‘t lie to you, folks…. I’ve not been doing so well lately.

My depression is getting worse. I feel very fragile and weak and exposed. I find lying down in bed increasingly attractive, and getting out of bed increasingly difficult. Life is so much easier when I just lay there and listen to music and let my mind drift into a half-sleep state where I feel comfortable and cozy and warm, and I am safe from all the world’s harshness and its oppressive sensorium abusing stimuli.

And yet, because it is only half-sleep, I am also safe from my inner demons, who would have the run of the place were I fully asleep.

At this point in my life, I feel like it’s probably best that I rarely remember my dreams.

At other, healthier times, I would crave their insights and feel cheated of them.

But right now,. I doubt they would do me any good.

The bed-seeking is the most obvious sign of my mental health’s decay. And it’s worse than merely wanting to stay in bed, because now even reading seems like a daunting task involving far too much effort and “noise”.

Admittedly, reading the Stephen King stories is probably contributing to that. He’s a brilliant writer but his stories tend to take more out of you than they give back to you, at least in the short term.

Makes me kind of wish I didn’t have this deep compulsion to finish what I start. Were I just a little flightier, I could declare the book to be a net loss for me and put it down and stop reading it, never to look back.

But if I did that, the book would in effect,. hang there in my mind as an unfinished task and continue to take up space until I finally finished the damned thing.

Best not to get in that situation in the first place.

Anyhow. Feeling bad lately. Fragiler and exposed. Talked about it with my therapist today. ^[1] He has upped my dose of Paxil from 40 mg to 50 mg.

I hope that helps. Right now, I feel like it’s all I can do to fight back the crazy voices that say that I “shouldn’t” need a higher dose and that needing a higher dose means I am “weak” and “pathetic” and yadda yadda sis boom BAH.

The usual bullshit. Fuck that noise. I’d take being a happy weakling over being a miserable manly man every single time.

I still have that feeling that something is moving within me. That all my recent mishigas is part of a larger process of healing that is finite and will leave me psychologically better off when it ends.

But lately, my faith that it actually will end is wavering. I tell myself that all tunnels end and all I have to do is stay on the train till this one does.

That means resisting the urge to despondently hop off the train and end up staying in the tunnel forever.

Like Churchill said, “when going through hell…. keep going!”  Seems obvious, but for a lot of people, their first instinct when they feel pain is to slam on the brakes.

Not always the right strategy.

One of my most vexatious issues came up in therapy today. it’s the issue I named tonight’s blog entry after.

It’s the issue of knowing what I should be doing. And it goes like this :

The issue is NEVER that I don’t know what to do. Not really. I am a highly intelligent and creative guy with a tough but highly flexible mind that bristles with muscles. At a moment’s notice I can name a dozen things I “should” be doing.

So advice along those lines, while gratefully accepted, is essentially useless to me. I will take the suggestions and I will agree that what is suggested sounds like a great idea and probably would help me a lot.

But what I don’t say is that there is absolutely no chance I will actually do the thing. None. Nothing. Nada.

And I can’t explain why, either. So I am agreeable without ever actually agreeing to anything concrete. That’s my solution to that problem.

And the thing is, I sort of half-believe that I will do the thing at the time. It’s always a nice idea that some ideal form of me would embrace in an instant and rush out to implement. It feels good to imagine what that would be like.

But of course, this means I have left so, so, so many disappointed people oin my wake/. People who were sure I was going to do the thing they suggested because I gave them every impression that I would do it and seemed totally sincere when I said I would.

And I was sincere. Sort of. LEt’s just say it’s very easy to sincerely mean something in the moment when you know, deep down, that you won’t mean it later.

That you will, in fact, have given up on the thing before even beginning to think about thinking about doing it because that is was depression does to people.

It robs us of all motivation. And no matter how blazingly brilliant and tenderly well thought out and creatively compassionate your suggestioin is, I guarantee it will take motivation, and hence is utterly doomed to failure.

It’s like suggesting the best route for a car with no gas to take.

And I know that’s a hell of a thing to say to people. It certainly left my therapist at a loss for words. He has a tendency to give me advice, as one does to those younger than yourself. And I listen because it would be rude not to do so.

But I don’t need more fucking advice. Advice is useless to me. No matter what route yoiu suggest, the car still has no fucking gas.

What I need from my therapist is to be asked questions that force me to think of things in a new way, and thus provide the kind of disuptive unsettling of equilibrium that leads to a new, superior equilibrium.

So no more life advice. Fuck THAT noise. I always know a million things that I “shoujld” be doing and it doesn’t make a god damned bit of difference because I am out of gas.

And no advice in the world can fix THAT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m a complicated man, and no one understand me….period.

Part of me has always wanted to be a kind of secular Messiah. To be the person whose wisdom and kindness and overwhelming good will inspires people and leads them to a new understanding of the world and how they, as human being fit in it.

This new understanding would sweep away hate and distrust and discrimination and usher in a new level of civilization which will make our current level of civilization look to these new citizens to be just as bad as the Aztecs with their human sacrifices or Nazi era Germany during the Holocaust.

I would do this via my message of tolerance and understanding for all that I would put in language anyone can understand and connect with and that in turn connects with the better version of themselves lying dormant in every, and tells it that it is safe to come out now. You don’t have to be scared any more.

Escape from your torments is possible! You have only to look up… and receive!

And so forth and so on. I could probably fill a book with that sort of thing if I just let that inner Jesus rock the microphone for long enough.

And I really wish I could do that. Just surrender to that side of me and live my life according to the highest of ideals.

But the thing is, I would still be a human being with lust and hunger and a thirst for power and all those other “unworthy” emotions.

And another part of me wants to surrender to THOSE emotions. To unleash my angry id and pour my rage into the world like molten fucking lava. To take the attitude that I am finally going to get what I want and fuck anything or anyone who gets in the way because I’m coming through with a white-hot sledgehammer and breaking down barriers like a runway steamroller.

That’s the part of me that dreams of unleashing my full fury on a world full of assholes with too much power and too little brain and even less conscience and beating these motherfuckers to death with my awesome powers of satire and mockery and sheer verbal violence on an apocalyptic scale.

To be a firebrand hotter than the center of the Sun, and lay waste to all the stumbling fools, limp and compromised liberals, crazy/evil/stupid conservatives. and everyone else in the way of true progress as a species for reasons petty, stupid,. selfish, cowardly, and just plain awful throughout the world.

When it comes to words, my powers are vast – vaster than I can even comprehend – and unleashing them full force to vaporize all the impediments to progress I can find would be an excellent use of them.

But the thing is, using that kind of heavy duty magic is bound to get to feel so good that I don’t notice how much of it is spilling into my normal life and hurting those around me when I react to them with the same intensity.

And that’s not acceptable.

So both Secular Jesus and Satirical Satan have their problems.

And another part of me just wants to be nice all the time.

To live in a world of harmonious and happy emotions with no harsh vibes and no nastiness, just peace love and harmony and real human affection.

A world where I can make people happy every waking hour of the day, just by being my warm, cheerful, kind, loving, lovable, adorable, silly self

A life devoted to spreading sunshine and making the world a happier, healthier, saner, stronger, better place.

A world full of positive vibes of love and affection and acceptance and harmony, with all the harmful barriers gone and people achieving true intimacy with one another.

A world where old emotional scars fall away like shed skin cells and let the true you, the person under all the pain, come out into the light and the sun and the warm glow of being truly valued and accepted at last.

A world I would create. first for a small group, then as we learned more about what works we would expand the group, and keep on expanding it until every human being on planet Earth would be happy in the new harmony.

So kind of like Secular Jesus, but more down to earth and homey. You don’t have to believe in God or Krishna or anything else.

All you have to do is open your heart to the love that’s all around you.

The rest will take care of itself.

Then again, yet another part of me wants to be a brilliant entertainer and universally acknowledged amazing dude whose reputation is so golden that big money is competing to produce my next product before I’ve even finished half of it. To have shows fighting hard to have me as a guest because not only am I a beloved media star but I also give good interview because I am consistently fresh, interesting, .entertaining, witty, and a whole lot of fun to have around.

The kind of guy who makes people’s faces light up when they hear his name.

Someone making insane quantities of money, most of which is plowed into his ever expanding media empire. An empire with a flawless reputation for producing high quality entertainment that has something for everyone and so everyone can enjoy it, from the loftiest intellectuals to the lowliest of lowbrows.

So basically, I want to be like my hero Walt Disney if he had started out as a brilliant writer and performer. So basically Walt Disney if he had started out as Mike Myers.

And without, of course, the Love Guru.

And that’s just four of my facets. I never even touched on the parts of me that want to be the Astonishing Intellectual, the Firebrand Politician,  the Eminence Grise, the Happy Clown, the Coldblooded Assassin, or even the Deranged Lunatic.

I contain these multitudes and dozens more. But as always, I must remind myself :

These are but facets of my personality.

And I am not the facets.

I am the jewel.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s very….. complicated.

I feel really wretched at the moment. So wretched, in fact, that a big part of me wishes I would skip the entire blogging thing for today so I can spend the day in bed, hiding from reality in sleep and books and blankets and pillows.

It’s called “bed-seeking”, and it’s a known symptom of depression. It happens when our chemicalxs get into such a bad state that any stimulation at all causes pain and the only way we know to deal with that is to retreat into the very low stimulus environment of our beds, where we can cover ourselves in blankets to prevent most physical stimulation and keep ourselves buried in nice safe book which offers very little physical stimulation but is engrossing enough that it shuts out the nattering demons of our minds and gives us a chance to think for a while.

For me, it’s always a sign that things have gotten pretty bad, because if sitting at this here computer and doing stuff is too much stimulation, then my chemicals must be in a very bad state indeed.

Goddamned stupid chemicals. Why can’t they just behave?

All in all, the world has seemed too damned real lately. It insists upon itself intrusively. And that upsets my precious equilibrium enough to provoke the sort of counter-productive primitive response that leads to self-destructive self-isolating behaviours driven by panic, not our long-term self interest.

So we end up doing things like backing out of social commitments, pushing people away. dodging responsibilities and making our condition worse by doing so, and all kinds of other ways to sacrifice long term happiness for short term relief.

Right now, I wish I could dig a hole, crawl inside, and pull the hole in with me. I wish I could escape into my own little pocket dimension where it is cool and quiet and soft and comfortable and nice all the time. I wish I could walk away from my life and go be someone else for a while and escape my self-loathing that way.

Fundamentally , I wish I could die, or cease to exist. But only for a little while.

Just long enough to let my stimulus levels drop to absolute zero and then let me enjoy that long enough to started to get bored.

If I wasn’t so god damned claustrophobic, sensory deprivation tanks would sound really good to me at times like this.

Barring such extreme interventions, all I can really do in situations like this is find something to do which drains my excess mental energies without queering the deal by also stimulating said energies at the same time.

That leaves out video games, for the most part. At least when I am fully in this Code Red state. On a deep level, video games are all about the mental stimulation to me. They provide a rich stream of stimulation and interaction (when they’re good), and thus do a great job of keeping my massive mighty mind too busy to interfere with the delicate mental processes of inner healing.

In other words, they keep my conscious mind busy so that my subconscious mind can get things done.

But when even that is too much for me, I need something that is almost exclusively energy output with very little stimulation in return.

Writing suits that role perfectly.  I should do more of it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about drain lately. That’s the name I have given to the variable that represents how much of my mental overcharge an activity absorbs. High drain activities promote my mental well-being by taking the energy away from all those self-destructive mental processes that tear me apart and break me down and keep me from ever getting anywhere, and making me feel bad about THAT too.

The times when I have experienced the most drain for the least stimulation have been times when I was doing a hell of a lot of writing.

Specifically, my million word year (2011) and the five National Novel Writing Months in which I have participated.

In both cases, I was writing over 2500 words a day, and in both cases,. I was a far happier, healthier, calmer person than I usually am.

So clearly, drain works. My violent neuroses can be starved. The raging storm inside my head can be turned into a calm clear day, at least temporarily.  It is possible for me to lay my burdens down.

Paradoxically, it takes a hell of a lot of work.

And yet, when I contemplate making drain my dominant lifestyle, I get scared. It seems like too much. Like it would take me too far from the comfort and safety of my mental refuge and leave me exposed to the world and its harshness. Like that would be the worst thing that could possibly happen because that would turn the volume all the way up on life and I wouldn’t even know who I was any more.

In other words…it would be my annihilation.

That’s how it feel, despite knowing that historically, it has actually made me happy.

It’s that Face of Madness thing I have mentioned before, where you know that what you are feeling and believing is not true but you keep right on feeling and believing it because your bad chemicals force you to.

Makes me wish getting all the drain I want was as simple as plugging a USB device into my ear and charging people’s phones for them.

I’d be so good at that.

But until that glorious day arrives, I am stuck with a mind that generates so much energy that it takes a truly spectacular draining activity to even put a dent in the standing supply, and a soul too weak to make that happen on a regular basis.

There must be some way to get the whole thing working properly. Some way to arrange my life so that I am comfortable in my own skin and happy with who I am.

But I have no idea ghat that might be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Told you the abstruse stuff would be back.

I have been pondering one of my many perennial subjects today, and that is the two systems of earning activate in the world today.

In general, people think you earn the legitimate ownership of things by paying for them, and you earn the money to pay for them via either labor or risk.

Labor is by far the easier of the two to understand. You do the work, you get paid. Anybody can grasp that. And while everyone in the modern world has some knowledge of why a business pays for labour, that system of paid labour would not work unless it tapped into something deep and primal in our minds.

Namely, the instinct we have to contribute labour to our tribe.

So when people work for a ;living, what they are really doing (in one sense) is fulfilling their duty to the “tribe” of modern society. That’s why people, even quite dull ones, take pride in “working for a living” and “pulling their own weight” and so forth.

Deep down,. we need to believe that we are doing what we are supposed to be doing in society, and the money we earn for doing so is the way society rewards us for our contributions. This is the most “legitimate” way to earn in society.

Risk, on the other hand, is less clear cut. Our instincts can handle the idea of risking your assets being rewarded in proportion to the risk taken.

That’s how gambling works, after all.

What doesn’t track in people’s minds s unlimited rewards for finite risk. Sure, the founder of a business took a big risk by investing money in a new business. And they deserve a reward prop[proportional to that risk.

But the way thoings work in modern society is that the owner of the business gets rewarded via profits for as long as the business exists. In that sense, the reward is unlimited, and hence way out of proportion with the risk.

Then there’s the fact that any business with employees has the much clearer labor theory of value in play. From a psycho-sociological point of view, it’s the people who do the actual work that deserve the rewards, not the people or person who took the initial risk and who now don’t do anything but collect the profits and boss people around.

This creates a definite and distinct tension in modern society. Deep in our social programming we feel that there should be some point at which the person has been rewarded for their risk and therefore should get no more reward out of it.

Society is now set up that way, though. And I am not sure how it could be. We lack even the concept of time-limited ownership. To us, ownership is a fixed value that remains the same until acted upon by an outside force.

So basically, ownership has inertia.

If you own something, you own it till you sell it or otherwise legitimately transfer ownership of it. This is such a solid concept in modern society  that we consider ourselves to still own things that are far away from us in both time and space and which we are highly unlikely to ever see again and for which we have no real use.

These items are still, nevertheless, “ours”. No legitimate transfer of the property of ownership has occurred, ergo it’s still ours.

Back to earning. The superiority of clarity that comes with earning via labor as opposed to earning via risk ensures that the tension between the investing class and the labor class will always be there.

Or at least, it will be there until we enter a post-scarcity world where everyone can get everything they want for free.

That’s  probably at LEAST two decades away.

Let’s look at things from the point of view of the person who takes the risk. I think that even they can get confused by the difference between the modes of earning.

That’s why even the most callous of them will feel some need to “do something” in order to justify their continued rewards. This might be as minimal as checking up on the business via the Internet now and then, or as deeply involved as being the center of the whole shebang and they from whom all authority flows.

It is very rare to find the person who is one hundred percent committed to the “I don’t care so long as the money keeps coming in” philosophy.

And even other member sof the investor class will look down on such a person because they are making money without “doing anything” to earn it.

That’s why society holds a special kind of contempt for those whose wealth is entirely inherited. And I think that the people who are so “lucky” feel this keenly. It’s a big part of what drives them to fairly extreme behaviours when they are younger. Society tells them they should be happy to be so fortunate as to not “have” to work but their deep social instincts drive them to want to contribute labor to society. Not money, not fame, not respectability, but labor.

Only labor really “counts” in our minds.

Compared to that, reward for risk is a nebulous concept that,. deep down. does not “make sense” to us.

After all, a disconnected business owner isn’t “doing anything”.

So where does consciousness of this phenomenon lead us? There is no obvious solution. Capitalism could not function without people willing to take on the risk of founding and running a business. Those people are going to feel a strong sense of ownership of the product of said risk. Having that ownership abruptly end at a certain point would feel highly wrong to most people.

And yet, having that person own the thing permanently feels wrong too.

Ideally, there would be a fixed amount of profit anyone can expect from any kind of investment – for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s triple their money back/.
But how on Earth could you bring that about?

I have no idea. Do you?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m going to deliberate stay out of the deep waters of my tortured psyche and  skirt the shores of matters massive and weighty tonight in order to talk about my life and what has been going on in it.

I am doing this as a way to keep things fresh with a change that was, as it were, not in in the script. I am sure that, were I to go looking, I could find a densely packed plethora of Big Subjects and Deep Thoughts lying about in this capacious cranium of mine just waiting to be unleashes upon an unwitting (and uncaring) world, but I have grown weary of self-absorption and the augury of examining my own entrails, so tonight, it’s biographical update time.

The heavy shit will return shortly, I assure you.

The backlog is mindboggling.

Just got back from a trip to Shopper’s Drug Mart. That had not been my destination when I left the apartment.

My destination at that time was the drug store where I usually get my meds. It’s a branch of a chain of pharmacies called Medicine Shoppe, and it’s just a block from here so it is my go-to place for the hefty fistfuls of meds I take for my various infirmities.

But when I got there, it was closed, and a cheery sign on the door said “Gone to seminar! Thanks for your understanding!”.

This put me in a state formally known as “miffed”, and I chose to withhold my understanding and thus eschew the offered thanks.

“No, I do NOT understand. In fact, I reserve the right to resent both this inconvenience and the galling presumption that I would ‘understand’! I SAID GOOD DAY SIR!”

So I ended up going a block and change further to the Shopper’s Drug Mart. I don’t go there often, but when I do, it’s always for the same reason : my Medicine Shoppe is closed and I need my meds now, not when it’s next open.

Before now, that’s always meant that I needed my meds on the weekend. My Medicine Shoppe is only open from 10 am to 2 pm on Saturdays,. and not open at all on Sundays. so weekends and my medications don’t mix well on that level.

Because honestly, I don’t know about y’all,. but there only one thing that could get me to leave the house between 10 am and 2 pm on a Saturday and that’s brunch.  And it would have to be a good brunch too. A buffet brunch.

None of this “you can get a burger OR scrambled eggs so technically it’s brunch” type brunches. Fuck that noise.

And it turned out that the trip to Shoppers had some good points along with the bad.

The bad point was that it took them 40 minutes to fill my prescription, so I had 40 minutes of time to fill at the mall. Luckily, in a rare show of forethought, I had brought my current book, the Stephen King short story compilation Skeleton Crew,  with me.

So I just found a seat in the mall and read for half an hour.

The book is a factor in my recent mood that I forgot to mentioned in my recent speculations. Stephen King does not write happy stories and some of the stories in the collection are quite disturbing and unsettling and this may have played a part in my recent feelings of sadness.

I’d rather it wasn’t. After all, I am a writer, and surely I am too sophisticated and knowing to be emotionally unsettled by mere words on a page. After all, I know all about how the sausage is made.

That means eating it can’t possibly harm me. Right?

But no, of course it doesn’t work like that. If anything, being extremely verbal makes me especially sensitive to having my emotions manipulated by writing.

It just has to be good writing.  And despite his reputation for writing lurid trash,. King was a damned fine writer before he got all whiny and entitled and started doing one thing you absolutely cannot ever do if you are in the entertainment biz :

Show contempt for your audience.

That’s how he lost me as a fan. I thought some of his later books, like Needful Things,  while still well written on a technical level, had a kind of snotty disdain for the audience going on under the hood which really came to the fore via their sloppy, unsatisfying, clearly slapped on endings.

But before that era, everytghing he wrote was masterfully constructed and so well engineered that it carried you along seemingly effortlessly. As a wordsmith myself, I know how much writing and rewriting,. not to mentioned blood, sweat, and tears, and coffee, goes into making that happen, and I applaud it.

And the thing is, I haven’t read most of these short stories before. Which is strange. I could have sworn that I had read my mother (the horror fan)’s copy of Skeleton Crew several times as a child, and yet I don’t recognize most of the stories.

So either my current copy is from an expanded edition of the book, or I never actually read the whole thing .

The latter is quite plausible. I was easily distracted by new things as a kid, and it’s quite possible that I read some of the stories, like The Mist and The Raft (shudder) and Survivor Type (dark giggle) , then got bored and started reading something less heavy and more fun.

Or it could be that I read those stories I recognize  in other anthologies and that made me think I must have read this one. I dunno.

A lot of stuff I remember from my childhood does not quite add up when subjected to logical analysis today. Things that I remember clearly and yet cannot logically be true.

I guess that even a mind like mine is subject to memory degradation over time.

And I still remember science from Grade 7!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

On the page, that is.

Been feeling anxious and sad recently. Not entirely sure why.

I have theories, of course.

I think the dominant factor is that I am simply going through one of those times in the process of psychological healing where I have to process –  in other words. feel – some of the latent emotion that chokes the life out of me with its weight and makes me depressed. The only way to get rid of this burden and clear the way for healing is to feel some of those latent emotions.

Not all of them. That would take years. But a representative sample.
So that’s probably most of what I am going through. The glacier of frozen emotion that lies atop my heart has calved another iceberg, and this one has a lot of sadness and anxiety in it, and as the sun’s rays melt this southward floating block of ice, the emotion within is release into the atmosphere of my psyche.

I must have some of the geekiest metaphors around.

I am supported in this theory in the very distinct feeling I have that this sadness is finite. That there’s a certain amount of it I need to get through in order to move on to the next stage of growth and healing,  and that when that’s done, things will go back to normal.

But a slightly superior normal, because now that glacier on my heart is a little smaller. And I have reclaimed another little piece of myself from the ice age within.

Because that’s the thing about all that ice and snow inside me. It’s not just emotion that is frozen in there. It’s aspects of myself, parts of my psychological physiology, that got caught in the freezing process and have been trapped in the layer of ice ever since.

Thus, recovery is a process of self-discovery as much as anything else. With every layer of ice melted, I can feel parts of me waking up and coming online,. sometimes for the first time ever.

That’s presumably why the process of recovery. from the first time I felt the Paxil kicking in, has felt like a long process of waking up. I look back at even who I was a year ago and it feels like I was asleep the whole time.

Like I am the world’s most high-functioning sleepwalker. See the amazing virtuoso somnambulist live something approximating `a representative percentage of a life while being completely asleep the whole time!

That would be a heck of a racket for a vaudeville act. All you would have to do was get good at pretending to fall asleep and at doing things with your eyes closed.

SO this psychological iceberg theory of mine probably accounts for the lion’s share of my latest mood event. But there are, of course, other factors at play.

Like it could be that my sleep apnea has gotten worse lately and I am waking up with so much un-exhaled carbon dioxide that even awake, my body can’t cope with it, and so it just sits there taking up valuable lung capacity and reducing my oxygen intake.

That’s bound to make a fella feel a tad under the weather.

It would basically mean my sleep apnea has expanded to become waking apnea as well. That would not surprise me. Sleep apnea is a serious disease that can really fuck a person up. Smothering in your sleep is no hangnail.

The fact that I completely ignore mine and therefore I am doing absolutely nothing to treat it does not change that fact.

But I can only do what I can do. You cna only play the hand you;re dealt, and I have a lot of psychological issues that keep me from taking proper care of myself.

And beating myself up over that would be worse than useless.

It would achieve the exact opposite of its intent. Instead of goading me into action, it would simply make me withdraw even further from reality and thus become even less capable of taking care of myself.

This things are never simple.

Low blood sugar might be a third factor in my current moodscape. It was one of the first things I thought of when I first realized how bad I felt. So I snacked.

And that made me think it couldn’t have been low blood sugar that was the cause because snacking didn’t change much at all. I felt less anxious and a little more stable, but that was about it.

But now I have hit one of these patches where I am super super goddamned hungry all the times, so it’s now an open question again.

Don’t worry too much about me, though, folks. Like I told my therapist today, I feel sad but not depressed. So I am nowhere near any danger of self harm.

I feel like crying, not dying.

And I know that this shadow will pass and the sun, such as it is on my distant little planet, will return once more. I will reach the end of the process and be better off for it because I will have worked through some of my “stuff” and I am a more whole, solid, sane, and secure person as a result.

Kind of like having a cold,. only you’re stronger after.

I know I have been feeling restless lately. My work isn’t really doing it for me any more. There’s no challenge and I don’t feel like I am growing as an artist by doing it any more.

And that… sucks.

And I think I am suffering from stifled energies in general. I need something more demanding than Skyrim to fill my time and drain my energies more completely.

I have ample evidence from my life that the more of my energies I express, the calmer and happier I am.

More drain, less strain, basically.

And yet my depression has me living  like a miser while sitting atop a mountain of gold.

Something has GOT to change.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fair warning, it going to get pretty metaphorical and/or figurative in here tonight.

Because what is on my mind is mt relationship with oblivion and how what I think of as darkness – the absence of light – is actually a response to far too much light.

What I am talking about is possibilities. Like I have said before in this space, one of the prices I pay for having such a strong, creative mind is that in an given situation, I perceive far more possibilities than the average person.

And that, of course. can be downright amazing. It’s boffo for creative problem solving, for instance, whether that takes the form of devising a reason for a character to be where I want them to be to something as prosaic as how to get a piece of software to do what I want it to do.

It’s especially fun when I have one of my flashes of brilliance and come up with a simple, effective solution to a problem someone is facing.

Of course, then the trick is to get them to accept said solution despite the fact that I have, with the best of intentions, now made them feel stupid for not seeing this simple solution for themselves.

And it turns out that saying “Don’t feel bad! I could only see it because I’m incredibly intelligent!” really does not help.

True story. Not kidding. I did it once. Did not go well.

Back to the point. This ability to see possibilities where others see none can be truly magical,but there is a catch.

When it comes to decision making, all those possibilities crowd in on me and I get overwhelmed by the task of trying to choose the right one out of a sea of thousands.

There’s solid science behind this phenomenon. Recent studies have shown that. past a certain point, having more options actually makes people less happy with their choices.

Makes sense to me. Choosing the right color for your new, custom-made couch is easy when there’s only four or five choices.

But what are the odds of getting the choice right when there’s thousands of colors? Or even worse, you are told it can be “any color you want”?

I don’t know about others, but I never come to that kind of situation with a firm and precise idea of exactly what I want. So saying “you can have whatever you want” is not helpful. All it does is throw me directly into the hot white void of endless possibility where a demonic Monty Hall is asking me to choose between an infinite number of doors when only one of them has a prize behind it and the rest end in death by torture.

That’s what I am getting at when I talk about my darkness being a response to too much light. I think that sometimes, in order to protect itself, my mind simply blanks out all the possibilities in my mind, leaving me with the false (but useful) idea that I can’t see anyh possibilities at all.

It’s an overreaction, but it works.

I think that’s what leads to this feeling of my mind being frozen sometimes. My mind overreacts to a surging tide of possibilities by freezing everything in place, which sort of solve the problem but leave me with very little mental horsepower left over for actually coping with the problem I am facing.

It’s like a state of suspended idiocy. And I tend to panic when I can’t think clearly, and that obviously only makes things worse.

This phenomena of getting overwhelmed by possibilities explains my life long issue with decision making. I used to think that deciding was something that I had a general issue with. But when I got a little older, it become clear to me that sometimes I was extremely decisive and could make solid decisions quickly and confidently. And at other times, I got completely overwhelmed to the point of being on the verse of collapse from the challenge of trying to choose a carpet deodorant.

I eventually went with the citrus scent, and never looked back.

Eventually, I figured out that the determining variable was whether the decision was about myself or some other thing. More specifically, it was about whether the decision required an answer to the question, “what do I want?”

That question has always vexed and confounded me. Most of the time. I have no idea. I certainly can’t figure it out when asked suddenly. I honesty have no idea what I want. How can I know what I want when I don’t even know what my options are?

I can only assume that there are people with much stronger personalities than mine who always know exactly what they want because getting what they want is extremely important to them and so they keep a sort of list of what they want in their minds at all times and are thus always ready for the question.

I cannot fathom living that way. It sounds exhausting. I can only assume that these people have very straightforward, linear, action-oriented minds and personalities that demand they go, go, go without slowing down for as long as they can.

I feel feverish just thinking about it.

I also assume that while these people are by no means stupid or dull, they find themselves at a loss in situations where there is no obvious, logical answer and the solution can only come from subtle, intricate thinking that embraces a far wider scope of options than a more linear mind can perceive.

In other words, they need someone like me around. They need a more thoughtful and perceptive person to point their magnificently abundant energies in the right direction and to get them out of a jam when their steam-locomotive minds run out of track.

I would love to provide that thoughtfulness for someone like that. It might make them feel like I am “smarter” than them, but for my part, I would be in awe of their energy, decisiveness, and drive.

So we’d make a good team. Complementary opposites. Me the thought, them the action. Me the brains, them the drive. Me, the person who knows what needs to be done, them the one who knows how to do it.

In fact, I kind of wish I could be both of those people at the same time.

But I can’t see a single possible way that could be achieved.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t feel so good.

I feel like I have been squeezed and squashed and mangled by a thousand unnatural births and rebirths because no matter how many times I pass through that misbegotten womb, I just can’t seem to get it right.

And every single time. I’m premature, born weak and malformed and nowhere near ready to breathe and function on my own. But there’s no incubator in the infant ICU waiting for me. No worried family looking through the plate glass window and commenting on how tiny and fragile I am. No highly trained medical professionals hovering over me, measuring and monitoring and maintaining in order to make sure I am one of the ones that makes it.

My only hope for survival is to go back in and hope I get it right next time.

But I don’t.

I have been having low grade panic attacks lately. They’re not set off by any identifiable trigger, and they are nowhere near the intensity of the real thing, but they still leave me feeling haunted and hunted and harried to death.

The fact that I know it’s just chemical bullshit in my brain making me feel that way helps in one way – I don’t freak out over freaking out any more.

That’s super helpful and I am extremely grateful for it. Would not trade it for anything.

But in another way, it makes things worse, because it means I come face to face with the reality of my insanity over and over again. It’s very scary to realize – in realtime, as it is happening – that your mind is broken and you are helpless to do anything to fix it.

All you can do is weather the storm and hope there isn’t another any time soon.

I think that a lot of the time, I am in a form of denial about just how sick I am. It’s a subtle form of denial because it’s not like I would deny being ill if asked and I never truly  stop feeling my damage altogether.

But I think, as a form of self-protection, I spend most of the time thinking that it’s not all that bad, and I could shake it off and be perfectly functional if I really had to.

And in a sense, that is reassuring to me, because it shows that my mind is not completely unable to generate the kind of highly functional illusions necessary for health and healing in the human mind.

Every day, my conviction grows that without the ability to lie to oneself in order to keep our fundamental assumptions unquestioned and inviolate, the human mind cannot function in a healthy and robust fashion and is doomed to constant chaos and collapse.

Its skeleton is just too damned soft.

And the truth is that reality does not meet all our emotional needs. Even if we have a life full of love, support, validation, and all the other things we associate with emotional wellbeing, there are still a lot of treacherous gaps and gaping holes waiting to swallow us whole, and the only way to stay out of them is to generate whatever beliefs are necessary to cover those gaps and then seal those beliefs behind a wall of protective denial that protects those beliefs from interference from our metaconscious minds.

That’s the vital role that religion plays in the life of most of humanity. It fills in the gaps and thus allows people to function as if truly whole. It creates the very important protected zone from which we can self-generate everything we need in order to get our most basic emotional needs met without having to worry about whether or not it is truly “real” or not.

Our mental health is too important to leave up to the vagaries of the real world.

A classic example of this self-generation effect is the phenomenon of the imaginary friend. Children create these friends in order to meet their psychological needs. To a child, this friend is real. Maybe not real like their parents or their siblings or their classmates, but real enough in all the ways that count.

Real enough to comfort them when they need it, entertain them when they are bored, play with them when they are feeling lonely, and in all other ways be whatever it is the child needs it to be at the time. ^[1]

Religion, in this context, serves the same function, but in a form that reflects the broader scope and depth of the adult mind.  It takes something cosmic and all powerful, composed of extremely potent emotional symbols in an equally potent supporting structure, in order to “fool” an adult’s mind in the same way.

But one thing remains true : these vitally necessary illusions must be absolutely safe from being questioned or doubted. Their role as the foundation of a person’s entire psyche demands it.

Sadly, people don’t realize this, and bring their religion into public discourse and thus open it to being questioned and brought into doubt, and then end up lashing out in anger as a response because this questioning hurts them on a very deep and intimate level. A level far too deep for a reasoned and rational response.

It exposes them to the truth that these deep beliefs do not represent rational reality. That was never their function. Their highest priority is to fulfill the emotional needs of the believer when rational, objective reality fails to do so.

Being an accurate model of external reality is strictly secondary. A highly accurate model of the world is useless if you are emotionally crippled by unmet needs.

Take it from one who knows.

Keep this truth about the function of religion in the human psyche in mind when you are tempted to attack someone’s religious beliefs as being logically absurd and completely unsupported by reason and evidence.

You will be, of course, be right. Religious beliefs do not make any sense.

But that was never their purpose in the first place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.