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.

 

 

 

 

What I should do

‘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.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. ‘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 tomo