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.