Let’s talk about sensory priorities.

I have realized recently that I am heavily biased toward audio. Because I was born with very poor eyesight, I learned to rely on my ears instead. That’s why I love two hearing biased activities so much: music, and words.

And hearing is how I interact with people. I listen to them. Almost all the information I get about a person comes from their voice. And not just the words. I get a lot of information from things like tone of voice, phrasing, diction, and so on. In fact, I would say that 85 to 90 percent of information I get from people comes through my ears.

Actually looking at them comes in a dismal second. To me, faces are like a label on the audio source that is that person. I think that’s why it tends to take me a longer time to associate faces with names than most people. My mind is working so hard on the audio that it lives little space for visual tasks.

That’s why I can tell you what someone said… but not what they were wearing when the said it. I’ll remember facts about their lives… but not whether they parted their hair to the left or the right today.

I am just plain not very visual. I can see well enough to get through life but very little of what I see makes it to long term or even medium term memory. The only way I remember deeply visual information is if there is a strong emotion anchored to it.

Or, of course, repetition. Places I stay for a long time get deeply ingrained. I could draw you a floor plan for my elementary school, my junior high, and my senior high. I could draw you an extremely detailed floor plan of the house I grew up in. Every piece of furniture, every painting, every item in the kitchen. All of it.

Heck, I could probably do floor plans for everywhere I have ever lived for more than a month or two.

That’s one of the dubious benefits of agoraphobia, I suppose.

But that’s it. Otherwise, it’s audio all the way.

And the thing is, I think this makes me, in a very specific way, intellectually impaired. I say that strictly in the sense that there are definitely cognitive tasks (and not just visual ones) where my performance would be significantly below average.

It’s all part of being the over specialized hothouse flower that I am, I suppose. If I was making a version of myself in a point-based RPG like my fave, Champions, I would have to put tons of points into things like intellect and creativity but almost nothing in anything else. Just the absolute minimum required to function in society.

So like other hothouse flowers, I only thrive in a very specific environment, and anywhere else, I wilt and dry out.

I have yet to find the environment in which I evolved and to which I am perfectly adapted.

Maybe I will find it in entertainment.

The real problem with being so audio fixated is that it interferes with social interaction. I don’t look at people when I talk to them most of the time, let alone make eye contact. If I do make eye contact, it’s extremely brief, like a rock skimming the surface of a puddle.

That’s a whole different thing as well, though. Eye contact freaks me out. The connection is too intense and the barrier between me and others threatens to collapse.

It’s possible that I am further along on the autism spectrum that I previously thought. I just hide it really well by being so goddamned intelligent and articulate. It doesn’t take much effort for me to prove to the world that I am brilliant, and I am capable of such things as spontaneous humour, deep empathy. and startlingly accurate insights into people’s personalities that Asperger’s patients, stereotypically, find extremely difficult or even impossible. So I am far from a “textbook case” for Asperger’s

Story of my life, really.   Nothing about me is typical.

But I do have a lot of trouble with social interaction. No doubt it stems back to my extremely isolated childhood. There’s so much that we are meant to learn from our fellow humans, especially those our age. I got none of that.

It expresses itself as anxiety in me. I feel very lost in social interactions when they go outside the group of people I know and trust.

I am getting over that, thank goodness. I’m not going to get far in show biz being a recluse. I plan to build up a number of activities that demand I leave the apartment and go out into that great big beautiful world out there.

Because there is only one cure for the effects of social isolation, and that’s social exposure. Like any other phobia, social anxiety can be conquered via exposure therapy, although that alone is unlikely to do the trick.

You need therapy too.

But it’s only via exposure you can overwrite the bad tapes with new, more positive tapes. It’s also the only way to desensitize your hair-trigger fear response.

My goal is to get out of the apartment on my own around three times a week. Not sure if that will come from three weekly things or three one time things or whatever, but the point is to get myself used to going out to things and at least checking them out.

Who knows, I might find myself a cozy little spot in a compatible subculture. That would do me a world of good. There’s all shorts of odd little niches I might reasonably occupy.

Like bears (the gay kind). Or writers. Or ga(y)mers. Heck, just getting together with my former classmates (if there are any still around) could be fun.

And, of course, I will be scanning for media events in Vancouver I might be able to get into on a constant basis.

Gotta get to know people who know people, right?

And hopefully, somewhere along the line, I will learn social skills.

That would be nice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

.

Slept like ten hours today. Highly unusual for me. I must have needed it pretty bad.

It was somewhat difficult sleep. I woke up feeling kind of crappy. Nothing like when the issue really hits me hard, but not wonderful either.

And it gives me a feeling of survival. Like I barely made it. That’s probably caused by the sleep apnea. My body works very hard just to breathe when I am asleep,. It is a body fighting itself. So when I do finally emerge from the murky and turbulent seas of by troubled sleep, it feels like my time asleep was one very long swim to cross the river of the night and make it to the opposite shore.

It’s a serious problem, and yet, as it stands, I am not doing a damned thing about it.

I still haven’t gotten myself to try CPAP again. The machine just sits there, gathering dust by my bedside. I remember how life was better when I was using it every night. It did help. The problem wasn’t solved but it did help,.

But it’s also a lot of hassle and it feels unnatural and it involves a ton of struggling with myself and suppressing panic.

And that’s what it was like before the thrice cursed thing failed me in the middle of the night causing me to wake up gasping for the air it suddenly stopped providing me.

This is why I have trust issues.

So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there is no chance I will ever try CPAP again. The logical thing to do now would be to go see my GP and tell him CPAP did not work for me and ask to explore other forms of treatment.

That’s not going to happen either.

Why? Because then I would have to confess to totally ignoring the issue for over two years. That’s a major roadblock for a social phobic like myself.

It also intersects with my strange relationship with authority figures. It is very hard for me to fight the urge to protect myself by telling them everything is okay. And other things I feel like they want to hear.

It’s how I used to deal with my parents and siblings. I think it was because I was so desperate for any form of approval. And I was so shy that exposing my vulnerabilities felt like an intolerable risk, like crossing the street without looking.

It’s another manifestation of my core duality, aka the fight between my desire to be noticed and recognized and loved versus my desire to be left alone and thus feel “safe”.

It was (and is) a highly maladaptive coping mechanism.

Nobody can help me with problems I do not admit even exist. I can’t blame people for not being able to see through my repeated assurances that everything was A-OK. Perhaps if there had been an authority figure who invested a lot of time and attention in me, I would have eventually felt safe enough with them that I would tell them how miserable I really was and how horrible my life was.

But nobody has ever been willing to invest that much time and effort into me. For much of my life, attention was something that came in small doses and at random intervals. I think I felt like I had to make the most of those moments and not spoil them by being a downer.

Plus, as a socially anxious person who is very sensitive, I knew that when people asked how I was, if I told them how I really was, things would get very awkward. They would say “Oh. ” and a vast gulf would open between me and them because they did not expect to have to deal with a negative reply. What’s worse, it would be a reply so negative that it would be like the ice cracking under their feet, threatening to dump them in my icy depths.

They didn’t really want to know. Even if they thought they did.

Person : How are you doing?
Me : Well, I contemplated suicide six times yesterday, which is an improvement over the previous day’s ten times, and currently I feel so depressed that nothing feels real and a voice inside my soul is silently screaming for death 24/7,.
Person : Oh.
(seconds of intensely painful silence)
Person : But other than that, you’re okay, right?

Plus there is a certain kind of pleasure in telling people what they want to hear. It comes with its own little empathic thrill because you have made that person happy, therefore you feel happy for a few moments.

It’s the same kind of feeling I get when I make people laugh. It’s like my own capacity for happiness is so broken that I can only feel happy when I bypass the broken circuitry via my empathy channel and get my happiness from someone else.

I suspect that’s true of a lot of comedy type people. That’s why so many of us are depressed people who turn to substance abuse to self-medicate. You have to do something for the pain for all those hours when you are not onstage and are forced to deal with yourself all day.

Thank God that modern antidepressants came along and offered people an alternative. Substance abuse is still rampant but modern antidepressants must have reduced the number of addicts by a substantial amount.

Or at least reduced it amongst depressive neurotic intellectuals like me.

Not that I have not been tempted. In fact, to be brutally honest, I think the main thing that kept me from substance abuse was that my poor social skills insured that I would never have contact with the sorts of people who could get me illicit substances.

I’m just not cool enough to be a junkie. Or even a drunk. My addiction is food, and while that’s a highly deadly addiction, it has virtually no cachet.

Instead, I commit very slow suicide by neglecting my health due to the rampant fucked up issues in my head.

At least I can go back to weekly therapy sessions now.

That should help me sort out all the bad writing in my head.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I just watched an episode of a pop-science show called Brain Games about how people tend to “follow the leader” in a lot of things. It culminated with a simple and brilliant experiment where all they did was set up a sign that said LINE STARTS HERE on the Vegas Strip and set up  a few velvet ropes behind it and get one person to stand at the head of the line .

Sure enough, after a few cautious sniffs from the passing crowds, a vacationing couple joined the one guy (who was a plant, of course) and after that, people started lining up behind them. And the longer the line got, the more people joined.

And remember, none of these people have the slightest idea what they were waiting in line for. They joined the line because anything with a line that long has to be good, right?

And that is the normal response in human beings.

But that would have never worked on me. I know this because I have encountered this situation. What I did was walk up the line (from outside the line) and asked someone at or near the front of the line what everyone was waiting for.

Then I exercised my own judgment as to whether the thing they were waiting for was worth the wait to me.

Admittedly, nobody ever said “I don’t know”. If they had, that would have tipped me off instantly, especially when the person at the head of the line said it. I would instantly know that someone was fucking with them and it was probably a TV or a social science experiment or possibly both.

That’s because I am socially defective.

Due to my intensely lonely childhood, I was (in effect if not strictly true) isolated from others of my species and therefore did not receive the proper socialization from other members of my species. I never learned how to tap into the zeitgeist and let it lead me.

On the contrary, I act like any under-socialized primate and actively avoid anything everyone else is doing, at least till I have made my own judgment.

And that’s the thing : I only trust my own judgment. Nobody else’s. I defer to others on matters of facts and knowledge if they are more learned in the subject than I am, but when it comes to judgment, I make up my own mind about everything.

That makes me, perhaps, some kind of ruggedly individualistic intellectual, but it’s just a side effect of being socially defective I don’t think I am capable of taking on someone else’s judgment without verifying its logic myself. That part is simply not installed in me. If I tried to do that, I would immediately panic and ask myself “But how do I know that they’re RIGHT?”. And then I would have to use my own judgment anyhow.

Us social defects usually have massive trust issues. Without the ability to partake in the mutuality of human life, we do not get the rewards from social interaction that healthy humans do, and that makes us a suspicious and mistrustful bunch.

That is only reinforced when our isolation from the social stream attracts negative attention. We are not conscious of what we are missing, and so these attacks seem absolutely unprovoked and without meaning.

But while I would never call these attacks justified, I understand them, Having someone who is not in sync with the group is disturbing to those who are perfectly in sync. They don’t know how it is possible to be so “weird” (remember, everyone else they know is in sync) and that makes the aggression come out. The anger is supposed to either force synchronicity on the social defective or drive them away so that they stop disturbing the members of their synchronized in-group.

They are seldom aware of this, of course. They are simply responding to the messages their social instincts are feeding them.

It is sometimes said that the problem with us social defectives is a lack of empathy, but I find that term misleading and inaccurate.

It’s misleading because it makes us sound like sociopaths. Like we truly do not care about others. But that’s almost never the real picture. We care as much as anyone else^[1], the problem is that we are operating on much less information that the socially healthy.

The problem, then, is not empathy in general but that particular subset of empathy I will call social empathy, That the empathic channel dedicated to sending and receiving social cues. That is as opposed to emotional empathy, which is more about syncing with individuals and feeling what they feel.

Despite the fact that society tends to shun us, it actually needs us.

Society will always need people who are immune (or resistant) to the social illusion and can see what is really going on. We act as the voice of reason and do our best to warn the herd when they are about to collide with harsh reality when it doesn’t match social reality.

It also needs us as independent thinkers who can solve seemingly unsolvable problems due to this ability to see through things.

Ever since I was a tween)and first read Flatland) , I have felt like I am not in the same dimension as everyone else. There was so much that I could see that others could not, and things others found obvious were perplexing mysteries to me. My radio was not tuned to the same frequency as others’.

In a previous era, I might have been a holy man, a seer, a scholar, or even a leader by dint of my unusual capacities. I might also have been a miserable recluse, a madman, a misanthropic hermit, or simply one of history’s many clueless victims.

In this current era, it comes across more as my being a totally clueless dork with some surprisingly good ideas.

I can work with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s official. I am a graduate of the Writing for Movies and Television program of the Vancouver Film School.

Not only that, but my particular class, Class 52, is by all accounts a truly amazing and wonderful group. All the professors who presented mentioned it. Some even said we were their favorite class ever, and some of them have been teaching for 15 years or more.

This was not exactly news to me today because a few teachers have mentioned it before now. I remember that when I first (over)heard it back at the end of Term 3, I thought the teacher must be joking, because there was nothing special about us.

But I totally see it now. We’re a very cohesive group, with genuine love for one another, and none of us are assholes.

Let me repeat that : none of us are assholes. Do you know how improbable that is, both in the world in general and the arts in particular? Especially in writing, a field which attracts intensely neurotic people with tons of interpersonal issues?

And I think it has to do with our vibe. Somehow, we built this vibe of mutual support almost right away and it only deepened over time. It didn’t seem special to me at first because it was the water I was swimming in, but looking at it now, it’s amazing how little drama we had. From what I have heard about other classes, that’s extremely rare. But for us, it seemed perfectly natural.

I like to think I played a small part in that. I have been known to make things gentler and groovier by being around. Seems odd for a person with so much pain inside to be so soothing, but maybe those things go together more than one would think.

I have been hurt by ungentle people. And that made me determined to be gentle. Besides, I thrive on positive vibes. Peace, love, and harmony, man. Like many a Taurus before me, in  my perfect life I would be relaxed, gentle, loving, and giving all the time, without ever having to do anything harsh, ugly, or discordant.

Life is rarely that kind, and so we have to move into other modes. But blue skies over endless sun-soaked green meadows full of love sounds very good to me.

That would include sex, of course. A paradise without fucking is no paradise to me.

God I’m horny lonely.

.Looking back on my time at VFS, I have some regrets. I wish I had figured out that I needed a higher dose of Paxil in order to do do complex mental activities like thinking and remembering stuff. If I had been on the right dose of Paxil for the whole time, I would have not been flakey at all and I would have relished getting shit done, on time and damn well.

More importantly,. I would have socially integrated at a much deeper level. I am certain of it. Depression acts like a wall between me and the world and when I was undermedicated, that wall was very, very thick.

It’s like I wasn’t really there. I look back at the time before my dosage increase and it repulses me. I feel so much better now. More awake, more focused, more aware of my surroundings, more mentally present. And far less isolated.

So part of me wants a do-over. I would do so much better on the social side of things (and the academic side). I totally have the kind of energy and focus to join my classmates on at least some of their social type outings. And I am finally put together enough to start worrying about my appearance and its effect on others.

I can thank my former teacher Kat for a little push in that direction.

When I was not in my right mind (in other words, my life until about a month ago), I was trapped in my lonely frozen cell on my tiny frozen planet far from the Sun. I seemed superficially to be present at things, but mentally and especially emotionally, I wasn’t there at all. I was trapped within walls of fear and confusion, and it was all I could do to keep my head in the game enough to make it through school.

I know from hellish experience that if that wall gets really thick, I start losing touch with reality altogether. Nothing seems real, not even the people. Its hard to believe that anything solid and warm and real can even exist.

That’s why I want to put a big sign on my wall that says THE WORLD IS REAL.

It would help me center myself when I am feeling very unstable.

Well, no matter how frozen I have been, I am thawing out and waking up now. In a way, it actually seems appropriate. Like I was asleep for 11 months but now I am waking up, reborn unto the world in a new form.

Maybe I have the power of transformation after all.

So, ya know, I got nothing big planned for the weekend, just a focused and concentrated effort to reforge myself into a whole new state of being.

There will probably be snacks.

I am ready for it. Not only am I on the right dose at last, but the days have become sunnier (finally) and that is making me feel so much better about the world.

Mental note : figure out of I have Seasonal Effective Disorder before fall. Sunny days make me way happier. It’s a real possibility.

My future looks bright. I am going to shop my pilot around to all the local animation studios that do kid’s stuff (in other words, all of them) plus I plan on trying to pitch the show directly to YTV.

And what the hell, Netflix too. They are producing a lot of kids’ shows these days.

Who knows, I might just get to make the damned thing some day.

And I know in both my mind and my heart that I could do a lot of good for a lot of nerdy kids (and their parents) with my show.

I want to make good television.

I want to do good via television.

I want to be good television.

And I am going to do it even if I have to invent the whole damned thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Normally I would put a comma in a phrase like that, but it seemed wrong when I did it, so I took it out.

Score one for intuition.

As you all (hopefully) know, I am about to graduate from good ol’ VFS and go out into the world of entertainment looking for a job.

I was pondering doing something about that today, but a number of factor intervened :

1.  I had one of my “sleepy days’ and no handy source of caffeine to counteract it, so I spent a lot of today asleep and/or utterly befuddled by bad sleep
2. I also had an errand to run, namely cashing the GST cheque that I got last week but had been too lazy to go and cash until I was almost out of money
3. The thought of doing it – really, really doing it – filled me with fear and dread.

And it’s Factor Three that I am going to attempt to talk about today.

This fear that I felt is very familiar to me. It is the social phobic’s deep animal fear of exposure . Because of my traumatic childhood, I have a deeply ingrained fear of being noticed. I only feel safe when I am hidden.

You will recognize this as the complementary opposite of my deep desire to be noticed.  Logically speaking, those should be mutually exclusive, but a more nuanced understanding of human nature expands the syllogism to something like this :

1. Fear of exposure causes me to isolate myself
2. Said isolation makes me very lonely and in need of validation
3. This, in turn, makes me want to be noticed

This defines one of the must fundamental conflicts in my psychology. It might be the one that defines the rest. I want so much to get connection, validation, be part of the community, and so forth, but I have this giant boulder of fear of that result weighing me down to the point of immobility.

Or at least that’s how it has been until now.

And I am glad I have made this realization because now I have a target I can fight. This is the fear that has prevented me from sending any my my writing anywhere, the one that keeps me isolated and alone, and terribly, terribly lonely,  the one that tries to utterly shatter me if I break its harsh and inhuman rules.

It is the One Fear To Rule Them All, and I am going to destroy it utterly.

Now that this fear is fully exposed to my conscious mind, it doesn’t stand a chance. It’s the prime fear that has ruined my life and stolen two fucking decades of my adult life from me, and I will never stop attacking it until it crumbles into dust.

And I know it will not be an easy fight. I have been dominated by this fear for a very long time and it will take many battles before it is overcome.

And I know I will lose some of those battles. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the war, not the battles. I will be relentless in my pursuit of this enemy’s total destruction because when I feel myself falter, I will draw from my primal rage and the utter loathing I have for this part of me, and I shall charge back into the fight.

There is a world of opportunities out there for someone with my gifts. I am a pretty amazing person and it’s time the world knew it. I do not know which road will lead me to what I seek, but that doesn’t matter either.

What matters is that I will never stop looking.

So right now, I am gearing up for the first big battle, which will take place either Friday night or Saturday afternoon. It’s going to be a lulu of a fight because it will be the one where I cross the threshold and challenge the fear for dominance. I am quite likely to end up in an emotionally confused and upset state many, many times. The fear is sure to resort to chaos and confusion when it can’t dominate me .by brute force. There will be times when I will have no idea what is going on.

But knowing this, I will simply relax my mind and wait for the chaos level to drop and let me think again. I might have to reconstruct what I am doing via deduction, but I have done that millions of times in my life, so I am used to it.

In fact, the very size of my opponent is inspiring to me. It stimulates me in a “the greater the glory” kind of way. I have long suppressed my combative nature because I had never found a non-destructive outlet for it, and it only seemed to get me into trouble.

Those who knew me in my twenties can attest to this.

But there is a part of me that needs to fight. I need challenges, opponents, a chance to accrue glory, and most of all, monsters strong enough so that I don’t have to hold back.

That’s what makes the idea of taking on a massive opponent so appealing to me. Where others might see a terrifying and insurmountable opponent, I see an opponent I feel free to hit as hard as I can.

Even a very gentle and civilized giant like myself wishes he could let loose now and then without having to worry about hurting all those Lilliputians down there.

I have spoken before about the lack of opposition I have had in my life. Being strong-willed, stubborn, and brilliant can do that to you.  I have never met someone who is better at arguing than I am. Nobody I could learn from. Nobody to push back

But maybe I have been looking at it all wrong. Maybe the superior opponent I seek is not a person but a problem. A big one that I can truly sink my teeth into, and fight as hard as I can because the problem is so huge and the cause so just that it justifies unrestrained force, even from me.

Maybe that opponent is “getting work in the local entertainment biz”. But first, I have to defeat the One Fear.

Maybe this is literally the fight of a lifetime.

Maybe this is where I learn to win

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

.

Technically, this is a On The Road post as I am currently eating lunch at school… for the last time ever!

I can already tell how bad I will miss this place. It’s been my second home for almost a year. It’s been the focus of my life the whole time. I’ve loved my time here (mostly) and when I go home today, I will never see it again, at least as a student.

I am definitely a way, way, way better writer for having been through this program. Every workshopping of my stuff taught me so much, so fast. It was way better than simply being told things because it all related directly to my own work and therefore I could immediately contextualize the information and thus better integrate it into my own method.

I wasn’t the best at being a student. Oh well. I am still wickedly talented and crazy smart and goofily charming, and fully committed to spreading my works to every nook and cranny of the Internet until, don’t look now,  but it’s soaking in it.

I originally wrote that as “spreading my seed”, but that means something else.

Still, the forecast for the next week or so is for intermittent showers accompanying a moderate to severe nostalgia system, with a tsunami warning as waves of sentimentally, some as tall as a four story building, are predicted for Friday and possibly straight on through the weekend.

I am still scared of the upcoming existential void. Come Saturday, I will be released on my own recognizance, and I always get nervous when I have to be my own keeper, because historically, I have not been very good at it.

But I am trying hard not to worry about the details. The most important thing is to free my mind and find my motivation and (and this is the most important part), feed it.

The more times I follow an impulse to completion, the more I will be rewarded for it with a sense of accomplishment, and that will make my sad little id grow into a healthy, hearty, robust id that easily counterbalances my overdeveloped ego and punitive superego.

And maybe then, I will be a whole human being, and not the half-formed creature I am and have been for such a long, long time.

When I was a kid, I was told I was sure to grow up big and strong.

Well I got it half right.

Time for me to go to Last Class, whatever the hell that is going to be. Knowing how things are run around here, my guess is that it will be half-assed, disappointing, and insulting.

But I could be wrong

I am sort of worried that grad will be deeply underwhelming. I mean, I’m not looking to throw my cap in the air, but a little pomp and circumstances would go a long way toward making me feel like the staff values us.

That says a lot more about me than them. For them, this is one graduation ceremony of the six they will do in a year.

But for us…. it’s the only one we will ever get.

Gotta scoot. More when I get home.

Here’s more, but I am not home. And I am proud of that.

Here’s the thing. I have finished my last class. The head of the writing department showed us a great pilot called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel  and I will not attempt to summarize the plot because it would not do the show justice.

What the show has is quality. Everything is done so well that the whole thing goes does effortlessly and the era (early 1950’s) is expressed with such exuberant excellence that it feels realer than real. I have never seen era expressed this well, ever. From the fashions to the speech style to the buses going by in the background., everything is era-perfect to the point that is feels like you are watching a documentary from that era.

And the script is full of that rapid-fire verbal fencing Bogey and Bacall dialogue that I love so very, very much. And the humor is genuinely witty. Not surprising, considering that the show comes from the creator of Gilmore Girls.

That show had a lot of faults, but a lack of witty dialogue was never one of them.

In the morning, we did a  table read of one of my scripts (Episode 2 of Sam), and I was very pleased by all the laughs my stuff got. Everyone loved the script and that was just the shot in the arm I needed to bolster my confidence.

I write super funny shit. Someone will see the value in that.

Right now, I am hanging around until the screening my classmates and I are putting on tonight. We are going to watch all the student movies we made, and it should be a hoot. We’re doing it in the Main Theater and it is a lot like a tiny movie theater. Lots of my classmates are bringing people, so it should be a full house.

The part where my pride comes in is that I was not, initially, going to hang around. I was going to go home like usual and not attend the screening at all, and presumably get super depressed when I knew that my classmates were together and having fun while I was home in Richmond being miserable.

But I stopped myself. Not all at once, but fairly quickly. I realized that going home would be the exact kind of thing that leads to my social isolation, and gives people the impression that I don’t like them.

In reality, the problem is that I don’t feel like I deserve to be with them. I avoid social engagement because it brings on the social anxiety and makes me feel conspicuously vulnerable and exposed. A very loud voice in my head screams that nobody wants me there, everybody hates me, everyone wishes I would leave, and if I don’t leave, it will bring on the social nightmare of rejection, ostracization, and expulsion.

And I know that, behind that enormous wall of fear that my anxiety disorder creates, are people who enjoy my company and want me around.

And yet, just typing that previous paragraph took a large act of will. I had to overcome a lot of deep resistance to the entire notion that anybody, anywhere actually wants me around ever just to make my fingers type the words.

And right now, even though I typed those words five minutes ago, I still feel shaky and out of sorts from the experience. Part of me wants to delete the words out of a pseudo-superstitious feeling that daring to claim such an outrageous thing as truth will bring doom and annihilation down upon my head.

It’s a powerful thing, and fighting it takes a hell of a lot of mental horsepower. But there is no way I am turning back. I am committed to the fight and I will jump atop this monster with a live grenade clenched in my teeth before I give up.

It’s so hard to believe the truth sometimes. It seems so unreal.

But I will triumph.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my last day of class. I am totally not ready for this.

then again, nobody ever is. Sometimes, life just happens to you, ready or not, and your challenge is to deal with it.

Today’s classes went okay. I had a long chat with my teacher Kat and she made me feel a lot better about my abysmal VFS career. She reassured me that my writing is very good, and that, at to her, my main problem is that I’ve no idea what effect I am having on others.

And she’s right.

I have known that for a while now, actually. I spent such a long time locked in my own echo chamber, believing my extraordinarily distorted perceptions represented reality, that I don’t really have a sense of how others truly feel about me.

It’s part of my being almost totally oblivious to my surroundings. Some of those surroundings are people.

I fought this revelation at first. After all, I am Mister Sensitive, right? I am always worrying the effect I am having on others. To a fault, really…. it means I put other people’s emotions ahead of mine and it makes it very hard to simply be myself.

But then I realized that it was not a matter of sensitivity. It’s a matter of awareness. I am sensitive to everything I perceive. But that tends to be limited to verbal stimuli. I can hear shades of emotion in people’s voices, grasp what is going on in subtext, and so forth and so on. But body posture and facial expression? Not nearly so sensitive. In fact, I often have trouble maintaining eye contact with people because I hate seeing myself in what I think is their judging, hating, resenting eyes.

This self-loathing thing runs very, very deep in me. I have mentioned this before, I think, but I spent many years unable to even look myself in the mirror, because if I did, a huge wave of self-loathing would rise in me and I would want to kill the person in the mirror.

And it’s still not easy. I have a huge mirror in my bathroom and I rarely look into it, even though it covers so much wall that the only place it doesn’t reflect is the shower. I still feel that burning self-hatred when I see myself most of the time. I have to take slow, careful looks at myself with my psychological defenses up. That’s the only way I can restrain the hate I feel for the…. thing that I am.

It gets better over time, though. My self-esteem has risen over the time since I started Kwantlen because, even though I keep screwing up, the fact that I was competent enough to make it through class day after day despite the physical effort and the much, much greater psychological strain of overcoming my agoraphobia and social anxiety each and ever day in order to get my ass to class.

That kind of thing is not to be ignored. It’s a huge deal for me to go out in public, amongst strangers, every single day. I had to overcome a lot to get to where I am right now, days away from graduation. Sure, I might not have comported myself in an ideal way, but I overcame a serious disability to get to VFS and to complete my course there.

Viewed that way, it’s pretty amazing that I made it this far.

And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I did not manage to both get my education and overcome my biggest psychological hurdle,namely learning to fit in. I couldn’t learn it as a child being bullied in elementary school and I still haven’t learned it at the age of 43. There is a hell of a lot of panic and anxiety and self-loathing in the way, and underneath all that, there is the social damage that a lifetime of isolation has caused me.

I grew up alone. That should never happen to any child ever.

It’s a hurdle I want to overcome for a number of reasons, from the purely professional to the deeply personal. I don’t want to be so isolated. I don’t want to be a lonely planet too far away from its star to get any warmth from it. I want to live a robust, engaged, connected life where I share in the common feeling and become a part of humanity instead of freezing to death in the vacuum of space.

I am tired of being on the outside looking in, afraid to try to come inside because freezing to death is better than being rejected and cast out into the cold again. Plus I don’t want to poison other people with my infernal toxicity.

After all, contact with me can only make life worse for people, right? And they know it, too, which is why they do their best to avoid dealing with me.

I’m hard to deal with and easy to ignore. So I get ignored.

Even today, when I made suggestions in class, most of them went over like a lead balloon. Actually, I take that back. A lead balloon would get more attention.

Instead, the things I say don’t fit in people’s minds and they just blink and move on like I had never said a damned thing. Teachers have told me that they think I contribute really good ideas. But if that’s true, they have a funny way of showing it.

I really don’t know what I am doing wrong. So it must be one of those things that comes with proper socialization – a sense of what people can and cannot understand. I have the verbal skills for that but not the social ones.

The only cure is social exposure. But clearly that won’t do it by itself, because I have had tons of it since the day I started Kwantlen, and I am still a lonely planet.

Clearly, some door within me has to open and let the sunshine in. Let myself be changed by the social inputs I get. Do my best to catch up.

I have been frozen for so very long.

I hope I can thaw out before the frostbite kills me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. Period.

After all, it’s not like I will have any homework!