I just keep doing these things to myself. I guess it’s my illness.

But I somehow managed to convince myself that I had already blogged today and went on my merry way plating Baldur’s Gate 2 and only now, with only 45 minutes to go before I said I’d be leaving with Joe at 9 pm to go see Felicity, do I realize that I totally have NOT blogged today and my belief that I had was 2/3 wishful thinking and 1/3 my usual hazy mental state, which has gotten even worse lately.

Example : The other night, I became convinced that me and Joe and Julian had just watched an episode of the Daily Show and got very confused when Joe queued up “another” to watch.

But we hadn’t just watched one. Not at all. My mental state had simply gone so soft that I had momentarily slipped back in time to the previous day. It really felt like I had just heard Trevor Noah say “And now, your moment of Zen” but it just wasn’t true.

And that really frightens me. We are definitely slipping from absentminded into delusional there. I am worried that the sleep apnea is addling my brain and that I am going to be a full time drooler at way too young an age.

And I can’t afford to lose any more of my grip on reality. It’s shaky at best as is. probably because I spend so little time interacting with it. Sitting in front of this computer is not just bad for my physical health.

It fucks with my mind, too. Everything in my daily life is so virtual and emphemeral. There’s so little physical input in my life that it’s almost like sensory deprivation and it’s a wonder that I have any grasp on reality left.

It’s ’cause I’m tenacious. To a fault.

Still, I am clearly losing my marbles and I have precious few to spare. I am going to have to make an appointment and go see my GP and tell him about these mental lapses and how my sleep apnea has been untreated for ages and see if he can point my way towards a solution that might just work for me.

But I don’t think I can ever do CPAP again. Well, maybe with the new masks that only go over your nose and not your mouth. But I wouldn’t count on it.

I can’t breathe through my nose most of the time anyhow.

So I dunno. It’s quite possible that nothing can be done for me at this point. There are surgeries that help but doctors often do not want to recommend them because to them, it seems like an unnecessary risk.

Yeah, well, you strap an alien facehugger to your face and try to sleep and then you tell me if it’s worth the risk. Because there is no way I am ever doing CPAP again.

I just can’t do it. Considering my extremely intense fear of smothering, it is a wonder I ever did it in the first place. I remember it took a lot of very careful puck handling of my fragile psyche to get me through it.

Only to have all the work shattered when I woke up unable to breath because the goddamned fucking CPAP machine stopped giving me air.

There was a kink in the tube connecting the unit to the mask, I think. Doesn’t matter. Point is, it was very hard for me to get to the point where I trusted the machine to breathe for me and that one incident means I will never trust it again.

So I don’t know. I’d like to think that there would be something that could keep me from smothering in my sleep a hundred times a night. I would be woilling to give home oxygen a try, although ironically, it would have to be by oxygen tent because otherwise it would be just another goddamned mask over my face that I have to trust to give me air.

It’s a heck of a catch, that Catch-22.

Maybe I will have to be hospitalized. That would suck. I hate being in the hospital. It’s quite stultifying and there is not nearly enough to do.

If it was a long stay, I suppose I could get a laptop so at least I would be able to write. And without video games to drain my energy, I would probably be writing all the time.

So who knows, it might work out.

But without the laptop, forget about it. I am used to a steady diet of very rich mental stimulation and without it I would go berserk. What started as being admitted for respiratory issue might turnj into a psych admission because I would not be able to stand the dropoff in mental stimulation.

At the very least, I would turn into a difficult patient. Demanding, irritable, always getting up when I am supposed to stay in bed. Pulling pranks.

The other other option is that I would simply give in to my depression and sleep pon the time and barely be alive.

I’d rather be a pain in the ass, to be honest. At least it would be something to do. And trust me on this, reading and crossword puzzles only get you so far.

I know, I will tell them to sedate me till I am well. I would be a model patient then. Never complaining, always compliant, never any trouble.

The worse I would do is snore.

Anyhow. My point is that I have real cause for worry and I am going to work hard to keep reminding myself of that until I do something about it.

If I don’t, it will slip back into the general goo of my mind and I will end up doing nothing about it (like with my sleep apnea) until things get really dire.

And maybe not even then. Depression’s a bitch. There’s no cure for a disease that actively fights attempts to cure it.

But I am not going down without a fight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m pretty depressed today, But it’s no big deal. There is no problem or lack of pleasure.

It’s just the weather.

That songs sums it up perfectly. I haven’t stopped feeling the depression. It’s still there and as unpleasant as ever, like a dark cloud hanging over my head and soaking me to the bone with a cold and unclean rain.

But it’s just the weather. I dion’t take it personally or let it shape my view of reality. Reality hasn’t change. My brain chemicals have changed.

And as we have established ibeyond doubt n these pages, they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.

So I don’t take the depression personally any more than I take the weather personally. The fact that it’s raining in my life right now is as meaningless to who and what I am as whether or not it’s raining out.

In that sense. it has very little to do with me. At best, we’re partners in circumstance.

It will pass. It always passes. Depression would tell me otherwise – it would have me believe that nothing gets any better ever even thought that is demonstrably untrue and completely aburd on the face of it.

It’s like having a cold and thinking that cold will last forever. Obviously not. You’ve had colds before and you got over those. You have not had a cold your entire life. Most of the time you have not had a cold. And this cold, like the others, will go away.

It’s the same for depressive episodes for me now. Sooner or later I will feel better and in the meantime, I will do what I can to weather the storm.

Apparently, it’s air imagery night.

I told you that to tell you this : what I want to talk about tonight is giving myself permission to stay out of the rain. Learning to accept that there are good days and bad day and thus forgive myself for the days in which I do nothing productive because those are the days when it is an acccomplishment just to make it to bedtime.

It’s a matter of emotional organization, really. Right now, I always ache to get things done and the warm wet whirlwind within never stops churning out ideas and nternal speeched and insights and all the other wonderful things that my mind produces all the time that I am awake.

It might happen in my sleep too, but if so. I don’t remember it.

But a fair bit of the time, I am suffering from depression, and therefore can be forgiven for not getting anything done because I am quite ill.

In fact, I know that berating myself for my lack of productivity only makes things worse. Maybe that’s the point. I don’t know.

And no matter what I tell myself, without giving myself that vital permission, and with the pain of unexpression burning as hotly as ever, as well as the twin fires of dreams and ambitions, plus the long deep yearning to be part of society like a grownup, my bad wiring interprets all that pain as being justified by how bad I suck and I take it out on myself in the usual fashion.

In reality, it’s just a bunch of unfulfilled desires that, in a healthier person, would do what they are supposed to do and drive me to fulfill them.

It’s like being hungry and instead of eating you just sit there hating yourself for being hungry and using it as proof that you suck at life.

That’s how insane depression is…. it turns natural healthy instincts and drives into reasons to hate yourself.

Yet another little naptime. I do feel a lot better now, so there’s that.

So how do I give myself that oh so important permission to have bad days?

For starters, telling my dreams and ambitions to cool it.

Yes, I know how badly I want to finally be able to support myself and feel like I am a vital and living part of the world and not just some dead skin that refuses to shed. I know how frustrating it can be when you want something really bad and it feels like it’s almost within reach but you never actually get it.

Yes, I know it’s very tempting to take that frustration out on myself. But that shit’s got to STOP. The cost is too high. The pain is too much.

And I know how hard this will be given how long I have been waiting, but it is time to learn to be patient. Waiting is fullness. There is no point in tearing myself apart being I can’t have what I want, especiallhy when the main reason I can’t have what I want is that I keep tearing myself up.

Funny how that works out.

So patience it is. I will wait patiently for the rain to stop or at least fade to mere sprinkles  and get as much done as I can before the next storm comes.

That’s a hard thing for me to accept. My inner fire rorars higher abd bristles with offended pride at the idea that I must live such a furtive and dismal life. I would much rather be able to finally be able to go at life, hammer and tongs, and kick some ass and grow sharp elbows with which to shove my way through the madding throng and take my place on life’s big stage.

But I am sick. And it’s not going away any time soon. Better to accept that fact than to constantly be burning myself in effigy. Better to get over it and get on with my life.

This isn’t a bad dream. This is my life. And I am not going to suddenly snap out of it one day. I’m not going to give my head a shake and says “Wait, the idea is to NOT be sad!” and then the whole thing will be over.

Not going to happen. No more denial. I am a very sick man and that imposes some harsh limits on my life and they are here to stay, at least for now.

I hereby own my ilness.

And thus, I set myself free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I got nuthin’.

Seriously. My mind is a blank right now. I am simply not awake enough to think of something to write about, so here I am, using the ol “write about not writing” gag in order to stall for time till my brain boots up qand spits out something I can focus on.

It’s not like I need much. Just some kind of jumping off point that can get me doing my usual serpentine wriggling from topic to topic until I’ve written enough words.

I know why I can’t stick to a topic. It’s because that is simply not the way my mind works. My mind follows the connections between things and not the things themselves. I think this is true of a lot of highly creative people. Creativity, after all, seeks to create novel connections between disparate subjects.

That’s also what makes me a generalist rather than a specialist.Sticking with one subject and learning everything there is to know about it strikes me as stultifyingly dull and mindlessly restrictive and entirely unsuited ro a lively and curious mind like mine.

I need to explore the byways and pathways of thought, not settle down and start a family and open a hardware score that competes with the big box stores by offering personal, friendly service from highly knowledgable staff.

That was weird.

It’s like all of my urge to explore got turned inward along with everything else when I was raped, and I explore in thought and not in person. Not only does that suit (and possibly cause) my reflective and thoughtful nature, but it is something I can do anywhere and at any timemk which is not dependent on having any physical resources whatsoever. Not even a computer and the Internet.

I developed this technique to deal with boredom, I think. When you have a very stimulation seeking mind, boredom is particularly painful, and in a world unlikely to contain a constant stream of high density stimulation like the one I grew up in, I had to generate my own stimulation.

How? Deduction. Broadly defined.

By deduction,. I don’t mean dashing around after a dastardly criminal wearing a deerstalker hat. What I am calling deduction is the generation of new knowledge from existing knowledge via the application of deductive logic.

A sort of “if A is true, and B is true, then C must be true” kind of thing.

So I dealt with boredom, especially the boredom I faced in school because the work was so easy for me, by thinking about stuff a lot.

That made me a generalist. Of course. I am not interested in all things equally. Nothing natural has an even distribution, after all. I have my areas of interest, like psychology, science, politics, philosophy, and so on.

But I absorb all information that comes my way, and I am a little interested in whatever happens to come my way. It all fits into my internal understanding of the world and how it works somewhere, and I am always willing to learn more.

But not too fast, or my creaky old brain will crash.

There’s knowing you’re crazy, and then there’s feeling crazy.

I know I am crazy. That, by all rational definitions, I am insane. That depression is a form of mental illness and that if yuou have it, you are mentally ill.

But I don’t feel crazy most of the time because crazy is my normal. When you have a disease that pollutes your perceptions like depression, there are no inconsistencies in how you see the world.

You see it through shit colored glasses, and that is it.

So I know my perceptions are distorted and that the world is not how it seems to me. I know that I am crazy and that therefore I should be cautious about trusting those polluted perceptions and maybe try to figure out what is really going on some time, as hard as that can be.

But at the end of the day, your perceptions are all you have to go on when dealing with reality and you have to trust them or you wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing.

So despite knowing I am mentally ill, most of the time, thank goodness, I do not feel crazy. That’s a good thing because let me tell you, feeling crazy  is terrifying. The human mind can’t handle the idea that its perceptions are in error. It’s like a divide by zero error, it just does not compute.

So I panic. Hard. A great and terrible panic. That’s what feeling crazy is to me, a panic attack on an existential level. And the only way out is to stop thinking about it.

And that’s highly unusual for me. I don’t taske that escape route very often. My usual response to something I am thinking about upsetting me is to attack said thing and try to conquer it. I don’t like having walled off areas in my mind where I dare not tread. It offends my intellectual pride and gives me a feeling of discontinuity that I find unsettling, to put it mildly.

But the walls are there nevertheless. Nobody is intellectually ferocious enough to have a mind that is completely open in all directions at all times. I suppose.

In fact, a certain level of concealment and misdirection of the conscious mind is probably necessary for a healthy mind, and my fanatical devotion to what I see as the truth is certainly symptomatic of, and possibly part of the cause of, my depression.

But still. It bugs me. This leads to my therapist’s repeated astonishment at how non-resistant to therapy I am. I am, at least, spared that. I know what therapy is, how it works, and what I can expect of the experience, and why I am there.

PResumably, most of his patients lack such clarity of perception and intent, and need to be gently inveigeled through the process.

Me,l I just need a second pair of eyes looking where I am not.

Hmm, maybe that’s why he forgets I am sick.

But we’ve already been over that.

I will talk to you nice people again

I don’t have much of it.

Apparently, accord to those who were there, I was a happy baby who was easy to take care of because I seemed contant to just drink it all in without raising a fuss.

So yeah. I have been accomodating others since the day I was born. I guess some people are just born that way.

I didn’t even try to keep myself from putting that there.

To put it in less embittered language, I have always had a certain equanimity. The ability to fall into a groove and be happy there. A groove that will continue until some outside force makes me have to leave it.

That changed as I got older, but I remained easy to look after because as my mind grew at kudzu-like rates I developed my insatiable need for mental stimulation and that meant I was happy as long as I was reading or watching TV or playing a video game.

How user friendly of me.

It’s like some people…. those born under fixed signs like Taurus and Leo, for example…. have inherent intertia and their default mode is stop. We need a reason to do things, as we have no inherent need to move and explore and interact and so on.

We’re happy just to be here.

And in the right situations, that’s an asset. There can be great power in remaining unmoved. For one thing, it lets us keep our heads in a crisis when everyone around us is freaking out.

The world needs people like that.

It also makes us highly resistant to being fast-talked or swindled. I am probably mostly talking aboiut Taurus now. Our default mode is “no” and you have to overcome significant resistance to shift that position.

Especially because that default mode includes “don’t waste money”, and you combine that with a suspicous and jaded mind and we are the mountain and the mountain doesn’t move unless it feels like it.

But when a disease like depression starts throwing its weight around, that inertia becomes deadly. The depression amplifies it beyond all reason and we end up doing very little because very few things in life have the power to move us.

Even the things that by all rights should move us do not. Love. Family. Ambition. The acquisition of value. All helpless before the might weight of depression.

I can feel those things. But they are very remote. They are the sun and I am Pluto. I feel them. I want to feel them more. A lot more.

But my soul is dead numb and very little can cut through that much lifeless scar tissue.

And this hurts those who care about us because it’s not hard to see that they are not reaching you the way they want to because so little of what they are sending out is reflecting back and there is nothing I can do about that because the numbness is not voluntary. I would kill it if I could.

But it was formed as a respnse to extreme trauma and until that primary trauma is somehow resolved, it’s here to stay.

And I have no idea how to resolve that primary trauma.

Remember it, I suppose, and relive it. Not eager to do that. For the most part I accept that therapy often involves reliving some of the worst moments in your life in order to get past them, and I have struggled. to do so. From time to time, something really bad will bob to the surface of my turbulent mind and I will feels its weight and its power and its menace and the fact that I really, really don’t want to go there, so I go there.

That’s where the big leaps in mental health come from. As horrible as it might be to write about it here and/or talk about it will my therapist, I know that the reward on the other side of that experience will be an enormous sense of relief as I lay that big part of my psychological burden down and walk away a light, happier, and saner man.

But going back to the rape that wrecked my life is something so much bigger than everything else in my mind that I can only think about it in the abstract.

Abstract as in, I know what all the words in “remember the rape” mean and I can’t deny that it’s a valid concept without any logical conflicts or issues with language. It is definitely a thing which, in theory, could happen.

But when I try to imagine it as a reality, I just shrink like a mimosa plant inside and then my mind goes dark like I am hiding in the deepest, darkest shadow I could find from a predator so terrifying that I am afraid to even think lest it hear my thoughts.

I suppose that makes it my Mount Everest. If I can conquer that, nothing else will seem difficult in comparison.

I will have already faced the worst possible thing in my world.

After that, nothing will scare me.

But that’s easy to say from the foothills of the mountain. Screaming it at the summit is another thing entirely.

Still, I have a target now. And just writing about it in this space has made me feel like doing it is a lot more possible. It’s no longer an infinite darkness that no force in the universe could possibly hope to overcome.

It’s a mountain that has a finite size and that I can see in broad daylight. I can see the summit and sure, it is a long way up. but now I can say “You know, I am going to make it there some day. ”

And perhaps on that day, the scales will fall from my eyes and I will finally be able to see and feel the world in full rich technicolor at last.

And I will finally, after so many years of wandering the tundra naked, be able to come in from the cold.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve only been awake for around 15 minutes, and I woke up rough, so I am not even half awake yet. I am, at best, a high functioning sleepwalker.

In fact. odds are that there’s one of those horizontal lines in this entry’ future because I am, with great effort, going to do 500 words then go the fuck back to sleep.

At least, that’s the plan.

To coumpound my infogment, I am out of Diet Coke. So no artificual consciousness to the rescue for me. `My body is used to getting a liter of Diet Coke with lunch and without it I am even more unfocused and confused than usual.

I ran out because I ended up not going to Paragon on Wednesday night. Had no choice. My Irritable Bowel System… System? Syndrome…. went off like I had swallowed a live hand grenade and I was obligated, shall we say, to stay close to the bathroom.

It was very unpleasant. Like I was being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste. Everything Must Go. Luckily, that kind of thing usually disappears once I am empty.

Not always, though. Let’s just say dry heaves are even worse from the other end.

I feel so spaced out right now. Staying focused on blogging instead of drifting off into thought (and maybe sleep) is even harder than usual. I keep having to pull myself back to the here and now like I am a dog with a shortattention span.

Oh well, I will make it through. I am half way to 500 words already. Just gotta keep on chugging and finish my lunch and then I will be able to go back to sleep.

Assuming I can find my way back.

Tomorrow’s my borthday. I will be 45. A nice, divisible, manly age.

Like a Colt .45. Hmmm. A colt is a gun. Guns have triggers. There was a famous horse named Trigger. It all makes sense now.

Horses got big weiners. Hee hee hee.

Being 45 will not be a huge difference from being 44, I expect. It’s just a number. I am looking forward to celebrating with my friends on Sunday.  No big party or really any party. We don’t put that much effort into things, truth be told.

Sometimes I wonder if I would be better off on a psychological level if I spent more time around healthy, normal people. I am, in many ways, a product of what I absorb and I absorb whatever vibe is around me, and while I dearly love my friends, the argument could be made that we are not making each other any healthier.

Or maybe more time around healthy people would just make me feel like more of a broken freak and I would be even more depressed.

Still, sometimes I ponder being a boarder at some nice family’s home and seeing if I can learn what they know and I don’t, and try to comprehend how healthy people live and what it is like to be functional.

Maybe absorb their patterns while I am at it.

Tine to resleep.

OK, I have napped and I am a lot closer to human now, so let’s finish this thing.

I am really going to have to do something about summer. Specifically, afternoons. I have had a lovely time of blissful amnesia about how bad afternoons can be for me when it gets hot, but now summer has returned and I am going to have to figure out how to cope with this shit.

Otherwise, there will be no way in hell I can get anything done in the afternoons. The heat simply wrecks ny energy level and destroys my executive function and other area of mental clarity, and I am not putting up with that shit this year.

I know one part of the cure : hydrate constantly. CONSTANTLY. It’s something I figured out when living in Silly Con Valley and it’s what led to my habit of drinking a lot of water in the first place.

And that was a dry heat.

But that’s not enough. At the very least, I need a desk fan. Sorry…. they prefer to be called desk enthusiasts now. Please, no emails.

Ahem. A fan for my desk. The kind that blows air at my poor overheated noggin and therefore keeps the nasty demon of heatstroke away.

I fucking hate my vulnerability to heatstroke and heat sickness. Just for the record.

I also plan to keep 2L bottles of water in the fridge, or maybe something smaller so it will fit in my mini-fridge. Hydration is great but hydration with cold water is even better.

And that’s fridge cold, not tap cold.

Of course, in a perfect world, we would have AC. Maybe I will do some investigation into the possibility I’d be willing to pay a lot to get the miracle of air conditioning happening in this lil apartment of ours.

That would involve enthusiasm and focus and effort, though, and we’re not too good at that. We are all depressives to some extent and therefore have a lot of resistance to doing thing, especially new things.

TGhat’s the sort of thing that makes me wonder if I wouldn’t be better off somewhere else. Amongst more energetic people. That way I could let them provide the energy while I provided the wisdom and guidance.

But not too much energy, or I will not be able to keep up. Man getting old sucks.

I was reminded of that rather forcefully yesterday. Someone mentioned a game called Warframe and I knew I had tried it but couldn’t remember what it was like. So I looked it up. And then it all came flooding back to me.

Yes, I had tried the game. But I couldn’t make the learning curve. IT was giving me too much information and novelty too fast and I just couldn’t take it. So I quit.

That’s the shit that makes me feel old, dawg. It’s the same thing that happened to me in that linguistics course. Age has imposed a hard limit as to the amount of bandwidth I have to absorb new information, and if the info stream exceeds that, I crash.

So here’s to being 45. May I get wiser faster than I get dumber.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight, in our continuing series Michael Bertrand goes crazy in text”, we’re going to talk about being a cold person.

I have spoken before about how modern brain science has identified a “hot circuit” and a “cold circuit” in the human brain.

Standard disclaimer : these are just useful names for highly complex phenomena. 

The hot circuit is extremely fast, wired directly into the amygdala AKA the emotion center of the brain, and is the generator of gut feelings,. instincts, snap judgments, waves of emotion, and what Western culture calls “passion”.

This is the circuit we share will all other mammals. it is well suited for navigating life in the state of nature. It reacts quickly and motivates and activates in one lightning fast motion in order to serve the mammal best.

However, it’s not very smart.

For what we would call intelligence, there has to be a cold circuit too. The cold circuit of the mind is the generator of forethough, reflection, calculation, and the rest of our higher mental functions. In creatures unburdened with all the gray matter we humans lug around. it primarily resolves conflicts between instincts.

For example, imagine a solitary hunter like a leopard sees some tasty looking monkeys a couple of trees over. One instinct would tell the leopard to go for it, and were the leopard a simpler creature, that would be the end of the story.

But predators can’t afford to be that stupid. The leopard hesitates because it knows that one monkey is helpless against its predatory prowess, the more monkeys there are, the more dangerous they become, and so opportunity must be carefully weighed against risk For that, it uses its cold circuit.

I have wandered off on an academic tangent once again. Sigh. Back to the point.

The point is that I am, in many ways, a “cold” person. This is confusing to everyone because I am, in many ways, a very warm person as well.

But it’s the cold that worries me. When I withdrew into my mind as a result of being raped as a child, the place I retreated into was much more a product of the cold circuit than the warm and this cold world of the mind and mental stimulation became the prison I now labour to escape.

This cold-circuit bias has worked its way so deep into the circuitry of the mind that it interprets nearly anything that would produce an adrenal response as a threat and responds with anxiety, which my brain then tries to kill by kicking into the parasympathetic response (the opposite of the adrenal) WAY TOO HARD.

So I go from anxious to alienated as a killer frost descends. And then I get to be anxious about THAT because it’s actually pretty fucking horrible.

Isolation is the last thing a scared monkey wants. What a scared monkey wants is the company of a whole bunch of others monkeys who will face the scary thing together with the scared monkey.

This overbearing cold circuit response is the opposite of that.

And I know the sort of ways this icy retreat of mine makes me different from others. It makes me more calculating, thoughtful, incisive, and deeper than the average person.

There’s a lot of benefits to that. But it’s also what cuts me off from others. I might feel safe withing my icy vault, but I am not.

I’m dying in there, and running out of air.

And lately, I have realized that underneath all that ice is a very strong and deep seated rage common in adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and that response is a cornered-rat emotion that screams ‘NOBODY FUCKING TOUCHES ME!“.

That voice speaks with the vehement violence of the violated. it’s like when I was raped at the age of 4, my mind dug this moat of infinite depth around my broken screaming mind and absolutely nobody is allowed inside.

That drawbridge never goes down. People can get close to me but they can never reach my inner sanctum.

They can’t. I can’t let them. There has to be somewhere where I am safe and I can only be safe if I am alone.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

I hide this truth from myself and others with a sunny demeanour and plenty of intellectual fireworks to keep the crowds entertained and happy and distracted from the man behind the curtain with the sad, sad eyes and a heart made of cold blue steel.

See how it shines?

It’s my infinity moat that keeps me from really connecting with people. I hear the words but I don’t feel the warmth, no matter how sincere the person is. To open myself up for that kind of input would be to risk being touched. Truly touched.

And my whole psyche is built around keeping that from ever happening again.

And yet, that’s exactly what I want and crave and need so badly.  Someone or something that can get past all my ferocious defenses and rescue me from myself and take me to where it is warm and friendly and safe and finally, I can return to the peace and the light that I knew as a child before the rape happened.

I want to go. I really do. But I can’t do it on my own yet. My prison simply will not let me go until I no longer need it any more, and that could be a long time coming.

Maybe the problem is my all or nothing thinking, which is an endemic problem with us depressives. I sholuldn’t be thinking of it as a sudden total liberation with no backsies.

That’s what I want to believe, but it’s not how these things work. The unsexy truth is that I am better off comings out of that vault a little at a time, baby steps, and that I never close the door behind me because that will just make me panic.

That’s what logic and reason say is the path most likely to succeed.

For what that’s worth,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Recently, Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano began erupting big time. 

That story reminds me of the Iceland volcano. Remind that?

Anyhow. for days now Kilauea has been spewing forth molten magma in order to relieve the pressures that have been building up inside it for a long time.

Sounds good to me. (See what I did there?)

That’s what I need about now. I have felt this pressure building within me for a long time and I have nurtured it like I was keeping a fireplace going because I want the only way for the pressure to be relieved is for it to force an eruption.

It’s the only way I will be able to create transformational change within me. And that’s what I need. I need the sort of change that destroys villages and creates new islands. I have spent a long time changing at the ludicrously slow speed of rational thought and it’s time I took this shit nuclear instead.

I am sick and tired of slowly working things out in full compliance with the absurd need for intellectual continuity that I have suffered under for so long.

Like I have said before, and will say again : there is so much more to life than what makes sense. Life is to be lived, after all, not just figured out. Intellectual pleasure is great but it’s not everything. There must be food for the soul, not just food for thought.

I am sloiwly developing my sense of what it means to be alive. What it means to invest in life and let the energies of my own passions drive me forward instead of keeping my passions on a short leash because they might make me do something “stupid”.

And by “stupid” I mean irrational, regrettable, suboptimal, or inconsiderate.

In other words, something human.

And honestly, how much worse can that be than how I live now? If following my passions causes me to tun headfirst into a lot of brick walls, at least I will have learned something from it.

There are worse things in life that being wrong and making mistakes.

I mean, FUCK caution. Fuck safety. Fuck the cowardice that says it is better to do nothing than to risk being hurt.

That’s not the real me. That’s just bullshit. The real me is tough, tenacious, confidently guy who never looks back because he’s having too much fun playing the game.

The real me is cocky to the point of arrogance and has a deep faith in his own amazingness and genius that lets him pick himself up whenever life knocks him down, grin, and throw himself back into the fray because he loves to fight.

The real me would rather be losing the battle than staying on the sidelines.

And the real me is not afraid that the world will break if he unleashes his full powers. I have spent my whole life in fear of my own incredible abilities because I was afraid of hurting people and, on a much deeper level, scared of destroying what fragile sense of reality I had managed to cobble together despite the deep thick walls around my mind.

From that blinkered point of view,  destroying that sense of reality and connection could only lead to the psychological hell of losing track of reality entirely and ending up living my absolute worst nightmare of being lost in my own mind forever.

But that was a previous me, who despite his visionary tendencies could not see past the immediate to a greater truth : that the mind cannot destroy itself via thought and what burning the old reality down to the ground would do is make room for a new and superior reality to arise in its place.

That’s one benefit of shaking myself loose from the shackles of intellectual continuity and what “makes sense”.

It doesn’t matter what “makes sense” in the grand philosophical scheme of things. My life is not a science experiment, nor is it any kind of test.

What matters is what makes sense to me. What works for me.  What makes me happy.  What lets me let the sunshine in.

I am incresingly willing to feel my way through life. My vaunted intelligence is less than worthless when it comes to figuring out how to go to my happy place where I can feel the sun on my bare skin and breath clean, clear, sweet-smelling air for the first time since I got locked up in this fucking cell.

So to hell with the petty restraints of mere logic and sensibility, or at least my previous narrow conception of them. So cold and shallow. Totally unsuited to me needs, too.

Ergo, I declare that I have finally risen from my own grave and joined the world of the living. I am committing to life. No backsies.

In fact, to give it even greater weight, I am promising the universe that I am alive for good, and the universe has every reason to be hurt, disappointed, or feel betrayed if I break my word and let it down.

There. That oughta do it. That’s the strongest spell I know how to cast. I never break my word without enormous justification (like, life or death level justification) and I abhor the thought of ever disappointing someone who was counting on me.

I am going to stride into the future with my eyes on the prize : a happier me. I am through with constantly trying to force myself into the mould of who I think I OUGHT to be or who I think I am SUPPOSED to be.

I don’t even care who I think I want to be any more.

I am going to go about the business of being who I really am, warts and all. I will fashion a life that works around said true self, and fuck absolutely everything else.

Because the truth is that I am a sensitive, arrogant, sweet-natured, hot-tempered, brilliant, hapless, and above all complex person.

But that’s not what is important.

What’s important is that I am a big bright beautiful star ready to bring warmth and life to my sad little ice planet and all the other planets in my system too.

What came before can burn and die.

I’ve just been reborn.

What happened in the stellar nursery don’t mean shit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about my being a vehement non-joiner lately.

It was brought on by the game I am playing, Witcher 1. There is a scene in which the leader of the non-human terrorist group the Scoia’tel demands that I choose between them or their bitter enemies, the Order of the Flaming Rose.

Well FUCK YOU,. elfy. You want to know how to instantly piss me off? Try to force me to choose sides. I’m not joining a goddamned thing and you can’t make me.

And those are, in essence, the dialogue options I chose. They were the ones that represented my actual emotions. I told Elf Boy that I was a Witcher and therefore neutral as hell.

He chose to interpret that to mean that I was now his enemy, and sicced a whole room full of enemies on me. The resulting fight was extremely difficult due to the odds, and there were times I was tempted to join him just to circumvent it. ^[1]

But I am nothing if not determined. So I perserved, beat the fight, and went on with the game. triumphantly pleased with myself.

But it got me to thinking about my whole non-joiner attitude and wonder what the hell that is all about. It’s definitely not normal for a human being to be so incredibly dedicated to their own total autonomy. So what the fuck, man?

One thing I know it is about is integrity. I absolutely refuse to violate my moral integrity for anyone and I sure as hell won’t do it just because someone told me to. I will do what I think is right every single time and there is absolutely no room in my mind for a higher moral authority than my own.

According to traditional Western individualist values, that’s exactly how I should be.  Our storytelling is replete with heroic figures who defy authority in order to do what is right and damn the consequences. We love that kind of story.

As long as we don’t wonder what that person is like in the rest of their life.

From another angle. my absolute rejection of any authority higher than my own seems like despicable arrogance bordering on delusions of grandeur. Who am I to go around acting like I am the smartest person in the world and nobody knows better than me?

To answer quite arrogantly. I don’t know that I am the smartest person in the world but I have never met anyone smarter than me and until I do, I will have to assume I am on my own and have to figure things out for myself because I am the only one I trust to produce answers I consider to be correct.

Should I ever meet someone smarter than me – and I really, really want to – I will want to stay around them and learn from them. I will become. in essence, their acolyte.

But I won’t be surprised if I figure them out and surpass them, either.

And from a third point of view. my non-joiner attitude seems downright hostile. And I can’t argue with that. There is a lot of anger in it. The kind of anger that can only come from things which threaten our sense of identity.

From my point of view. people have been trying to trick me into signing over my autonomy to some goddamn group for my whole life and it pisses me off.

It’s not gonna happen. Leave me the fuck alone.

But I can see it from an outside point of view and from that angle it is clearly both insane and extremely hostile.

Some nice person offers me a place in a group which they love and feel is a good and wonderful thing, and I react with a swift vehemence that, even at its most polite, can’t be interpereted as anything but violent rejection.

And I hate that. I hate that I am so socially damaged that I end up hurting people who were only trying to help me. I hate that I am so psychotically devoted to my own autonomy that I reject a lot of things that would probably do me a lot of good.

But that’s not going to change any time soon. I can strive to be as diplomatic as possible when turning down such offers, but there are always going to be the people who keep pressing and wanting to know why and then I will end up telling them and they will be hurt because they do not understand.

It’s bad news all around, is what I am saying.

Here is what I am imagining when I am asked to join something :

Group member : Welcome to the group!
Me : Thanks! Glad to be a part of it.
Group member : Great! Now we are all going to go do this thing.
Me : I find said thing morally unacceptable and refuse to do it.
Group member : But you have to… you’re one of us. 

Well fuck YOU. I am one of ME. End of story.

Better off not joining in the first place, n’est-ce pas?

But that doesn’t answer the fundamental question of why I am like this. It certainly has something to do with trust. I have massive trust issues, presumably because I was raped at the age of 4 then reinforced by how the world treated me.

And so to be a “joiner” I would have to trust the group in question to never, ever ask me to violate my conscience, and that is a hell of a lot of trust, at least for me.

I could quite easily be part of a team with a clear task, like a workplace. But it would have to be the sort of job that I largely do by myself.

If I have to actively collaborate with others all the time, I had better learn to like and trust those people really fast or there is a high chance of trouble.

But outside a scenario where “because I said so” is a perfectly good reason to do a thing because that’s what I am being paid to do, you will not find me joining teams or choosing sides any time soon.

As it turns out, refusing to join the Scoia’tel caused the Order to decide I had joined them and there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do about it.

Oh well. They will learn their mistake when they try to give me orders. I am no more one of them than I am a Scoia’tel.

But if I had to… had I been given a clear choice and no other options.. I would have gone with the Order because the Scoia’tel are goddamned terrorists who hurt innocent people in the name of their “cause” and the Order at least represents… well order.

I agree that nonhumans are treated very shittily by humans in the world of the game.

But I can’t condone or even indirectly aid those who hurt the innocent while saying “sacrifices must be made”.

Fuck you. As the great sage John of Lennon said :

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you’ll have to wait. 

Besides, the Order seems genuinely dedicated to fighting evil.

But I am ready to dump them if they turn out to be corrupt.

Because I don’t join sides. I follow my ideals.

And if that makes me arrogant, so be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonjight, we are starting out with the quiestion of depression versus investment.

Emotional investment, that is. And in particular, the kindc of emotional investment we often refer to as “energy” or “effort”.

Energy as in,. “I was going to do that, but I just didn’t have the energy. ”

Effort as in, “I know that would make me happy but it’s way too much effort. ”

And it’s that latter case I want to talk about tonight.

I often talk of depression in terms of effort and reward, in the sense that I talk about how depression restricts your ability to feel pleasure and happiness to such an extent that we depressives become extremely dependent on extremely high reward activities in order to feel any kind of reward and approval at all.

Included in that, however,. is the idea that it has to me an extremely high reward relative to the effort involves.  That’s how how human beings are wired as a fundamental part of how we decide whether a potential action is “worth it”.

Enter depresiion,. and that definition of “worth it” gets bottlenecked down so hard that almost nothing qualifies as worthwhile.

So far so good. I have said these thing before. But what I have only just recently realized is that it is not quite that simpler.

Depression also sets a hard limit on expenditures of effort no matter what the expected reward might be. There is only so much effort we can ever expend on anything, or so our lying predictor would have us think, and that’s it.

I like to use the lottery as a way to illustrate this phenomenon ad absurdeum.  Say I won the lottery. We will say it’s ten million bucks just to put a number to it.

And all I had to do to collect my prize was go to the award ceremony. Easy, right?

But that would involve a long trip by bus with three tricky transfers, all in neighborhoods I have never been to, and two of them in rich neighborhoods. And they all involve waiting around at the stop for at least 30 minutes, all alone. Watching strangers walk past me, knowing they “see” me, trying hard to fight the feeling that they all hate me for even daring to let myself be seen let alone breathe the same air as them while anxiety about making my connection eats away at me from another direction.

There’s also a lot of walking involved, and finding the rright bus stop in neighborhoods filled with twisty interlocking decidedly non-gridlike neighborhoods, and the Google Map of the places only left me more confused.

And then when I get there. I will not know who I am supposed to talk to, where I am supposed to go,  what I am supposed to be doing, and there will be nobody there I know but plenty of people who will be looking at me an judging me and hating me.

Oh, and to top it all off. there is no time for me to borrow some money so I can buy decent clothing so I will have to show up looking, as usual, like a sloppy hobo. ^[1]

That would be a trip I would find extremely hard to make. I would have to overcome an enormous amount of resistance just to walk out that door. My anxiety level would go through the roof. A very loud voice in my head would be telling me not to go, that I will inevitably fuck things up  so bad I wouldn’t get the money ^[2]and humiliate myself in front of the whoile world and it just won’t be worth it.

Ten million dollars. Not worth it.

Now don’t get distracted with problem-solving my scenario. There’s a ton of ways to circumvent the parameterts. Take a cab, take a friend, borrow clothers, blah blah blah.

What I want to you focus on is that the ten million bucks would not be enough reward to make all my anxieties and depression evaporate and let the joy and happiness that a lotto win normally generates in.

In fact. part of me would resent winning for making me leave my tiny broom closet of a life and deal with all kinds of unknowns and complications and other scary things.

And that would. making staying home in my nice warm nest seem very tempting.

As you can see from the example (assuming you’ve stayed focused),. no level of reward is big enough to unconditionally override aoo my mental damage.

That’s why I feel an enormous and deep sympathy for the people who pursue all the usual tokens os success in out society (money, status, family. high standard of living, repsect of one’s peers, etc. ) and find that none of it solved their basic problem of being unhappy all the time.

The real problem was depression, of course, but they didn’t know that. They believed society’s bullshit about what makes people happy and now they feel like they wasted their lives in pursuit of things that not only didn’t make them happy but don’t even mean anything to them any more.

Hmmm. I could write something downright literary about someoe like that.

Anyhow, back to my own situation. Facing this dire and desperate aspect of my depression is a sobering experience. The urge to ask what the fuck is wrong with me is strong, but I know that is a very unhelpful question.

I know what’s wrong with me. Depression. It doesn’t help.

But the question within that question is valid. That question is, “what do I have to do to make myself happen now that I know the normal things don’t work for me?”.

We’re all struggling to find that door that leads to happiness.

Like the one she found!

But society doesn’t know what to do with you if the normal things do not work. So people like me end up addicts. The form of the addiction vairies – might be food, or booze, or risk-taking, or acquisition, or drugs, or sex,. or whatever.- btu the nature of the beast is always exactly the same.

Normal life doesn’t do it for you.

You find something that does work – that lets you feel good or at least lets you feel normal and sane for a while – and it becomes your God. Absolutely everything your life becomes optimized to maximize contact with this new God.

And it hollows you out in the process. It takes larger and larger doses of the thing to get the same effect, and everything else has to go – career, familly, social esteem, even basic self-care and grooming.

And one day,. you wake up and don’t even know who or what you are any more and feel such an enormous void within you that suicide seems like the only solution. At least that way, you will escape the guilt for good.

Makes me glad that my addictions are food and video games.

They might keep me from having a life, but they won’t take mine either.

At least, not directly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Gonna talk about the lack of challenge in my life some more.

It mjight seem cool to be the kid who is smater than all his teachers combined and who can, whenever he feels like it. demonstrate that he cannot be forced to do things against his will and must be dealt with rationally and intelligently because he has absolutely no fear of adults because he can think rings around them. The kid who makes it abundantly clear that his participation in school is voluntary.

It might seem cool. But it ain’t.

In fact, it kind of sucks.

But it sucks on a level that is not immediately obvious. It sucks on the level of discipline,l which is a level that can be hard to see in our individualist culture.

It sucked because it meant nobody could push back at me. I never had anyone who could put me in my place, so to speak. No powerful authority figure who could stop me from doing stupid things. No will superceding my own that could give me the comfort of structure and limits and discipline.

And these are not things a child can provide for themselves. Not well. anyhow. And in my case, what that lead to is a profound insecurity and an unwillingness to test the limits based on a great fear that there won’t be any.

And what’s to keep me together if that turns out to be the case?

It is profoundly frightening and depressing to test the limits only to find that there isn’t any. Kids naturally seek limits because they want to know where the walls of their reality is and they are programmed to learn and follow the rules of their society.

But when nobody in the life of a child is “powerful” enough to do the job, that child gives up on the whole idea and is left to their own immature and inadequate devices.

In my case, that meant collapsing even further into myself. Outside my mind’s inner garden was a scary world where I had been abandoned to my fate like a unwanted Roman child left in the woods.

Inside my mind, I was safe. My life therefore became about keeping the time I had to spend outside that inner garden to an absolute minimum, and thus my terrible inward tide was born.

I’ve often said that I never rebelled against my parents because they didn’t give me anything to rebel against. Ditto my teachers, to a lesser extent. And that is true up to a point but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

The truth is that I never rebelled because I knew I would win. I knew, to my very corfe, that I could win any contest of wills or battle of wits without even trying, and far from taking pride in that I found it extremely depressing.

So what would be the point of rebelling? All it would do is shatter whatever tiny sense of order and structure I had, and to what point?

To confirm that I am, indeed, totally alone in the world?

To prove I am smarter than everyone else? That’s self-evident.

To defeat the forces of evil? What force? What evil?

There are times when I wish someone had done me the favour of trying to control and suppress me. At least then I would have had a focal point for my restless and defiant energies. At least then I would have had the stimuli that creates character.

At least then I would have had the validation that comes from someone caring enough to fight me.

But why would someone put themselves through that? Having an elementary school student kick your ass to a bewildering extent in an argument must be humilating. and disturbing. Very few people are going to want to put in the kind of energy it took to struggle with me on a long term basis.

And few people are as intelligent and articulate as it would take to deal with me the way I wanted to be dealt with, which was rationallky. I was, am, and always will be open to a reasonable and sensible argument. It’s how my parents controlled me back in those golden days when they occasionally attempted to parent me, and it worked.

In fact I am, by default, a highly agreeable and accomodating fellow. It’s how I am built. I figure that life is easier when you keep your hard limitations to a minimum and do what you can to help if you can at all manage it.

To put it plainly : I am eager to please. Pathetically so. at times.

But people have to be able to explain what they want from me. I am not equipped to fill in most of the blanks. There is a minimum amount of information I need before I have a hope of intuiting the rest and if people can’t meet that burden, I am helpless.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve enjoyed customer service jobs so much. In customer service. I have a role and thus a defined relationship with the customers and they come to me asking for things simple enough to anyone to articulate clearly and that I feel fully competent to provide for them.

As a result, I don’t feel out of place or awkward at all. That, in turn, lets my naturally friendly and warm personality shine through, and the customers and I get along great.

Now if only I could apply that to the rest of my life. Devise a defined role for myself, something I can communicate to others in order to make me less mysterious and undefined so that I have a good starting point for making a connection.

I can be incredibly charming and personable when I am relaxed and not beset by social anxiety. I have a powerful personal appeal. And I can be very pursuasive. \

But for now, all that is locked behind walls of anxiety and depression.

And I can unlock it any time I want.

I just have to be absolutely sure that’s what I want.

Because letting myself means letting everyone else in.

And that thought terrifies me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.