It’s more complicated than you’d think.

I’ve talked in the space before about having a rather fluid sense of identity. And that can be a great tool for being adaptable enough to sacrifice surface ego – like letting the other person think they have won – in order to pursue my own goals.

All the while secretly laughing at them for being so easily manipulated, of  course.

And I think it also lends flexibility to my mind. My mind, metaphorically speaking, can flow into the tiniest of crevices and explore the subtlest of ideas because, like water, it can seep through any crack and flow through any opening.

But I think my kind of mind comes with its own weaknesses, and those are what I am going to talk about today.

The first and most important weakness is in my sense of identity. When one can change shape at will, who’s to say who you really are? I often wonder what I am, let alone who.

I can be so many things!

The only solution to that issue is to remind myself that all the things I can be are merely facets of the jewel that is me.

That closes the gap but it’s not very satisfying.

Because without a stable sense of self, I have no solid ground to stand on. I am at the mercy of the wind and the tides. You need a good boat beneath your feet and a warm dry place to call home before you can tame the turbulent waters of my inner life.

What’s more, when you lack a stable identity, there is nothing holding you together. You are a liquid without a container. The only way to hold yourself together is to constantly invest a tremendous amount of energy maintaining your shape by sheer force of will.

In fact, maintaining any particular form requires a huge amount of energy.

And that is so very very tiring that you are liable to take the first container that comes along and stay with it.

Oh, but it’s not even that simple, because at the same time as I long for a good container, I fight against any kind of restrictions on my autonomy. I am my own person and I will not be bound by any label, category, tribe, group, team, side, summary, generalization, or type.

In fact, none of the usual lazy shortcuts people use in order to keep from actually getting to know one another work on me.

Thus, I force people to treat me as an individual.

And that would be fine, except that it tends to run in the exact opposite direction as my need to find a container I can use to define.

That’s one of my primal paradoxes : I have many more.

Getting back to the title of this post, another consequence of my fluidity of identity is that, coupled with my high level of empathy, it makes it very hard to figure out where I end and other people begin.

This came up in therapy today. I told my therapist about how hard it is for me to do things which I know will upset people. With my level of empathic sensitivity, someone else being upset makes me upset, and if I know that they are upset because of something I have done, the guilt amplifies the effect until I am more upset about whatever it was than the person in question.

This gives me a pretty strong incentive to be nice to people and to want to make them happy. The problem is. sometimes life requires you to upset others, or at least risk it, in order to pursue your own best interests.

Historically, I have not been very good at that. Other people’s feelings easily swamp my own. It’s so much easier to minimize my own needs and put other people’s temporary comfort over my long term well being.

When your identity is liquid,. you tend to go with the flow. Water, after all, seeks its lowest level. It is a slave to the forces of gravity and fluid dynamics.

It doesn’t decide anything at all.

This permeability of mine is not healthy. I would be a much saner, stabler, happier person if I could just pick a general shape and then solidify it.

Only then could I relax enough to melt into a relaxed puddle, secure in the knowledge that my container will keep me together without my having to do a thing.

But in order to get that, I would have to figure out how to tame this restless willfulness that makes me fight being defined so hard.

It’s the main reason why I am not, by nature, a “joiner”. I can’t be part of anything that requires a lot of sacrifice of individual identity, and places limitations on my autonomy.

And that covers a lot of ground.

I know that this bloody minded determination to be myself is, past a certain point, absolutely bonkers insane to be point of being downright suicidal on a metaphorical level. It is a form of fanaticism, in the sense that it is an ideal to which I am so passionately and vehemently dedicated that it blinds me to my own self-interest and makes me willing to sacrifice anything in its name,.

This comes across as radical egotism to some, and I can’t argue that it isn’t. All I can say is that being radically dedicated to one’s right to define themselves does begs the question : what exactly does one do with all that autonomy?

In my case, the answer is “not very much”, and that’s the ultimate bitter irony of this whole deal. This ferocious individualism only manifests itself when my autonomy is threatened. Without a threat, I go right back to being a puddle.

The only solution is to find a power source for my little boat strong enough that I am no longer at the mercy of the wind and the tide in this, the doldrums of my life.

I know what that power source is : passion and other strong, id-oriented emotions.

And I am increasingly in touch with those emotions and I can feel their power.

All I need is the courage and fortitude to act on those emotions.

And I am just not there yet.

But I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the thing.

As patient readers know, I was raised without religion. We didn’t even have a “technical” religion, as in “Well, I guess technically we’re Catholic… ”

What I am saying is that there was no house of worship we “should” be going to but never do because church sucks. ^[1]

My mother had abandoned her Catholicism when she was a teenager, long before any of us kids showed up. And she did so consciously and deliberately. She didn’t slowly drift away from the church.

She left in a huff and never looked back.

So my embrace of religion might come as a surprise to some, but know that I am not accepting the existence of an omnipotent father deity with an oddly erratic parenting style. I am not capable of that.

If I ever believe in that sort of thing, it will be a conscious choice to believe in something because it makes me feel better, and nothing more.

But that doesn’t mean religion is wrong about everything. There are a lot of very good and valid concepts buried in the inner workings of the three big monotheisms, and I think it would be a mistake to throw them out with the proverbial bath water.

So here’s the ones I believe in.

I believe in sin. Not in the sense  of it being a negative number on your ecclesiastical scorecard, but in the psychological sense. A person sins when they act against their own beliefs. This “sin” will remain in the mind of the sinner until something is done about it. Sin is, in essence, the persistent form of guilt.

Speaking of which….

I believe in guilt.  Guilt got a bad name because a lot of bad religion made people guilty about far too many unimportant things and for the victims of this abuse of guilt, the only way to escape it is to abandon guilt entirely, at least in theory.

But guilt is a very important emotion. Guilt and anticipated guilt are the muscle and bone of morality. It’s the emotional enforcement wing of our ethics, ready to dole out the punishment for doing that which we know to be wrong.

Guilt is not the brains of the morality operation – that job tends to go to a melange of what we’ve been taught is right and wrong and what we have figured out on our own – but it is the heart of it.

Guilt can be a good thing.

I believe in confession. I consider the Catholic ritual of confession to be one of the most brilliant bits of folk psychology ever. People need a way to deal with guilt and the Catholics have a method. You confess, thus relieving you of the tension that comes with keeping a guilty secret. Then you perform a symbolic act of attrition which often involves a form of the mantra repetition method of blanking out the conscious mind and letting the subconscious do what it needs to do in order to heal itself.

I abhor the concept of original sin and I deplore all the ways Catholicism has made people feel guilty for merely being human, but when it comes to confession. I think they are right on the money.

But what about when the guilt and the cognitive dissonance associated with it, gets so bad that it becomes a crisis?

Well, religion has a cure for that too.

I believe in salvation.  When people are overcome by their feeling of sin and guilt and run out of ways to run away from themselves, it puts them in an extreme state of mind where their psyche is particularly open to change and where the conscious mind has been subdued. This allows the mind to relieve itself of its guilt in a massive burst of unimpeded emotion, and the enormous relief caused by this release is absolute bliss to the person and with that bliss comes the strong urge to thank someone for it.

Religion gives them someone to thank.

Now where this relief “comes from” is irrelevant. I think it comes from a buildup and release of electrochemical potentials in the brain , others ,might think it’s God, others Allah,and so on. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the human mind has the capacity for this kind of transformation, and I think this capacity should be both nurtured and trained.

I also happen to think that this capacity of ours is heartbreakingly beautiful and it makes me happy-sad to think about it.

I believe in contrition. To be specific, I think the only known cure for guilt is right action. Ideally, this should take the form of actually repairing the damage you have done via your sin, and thus, repairing the injury to your psyche as well.

However, there are many sins which defy contrition, and for those poor unfortunate souls plagued by this unresolvable guilt, symbolic acts of contrition are needed.

This should take the form of something as close to repairing the damage as possible, even if it’s only done in symbolic form.

And I believe in God.  Not as a magical sky god, but as a way of personifying our highest ideals in order to give us something to strive towards. Societies need this kind of ultimate inspirational ideal to act as a beacon that shows them the direction in which they want to go.

They also need comfort in times of trouble, company when they are alone in the world, the feeling of safety that comes from believing oneself to be protected by a powerful alpha male, someone to praise for the good times and curse for the bad, and dozens of other functions that religion performs for people.

Therefore, I believe in religion.  Nothing else could possibly take over all of those jobs all at once.

I might not believe in the literal truth of any mystical religion.

But I do believe religion does a lot of good in the world.

And I wouldn’t take that away from anybody for anything.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t feel very good right now.

I feel slightly dizzy, a touch nauseous,, my lower intestines are feeling testy, my head aches despite th Alleve I took, and my back hurts in the very specific way it does when there’s a bit of a backup on the Hershey Highway and I should expect delays.

And cramps. Definitely cramps.

So far, none of these symptoms rise to the level of being severe or even moderate. The worst one’s headache and that’s probably from my sinuses getting clogged and I know how to deal with that.

There are multiple ways to relieve the pressure and get things flowing again. On multiple levels, come to think of it. It’s like I have body wide constipation and everything is clogged up and backed up.

Anyhow, all the little pains add up to me feeling cranky and irritable. If I had serious obligations, ones where I had to deal with people, I might come across as a wee bit testy and there would be a real chance that I would lash out at someone with my sarcastic wit and hurt them badly.

In fact, I am pretty sure that in a workplace environment, I would have to make a point at seeing how other people deal with anger and frustration and try to learn to do it the same way. I certainly couldn’t “speak my mind” every time I felt like it.

When I speak my mind, my voice is very loud.

It comes from spending so much time alone, I suppose. Amongst the whole host of social skills I never learned is how to modulate one’s expression of one’s opinions in order to not come across as a volatile lunatic.

Most of my views were developed in a social vacuum and hence they do not take other people’s feelings into account at all. Why would they? Feelings are not facts, and I cared only about the truth.

In other words, I really was a volatile lunatic on a social level. When people are sharing their opinions on something, it’s a social ritual, not a bloody symposium.

And so when I express my detailed, thorough, precise,. and passionate opinions, it leaves people feeling like they have just been attacked by someone who wanted to make them feel stupid.

The fact that this was not my intention means very little. It is a predictable and avoidable consequence oh my behaviour and it is therefore my ethical duty to change it.

Ironically, I think the very passion and vehemence of my articulated opinions would make me a very good public speaker, especially of the rabble rousing kind. When addressing the public, the concern for how “loud” you are being is diminished and if the object of the speech is to call people to action, passion and projection is exactly what is needed to reach down into people’s souls and find that spark of anger at all the things that have gone wrong in their lives and, through articulation of that for which they do not yet have words, fire them up.

Restraint on my part in these matters is never fun, of course. The id rarely appreciates restraint and a big part of me wants to write words of blood and fire across the sky and to hell with anyone who can’t take it. It wants to scream its pain into the night and growl a warning to the world to back the fuck off because fire lives here.

And I could totally do that. Just not as part of normal, social grooming type  conversation. Conversations are not soapboxes.

I am still learning this.

Luckily, I have very good friends who are quite used to my particular brand of firebrand passion, and so they are not freaked out by it. Word cannot express how much I appreciate that. Like all writers, I was born with a burning need to communicate and being able to do so freely and in my own way does wonders for my soul and helps reduce the pressure of all of those words trying to get out.

That pressure can get pretty intense. It’s like one of the prerequisites of being a writer is the inability to let something we want to say go. The words all join the long, long lineup of other things we want to say about things and wait for their names to be called.

I can only assume that this is not how it works for most people. The non-writers of the world must be able to totally let go of whatever they want to express if they don’t get a chance to express it.

But I am deducing that logically. I can’t imagine living like that.  Like many writers, I am driven by the feeling that I have something to say.

It doesn’t matter that I often have no freaking idea what, exactly, I am trying to say. The urge, the itch, remains. And part of a writer’s artistic development hinges on writing  enough so that they can clear enough words out of their heads for them to finally be able to find what they really want to say.

It can take a lifetime to figure that out.

But like trying to find something in a cluttered garage, you have to clear a lot of other stuff out of the way before you can get to what you are looking for.

That’s why my biggest piece of advice to other writers is that writers write. If you are writing, you’re a writer, whether or not it’s any good. Indeed, whether or not another living soul ever sees it.

You’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it for you. It’s the only way to truly become a better writer. Get all the garbage out of your system so that you can find your true voice and figure out what you really want to say.

And it’s amazing how pretty much everyone reacts to this advice the same way : they pause thoughtfully and say “I guess… ” then go back to thinking about writing instead of actually doing it.

They react that way because my logic is flawless, so it can’t be immediately rejected, but the conclusion is unpalatable to them because it means they really should be actually writing and they are far too comfortable thinking about writing, which is easy and fun, as opposed to actually writing  which requires actual effort.

Well here’s the reality update, potential writers : if you are not writing, you are not a writer. You’re just someone who thinks about stuff. If you want to legitimately continue thinking of yourself as a writer, you better get your ass to writing.

Otherwise, you are just another self-deluded poser.

So write, goddamn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As the people in my life know, I believe in equality so strongly that it can come across as downright ruthless. I insist upon equality in all places, all situations, and on all levels.  I believe in equality for all, no matter their gender, race, sexual orientation, income, religion, country of origin, or preferred Captain of the Enterprise. ^[1]

I demand equality. I insist on equality. Nothing but total equality is acceptable to me and I will never stop fighting for it.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds highly admirable. In fact, I am sure to some it sounds like I am bragging. And I am too honest to deny that bragging is part of it.

But mostly, it’s about telling you what ruthless equality means in a social context : it means I will stand up for absolutely anybody who is being unfairly and unjustly. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they believe. It doesn’t matter what their social station is. And it doesn’t matter what society thinks of people like them.

Still sounds good, right?

But what that means in practice is that I’ll defend the rights of an openly racist white trash wife beater with the same ferocity as I would defend the rights of a black single mother on welfare. I’ll defend the rights of a rich man who is being railroaded by the system with the same passion as I would a poor person who is getting screwed. And I’ll defend a man’s right to be treated with dignity and respect as vehemently as I’ll a woman’s.  It is all the same fight to me.

And people don’t like that. People expect you to choose sides and identify with their side and remain in ideological lockstep with said group. When you refuse to do so, you make them nervous. They desperately want to pigeonhole you as either One of Us or One of Them, and when you choose instead to remain a completely independent free age who always sides with the people he thinks are right, they become upset and blame you for their distress.

That’s how reasonable neutrality can get you hated by all sides of an issue. In fact, two opposing sides will unite to fight you because the one thing they agree on is that they certainly don’t want an asshole like me injecting logic, reason, and fairness into the battle and ruining everybody’s fun.

And I’m kind of bitter about that.

Nevertheless, there is one issue about which I am openly sexist and make no excuses for it, and that is the subject of international relief efforts.

For God’s sake, give the money to the women.

The men will waste it on whatever teenage level social activities have become their substitute for true manhood. Usually this will take the general form of “drinking with their friends” and will easily eat up the entire family income and leave the kids to starve.

I have seen it happen. I grew up in an area with chronic high unemployment. I have seen the way it can utterly wreck a man and leave him in a perpetual frozen adolescence that inevitably turns into frustration, rage, and alcoholism.

These men are suffering because every instinct is pushing them towards leaving their “youth” phase behind them and moving into their “father” phase… but society denies them the chance because it has no jobs for them.

And I feel for these guys. Both our instincts and our societal programming make it clear that a man has no go prove himself to be a “good hunter” in order to become a man, and they can’t get there.

Nevertheless, because of the state they are in, they cannot be trusted with money (or whatever is passing for it). Give the money to the man-child who is in deep pain for reasons he does not understand and he will spend it on whatever it takes to make him feel better, even if it’s just his position in his peer group.

In the West, this usually involves liquor and other vices. You might as well give the money directly to the local bars.

Give the money to the women, however, and they will spend it on the kids. And not frivolously either. They will spend it on the foundations of decent society, like education, good nutrition, personal safety, and opportunities for their kids.

Now ideally, coupled with that should be a very robust program of employment for all. That means hiring people to do things instead of just handing them the cash. Meaningful labour is a right, as far as I am concerned, and the government should take that to heart and make it their business to get that labour for every citizen.

If you want to help families who are suffering because of local poverty and unemployment, the absolute best thing you can do for them is hire them.

Let them earn their money. When a person is hired, it confers dignity to them, and says to society “this person has worth”. When they have meaningful labour to do, all those unnamed frustrations in their lives cease to be and they stop resenting the society that both denies them a job and has contempt for them for being unemployed.

And it would give young people something they desperately need : a way to prove themselves. And in doing so, prove to themselves that they are real competent grown up people who deserve to have a seat at society’s grown up table instead of being fobbed off on the kiddie table like they will never grow up.

It doesn’t matter what, exactly, you hire them to do. Whether it’s stoop labour or office work, the important thing is that it demands something of them (so they can prove themselves), that it conveys the feeling of participation in society, and that it be visibly productive in a way people can relate to and thus give them what they need so badly, which is something to do with their lives.

Implemented correctly, and over a sufficient period of time, a program like this could turn a desolate backwater riddled with crime, teenage pregnancy, domestic abuse, and rampant drug problems into a happy, thriving community right out of the middle class’s domestic dream book.

The problem is lack of money in the area.

Bring money into the area.

And use that money in a way that produces the largest economic benefits to the region.

HIRE PEOPLE. And giving them a way to earn a living.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve often talked in this space about feeling poisonous, toxic, radioactive, and so on. It’s a feeling that’s almost always there, and sometimes it gets pretty bad. There’s been times when I felt like just looking at someone would taint them. I can’t recall the last time I felt truly clean on the inside.

Maybe it’s never happened. Not since I was raped as a preschooler. That’s when someone else injected their poison into me. And I have carried it ever since because I refuse to pass it on to anyone else.

It dies in me.  I will not be a transmission vector for evil.

Spoiler for a 20 year old video game : at the end of the classic PC game Diablo,  after you beat the game by slaying its eponymous demonic villain, there is still the problem of what to do with the potent evil entity and/or force that was animating it. The only solution you have on hand is to take that evil spirit into yourself.

That ending has always appealed to me on a metaphorical and psychological level because it mirrors my own inner struggle so perfectly. I feel like a great evil lives within me, put there by someone who no doubt got it from someone else, and that person got it from another and so forth and so on all the way back to the dawn of humanity.

Or even further. For all I know, this all began with some particularly cranky amoeba.

Of course, in my case, this feeling of toxicity has both a psychological and a physiological component.

Psychologically, it comes from a variety of sources, but they all boil down to the same thing : how I was treated.

Life treated me like I was toxic and so I came to believe it. My family treated me like an unpleasant afterthought. My peers at school hated me and had fun doing it. The teachers on whom I was pathetically emotionally dependent did not care for me either.

They felt the same way my peers did about me. They tolerated me out of sheer professionalism alone.  Looking back, it’s clear that they, like everyone else, really didn’t want to deal with me and I didn’t have the psychological tools to demand my due.

I was hard to handle but too meek to protest being ignored. Dealing with me was difficult but ignoring me was easy.

That made it a no brainer for everyone around me.

When you are treated like that for long enough, you have no choice but to believe it to be true. At least, if you’re a psychologically permeable type like me.

I adapt. That can be a bad thing. Some adaptations work for the situation you are in but are terrible afflictions once that situation ends.

And others are simply too crude and heavy handed. They over solve the problem and thus become problems of their own, to the point of being worse than the original problem and leaving you with a net loss.

Children should not be de facto abandoned their first day of school.

The other half of the equation is physiological. I am not a healthy man and I do a poor job of looking after my many health issues.

There is a horrifying catch-22 aspect to that. I do such a poor job of looking after myself in large part because my health problems make self-care very hard for me.

I just don’t have the strength.

Topic threadjack due to sudden revelation : I don’t think I truly want to get better.

I shall explain. I just realized that a very big party of me passively but very effectively resists efforts to take care of myself, and it goes beyond treating myself the way I was treated or the massive inertia of depression.

No, it’s worse than those : I don’t want to get better because healthiness turns the volume knob of life up far too loud. I use being sick and depressed as a shield against reality – sometimes to dull my inputs to a tolerable level.

And every time I have gotten myself to a seriously healthier state, it has resulted in a life that is too goddamned emotionally loud. Once my perceptions are cleaned up and I can truly feel the world around me has, on a deep level, terrified me, no matter how good I felt on other levels.

And so it was just a matter of time before my subconscious mind sabotaged things so that the old regime, with its comforting numbness, could return.

I’ve talked about depression being a shield to hide behind in this space before,a very long time ago, but I have never seen the problem quite so clearly before.

And I don’t know what to do about it. How do you treat someone who is afraid to be healthy? What kind of pill fixes that?

I’ve thought before that the solution was to turn the volume on life very slowly, with frequent stops to let myself adjust to the new input level.

And that sounds sensible,. but I don’t think it is implementable. I don’t have that kind of fine control over my input levels.

The maladaptive solution I have been using is to control the volume be isolating myself from the world. Kind of like controlling the volume on your stereo by moving further away from it. It technically solves the problem but in a way that costs a hell of a lot more than it brings in.

The only solution I see is for me to find some source of inner strength that can see me through the nightmare of adjusting to the new, higher input levels. Were I capable of religion, that would that source.

But I am not. And that’s not a brag. I wish I was. But I am not.

So I don’t know what to do. I need someone to hold my hand through the process and tell me everything is going to be okay and anchor me through the storm.

At least I have a clear fix on the problem now. I will bring it up first thing in my next therapy session and see what my shrink says.

Maybe he knows what to do when health terrifies you.

But you know what?

I seriously doubt it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

At least, not in the Freudian sense.

I have talked about my being oral retentive in this space before. Under Freud, that means that I never completed the transition from the oral phase on an infant (passive. self-oriented, concentrates on pleasures via the mouth like talking and eating) to the anal phase of a toddler being potty trained.

Said little pooper has transitioned from oral passivity to a phase where they must differentiate themselves from others and learn control themselves – to not do what their body is telling them to do – in order to please its newly differentiated caregiver(s).

As an extension of this, the child learns disgust, and the concepts of “mess” and “dirt” and other extensions of the anal phase. It learns to control its environment in order to satisfy these newly awakened and shaped sense of “dirty” and “clean.”

And I…. didn’t quite make it.

That’s very clear to me now. Obviously, I made it enough to know where the poop goes, but I never got the lessons in taking care of yourself and your environment.

This was, I have decided, do to neglect.

Nobody was paying enough attention to me to enforce anything but the most basic hygiene rules on me. Nobody had the slightest intention of investing anything like that amount of time, attention, and energy on an unwanted interloper like me.

It’s a little odd that my babysitter Betty didn’t step in to fill that role. She was a wonderful babysitter and I will go to my grave loving her with all my heart, even though she probably barely remembers me now.

What could be more middle class than hiring a working class person to love your children for you?

Looking back on my early childhood. I think she probably did perform the role if teaching me to be more neat and tidy and to look after myself.

But then I got raped at the age of 4. And that’s a textbook thing that causes children to regress. I regressed back into the passive oral stage, and was still there when school, rejection, bullying, and total social isolation happened.

No wonder I never made it back to the anal stage. I’m lucky I didn’t end up regressing so far that I became a zygote.

As a result of this, I have very little urge towards cleanliness. My room is always a total mess. Showering is something I do purposefully but without any sort of natural urge egging me on. My excessively deep inner focus makes me quite oblivious to the state of my surroundings. Nearly all the extensions of the anal stage urges are weak to the point of barely existing in me.

And I know that’s wrong. I can feel the wrongness of it. I can feel the lack of appropriate emotional reactions to certain inputs. I can feel the hollow space where they should be.

But the worst part is that these stages happen in sequence, so failure to complete one hampers the development of the others down the line.

In my case, it means that not only did I not complete the anal phase of my development, I never ever got within long range sensor range of the final stage, the genital stage.

That’s the one where you learn to get pleasure from interacting with others.^[1] This where all the kindergarten level social programming comes in about sharing, getting along with others. and making friends comes in.

I never went to kindergarten.

And yet I was blessed with this outrageous IQ. So the school part of school was never difficult for me. It was so easy for me that I never even took it seriously.

Kind of wish I had. At least in high school. Scholarships, as it turns out, would have been a very good thing for me.

But nobody asked me to try for them, and I have never been long on initiative.

So here I am with my genius level mind and my infant level social development, trying to make it in a world for which I am not at all ready for even though I am 44. I live in a state of constant maximum retreat from reality. I am always dealing with the absolute minimum amount of reality, and especially sensory input, that I can get away with and my standards for “getting away with” are extremely low.

Childishly low, one might say.

I think this disconnect between my mental development and my psychosocial development explains a feeling I have had for a long time.

Basically,. it’s a feeling like my soul is too small for my brain. I often feel like my magnificent mind is this enormous overpowering entity and I am this tiny figure cowering in its shadow, terrified by its power and force of presence.

On my better days. I at least feel like that tiny figure is in control of the mighty machine it is too weak and scared to deal with.

And I have spent a long time trying to forget that there is a difference between myself and my mighty mind. Pretending it is me and I am it is second nature to me. After all, I tell myself, who am I if not that smart guy? Where would I be if I didn’t at least have brilliance going for me? What else do I have to offer the world but my mind?

But I am not my mind. My genius is not my defining characteristic. I am so much more than a really smart dude.

In a way, I feel like my big brain has been pushing me around for a long long time. Like it’s a pet that has grown into a menace due to neglectful owners.

But I am not my mind. I am me, the person, Michael Bertrand. And if my mental monster of a mind can’t handle that, it can fuck right off.

Because I was here first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Caveat : Some of what I talk about today is pretty well traveled territory, so this might not contain any of my (of course) brilliant flashes of psychological insight.

I will, however, be talking about them as they apply to me. And trust me. I am a very unique person. Overwhelmingly so. So unique that I’m not really compatible with the standard models of reality.

But that’s a topic for another day.

Today, I am going to talk about the control/blame spiral that some of us depressives get into. It happens when we blame ourselves for everything that has gone wrong in our lives, even if they were completely beyond our control, because taking the game gives is a feeling of control over the problem.

After all, if it’s all my fault, then in theory, I could prevent it in the future. Right?

But that’s not what it really is about. That healthy system of regret and improvement gets hijacked (just like everything else) by the depression and used by our inner prosecutors as further evidence it can use to condemn us.

It’s at this point, however, that a curious dichotomy emerges : the same depressive who takes the blame for everything believes themselves to be responsible for nothing.

This is an obvious logical non starter. But this isn’t about logic. It’s about the mind of the depressive trying to interpret its very unbalanced chemical state. Therefore, the same person who blames themselves for all the pain in the world will be the same person who will earnestly details how badly they have been screwed by fate by things totally beyond their control, and have a large cast of characters to blame for their woes.

That’s the sort of thing that happens when you have a head full of bad chemicals.

I’ve wandered away from talking about myself again, haven’t I? Damn you, intellectualization, you’ve foiled me again!

What all this means in my life is that right now, I can’t be sure what I should “own” as being my responsibility and what I should shrugs off as beyond my control.

It’s a complex equation to solve. One of the only good things about blaming yourself for everything is that it makes the paperwork extremely easy.

I wanted to make a funny flowchart to explain how this works, but I gave up because none of the solutions actually work. They basically just say “Use a drawing program!”.

Um,. no, the whoile point of my looking for a tool for this task is that I don’t want to have to align everything by hand and figure out how to make the text align with the symbol and all that.

I want a program that does that for me. And not one where I have to sign up to the website in order to try it.

I have no idea if it’s worth the effort yet. Let me try it first to figure out if it’s what I need, THEN maybe I will sign up.

Ahem. Back to the topic at hand

Basically, the flowchart would have started off with a box that says “Is it your fault?”. If you choose “yes”, it says “Then it’s your fault. ” And if you choose “no”, it would lead to “better safe than sorry” then to “it’s your fault”.

Such a simple idea, yet frustratingly hard to implement.

I guess it’s one of those things over which I have no control.

Oooh, what a segue!

I know that I have some serious trust/blame/control issues. It would be hard to avoid them given my brutalized and isolated childhood. On a deep level, I only trust what I can control. The unknown and the unpredictable terrify me. I automatically assume that if something is left up to fate, horrible things will happen.

This is a highly counter-adaptive position to take in life.

furthermore, the thought of true intimacy with someone – where the walls come down and our true selves are revealed – scares me even more than the unpredictable. Like a lot of survivors of sexual abuse, I feel like I am more or less a sack of shit that sometimes manages to fool people into loving him, and that if anyone was exposed to my true self, they would run away screaming.

Then die from my toxicity.

Having the badness inside me spill out into the world to shame me is one of my worst fears of all time. Then people would know how horrible I am and nobody would want to have anything to do with me and the world would know what a disgusting poisonous person I am and I would die from the shame.

I trust the Freudian aspects of this do not need to be spelled out.

I know all of this talk of my own horribleness is irrational. And I know that other people who know me don’t see me the way I do. I have all the evidence I could ever need that my toxic view of myself makes no sense at all.

And yet, part of me clings to my toxicity. Maybe it”s because it’s all I have known for such a long time that to let go of it would leave me in the existential void without any kind of identity to hold me together.

And maybe it’s because some part of me views this powerful poison as my last line of defense. If all else fails, deploy the poison, like a an octopus squirting its ink, and then escape while everyone chokes on it.

Then I will be safe from being reached.

Maybe that’s what all us sexual abuse survivors do. Build a fortress around ourselves with dozens of protective layers so that nobody can ever get to you again.

And then you sit, and wait to be rescued from yourself by a theoretical somone who can make is through all your defenses and still have the will to live.

Then, maybe, you can love that person.

But then again…. maybe not.

I will walk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The truth is highly overrated.

Or as my favorite rapper ever put it :

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I just got back from therapy, and one of the things we discussed was my decision that a hardcore, total dedication to the literally, objectively true was self-destructive and that the human mind needs the capacity to “spin” information in a way that preserves the ego while maintaining sufficient relationship to the truth.

As expected, he struggled a little with the concept. It’s a slippery one. It comes very close to saying I have decided to believe lies, and that’s simply impossible.

The human mind cannot choose to believe that which it believes to be untrue. That’s a null set, an empty equation. a logical non-starter.

However, there is always more than one way to look at things, and that is wherein the wiggle room lies. What I have been doing is looking at things with a certain sort of objective truth being the sole criterion for validity.

That approach allows no room for mercy, forgiveness, or adjustment for ego protection. And that leaves the mind far too vulnerable and fragile.

Worse, that kind of brutal truth machine thinking is far too easily hijacked by the bad agents of my mind and used as evidence against me by my malicious inner prosecutor.

Thus, the “truth” is turned against me.

I used to be so proud of being “naked before the truth”, meaning that I did not try to protect myself from the truths of life, no matter how harsh or dark or damning.

But now,. I wonder what is so wrong about putting a fucking coat on.

Furthermore, the sort of “truth” derived from my brutal truth machine is only one sort of truth, and only true if things like the wider emotional picture and a robust view of people’s needs are ignored.

So it might be true, but it is far from the whole truth.

And what has my merciless,. pitiless,. fanatic pursuit of the truth ever gotten me anyway? Sure, I get a lot of insights from it, but those insights haven’t exactly improved my lot in life. It certainly hasn’t made me any happier.

So big deal. What use is seeing more clearly than others if it doesn’t make things better in your life?

Repeat after me : I’d rather be happy than right.
I’d rather be happy than right.
I’d rather be happy than right. .

That’s the lesson I need to pound into my head. There’s such a thing as a functional delusion – a belief that is not objectively true but nevertheless is a net gain for the person who believes it.

I think a lot of people’s higher-level beliefs are like that. Beliefs about how the world works, politics, transpersonal morality, and so forth. Their primary function is a psychological one, and as long as that belief does not impede or impair their ability to function on a day to day basis, it really doesn’t matter how “true” it is.

People believe what they need to believe.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I have pursued the kind of truth I pursued driven by a blind faith that, when all is said and done, I am always better off knowing the truth.

But now I am questioning that faith. Surely it doesn’t have to be so final or unforgiving. Surely I am better off leaving room for certain adjustments.

Surely there is room in their for compassion and mercy towards oneself.

No wonder I have felt like I was forever walking over frozen tundra with the icy wind whipping through me. Via this fanatic pursuit of transpersonal truth,  I have denied myself all forms of shelter and protection from the elements. Not to mention cutting myself off from the warming rays of mercy and kindness.

Now I am asking myself : is believing something that isn’t one hundred percent true really that big a deal? Is adjusting belief to support my ego really such a crime? Is a little fudging of the facts really all that dangerous?

The answer may surprise you.

Suddenly, I see why some people mistrust anything that seems too coldly rational and brutally objective. On a very basic level, the “truth” can’t be trusted.It might hurt you at any second. It has no mercy or restraint. It doesn’t take anyone’s feelings into account.

It just nails down reality and takes away people’s ability to deny what they cannot handle or do not need to know.

That was, in a way, what I liked about it. The truth, however bitter, was something you could rely on because it did not change no matter how people felt about it. What it lacked in compassion it gained in solidity.

The truth had weight in a world that often felt paper thin to me due to my transcendental mindset that seeks inner truths at the expense of the outer realities of life.

But now, I think I took it too far. To the point of brutalizing myself unnecessarily. Like I said, my inner prosecutor used this powerful truth seeking mind of mine as a source of ammunition against me, and a chance to paint everything in the wosrt possible light.

So what I really need is a defense attorney. The prosecution has had the court to themselves for far too long. I need a sympathetic person willing to fight the prosecutor and hold him accountable for his lies and tricks and dishonesty.

And I am getting there. I have tapped into my vast rage reserves and hooked them up to my defense. The result is that when I catch the negative thoughts, I don’t just stop them and insert a more positive one.

I blast that negative thought so hard it shatters into a million pieces on impact with the wall and the pieces burst into flames.

Get the fuck OUT OF MY MIND,  you disease! If I could, I would scrape you out of my brain with a grapefruit spoon!

But I suppose I will give this therapy thing a chance first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, it’s 10:45 pm and I have not blogged yet today. I was too damned sick to do it in the afternoon like I usually do, and I only have an hour and a quarter in which to do it now, so consider yourself warned :

This post might end up being shorter than usual.

I’m sure that leaves you all heartbroken.

I was sick this afternoon because of the pressure washing. My building is being pressure washed on all exterior surfaces this week, and that means we have to keep our windows closed so the water does not get it.

And seeing as the computer I am typing this on is directly in front of my bedroom window, I am taking this warning in earnest.

Having the windows closed, though, leads to a much, much hotter bedroom for me and that leads directly to the dehydration and heat sickness I always get when I am overheated for any length of time.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the summer.

I just wish it loved me back.

SO I was sick from the heat for pretty much the entire afternoon. Happened yesterday too, only not quite as severely.

It was all I could do just to play Skyrim very, very listlessly, and I only did that out of the sheer spiteful determination to have some kind of fun.

It was that or sleep all afternoon, siesta style,. but that would not solve anything in the long run, because heat stroke dreams are always extremely intense and realistic and nearly always unpleasant and scary in some way.

Like a religious experience mixed with a nightmare and directed by someone on acid.

Unfortunately, I was to incoherent and miserable to think of doing what I know would have bought me some time, which is to drink some ice water and in general stay hydrated via drinking plenty of fluids.

There should be some way of checking the fluid levels on yourself.

“Wow, no wonder I feel like crap, I’m a quart low on water, my bile is all our of whack, and my eyeballs are overdue for maintenance  and rotation!”.

Wouldn’t that be cool? It frustrates me that we can’t get a clear diagnostic picture of ourselves. We’d be so much healthier if we could see what was wrong and take steps to correct it. Vitamin deficiencies, electrolyte imbalances, trouble in the gut biome… image if we could see those on our smartphone screens as easily as we see the rest of our apps. Press a virtual button, and you’d get a list of proven ways to fix the issue.

Well, it would work for me, anyhow. I can do anything if I have the data for it. I am inherently soothes byh knowing more about things, especially scary things, even if the information is all bad news.

The more I know, the more I understand, and the more I understand,. the more I feel like I have power over my situation, and that lows my anxiety level.

It’s the unknowns that kill me. The uncertainties. For example, if a person agrees to meet me in a certain place at a certain time, and it’s past that time and they have yet to show up, it’s the uncertainty that bothers me and makes my anxiety level rise.

So I would much rather that this person contacted me and said they were running late than to just leave me hanging. I won’t be mad when they call. Things happen, Life has many ways to fuck up our plans.

But if you have left me in the void of uncertainty for a long time, expect me to be somewhat upset when you arrive. Probably not actually angry as long as you have a sufficient explanation. But in a highly agitated state.

Where was I? Oh right, detailed diagnostics for the human body.

I suppose we’re getting there. The cheap sensor revolution is bringing medical diagnostics to the average person every day. You can already get the entire  suite of sensors they used in old fashioned lie detectors on a single chip.

So while detailed and sophisticated diagnostics might not be available for consumers any time soon, we will at least be able to get base line readings like heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, and so on.

Hypochondriacs will rejoice.

Come to think of it, in a sense my bout of hypochondria in my early twenties was about information and control as well. When a hypochondriac leaps to the conclusion that the little twinge in their neck means they have cancer, it seems like it’s an exercise in self-torture and nothing else.

But every human behaviour, no matter how self-destructive, solves some kind of problem or conflict.

In the case of the hypochondriac, what deciding it must be cancer does is turn the unknowns of nameless anxiety and dread general malaise into the known quantity of a concrete, physical disease that objectively and scientifically exists and which, at least in theory, can be solved.

I used to wish that my doctor would tell me that all my problem come from this one clear medical problem which can easily be fixed.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Then none of my problems would be my fault, and soon they would be gone without my having to learn to grow as a person or anything.

All my problems solved, and all I had to do was show up for the operation.

I realize that, in more ways than one, that is a very sick sort of dream. But that’s the sort of strange mind space I have always inhabited.

It’s a sad place, with much traditional gender role failure on my part. Men are not supposed to long for someone to take care of them because they are clearly not suuited for the job themselves.

Luckily, I’m a fag, so there’s more options for me. There’s no problem with my being somewhere between genders. I can be “womanly” in some ways and it doesn’t make me a failure as a man.

But it does leave me wondering who I really am.

All I can say is that I am whoever I happen to be at the moment.

And that will have to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

People find it hard to believe that Donald Trump’s approval rating is still at 36 percent. And these people wonder what is wrong with these people that they can’t see what an infected prolapse Donald Trump is. How can anyone still support him?

The answer is not that complicated, but it is invisible to most of the hand-wringers due to the left’s inability to see and overcome its own prejudices.

The secret, for those interested, is that these people do not actually support Donald Trump at all.

They support the idea of Donald Trump.

That’s what they fell in love with and voted for and that’s what they support today.  They support their dream of Trump, and the warm, comforting feeling they get from their image of who he is.

In short, they worship an imaginary Trump which is partly of their own making.

In this, they are merely completing the journey that the American right wing has been on ever since Rush Limbaugh convinced them that being a “ditto head” (as in, “you know what he says? Ditto for me too!”) was a good thing and not a source of great shame at your complete failure to do the hard work of thinking for yourself.

Which is very un-American of them. Their founding fathers built their democracy with the idea that every citizen would form their own informed opinion and contribute to the marketplace of ideas.

But then again, these people love an imaginary version of America, too.

Holy crap, it’s hot today. Heatstroke sucks.

Anyhow, the Trump supporters of today have divorced themselves from reality entirely. It’s the only way they can can maintain their belief in him.

In that, they are merely conservatives.

What makes the Trump version of this intellectually disabling conservative disease is that this time, they have to ignore not just what the “biased” mainstream says and does, but what the man himself says and does.

Thus, they have embraced pure idealism. To them, Trumps now partakes of the perfection of the ideal without any of reality’s weaknesses. They are now free from all need to take in information, let alone make up their minds about it.

This, for them, is bliss.

However, no matter how deeply anyone embraces this insipidity, their brain continues to work. So maintaining this form of Zen ignorance is not without cost. It requires his adherents to ignore massive amounts of cognitive dissonance and that takes a hell of a toll on people.

Also ignored : the strong part of the conservative mind that wants to be “normal’.

Preferably extraordinarily so.

The modern liberal is fond of thinking of Trump supporters as brainless sheep perfectly content to believe whatever Fox News tells them

But that’s not true. They are not perfectly content. They are, in fact, increasingly unhappy and under a lot of strain.

They just lack the mental flexibility to change their minds based on new information. It’s something that few people find easy, and it is, of course, always easy and fun to talk about someone else changing all their fundamental beliefs based on what you, yourself, see as the obvious truth.

And you, of course, are perfectly objective and all your opinions are based on a rational and sober evaluation of the facts, not like those brainless people on the right.

But tell me this : when was the last time you changed one of your own fundamental beliefs based on new information?

Not in a long time, you say. “But that’s different. I don’t have to change my fundamental beliefs because I’m right!”.

They think the same thing, friend.

Anyhow, my point is that this state of suspended reason is fragile and hard to maintain. And it can’t withstand direct betrayal. Right now, Trump’s supporters can still fool themselves into thinking he’s going to make America great again eventually, but that only lasts as long as it takes for Little Donny to get around to hurting them and/or people they know personally.

In fact, it can’t withstand even oncoming harm. The fragility of his support means it could crumble just from the strain of accumulated proximal embarrassments. And if he does something that violently contradicts one of the right’s sacred talking points, like says something bad about Christianity, or get caught in some kind of sex scandal that is way too pruriently fascinating for them to ignore, then he will lose the social conservative support that is already on life support.

But first, they will need a way out. A better candidate for their support,  be it politician, pundit, or philosophy. These people cannot tolerate doubt and so they can only leave a position when they have a better one to run to and go back to blessed certainty.

It’s both an intellectual and emotional need for these people.

It is my belief that nearly all his supporters are looking for that way out now, some with frantic intensity.  They need a way to exit Trump fandom that doesn’t require them to come right out and admit they were wrong.

They can’t do that, either.

We saw a preview of it during the 2016 election. We saw it when the “grab them by the pussy” tape came out. That conversation was so gobsmackingly offensive that it gave a lot of Trump supporters the break they needed to abandon him by saying “Okay, NOW he has gone too far. ”

It’s hard to say what Trump revelation could do that now. Like I said, these people are not even paying attention to what Trump actually says and does any more. Damning evidence that Russia controls him might do it if it is accompanied by some kind of shocking mental imagery, like a tape of him badmouthing America as being full of stupid sheep he can easily deliver to Putin.

Luckily, destroying Trump’s presidency can be done without winning these people over. His list of impeachable offenses reads like he used the impeachment clauses of the United States Constitution as a workbook.

So all it will take is for enough of the Republicans in the House and the Senate to smell the wind and defect in order to start impeachment proceedings against him and he is one cooked goose.

It’s only a matter of time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.