I have a very slippery mind.

On one hand, it means that my mind can find and slip through the tiniest cracks in someone’s bullshit. Or to a lesser degree, my own.

The slipperiness also makes my mind very quick and agile. I have a lot of mental maneuverability. In the right situations (say, ones where verbal skills shine) I am quick-witted, pithy, witty, and total in control of myself and my situation.

On the other hand…. well,. things slip my mind very easily.

I really feel like no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try to stay on the ball,. things go missing. There’s a limit to how many plates I can keep spinning and when that limit is exceeded, for every plate I start spinning, another crashes, and boom goes that memory.

I have never been any good at keeping a lot of things in my mind at the same time. I have specialized rather heavily in being a deep processor, and that comes at the cost of not being much of a multitasker.

And that wouldn’t be such a problem if I had the self-discipline to make and keep lists and calendars and so on. But I don’t. Doing the necessary tasks often, ha ha, slips my mind. Those inner processes of mine are extremely demanding and they will delete anything that stands in their way if they need more mental space.

It’s like I start off with great intentions, then I think really hard about something, and my “keep my shit together” tasks go out the window.

It’s a crude approximation, but apt.

Now arguably, with enough therapy,. a lot of the junk in the attic of my mind will get cleared out and that could pave the way for something approaching competence.

That makes sense in theory. But I have a sneaking suspicion that I would end up using that extra space to think yet deeper thoughts.

That’s the benefit for me of being 43. I may have lost some perspicacity to age, but the older I get, the deeper my mental integration goes. I feel like my mind has deepened with age, so that everything my mind does draws from a deeper and far more powerful source than when I was younger.

So powerful that it scares me, to be honest. The power of this subconscious creative engine of mine is staggering. The feeling of being a small man walking a large dog (and vice versa) grows with every day. The one thing that reassures me about it is that my mind can’t run away from me too much because it is, after all, only a supercomputer. It still needs me to tell it what to do.

So I am safe for now. Unless I develop a psychosis. But I am too old for standard psychosis and too young for senile psychosis, so I think I am good for a while.

Normal people don’t think things like that, do they?

But when you are mentally ill science-minded genius who loves psychology and has a deep  DEEP fear of finally losing all his marbles, you need facts like that in order to control the fear so that the fear doesn’t control me.

When I went through mental and physical hell in my early twenties – when I was consumed by hypochondria and paranoia  – one of the many thing I thought was happening was that I was going crazy.

Turned out not to be the case, mostly because I was already crazy. My thought processes during that period of time were extremely unstable. It was hard for me to keep a thought in my mind for more than a second or so. The enormous shit tornado^[1] of pain and anxiety and confusion and everything else ripped my thoughts apart. I was extremely depressed and anxious and ill and I spent most of my time propped up on a couch watching TV in those periods where the storm was not so bad.

And spending the rest of the time in the bathroom.

And as I have said before,. severe IBS left me malnourished, dehydrated, with my electrolyte balance completely off and a gut like an earthquake zone.

That’s what happens when a disorder wrings your guts out until you have absolutely nothing left in you (and then some) and then keep you empty by murdering your appetite with a straight razor in a graveyard at night, and even makes it so that just drinking water sets off the intestinal fireworks.

But you have heard all this before.

I am still figuring out how to adjust to the knowledge that you WILL forget stuff. Important stuff. ^[2] And that, at least until you at least gain the competence to write shit down, there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it.

I suppose my existing coping mechanism will have to do : being self-effacing and friendly and humble and apologetic so that people will forgive your frequent fuckups.

It’s nothing I set out to do, but I suppose I had to develop some kind of defense mechanism, and I am definitely not the sort of person who can pretend these things don’t matter or blame it on others.

I have too deep a sense of responsibility for that.

I keep coming back to the same answer : I need a personal assistant. Someone whose job it is to keep track of what I should be doing, as well as what I could be doing but is not yet a must-do.

Only a live human being with a functioning forebrain can compensate for my mental vacuity and general reality issues. Someone bright and focused and competent who is willing to be the gardener who takes care of this delicate little hothouse flower.

For now, at least, I can’t fix my brain. It is what it is.

But maybe someday I will be able to pay someone else to do it.

I wikll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something to tell the depressives you love : I’m here for you even when you can’t feel me.

Because depression is disconnection.

The root cause of the disease is a kind of mental anesthetic that the mind normally produces at times of psychology trauma in order to keep us going so we can  heal.  Once the trauma has been healed, the anesthetic tapers off.

Depression occurs, then, when the trauma is too big,. too severe, for the mind to heal. Therefore, the signal “stop producing the anesthetic” never comes. The wound remains, and the depressive is caught in a situation where the mind can only treat the symptoms, not the whole disease.

And it doesn’t do a very good job of it. Especially if the trauma occurred early in life, and therefore distorted all psychological growth after it.

Mine happened when I was three. Maybe four.

And the thing about anesthetic is that it numbs you. Think of it as Novacaine for the brain. And that numbness makes it hard to feel things the patient vitally needs to feel in order to have a balanced and healthy psyche.

Things like love, a sense of connection with others, positive social feedback, and all the other things from that upper middle section of Maslow’s hierarchy.

The teal bit and the purple bit.

Note that the above is a hierarchy of needs. Not a hierarchy of wants. A human being needs these things in order to be happy and fulfilled.

And the purple and teal areas are the things that depression blocks. No wonder we’re so sad. We’re walled off.

So from the point of view of the depressive, those things in the “happiness zone” (HZ) do not exist. Not in any real, meaningful sense. They don’t exist because we can’t feel them.

And if you can’t feel a thing, it doesn’t exist. Feelings trump perception every time. ^[1]

That’s why reminding us of our blessings is worse than useless. Not only does it make us feel like you are invalidating our suffering, it only serves to remind us of how we should be happy… but are not.

And we hate that. We would rather think the world is against us and that we are genuinely the worst human being ever than face the bare fact that we are broken. That it’s not something wrong with the world. It’s not even something wrong with us, or at least, not in the way we think there’s something wrong with us.

Objectively speaking, we are nothing like we think we are. But the human mind interprets the lack of HZ input only one way : we are terrible people of negative worth, nobody loves us, our friends and loved ones hate us and resent us, nothing we have done in our lives matters, and the world would be better off without us.

Again, this is all extraordinarily contrary to the observable facts. But again, that doesn’t matter, because it’s how we feel, and feelings trump perception.

Note how these feelings map perfectly onto the HZ, especially the purple “esteem” zone. We are receiving none (or almost none) of the necessary inputs for self-esteem.

And we interpret that as meaning they are not there, when in reality, they are there, we are just not receiving them.

It’s not that there’s no signal. It’s just that our antenna is busted.

Therefore, ergo, and so on, to really attack the problem from a cognitive point of view, what is necessary is to construct a way for the depressive to believe in signals that they can not feel because of the disease.

Perhaps that is the true function of faith. Faith allows someone to, in essence, generated those HZ signals for themselves, no matter what happens in the world.

From that point of view, faith is brilliant. I wish I was capable of it.

Assuming faith is not a possibility, how else can a bridge to belief be built? Believe it or not, the answer might be reason and the rational mind.

But rationality used in a specific way. A rough, working definition of rationality is the ability to let observation and reason to change emotion.

In other words, to defy the usual pattern of emotion overriding observation and rationality, and letting observation and reality change emotion instead.

In order for this to happen, however, the patient must be able to truly believe in the products of their rational mind. To have faith in their own intellect, more or less. Such faith is a potential bridge to sanity for some depressives because it opens the door to modifying one’s emotions through reason.

The essential method is this : to fill one’s mind with all the evidence that the positive HZ inputs are out there – say, that your friends really do love you – and hold on to that knowledge despite the attempts your depression will make to negate this strange and foreign emotion that threatens its reign.

And this will not be easy. It will, in fact, be an intense defensive battle wherein the patient must fight off wave after wave of attacks from the forces of the “status quo” mindset, and the weapons they use will be both emotional and intellectual.

The emotional side will consist of a feeling of “wrongness” to the new emotion of self esteem and a desire, almost like a mental itch, which makes the individual want to reject the thought. You have activated the mind’s immune system and it is going to try to convince you to dump the positive input of reason in favour of giving up and thus releasing the mental tension.

Intellectually, it will come in the form of attempts of the mind to come up with reasons why the conclusions that have been drawn from the evidence is false. Call it a very personal form of motivated reasoning. This can be harder to resist because it comes bearing the marks of reason.

But if these negations are examined as they attack, their logical flimsiness will soon become evident, and countering arguments can be developed. Such as :

Depression : Those people who said nice things about you didn’t mean it.
Counter : What evidence do you have for that? Because you have way, way more evidence that they do mean it.

Depression : Everybody wishes you would just go away.
Counter : Really? Because that’s not what they say. What proof do you have that they are not being sincere with you?

Depression : I am the worst person ever.
Counter : Worse than Hitler? Stalin? Vlad the Impaler? Trump? Don’t confuse feeling bad with being bad.

And so forth and so on.

Now I realize that the above solution is not for everyone. It is, in fact, only suitable for those of us who walk a very rare and harsh road. Those of us who have faith in the truth and pursue it at all costs. Those of us whose reason can modify our emotions.

Those of us who conquered their childhood fear of the dark by repeating “there is nothing in the dark that was not there in the light” to ourselves.

So remember folks : the sun is always shining, even when you can’t feel its warmth.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Get ready for some brain farts, because my mind is pooped.

But for a quite wonderful reason. I am just getting home from collaborating on a project with another student and it was AWE SOME.

I have avoided collaboration so far because I thought it would be like group work and I hate group work with a pink and purple passion. To a “get it done” introvert, group work is the lowest level of hell. People fuck around, they don’t listen, they don’t take the project seriously, they don’t do their part of it, and the whole time, they give you fucking attitude.

Admittedly, that’s group work in a scholastic setting. It’s probably worse in offices.

And the thing is, I take responsibility for what I do. To do otherwise would impugn my sense of honesty, honour, and personal integrity and do me a moral wound.

Fuck THAT noise.

And that’s all very noble, but the thing is, most people are not like that. They feel no sense of responsibility to the group to do their part,. They treat anyone who expects them to pull their weight like they treat their parents. They are sullen, pouty, difficult, and feel absolutely no guilt about making other people do their work.

Just thinking about it makes me remember why I was a conservative in my teens. Then I found out that the Progressive Conservatives were a bunch of jackals like Mulroney.

Back to collab. The one thing where I was forced into collaboration at VFS was my film group, and you all know how that went. I got shut out of the process entirely.

So I was not super happy to be forced to collaborate with my classmate for the final project in Writing for Video Games. But tonight, I got together with my partner and we brainstormed a story together and it was so much fun.

THAT is what I hope I find in the TV industry. Creative people bouncing ideas off each other, helping each other out, everyone working to make the show as good as it can possibly be, all one big neurotic dysfunctional family. The story we came up with for a video game is quite good, if I do say so myself, and I am quite happy with the result.

And the process was a lot of fun too. Exhausting, but fun. Like the most fun exam ever. My creative engine was running at full throttle and so was his. We played off each other quite well. He’s young and energetic, and I’m… not, and I think between his enthusiasm and my own creative depth, we make a decent team.

For three hours we hammered away at that thing. It was exhilarating. He took care of writing things down on the dry erase board in the classroom we used,  which is proper as he is the one with the energy, and I got to just sit there and generate ideas and solutions.

I wish my life was always like that. I’d be such a workaholic!

By the time those three hours were up, though, my brain calories were used up. Also, regular calories because I had not had my supper yet. I maybe could have done another half hour, but I would have been a goddamned zombie by the end of it. As it turned out, we finished more or less in sync with my mental gas tank.

Even my partner’s laptop was exhausted!

Actually, today has been a pretty good day. It didn’t start out that way though.

See, I was supposed to present my TV ads project in Writing for Commercials this morning, but there was one small problem : I hadn’t done it.

But I had a pretty good excuse. I’d never received it.

I was sick the day we did TV ads in class, and therefore never got the assignment. In fact, I completely forgot there was another assignment in that class until last Saturday, where a paranoid prowl through the school Moodle  reminded me of the assignment.

Which I had never received, and therefore could not complete. It was too bad, too. I like writing my radio ads. Writing TV ads seemed like even more fun.

So then I had to get my hands on the assignment. First, I put a call out to my fellow students. Nada. Then I emailed the instructor. Nada.

Finally, Tuesday night, one of my fellow students photocopied the assignment and put in my binder at school.

Sadly, I did not learn of this fact until this morning, aka Wednesday morning. Right before the thing was due. I couldn’t even start it because the assignment was at school. I was completely out of options.

So I stayed home. It was not an easy decision. It was the product of a sudden and very fiercely fought battle between my will and my social anxiety.

Social anxiety won.

I just could not face my peers and an instructor without anything to present. My sense of shame was deep and burned bright hot. So I composed a point-form email explaining my situation to my instructor, and stayed the hell home.

Not proud of it, but so it goes.

I did make it to my afternoon class, which was TV Pilot 2, though. And I enjoyed it. For whatever reason, possibly the extra sleep, I felt far more alert and engaged today, and that made all the workshopping something to enjoy rather than endure.

Apparently, actual TV work is a combination of individual and group work, much like my workshopping courses. Writers go off to their office, write, then get together and present their work, which the group then workshops.

I kind of wish it was more like what I did today. And who knows, some people in TV write with a partner, maybe I could do that too.

I can say with certainty that what I produced with my partner is way better than anything I could do on my own. With him to do the writing down and contribute phenomenally good ideas, all I had to do was the parts that I do best, and bingo.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

So for the most part, today was great,

Except that I forgot to get the assignment out of my folder.

I am so high maintenance to myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The eternal questions : who am I and what do I do?

I’d really like to know. I have felt like I served no purpose except to subtract from its overall productivity Useless… that’s the word that got hung on me at an early age. And it stuck. I have a deep sense of being a net loss to the world. Nothing but a pathetic blubbering mass of flab, completely incapable of supporting himself, and my only hope in life is other people’s pity.

I know this is not true. I actually have extraordinary talents and an amazing mind. A lot of people would give their eyeteeth to have what I have always just taken for granted. There is a vast latent power in this megavolt  mind of mine.

And that scares me.  Perhaps irrationally. Maybe the fear is just one of the ghosts that my mind uses to keep me “safe” by making sure I don’t step outside my teeny tiny comfort zone. Maybe I have nothing to be afraid of.

But I have had a sense of my power since I was a kid, and how much damage it can do, and because I am a morally responsible, sensitive person, this power frightens me. I am terrified of hurting people via a careless use of mental muscle.

There’s a part of me – my id – that would love nothing more than to pull out all the stops, disconnect the safety systems, and shine as hard as I can without worrying about hurting people’s eyes. To take the attitude that I am just a normal person with no extra responsibilities and use my extra worldly power to make a life that suits me, and to hell with the consequences to anyone else.

I’m going to be me as I am, and the world will just have to deal with it.

But that would only change the polarity of the error. Take it from too much to too little. For every wrong solution, there is an equally wrong opposite solution.

Sometimes I wish I had gotten the clue about how much my life sucked and how it totally did not have to be that way when I was younger. Say, when I was thirteen. Then I might have rebelled and copped a massive attitude that basically said “Fuck you, I’m smarter than you” and dared the world to prove me wrong.

Secretly hoping that it would. Then there would be some sense of authority in my life. Your teenage years are supposed to be about testing your boundaries and seeing what you can get away with. They’re about testing the limits of your capabilities and discovering the walls of your world.

But I never did that. If there was some kind of urge to go crazy and push the boundaries in my teen years, it was hidden under all the depression. Despite my prodigious intellect, I was markedly incurious about the world around me.  The world inside my head was so much more interesting to me.

And as far as I can tell, I was never much of an explorer. I recall exploring my neighborhood when I was a preschooler. I remember doing it slowly and cautiously. But once I started going to school and getting bullied, all I wanted was to be safe and that killed whatever exploratory urge I possessed.

I wanted to be safe and safety meant home. That’s how agoraphobia is born.

Instead, I took up the depressive defensive posture – the one where you bend over with your hands on your stomach in order to keep your guts from falling out.

I suppose that’s what happens when you go through life as one of the walking wounded. I suffered a lot of trauma as a child, and those wounds were left completely untreated and left to fester with infection unimpeded.

And that stunted my growth. Not physically, obviously, but psychologically. Socially. Spiritually. I never really grew up. It’s easy to get away with that when you are as intelligent as I am. All you have to do is keep flashing that advanced IQ and talking vastly above your age and such, and nobody even imagines that you are not growing up.

But I wasn’t. I was largely in my own isolated world. I went to school. I ate supper with my family. I went to the mall with my allowance. Physically, I was present, and at a glance I seemed to be fine.

But I wasn’t. I was deeply ill. And I didn’t know how to express it. I am very lucky that my mother got a sense of my depression and arranged for me to go see Doctor Klein. He probably saved my life, because when I was in high school, the depression got bad enough to distort my sense of reality and there were times where dying seemed like the easiest thing in the world, and not even important. Like I could kill myself and it wouldn’t be a big deal. Nobody would even miss me, least alone myself. It would be fine.

Luckily, I had Doctor Klein to talk to. As a therapist, he was average, but just having someone I could talk to about things helped enormously.

That kept me alive till college, and I didn’t feel useless there. But then my parents pulled me out of college because they wanted to take early retirement (or rather, my Dad did) and brough me back to high unemployment Summerside and the depression took over and I was useless once more.

And that’s how it has been since then, really. I foundered in the pits of depression for two decades because there is no disease more deadly than one that prevents you from seeking treatment. It took me many, many years to get over having been dumped by the local hospital’s psychiatric outpatients program.

It was only when I finally got my shit together enough to bug my doctor to get me individual therapy with Doctor Costin that I began to recover. And even then, it took five years to have anything like an appreciable effect.

And now I am only 2.5 months away from actually having that precious piece of paper that proves to the world that I can do things.

Surely someone needs my genius!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about this excess of mental energy of mine and the role it plays in my mental illness and general fucked up lack of a life.

It should come as no surprise that I have the kind of mind that produces more energy than I know how to use. After all, I started out with a top notch brain (for certain areas of application) and then spent nearly every waking hour exercising it in some way due to my insatiable hunger for mental stimulation.

In fact, that’s probably the pathology of the problem : I need a lot of mental exercise to deal with the high energy output that comes from all that mental exercise.

That’s why I am so addicted to video games. They can keep my mind relatively busy. Only the really, really good ones engross me enough for it to be the kind of mental drain that puts me in “the zone”, but as long as I am enjoying the game, it helps a lot.

And the great thing about video games, from a certain unhealthy point of view, is that they can help me use up that mental energy without also stimulating my fear and anxiety (much) because they ultimately don’t matter.

Nothing is truly at stake when I play a video game. It’s just me and my computer versus the game. I might get very frustrated or even angry, but at the end of the day, it’s as safe and solitary as reading, watching TV, or masturbation.

This makes my time playing video games, especially the really good ones, the closest I get to really being happy. The game absorbs enough of my mental overflow to produce a sense of calm within me, the game itself is fun (of course), and with some good music from my mp3 collection on, I can actually gain a certain amount of mental peace and a feeling of flow that makes me feel good about life for a while.

This suggests that my mind is, in a crude sense, its own worst enemy. Or at least, my inability to find the motivation to pursue more productive means of diversion is. Productive things by their very nature have stakes and therefore pressure and fear attached. TO my diseased mind, that makes them too scary and it is so much easier jto play my nice safe non-scary video games instead.

And meanwhile, my days go by and the next thing I know, I am 43 before I even get around to acquiring marketable skills.

My point is that if my mind is left unoccupied, it attacks itself. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it uses maladaptive means to dissipate that leftover mental energy, like for instance turning it into an energy for my crude and overweaning superego to use in its never ending destructive self-analysis and harsh judgment of the contents of my soul.

It’s like I am constantly prosecuting myself in a court without mercy but with plenty of malign intent to go around.

So it behooves me to keep my mind busy. And that would be a lot easier if I was a self-starting go-getter who loves generating their own projects and then seeing them through to the end and enjoying the sense of accomplishment that brings.

But I am just plain not that kind of guy. Not yet, anyhow. The only times I have been able to overcome my terrified paralysis have been when I have set out to do a certain thing every day. And that certain thing has to be something very simple that I can do entirely by myself and then push out into the world before my inner demons can catch up to me and tear down my confidence and make me give up in horror and shame.

That’s why I have to do things like this blog, where I don’t edit or proofread or anything. I just make wordcount and then hit Publish. It’s not that I don’t give a shit how good my work is. I care a lot and I really wish I was capable of writing and rewriting and polishing and perfecting a thing before sending it out into the world.

But I’m not. At least, not yet. While I am working on the initial edition of a thing, the work itself can keep me going. It absorbs enough of my mental energies that it keeps the demons at bay and my compulsion to complete what I start carries me through, at least if the journey is relatively short.

Once I finish the first version, though, all bets are off. The spell is broken and the demons arrive in full force. If I didn’t immediately push my creation out into the world, I would  never get anything done at all.  The demons would tear it apart, destroy my confidence, fill me with shame at having ever dared to do something so clearly awful, and I probably would not create anything for a really long time after that.

So instead, I do a lot of half-assed work. If I could overcome these personal demons of mine, I could produce work of a much higher quality.

But nope. I just squirt is out and shove it through the door.

And the thing is, I can get away with it. In a way, I am still coasting on natural talent. Even at VFS, I do my halfassed work and submit it, and get good marks anyway, just like always. It’s almost too easy.

I am the only one who knows for certain that I am capable of so much more. That is my shame. I hope to eventually be in a position where I have to try much harder in order to make the grade.

Because when the work does not challenge you, it’s hard to value it at all. I have been looking for that sort of challenge for my entire life.

Maybe so day, I will be able to provide it for myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I had a really good idea for what to blog about tonight, but I didn’t write it down, and so now it is gonna like the summer dew.

Oh well, I am trying to adjust to my absentmindedness and learn to go with the flow. Be who I am and just deal with it.

Oh wait, now I remember something I was going to blog about. It’s not the thing I forgot today, it’s one I forgot last week. But what the heck, it’s a good one.

The subject is what I am calling the inner cringe. It’s that tendency to present oneself submissively by always being ready to withdraw and blame oneself for any negative emotional input one receives. The slightest bit of negativity and the victims of this maladjustment shrink away like the leaves of the mimosa.

Hmmm. They have berries. I wonder what they taste like. Probably shyness.

This shrinking away is what I call the cringe. The reaction’s (mal)function is to remove the cringer from the scene of the danger and ready them for flight.

In absentia, this can be a healthy response. But all maladaptive responses start as perfectly adaptive responses then get horrible distorted by being overused to the point where they dominate all other responses and become the cringer’s only coping strategy.

Not this cute little guy. But a lot like him.

That scaredy cat has clearly adopted the life strategy of “assume everything is dangerous unless otherwise proven safe. Hence the exaggerated startle response.

And that’s just how the cringers of the human world cope. They go into absolutely every encounter with the unconscious underlying assumption that it will probably go wrong and they should be ready to submit to the superior power as a means of placating them into letting them flee.

This assumption creates a person who starts social interactions from a position of apology. They are, with their body language and reaction patterns, apologizing for being alive. This is, on a primal level, intended to placate people, but instead it only arouses their contempt. Our social hardware dictates that groveling and other exaggerated submission poses disgust us because they make someone seem so socially inferior as to violate basic equality and arouse in us the desire to drive these people away.

This means that this inner cringe is not just maladaptive, it’s paradoxical. It elicits the exact opposite of the desired reaction. And yet, in a sick sort of way, it resolves the problem of the tension created by situation by causing the cringer to either be driven away or to go away themselves, thus eliminating the fear stimulus.

What makes it maladaptive is that the cost for this escape is far too high. It requires one to jettison one’s self-worth, dignity, social standing, and ultimately, one’s mental health if the pathology proceeds far enough.

One of the ways this cringe harms the cringer’s goals is that it creates uncertainty in social interactions. People can sense the cringer’s hesitation and vacillation and it makes them nervous. They don’t know whether the person is going to freak out like they have just seen a monster or not.

And people, in general, do not like being treated as if they were monsters when, as far as they are concerned, all they did was try to interact with the cringer in a perfectly normal way that works for everyone else.

It’s like saying hello to someone and having them react by screaming “MURDERER!” and running away like the hounds of hell were on their heels.

I’ve been on both sides of that. Not pretty.

The bitter truth is that people punish a lack of confidence far more harshly than overconfidence because the low confidence is a lot more unpleasant to be around. Sure, the cocky person might be obnoxious, offensive, or even delusional, but they will not trigger a response of disgust and contempt from people.

Hence the Trump presidency.

This life of cringing is a dark and terrible one. So how does one escape it?  The secret is to make friends with one of the demons of timid people : risk.

Being confident in social interactions means being willing to risk being wrong. And not just factually wrong, but actually in the wrong.

It means being willing to back your own play instead of constantly looking for the way out. It means defending your position in the face of social disapproval. And not just in a noble, being true to one’s beliefs kind of sense.

In the down and dirty sense of passionately defending your self worth in the marketplace of status, even at the risk of coming across like an asshole sense. That doesn’t mean throwing away all restraint and actually becoming a total asshole, it just means that you have to move in that direction and accept the consequences if you want to get to a healthy middle ground between self-loathing and delusions of grandeur.

This is a very difficult transition for us sensitive types. We are all too aware of the emotional impact of our actions, being highly empathic, and in general we have significant self-worth tied up in our idea of ourselves as gentle, kind, and easy to get along with. Thus we are reluctant to risk that for anything.

It also means being willing to act illogically. To defend an emotion without concern about being factual, reasonable, or even fair. This can be even harder than risking one’s self-image as a nice person.

Because it means possibly acting in a way that just isn’t….. justified.

And the thing is, healthy people know this, unconsciously. They know deep down that there’s more at stake than simply winning an argument or being liked. They get that their self-worth is something worth defending against all challengers, at least in certain circumstances. They get that sometimes, you have to be unreasonable.

Sometimes, in order to be healthy, you have to act on emotion without restraint.

And for me at least, that’s a very scary thing to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The real war has never been between art and commerce.

The real war has always been between art and ambition.

Think about it. The artist – whatever the medium, be it words, watercolor, or shadow puppets – would be completely true to their art if all they wanted was to make their art the way they wanted to do it, alone.

They could even stay mostly true to their art if all they wanted was to share their art with an audience who could appreciate it. The Internet has made this easier than it has ever been in the history of humanity and it will only get easier from here. You could totally be a completely fulfilled artist with nothing but a computer and a Tumblr account.

But of course, artists are as ambitious as any of the rest of us in modern Western consumer capitalist democracies. Our entire society raises us to want more, more, more, so much so that “lacking ambition” is one of the worst things you can say about someone. We take it as a given that everyone should be striving for more forever and if they are not, we think they are deeply defective.

And then we expect that to abruptly stop when someone retires. Strange.

This ambition entirely a societal construction. We are a social species, and thus we are hierarchical. And hierarchical species are ambitious because that’s what drives individuals to want to rise in the hierarchy, and without that desire to rise, the hierarchy would become stagnant and fall apart.

And hierarchies are the only way to get things done as a group. Trust me on this. Somehow, the group must figure out who makes the decisions so that everyone else can concentrate on doing their individual jobs.

It need not be a brutal hierarchy. It can be one where the leaders are thought of as people with jobs like everyone else. But there has to be a hierarchy.

So we are born ambitious, and society reinforces that.  And it is this ambition is the seed of all corruption in art. It is this ambition – the desire for fame, acclaim, wealth, respect, a beloved status, a life of privilege, and so forth – that turns the artist away from their art and makes them willing to compromise their art in order to “get ahead”.

In olden times, this meant pleasing one’s patron. All the Old Masters earned their place in history by doing what their rich sponsors – like the de Medicis – wanted them to do. Sometimes the order was “paint what you like”, but the point is that they would not have been able to jack squat without their patron’s consent.

And what do you think they had to do to attract a patron in the first place?

In modern times, the entrance to Art Hell bears a sign that says “Doing This For A Living”. The modern world offers the tantalizing possibility of escaping the hamster wheel of the job market through one’s art, and seeing as for any real artist making their art is fun, doing it without having to do anything else is as close to not having to work for a living as any of us are going to get without inherited wealth.

At least, that’s the theory.

The reality is that absolutely all jobs are work. That’s because all jobs involve doing things you don’t want to do. Even if I had my dream lift of doing nothing but writing what I like then handing it to an agent to sell, there would still be times I had to do it when I didn’t feel like doing, and that, my friends, is the very definition of work.

After all, that’s the only difference between the things you’re paid to do and the things you’d pay to do.

Thus the tendency of artists to become disillusioned with their art once they realize it’s actually hard work. This costs the world a lot of artists, and leaves a lot of people in that hazy state where they are sure they will make it big some day with the art they are totally going to do any day now.

And this ambition to do nothing but one’s art puts the artist in direct competition with all the other artists with the exact same idea. A similar delusion leads young people to work hard to get degrees in things where the only job available is to teach it.

And when a lot of people want the same thing and the quantity of that thing is fixed and therefore cannot respond to the high level of demand, it becomes a buyer’s market for said thing, and the level of compromise the artist must endure (and be grateful to do it) in order to “get ahead” skyrockets.

And even if one manages to be one of the lucky ones who actually manages to get a job doing their art, or otherwise secure a living income through it, the compromise does not end there because now you will have to do what the money wants you to do.

And the money people will tell you that if you just play along and do what you are told, eventually, some day, you will get to do what you really want to do.

But what are the odds that the money people will be willing to let you do something other than what has made them money some day? When it costs them money?

And even if they do, who will you be when you finally get there? The passionate, ambitious young person with a mind full of amazing ideas the world needs right now, or a tired, content old person with a bank full of cash and a home full of comforts and distractions?

So here’s my conclusion : If you want to maintain your artistic integrity, you must abandon ambition. That includes the dream of doing your art for a living.

Otherwise, you are doing to have to make compromises.

And you will have to decide just how far you will go. On a daily basis.

There’s no third path.

Better get used to that right now, it will save you a lot of pain in the long run.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or maybe it’s me that’s crazy.

Actually, it’s probably both.

Today sucked like the vacuum of space. It sucked so hard that it’s barely credible. There was a confluence of events this morning that beggars the mind.

Well, okay, maybe not. But it was pretty bad.

It started out OK. I took the bus to the Skytrain. Sure, the walk is only two and a half blocks, but it was nice to go in a nice warm bus. I even timed it perfectly so that the bus was at the red light when I was crossing to the bus stop practically right in front of it. So I got on and was deposited right at the Skytrain station.

And that’s where the fun stopped. So much for omens.

The first inkling of catastrophe took the form of an unusually thick crowd at the entrance to the Skytrain station. It was quite crazy, like something from Tokyo. The fellow that hands me my copy of Metro was quite overwhelmed with all the people flowing around him. It’s usually not even a quarter as busy even during rush hour.

So while I was still somewhat cheerful, a warning light was blinking in my mind.

And another came on when, after going through the fare gate, we were stopped by a transit employee before we even got onto the escalator because the platform was so packed with people they couldn’t let anyone else go up to it.

Uh oh. That can’t be good.

So the throng about me and myself had to line up and wait. And when we finally were allowed to go up, it was, of course, absolutely packed up there.

It’s times like this that I really appreciate my Paxil. Without it, I would have freaked out and gone home from sheer claustrophobia.

Turns out, the bottleneck was that some kind of technical difficulty had the result of making the Skytrain trains show up at half the usual rate.

Normally, during the morning rush hour, you get a train every 7 minutes, like clockwork. This morning it was 15. The results on the system were cataclysmic.

In retrospect, it’s not a huge surprise. I had noticed that on the Canada Line, the line I take to school, the instances of the train I was on having to slow way down for some reason were escalating in both frequency and duration. Quite often lately the train crawled along for some time at roughly the speed of a brisk jog.

This didn’t concern me too much because I just want to get where I was going. I am not, by nature, someone all fired up to get where they are going as fast as possible. In fact I usually enjoy my commute times. I find them relaxing. I can do a crossword puzzle, read, stare out the window. And for some reason, I have always, since I was a wee sprog barely up off the floor, found being in a moving vehicle relaxing.

Not sure why. Perhaps the sensation of motion drains some of the overcharge of mental energy that seems endemic to my particular make and model of brain. I dunno.

Anyhow, it takes forever to even get close enough to the Skytrain to get on, and then the seat I was about to take gets occupied by a little old Asian lady and I am stuck in the middle of the car with no hope of making it to an exit with all those people around me.

That means that the unthinkable has occurred : I was going to have to stand for the entire trip from my station to Waterfront. 

This is not something I can do without coming to significant harm. I am not built to stand for that long. The circulation in my legs and feet is too compromised to allow it. The one time I tried it before today, I ended up feeling nauseous and dizzy and the muscles on the back of my legs seized up and began cramping painfully.

Oh, and of course, my feet were goddamned killing me. My dog weren’t barking, they were whimpering with the occasional pained yelp.

And today was no different, except that the trains were running way slower than usual, so the trip (normally 25 minutes) took 40.

And it was a very Zen experience. Which means consciousness-expanding levels of pain. By the time I finally got off at Waterfront, I couldn’t feel my calves at all, my feet were screaming at me, and I felt like I was floating in cold syrup.

But I plodded down the street to school anyhow, finally making it to my Writing for Games class at 9:45. Story over, right?

Nope! Turns out today was the day we went to the gaming campus of VFS! So I got to sit for like five minutes and then we had to walk the ten blocks or so to THERE.

I’m a writer, goddamn it, I am not built for this walking. Especially after having to stand on the Skytrain for 40 goddamned minutes.

And today was a cold and clammy day, the exact kind of early spring day I loathe because the snow is still there, chilling everything, but it’s also raining.

It’s the perfect weather for making every muscle in my body ache.

And once we got there, we had to take a tour of the place. This is normally something I would greatly enjoy, but I was too cranky to think of anything but sitting.

Finally, we got to the reward : getting to play video games. I played Batman : Arkham City for a couple of hours. It was very cool – the combat system is tons of fun, very Batman in the way you can take on huge crowds of bad guys and kick their asses – but I can’t help but think I would have enjoyed it more had I been in a better mood.

After that, I was turned loose on the mean streets of Chinatown again. Now I had to find my way to the Skytrain from wherever the hell I was. More walking.

Luckily, it wasn’t that bad. Once I got to the International Village (mall), I had some idea where I was. From there, I got to Stadium Station (up four flights of red brick stairs) and got on the Expo Line for the first time in like, a decade.

Which explains why I got on the train going in the wrong direction. That turned out cool, though, because I got out at the Main Street/Science World station, which is in this retro-future tunnel of plastic windows which I loved.

I mean, check this shit OUT. Futuristic!

And you should see the Skytrain cars they have on the Expo line. Very cool looking… but freaking tiny compared to what I am used to on the Canada line.

As a result, I had to stand for that Skytrain ride too. Un fucking believable. Finally I made it to Waterfront Station… but to get to the Canada Line, I had to go all the way up to the main concourse, then back down, then down a loong ass tunnel on the Cordova Street side of the station, and only then could I get on my beloved Canada line and go the fuck home.

I hadn’t even had a chance to do my crossword!

So today has really taken it out of me. So far the health repercussions have been mild, but this kind of thing can cause problems further down the road, so I am wary.

Luckily, I don’t have to be back in class until next Tuesday, four days from now.

It might take me that long to recover.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Dunno what to blog about tonight, even though I had a ton of great ideas during the day, when I couldn’t do anything about it. That’s how it goes, I guess.

Feeling sleepy and vague. I am making it through the day but sometimes I feel like not even really here, or anywhere for that matter. I feel like I am nothing but the echo of the reflection of a shadow’s thoughts.

Like I exist only on a technicality.

I know that’s the disease talking. I’m as real as anyone and it’s the darkness of my depression which makes me feel so unsubstantial. The feeling that I have that night has fallen in my soul and dawn is impossible far away is merely the product of a chemical imbalance in the neurotransmitters of my broken and battered brain.

But then again, all our experiences are merely chemical in our minds, when you really look at it. That kind of reductivism only gets you so far before you have to reset your parameters and try a different path.

Maybe that’s why there is only so much rational reason can do against depression. The real solutions are spiritual, not mental. The bare truth of the chemical imbalance is exactly the sort of solution that mere reason can deliver.

It’s both perfectly true and completely useless.

The only real solution is growth. The spirit must explore and expand. That’s a tricky thing for a ramrod rational  cerebral type like myself.  All of my instincts are wrong for the task. My primary mode of dealing with the world is to throw my mental might into finding a solution. To conquer the problem with mentation. It’s oddly like solving every problem with physical force and violence like a brute.

The only force is that it’s the brute force of the mind.

I have a concept of emotional growth,. I tend to think of it like sunshine making a plant grow. The right conditions and the plant flourishes. The wrong ones and everything withers away and dies.

It’s winter all the time in my soul.

But without any sense of the mystical – with a soul so bound by the rational as to be practically moribund – it’s hard to know what will make me grow.

Then again, maybe the need to know what I am doing instead of simply flourishing on my own terms is the root of the entire problem.

Or maybe the real problem is how I shrink away from the light when things get too intense. Winter may not be warm but it’s very quiet. When I finally get the kind of warmth I so desperately seek, I am as like to flee as I am to stay and grow.

What I desire the most is also what I fear the most. No wonder I am so messed up,. I am desperate for positive input but when I generate it myself, I run away from it.

I mean, how good can it be if it comes from me? I’m poison. Toxic. Radioactive. Tainted.

I hate that I can’t stop hating myself. I know that I don’t deserve it and yet I can’t stop believing it. I really do loathe myself most of the time. I try to keep my self-esteem afloat with knowledge of my writing talents, but while I have all the evidence I need to ascertain the truth of my strengths, when it gets this bad inside me I can no longer believe in them because I can’t feel them at all.

Depression disconnects me.

And that makes me want to disconnect from life. Call a full retreat and hide from the world in a deep dark hole with all my distractions installed, and wait for it all to be over.

Wake me when life stop being so scary and hard.

At least I am keeping up with my school work. That’s good because I am going to have a lot of it. There’s only two weeks (plus tomorrow) of class left, and that means it;s crunch time. There’s so much to be done looming towards me.

So it’s good that I have at least gotten to the point where I can do the work to keep up with things. I was pretty far gone there for a while. Really lost my grip and feel back into old patterns of crumbling in the face of adversity.

That never really works. No matter how hard you submit to reality’s attacks, it will never really let you get up, turn tail, and run away. It will never accept your surrender and leave you alone. It will always keep on attacking.

Because it’s not a person.

I feel a great sadness inside, like a cold sticky mass that clings to my bones and drains all the life out of me. It kills everything it touches and its chill goes right to the very marrow of my soul. It’s killing me, and in a way, I am letting it.

Perhaps I am addicted to its ability to make emotions go away.

Maybe I need a medication change. Or maybe I need a year of therapy. Or maybe all I need is some full spectrum light bulbs.

I did feel a lot better when it was sunny yesterday. Make my whole mood slump is the product of not enough sunshine in a very literal way.

Or maybe I am just plain fucked.

I have been doubting my ability to survive post-graduation lately. This whole VFS thing might end up being a waste of time and money. If I find life so hard in my current mode, how much worse is it going to be when I have an actual job and have to pull myself together for eight hours a day?

And I feel so slow and stupid and old. It’s so hard to think lately. I feel like my head is full of ice cold tar.

There must be a door out of this slow hell somewhere.

There must be a way to let all this coldness out.

I will find it some day.

When I have the energy to go looking.

And the freedom to grow my soul.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.