Feel fairly chemically depressed lately.

That means that I have a strong feeling of there being a cavernous void at the center of my soul that devours everything but the barest amount of energy needed for me to survive and maintain my current crappy lifestyle.

And even that take a sustained effort of will.

Were I a different sort of depressive, I would be staying in bed all day and not dealing with anything or anybody and crying a lot and possibly even harming myself.

But that’s not me. I am not that kind of person. I keep going no matter what.

And who’s to say which is bettert? Perhaps that other kind of depressive, by falling to pieces and losing all hope, hastens the process of depression and that speeds them towards some process of renewal that leaves them feeling a lot better.

More importantly. by falling apart, they stands a decent chance of clearly signaling their distress to the world and attracting some kind of nurturing from it. People in their support network might even support them, emotionally and otherwise.

But not me. I keep it all to myself. An ironic thing to say in my tell-all (well, tell-most) blog,, but it’s true. That’s what the biggest revelation in my entire recover was about.

I can talk about my depression all day long. That’s easy for me. I’m chatty.

What I have so much trouble doing is actually expressing it on an emotional level. It took me five years of therapy before I could share my dark and bitter emotions with my therapist. Before that, it was all just talk.

I just realized that this ease of expressing words but not actual real live current emotions is the trick behind my illusion of total openness. I will talk about damned near anything about myself to anyone – whether you call it being an open and honest person, or call it being a social retard with no sense of boundaries.

But if they asked me, “What are you feeling right now?” I would be shocked and stumped for a few seconds. Because that would mean someone had pierced my disguise and was asking to see the real me.

Talk about a feeling of exposure.

I would probably end up saying “Fine” or “okay” or “not bad” or the equivalent. Something that answers the question without actually revealing anything. The response thus accomplishes the goal of making the person go away, either literally or by changing the subject to something less difficult for me.

So now that you know how the trik is done, dear reader. you will recognize it when you see it again.

And the thing is, I am a good enough conversationalist that I can keep people distracted with all my magic tricks so that they never realize that I am hiding something.

I’m hiding the real me. Shhh, don’t tell.

So expressing emotions in realtime is a very big challenge to me. Realtime is just too… real. And I can talk about my depression in detached academic terms all day.

But get into the emotional heart of it and I am uncharacteristically mute.

It all comes bacjk to that old bugbear of mine, intellectualization. Emotions in realtime are raw and immediate and I have had no time to detach myself from them and thus intellectualize them. That means I have to deal with them in their unprocessed state and that makes me feel like I am going out of control and we can’t have that, can we?

Next thing you’d know, I would be doing and saying spontaneous unfiltered things and dealing with things head-on instead of when they have been converted into symbols in my head and thus defused.

That can only lead to disaster.

Or finding out who I really am. Either or.

Because it only just occurred to me that the real me has to be the person I am when I am not in control. It seems intuitively obvious to me now. The real me must be the sponaneous me because that’s the version of me that flows from my full being, emotions and all, and not just the icy reaches of my intellect.

It’s the me that squats in his high tech hog wallow and plays video games all day that is the fake me. I have been making the classic mistake of thinking the person I happen to be at the moment is who I am, and that’s just not true.

The real me is the person I am when I am out with my friends and enjoying their company and conversation. The funny, weird, sweet, fascinating, warm  person with the sparkling wit and goofy sense of humour, both turned up to 11. The guy with the big brain and even bigger personality. That’s the real me.

That explains why, when I come home from being out, I get this feeling of deflation and despair, and a little voice inside my head says “I don’t want to go back in the box!”.

Because once I get over the initial anxiety reaction of being out – no prob, it’s pretty mild when I am with friends – I relax, lose my self-consciousness, and start actually living.

This is, to put it mildly, an epic revelation. All this time, I have been thinking that the depressed shut-in version of me was the real me and the person I am when I have ot leave my lair is the fake one.

But that was just the depression talking, convincing me that the part of me that longed to be home safe again proved that home was where I belonged.

But no. That feeling is an illusion enforced my anxiety, and I am not my anxiety.

I am that which experiences the anxiety….and therefore I can choose to experience something else with absolutely no violation of self.

So fuck anxiety. Time for IT to back into ITS box. It’s played its part and now needs to get off the fucking stage and let a legitimate show perform.

Man. I just blew my own mind. Several times. Impressive.

I will leave you with this thought, dear readers : I am Fruvous. Fruvous is me.

And everything else is just dust on a diamond  – something meaningless to its inherent value and unworthy of consideration.

Time to wipe it off and let it shine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow/.

Lousy sleep. Sweaty and disoriented. You know the drill.

The words, they do not come easy right now. I am seriously torn as to whether it would be smarter to go back to bed rather than blog at my usual time, which is now.

On days when I have nothing in particular to do in the evening, I blog somewhere nearish to 7 pm. On days when I do have something to do in the evening, I blog withing a stone’s throw from 1 pm.

Fascinating, I know. But wait, there’s more.

On days when I am feeling particularly ill, I sometimes break the blogging into two 500 word sections and do one per sitting. That gives me a smaller and therefore far less intimidating goal to face per sitting. .

That doesn’t happen very often though. I have done literally thousands of blog entries. I am quite used to it by now. The words flow fairly freely, even on bad days.

Like right now. Although I must admit, I don’t feel ill so much as I feel tired and sort of gross. That might change before I am done typing.

That’s the great thing about being totally unstable. Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes and it will change!

Ha ha… ha.

If it doesn’t change by the time I hit 500 words, I guess this is going to be one of those two segment days, because I am damned tired. This is what happens when I get behind on sleep. I end up having that difficult kind of sleep which I think comes from my mind going into REM oversdrive as it catches up on all the dreaming it missed.

I guess that means that when my head clears, my head will be clearer.

Or…. eh. You know what I mean.

I sometimes wonder if I would sleep better if I didn’t drink so much Diet Coke. I don’t think so. I seem to sleep just as well (or, more times than not, just as badly) whether I have had any Diet Coke recently.

Then again, I do drink a fair bit of the stuff. And I have a strange relationship with caffiene. Sometimes its effect is strangely delayed..

So I dunno either way. What I do know is that I am addicted to the stuff, and that can’t be just because it tastes so good.

If I go without for long enough, I begin to crave it. Not in a hardcore way, just at a nuisance level. If that goes on long enough, it escalates to mild fantasies of Diet Coke consumption. Fantasies in which the Diet Coke tastes like the nectar of the gods.

I find it all terribly amusing. It’s such a small addiction that it’s downright adorable. I might feel differently if I suffered from withdrawal symptoms but I don’t. I don’t get cranky, or sleepy, or headachey if I don’t get the stuff.

The symptoms are mild and easily dismissed.

I have never goitten into coffee because I have never had a reason to do so. If I had a job, things might be different. I might get into the whole coffee thing both in order to have the fuel I needed to work and in order to better fit in.

The sad thing is that I am 44 years old and drinking coffee would make me feel like a grownup. SO would having a job.

Because I still haven’t grown up. Not on the inside. I am frozen at around 13 years of age. I was never truly a teenafer, not psychologically. And apart from my college years,. I have led a cloistered life from which there seems to be no escape.

I mean, I know what I need to do next. The only way I am going to resolve the conflict between this feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction with my life and my massive intertia is to set out to do something challenging to said inertia and bulldoze my way through the fear and resistance until it is done.

And I will do so. Soon. Ish.

But right now I feel too tired and weak. I just want to crawl into bed and go back to sleep. PRess tghe snbooze alarm oin life and hope to feel bettter when I wake.

But I have miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep.

And around 270 words.

Sometimes I feel like I am stuck in the nozzle of a funnel and all this stuff drops from the sky and gets funneld down to land on my poor head.

What I need is the strength to fight back, To solve problems instead of avoiding them or escaping from them.

And the courage to turn around, look my ghosts right in the eys, and demand ID.

But my life is always a struggle between what I know I “ought” to do and what I actually can do. It would be lovely if those two lined up more often.

But I cna only do what I can do. The notion that I could be doing more to help myself is both noxious and specious. It’s a toxic attitude that only serves as an expression of my depression. It’s an attitude I can’t afford to entertain.

And, it’s true that I’m not happy with my life. That needs to be expressed too. I keep waiting for that crisis moment where I have finally had enough and I break out of my shell in a moment of pure rage, but it’s been a long time coming.

So maybe I need to think of some larger move. Something clever and strategic that is both within my current powers and effective in drawing myself out.

If only depression was lke any other illness and you could just spend some time in the hospital and come out completely cured.

But no. It is, instead, a daily struggle against a montrous burden that crushes the life out of you and makes the simplest things impossible.

I want to walk in the sun again.

I want to feel like I am alive.

I want the springtime of my soul to finally arrive.

And I am so very tired of waiting.

I will takk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks, Sir Philip Sidney.

How geeky is this : I know that line because the superhero The Vision said it when establishing a rapport with Hank Pym.

Basically, they were nerding out together. Gotta love it.

Tonight’s blogging will be an uphill struggle because I have been havinjg troiuble sleeping lately and it’s definitely taking its toll. I can feel my medium term memory filling up and displacing my working memory, which in turn makes it hard to stay focused and hard to stya in the here and now and hard, sometimes. to remember who I am and what the fuck it is that I am doing.

But only for a few seconds. So far.

Oddly enough, this does not impact my video game performance as much as you would think. I think that’s because video games offer such a rich and reliable stream of stimulation that it can compensate for my lack of working memory by keeping what brain space I have left in a hyper excited,. high performence state.

The reason I am overdrawn at the sleep bank is that I had such a hard time getting to sleep last night. I don’t know why. But my mind just would not slow down so I could rest. It just kept whirling around like an out of control merry go round.

It took hours of laying very still and letting the windmills of my mind wear themselves down before I got to the point where I could drop off.

And then I woke up less than two hours later. and couldn’t get back to sleep again. So I had to get up and do stuff.

Since then,  I managed to get an hour and a half of near-sleep and that is it. Right now, all I really want to do is take a nap.

And that’s a good sign in that I am at least getting sleepy instead of feeling like my eyes are being held open like in A Clockwork Orange. And a voice in my head says, through a bullhorn : I hope you’re enjoyiung the ride, because you CAN’T GET OFF!”

My mind is kind of haunted.

But I have pizza on the way and blogging to do, and so I cannot just curl up in bed and catch up on my sleeptime.

There are thing that need to be done. And eaten. Things that need to be done and/or eaten, whichever is appropriate.

I am struggling with my meaningless existance lately. And I don’t mean that in some throwaway, hyper dramatic emo way, either.

I mean it literally. My life is devoid of meaning because it lacks the most critical form of meaning : meaningful effort.

A lot of the time. I feel like I am just biding my time and waiting to die. What else do I have to show for my time? It has been a long time since I did anything that really meant something, as judged by the only judge that matters…

Wapner. Just kidding. It’s me!

And maybe that’s part of the problem. I am mentally ill, as you all know, so my judgment as to what is meaningful effort is, at best. somewhat suspect. It could be that part of the problem is that no matter what I do, if it conflict with my self-loathing and therefore would require a massive restructuring of my mind, I will reject it.

That’s how a lot of badness persists in the human mind. Our brains automatically rejects things which would require too big a change or that are inconsistent with what is already known and taken as true.

It’s a necessary function that protects mental integrity, but it operates just as efficiently and effectively whether what is known is rock solid truth or felonious bullshit.

That’s why people are so adept at rejecting evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs. It might be the most credible and verifiable evidence possible, but if it conflicts with what is already there, the mind just says “Nope!” and rejects the information before it can destabilize the psyche.

It is a rare person indeed that can truly be naked before the truth.  It requires extraordinary mental discipline (and maybe being somewhat mentally fucked up) in order to really commit to the spirit of the scientific method, which I formulate thusly :

I will believe nothing that that the evidence does not support, and everything that it does support, no matter what.

Italics on that second part, because it’s the part most people have the hardest time with. It’s relatively easy to reject things for which there is no evidence.

I’m not saying most people do it, I am just saying it’s easier.

But accepting the truth of that which conflicts with a great deal of what the person already knows is extremely difficult and not for amateurs.

Hence “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. In fine detail, that is not logically justifiable. The nature of the claim has no logical connection to its burden of proof. There is either sufficient evidence to support the claim or there isn’t.

Calling a claim “extraordinary” is, strictly speaking, an emotional valuation. not a logical one. It just means that the claiim feels implausible.

But plausibility is also an emotional valuation. not a logical one. The truth is the truth no matter how we feel about it.

But that’s nitpicking. For the most part, this maintaining of integrity in the human mind correponds sufficiently to reality for it to be useful.

And honestly. I am not sure we have a choice. I mean, I’m a mental mutant from the shadowy fringes of society and I doubt I could accept strongly conflicting evidence more than twenty percent of the time.

Because the truth is that, under all the mental machinery of the logical mind, there are still things we simply do not want to be true. And we willl avoid believing those things for as long as we can because we don’t want to be upset.

It’s a very human weakness.

And as such. I treasure and value it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s bizarre how little I know about it.

I have led a very sheltered life. I have done very little. I have stayed out of life’s way and hid myself away from the world for almost my entire adult life, and that means that I have not tried a lot of things or done much.

I’m not mad at myself for this. I am very ill. My mentqal illness has limited my life and continues to do so.

But something’s got to change or I will go nuts.

I have these fantasies of being able to be a much much more social guy. The sort of guy who gets invted to parties and who goes on little day-trip adventures and did not feel limited by his fears or his poverty because he knows how to get the most out of life no matter what the circumstances.

And when he is out and havig fun, he would never, ever wish he was safe at home and never feel exposed and judged and want to run and hide from everything forever.

He would just take things as they come. The Dude abides, man

I wanna be that guy. It would be so awesome. And I can feel him in me in that vast vast expanse of unused potential inside me.

It woudl be another version of me, and somewbhere inside me there are thousands of those. People I could have been if life had been a little kinder to me, or if I had gotten a vastly different start in life, with a different kind of family.

I suppose most people don’t think like that. They can live in the moment and take life as it comes and not go anywhere near the bizarre confluence of creativity and identity fluidity that makes me think about that kind of thing.

Somewhere in my mind, possibilities are iterated and options explored and potentials tested and so forth and so on.

Back on topic. I could be that amazing guy I dream of being… I am positive about that. He lives within me, in a sense, and I can feel him struggling to be born.

And that is going to happen some day.

But first, I have a lot of shit I need to let go.

It’s the same psychological debris that I have talking about “getting rid of”  for forever now. And I have had a great deal of success in doing just that.

My psychological burden is far, far lighter now.

But I think it’s time to face the facts that it is not just garbage that needs to go. I also need to let go of things I hold dear.

I don’t know which things yet. All I have now is the feeling that my tortured psyche is formed around a great and terriblre knot of crushing tension, and everything else revolves around that knot,. like flotsam in a whirlpool.

And I am not exactly good at letting go. Oh, if it’s material objects, I can be quite clinical about getting rid of that which I no longer need. Same with files I collect, like mods.

The letting go I am talking about is far deeper than that. I am talking about letting go of that which I cling to the hardest. The things I haved held onto in order to keep from falling into the eternal abyss of insanity and completely losing my grip on reality

But these things are also killing me. Some of them, at least/. And I have a strong feeling that the precariousness of my position has been vastly exagerrated by my depression and that I could let go of everything and fall and nothing particularly tettible would happen as a result..

The abyss below might well be a quarter inch thick and when I pass through it and land on the other side, safe and sound, I will wonder what alll the fuss was about.

But I can’t do that. Not yet. There are muscles in my mind that I no longer know how to relax because they have been tightly clenched for so long. There are pains so central to the core of my psyche that I literally cannot imagine life without them.

And there deep traumae that my vast and powerful intellect can’t ever reach, because the problem is with the very thing that is doing the reaching.

Even my big powerful brain is sick, flawed, and incoherent.

As I continue to this journey called Recovery, I get ever closer to the source of my river of pain. Every day I fight the current to go upstream, upstream, always upstream. My ultimate goal is to cut the pain off at its source by healing that deep wound that causes all of my problems and making myself whole and clean and healthy again.

Maybe then I can get that little redhaired kid with the precocious mouth and the lack o fear of adults and the endless charm. Maybe I can rescue him from that place he took his mind to in order to escape being raped.

Maybe he can finally come home. A home where he feels loved, valued, respected, and safe. A place where things are happy and healthy and functional and robust.

Other people have that, or have had that. I’ve seen all the evidence, both on TV and in real life. Somewhere out there, people are whole and strong and feel good about themselves/. They like their lives, which are rich and full and entirely real. They have jobs and family and friends and everything else they need in order to thrive. They feel love, happiness, and even joy in their lives, and they never get addicted to anything because they do not have massive gaping holes in their psyche that have to be filled with something. even if it’s temporary.

Even if it only makes the hole bigger.

Even if it makes the whole problem worse.

Even if doing so is the reason your life sucks.

Something has ot fill that hole.

The hole inside of me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling overwhelmed from within today.

It’s aversion and aversions that does it. One thing overwhelms me when I trry to think about it and the possibilities rise like a swarm of wasps, so I back away and try to think of the next thing, but its possibilities multiply like fractal micro-organisms and so I get the fuck out of dodge on that, and so for and so on till I am close to having a nervous breakdown over what is, objectively speaking, absolutely nothing.

It’s all in my head. But then again, aren’t we all?

Had to beg off doing Paragon tonight because I have been suffering through some IBS badness all day.

It started about ten minutes after I ate lunch and seemed to come out of nowhere – one second I was fine and the next I had that awful feeling like there is a heavy foot pushing down on the contents of my lower intestines.

Like my guts are a trashcan and someone is pressing the contents of it down in order to make room for more trash.

There must be a more elegant way to say that but after ten minutes trying to come up with it, I am officially moving on.

I am having enough problems staying focused on my blogging without getting hung up searching for les mots juste.

Where was I. Oh right. To sum up : I am sick.

Add that to the fact that my usual Thursday therapy session got canceled and it’s no wonder I am in a grumpy mood.

One good thing happened today : I picked up my new glasses. Yay! Only two weeks (to the day) after the appointment.

It would have been a LOT sooner but I kept forgetting to return my optometrists’ phone call. And when I finally remembered. it was last Friday, which was Good Friday, and so they were closed.

By the way, am I the only one who things calling the day Christ was crufified a Good Friday is a little messed up? I mean, I don’t want to go down the whole “is Judas in Heaven or Hell” rabbit hole, but I am pretty sure that it wasn’t a good Friday for Jesus.

Probably his worst, to be honest. Worse even than that time Paul (once called Saul) brought his new girlfriend and everything was really awkward because she didn’t know their references and wasn’t part of the scene and then, even though she insisted everyone just ignore her and go on like usual. not ten minutes later she freaked out and screamed something about how everyone was “ignoring” her and stormed out.

That was pretty bad. But it was peanuts compared to the Crucificion.

And why is there no Good Thurday to celebrate the Last Supper? It could be a day of families gathering for a nice meal together.

And of course, like I say every year. Easter Monday celebrates the day that the Apostles rolled back the stone again and looked in the cave, and said “Ayup! He’s still not in there. ”

And then they prayed for Christ’s risen soul and for all the sins of the world that had now been washed clean in the Blood of Chris, but mostly for a long weekend, because Sundays are always a holiday and without Easter Monday, people would feel ripped off.

And this was also the day that Jesus appeared once more to Mary, and said “Oh, by the way, never wage war in my name. never try to convert people by force. never persecute non-Christians, and never, under any circumstances, celebrate the day of my death, because it was the worst day of my life and I would rather forget all about it. ”

Then Jesus gazed upon Mary, and said “Are you writing all this down?”.

“No. ” said Mary. “but don’t worry. I’ll remember to do it later. ”

Anyhow. New glasses. And they are definitely way better than the old ones.I can feel the lack of eyestrain and it’s marvelous. The world is in HD to me now and it’s great.

It will take time for my eyes to get used to the new prescription, of course. SO there is this sort of weird feeling in my eyes. Like very faint pressure on the outside walls of each eye. But that’s par for the course.

It’s not like this is the first time I have had my prescription updated. It’s needed updating every three or four years for my entire life.

One weird thing though : I was told to never use any glass cleaning products OR paper products to clean the lenses.

WTF? Apparently, it strips the coating right off.

I didn’t get any special coatings (gubmint don’t pay for those) but I suppose it’s a case of better safe than sorry.

And then… sigh.

And then we (Joe and I) headed home, but we didn’t get far before I patted down all the pockets in my jacket and declared that I had somehow lost everything they had just handed me – the cleaning solution,  the case with my old glasses in it, the little blue chamois I am supposed to use to clean my glasses,. everything.

So, panic in the Joemobile, and we have to turn around and go back to the optometrist’ office so I could look for the stuff.

I don’t find it anywhere along the path between the parking lot and the office, and I was just about to turn around and admit defeat when I checked my pockets one last time, and lo and behold,. the stuff was in my left PANTS pocket the whole time.

This is how my life works. This shit happens to me all the fucking time. I try my hardest to prevent it but it happens anyway.

And note how the humliations ganged up on me : first I was humiliated that I had lost the stuff, then I was humilated by that meaning Joe had to drive me back to the optometrist, then the coup the grace, the humiliation of realizing that the whole exercise was not necessary in the first place.

And gods, am I sick of it. And there’s no way to avoid it. The best I could hope to do would be to become a blithe idiot who doesn’t take personal responsibility for anything unless he absolutely has to and who leaves a trail of wreckage behind him.

That’s not going to happen.

And I can’t even lie about it. I told Joe that I had “found” my glasses accoutrements and even that tiny white lie makes me feel ill. I can’t stand the feeling of speaking untruths and I hate anything that comes between me and those I care about.

And a lie does just that.

Plus, I hate keeping two versions of reality in my head.

So I am going to have to tell him. It’s the only thing that will make me feel better.

And so there I go, living a life of cringing apology with no way out.

It’s no way to live, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

I guess I was born to suffer. And to never have dignity.

No wonder I long to escape having to be myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Finally got around to doing my taxes for this year.

Sort of. Almost. Kinda. Grr.

I don’t feel like going through the whole sordid sequence of events and I am pretty sure you would not enjoy reading it either.

Suffice it to say that I am now locked out of my Canadian Revenue account because it rejected my completely accurate information three times (after telling me I had five chances, BTW) and now I am going to have to call them up and turn on my nonthreatening charm and get them to open my account again so I can actually file the damned return and be done with it.

At least the return itself is done. Turbotax once more helped me with that. I have used them every year since 2010 or so. And they do it for free if you are a “no taxable income” type like myself.

This year, they also nagged me constantly to sign up for one of their paid services,  and I was a little tempted by their “plus” service because it was only ten bucks and had all kinds of benefits like being able to consult a “tax expert” via online chat to ask questions and importing all my info from last year and so forth.

But nope. I am just too damned cheap to do that. Pay money to avoid a little bit extra effort? You have no idea who you are dealing with, pal.

But thanks, because I will now positively enjoy doing the extra work because now I will feel like I am earning that money. Or, looked at another way, I will enjoy the thought of saving the money through the whole process.

Then again, if there wasn’t a tax return check of $75 on the line, I probably wouldn’t bother filing at all. I figure that’s why that standard deduction is there, to give poor people like me a reason to do our taxes.

It used to be the only way to make sure the GST cheques kept coming too, but that is automatic now. So it’s really just the $75.

Otherwise, why bother? I have the world’s most boring tax return. I have one source of income, my disability cheques from the BC government, and I qualify for absolutely no form of deduction whatsoever.

Not that it mattesr because I have no taxable income to deduct from in the first place.

So I am pretty sure that the Canadian Revenue Agency could live without my incredibly small amount of tax info. Call me for the next Census, we’ll talk.

But I needs me that sweet, sweet cash.

Speaking of cash, this is a GST cheque month, which is nice. It’s usually somewhere in the vague vicinity of $100, plus or minus twenty bucks. I will most likely just stick that on my credit card, which is my equivalent of a savings account.

I have a savings account too, but I can’t buy stuff off Amazon with it.

I am not looking forward to making that phone call. I meanm who wants to tell a completely stranger that they fucked up? My life is humiliating enough already.

But sadly, I have gotten pretty good at it due to a lifetime of fucking things up. It’s a constant theme in my life. I am always forgetting something important or making a mess or saying something appalling, bizarre, or just plain weird.

It’s probably due to my being such a space case. A head in the clouds dreamer whose internal processes take up so much of his mental resources that there is precious little left for paying attention to like, reality and stuff.

And I don’t think I could change that. I will always be a very deep and thoughtful fellow whose head is full of ideas and information and emotions and all kinds of complex mental processes always ticking away in the background.

And all of it constantly being compressed by the massive gravity well at the center of my mind until everything extraneous has been squeezed out of it and all that is left is the high density neutronium that is my model of the world.

Sounds impressive when I put it like that. And it’s an accurate depiction of what is going on in my head most of the time. It’s bedlam in here, except that all the noise and craziness produces a high quality end product that I can then use to fuel my creativity and my insights and my politics and, most importantly. my morality.

But it makes it hard to concentrate on the here and now for very long. I am ready to disappear back into my head like a startled squirrel at the slightest provocation and without any thought as to how that will impact the actual situation I am in.

That’s the conscious mind’s problem, I guess.

SO I never know exactly how much brain I will have at my disposal at any moment. My life history contains thousands of moments when I was in the middle of doing something important, something involving others, when my mind suddenly emptied and I could barely remember where I was or what I was doing.

It’s rather stressful.

I call it “losing the thread”, but that doesn’t really cover the totality of the experience. Getting behind on the conversation and missing an important piece of information without which the conversation makes no sense is one thing.

Having your working and short term memory go totally blank and then having to deduce where you are and what is going on is quite another.

Right now, the most likely theory to explain this is that my social anxiety triggers this memory dump when it tries to retract from the situation into the world of my mind.

Another possibility is that I have such aggressive and demanding inner processes going on in my mind that there is nothing stopping them from shoving my conscious mind out of the way and emptying my mind when they need more resources.

And it’s also possible that I have something wrong with my brain on a hardware level. It’s happened all my life. I can’t discount that possibility.

Not more than ten percent, anyhow.

Bottom line is that I am all kinds of fucked up, including some previous unknown to science., and it’s a wonder I can get anything done.

I suppose I should cut myself a whole lot of slack for that.

But I am too fucked up to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well apparently I am at THIS part of my cycle again.

I have been feeling very restless for the last two days. It’s a painful sensation when it is not acted upon. In the past, not knowing what it was, I thought it was part of the usual torments of depression.

The really painful part. The worst part, even.

Because in my ignorance of the cause of this pain, it seemed to me like was just sitting peacefully at my comnputer doing whatever and then suddenly this howling screaming inner pain wracked me and scared the heck out of me…. out of nowhere!

So I did what all dysthymic depressives do in reaction to pain : I froze up. My type of depression interprets the basic problem of depressin – an adrenal response that is stuck in the “on” position because of unresolved trauma(e) – as meaning “it is time to hide and be very still until the predator goes away”/.

In other words. it’s the “hide” part of adrenaline’s fight/flight/hide potential.

In the abovementioned situation, of course, freezing up is the exact opposite of what I should be doing in response to the pain of restlessness.

I know this now. And that helps. \

But the pain persists because there is stil a lot of freezer-burned psychological scar tissue any urge to act has to push through in order to move me to actual action.

And that…. hurts.

But unlike in the past. I view this pain as a good thing because it means an important part of me is trying hard to wake up and that’s something I really want to happen.

It’s like rays of the sun have warmed the earth within me enough to signal the seed of my id that it is time to push it tendrils through the semi-frozen earth above it until it break through the frosty surface and can, at last. after the long long winter,. feel the light and warmth of the sun and grow tall and strong for all to see its beautiful flowers.

In other words. I’m a late bloomer. But better late than never.

To continue the metaphor (because at this point, I might as well), in these early stages of growth, those tender buds of May (my birth month) have to be carefully nurtured and given room to grow unmolested if they are to make it to the sunlight.

So once more I am doing my best to let the restlessness do its ob and wake me up inside and lead me to joyous and purposeful action.

It’s just going to hurt like heck first.

But I can feel it working. I can feel my usual state of being frozen stiff and unable to step outside my teeny tiny comfort zone melting away from my id’s long dormant fires.

All I have to do is get out of the way and let the process proceed. Pain is only pain, after all. It’s bad but it’s not the worst thing in the world.

The worst thing is being too dead inside to feel anything.

Pain at least reminds me that I am alive and real and present on Planet Earth. And I would rather be alive and in pain than dead and “content”.

Because I’m not content. Not at all. The voice screaming “THIS IS NOT ENOUGH!” inside me has a point.

This life of mine is not enough for me. I need more content in my life.  I want to truly be a part of things instead of being forever locked out of life in my tiny little cage.

That means throwing open the doors and letting life in. And that. in turn, requires me to learn to tolerate not always knowing what is going to happen or where this all is going.

And the only way to learn that is practice, practice. practice.

Even thinking about it in a totally abstract way. like I am doing as I write this, fills me with the ice cold fear that has kept me from living life for 20 years. It’s like icy fingers wrapped around my heart and it freezes me in place.

I’m still waiting for that predator to leave, apparently.

Well fuck that. I am truly and deeply sick and tired of hiding in the bushes. So I’m going to go out there and either get eaten or go back to living.

Either way, at least it will be over.

This means my immediate goal is to practice overcoming that icy feeling instead of being trapped by it. I realize now that I have been letting my fears control me for a long time now by not doing a single thing to challenge them.

Hmm. There’s a story in there somewhere but now is not the time.

And why have I let them have their way with me? Because it’s easier. It doesn’t require much energy to maintain. And I have so little energy that I have to be very careful how I spend it so that I have enough for the essentials. Right ?

WRONG. That’s austerity thinking and it does not work.  There is plenty of energy out there for the taking but you have to invest energy to claim it. That little seed of mine has to deplete its battery trying to get its shoots to the surface if it’s to get to all that wonderful sunlight up above.

And the thing about the life force in humans is that if you stop spending it,. the pathways shut down and your mind goes into austerity mode.

But the energy is there – it is within you and I – the depression just makes you too numb to feel it.

So because you don’t feel like you have the energy, you don’t do the things that would actually get you the energy to do still more things and so forth and so on until you end you day exhausted and content.

It’s like yuou have to pay life’s maintenance bill or they turn your power off.

Imagine how much being shut down like that will cost you.

Makes spending the energy the wiser choice, right?

So I am going to spend like a sailor and not worry about whether I will have enough energy for a “later” that never comes.

Winter is over. Spring has come.

It’s time for my garden to bloom.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

<how can you tell people they are stupid>

Well, it’s official. I’m losing it. I'[m starting to fall apart and I never even had it together in the first place.

Here’s the deal. Tonight, I dropped and broke one of our plates. No big deal, shit happens, it jangled my nerves and I feel a little bad about it, but whatever.

It’s how it happened that has me scared.

Because it didn’t just slip out of my wingers or accidentally get knocked off the counter. I twitched. That’s the only word I have to describe it. There was a muscular twitch in my hands, my dfingertips went completely numb.

In fact, the feeling hasn’t totally come back yet and it’s been half an hour.

So clearly my diabetic peripheral neuropathy is getting worse. To be honest, tonight’s incident was not the first such incident. Not by a long shot.

Tonight just happens to be the night I chose to stop bullshitting myself about it and face the facts. The truth is, it’s more than just some numbness in my fingertips now.

Now the nerves as damatged enough to misfire and trigger muscle spasms, and the numbness is beginning to slowly spread up my fingers.

And if I don’t do something about it, I will end up even more disabled than I am now. The problem is already messing with my typing. I type a lot more extra letters than I ever did before, and it’s because I am losing fine control of my fingers.

And I never had much of that to begin with.

And I know what the damned problem is. It’s that I suck so bad at taking care of myself, especially my diabetes.

What do I do to control my diabetes? Take my meds and qavoid sweet foods.

What don’t I do? I don’t monitor my glucose levels. I don’t take insulin at night. I don’t eat a low carb diet. I don’t exercise to keep my circulation going.

I don’t even rub my feet to stimulate circulation, and they are right there.

Instead, I sit here and play video games all day like a fucking zombie while my life ticks away and I get sicker and sicker and every day is another shovel load of dirt towards the day when I am buried alive in my own flesh,. and yet I do nothing.

And it’s not good enough, dammit. And part of me is screaming for me to change but I am too numb from my depression to listen.

It makes me want to scream. But that would take too much effort.

I’m just so numb, numb. numb. Motivation doesn’t stand a chance.

The icy seas

never cease

their deadly beating on my shore. 

They’ll only stop

When down I drop

And not trouble this world any more

That just kind of came spilling out of me. I could probably go on for a lot of verses but that, too, seems like too much work.

Besides. poetry is too easy for me. That’s why I don’t value it.

How fucked up is that?

I have to admit, my depression (in the form of the chemical imbalance) has gotten a lot worse lately. The desire to stay in bed and sleep all I can so I don’t have to deal with anything ever is growing strong in me.

I’ve been ignoring it, for the most part. My will is strong enough to handle it. This gives me the chance to consider my path.

On the one hand, I certainly don’t want to give in and become even more depressed and end up in an even deeper hole that I am in right now.

On the other hand,. I want to listen to my emotions and try to figure out what they are trying to tell me. Part of my disease of excess rationality is that I don’t listen to my emotions and hold myself rigid through intellectual rigor instead.

Like I can force myself to be someone I’m not by sheer force of will.

Yeah, that’s pretty much bullshit. NOT. GONNA. HAPPEN.

Instead, I want to open myself up to my own emotions and through them find out who I really am. That means I have to be willing to risk finding out that I am not the person that I thought I was, and that’s a very scary thought.

But better to know who I really am, warts and all, than to keep doing the insane thing of trying the same thing over and over again expecting it to word “any time now”.

It ain’t workin’. It will never work. Move on.

It’s super scary to step out of the bright light of logic and reason, with their seeming ability to solve any problem in the world.

But life is not a riddle. A lot more is going on that what logical reasoning can hope to contain. We are not robots. We are human beings, with emotions and instinct and needs that all interact in a complex web of forces that we barely understand.

One of the deep truths about being a live human on planet Earth is that even the most reflective and thoughtful of us remain mostly a mystery to ourselves for our whole lives.

That’s because the totality of our minds is far, far more than our conscious minds can comprehend. Even the dullest among us are a vast dark galaxy unto themselves.

That is the sort of thing that informs my humanism. It makes it hard to reduce people to cartoonish stereotypes when you truly see into the souls of others and find so much pain and confusion and fear that resonates with your own problems.

And remember, every human being is 99.99 percent genetically identical to all other humans. And we all have the same basic programming in our brains and bodies.

That is what we humanist types mean when we say that we have far, far more in common with one another than the few things on which we differ.

And I see that I have once more wandered off on an intellectual tangent rather than talk about the scary thing I set out to talk about.

I still have no idea what I will do about my diabetes. Probably nothing.

It’s so much easier to just let myself die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Freshly awoken and feeling like death warmed over in a microwave.

And speaking of microwaves, ours is dying. It took me a while to figure this out. For a long time, I had this growing feeling in the back of my mind that I was somehow getting less popped corn per bag of my beloved microwave popcorn, but it didn’t cross the threshold into conscious thought until recently when I finished the popcorn from a bag and saw that there was this huge pile of unpopped kernels left.

And suddenly I realized that I had been being denied popcorn for a really long time. And by God, I was going to find out why!

Well maybe not. The reason why was obvious. But still. I was a lil pissed off.

This has led to a period where every time I pop a bag, I increase the time. For ages, putting the bag in the microwave for 4 minutes and 20 seconds was ideal. Popped almost all of the kernels. But right now, I am up to 6 minutes and there are still a lot of unpopped kernels. Who knows where this will end?

Feeling somewhat lazy. That;s probably because I am naked. Like I have said in this space before, I learned from my experience living with nudists that I need to get dressed in order to start my day. It’s the little ritual that tells my body and my mind that it is time to wake up, get focused, and get going.

Otherwise, I end up staying in the vague grey mode that I am in when I wake up all day. I never truly wake up. And because it’s such a undefined and structureless mood, over time it degrades into depression.

Kind of how a cloud of smoke disperses over time.

It’s hard for me to relate to now, but there was a time in my life where I would spend most of most days naked. My roomates will remember this time, for obvious reasons. I stayed in that vague grey state of not really being awake almost all the time because it was my defense against my anxiety.

It worked, kind of, because in the short term, it can be a very pleasant state. In it, I feel relaxed and cozy and safe. It’s like I never quite commit to being awake and thus can retreat into sleep whenever I like.

So it took me a while to realize that in the longer term, that led to feeling depressed. The mind and body inherently want to activate and get going. It’s part of the natural waking sequence. When I denied myself that, the pressure to do so built up in my mind, and without release, that translated into mental pain.

I think a lot of depression works like that.

It’s hard for me to relate to now, but in the bad old days before Trazadone, I would spend all day staying up for two hours then sleeping two hours, over and over again, all day long, ad infinitum.

At the beginning of my Skyrim addiction, I fell into that pattern again for a couple of days. I wasn’t taking any of my meds (unbelievable) and so I didn’t get my Trazadone sleep. And at first that didn’t matter, or at least, didn’t matter enough to overcome the power of my freshly acquired obsession.

But as time passed, I could feel that something vital was draining from my mind. It’s easy for me to see what was going on. When we don’t get enough REM sleep, the process of moving memories from our short term memory into long term storage doesn’t have enough time to complete, and so our short term memory fills up and starts displacing our working memory.

So that’s what was “draining away”: space in my working memory. And my mind’s subconscious processes use up a lot of my working memory even when I am fully awake, so any further strain on it can be catastrophic.

It’s like my mind is a web browser with a zillion tabs open, and my conscious mind is only one of them. The rest run in the background and slow everything down.

And ot think, I lived that way for my entire adult life until a few years ago when I finally got someone (namely my therapist) to prescribe me some sleeping pills.

I had asked for them from every GP I had before that, but they wouldn’t give them to me. Admittedly, I didn’t ask for them very assertively and so it was easy to brush me off and give me advice on proper sleep practices instead.

Maybe they thought I was looking for street drugs. I dunno.

Bu finally, I managed to spit it out to my therapist and he agreed that it was a big problem and it needed to be tackled.

First he started me off on zopiclone, but that didn’t have much effect. Then he switched me to another whose name escapes me at the moment, and that worked a little. Then he added the Trazadone and now I could finally stay asleep for a whopping five and a half hours when the drugs were working right.

Eventually I dropped that other drug because I accidentally took only the Trazadone one night and ended upgetting just as much good sleep but found it way easier ti wake up and stay awake the next day.

And it took me a while to learn to work WITH the Trazadone because, despite its reputation as strong stuff, I can shrug off its effects easily. So I have ot make sure that I do not do anything mentally stimulating after taking it or my mind will simply disregard its effects in order to keepo doing what I am doing.

So it’s still not the sleeping pill of my dreams, which would be one that was so strong that it knocks me out without asking for my mind’s permission. Something strong enough to overpower all the stuff going on in my mind and force me to slee.

That way, I could choose to sleep by taking the pill(s) and past that point, there would be nothing my babbling brain could do about it.

Instead, I have to sort of baby the process along, knowing that one wrong move and the drug’s effects will evaporate and I will be wide awake again.

So mostly, Trazadone helps me stay asleep.

But what I want is something that helps me GET to sleep.

And so far, nothing can do THAT.

I will talk to your nice people again tomorrow.

I am slowly making progress toward being able to handle the truth of my extraordinary gifts. Thinking about it doesn’t scare me as much any more.

So tonight, I am going to venture into that territory and see what treasures I can find in the arctic squall I call my soul.

In the unlikely event that someone who already thinks I am a smug, self-satisfied asshole, this post will only make you more unhappy with me, so feel free to leave.

Also, fuck off.

Oh, and be warned, my patient readers. that this is still a scary subject for me so I might go rambling off into some intellectual discussion and leave the emotional stuff behind.

I will be monitoring myself for just such a digression, but I can’t promise success, because my issues are very sneaky, and might show up in the form of an anecdote, a theory of mine, or an overlong introduction to the blog entry.

Nah, that would never happen.

Let’s start from this : I avoifd thinking and talking about this subject because it frightens me. I am scared of my own powers. When I think about them,. I feel the pressure of the elitism trying to form in my mind and it scares me and I reject it.

Plus,. like I have said before, the feeling of power feels like it is trying to tear me away from the rest of humanity and I have a very tenuous connection to my fellow humans as is and the thought of losing that scares the hell out of me.

I’ve had nightmares many times in my life where I become very light like a balloon and have to cling very hard to some object in order to avoid floating away from everything I know and love and getting swallowed up by the sky, never to return.

That’s exactly what I am afraid of when I contemplate my “powers”.

And they really do feel like magic powers sometimes. That’s why I keep coming back to imagining myself to be a wizard. And like a classic D&D wizard, I have amazing abilities but I am otherwise rather useless.

Perhaps I need to level up.

So what are my powers? Let’s start a list.

1. Creativity.  I am a fountain of ideas. My mind produces them as easily as my lungs produce CO2. Everything I experience goes into the bubbling cauldron of my creativity, and out of that primordial goo, ideas crystallize. This gives me the usual kind of creative skill, in my case writing, but it also makes me w hiz at creative problem solving when combined with my…/
2. Incision. Over the years, I have honed my mind to the point where I cut right to the heart of things without even trying. My mind automatically reduces things to their essence and throws away the extraneous bullshit. What’s left gets integrated into my existing body of knowledge and experience. This gives me great…
3. Insight. I see a lot more than other people with my inner sight. I can see how things really work and what ideas work  (or don’t). I am especially good at understanding what makes people tick. To me, most people’s minds are an open book, and that’s a heck of a power, especially when combined with my,….
4. Sensitivity. .  I’m higly empathic. I pick up other people’s emotions like a radio picks up radio stations. It gives me a deep, emotional understanding of the inner worlds of other people and makes me very…
5. Understanding. You can’t see the world as I do and remain judgmental because I can see how fragile and human we all are. Even the worst villains are acting out of an inner pain that is so great that they have to externalize it. That doesn’t mean I suspend all judgment. It just means I see more shades of grey than others. Perhaps that’s why I have such a great…
6. Personality.  I am a sweet, gentle, funny guy who sincerely loving helping people and wants to make everyone around him happy. I have a strong presence and force of personality. I have charisma and a talent for being likeable. I am a gentle giant, a big ol’ teddy bear, and people respond well to that. Of course, all of this is powered by my mightly..
7. Intellgence.  I have an IQ of 161. School was almost always easy for me. I aced all the academic subjects without even trying. My mind moves so fast that sometimes it takes my breath away. What others struggle with, I learn instantly and retain forever. By all the usual standards, I am a genius.

I think that’s enough for now. I am probably forgetting a whole lot of things but this journey into sensitive areas of my mind is already making me feel sort of bruised and nauseous, so I am going to stop there.

Now if you didn’t know me, that list would seem incredible and there would be no doubt in your mind that, if it was all true, I would have everything I needed to have an amazing life and make a lot of money.

But here I sit, 44 years old,. on the dole, with very little money and a life that bears no relation to the amount of potential I have described.

And that’s the final reason I find this subject so hard to think about or deal with. It’s not just that I am afraid of eilitsim taking hold and turning me into the sort of person I hate, and it’s not just the feeling that I have to cling hard to my connection to humanity lest I disappear into the stratosphere.

Nor is it just a fear of the responsibility implied by such power, or the my deep fear of hurting people with my mighty mental muscles.

It’s also that the whole subject depresses the hell out of me because, if I think about all my gifts, it makes me feel like even more of a loser for having the life I have.

And that’s something that is really hard to take.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.