This trying to live life in a totally different way thing is hard. y’all.

I have been trying to just fucking relax about stuff. Relax about life, about my problems, about my medical issue…. everything.

I am taking a big chill pill and it’s not going down easily.

Partly that is becqause I find it very hard to escape the punitive mindset. My depression thinks it has been keeping me safe by putting up all those “here there be dragons” signs all over the place and then growling and shaking the scenery if I get too close. That;s not the kind of thing that is easy to change.

And one of the favorite hymns of the Church of You Suck is the one that goes “well, without me punishing you, you’d never accomplish anything! Sure, go soft on yourself, lie on the beach in the sun and forget all about all your problems.  That will only make them worse and then I will be kicking your ass for being such a loser!”

And all to the tune of “I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts”.

But of course, that particular hymn is utterly full of shit because I’m not accomplishing anything right now, under its direction. In fact. I am pretty sure that the only way I could accomplish less with my life is to lapse into a coma.

So really, the only way to go is up. Changing tactics cannot make things worse. It’s like a perfectly chaotic system. Any energy input can only increase order.

I use such nerdy metaphors. But they are the ones that come naturally to me and I am not going to lie my way into relatability.

I’m perfectly happy writing things that only nerds can understand. They are, after all, my people, and I love them.

Anyhow. The way I see it, worst case scenario, I continue to accomplish nothing with my life under the new regime. but I am substantially happier about it.

That’s a net gain however you slice it.

So I am trying to dream myself into a newer, healthier shape, and as astrologically incorrect as it is, the form that has arisen in my mind as part of that process is the form of a lion, or perhaps a big tiger like Shere Khan.

I imagine myself as vast, powerful, strong, and deadly… but also very lazy and self-indulgent and fond of a good stretch and purr in the sunshine.

The scene attached to this image in my mind is one where there are some troublemaking animals in my little jungle kingdom and, just when it seems like something bad is about to go down, a previously unnoticed long shadow lazily detaches itself from the shade of a tree, meanders over to the brewing fracas, blinking away sleep, and emerges into the sunlight, squinting a little as it adjusts to the sunshine.

It is clearly a massive male tiger whose body ripples with muscles underneath its striped fur. It walks with the languid ease of the truly confident, and as it moves, every animal around it moves aside as though pushed by an invisible tunnel-shaped force field.

It strolls unhurriedly up to this scene and. in a voice somewhere between Shere Khan and Jeremy Irons from Reversal of Fortune, says “Well hello there, gentlemen. You know, I was just having the strangest dream. I dreamt that some ruffians had come to my territory and began to harass my people. Isn’t that silly? Who on Earth would ever be that foolish? Hmm?”

As he says these things, he stretches and grooms himself in the manner familiar to all cat lovers, but at his size, it’s an utterly terrifying show of power in repose. especially when he sharpens his claws on a tree.

The villains, by this time, are scared shitless (possiblly literally. if I am in the mood for that kind of comedy) and manage to stammer out something about their total inability to imagine someone that stupid, or anything else for that matter.

The tiger smiles sunnily, and says “I’m glad you agree. Dreams can be very silly, sometimes, can’t they? Now if you don’t mind, I was quite enjoying my mid-day nap, and I would like to get back to it…

And then, with a soft but deadly edge to his voice, ” assuming there are no further interruptions. “Then, back to breezy and cheerful,. “But there won’t be. Will there?”

The villains nod like bobbleheads in an earthquake and get their fuzzy butts out of there like their tails were on fire.

The forest critters break into wild cheering, which the tiger acknowledges with a lazy wave of a paw as he slinks back to where he was napping before.

Just as the cheering is dying down, the tiger puts a claw to his lips and says “Shhh. ”

And the jungle goes quiet.

Wow. That’s a pretty good scene. I think it would be extremely satisfying in that particular way that only seeing your accepted alpha show that they are much stronger than any threat can be.

In our modern individualist society, to be safe, it’s best to express this via a parent-child relationship. Seeing a parent kick serious ass to protect their children is something that will make almost anybody stand up and cheer.

That’s why the final confrontation between the Xenomorph Queen and Power Armor Ripley at the end of Aliens is so damned good.

“Get away from her you BIIIIIIITCH!”, thanks to Sigourney Weaver’s incredible performance, embodies the battle cry of every mother of any species who has ever had her primal parental protective circuit activated.

“When’s the first time you knew, for certain, that you could kill a person if you had to?” 
“…when I had my first child. ” 

Exactly. I don’t remember what that is from, but it sums it up perfectly.

If I ever kill some motherfucker, it is far, far more likely that I do it in defense of someone I care about than anything to do with my own interests.

‘Cause deep down, I know I can go from fluffy friendly fox to full on mama bear defending her cubs in a heartbeat.

And you know, maybe it’s uncivilized of me, but….

…I am kind of proud that she’s there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So if I didn’t play Skyrim all day, what the hell would I do with myself?

I still retain a residual memory of the Before Times. I seem to recall that what I did was more or less the same – reading, eating, playing video games, using the bathroom.

So arguably, Skyrim hasn’t changed my life that much. Not on that level. The fact that it’s been the same video game for a long time is unusual, but so is Skyrim.

But on another level. it has consumed a hell of a lot of my energy and time that could (in theory) have been used on something productive.

Like writing stuff, submitting stuff, job hunting on UpWork. and so forth and so on.

But all that hangs on the question of whether I could be doing those things. and that’s where things get very, very sticky.

Obviously I am physically and intellectually capable of it. I know that I have the capacity to do it, at least in theory.

But theory isn’t practice, and there is a great big monster call Depression that sits between my capacities and actions, and blocks nearly everything from getting through because if it doesn’t, the sleeping giant of my anxiety wakes up and I start to freak out.

Or something like that.

It’s like those 70’s horror stories of patients kept sedated for years because when they woke up. they became “agitated”.

If you set the bar low enough, we all wake up “agitated”. Add waking up in a straitjacket and strapped to a gurney in a hospital, and that will fucking agitate anyone.

I know I would be agitated as fuck, given my claustrophobia. That’s the kind of thing that can turn a mild mannered intellectual like myself into the scary biker it takes five cops to subdue in a heartbeat.

Anyhow. Enough about institutional abuse and back to the more personal kind.

This “sleeping giant” aspect of my depression makes it hard to do anything even slightly different from the usual routine. Especially anything new.

New things come with a much higher stimulation level, and my coping mechanism for keeping the giant asleep is to brutally limit the amount of physical stimulation of any kind that I get.

It’s not a good method. It is, in fact. grotesquely draconian. It’s like Procrustes’ bed, where everything that doesn’t fit in the tiny little box of my life is brutally severed.

And as long as I keep myself busy with my distractions, I don’t think about how kmuch I am sacrificing by living as I do. I am too busy to look around and wonder what is outside my tiny little box.

I can even pretend my tiny little box is the universe.

And it works in that it gets me through time without much pain or friction or stress. With Skyrim et all, I can survive day to day life without having to face my problems and actually deal with them.

But at what price? Here I am, brain the size of a planet, with phenomenal capacities that I have barely even tapped into,  and all I do is play video games all day.

I feel like this is a pattern I share with a lot of great creators : vast capacities crippled by deep psychological issues.

I suppose that’s why we need agents.

So clearly, my life is not going how anyone would want it to go, especially not me. Time to take this in and begin an aggressive campaign of self-improvement. Right?

Wrong. It’s not that simple. Nothing ever is when it comes to depression.

I am nowhere near healthy enough to be able to set a long term goal and work tirelessly toward it. My interior weather is far too stormy and unstable. There are times when I am feeling good enough to take on that big old world. but they are few and far between.

Mostly, all I can hope for is to make it through the day.

And I can’t take the obvious route, the biologically simple route, of reacting to my state of distress by taking direct action against it and doing whatever it takes to return myself to a state of contentment.

I am not that healthy an organism. My inner workings are too broken. And when you put energy into a broken system, you only end up breaking it further.

Plus, in my case, the very agency in charge of getting shit done is in itself corrupt. punitive, and malign. Anything that has a potential for negative self-evaluation is seized upon by my inner prosector and used to punish me into submission.

Thus, the exact opposite of the normal motivation occurs. The dagger of potential is turned inward and polunged more deeply into my heart.

And as far as I can tell so far, the very part of my mind that is doing that is the part that would be in charge of executing life changing plans via motivating action.

And maybe that is, in effect. by design. Maybe that is how my depression works as a system. The punishing prosecutor is there to keep me in my box because what my depression is ultimately about is keeping me safe.

Dead. But safe.

Well, that’s what you get when a timid child is left to raise himself. There was never anything to encourage any kind of risk taking in my life and therefore I became catastrophically risk-averse and oversensitive to loss.

Had I had a healthier early childhood (one sans the rape), the urge to explore the world and expand my capacities and learn from experience might have been strong enough that. despite the emotional poverty of my life, I would have become a self-starting conquer the world type person.

But I received an almost incalculably severe injury before I had even completed my primary brain growth, and that left me crippled in a way I could not understand, let alone explain to others.

If I had a time machine, I would go back in time and kill whoever did it.

As is, all I can do is cope as best as I can.

And try to remember that, as counterintuitive as it is,  before I can make things better, I have to believe that things are okay now.

That means no self-prosecution over all the things I am not doing.

I have to make it safe for the real me to come out and play.

And that is going to take a whole new mindset.

So it might be a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

“Reality’s  a nice place to visit, but…”
–Me, Just Now, Right Here

I have a complicated relationship with reality.

On the one hand, I am clearly living a lifestyle which minimizes contact with it. I am a recluse who spends all day playing around in a virtual world where he feels safe and powerful because in Skyrim, I am not clumsy, clueless, or a mess.

In Skyrim, I am a hero with awesome skills who routinely defeats evil and saves the day. I can be a mighty wizard. a fearsome warrior, or a sleek and deadly assassin, and many things in between. I don’t have to deal with my social anxiety (except in one party scene) and I have no depression or other issues b ogging me down.

Skyrim is something I can do.

And when I am not playing Skyrim, I am asleep or reading before going to sleep or eating while watching whatever online.

I feel like I am becoming even less social lately and it worries me. I don’t even hang out with the fuzzies as much as I used to.

It’s just so much easier to do things by myself.

And I know that withdrawing further from people is not a vicimless crime. As hard as it is for me to belive, people actually do like having me around and consider me to be a very special person in their life.

And objectively speaking, I am kinda fun to be around.

But it’s very easy to forget that when I am esconced in my hermit-ically sealed little world. My depressions is always ready to convince me that nobody cares if I live or die and that my not being around is probably a relief to them.

The demon speaks :

“Wow, I just realized I haven’t seen Fruvous in a while. No wonder I have been happier and more relaxed lately. ” 

“I know. Isn’t it great? That guy is such a pathetic loser. And he tries so hard to be funny, but all he is really doing is irritating people. “

“Too true. People only put up with him out of pity. He should get a clue and just stop bothering people and go away. “

“Well we haven’t seen him in a while. Maybe he finally did. “

“Ha! Well if he really did go away, it would be the only useful thing that he’s ever done!” 

Both laugh, end scene. 

I am sorry if that was harsh and upsetting to read, but I feel a lot better for having gotten it out of my mind and onto the page.

It has occurred to me that I need to stop suppressing my negativity in an attempt to bend myself into a better shape and just let loose with it in my writing and thus expunge it from my soul.

The above was a first tentative attempt at that. It may get much, much worse. And I apologize for that.

But that’s how I feel a lot of the time. That people are having those exact kinds of conversations when I am not around and sharing stories of how pathetic I am and how they wish they didb’t have to endure me any more.

You can see how, in that state, it is damn near impossible to believe that people would actually miss me when I am not around. Even though I know they do.

Anyhoo, back to the subject at hand. Pretty much everything in my life points to someone who wants as little to do with reality as possible while knowing that he has to maintain some contact or descend into the finaly madness that is his worst nightmare.

Well, okay, that last part is not necessarily obvious.

But the thing is, on another level, I have a far better grasp of reality than most people. I have real vision and I see what is really going on and understand how it all works to a level that sometimes creeps people the fuck out.

I can’t help it. I’m a mutant.

All my life, I have “seen” things that nobody else saw. Not in the “I see dead people” sense, but in the sense of active understanding of how things work and what people are really doing as opposed to what they say they are doing or even think they are doing.

Things which are blatantly obvious to me are opaque mysteries to others, and my depth of understanding makes me a chronic soothsayer.

I try to keep my saying of sooth confined to this space and people who know me and know that extraordinary perceptions are part of the package along with the wit and the silliness and the friendliness.

Well, semi-friendliness. Another thing I have been (reluctantly) pondering lately is the icy hostility that underlies a lot of my attacks of extraversion.

Underneath it all, I do not trust people. More specifically, I have no faith in people. I have no faith in anything. All I have is knowledge, insight, and understanding. If I trust someone, it is because I have used my X-ray vision to peer inside their skulls and decided they are worthy of my trust.

And there is always part of me that stays coiled like a snake, ready to lash out at people for hurting me, and nobody is immune to that except maybe my mother.

That part of me – the crazed lunatic ready to take a hostage and make demands at any moment – has been with me for a very long time, and has gotten in between me and others many times by filling my head with paranoid thoughts and doubts about the sincerity of damn near everyone, all the time.

And you know what? Past a certain point, paranoia turns into solipsism. If everyone is lying all the time, wouldn’t that mean you are the only “real” person?

My point is that underneath all my happy fuzzy emoting is an ice hard ball of hostility and rage ready to explode like a hand grenade  and spew shrapnel in all directions while shouting “LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!”.

And thaty for someone who avoids as much reality as he can, I sure do “get” a lot more of it than most people.

I guess when you are on the outside looking in, you see things that are invisible to the people on the inside.

It’s not worth it. At all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I didn’t go to the party.

I stayed home and had my usual Saturday night. Ordered from Pizza Hut, played Skyrim too much. The only difference was that I had done my blogging after lunch, in anticipation of maybe being at a party that evening and hence not being able to blog at my more usual 7 pm (ish) time.

So I logged on to Tapestriest MUCK and was social there instead.

Right now, there is a grappling match going on in my head between the reigning champions, my eternally self prosecuting depression, and the rising contender, my newly formed will to fight that shit.

The up and comer will win eventually. But it will be a battle of attrition.

Right now, normally, I would be beating myself up for not going and calling myself a loser and stupid and pathetic and feeling just terrible.

And for what reason? It’s not like such self-abuse will make it easier for me to make the “right” choice when the next Challenging Thing comes around. In fact, it will only add to the tension attached to the whole subject and thus make me even less likely to make the “right” decision next time because saying no is the easiest, fastest way to escape the tension and pressure.

And what really gets me is that this self prosecuting side of me is the exact same side that would have been punishing me and making me miserable if I had decided to go.

Then it would have been saying I was stupid to have come, I should have stayed home where it is safe, I’m pathetic and everyone here can tell and wishes I hadn’t come either, I should go run and hide somewhere.

That’s because it is a dishonest prosecutor that seeks not truth but the satisfaction of punishment, and hence, I cannot win.

So fuck it.

This persecution persists because it is the only way I can express the flaming ball of rage that burns inside me at all times.

The fact that I don’t seem like I am filled with rage to others is a testament to just how deeply I repress that rage. I don’t vent it externally at all. Ergo there are no outwqard signs of it.

About the only times when it can be seen is when I am talking about politics or ideology, or when I am rising to defend someone I care about.

Surely, my history of getting really, really mad when people I care about are harmed or threatened is heavily informed by this endless rage of mine. It is one of the only route out for my bitter rage and so it lunges at that escape rout whenever it presents itself, and tries to get as much of itself expressed as possible during this brief window of opportunity. So I get super frigging mad.

Like, crazy mad. Perfectly willing to visit extreme harm on people mad.

And that’s the sort of thing that makes me afraid to tap into that rage. Because it makes me feel like harming others. Like I want to Hulk out and go on a Godzilla level rampage of murder and destruction, destroying everything in my path until I could finally go back to being sane again.

And yeah, this fear is probably how my depression guards its primary power source. But that does not mean it can be disregarded. I know for a fact that I am exactly the sort of person who might snap and do something really crazy and bad some day precisely because I have all this rage building up inside me and there is only so much internal pressure any containing vessel can take before it explodes.

I can only hope that if I ever get to that point, I can get the help I need before I do anything explosive. And when I say help. I mean like… commital.

Might do myself a lot of good to be somewhere where it is someone else’s job to control me. I have been holding it all in by myself for so very, very long.

My mind keeps wandering away from the writing today. I must need more sleep.

My point is that I can’t afford to just throw open the pressure valves and vent all that nasty rage all at once. It would take me to Crazytown at bullet train speeds and I have worked so hard to stay out of jail and the psych ward that it would be real shame if I blew it all now.

Actually, I guess there is a third way my rage vents : through video games. I kill a lot of virtual people in Skyrim, and I am not inclined to deny that this gives me the sort of deep atavistic pleasure that the expression of rage as violence brings.

So I suppose, in a sense, I should be glad that I have had video games as a pressure reliever all these years because otherwise I might have turned into one of those neckbeard nerds who hates the world and takes enormous pleasure in trolling people and inflicting as much emotional harm as possible.

Or, ya know,, a murderous psycho. Or at least someone with serious anger issues.

And I would rather die than turn into my father. And I mean that literally.

And, no word a lie, I could be the most downright Satanic trolls out there. I am very good at pushing people’s buttons and there is a side of me that loves fucking with people and making them dance for my amusement and feeling of superiority.

My combination of verbal skills, emotional insight, and sheer diabolical cleverness, plus my trickster nature telling me that all I am doing is forcing people to think. could make me one hell of a chaotic destabilizer.

Hmmm. There must be a way to use that power for good.

Trolling right wing message boards?

That presumes those people deserve to be trolled.

I will have to think about that. In the meantime…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My friend Garth Spencer is throwing a party tonight, and I honestly don’t know if I will go or not, even though I passively indicated that I would.

It’s a social anxiety thing. This will be an event which has the Fruvous double whammy – people I don’t know and a limited amount of space.

Those two combined tend to be anathema to me. That combo is what drove me out of the local furry fandom that I founded and led myself.

Between the two, the crowding is the major factor. I can’t be all jammed in with other people without at least a place to sit and something to absorb my attention. like food or a crossword puzzle or whatever.

And in that case, I am deliberately closing myself off from the upsetting stimuli and that does not work well with being at a party.

So it’s the claustrophobic aspect that is the big deal for me. There is more to it than claustopoobia, but that gives you the basic idea. The fact that I can’t move around freely and that so many people are breathing the same air as me in that tight space sets off a super major freakout level anxiety attack and it doesn’t matter if I am otherwise having a great time, the fear will rise like the mercury in a cartoon thermometer until I have no choice but to get the fuck out of there.

The fact that I am also in a social anxiety producing situation doesn’t help any, but it’s nowhere near as big a problem as the claustrophobia.

That claustrophobia is a monster, y’all.

So that’s the case against, more or less. It could be the kind of thing that’s bad for me toi be around. And it’s not like if I hit the danger zone I can just bug out and go home.

Garth lives in Vancouver. I live in Richmond. It’s a 45-60 minute drive to get to his place. I have no idea how long it would take via mass transit.

But suffice it to say that it would be a long time before I got to someplace where I felt safe. And that’s a real problem.

I suppose I could go wait in Joe’s car. That means that if I go, I should bring the book I am reading and maybe some snacks and a drink.

And some horse tranquilizers.

The whole thing makes me once again wish I had one of those immediate anti-anxiety meds like Xanax in my anti-anxiety arsenal. It would be so lovely to be able to zonk out my freaking out circuits for a time.

And I don’t want to start drinking. I have enough health problems as it is.

Speaking of which, I am beginning to worry. I have been having these attacks where I feel incredibly, incredibly cold, especially on my right side. And the cold feels like it is coming from inside me. Like I’ve suddenly got a refrigerator in my bloodstream.

Now any way you slice it, that is a very bad sign. It suggests that circulation to half of my body becomes compromised in some way on a semi-regular basis.

Last Thursday night was the worst attack so far. Bad enough that it broke through my usual thick wall of disconnection between my mind and my body and forced me to become consciously aware of the problem.

Once that happened, I realized that these attacks have been happening for a long time, and like a fool I just shrugged them off as just “getting a chill” (like that’s a real thing) or there being a draft in my room (that I couldn’t feel).

For years now, I have experienced times where it felt lik emy right foot was in a sock full of ice water and my right hand felt like it was two seconds from frostbite. In a healthier person, these incidents would raise major alarms.

But my depression shuts most things out, especially when I am knee deep in my distractions. That’s why it had to get  pretty bad before I really recognized it.

I am starting ot think that I had a mild stroke at some point, or maybe an embolism or anuerism. A tiny one – the sort that can go unnoticed or present as just a vague unpleasant feeling or a touch of the flu.

And since then, the right side of my body has been malfunctioning. Either the circulation is messed up (which seems unlikely given how localized it is) or something is up with my central nervous system somewhere (which is exactly the sort of shit that diabetes causes), but I am a fairly fucked up dude.

So right now, I am gathering the wherewithal to make a doctor’s appointment to go see him about all this. I get the feeling that such a doctor’s visit will lead to a world of unpleasant experiences as I get tested for stuff, but I am worried enjough that I am willing to do it anyway.

I mostly don’t want to die. Mostly.

And the thing is, this sort of thinjg was inevitable. I do not take good care of myself at all. The depression keeps getting in the way. I have no internal models for caring for myself because nobody ever modeled that by taking care of me as a kid.

I was left to my own devices.

And my devices suck.

Children are not competent enough to look after themselves. That;s the entire reason they need parents.

But my marks were good and I never complained, so everything must have been fine, right? And we’re much happier ignoring you, so we choose to believe it!

So I treat myself as I was treated : I neglect myself.

And it doesn’t matter how “wrong” it is. It’s what I am stuck with. I will continue to try to look after myself better but it’s going to be a long time before the supply of self-care rises to meet the demand.

Let’s hope I live long enough for that to happen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Another subject that came uop oin therapy was what happens when a person prioritizes safety over absolutely everything else due to a childhood trauma.

Someone like me, for instance.

Superficially, it sounds like a non-problem. What could possibly be wrong with staying safe? Safety first, right? And you can’t be too safe.

And that is literally true. The nature of safety is such that, by definition, there can be no positive excess of it. It’s like “healthy” and “sane” in that respect.

But what can be true is that an obsession with safety can lead a person to expend far too much energy, worry, stress, and other inner resources chasing after that last 0.1 percent of safety and deny themselves almost all of life’s pleasures because they just can’t take the risk.

I keep coming back to the metaphor of the fascist state. Your typical fascist dictatorship is obsessed with safety. That’s because absolute power leads to paranoia^[1]. And these governments are often shored up by claims that only a facsist state can keep the citizens safe from an outside force of unlimited evil and deviousness.

And because the government controls all information and therefore keeps the citizens from being able to externally verify anything the government says, the people have little choice to believe that they are, indeed, being saved from rapacious and malign forces on a daily basis.

And the dictator, who orders the propaganda to be made, also believes it.

The result, of course, is a country with extremely little freedom. Every movement has to be approved of by numerous government bodies. The slightest of changes gets bogged down in endless committees that strangle the idea in its cradle. An atmosphere of oppressive tension pervades the culture and the people are, in general, unhappy.

Safe. But unhappy.

All the people have to keep them going is a very short list of government-approved activities. They do these activities with great fervour and devotion precisely because they are all they have, and they do their best not to think about anything outside these activities for fear of attracting the attention of the thought police.

This describes the inner life of a depressive like me with startling precision. I have a very short list of activities I do, and I rarely think of things outside them because I don’t want to wake up the pervasive fear that hounds me constantly.

And because I never go outside my little world,. I never get a chance to find out whether my fears are justified or not. Specifically, I never get a chance to receive the positive social input I need in order to counter the negative social input I got as a child.

And even when I am out in the world, like when I was going to Kwantlen and VFS, I am in such a constant state of freaking out that nothing gets in anyhow.

That is, I think, the point. The fear might be unpleasant but it.. wait for it… keeps me safe. It does so by blotting out all social inputs, replacing them instead with its own crazy messed up inputs that, being propaganda, only reinforces the fear.

Hence the voices telling me that everyone hates me, nobody wants me there, and I should just go home and hide.

This icy cold fear isolates me, which again, must be the point. And it is nearly impossible to negotiate any social environment with all that fear going on.

It renders me socially numb, essentially. That’s where the awkwardness comes from. Turns out that being numb all over makes you very clumsy.

Go fig. How counterintuitive.

The awkwardness leads to social failure and that, of course, only reinforces the anxiety that is causing the problem in the first place.

Sometimes I wonder if the only way out of my cage is to say “I don’t give a fuck if anyone likes me, I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want and fuck the consequences.

That’s certainly what our heavily individualist culture says I should do. There are few messages more strongly reinforced in modern democratic culture than “Be yourself!”. And who knows, that might actually work.

There’s certainly more than enough anecdotal evidence to support that claim. SO many stories of people who were miserable until they decided that they’d had enough and  didn’t care what anyone else thought, they were going to be themselves.

What I am saying is that it’s more than plausible.

And all that is holding me back from making such a declaration is my own fear. That  icy hand, colder than space, that grips my heart when I try to outside my box.

And that is, once more, the point.

All the fascist tactics employed by my inner government are designed to keep me safe. To brutally minimize risk no matter the cost. To keep me in my little world because said world is known and controllable and predictable and hence safe.

Anything else sets off all the alarms in my head and pulls me out of my nice warm socket and throws me into a red alert situation without my even knowing why.

It’s amaing to look back at my days of schooling and realize how freaked out I was more or less constantly. I didn’t notice it at the time because, and this is very sad, for me that kind of thing is normal to me.

Social emancipation, then, can only come from convincing my inner government that it is glasnost time and begin a program of slow, gradual reforms that will open me up to the world and make conditions more free and wondrous inside me.

That deep down animal fear is not rational, however, so it’s not easy to shift. That scared little animal inside me has been freaking out for a very long time and it will be very hard to talk it down from its tree.

I wonder if there is a drug that could temporarily knock the poor thing out so I could approach a social situation calm and confident, without the shrieking howling void making me a social cripple.

Maybe that’s what all that Xanax is about.

Maybe I will ask my therapist about it.

Maybe there is hope for me after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got to talking about what a strange child I was in therapy today, and it got me thinking.

Maybe I do land on the autism spectrum somewhere. Even as a preschooler, I was not like other children. It’s like I was born with an excess of sensibleness and intellect.

Or was I? Maybe I became that way after I was raped by a stranger at the tender age(s) of three or four. It happened when I was so young that it’s very hard for me to remember what life was life before it.

What I do know is that long before school damaged me. I was already an offputting little alien boy in many ways.

Tonight on the Nebula Network – they knew raising Zkzorn, child of an alien embassador, would be hard. But they had no idea HOW hard. 

Let us review.

I never formed an attachment to a stuffed animal, comfy blanket, or any other transitional object. I can’t remember ever treating a stuffed animal like a real animal.

There was an incident where I was given a stuffed toy version of Nipper, the RCA dog, in front of a group of expectant adults when I was four or five years old.

And I did my best to have the right response. I thanked them politely for the toy. But I could tell that this was not they wanted without quite understand what they DID want.

Presumably, something very Hallmark where I instantly fall in love with my new toy and give it a big hug and all the adults get a big warm fuzzy moment from it.

And I am all for those moments. But I was not necessarily suited to be in them.

It stands out in my mind so clearly because it’s one of my earliest memories of disappointing people by acting like myself.

Which leads me to my next point : I never had the urge to conform as a kid. I was always ferociously and doggedly myself without the hint of compromise.

Like I have said in this space before, it literally never occurred to me to change myself in order to fit in. And that’s a problem because it means I did not feel social pressure, or really social anything. I was not picking up whatever signals normal children pick up that make them want to fit in and integrate with their peers.

Hence my thoughts on autism. A vital social circuit was broken in me, just like with the Barnacled Hermit android, and I was not even aware of what I was not aware of.

What is water, asked the fish.

If someone had suggested that I change to fit in, I would have dismissed it out of hand. And if they had persisted, I would have told them to go fuck themselves.

And that makes me the hero of our individualist narrative, right? The hero is always the pne who insists on being their own individual self Screw comformity! Be yourself!

But let me remind you that I was miserable.

The social isolation was brutal on me. I desperately wanted to connect to my fellow student and have friends I could do fun stuff with and hang out with and all the other things I saw friends doing on TV.

And yet, it never occurred to me to change to get it. I wouldn’t have if it had. It’s a tragic Catch-22. I was depserate for something I was incapable of getting.

It’s truly heartbreaking if you think about it.

Third example : I never had an imaginary friend. That also would never have occurred to me. I was absurdly literal minded and logical and analytical even as a preschooler.

Similarly, I never invented scenarios and play-acted through them with my toys. I had virtually no interest in toys to begin with, and I certainly never improvised stories with them, like I have seen normal children do.

And I have to ask myself : why the hell not? What the hell was wrong with me? I ask this not to judge but because my heart cries out for that little alien boy and I feel like if I understand the problem, I maybe can reach back in time and help.

Or at least help the grown-up version of that little alien boy.

To me, the pattern is clear : my social circuitry was completely broken. That’s why I never had an imaginary friend or play-acted scenarios with my toys. Those activities come from our social instincts waking up and exploring various scenarios and creating what the mind needs in order to meet its needs before the child knows how to do it themselves. They are vitally important in a child’s growth and my lack of it would be a huge red flag for today’s child care specialists.

They woiuld quite rightly see it as a sign there was something very wrong with the little alien boy and out would come the autism spectrum tests and I would have gotten a diagnosis and some form of intervention early on.

I had a form of that. I was subjected to a large battery of tests when I was in elementarty school. I didn’t mind at all. I loved all the attention and I found answering all the questions to be fun.

I still find that kind of thing fun, come to think of it. Honestly, I am just happy anyomne is interested enough in me to ask.

That’s…. sad, isn’t it.

So to sum up, I was a very strange and clearly quite damaged child. The system tried to figure me out. but I suspect that I was so different that all those tests did absoutely nothing to enlighten them about me because they all presupposed some kind of shared attributes of all children and I matched none of them.

So i went through school as this weird but always well-meaning kid who was painfully bright and way, way ahead of the other kiddies intellectually, but a special ed reject when it came to my social education.

Well I have always been too damned unique for my own good.

Guess I will just have to make the best of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.