Wow. He is not nearly as butch looking as I thought he would be.

Anyhow, 44 isn’t much different than 43. Except that my 43rd birthday wasn’t, ya know, hell.

I was supposed to be at a Secret Informant meeting this afternoon, but I was too sick to go. By sick I mean depressed, of course. That’s my illness, both chronic and constant. I have still not fully recovered from last Friday night. Right now, I feel beat up inside. Bruised. And really goddamned tired in a way that goes beyond the physical I can tell I am on the mend but it’s taking longer than I thought I would.

I am struggling with feeling self-loathing guilt about not going to the meeting. Part of me feels like a total loser for having taken the loser choice instead of forcing myself out there where the odds were good that once I got moving, I would feel a whole lot better.

The other side of the internal argument says that I have to take care of myself and not push myself too far and end up totally collapsing. Part of managing illness is knowing when to push and when to accept your limitations – and forgive yourself for them.

It’s that last bit that’s hard for me.

I hope that some day, I figure out how to turn off this ruthless, relentless self-judgment. Accomplishment will help. I completed that insane assignment and the payment for it has been put through. The funds will be available in a week, if I’m lucky.

Because that’s how modern banking goes. Everything is instant except the things that mysteriously take days to happen. It will be three days for my method of payment (PayPal) to be approved. And then Upwork only does payouts once a week.  And only if there is more than $100 to pay.

The usual bullshit. I supposed that if it is a pay per transaction situation with Upwork, then doing fewer transactions overall would save them money. And also bandwidth.

But it is frustrating to us poor schlubs waiting for our money.

Oh well, it will show up in my Paypal account eventually. PayPal was not my first choice for the receipt of payments. My first choice was direct bank transfer – that way the money goes directly into my Vancity account, and it would be simple to transfer it onto my reloadable VISA from there and then use it wherever.

But I ran into one of those situations that drive us poor idiots stuck insisting the world make sense crazy, because in order to set up the direct transfer, I needed my account number, and there is literally no way for me to find out what my account number is. No way I could find, anyhow. I did every Google site search I could think of, and the closest thing I could find was a page that told me how to find my account number… on a check.

Who the fuck uses checks any more? Might as well be banking using marks scratched on clay tablets with reeds, or notes tied to carrier pigeons.

So that was super frustrating. I can see that PayPal is almost as good because it it set up to draw from my credit card anyhow, and most importantly tons of places accept PayPal as a form of payment for stuff now, so I can use it for online shopping no prob.

But, well, I am one stubborn dude who hates to stop anything before he finishes it, and so I will probably call the bank tomorrow and get my account number from them, and set the fucking thing up like I wanted it set up in the first place.

But hey, that’s the stubbornness that earned me that money in the first place. Only someone like me would have worked so fucking hard for a whole week for $100. It’s that semi-insane persistence that sustained me.

And the stubborn pride of never giving up no matter what the challenge is…. in other words, never letting a challenge defeat me. Fuck you, challenge. I am going to defeat you whatever the cost.

Again, not exactly one hundred percent sane, but potent when harnessed properly.

When I was feeling overwhelmed by the task next week, all I had to do was imagine failing my first ever freelance assignment and that would goad me back into action. I worked rally hard on that insane thing, but I got it done.

Just between you and me, and don’t tell the client, but it was not a very well thought out assignment. For me at least…. I am dying to know how the others hired (if there were any) fared on the job.

I can’t escape the nagging feeling that there was an easier and faster way to do it and it was only my very high standards that made it take me so long to rephrase four paragraphs. Maybe if I had truly accepted that I could trash most of the content from the original and done my rephrasings by taking like two facts from each paragraph and completely ignoring the rest.

But I care too much about information,. I can’t just casually destroy it like that. Even with permission. I made a few concessions to the idea, like only including three from any list of more than three items, but for the most part it all stayed.

And while that slowed things down and made way more work for me, I will say this : My reworked paragraphs were well written!

Oh, and the agreement for the job was to do it for USD $72, and I was paid USD $86 instead. So they threw in a tip, at least.

That means that, at the current exchange rate, I got paid CDN $116 for the job. Which is nice. Nowhere near minimum wage, but still. Nice.

Aaaand I have a completed job on Upwork so I am not a total nonentity any more. Plus I have the animation thing I am going to be doing 5 days a way.

So things are looking up for me. I just have to pull myself together and get on top of it.

And I am totally going to do that…. TOMORROW.

Today, I am going to freaking relax.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First  : status update. I feel a lot better than I did last night. But I am not yet well.

And this has brought up a curious subject, because I am now at a stage where I can consciously assess the amount of depression in mt bloodstream. I can feel its presence, I and sense the healing process. I know I am going to get better over time. I am not particularly worried about my future mental state despite how bad it got last night.

A previous version of me, the pre-Kwantlen me, would have simply done… nothing. Well, nothing except let it eat me up inside for decades. He might have gotten somewhat pissed off but he would have just sucked it up and gotten even more numb.

The suicidal impulses would have been there. I might even have done it.

But now, I feel it all. The road to recovery for my particular kind of depression is paved with blood, because in every way and every way, I must choose to be alive and in pain rather than numb and pain free.

It’s like I am chewing off my own leg to get free of a trap called depression.

The important thing is that I don’t feel like I own this leaven of depression. It is not a part of me. It’s just something that has happened to me, like a cold or the flu.

And like those ailments, I know it suck for a while butI will get over it eventually.

And unlike those ailments, there is even a good chance that I will emerge stronger and saner from the experience. I feel like my recovery has left the “waking up” phase and entered a “breaking and remaking” phase.

Life, by which I mean the metaconscious healing part of my brain, will continue to shatter me and reforge me, each time terrible at the time but necessary to precipitate the sorts of changes that need to happen. Each reforging purifies me because that’s what lets the poison out. I have to be rendered unto a molten state by the emotions and the pain because only then do I have the fluidity to filter out the impurities.

In other, less poetic words, it forces some catharsis on me.

And I am sure that could be changed. I think the forces that have kept me semi-sane (or at least non-delusional) have the end result of making my internal structure rather inflexible. So for me, recovery has to be a series of painful rebirths. My internal structure is too rigid for gradual growth at this point.

I’m currently about 2/3 of the way through legendary lemon “Jupiter Ascending”. It is supposed to be really awful but I am not seeing it. It’s cheesy and stupid in parts but as a connoisseur of terrible things, I can tell you that it’s really not that bad.

In fact, it’s more well thought out than a lot of movies that don’t get tagged as terrible.

Anyhow, the reason  I bring that up is that there is a scene where the main character, Jupiter, tells someone that (spoiler) her powerful new role as space royalty won’t change who she is as a person.

And I had to laugh a cynical old person laugh.

From my point of view, she could not be more wrong. And not just because we all know that wealth, power, and luxury all corrupt people and infantilizes them.

It’s because this change in her life means she is on the precipice of total change. The rise in station (so to speak) means that, spiritually, she is the goo inside a cocoon that is neither caterpillar nor butterfly, but a stage in between. This makes her both extremely vulnerable (good thing she has a hot Space Stud to protect her) and capable of changing into whatever the hell she wants to be.

She can make her outside match her inside in a way that most of us can only dream of. Especially in the context of a giant space empire that has the ability to rewrite the human genome however it likes.

So she is in the sort of molten state I am talking about. Whatever she needs to be, she can be. I would love to have that kind of freedom, even if it would basically mean going beyond all realms of human meta-consciousness.

It’s a level of choice and options that might well drive a person insane. But I would still go for it if I could. I would not be able to resist.

I am dying to know if I could be able to remain a force for good despite the social programming in my primate brain telling me to become a ruthless reptile who doesn’t need to consider others at all now.

I honestly don’t know the answer. My best guess would be that I would turn into a character like Trevor Goodchild from Aeon Flux. He’s an excellent example of an ice cold INTJ who believes himself to be always working towards the public good, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that he is really just a megalomaniac totalitarian  like any other.

I suppose I might be less hypocritical than him because I am more self-aware and I know how easily that line of bullshit – the idea that you are always working towards what is good for people in the long run – can open the door for your worst instincts to reign supreme by letting you justify any level of inhuman barbarity by saying it will turn out to be the correct utilitarian choice eventually.

So I am well aware of that trap.

The other route to horribleness would be the decadent path, where I revert to the oral stage of development because I have decided that all that matters is my own pleasure and doing whatever the hell I want.

That leads, inevitably, to cruelty, because once physical pleasures no longer thrill you that much, the next step is to indulge in the pleasure of the exerting of power over others. The dominance thrill. And without any moral or spiritual ground for that, you get the Stanford Prison Experiment. You get Abu Graib.

You get the Holocaust.

Because that’s how decadence works. It always needs stronger and stronger doses of the pleasure sought in order to be satisfied. So everything inevitably escalates.

It has a tragic quality to it. Kind of like a kid who makes himself sick on the candy in a candy store because he is so excited by it all he ignores the warnings his body are trying to give him. Because it starts from a place of innocence – the simple urge to have a lot of fun – but goes downhill rapidly.

So anyhooo…. um… something something I feel separate from my depression now, something something that’s a good sign, something something dark side.

You’d think I would be friends with my depression now. After all, we’ve been together for so long and been through so much together.

But he knows I am going to kill him.

And then I can finally be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.