Is “mattress” really just the female version of “mattress”?

Had therapy today, and my therapist had an unusual but quite sound suggestion : that I prop an old mattress up against a wall and beat the ever loving shit out of it.

The idea is that it would be a great way for me to both get exercise and work out my latent aggression at the same time.

It makes perfect sense to me. I have always wanted a punching bag or heavy bag to use for that very purpose.  But those are both extremely expensive and totally incompatible with the size of our apartment.

But a single mattress, sans frame or bedding, would fit in my room. In fact, the best place for it would be a space not three feet from where I am sitting right now.

And I have to admit, being able to stand up from the computer and vent my rage at will sounds pretty frigging sweet.

The topic came up because I was talking about hwo I think a lot of my problems come from pent up emotions and unexpressed anger. As patient readers know, I have an enormous amount of anger and frustration built up inside me because anger is the emotion I have the most trouble expressing.

And I told him the story of why. I have told it here before but I will tell it again because it really does explain a lot.

The incident in question happened when I was in high school. In computer class. Which in that semester was taught by none other than Mister Yeo (pronounced yo).

Yes, that’s a very funny name. Moving on.

Now he and I did not get along at all. I had discovered this n the previous year when he had been my geometry teacher. I swear it was mostly some weird kind of pheromone thing. When he and I were in the same room we set one another’s teeth on edge. This despite us both trying really hard to get along.

Him more than me, because I was 17 at the time and less aware of things. But  definitely tried hard. I think we were both bewildered by the whole phenomenon and wanted to regain some kind of control over ourselves despite the fucked up messages our primitive brains were sending us.

That’s what we intellectuals do. We have to prove to ourselves that we can resist purely hormonal bullshit and remain masters of our own actions.

In practice, that only goes so far, and we have to shamefully admit that we get overwhelmed by hormones and pheromones sometimes too.

Personally, I’d rather admit to a bizarre and outre fetish or a  love of Justin Beiber than admit that I had lost control like that.

Anyhow, we didn’t get along. Luckily, we both knew it going into computer class, so we dealt with it in the classic male way by simply ignoring one another.

I suppose it helped that I knew so very much more about computers than him, and he knew it. So that kept him in his corner, and I had no desire to tangle with or hurt him, so that kept me in mine.

But then there was that fateful day at the end of the semester when he deleted all the student files off the hard drive of the one computer in the computer that HAD a hard drive (that’s how long ago this was, folks), exactly as he’d been saying he would all semester, but I hadn’t listened, and so I had not backed up my work to my school-assigned floppy disk like I was supposed to do.

So let me be clear. I was in the wrong here,.

Nevertheless, this action pissed me the fuck off. I guess on some level, I didn’t think he would actually do it. So when I found out he had done it, a fuse was lit in me and it did not take long before it went off.

I forgot what I said in my high intensity tirade But I remember putting absolutely every ounce of my being into telling him to go FUCK himself.

And then I went home, because honestly, how can you top that?

I come to school the next day, and I find out that directly after I did that, he had a heart attack. He survived but it was pretty bad. He never returned to being a teacher, as far as I know. He was too physically weak.

And I feel really bad about that now. Looking back, he was a pretty harmless kind of guy. Maybe a bit of a dick sometimes, but he certainly didn’t deserve such a crushing blow. I would take it all back if I could.

But you can see how that make me reluctant to let my anger call the shots ever again, can’t you? I nearly killed the guy. That’s the kind of damage I can do.

And yes, I know all the counterarguments. Like, maybe he would have had that heart attack that day no matter what happened. And of course, he had to have a bad heart in the first place.

And those are all sane, rational, and credible arguments. And no doubt they represent the objective truth.

But I know in my heart that it was me. My rage, with all my considerable emotive power behind it, magnified by my size.

The poor man probably feared for his life. I had my full adult height of 6′ 1″ at the time, and I weighed around 230-250 pounds. He was fairly small, like 5′ 6″. Plus, this was completely out of character for me. So it was extremely shocking. as well.

So there ya have it. The reason I keep my anger on a very short chain. I damn near killed a man with it. Someone who did not deserve it at all.

I am slowly coming into my power now, though. Less scared of myself. So who knows, knowing that I have this kind of power might come in handy in the future.

But would I be willing to bully my way to the top?

I am going to have to say “maybe” to that.

It’s something I will have to think over.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been going through what artists always have to go through in order to get shit done : a period of hating everything that I have ever done.

I wrote a script for the trailer for Secret Informant, that show I am part of developing. This is the trailer that will be shown to attract funding. So I want it to be perfect.

That’s probably too much pressure for a guy like me. Sad but true.

Anyhow, after dithering a bunch, I wrote… something.

And I hate it. Hate it hate it hate it.

That’s not a problem. That’s just part of art. Every artist in every medium and form makes bad art. This is something I understand.

Nevertheless, writing that putrid piece of crap has kept me from either fixing the fucking thing or starting anew, and people are counting on me. I can’t fuck this up.

So I need to get the fuck over myself as quickly as possible so I can treat the whole thing like a few new task and attack it with my usual zeal.

First step for that, as it turns out, will be talking about it here so I can work through the emotional blockage I am dealing with and get things moving again.

I don’t lack of inspiration, that’s for sure. Love the whole idea of the show, love the plans we have for it, love the people I am working with. Excited to see where this all goes. Eager to get this kind of credit on my resume.

In other words, this is definitely a “me” thing. My mental damage. My weakness of spirit. My path to strength and courage and drive. My recovery.

Somehow, I have to connect with my cocky, confident, charismatic side and use that energy to power through all this psychological garbage to make way for my real self.

Have to keep remembering that. Who I’ve been is not who I am. The real me is nothing like the depressed me. The real me is strong, courageous, bold,. brilliant, and capable of ten miracles a day – 12 if there’s money or sex involved.

I’m a wizard, goddamn it^[1],  For so long, I thought I was useless because the things I couldn’t do were so simple and basic. Things that other people do automatically, without even having to think about it.

But do those things really matter compared to what I can do with my creative and intellectual talents? I would excel in any office. From working in the mail room to being senior manager in charge of development, I could do it all.

And do it damn well, too. I know I have it in me to see unique solutions to problems others find intractable. I could be a heck of a troubleshooter. I also know that I can pinpoint inefficiencies and figure out how to eliminate them. So I could totally be an efficiency expert. And I have a head for certain kinds of strategy. So I might do well in strategic planning as well.

And that’s just administrative stuff. It doesn’t even include my writing skills. I could writer damn near anything in damn near any genre for damn near anyone and it would be pretty goddamned good.

So I know, in my heart, that I can do this. Now let’s back the truck the fuck up and take a look at why I haven’t, yet.

It’s that whole “avoidance” thing,. I was upset by how my first attempt turned out, and that made it hard to think about a new attempt, so I just kept pushing it out of my mind and into the future.

Weak stuff. Unworthy of me. Looked at with the harsh cleansing light of objectivity, it’s clear that I have been dicking around, spending half my day playing Witcher 3 when I should be working on important things.

This is the point where we enter the minefields, however. Because if I excoriate myself for this failing, it weakens my self-esteem and thus the strength I need to continue, as well as making the task even less attractive by putting this huge emotional tag on it that says “YOU ARE A LOSER”.

So that’s the wrong road to go down, even though it feels right and traveling on it is so easy because I have trod its stones so many times before.

What I am trying to develop in myself is the ability to ruthlessly cut off the past. To say to myself “Whatever. It’s in the past. Can’t be changed. Doesn’t matter now. What matters is getting things DONE. Everything else that gets in the way of that is bullshit and needs to be instantly burned to ashes and the ashes flushed away.

I’m working on it.

I realize that part of my problem is that I have been in a world of my own making – otherwise known as my rich inner life – for so long that I lost the ability to separate myself from my thoughts, emotions, ideas, and so on. So any kind of change or lack of faith in them feels like I am cutting off a piece of myself.

And that’s no way to run a railroad, son.

Don’t get me wrong. I am positive that my deep connection with my art is a big part of what makes it good. I wouldn’t risk that for anything.

But when it gets in the way of my actually using my skills, something has to change.

Perhaps the gentler approach of “water under the bridge” would suit me better. Less “FUCK THAT PAST, SCORCHED EARTH MOTHERFUCKER!” and more “Meh, whatever, let’s do the next fun thing!”

Whatever the approach, it’s clear that I have some shit I got to work out before I reach my full potential as a writer..

Good thing I have therapy tomorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again later.

I don’t always know which side of the river I am on.

It comes up in my dreams a lot. Confusions between similar things, things seeming to divide and overlap on their own, not know whether I am looking at the opposite shore or whether I am there. Watching myself do things, and yet, still being the one doing them. A sense of the infinite fractal tree of possibilities of the future, where choices lead every which way into the future, and a sense of sadness that I will only ever – that I can only ever – live one path through that forest of options.

I’m only one person, after all.

One person with one life and one point of view and one trip through life. I supposed it says something about my unusual mental state that this bothers me. I want to do everything, see everything, look at things from every possible point of view.

But I can’t, so my combination of deep insight into human nature and vivid imagination will have to do.

I have never had any problem. putting myself in someone else’s shoes. At least, not since I was in Grade Four and realized that everything people do make sense to them. After that, the jump to realizing that other people have their own lives just like me but different – that every person is as valid and real a person as I am – was easy.

That’s still a fun one to contemplate – truly contemplate – when I feel like blowing my own mind. To imagine even one person’s totality as being equal to what I know to be my own is staggering. To repeat the exercise seven billion more times is nigh on impossible – but it can be fun to try now and then.

For me, that leads inexorably to humanism. The common element in all of us is our humanity. Not just in the literal biological sense. But also in the spiritual sense. Once you accept not merely the knowledge of this shared humanity but the deep down emotional truth of it, judging others becomes more difficult because you know that, like you, they are on a journey not even they truly understand and their actions are motivated by things unseen and unknown.

This effect on judgment can be hard for people to accept when they start to apply to the judgments and hatreds that are important to themselves. Judgments like “my parents did a terrible job of raising me” or “the divorce was all THEIR fault” or “it’s not my fault that my kids are lazy and badly behaved – I do the best that I can” can be incredibly important to people’s self-image and self-esteem, and I would never suggest people are somehow no good unless they rip those elements out of their psyche.

That would be far too judgmental of me.

And I am no paragon of it either. For me, it’s the direction I wish to go, but I don’t actually expect to get there. To me, that’s what it means to have ideals. They don’t provide a roadmap to an established goal.

They are just directions to self-improvement.

Anyhow, when the true acceptance of the humanity of others makes judgment more difficult, it opens the mind to truly understanding others without all that judgment in the way. Then you can see the world through eyes other than your own, spiritually speaking.

Given that unusual point of view of mine, it’s not a surprise that I have a certain amount of confusion as to who and where I am sometimes. And why I need help focusing. That’s why I am so mission oriented. When I have a clear goal in mind, I have a focal point for the kaleidoscopic scintillation of my endlessly searching mind.

My inner world is so demanding and distracting. I wish I could just empty it out and have some peace of mind now and then.  Not only would it give my poor overworked circuits time to cool off and rest, but it would make dealing with the real world so much easier.

It’s like I am always at a loud party straining to hear what the person on the phone is saying to me. It’s so exhausting.

In theory, meditation performs that function. At least, that’s my theory of it. Meditation teaches you to shut down all those background mental processes that you don’t even know are running and in doing so, lets you mind truly truly rest.

I’m saying “true” and “truly: a lot today. I wonder what I truly mean by it.

Maybe once you finally finish the task of force-quitting all those background programs and achieve a state of unified, simplified, harmonized consciousness, the relief is so profound and the sudden insight of such scale that the only word we can use is “enlightenment”.

It all sounds great on paper. But I have a lot of psychological issues which fuel the shark-like restlessness of my mind and so far in life, I have not been able to tame my monkey-mind enough to do more than lightly dabble in meditation.

I have too much of the problem meditation solves to solve it. Catch-22.

The real barrier, though, is the one that keeps me from getting exercise. I know that at least half and possibly much more of the problem is that I have all this energy that my depression, obesity, and sleep apnea get in the way.

Especially the depression. I have said before that madness is when you know for certain that doing a thing will make you happier and yet still finding yourself unable to do it.

I know damned well that if I got more exercise, I would be calmer, more focused, and a lot happier. All that excess energy demands expression and when it doesn’t get it, it turns into the energy source for anxiety and depression.

But I still can’t make myself exercise, because exercise hurts. And when I am exercising, I don’t have all my usual psychological defenses at hand and that makes me feel exposed and hounded and scared.

Or at least, that’s what I think will happen. I could be dead wrong and find that the energy release as well as muscular tension release makes me feel wonderful.

I guess I will never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I have been trying to explain how I experience the world and what is going on in my head for my entire life.

I’ve talked before about how, despite me repeatedly telling you about my frosty tomb of cold circuit only emotions, in many ways. I “feel” my way through the world.

And not just when I have lost my glasses. Ba dum bum.

No, I mean it in the sense that I experience the world as very finely tuned emotions first. I experience them as sensory inputs second. The timing difference is negligible, but in terms of processing priority it’s massive.

In a sense, all I am describing is what it means to be a fundamentally intuitive person. And it’s kind of mindboggling, at least to the Western mind, to imagine that I do all my complex analysis, creative, synthesis, and all my other magic tricks via emotion, but that is seriously how it works for me.

Everything I do involves my intuition working as the powerhouse processor that it is, and my conscious mind being merely the computer operator. All that it does is enter commands and interpret results. The rest happens under the hood.

Of course, when a brain like mine, that can be a very powerful combination. It is, in fact, the only way truly powerful minds can operate. The speed and power derives at least partially from the fact that processes operate on their own, without using much of the conscious mind’s limited bandwidth, and therefore can process enormous amount of information and still produce usable results.

That’s why us INTJ types constantly compress and optimize that signature highly refined picture of the world in our heads. We can our minds to run as efficiently as possible so that the right answer or solution can be derived with the least expenditure possible.

Yes, we are efficiency fanatics even within our own minds.

And yes, this brutal efficiency of mind can make us seem coldly calculating and even inhuman sometimes. But that’s just how we solve problems. Problems we passionately want to see addressed and that we are absolutely sure can be solved given the application of enough brainpower, common sense, creativity, and the will to succeed.

I see the world as full of problems to solve. But I am not interested in solving them merely because they are interesting puzzles and it amuses me to solve them. I want to solve them because I am determined to make the world a better place by the most effective means I can find.

I want results, goddamn it. And I will ignore, override, reroute, work around, unplug, deactivate, disintegrate, and destroy whatever gets in the way.

And that makes me, in some ways, very demanding. I won’t accept inferior solutions as being the best we can do. I will demand that things be done right according to how I see it at times. I take a dim view of people who put their own petty squabbles and interpersonal BS ahead of the group endeavour. I have very high standards of self-control and lose respect big time for people who don’t pull themselves together when the time comes.

But it’s true what they say – people who are demanding of others are often even more demanding of themselves. Maybe too demanding… I’m only human, after all.

So that’s one way in which I have been trying and filing to get my point across for what seems like my whole life. So many things have clear and logical solutions to me and yet the problems just keep going on and on because there is nobody with a lick of sense in a position where they can actually do something about it.

But on the other side of the coin that is me, I have always been a heavily poetic person in that I feel a lot of things which are hard to put into words. The only way to express them is in poetic language, as opposed to linearly descriptive language, because the emotional content is too important to the message to eliminate.

So I talk about feeling like my heart is trapped under a glacier of frozen emotion and that recovery is a process of icebergs periodically breaking off the glacier with a mighty crack and plopping into the ocean of emotion, and from there to float southward and melt.

To a lot of people, including a lot of people who would (ha!) consider themselves very logical and sensible, that paragraph would be utterly incomprehensible. The language would be too figurative, too nonliteral, too “imprecise” and above all too emotional for them to be able to process.

All I can say is that it conveys how I feel in the best way I know. And like many poets before me, I still feel like I am not really saying what I am trying to say.

Poets can build entire careers out of trying to say what they really mean.

As I have mentioned, I think I might have a toe on the autism spectrum, and when I look back at my childhood, I remember being overwhelmed by all the input to my little brain. Not just the sensory stuff, but the rich stream of emotions and intuitions that came along with that sensory barrage, as well as inputs from things like my empathic understanding of what others were feeling, the part of my mind that tried to predict future events, the constant babble of semi-verbailzed thoughts that are the byproduct of all that mentation, and so forth and so on.

I think that might have been why I took refuge in the logical analytical mindset in the first place. Logic, reason, science, and so on – those counter the cacophony within and act like islands of refuge in a sea of babble.

It would makes sense, and possibly apply to everyone on the spectrum. The difference lies in severity of effect versus ability to cope, I suppose.

One more try : when I am out in the world, I feel everything I experience. I have deep envy for people who can experience in the world in a purely sensory way and enjoy every moment as it comes. To me that sounds like heaven.

Because when I am out there, I have to shut nearly everything out or all the emotions will swamp me and I will get overloaded and have a panic attack and feel like I am drowning.

Only very slowly have I been able to open my sensorium up to include more of what is happening in the world around me. The creature is responding well to the medication and is beginning to wake up and show interest in its surroundings.

So part of my walking in the sunshine at last world is to finally be able to simply experience life without all this goddamned grating echo chamber bullshit going on in my head so I can just…. be.

My mind has no off switch and no volume control.

Guess I will have to learn to do it myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s always, fundamentally, about the cold.

Depression is cold. It numbs. It freezes. It chills. Depression is frostbitten fingers desperately fumbling for a match. It’s miles upon miles of cold dead tundra where nothing lives. It’s It’s a period of glaciation, where mountains of ice move over the land and scrape it die. It’s freezing rain that sucks the heat from your blood like a vampire. It’s a cruel frost that kills the tender bud before it can bloom. It’s being stabbed in the heart with an icicle over and over and over again.

Depression is the cold and unforgiving heart of Death.

Patient readers know my theory as to why this is. I think that the mind produces a kind of anesthetic in response to psychic trauma. This is necessary because it allows the individual to function while this  emotional trauma heals. It’s analogous to the body’s response to physical trauma via the production of endorphins.

But what happens when the emotional injury does not heal? When it is more than the mind can handle, for whatever reasons, and so the wound remains indefinitely?

Then so does the response. These unresolved traumas continue to be met with this numbing effect of which I speak, and this effect causes the mind to lose contact with the communal feeling of humanity and hence leaves the sufferer feeling utterly alone. It also makes the mind sluggish on some levels, making it hard for the individual to cope with reality. Furthermore, it drains the afflicted of energy by shutting down the connection between desire and achievement of said desire, in addition to giving the mind the feeling of being weak and overburdened and helpless.

In essence, it leaves people feeling dead inside. But they are not dead, merely sleeping. All that they were and all that they were meant to be are still there, just like our hands or feet are still there even if they fall asleep and you can’t feel them any more.

It’s especially pathological because the effects of this numbing often lead to further emotional traumas, and the patient’s mind becomes a museum of frozen and unresolved emotional issues, all of which radiate their own coldness, and before you know it, the whole psyche goes numb and you are left with a very depressed individual who can no longer feel much of anything from the outside world and is thus turning ever inward to experience the emotions left to them, namely those generated internally.

And those emotions are not going to be healthy ones, because without that external emotional input, the mind grows stagnant and rots from within.

A harsh image, to be sure, but true nevertheless.

Medications help counter some of the effects. SSRI’s like Prozac and Paxil can interfere with the ways depression operates, especially how it results in and/or from the depletion of serotonin in the bloodstream.

But that merely treats the symptom. The root cause of the problem  is the unresolved emotional issue provoking the numbing response in the first place and the individual cannot truly be free of their illness until these emotions are resolved.

Especially, presumably, the initial trauma.

Interesting how I started out poetic then went straight into clinical, isn’t it?

In my case, resolving the initial trauma is tricky because I was only three when it happened. That means both that the memory is extremely primal and vague (yet also extremely powerful) and that it’s an extremely old memory and thus hard to retrieve.

I mean, who remembers a lot of what happened to them when they were three?

Plus, it is such a profound trauma at so early an age that it is buried deep in the very structure of my psyche. I have mentioned before how between the ages of zero and five, we gain most of the brain mass we will have for the rest of our lives.

This is obvious if you compare the size of a newborn infant’s head with that of a five year old. There is simply no room for a fully functional human brain in there!

That’s why those years are so very very very important to the child’s future development. Whatever happens and whatever they learn during those precious years will get encoded into the very structure of the brain itself, and get programmed into the fundamental base code of the operating system of their mind.

If more people understood this, maybe they would understand the enormity of what is at stake in those magical early years.

And smack in the middle of those years, I was raped by a stranger.

I don’t consciously remember most of it. Which is a blessing, and probably the only benefit of having it happen at such an early age. Had it happened when I was older, the memory would have been clearer and easier to access.

But I know it’s in there. Lurking.

I do remember making the decision to “take my mind away”, like so many other victims of child rape. I did this by deliberately and desperately unfocusing my mind till everything was a soft, warm blur on every level.

And I think that became a deeply ingrained psychological defense. It’s the root of my tendency to retreat into my mind when emotionally distressed. Once I defocus from the world, I can focus on my inner life and in there, I feel safe from the horrors of the outside world. The bullying I endured in elementary school, and especially the boredom I endured in class due to my advanced intellect, only reinforced this tendency.

And that’s the source of the “inward tide”  I have mentioned before. Just to focus on the world as much as I do,  have to fight a constant battle against the pull of gravity from this black hole deep inside me. I live in a state of constant terror that I will fail to keep up and go crashing through my own event horizon.

And as we all know….

Nothing can escape the black hole after that.

Fighting my own gravity drains most of my energy, which is why I have so little left for everything else. That’s why i can seem gobsmackingly absurd when I am asked or expected to do something which is patently impossible for me.

It’s like asking a man dangling from the edge of a cliff to juggle.

But the world cannot see my inner struggle. They can’t possibly understand what it’s like for a person of me to make it through the day. They cannot conceive of the burden we depressives carry around with us or how much that drains us.

It’s like we are wearing thick heavy armor nobody can see.

It’s not hopeless, though. Therapy can disperse the mass of the black hole so that its gravitic pull lessens over time, and suddenly, you have more energy for other things.

And if, some day, I can get at that primal trauma and release its cargo…

…then I might finally be free to leave this stinking solar system and explore the univrse with all the other ships.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(NOTE : This is an abstract discussion of my problem, so you don’t have to worry that I am once more the victim of my own incompetence. There’s no tragedy to be told. I’ve just been thinking about it today. ) 

Been thinking about the whole “I keep screwing up” thing.

I haven’t done it lately. Knock on wood. So improvement is possible, at least for a while. But I know that it’s only a matter of time before the scintillating shimmering kaleidoscope that is my mind shifts and I stop pay attention to the right variables and lo and behold, I am an idiot once again.

It’s definitely related to my state of mental health. The more depressed I am, the thicker the fog in my mind gets, and the harder it is for me to think clearly and remember things and predict future needs, and so on.

That, of course, makes my signature brand of fuckups far more likely to happen. And what happens after? I become even more depressed.

It’s a tragic cycle. Luckily, I have learned to resist it, and thus break the cycle a bit.

It helps that I have at least some tiny bit of accomplishment now. Tahnsk to my awesome script writing capabilities, I have $140 or so sitting on my reloadable visa, waiting to be used. And that’s after making a $50 payment on my delinquent cell phone bill.

And there is nothing quite like the validation one gets for being paid for one’s work. Sure, it’s not exactly a huge amount of money…. 5 scripts a week for USD $10 a script…. but with all my living expenses already covered (and with my having lived in crushing poverty for so long, it makes a huge difference.

It’s USD $200/month. That’s around  CDN $250 a month.. Compared to an income of roughly $1000/month, it’s a 25 percent increase.

Not frigging bad! And it’s only my first gig. I am being paid WAY less than industry standard. If I was a staff writer on a TV show, I would be making around USD $2800/week, which is around $3700 Canadian.

But it’s a start. Not a lot of writers get so many webisode writing credits in so short of time after graduation. Once I have done 30 or 31 of the things, I will start looking around for opportunities further up the ladder. Something in the actual TV industry, maybe. Or at least a higher level of freelance work.

I wonder how many minutes of script I need to have written before I go from a Beginner (for people who want the lowest possible price) to Intermediate (for people looking for the best combination of experience and price)?

Maybe all you have to do is change a setting in your profile. That would suck possum taint. I want to earn it. And Upwork is too well run a website for something that sloppy. They want to assure the purchasers of freelance work that they are getting what they paid for. So it’s in their best interests to make sure that is true.

Anyhow, so for once in a very long time, I feel like I have worth. Measurable worth. For a long long time, I felt like I was a permanent liability to the world. That all I could do was suck up resources without contributing at all. That I was making the world worse just by being alive in it.

That the world would be better off without me, essentially.

Luckily, I got over that, for the most part. I still have times when I feel that way, but most of the time I can remember that those feelings are the result of transient neurochemical phenomena and do not represent anything true or real about me.

Remember, kids, just because you feel like shit doesn’t me you ARE shit!

And I bounce back fairly quickly. So I feel like I have my head above water on that issue. If I am lucky, I can keep myself together long enough for this era of basic minimal competence to become something permanent.

And I know there is a job I can do well, so that’s a plus. Yay, I’m not useless! Take that, my sister Catherine in something like 1979!

It’s very weird when you realize you are haunted by people who are not even around any more. But it’s almost as weird – and in some ways weirder – to realize you are haunted by people who are still around but are not that person any more.

And that applies to most people’s childhoods. Whoever the other kids at school were, they are probably nothing like that now. Even the bullies. We victims of bullying, for good reason, tend to cast the kids responsible as villains for life. Our hate burns eternal for them and part of us still wants revenge.

But they probably are not that angry cruel person any more. That person is, effectively, dead. That does not come within twelve parsecs of justifying what they did, of course. It was still a horrible crime, and I mean a literal crime, as in something that should have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

But it does put the whole thing in perspective. Everyone involved were just kids who were acting on emotions. None of us had any idea what we were doing. Would any of us want to be judged by adult standards on things we did when we were that age?

I am pretty sure we would all go to jail if that were the case. Or at least totally humiliated. There’s a solid scientific reason why we do not hold children as liable for their actions as adults, and that’s because they do not yet have the mental machinery upon which our concept of personal liability rests.

I am not claiming to be a saint myself… I still hate the people who bullied me. There’s a part of me that would be glad to watch them burn in Hell for what they did.

But I hate them less and less over time. And I am happy about that. Holding on to the past can only hurt you and there is no use in carrying all that pain around just in case you ever get your chance to return it, with interest, through revenge.

So I forgive you, Lenny Mcausland. You were a nasty little shit, but I know you did it because you were jealous of me and saw a way to take me down and make yourself feel better about the differences between you and I. Me with my huge brain finding school easy then going back to my comfortable middle class home. You struggling to even pass then going home to a working class nightmare of a home. I can see why you might take every chance to “get back” at me for that.

It doesn’t justify anything you did. But I get it.

Besides, I am not forgiving you for your sake. I am forgiving you for mine, so I can let you go and get you out of my head.

Consider your ass evicted.

I wuill talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s another battle in the war to unlock my cage.

I’ve about trying to live a natural life. Not in the sense of eating only organic produce and such^[1], but in the sense of being able to relax in my own skin and not constantly second-guess myself and try to control things with my conscious rational mind that would be far better handled by a lower down process that evolved specifically to do that kind of thing.

It’s a tricky thing to explain. I’ve tried to get my therapist to understand it but had no luck. It’s hard to describe something that operates on such a deep level of my mind – the really fundamental machine code levels of my mind.

LOL. The jackhammer outside sounds hilariously farty from here.

I will try to explain it via a story : In elementary school, I was a super clumsy kid. As in, running into walls and tripping over my own feet clumsy.

And to be honest, I never totally got over that. I just got better at avoiding doing things that required a dexterity level of “total spaz”.

But I did get better. And that’s a good thing. But the way I improved was not a good thing. I improved more or less by sheer act of will. Specifically, I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was to solve it by throwing my mind at the problem and developing an instinct to concentrating really hard on things most people do without a thought.

That means that even when merely getting through life, I am under constant strain. For the most part, it’s not conscious, but it’s always there. It’s as though life is simply twice as hard for me. I am living on a higher level of difficulty than most people. Doing something like going to the grocery store to pick up a few things involves a level of strain that most people only feel during a tough exam.

Not to mention that I am also in constant struggle with my social anxiety the whole time.

Fundamentally, the problem is one of emotions. I don’t trust mine. That goes for all the levels, like instinct, reflex, and empathy, to name a few. On a very deep level, I am terrified to let myself go and act on impulse. To my mind, that can only lead to massive failure and terrible consequences. Every impulse faces a very strict acceptability court and almost all of them get eliminated at that point.

I feel compelled to do the “smart” thing at all times, and operate on a punishing level of background anxiety. When I was a scared little kid, I hid in logic, knowledge, and the power of my mind. . It seemed like a winning solution at the time. I would use my crazy smart brain to look for the most logical answer that increased the greater good. I would avoid what I could and do what I could not avoid via intense concentration and paranoid anxiety that was on constant lookout for the next thing that was going to trip me up and embarrass and humiliate because I could not do some simple thing.

And until I convince that deep down part of myself that sometimes, emotion alone is good enough to get the job done, I will not be able to eliminate that anxiety and be able to relax in my own skin and not worry about stuff so much.

That’s the advice my uncle Sonny gave me on Facebook recently. He told me that I don’t need to analyze everything and that I should learn to just relax and enjoy life.

And he is absolutely right. I have no skill at enjoying life. Between rank poverty and crippling social anxiety, I have not had a lot of chances to go have fun out there in the real world and maybe learn enough about myself so I can fucking relax once in a while.

All I know is books, the Internet, and video games. Virtual experiences. Pale shadows of the real thing, and no good for building a life.

I know that how I live is wrong – very wrong – in terms of my spiritual health and growth. I have been stuffed into this tiny cage for a very long time and it’s led me to have a very cramped, stifled soul that years to breathe free, but is terrified of it too.

It’s all just so… unknown.  And unknowable.

I am extremely alienated from my emotions. We’re not even living under the same roof on a conscious level. I still have emotions, obviously, but I have suppressed them in order to be “rational” and see things with “clarity” for so long, I can’t imagine anything else.

And the thing is, it works. The magic is real. I have deep insight into a lot of things and “see” a lot of things that are invisible to others. This increases my mental power to an nearly un-measurable degree. My substantial intellect has a lot to work with. My power frightens me sometimes.

But none of that makes me happy. None of it enriches my soul or makes me feel good about my life. I end up feeling empty and cold a lot of the time because it’s all ice cold pleasure devoid of nutrition.

I can tell you how to defeat terrorism forever, but I don’t know how to be happy. The fear pins me in and I am locked tight in a cage without bars. I really want to escape the darkness and walk in the sun, but I am terrified of the exposure that would involve.

I wish I had the courage to say “Fuck it!”, escape, and destroy the cage so that I can never ever ever come back. Then deal with whatever consequences may come.

And maybe some day I will.

But for now, all I can do is grow a little stronger every day.

And that will have to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.