Feeling rather bleh at the moment. Just woke up from some of that hyper intense REM state sleep that always leaves me  feeling all disoriented and messed up.

Right now, my head is full of cobwebs, I feel dizzy and confused, my head hurts, I am having a lot of trouble focused on what I am doing, and I feel a slight tingle all through my body that is a sure sign that I have not been getting my recommended daily allowance of oxygen due to my untreated sleep apnea.

Sleep hurts me sometimes. That’s not supposed to happen. That’s not right.

I’ll try not to go off on one of my “why can’t I take care of myself properly” ranting ruminations. Because depression, that’s why.

Depression makes self-care very difficult, especially for someone who was neglected as a child like myself. There is only so much I can do and that amount varies from day to day and moment to moment.

It all flows from that terror of leaving my tiny little hidey hole of retreat from the world inside my head. Anything that involves me leaving my tiny comfort zone activates my deep anxiety and the clock starts ticking on how long I can fight that deep anxiety before I have to yank my tentacles back and close my shell for a while.

Yeah it’s a weird image. Those happen here.

I’ve thought about the tentacle thing before. Not in the ecchi hentai schoolgirl orifice invasion sense, but as a metaphor for my approach to life. At all times I stay in my comfort zone deep inside my mind, and deal with life via extending cautious tentacles into the real world, always ready to haul them back in like fishing line on an automatic reel the second something makes my anxiety level exceed its very low trigger point.

On a good day,. I am willing to come out of my shell a little in order to get what I want or to take advantage of something good. But for the most part, anything too far away from my timid tentacles to reach is simply not possible for me.

I’m just too damned scared/

That is the source of all my “I just can’t” moments, where I can’t do something and can’t explain why .The real answer would be, I suspect, something like “because my depression won’t let me” or “because that scares me and I don’t know why” or, I supposed, “because my tentacles aren’t long enough yet”, although that answer would probably get a few strange looks.

To put it mildly.

Growth and recovery, for the likes of me, comes from pushing myself to stretch those tentacles out further than they have ever gone before, maybe even taking a few steps out of my usual anchor point.

If all goes well, what I get out of it is proof that exceeding my limits does not always lead to instant catastrophe and regret and self-excoriation over how stupid I am for having done something I “know” is a bad idea.

If it goes badly, of course, that catastrophe happens. My anxiety explodes like a fucking hand grenade and all I can think of is surrender and/or retreat.

Whatever lets me go back to my teeny tiny comfort zone and lick my wounds and wait for my anxiety level to slowly go down to the point where I can feel safe.

Well, as safe as I ever feel, anyhow. An acceptable minimal state of panic equivalent to my usual level of background panic.

Those are the stakes. I might get a littler better or I might feel a lot worse for a while. I never forget that extending my limits is good for me, but that won’t matter if my red alert condition is triggered and I am helpless to fight the raging storm inside me.

That said, I have made a lot of progress over the last couple of years, and that comfort zone is bigger and stronger than ever. And I have gotten a lot better at weathering the storms by reminding myself that it’s only weather and it will pass and after that I will be warm and dry on solid ground once more.

But it’s still a tentacle based world for me. In a sense, getting the writing gig that I did made me backtrack some because I could work for… well, not a living, but for money, anyhow – from the comfort of my computer and not have to deal with the world at all besides sending my script to Prasad every working weekday.

Oh, I pulled the trigger on that, by the way. Along with my 60th episode, I messaged him that I wanted a raise from $10/episode to $15/episode. And that I wanted to work directly with the animator(s) and Ryan, our voice actor.

I am positive that if I can work with them directly via some robust online collaboration platform, I can improve the quality of our little toons ten times over.

Here’s one of the latest ones :

Ugh. The “automatic” lip syncing is terrible, the timing my my jokes is all wrong, and the whole thing comes across as amateurish, clumsy, and laaaame.

At least, from my point of view. If you thoroughly enjoyed that, god bless you, but from my side of the screen, it is not good enough, damn it., not good enough.

I have mentally quoted that line like a thousand times when I am fed up and my controlling urge is on the rampage.

That’s why I am very reluctant to actually watch the things. It pains me to see my words go wrong like that and makes me feel acutely embarrassed about being associated with such shoddy work.

When I ignore the videos, I can be the faithful writer who just writes the thing, submits it, and collects his paycheck.

But if I watch them, when I obsess over the final product and that is not good for me.

Working directly with the team is the only solution, as far as I can tell. Well, either that, or get my own account on GoAnimate.com and make the fucking things myself.

And let me tell you, I ma very tempted to do just that.

Maybe I will.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the thing.

All my life, I have had this sense of power. A feeling that enormous latent energies lie within me and that I am a person of extraordinary gifts who could really have an impact on the world. My mind crackles and sizzles with the kind of energy that average people can barely even dream about. I’m also highly creative, a very nice person, and I have no problem letting other people shine.

In short, there’s a rela chance that I might be an awesome human being.

And that scares the hell out of me.

In in tonight’s entry, we’re going to try to figure out why.

On the surface it makes no sense. It’s like being born rich and being afraid of your own money, or having natural athletic gifts and hiding them from everyone.

I’m in a position most people would envy in terms of natural gifts. But for all the time I have felt that sense of power, I have feared it. That caused me to ignore the information that comes with this feeling of power, and when pressed to dismiss it as something that didn’t matter and/or didn’t count.

It’s like there is me, and there is It. I’m the sweet, funny, lovable nerd and It is some kind of terrifyingly brutal machine that works for me, but strictly under the table.

Scares the hell out of people just the same, though.

I am sure that at least part of it is a fear of the responsibility that comes with so much power. I have a strange relationship with responsibility – part of me welcomes it and part of me avoids it like it was radioactive mutant cancer.

And the level of responsibility implied by my gifts terrifies me. It gives me the feeling of being trapped in my mind’s gravity well about to be chocked  by the life a responsible person should have if they are gifted like me.

My god, it even implies that I should be doing something with my life. Fuck THAT.

That leads to what I feel might be a real issue here : the feeling that if I embrace this power of mine, it will tank me out of the warm comfortable socket of my life and rag me kicking and screaming into the light.

And despite all my talk about wanting to walk in the sun again, the thought of being pulled out of my comfortable little hidey hole and forced to account for myself scares the living daylights out of me.

I take great comfort in my social invisibility. At the same time, I constantly complain that nobody notices me.

What I’m saying is that I am a complicated guy.

As I have been contemplating this subject, the outline of a science fiction ish short story has formed in my mind. It would be about a world where the government is constantly looking for high IQ people in order to take them, by force if necessary, into government service. Our hero would be someone with a high IQ who hides it for fear of being detected and indoctrinated and forced out of his comfortable low-status life.

The story would be about the day he is finally detected.

And sure enough, he is pulled out of his life, away from his friends and co-workers and everything else he knows, has all his clothes and possessions taken away from him,. and is given things “more in according with your new station in life”.

So there he is, in a grey funk, miserable in his weird new clothes in this weird government room around all these weird new people who are loud and efficient and always on the go, in this place where everything happens too fast or not at all, and all he wants in the world is to go back to his life and hide forever.

This sets the scene for a conversation between our hero and someone from the government whose job it is to convince him to go along with the whole thing willingly rather than making them use more force on him.

Eventually, he would learn that his new life is not so bad and that there are plenty of government jobs where he can truly help people, which is something he has always wanted to due.

There. Now I don’t have to write the damn thing.

And maybe another aspect of my fear is that my power seems so much bigger than me. And with so much force at its disposal, it’s like being at the controls of a massive machine you have no idea how to operate yet one wrong move could end in unthinkable disaster for everybody.

I suppose there is a social aspect of it too. I already have trouble relating with people without hanging a sign that says “super genius” around my neck.

I think the talking  version of the Warner Brothers’ Coyote did that once.

Perhaps I am in a form of deep denial. Part of me stubbornly insists that I am not that different from others and I can live in their world and be both like them and with them.

But I am a giant in a world full of pygmies (my friends and family excluded, natch) and that is possibly what frightens me the most. The idea of myself as Gulliver in Lilliput, desperately trying not to step on anyone, chills me to the core.

And yet,. it’s the truth. I am not like them. I’m not like anybody, really. Maybe I would be better off accepting that I am an alien amongst humans rather than rather lamely trying to blend in with them.

It’s a hard problem to solve. Denying a fundamental truth about oneself is always a recipe for disaster. And yet I can’t imagine truly owning up to my power. When I think about it, I feel myself pulling even further away from people until I lose all contact with the reality outside my mind.

That is my ultimate nightmare : the slender cord of my contact with reality finally snapping and leaving me trapped in my own mind.

That’s worse than being buried alive.

Because being buried alive ends.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.