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.