Eat the pain

Pay attention, because this might turn out to be my “lean in”.

I was conemplating my issues while urinating, and the phrase “eat the pain” popped into my head, along with a sense of what that meant.

It’s not quite sane. In fact, I am pretty sure that it comes from the same circuit that lets aa coyote chew its leg off in order to escape a trap, and that allows a harmless critter like a rabbit to suddenly turn savage and strike out with blind fury like they are possessed by a demon when cornered.

But the idea is basically that  through this act of metaphorical cannibalism, you both triumph over the inner enemy by defeating and devouring it, you also take the truths contained within those demons and that the demons were, in a sense, created to convey to you but got frozen in your inner vault for so long that they had to grow progressively more brutal and twisted just to stay alive.

Emotions are information, after all. We fall into inner conflict when the part of our minds that maintains our sense of reality – call it the truth center – battles the part of our mind that doesn’t want to feel negagive emotions or face to face unpleasant truths – we will call that the Inner Animal.

Or in my case, the Jagoff.

We’re all familiar with the concept of delusion and the ability for the human mind to fool itself, and this causes people with more intelligence than vision to declare that there is no such thing as truth or objective reality and it’s all one big delusion.

I hate those people.

Because if that were true, we would never have survived as a species. We wouldn’t even be able to communicate, let alone function. We would all be schizophenics, unable to distinguish between the inner world and outer reality. And no two people could ever see anything the same way (unless by blind chance) because there would be no objective reality for them both to see in the first place.

Clearly, then, there is a counteracting force, and that’s the force I have labeled the Truth Center. That’s the part of our mind responsible for constructing our sense of the reality of things, our consciousness, out of things like our sensory input, our memories, our associations, what we’re used to experiencing, and so forth and so on.

And this part of the mind might get suppressed, but it never gives up. It doesn’t understand the meaning of the term. If the Inner Animal halts a negative emotion or unwanted fact at the border, it doesn’t disappear.

It waits. And as it waits, the impulse that propels it – call it the truth engine – pushes it into a higher and higher state of agitation as it continues to be ignored.

Think of it as water pressure rising behind a boulder that is blocking a river.

And as that pressure builds, it changes the emotion/information packet. It becomes increasingly desperate to be expressed and its voice becomes more and more savage, primitive, and LOUD.

Still, by itself, it would never have much of an effect. But when suppressing the bad stuff becomes a deeply ingrained habit – when our emotional shutoff valve is being wildly abused – the blocked emotions build in number and strength till there is a massive army of them waiting at the border station, all wanting through at the same time.

And if the repression continues, the state has to spend more and more of its resources just to keep this growing mob at bay. As it does so, life on the other side of the border gets worse and worse because necessary resources can’t get through either.

And with both sides pushing as hard as they can, the mostly deadly form of pressure builds up – the tension of the conflict – and threatens the entire structure of the psyche if it is not resolved.

So unless the individual realizes (on some level) that they need to resolve the tension, eventually, their mind breaks down and they have, if they are lucky, just a ndeervous breakdown and nervous collapse, or if the problem is truly intractable, they will go crazy for reals and at that point, anything can happen.

The most obvious answer is to start letting emotions through. Even the negative ones. That requires changing the paranoid beliefs that have been used to justify this “no access” policy. Beliefs that are outdated, maladaptive, extremely painful, and that melt like a snowflake when subjected to even small amounts of the pure light of reason.

That’s what recovery is all about. Reducing that pressure at the border by letting some of the negative emotions through. Either one at a time, and with great caution, like in my case, or by just flinging the gate wide open and letting everything through all at once, and dealing with the consequences as they come.

KInd of like this:

I think I went long enough without posting that video that I can do it now.

My god, that song has deep spritiual meaning for me. I connect with it so deeply it’s scary. It’s like it was written by a part of myself far wiser than the rest.

And what do you know, it’s full of water imagery. Quelle surprise.

In case you haven’t’ figured it out yet, the “situation at the border” that I have described is a metaphor for depression. As the border suppression system deals with an incresingly large number of waiting emotions. it uses up more and more enery and makes the person involved more and more lethargic, unmotivated, and depressed as their inner world starves.

And if it gets bad enough, the pressure will be released explosively, and result in anything from a nervous breakdown to an unspeakable act that the person would never do when sane, to a suicide attempt, to a full on psychotic episode.

Luckily for me, I have therapy, and I have this blog,. Both give me a please where I can let those emotions in – slowly – and thereby reduce that terrible inner pressure.

It’s all about release, man. Your legal immigration policy.

Find yours or you will pay for it, one way or another.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

Stop worrying about North Korea

Sorry if my soapbox leaves splinters on your floor, but I need to rant.

I can’t believe I have to explain this all again, but here goes : North Korea is not a threat to anyone in the USA or Canada.

Why? Because all it has is a piddling few nuclear devices that use all the uranium and/or plutonium that the South Korean government has been able to purchase and produce over the lifespan of its fifty year nuclear plan.

So say the worst possible scenario occurs and the Un One thinks that maybe that one solider with the natural good looks and charms was looking at him funny, and this time, having the man and all this family tortured to death just isn’t going to cut it. This time… the whole world has to pay.

So he launches all his devices while stroking a non-existant mustache and cackling evilly, or at least, what he thinks is an evil cackle but sounds more like a frog with the hiccups about to barf.

And all those devices are heading for major cities in the USA. Oh no, surely this must mean we are all doomed!

 

Well guess what? There would be ZERO DOOM, at ;least in the Western Hemisphere. In order to get to us, the devices would have to cross China (who is a nuclear power too, remember?”) and then cross the Pacific Ocean, which is, ya know…

KIND OF LARGE

and that would give the world plenty of time to intercept the missiles and cause them to splash harmlessly into the ocean where they can be picked up later.

Meanwhile, the entire world would have invaded North Korea and in record time Un would be Un-employed and his country would be absorbed into South Korea and become New Korea, or looked at another way, Korea Classic.

And why would Un the Great and Mighty bring that on himself?

Remember, it is never only a question of what the enemy can do. It’s always a question of what they would do.

I mean, you could punch your boss in the face tghe next time he talks to you like you’re in fifth grade. You have the capacity. You have the fists and the rage and the opportunity to put both of those things together for a moment of punchtastic glory.

But you wouldn’t. DO I need to explain why?

And for heaven’s sake, people, don’t make fools of yourselves talking like the world ending in a nuclear holocaust is a possibility. It ain’t. Korea isn’t the Soviet Union. A nuclear exchange between it and the rest of the world would not bring an end to all life as we know it.  Un just plain does not have enough nukes for that, and it’s not like we’re going to blow ourselves up just to make up the difference.

Now don’t get me wrong – he could do a lot of damange with the nukes he as, especially to countries way closer to him than us. If he decided to take out Beijing or Tokyo or Ulaanbaatar[1], he might be able to do it. And not only could millions die in the initial striek, the environmental impact would be felt for hundreds of years. In fact, fallout would take even more lives than the initial blast.

But that’s not going to happen, because no matter who he attacked, the world would wipe out his regime before the ground has even stopped glowing and why would Un want to do that?

But people will go right on believing that we are on the brink of total annihilation, and you know why?

Because it’s fun.

It’s fun to imagine that we’re at risk of losing it all. It makes life more exciting and dramatic and the fun kind of scary, the kind you get in a horror movie.

And like in a horror movie, it’s safe to get scared about North Korea’s nuclear proigram because you know, deep down, that it’s all fake, there’s no real danger, and at the end, it will all go away and you will go on with your life.

It’s the attractive bullshit of popular delusions, and I am sick and god damned tired of it. So here I am, being the “no fun” guy who tells people that the Emperor, despite what you read on Twitter, actually IS wearing clothes, and any gimpses of his genitalia you thought you saw were only the products of your fevered imagination.

Nark my words. Were this article to be seen by a large number of people, I guarantee that I would receive dozens of angry letters in which people would be making superficially logical as to why I am wrong wrong WRONG, but the subtext would be clear, and it woudl read “”you’re no fun!”.

How dare I insist upon reality when we’re all having such a fun time being scared?

Because real world things are happening and our priorities are all fucked up because of the media pursuing what they think is the best story, instead of looking for the truth.

And social media only makes things far worse because now it’s not about rating, it’s abnout clicks, and everyone is competing to share the stuff that will get likes and shares and that kind of intellectual populism is going to favour the sensational falsehoods over the unglamorous truth  most of the time.

It’s all reality television now. Everything from the biggest news program all the way down to your auntie’s Facebook feed is just as trite, just as manipulalative, and just as “real” as Toddklers and Tiaras and Survivor : Atlantis.

Clearly, the public mind needs a better immune response to bullshit.

I have no idea what that would look like.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. You mena, those two Klingon chicks from Star Trek? Actually, it’s the capital of Mongolia. Don’t worry about not knowing it. Neither did I till I looked it up just to make myself sound smart!

Sometimes, my depression is like….

(This was originally going to be a poem. But  FUCK poetry. I have way too much to say for that shit .)

Sometimes, my depression is like….an invisible straightjacket that restricts what I do in a way that makes no sense to those who cannot see it. I don’t believe I can escape it, so to save at least some of my sanity, I’ve  learned to ignore it too.

In fact, when I am performing socially, I can fool myself into forgetting that I am sick and believing that there is nothing really wrong with me, I have just been in a bad mood.

For my entire adult life.

And I am 44

It’s a nice place to visit, but I can’t exactly live there.  I wish I could become the person I pretend to be, and I am working on that.

But it will take a long time. I just have to remind myself that the person I pretend to be is me as well.

Sometimes, my depression is like…. a twisting, crushing, spaghetti-fying black hole at the center of my soul. A brutal inward tide that draws everything into its maw of annihilation and despair. It devours all, leaving me hollow and empty and sad. Attemptds to satisfy it work for a while. But the void in my soul is patient. It knows it will win in the end.

Sometimes, my depression is like….a terrified beast hunted by long, dark demons and driven into a state not unlike insanity where it wants to get away,  get away, get away before the bad thing happens!

This animal knows, in its heart, that it is going to die, because it’s only one little animals versus a galaxy of monster that all want to eat him, crunch crunch GOODBYE.

He also knows that before he dies, when he knows there is no way out, he is going to snap like a dry twig and murder every single fucking one of them he can before they eventually put him down.

He doesn’t want this to happen.

But the thought makes me feel a little better.

Sometimes, my depression is like….an endless dirfting through dimly lit subterranean canalls, where the only sound is the lapping of the waves against the hull of my gondola and the tiny bumping sounds from the gondola’s smooth passage through a canal barely wider than it is.

And behind it all is a slow, even, strong, masterful rowing.

And the real mystery is not why I am in this canal…

But why I like it so much.

Sometimes, my depression is like….being the outermost planet in a vast solar sytem, pathetically dependent on the tiny amount of energy it gets from that hot and wonderful star at the center of it all, and worried that nobody even notices or cares about it because it’s so far out.

And on that planet is a robot. And that robot’s job is to monitor signals from the inner planets, and report what it finds.

And it spends every day monitoring as hard as it can. It has to try so hard because it is barely picking up anything. And the signal he picks up are so faint that they barely make any sense and seem random and thoughtless to the robot.

So the robot has concluded that nobody is transmitting, that the signals he picks up are all in his mind, and that he would be better off shutting down and going offline.

But what this robot does not know is that it has a broken antenna. That therfe are, in fact, many stations broadcasting to it on every channel and at full power, and that are desperate to make some kind of contact with him.

It thinks that nobody cares.

But it’s just a broken antenna.

Sometimes, my depression is like….a chill fog that fills my mind and makes it so hard to think and plan and do complex things. An artificial lobotomization that renders a n otherwise highly intelligent person from being able to cope with even the most basic levels of life. The things healthy people don’t even think of as tasks, let alone understand wbhy someone would find it hard to do them.

So it leaves me drowning in plain view of everyone but nobody can throw me a line because they don’t even see what is killing me.

Sometimes, my depression is like….a deep rage that burn all it touches and most of what it touches is me. An impotent rage that takes out its frustrations on the one available target : ,me.

It’s a ravenous monster, and I have locked myself in with it in order to make absolutely sure that it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

So it eats me instead. And that only leads to more rage. So it’s like I am constantly punishing myself for the crimes I have committed against myself when punishing myself for the crimes…. and so forth and so on.

And the great thing about this self-torture is that it’s conflict free. You don’t have to challenge anyone to a fight over it. You can do it whenever you like, because your victim is always right at hand. And you know he deserves it too for being such a pathetic loser and sucking so bad at everything and basically being horrible….BECAUSE of the self-loathing and self-torture.

The punishments is part of the problem.

And sometimes, my depression is like….being a kid who is all alone in front of the school because everybody forgot to pick him up and now the shadows are getting longer and the people who live across the street from the school are starting to wonder what is going on and the people driving by wonder too, but not for very long, because they have to get on with their lives.

He doesn’t notice any of this, though, because as the minutes tick past he gets sadder and sadder till ihe feels like he will crumple in on himself at any moment, because that screaming void inside him just keeps getting bigger and bigger because it’s clear that he doesn’t matter and doesn’t count and nobody cares about him enough to do one single thing to help him.

And he deserves it all, because he’s terrible.

His harried aunt arrives just in time to see he has attempted suicide… again.

She rolls her eyes. Nobody nobody likes the kid. He’s such a drama queen.,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

Easy to love, hard to respect

The title refers to me, of course.

For many years, I more or less ignored the concept of respect as it pertained to me. I felt like loosely tied sack of shit (still do, sometimes) so I figured respect is something that I would never have.

You know…. like someone who was sexually attracted to me, or love.

And besides, respect seemed very dull to me. Very staid, and dignified, and dull dull DULL. I would rather have people love me than respect me.

But as I have been going through the process of recovery. my inherent human desire for respect has surfaced and bveen hooked up to the main rig. And now I find I want people to respect me.

At least enough to listen to what I say, anyhow.

A lot of what I am describing as “respect” goes by other names, like “the recoignition of one’s peers” and “a place in the community” and so on.

But it all boils down to one thing : people recognizing and validating one’s worth.

At this point, the knee-jerk pop psychologists would leap to their feet and tell me that you shouldn’t look to others for validation, that you need to look within for validation, and that the only person’s opinion of you that matters is your own.

Yeah, well, I think I suck. I was kind of hoping to get a better opinion somewhere else.

Because I want respect now. Not the staid stuffed shirt “respectable” kind of respect. Or the much worse kind of respectable that haunts the middle class.

 

 

That’s the kind of respectability I actively avoid.

No, I am looking for a more basic kind of respect. Essentially, I need validation. Some positive input about my worth that I can use as a defense against the ravenous demons that attack my self-worth on a near-constant basis.

There’s a problem with that, because I don’t expose myself to situations where that might happen very much. I don’t send my writing to potential purchasers. I don’t job hunt and go to interviews. I don’t even go to industry events.

In fact, I have a very strong pattern of fearing and avoiding the exact kinds of situations where I might get my validation due to my fear of rejection.

Hence the writer’s dream version of a literary agent as someone to whom you can send your work and then THEY do all the socially scary work of finding people to buy it.

We writers are an introverted lot. Who else would be willing to invest all those lonely hours that writing takes? Extroverts would be so bored they would fall asleep.

Although the image in my mind of an extroverted writer super excitedly typing the adventure in their heads into text on a page and completely emotionally engaged with the story they are writing, like Jo from Little Women, is a pleasant one.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Respect and stuff.

The thing is, I crave respect and validation, and while the validation is available – I have enough evidence in my memory banks that I am a very funny writer, for example – the respect is hard to come by because basically, I’m a mess.

It’s hard to maintain respect for someone as clumsy, absentminded, and cowardly as myself. At least, that’s how I perceive it. I have a lot of gifts, and so the validation is there, but as a person, there’s not a lot of hooks to hang respect on.

I have done little to prove my worth to the community. I have a tendency to wimp out and look to others to solve the crises caused by my clumsy and absentminded nature. Over and over again I find myself helplessly apologizing for makling yet another stupid mistake that no normal person would make and that I can’t even explain except to say “I guess my brain doesn’t work”.

The learned helplessness from my childhood is still there. My first thought when things go wrong is to look to someone to help me out of it.

And that’s damning for either gender but especially bad for a man. Men are supposed to keep it together and be competent and tough and strong.

I am none of those things.

Oh, I have my areas where I can be all three. Most of them rely on my being inspired by my deep protective urges that mean I absolutely must act to protect people, whether in a physical situation like an altercation or on a more ideological level.

when my sense of injustice is activated, I’m a goddamned lion.

When it comes to my own interests and feelings, I am a particularly feeble lamb,

Sometimes I envision a scenario in which I could be “The Man”, the guy who is in charge of everything and whom appears to be totally awesome and in control and brilliant as fuck.

But it would be a bit of a con game. Essentially, I would be desperately trying to avoid revealing my incomptence, so I would be using my powers of persuation to convince others to do the things I can’t do while I retained my status by being a very good, fair, loving kind of leader who can guide the group (whatever it is) away from danger and into the green pasrures of safety and coimfort and happiness.

It’s that eternal problem of mine : what if you would make a good Chief, but a lousy Indian? What if you are much better at knowing what needs to be done and how  than actually doing it?

As the world is set up, you generally have to be a good Indian before they will even consider making you a Chief. In a system like that, I am screwed.

But if being in charge was recognized as just another skill and not some messed up status game which makes it seem like management is a special breed or person as opposed to people will jobs like everybody else,. then people like me might go straight from the aptitude test to the lowest level management position.

Because that’s what I’m good at!

But no, we are sutck with a system where people like me never get to do what we do best. And yet we still sometimes claim it to be a meritocracy.

The only people who actually believe that are the ones who have done well by the system and want to imagine it’s because they are extra magical special.

The rest of us knows that it’s all about who you knoiw.

Well then I’m fucked.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

Um… uh… skyrim?

No idea what to write about, so what the hell, I will talk about my Skyrim life.

The first thing you have to know is that in RPG style games like Skyrim, which have a lot of options as to how your character develops, there are what are known as “builds”. Basically, they are ways of playing the game that result in a certain kind of character by using and improving the right set of skills and by choosing the right weapons and armor and other accoutrements in order to turn your character into a very effective version of whatever build you are following.

Confusing? Well here’s an example. One of my builds I called The Ninja. I really wanted to play as a ninja, so I  found a mod that added ninja weapons and spells to the game.

I installed it, and had fun for a while as a ninja, with skills in stealth so I could glide silently up to enemies and take them out with a katana to the back. I had ninja powers that let me do things like disappear and leave three identical copies of me behind, which attacked the enemy while I snuck around to stab the enemy in the back.

Actually, a loit of it was about stabbing people and creatures in the back. It’s even more fun than it sounds. And it forced me to adjust my play style. Normally, whatever sort of character I am playing. I almost always just charge into battle and kick some ass.

But being a ninja meant it was worth it to be less direct. And I discovered that. despite my usual impatience with indirect things, it was also fun and interesting to sneak up to enemies sometimes and spring on them and kills them so fast that they are dead before they even know they are hurt.

But after all that misdirection,. I needed something extremelty direct. So my character right now is Malkoth the Maker, a huge orc that uses huge weapons to layeth down the smack on the bad guys.

This is by far the easiest sort of character for me to play. No pondering what spells to use. No need to plan a battle strategy. Not a lot of need to use the Block (as in, with a shield) button as things tend to die realy fast when you hit them.

Just pure fucking brute force applied with all the skill and precisions of a sledgehammer to the forehead.

It is very satisfying to my Taurean nature. Big man hit bad thing very hard. Repeat.

Oh, and he’s called The Maker because it is with this character that I have explored the “crafting” options of the game. Like the name suggests, crafting lets you make stuff in a game. It’s quite popular in video games because it gives people that sense of satisfaction that comes with making things.

And all without having to have any skill in it yourself! Suits me.

So I have made weapons and armor for my big Orc, then refined them, then put enchantments on them to make them even more awesome.

And it must have had an effect, because I have taken this mnagnificent thug of mine further through the game and to a higher character level than ever before. And that’s a good thing, because it means I am not feeling twitchy and restless any more.

Recently, I have had a pattern of starting a new character based on the “build” in my mind, getting them to around level 20 then getting bored and going on to the next idea for a build. There’s nothing wrong with that – after all, the whole point of playing video games is to have fun, not to fulfil a specious obligation to an imaginary character.

But it gave me a feeling like I was missing a lot of the game due to my impatience. And it turns out that I was right. Hanging in there has brought my character to new heights of power that I had never seen before.

He is truly one magnificent brute now. He can kill dragons in 30 seconds. A lot of regular enemies are one shot wonders to him now.

He rarely has to hit anything twice.

And I am having fun with all that power. My guy is Level 34, and I am not quite done with him yet because I am not going to stop playing him because his weapon skill is almost at 100, and apparently something magical happens then. I don’t know what…. something about resetting the skill to 15 and giving me extra powers or something… but I am daying to find out.

After that, I will probably move on to my next character build idea : the Necromancer. I have wanted to explore the other sorts of magic in the game besides the combat stuff (shooting fireballs and such), and I in particular wanted to explore Conjuration magic, which lets you do things like make zombies out of corpses and summon powerful critters to do your bidding.

I have also wanted to play a character thjat works through others instead of throwing himself into battle, and being the guy who summons stuff works great for that. I can just summon some minions and hold back while they fight the baddies, tossing a well chosen and timed spell into the fracas when appropriate.

It will take even more restraint of my tendency to throw myself into battle than the Ninja build did, but that will be part of the challenge and thuis part of the fun.

After that, my next character build idea is The Paragon, who will be a shiny golden example of all heroic virtues and with whom I plan to do every quest from every town.

That’s crazy ambitious, but what the hell, that just makes it more fun.

So that’s the updatge on the part of my life that is spent in a video game. You’d think I would be tired of it by now, but there’s just so many ways to play it and so much content available that it keeps me happily engaged for hours on end.

And it’s way easier than actually having a life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Feel my power

nk I’ve been making progress on that “owning your gifts” thing that I have been going on about for ages now.

I still feel like there is this massive monolithic machine that is my intellect. and then there’s itty bitty me. cowering in its shadow, feeling helpless before it, even though my hands are on its controls.

It terrifies  me, to be honest. Even though I know it is also me. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like me, though. It feels like a ghost that haunts me.

Or maybe I’m the one haunting it. I don’t know. I just work here.

But on another level, I am improving. I am starting to “feel my oats[1]“, as the saying goes. I have periods when I feel powerful in a good way. Where I am amazed by myself, not just dazed by myself. Where I can grapple with the truth of being considerably smarter than most people (and the ice cold loneliness that implies) for short periods before having to push it out of my mind as something I just can’t handle. Where I can entertain thoughts like “I’m amazing!” and “I’m brilliant” without the demons of my depression immediately tearing that feeling apart.

Because I am amazing, god damn it. Most people would look upon my gifts with envy. I’m a talented writer with a unique point of view. I’m a genuinely nice guy. I’m sensitive and intuitive while also being hardheaded and pragmatic. I have deep an unique insights into what makes people tick and how the world works. I am passionate about my ideals and live my day to say life by them. I have innate charisma that can light up a room. I can project my vision of the world to an audience. I can embody my ideals.

And, of course. I have a brain the size of a planet[1]. I have a powerful mind that cuts through the fog of illusion and sees the truth of things. I retain facts for a very long time – hence my ability to remember stuff I learned in grade 7 science, like the water cycle. I have extraordinary verbal skills and can make words do whatever I like, including things that seem like wizard level magic to the average person. I’m very funny. I can make cutting observations that can really hurt someone if I feel it is needed.

In fact, when it comes to words, I’m a well armed ninja.

I’m honest,  trustworthy, reliable, loyal, patient, and dependable while also – miracle of miracles – being an interesting person.

I am a genuinely deep person who thinks deeply about things and who does his best to look at the whole picture before rushing to judgment. I am always striving to be as fair and objective as I can be. I don’t pick sides or play favorites.

And I am alway striving towards being a better person. My spiritual ambition is limitless. I works towards becoming not just a better person in terms of morality but a purer, stronger, stabler, more enriched soul that has transcended itself over and over until I am the best possible version of myself.

Basically, I want to be secular Jesus. Or at least a secular holy man.

I have a very strong desire to help others. And an even stronger urge to protect others. I will interpose myself between the innocent and the cruel and thoughtless hand of fate every single fucking time.

And for the guilty most of the time, too.

I am a very genuine person. I fabrcate no emotions. The very idea of it disgusts me. I do my best to be diplomatic and considerate and restrain my instinctual bluntness. But I do it via nuanced expression of genuine emotions, not by faking anything.

I absolutely refuse to misrepresent my emotional state. Come what may. I might not reveal all of my emotional state in every situation, but I never,  EVER  project an emotion that I am not feeling.

Let’s see. What else. This is fun! And I think it will be a very good exercise for my emotional growth and self-esteem.

I feel no need or desire to dominate others and I am in no sense one of those people driven to get their own way all the time.

On one level, life is a game of chess to me, and I will make whatever moves advances my position. I know that sounds so cold it’s sociopathic. but my chess board very much includes morality and the utilitarianism of maximizing the good and minimizing the bad in life. My ethics demand this kind of optimization. Otherwise I would be failing to live up to my ideals, and that would be completely unacceptable.

So the whole chess game is just my rather cerebral way of trying to make the world a better place for humans. Were I less dogmatically objective and determinedly fair, I might have a different approach to life.

But I am who I am, and I do the best I can. If that causes some people to mistrust me, so be it. I am a cold and calculating machine, after all.

Just one programmed to benefit humanity.

I am kind, gentle, and empathic. I want everybody to be happy. And I am very strongly oriented towards peace and harmony. I want everyone to get along. I want to end all artificial divisions between us, especially the harmful ones. And I want people to be able to become the best versions of themselves so they can be happy about themselves. and their place in the world.

Phew! That took a lot of effort. Worth it, though. I should print this article out and put copies all over my room so I can always see it when I want to.

I have all that going for me, plus, I assume, things I am now too tired to think of.

And yet, I still feel like a scared little money with his hands resting on controls he is afraid to use because the effects are so much bigger than him.

Maybe it’s time for that scared little monkey to grow up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

[[2]] Probably a gas giant. That seems fitting. [[2]]

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Joke :  “Son, it’s okay to feel your oats, just not when they’re inside a horse. “
  2. nk I’ve been making progress on that “owning your gifts” thing that I have been going on about for ages now.

    I still feel like there is this massive monolithic machine that is my intellect. and then there’s itty bitty me. cowering in its shadow, feeling helpless before it, even though my hands are on its controls.

    It terrifies  me, to be honest. Even though I know it is also me. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like me, though. It feels like a ghost that haunts me.

    Or maybe I’m the one haunting it. I don’t know. I just work here.

    But on another level, I am improving. I am starting to “feel my oats[1]“, as the saying goes. I have periods when I feel powerful in a good way. Where I am amazed by myself, not just dazed by myself. Where I can grapple with the truth of being considerably smarter than most people (and the ice cold loneliness that implies) for short periods before having to push it out of my mind as something I just can’t handle. Where I can entertain thoughts like “I’m amazing!” and “I’m brilliant” without the demons of my depression immediately tearing that feeling apart.

    Because I am amazing, god damn it. Most people would look upon my gifts with envy. I’m a talented writer with a unique point of view. I’m a genuinely nice guy. I’m sensitive and intuitive while also being hardheaded and pragmatic. I have deep an unique insights into what makes people tick and how the world works. I am passionate about my ideals and live my day to say life by them. I have innate charisma that can light up a room. I can project my vision of the world to an audience. I can embody my ideals.

    And, of course. I have a brain the size of a planet[1]. I have a powerful mind that cuts through the fog of illusion and sees the truth of things. I retain facts for a very long time – hence my ability to remember stuff I learned in grade 7 science, like the water cycle. I have extraordinary verbal skills and can make words do whatever I like, including things that seem like wizard level magic to the average person. I’m very funny. I can make cutting observations that can really hurt someone if I feel it is needed.

    In fact, when it comes to words, I’m a well armed ninja.

    I’m honest,  trustworthy, reliable, loyal, patient, and dependable while also – miracle of miracles – being an interesting person.

    I am a genuinely deep person who thinks deeply about things and who does his best to look at the whole picture before rushing to judgment. I am always striving to be as fair and objective as I can be. I don’t pick sides or play favorites.

    And I am alway striving towards being a better person. My spiritual ambition is limitless. I works towards becoming not just a better person in terms of morality but a purer, stronger, stabler, more enriched soul that has transcended itself over and over until I am the best possible version of myself.

    Basically, I want to be secular Jesus. Or at least a secular holy man.

    I have a very strong desire to help others. And an even stronger urge to protect others. I will interpose myself between the innocent and the cruel and thoughtless hand of fate every single fucking time.

    And for the guilty most of the time, too.

    I am a very genuine person. I fabrcate no emotions. The very idea of it disgusts me. I do my best to be diplomatic and considerate and restrain my instinctual bluntness. But I do it via nuanced expression of genuine emotions, not by faking anything.

    I absolutely refuse to misrepresent my emotional state. Come what may. I might not reveal all of my emotional state in every situation, but I never,  EVER  project an emotion that I am not feeling.

    Let’s see. What else. This is fun! And I think it will be a very good exercise for my emotional growth and self-esteem.

    I feel no need or desire to dominate others and I am in no sense one of those people driven to get their own way all the time.

    On one level, life is a game of chess to me, and I will make whatever moves advances my position. I know that sounds so cold it’s sociopathic. but my chess board very much includes morality and the utilitarianism of maximizing the good and minimizing the bad in life. My ethics demand this kind of optimization. Otherwise I would be failing to live up to my ideals, and that would be completely unacceptable.

    So the whole chess game is just my rather cerebral way of trying to make the world a better place for humans. Were I less dogmatically objective and determinedly fair, I might have a different approach to life.

    But I am who I am, and I do the best I can. If that causes some people to mistrust me, so be it. I am a cold and calculating machine, after all.

    Just one programmed to benefit humanity.

    I am kind, gentle, and empathic. I want everybody to be happy. And I am very strongly oriented towards peace and harmony. I want everyone to get along. I want to end all artificial divisions between us, especially the harmful ones. And I want people to be able to become the best versions of themselves so they can be happy about themselves. and their place in the world.

    Phew! That took a lot of effort. Worth it, though. I should print this article out and put copies all over my room so I can always see it when I want to.

    I have all that going for me, plus, I assume, things I am now too tired to think of.

    And yet, I still feel like a scared little money with his hands resting on controls he is afraid to use because the effects are so much bigger than him.

    Maybe it’s time for that scared little monkey to grow up.

    I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

     

     

     

    [[2]] Probably a gas giant. That seems fitting.

On making myself happy

I don’t really know how to do it.

Now before we start, I want to make it clear that I am not talking about that airy fairy “happily ever after” romantic crap. Thjere’s no such thing, it doesn’t exist. There isn’t a place called Happy where, once you get there, you can stop striving for happiness because it’s yours forever now.

No, life is work, and happiness will always require effort to achieve.

So what Iam talking about is a more direct and functional kind of happiness. I don’t have a precise definition for happiness – it’s too large and vague a concept for that – btu I have identified some elements of what I would consider happiness., such as :

Being comfortable in your own skin.  For me, one vital criterion for happiness is self-acceptance and self-love. And I am working on it. No transient pleasure is going to truly help me when I can’t stand to even look at myself in the mirror because I hate myself so much. So I strive towards forgiving myself for being human and try to strike a balance between accepted and valuing my considerable strengths while also tempering that with rational humility about what I can and cannot do.

After all, I’m amazing…. not omnipotent. No matter how smart or talented or otherwise gifted I might be, I am still just a twitching bucket of carbon compounds whose totality amount to one tiny drop in the ocean of humanity.

I remind myself of these things not to punish myself,. but to assuage the feeling I get sometimnes that I am inches from flipping the switch from self-loathing all the way to delusions of grandeur., and I really don’t want to go crazy, thank you kindly.

That’s one of the biggest blocks to my truly accepting my gifts : the feeling of rapidly inflating ego threatening to break my precarious connection to reality.

In essence, it makes me feel like I am going crazy.. Like my ego is going to inflate like a hot air balloon and float up into the stratosphere.

And it is oh, so cold up there.

More physical pleasure in my life.  I am very good at pursuing the mental pleasures that my cerebral nature craves. After all, I have the entire Internet stretching out before my like a nigh-infinite intellectal buffet. I cna always get lots of mental stimulation. I can even get good intellectual conversatiobn sometimes.

But it’s not enough. I can see that clearly now. Even to most exquite of intellectual pleasures – like the kind I get from top quality intellectual conversation – is a product of the cold circuit of the mind., and in order to be a happy uppity monkey, a human being needs hot circuit pleasures too, like the kinds we get from physical pleasures like eating, getting a good massage, really good fucking, and all the other physically active and attuned activities ibn life. Us icy intellectuals tend to fear and mistrust any activity that pulls us away from our crystalline hideouts in the world of the mind, and thus eschew most forms of dynamically engaged activity.

But you canb’t skipo that shit entirely. You need to get in touch with the side of you that doesn’t feel the need to always think things through before they act and learn to trust your instincts and act on your desires.

That is what makes a person feel truly alive.

It’s that last bit that I find hard to do. I have spent decades ignoring my physical desires because I lacked the finds to do anything about them so what, I thought, was the point of torturing myself over what I could never have?

And now I know. My solution was too drastic. It’s like dealing with chronic pain by cutting the offending body part off. Sure, it works, but at what cost?

2If I had endured the suffering, it might have actually inspired me to act (the other way of solving the problem) and I might have learned more about what I do and do not like and eventually learned how to make myself happy that way.

At rhe very least, it would have taught me how to stay in the game and deal with shit, instead of tapping out at the slightest of provocations.

I would have learned to grow the fuck up.

Material security.  This is not as crassly materialistic as it sounds. I am not seeking wealth, just security. A feeling that I have the resources I need to enjoy life without having to worry about money all the time.

What they used to call being “comfortable”

So no need for yachts or fancy cars or gold plated toilets. I would be happy with a pleasant three bedroom home in a nice neighborhood, enough money for groceries and rent and so on, and like a thousand a month for whatever.

Oh, and ebnough cash for traveling in comfort, either via cab or uber, or in my own privatre car with my own driver.

That would be enough for me to lead a full and decent life. Room for a lover and some friends. Pleasant and agreeable surroundings. A nice, relaxed, harmonious background vibe from the good neighbrhood. Freedom to go hither and yon, as the whim takes me, without having to deal with public transit. The ability to customize my lifestyle as I figure out what works for me and what does not. Simple pleasures in abundance.

That’s the life I long to lead. Very low on stress and very high on empowered freedom. A little world unto myself where I could relax and truly be myslef because I no longer felt insecure, anxious, and woriied all the damned time.

IOh, and this nice home in the nice neighborhood would be near moving water of some kind. The ocean, a lake, a stream, a waterfall… something like that.

There’s something about moving water that calms and soothes me. It’s like the water is washing me clean and taking all my sick impurities away.

Flow on, sweet river. Make me whole. Make me well. Make me clean.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

A different economy

I’m going to talk about introversion and it’s wacky brother extroversion. But first, a brag.

I left the apartment at 5:15 pm and manged to take the bus to the bank, cash my cheque, walk to Pricemart, do all my shopping there, and cab home all before 6 pm.

That’s right  – all that in under 45 minutes.

Right now, I feel like a ninja master of Getting Shit Done. Before I actually got home, I had the vague idea that when I did arrive, it’d be between 6:30 pm and 7:00 pm.

So when I got home and say that is 5:58 pm, I was like, SCORE!


Back to our irregularly scheduled programming.

It’s no surprise to introverts that extroverts don’t “get” them. But it might surprise introverts to learn how much they don’t “get” extroverts.

It’s an easy mistake to make. After all, we’re the deep thinking, introspective ones who, it seems to us, understand so much more of the world than those crazy extroverts who are always running into easily avoidable brick walls because they never think ahead.

It’s a kind of snobbery,. albeit a very harmless one. But it blinds us introverts to, to put it bluntly, what they know that we don’t, and the very different energy economy they live by and how it explains so much of why they are so different from us.

Tonight, I’m going to tackle that difference.

Let’s start with introversion. Introverts generate their own energy, and then apply that energy to their lives.

And on an emotional level, what most of that energy goes to is what I am going to call “the force field”. It’s the protective layer we introverts use in order to deal with this hot and noisy world. We need this layer because stimulation drains us and the only way we can deal with the world is if we have this layer of protection between us in the world.

That way, it’s the force field  that gets drained, not us.

But that means that our ability to cope with the world – our ATC – is limited. We have a finite amount of energy we can devote to keeping that force field up, and the more our lives and our environment drains it, the more stuff gets through and thus the faster our ATC reserves are drained.

And when that force fi3eld falls, we have to go. It’s a choice between exiting the situation and staying there and being wretchedly miserable because our entire nervous system is screaming at us to GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE  and go someplace with a low level of stimulation while our overstimulated state slowly subsides and our force field’s batteries can recharge.

And let me be clear, I am not just talking about physical stimulation. I am also talking about social stimulation, which tends to drain us even faster than the physical kind.

so that’s how an introvert’s energy economy works. We generate our own energy and when it’s gone, we’re gone. It’s just how we are wired up.

But extroverts operate under radically different economic rules. They take their energy from their environment VIA stimulation. It’s LACK of stimulation that drains their batteries and there is only so long that they can endure that before THEY have to go find THEIR preferred environment : one with more stimulation.

That means that an under stimulated extrovert is every bit as miserable as an overstimulated introvert,. and I think we introverts, if we want to keep our “the more sensitive one” title, should acknowledge and value that, instead of telling them to go read a book and eyerolling at their ridiculous running around like they will die if they get too bored attitude.

That’s what it feels like to them. Sure, it’s not literally true, but then again it’s not literally true when an introvert says they feel like their head is going to explode when they are overstimulated, and we introverts recognize that as a valid feeling.

And this point might seem obviously but I nevertheless feel it has to be made : things that would be very stressful for us are happy occasions for them, and vice versa. If we want their sympathy when we are in a bad place, we have to give them sympathy when they are in one too. and not judge or minimalize their concerns and their needs simply because they are not like ours. In fact, they are usually the exact opposite of ours.

We wouldn’t want them being so insensitive to us, would we?

To me, this ability to not just open to one’s environment but to take energy from it is fascinating and mysterious, and I must admit, it makes me a little jealous. For an introvert like me, it seems like topsy turvy voodoo magic.

And it would be so nice to feel in harmony with one’s environment and look forward to high stimulus situations, as opposed to living in opposition with one’s environment and dreading high stimulus situations.

Then again, our ability to keep going in low stimulus situations in which they would be miserable probably seems just as amazing to them.

The world needs both of us.


I’m experimenting with using those horizontal lines to visually demark changes of topics. It’s a way for me to be able to stop talking about something when I run out of things to say about it nstead of forcing myself to keep going in order to make wordcount.

That should improve content density considerably.

In this section, I want to talk about something weird about today’s blog entry : I am writing it without Windows Ten’s automatic spellchecking.

Not by choice, mind you. It’s just something my web browser decided to do today. That automatic spellcheck that underlines misspelled word in read is working in all my other programs, but not in the browser.

And it makes me feel very insecure. My safety net is gone. It makes me really appreciate how dependent on that damn thing I have become.

The very idea of doing all the proofreading myself seems like crazyness.

I am definitely going to cut and paste today’s article into a window with functioning spellcheck before I post it.

And I get the feeling there will be a LOT of correcting to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

A comfortable kind of crazy

In a way, I am comforted by my craziness. On some levels and in some forms, I feel like it keeps me safe. Keeps the world at bay. Gives me a last ditch emergency mode that I hope I never need – after all, I might not come back – but whose presence as an option soothes and comforts me.

And I need all the soothing and comforting I can get. to be honest. I’m an emotionally needy guy. It just doesn’t show so much because I am so bad at getting those needs met that I don’t usually do a thing about them.

That, obviously, has to change.

More importantly. I want it to change.

But let’s not get into that whole “why wanting is better than needing” spiel.

Instead, let’s talk about the killer inside me.

I have spoken in this space before about how the brutality of my elementary school years changed something in me. I became more savage and less civilized. I was forced by circumstance to tap into my most primitive self and while that eventually worked out for me (with help fromk puberty – we mutants love puberty), I still wish I could have kept my civilized innocence instead of having it bashed out of me by rape, then physical abuse at the hands of my peers, then lengthy social isolation.

It’s a wonder that I never went the jail kind of crazy.

But that would be attracting too much attention to myself. I’ll just live in quiet misery out of the way somewhere, and not bother anyone.

Heck, I will even put on a happy smiley funny cute face for the world in order to hide my pain and keep my secret.

And you’ll believe it because I believe it, sorta kinda. When I am being That Guy, I can forget about my problems and my pain for a while. And I am not exactly fabricating anything either.What you see is all me.

But not all of me.Nobody will ever see my totality. It would be too much for the mind to take. Like the science fiction trope where the Clarke level alien tech tries to cram a thousand lifetimes of knowledge and experience into the human brain all at once.

You’d think hyper advanced alien races would be able to factor in such a basic variable as mental bandwidth into their fancy knowledge machines, but apparently they really do this kind of thing to burn out people’s mind and laugh at how stupid they are.

Aliens are such dicks.

And when I say nobody will glimpse my totality, I am very much including myself. I couldn;t handle it either. H. P. Lovecraft said that the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ”

I’ve resented that statement ever since I first read it when I was a teenager. And I didn’t even know what a racist POS Lovecraft was!

What I resented was the implication that I, personally, couldn’t handle that level of total consciousness. (I never said this was sane or reasonable. )

But then I got a little bit older, and I realized that old H. P. Sauce Lovecraft was right on the money with that one. for me especially.

I have layers upon layers upon n-dimensional layers of knowledge, emotion, opinion, reasoning, and everything else built up in my mind. No indexing system in the world could keep up with it all.  The whole damn library would collapse under the weight of all that integrated data.

And that’s probably a bad thing.  Overall.

 


 

Time jump! From this point on, everything I write will have been written between 6:30 and whatev. The stuff before now was writter aeoun noonishly.

Fun fact : I have slept only two hours out of the last 24! And yet,. I feel fine. Super, thanks for asking.

So clearly I am in that even more hypo than hypo-manic that I fall into every now and then, and eventually the walls will come a-tumbling down and I will sleep for like, twelve hours or something.

Or at least eight hours,. which is three more than I normally get. Even with the sleeping pills, I only get five.

But seeing as before the sleeping pills I couldn’t stay asleep for more than 90 minutes. the sleeping pills  are much, much appreciated.

They don’t help me get to sleep (dammit) but they keep me asleep.

What I dream of is something that helps me get there. I have tried a bunch of OTC stuff as well as Zopiclone and my current pair, Quetiapine and Trazadone. and none of them offered much help in the actually getting to sleep bit.

For that, it seems, nothing will do but the long packing up process of my mental circus My brain runs at such a high rCPU ate and at such overwhelming horsepower that it takes a long time just for it to slow down enough to get off the fucking train, let alone doss down in Sleepytown.

Earlier I was thinking about how much it would suck to be a teenager in a community built around the sort of facility where the patients are there for rest in a quiet. uneventful, soothing environment with gentle pastoral splendor and plenty of fresh air.

It would have a name like SoftWillow or Glittering lake, and everyone in the community works there,. either directly or as part of the business that serve it.

Because of this. there is a very strong connection between the community and the facility and everyone considers it their duty to make sure the patients are not disturbed.

Into this setting would come our teenaged protagonist. who just turned fifteen and is starting to realize how much he hates all the peace and quiet because he’s has a lively mind and a decent IQ and thus craves STIMULATION.

I mean, can you imagine? I mean, sure, my home town was dull and boring, but this place would be dull and boring on purpose.

Hmmm. This is actually a pretty good setup for a TV series. It could be part teen drama. part medical drama, part ensemble comedy, with plenty of room for “quirky” one-off characters, as it’s a huge facility and most of the patients have mental issues of one sort or another, whether it’s from mental illness or from brain damage or whatever.

God damn I am brilliant. I create stuff like this without even trying.

Now I just need a friend in the biz…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

reality.sys error : object(s) missing

I’m currently experiencing a reality issue, and it’s a lulu.

I can’t find my drugs. Last Friday. I got all my psychiatric drugs refilled, and now I can’t find some of them.

Note that “some”. If they were all missing, that would at least be logically coherent. But no, only half of them are missing. My sleeping pills, Quetiapine and Trazadone, are present and accounted for.

That means that the batch of meds I got definitely made it home and into my bedroom and on to my desk. But some time after then, the more important ones, my antidepressants Wellbutrin and Paxil, went missing.

And I am trying to stay calm about this and think things through logically and methodically, but I am prone to freaking out in situations like these which is the whole reason I need the fucking meds in the first place.

So I am not a happy camper at the moment.

Memory : when I was in grades 1 and 2, gym class consisted of a nice old lady playimng this ancient children’s exercise LP for us and encouraging us to do the xercise by doing them herself, with us.

God, I hated that thing.

And the thing I hated most was this part where the voice on the record said “Is everybody happy?” in a plummy chummy kind of voice, and we the chillun’s were supposed to reply “Yes, we’re happy! H A P P Y!”.

That’s us poor saps spelling out the word “happy”.

So you see, me and gym class started off as enemies and it only got worse from there.

Sometimes I wonder about how I got to be such a smartass kid who never really participated in the innocent group reality of my surroundings. Part of us must be the early childhood trauma of being raped by a stranger at the age of 3, and of course being the youngest of 4 probably played a role, but I feel there must be more.

I think I was born this way, to a certain extent. I mean, my reaction to that form of gym class was by no means typical. The other little kiddies enjoyed themselves and, looking at it from my current perspective, it was lame but it was harmless, and actually a lot less traumatic than real gym class.

But there I was, rolling my little eyes at how lame the whole thing was and doing the absolute minimum I could get away with as a form of protest.

It’s like I was never innocent. Maybe it was a function of my IQ, I don’t know. But I never had an imaginary friend. I never had a toy animal I dragged everywhere with me. I never played with toys and I never used said toys to create little dramas. I never thought the Easter Bunny was real. Ditto the Tooth Fairy.

And my belief in Santa did not last very long because my high torque little mind produced such an intense battery of questions about how Santa got in and how he did it all ibn one night and such that my siblings had no choice but to admit he was not real.

And this went down before I was even school age.

So yeah. I was a weird, weird kid on all levels. And I was so sensible. No flights of fancy for me. Not in the traditional “dreamer” sense. I didn’t go on Spaceman Spiff style journeys of the imagination. For me, the walls between imagination and reality were rock solid, and I never believed somethibng because I wanted to believe it.

It’s always been an evidence bnased world for me.

And I think I have suffered for it. I have talked in this space about how the capacity for self-delusion is necessary for a mind to stay healthy. I think my lack of imaginary friends etc is an expression of that.

I never had the ability to invent a way to satisfy my emotional needs.  And that bothers me, and not just because I have figured out that being that way has been bad for me.

No, it also bothers me because it suggests I might have been born with some kind of psychological congenital defect. Something which kept me from functioning normally right from the beginning. Something that means I was bor wired weirdly.

I find that notion entirely plausible. And it would explain a lot.

Of course, it’s hard to be certain what is nature and what is nurture even under the best of circumstances, and with my primary trauma having happened when I was only 3 years old and hence at a very early stage of my psychological and mental development, the line becomes hopelessly blurred.

It’s not so much a line as a smudge.

But as far back as I can remember, I have had the same no-bullshit mindset. I have always seen through the illusion and known what was truly real and what was merely a thing people believed. I have always had laser-hone razor for a mind and my restless and relentless hunt for the truth of things started when I wasn’t even old enough to need my own movie ticket when we went to see a flick.

And it really seems like there is no way out of this machine for me. I have taken a teeny tiny step by deciding there is such a thing as “true enough” and permitting at least the idea of acceptable bullshit cross my mind.

But that’s about it. This brutal truth machine of mine is my main way of deriving the reality that exists beyond my immediate sensory world. It is like a sense unto itself, and without it, I would be lost in absolute chaos and wouldn’t even know my name.

Or so it would have me believe, anyhow.

Perhaps it can be tamed, though. Pacified. Domesticated. Trained to know when it should restrain its urg to lunge for the jugular all the time in its pell-mell pursuit of the truth. Teach it to make peace with my fragile humanity and recognize that I am as frail as any other human being and there is really only so much truth I can take before shit starts breaking down on an epic scale.

A part of me was wisgusted just to type those words. Admit limitations? NEVER!  I am a truth warrior! I am The One Who Sees! I am the ideal rugged philosopher who will pursue the truth no matter the consequences! I AM VERY SMART.

But even us geniuses are, at the end of the day, still human.

And that means we have to respect our own limitations.

Even when we don’t want to.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.