my soul.

I’m a utilitarian, and we don’t do that zero sum bullshit. An action has to improve the world, or at least do no harm to it,  in order to be morally acceptable to me.

This precludes most forms of victimization, except in extreme situations.

I suppose I should not be worried about my therapist’s mental health either. After all, absorbing my toxic output is what he is there for too. And perhaps it is absurd of me to think my problems are somehow worse than those of the rest of his patients.

But the rest of his patients aren’t geniuses with crazy strong verbal skills, high emotive power, and so much zombie tissue embedded in the flesh of their souls.

Deep down, my id says “Fuck everyone else, just let loose with the full power of your personality and mind and leave a smoking fucking crater where your suppressed life used to be. The world can take care of itself. ”

And maybe everything would be fine. All my fears would prove to be unfounded and the world would go on just the same only with me far, far happier.

But maybe I would end up in the secure psych ward.

And I just can’t tkae that kind of risk.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was not good.

It started off on the wrong foot when I either slept through my alarm or the damned thing didn’t go off. I have checked and rechecked all the relevant settings and as far as I can tell, there was no reason for it not to go off. Everything is 5 by 5.

So once more, an alarm clock has failed me in a way that seems impossible. I know I would not have slept through it had it gone off. The dang thing was only inches from my ear. Plus, most alarm clocks keep beeping till you tell them to stop/

And that’s clearly not what was going down. So I dunno.

All I know is that I lazily awoke at 7:36 am, convinced it must still be before 7 until I looked at the clock and shouted “Excrement!”.

Or words to that effect.

Luckily,. I have enough wiggle room in my schedule to accommodate such a SNAFU. It just meant that I would not get my usual “grade period” of time between waking up and actually having to pull myself together and act like a human.

Usually, I play video games during that time and that keeps my mind busy enough that it doesn’t interfere with my mind’s delicate and intricate booting up sequence.

Anyhowzit, I had a quick breakfast and got my big butt out of the door. Missed my bus by mere moments (I hate it when that happens) and had to walk. Not a huge deal – I only went back to taking the bus in the mornings last week – but definitely part of a sort of theme that was emerging from the events of the day.

And of course, it was a really cold morning.

Fast forward to class. Story Editing, last class of the year. I was dreading this class for two reasons : 1) my story editing report was going to get workshopped and it suuuucks and 2) we had a test for which I was not prepared because the instructor has the charming habit of testing you on the last day of class on things from the handout on the first day of class, and I am not very good at keeping things like that.

I have that instructor next term too, for Career Launch. I am thinking of taking everything she gives us on the first day and nailing it to my wall.

Also… Career Launch! I’ve been waiting for one of those my entire adult life. The whole thought of it makes me a-tingle with that feeling that is anticipation, excitement, and terror all rolled into one.

Call it…. teranticement.

Or don’t. I’m not your mother.

Anyhow, coming up on halfway through class I began to realize that my bowels were sending me urgent messages of dire need, so I went to the bathroom. All was well until I stood up at the end of the performance and realized I had made a rather substantial deposit. Uh oh, I thought.

And I was right to be concerned. Despite my pre-flush efforts, the toilet overflowed violently. Water fountaining over the sides of the toilet with me helplessly jiggling the handle. I had to go next door and tell the two program aides about it.

Patient readers know that this kind of thing freaks me the fuck out and throws me into a depressed, anxious, and freaked out mood filled with so many layers of Freudian shame that it it’s like a baklava of neurosis.

So I was deep in the depressive deep freeze when I went back to class. I felt cold and numb and like I was in shock, which was not that far from the truth.

Weird how our minds can throw our bodies into genuine medical distress just from emotions, don’t you think? Makes me feel like we need better safety circuits.

And then came the test. I knew I would not do super well, but I wasn’t too overly concerned (just overly concerned enough) because I test well and I figured that meant that I would at least pass.

But then it came time to mark our tests and I realized that I had missed two pages of a five page test. The pages had been stuck together and I had not seen them. No wonder I had finished so early.

So I went from “deep freeze” to “bathed in liquid nitrogen” I did do something very intelligent, though : I immediately got up and left the room so that I would not hear the answers for that section.

Because of this, the teacher let me do that part of the test over my lunch break and I handed it in to her before the next leg of my long day’s journey into neurosis.

Which consisted of getting together with my partner for that Writing for Video Games presentation (after a quick Subway lunch). I had not heard a thing from them since our creative jam session last Wednesday, and seeing as the presentation is to be given tomorrow morning, I was kind of eager to get down on it.

So yes. I still have that to dread. Yay me.

It quickly became apparent that our crazy ass plot from the jam session was going to be very hard to explain. After a fair bit of work, we (I hope) have it reduced to something that can be conveyed in a ten minute presentation.

Makes me really wish we had come up with something really simple involving penguins, though. Cute little penguins having cute little happy and harmless and LINEAR adventures that a child could understand.

Bit late for that though.

After we finished, I headed on home. Good news : I finally remembered to get some prescriptions filled that had been sitting in my wallet for more than a week. The bad news : the bag my pharmacist put them in had no bottom, so my four bottles of pills scattered all over Cook street while I was in the middle of crossing it.

So I had to risk life and limb to retrieve them. At least I realized that the spillage was not my fault. At first, I, of course, blamed myself immediately, assuming that I had somehow managed to turn the bag over while clumsily handling it.

But no. The bag had no bottom. For once, it was not my own fuckery at work.

Oh well, at least today is over, school wise. All I have to do before tomorrow’s double whammy of classes is study up on our presentation so I am ready to do my part.

And once tomorrow is over, I have five days off before I start Term 6 : Endgame.

That’s roughly the right amount of time off. I don’t want any more than that. I just need a nice stretch of days in which there is absolutely nothing expected of me so I can concentrate on relaxing, and I am good to go.

Only one term left!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A rare sequel! Mark this day on your calendar, folks.

What I forgot to mention yesterday is that this “listening” state is my preferred mode of being. I live my life insuch a manner as to maximize my time in the creative/intelligent mode. i.e. open to mental stimulation but emotionally closed off from the world.

I have talked before about how depression seems to have some kind of relationship with stimulus level. The theory (which is mine) is that by keeping stimulus levels preternaturally low and avoiding as much physical arousal as possible,  the depressive keeps their anxiety in check. But at a terrible cost.

It creates a very strong and destructive anti-vitality bias. The things that normally stimulate people to a happy, balanced level of physical arousal are violently shunned. An artificial, deathly calm is enforced with brutal thoroughness. Nearly all forms of emotion are suppressed lest they wake the sleeping giant of the depressive’s anxiety.

The safe island in all this is mental stimulation. That is a form of stimulation that can be controlled with precision, especially with the Internet available to all. This fine control allows the depressive to keep the emotional stimulation to a “safe” level.

I do it with video games and hanging out with my fuzzy friends, and frequent naps. Another person might do it with TV and junk food. A third person might do it with music, reading, and prayer.

But the game is always the same : substitute “safe” mental stimulation for all the rest of the stimuli that normally keep people feeling alive, awake, and content.

That’s why I live in this bizarre “outside the Cave” way. I live Plato’s philosopher’s life as much as I can, and you really shouldn’t do that. I live in my world of ideas, observations, information, and other cold-circuit things because that’s where I feel safe. Interaction with external reality is kept at an absolute minimum, often at the cost of doing a very clumsy and weak job of relatively simple tasks.

Which, of course, only encourages further withdrawal.

It doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing I can conquer by sheer force of will. I can push myself to spend less time inside my head and more time dealing with reality, but the fundamental pattern of withdrawal from excess stimulus no matter what seems to be very deep set, probably because it started when I was raped at the tender age of three.

I dealt with it while it was happening by taking my mind away. This is not real, this is not happening, I am not here. I basically unfocused my mind to blur it all out, and retreated deep into my mind in order to cope with the horrible reality of what was happening.

And that is what I have been doing ever since. Trying to stay in that tiny room inside my head so that horrible reality can’t get to me. Brutally and desperately minimizing my time outside that room. Restricting my life to only that which is compatible with this regime.

For an agoraphobic like myself, home is a place in our minds far more than it is a place in the real world.

It’s hard for me to even imagine leaving that tiny hovel of my mind for very long. When I contemplate it I feel a very intense sense of panic that shuts the whole thing down. It’s that kind of panic/anxiety that is similar to the nameless dread of the compulsive in that it is a fear so great that it has no object. You are not imagining a specific outcome or a particular consequence of the action. The action itself is far too terrifying.

Even as I type this, I am filled with terror and dread.

So I stay in my teeny tiny safe place and only touch reality with a ten foot pole. Two of them, actually, used like chopsticks. Very clumsy.

It’s not without is benefits. This inner world of mine is extremely well developed. All this time listening to my inner voice in contemplation has given me a deep understanding of many things, such as what makes people who they are and why they do what they do. This understanding makes me a better writer and gives me insight into things which most people would consider an unsolvable and opaque mystery.

That has its drawbacks too, though. It’s not easy being the only fish who knows he’s swimming. I have always “seen” more than others and understood more than was probably good for me about human frailty and the everyday darkness of life from which there can be no escape.

At least, not for me.

Because it’s not just that I perceive things about people that others don’t, it’s that I lack any sort of escape from the reality of it all. I have denied myself denial as a coping mechanism for so long that it’s simply no longer an option.

I am naked to the truth, and dying of frostbite. And I don’t know what to do.

Lately I feel like my superego is this enormous and  brutally judgmental eye in the sky, filled with malevolence and hate and determined to crush me flat and keep me that way. It knows no mercy and no compassion, and with it, you are failing the moment you begin.

And all the time, it stares into me, freezing me in place and keeping me from healing. Things happen in my mind that make no sense. Like whenever someone is waiting for me, I get this intense anxiety the second they begin to wait, as if I am already doing something inexcusable, and need to move as quickly as possible because even one second more than the absolute minimum amount of time it takes to finish what I am doing means I am a horrible, horrible person.

I got that from my impatient Dad. But I am sure that even he would say that it goes way too far. When I am in this anxious state, I truly feel like I have to rush or I will be abandoned. Left behind and forgotten.

And I have felt that abandonment anxiety for a very long time.

Pretty fucked up, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been pondering that place I go when I think about stuff.

I’m no transcendentalist, so I am not talking about a real place. I do not literally go anywhere. Anyone observing me would just see me staring off into the middle distance with a faraway look in my eyes. In this, I look like any other human being.

Remember this when contemplating your fellow humans. No matter how they look, how they dress, what assumptions your social programming are telling you to make, or anything else. You have no idea what is actually going on in that person’s head. They could be having amazing thoughts that would astound you.

I certainly don’t look like a genius. In fact, due to my usual state of dishabile, I imagine I often look rather the opposite. I imagine I look kind of homeless, to be honest. Fat homeless, but homeless nevertheless.

Anyhow, back to the inner voice thing.

It was when I was collaborating with my classmate on our Writing for Video Games project that this subject really stuck in my mind. Repeatedly though the process, I would go to this inner state in order to come up with something or figure out a solution to a problem.

And the thing is, it’s a very hard state to describe. Despite my articulacy, when someone asks me what I am thinking about, I don’t know what to say. My thoughts are too multifaceted and complex to be rendered into a simple linear sentence.

And even if I could express it in a sentence, odds are nobody would understand it because it is so uniquely idiomatic to my way of thinking. It would be like asking a question and getting an entire library in response – and all the books are in Swahili.

Plus, well…. a lot of my thoughts are beyond most people’s ability to grasp. That’s a fact I find hard to take. I always, in quixotic fashion, feel like if I just explain it right, people will understand it and we will have connected.

It almost never works. But it is one of the things that has pushed my verbal skills into the stratosphere, so I supposed it is worth it.

As usual, my biggest problem with my advanced capacities is that I honestly don’t know how to handle them. By that, I do not mean that I am incapable of using them, but rather that I don’t know how to emotionally integrate the notion of intellectual superiority.

It’s weird. I have no problem with people thinking I am very smart or very talented or a lot of other ways of being good st stuff. But when I contemplate anything close to thinking of myself as better than another person, I get incredibly uncomfortable.

I mean, can’t we all just get along?

But I grasp that most people don’t go into this inner voice state and come back to reality with the sorts of things I can do.

So I suppose I can handle being unlike others. Just not superior.

Once more, we shall tack patiently back to the subject.

I call it a voice, but it’s not like there are words or a tune. It’s a voice only in the sense that accessing it is so much like listening for something. I go very still and there’s a sense of straining to sense something. External stimuli are muted in order to free up as much of my mind for the task at hand as possible.

If it’s merely a matter of accessing information, it lasts only a moment. Remembering does not take a lot of effort, although the older I get, the more full my memory gets. And that means finding what I am looking for takes a bit more time.

It’s like trying to find the right book in a very large library.

I used to say that the process did not involved imagery, but I was mistaken. I said that basing it purely on the preconceived notion that I was not a very visual person and therefore I did not think visually.

Never make that kind of assumption. Always observe before you conclude. Even if you are pretty sure you are right.

Images do flash through my mind while I think. But very, very briefly. It’s almost subliminal. I never really get a “look” at them. And it seems almost incidental to what is going on in my mind. Like it’s just what flashes on the screen while the supercomputer works away, no more meaningful to the process than the noise the printer makes.

Computer analogies and the human mind : together since computers.

I have never been able to call up an image of something I have seen like I was looking at a photograph. My mind just doesn’t work that way most of the time. The only time I can think of that it does work that way is that, occasionally, when I am remembering some piece of arbitrary information like a phone number, that I have seen but not used yet, I will get a brief flash of where I saw the information.

The other exception is in situations where I have an enormous number of visual samples because they are people, places, or things that I’ve seen an enormous number of times.

I can easily see everything in my childhood home, for instance, and in such detail that I can walk through that home in my mind like I am taking a virtual tour. Same with the writing department at school, and that restaurant I like, Bob’s Sandwiches.

To a lesser extent, I can still mentally survey all three schools I attended growing up, parts of my home town, and the bits of the neighborhoods I have lived in here in the GVRD.

Those are the exceptions, though. For the most part, my mind just plain doesn’t take pictures, or at least, doesn’t keep them very long.

Music, on the other hand, lasts forever, even if I only heard the chorus on a K-Tel commercial when I was six.

Funny how that works.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.