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.