Actual blogging will commence shortly, but first, I have something to share.

This is how I just asked for RSVPs for the next FRED on the FRED Facebook group :

(To the tune of Manic Monday by the Bangles)

The 4th will be a FRED-ish Sunday
That’s our fun day
Our chat with everyone day 
Our burgers on a bun day
The 4th will be a FRED-ish Sunday!

I feel compelled to share that with you because not only I am inordinately pleased at my own cleverness and whimsical charm, but I just spent twenty minutes working on the dang thing and I think that should count.

Anyhow. On with the blogging. Ahem.

(TRIGGER WARNING : I will be touching on the subject of suicide today.)

Nobody ever actually wants me around.

That’s what my depression tells me. Despite buckets of evidence that the exact opposite is true, the feeling persists, and it persists because it was installed when I was a very young child and that kind of thing is not easy to overcome.

Thus, it is an example of true madness because it is a thing I know not to be true but cannot help but believe.

So much for the supremacy of the rational mind. Oh well, I never truly believed in it anyway. Not as such. There have been times when it felt like I was a mighty wizard in total control of my mental domain and capable of feats of astrounding power and subtlety and wisdom.

But that’s always been bullshit.  The truth is that there are parts of my mind, the parts I call the dark forest, that cannot be touched by even my mightiest of magics, and I am therefore a slave to their irrationality.

I believe false things. It hurts my rugged philosopher’s pride to admit it, but it’s true. I used to think that was impossible – that it was impossible to know a thing is false but believe it anyway.

But that was the arrogance of the conscious mind talking. It presupposes that there is no belief which is not based on reason and thus subject to reason,.

Bullshit. People believe things for a lot of reasons and most of them are not positions derived from reasoned thought.

Instead, they are,., god damn it, I have wandered way off point into intellectualization once again. Oh well, at least I am beginning to catch myself at it.

Back to the point. I have this deep feeling that people are barely tolerating me and that stems from my childhood and leads to me feeling like I am a horrible, horrible thing, less than human and way, way less than worthless. That I am a liability to the world and a bane to all who know me and the world would be better off without me in it.

That’s where the suicidal thoughts come in. I am a long way down the road of recovery from actually believing that to be true, but the feeling remains.

The feeling runs so deep that at one point, it even informed the severe hygiene issues I had when my depression was very bad. I figured I was so inherently repulsive and that nobody could ever like or love me so what was the point of showers and such?

People would hate me anyway. I’d still be inherently deeply repulsive to them. At least if I smelled bad, they would have a reason other than my deep down revolting self.

That’s something I truly believed at the time. There’s no such thing as a clean turd, I said. No matter how hard you scrub, it’s still shit.

Crazy, I know. That’s some highly diseased reasoning there. But it matched how I felt about myself and I was too depressed to care so I kept believing it.

I’m feeling much better now. I still struggle with the motivation to look after myself sometimes and I have days when I can’t stand the thought of dealing with myself on any level because I am so goddamned sick of myself.

But most of the time, I keep it together. I still don’t shower every day – that is beyond my reach right now.

But I shower four or five times a week, so I’m am not far from there.

As for the feeling that nobody ever wants me around, I am on the plus side of a stalemate with it. I correct the thoughts when they pop up and I push back against the feeling whenever I can.

But it’s still the size of an elephant and as hard as it is to stop an elephant, it is still far harder to get it to go in the opposite direction.

I suppose what I really need is strongly positive social input. Something to override those harsh and toxic early lessons and reach that child crying in the cold inside me and show him that there is light and warmth and hope after all.

But it would have to be really strong because I am so delicate and damaged all throughout that part of my psyche that it’s very hard for anything to get through. People can tell me nice things about myself and treat me well but all that positive energy gets blocked by my anxiety and tension in social situations, not to mention that toxic swamp of self-loathing that lies ready to swallow up any positive feelings.

Maybe I’m too scared for hope. Maybe I am too scared to let the love and warmth of the world in because deep down, I feel like the second I do that, life will crush me heart so bad that there will be notghing left of me any more.

Like I’m a lab mouse who has received a painful electric shock the last 100 times they reached for the cheese and now won’t even look in its direction no matter how safe it might seem or how good it smells.

The risk is just too great.

I’d rather starve.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

ht, as a jumping off point ^[1], I will start me issues with letting go of things.

For example : I was just playing Skyrim. Quelle surprise. But I had to stop in order to fix myself some food^[2] and then get my sweet fat ass to bloggin’.

And I didn’t want to stop. It took a non-trivial act of will to make myself do it. I didn’t want to change gears, and when I made myself do it, part of me viewed it as being ripped from a nice warm happy room and thrown into the icy dark outside.

All this from just stopping playing a video game.

But it’s not just Skyrim. Whatever I am doing, I will react to change in mode the exact same way. For instance, when I finish tomight’s post. I will step away from the computer and take a nap. ^[3]

And that very same part of me will view that like I am being from my womb untimely rip’d. It’s like there is always the part of me that can’t accept a justified change of gears and that’s the part of me that adds drag to my every action, weighing me down in every single thing I do that is significantly different than what I am doing.

That part of me is never, ever ready for change. Any change, no matter how good. It could be a change from waiting for a bus to having amazing sex and it wouldn’t matter. Part of me would still be wishing I was still at that bus stop and not in this new situation where everything is different and weird.

And I wasn’t always like this. I clearly remember having the simple instincts that regulated my activities, the primary one simple being getting tired of what I was doing and deciding to do something else.

That doesn’t happen any more. I don’t get tired of playing Skyrim. I learned that when I first had my tragic and precipitous plunge into addiction. I played (and played with) Skyrim for every waking hour of the day, not even eating and barely sleeping.

And the thing is, I didn’t feel bad, exactly. Not the way you would think completely neglecting oneself like that would hurt. The hot circuit between me and the game pushed all the usual sensations like hunger and thirst to the periphery of my consciousness. And, I reasoned falsely, if I don’t feel bad then everything must be okay.

In a way, it’s shocking that our minds are even capable of that.

Anyhow, back to the point. I can feel how wrong my mental situation is. It’s not normal to spend most of your waking hours playing a video game. And it’s not just abormal, it’s unhealthy. Life is meant to contain more ingredients than that.

And yet, I remain addicted. Healthy or not, when I am playing Skyrim, I am happy. Against that no logical and/or sensible argument can prevail. I have, at my mouse-clicking fingertips, an unlimited supply of a stimulus that can keep me sufficiently absorbed that there are no mental CPU cycles left for being depressed or anxious or picking myself apart.

All my demons are too busy with the game to harm me.

That’s my kind of religion.

And unlike other addictions, it has no self-regulating limitations. Whether you are addicted to crack cocaine, gooey desserts, or long distance running, there is only so much of it you can do before physical limits kick in.

Plus, in the case of substances, you only have so much of them, Once you finish that, that’s it, you are out of it, and so the experience limits itself that way.

Not so with Skyrim. No matter how much I play, I will never run out. EVen when I exhaust every single aspect of the game that I currently have at my disposal, with a few minutes work I can download entirely new things that revitalize the game and suddenly it’s a whole new toy.

I’ve been slowly trying to pull myself away from it ever since I fell into that deep dark hole, and I feel like I am making progress but only peripherally.

I have not come anywhere near confronting the addiction itself. That will only happen when I have the strength to choose to do other things with my free time. Things that cannot help but seem pale and dull and onerous compared to my beloved Skyrim.

Hmmm. I set out to talk about my problem with letting go, didn’t I? Oh well. ^[1]

It is the nature of addictions that they make it nearly impossible to believe that anything in the woirld can be as good as the object of the addiction.

That’s the point of my obesity related question, “If you could take a pill that made it so you would get everything you get out of food now but from half the amount of food, would you take it?”

Clearly, the logical answer is yes. After all, it is one heck of a good deal. You would lose weight without sacrificing anything at all.

What a bargain!

And yet, for an obese person, the instinct is to say no. Why? Because we cannot believe that we could ever be happy with less, even when it is stipulated as part of the hypothetical. It’s an unthinkable thought, an unbelievable belief.

The addiction can only see less food as deprival, no matter what else is said.

And that’s how I feel about Skyrim. Intellectually, I know that there was life before Skyrim and in said life I did many things with my day and enjoyed them all.

But I can’t relate to that any more.

For me, there is just Skyrim and the void.

And the void left town.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.