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.

That title is my way of admitting that I have no idea what to write about tonight in my signature “honest yet oddly endearing” style.

It’s a great combo if you can pull it off. But be warned – what you see in this space is the product of many many years honing a particular persona and if you choose to try to emulate it, do not expect similar results right away.

In other words, “Professional driver on closed track. Do not attempt. ”

It’s always going to bug me a little that “don’t try this at home” type warnings are viewed as necessary. I was a kid when the whole “imitatable acts” cases went through, and I never bought the whole notion that children’s TV programs should be held accountable for some dumb kid getting hurt because he was imitating He-Man’s powerup sequence and got hit by lightning.

Well, okay, that never happened, but still.

If Little Timmy (or Tammy) falls off the stoop and cracks their wrist while pretending to be their favorite cartoon hero, that has nothing to do with the cartoon. It could just as easily been a passage from the Bible they were imitating, or even something straight from their own fertile imaginations.

And it takes a very special kind of twisted, impacted, super entitled middle class mindset to even try to blame the cartoon for what the kid did. To me, it has always seemed like a combination of the hysterical NIMBY parent feeling guilty about letting the child get hurt and a completely and total inability to take responsibility for one’s actions if doing so conflicts with that great rush of righteous anger that comes with throwing the blame on an outside force, however dishonestly.

I mean, what kind of person does something like that?

Being mad is so much more fun that parenting!

Had a bit of a cock up on the job front. Apparently, I was so tired and spaced out when I did my episode last night that I totally forgot to actually send it to Prasad.

And I did not realize it until this evening, so it was very late. Technically. I doubt he would have looked at it before Monday anyway, but still.; I goofed up.

And you know what? Whatever. The only workable solution to the way I freak out over these things is to immediately relegate them to the past and move on. Exoriating mtself over them is counterproductive, to put it mildly, and so I am better off just taking it philosophically, even when that makes me seem like an irresponsible dickwad to other people in my life.

It’s not that I don’t care and it’s not that I am not sorry. It’s just that dwelling on it for any period of time leads to very bad things for me, and I have to start that particularly energetic downward spiral by nipping it in the bud the moment it begins.

I don’t like that it has come to this, but I see no other route. My only consolation is that I am confident that it will be a temporary stepping stone towards getting the sort of sold sense of self-worth that can weather dealing with my own failures without it initiating a total cascade failure of self-loathing in my fragile psyche.

It’s hard to be me. I don’t recommend it. Would not incarnate thusly again.

Actually, I don’t have it all that bad. I have loads of talent and intelligence, I have safe and stable life circumstances, I have a tiny but steady gig as a writer, and I have a Skyrim habit that brings me many hours of fun every single day.

It might not seem like much from society’s point of view, and there’s a lot of people who would call me a loser. But I don’t care. All I care about is enjoying the life I have and letting other drives work their way to the fore before making any big decisions based on an arbitrary cluster of “shoulds”.

One voice getting louder every day as how dissatisfied I am with my writing for Prasad lately, and how the work itself isn’t really doing it for me any more.

As my father would say, I really outsmarted myself on that point. I gave Prasad my ultimatum without even considering the fact that if he accepted my terms, that meant I had no choice but to keep doing the work.

D’oh! So I figure I will keep going for twenty or thirty more episodes, or maybe 35 more so that I hit 100, and then reevaluate.

I’d like to think that I will also look for other work during that period, but I have to be realistic about my energy levels. Or maybe the right term would be “wherewithal reserves”. I only have so much energy I can devote to trying to change the envelope which defines me, and I have to strike when that reserve peaks.

Until then, no pressure, whatever. Maybe I will suddenly get inspired and spend an afternoon on UpWork applying for things I’d enjoy. Maybe I will do nothing of the sort and end up just playing more Skyrim. I couldn’t really say.

But both are fine. I am currently getting through life without a lot of pain, worry, fear, strife, or chaos, and so if that continues, fab.

And if that leads to my reaching the point where I am ready to reach out and strive to make it to the next level of growth and achieve a superior equilibrium, that’s awesome too. Both are good.

What is important is that I keep fighting to learn how to lead a natural life, free of corrosive self-consciousness and n-dimensional paranoia so I can simply be myself and trust that will be enough.

I get closer every day. Now and then I remove another of my radical self-consciojusness and move cloer to living in harmony with myself in the world. Eventually, I will have ripped out all the unnecessary superconscious machinery that does nothing but sap my clock cycles and my will to live, and then I will be free to life life with the carefree attitude and easy self-confidence I had when I was a preschooler.

I can picture this new version of me so clearly in my mind.

And if I can do that, I can make it real.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.