We’re having out Paragon meeting tonight, Wednesday, instead of the usual Thursday, and it is amusing how much that throws me off.

It’s not sudden. I have known about it for a week. Technically. In fact, I more or less forgot about it until yesterday.

But the point is, it’s not a sudden change. And it’s a change I have made before, at least a half dozen times.

But it throws me off every single time.

Not in a huge way, but in a large way. It’s like suddenly I have to rebalance the stresses on a skycraper that just lost its major load bearing wall.

That skyscraper, in this metaphor, being my usual weekly routine.

Look, they can’t all be gems.

So why does something like this throw me off so badly? Why does any sort of alteration of my usual routine upset me and make me anxious? Why do I feel so compelled to do things in threes that I am making this dumb joke just so there will be a third question?

I think it boils down to self-soothing via hyperfamiliarity. I have spoken (written, whatever) before how how having a life in which nothing much changes is a way of self-medicating against anxiety.

The hyper-familiar, in this case, is the least stimulating. By staying in my room and spending most of my time on this computer, I create a low physical stimulus, high mental stimulus environment which therefore cannot stimulate my anxiety.

As solutions go, it’s crude and maladaptive, kind of like keeping yourself from getting a runny nose from your hayfever by living in an oxygen tent for the rest of your life.

It works, but it sacrifices way too much to pass a cost/benefit analysis.

The most sensible way to overcome this crippling dependency on low stimulus environments for mood stability is to pursue a regimen of gradual desensitization. Expose myself to increasingly physically stimulating environments so that I can adapt to them over time and thus create a situation where I can handle the real world better.

But that horse doesn’t make it out of the gate. Doing that kind of thing would take the exact kind of focus and discipline that I lack. I would need to both overcome the blinding chaos inside me that tears apart any kind of structure and focus inside me AND somehow break the lock my anti-action bias poses in order to do that.

It’s just not within reach yet.

And that’s the thing with me. I make all kinds of plans that “should” work but are actually less than worthless because they don’t take into account my lack of energy, ambition, focus, and drive.

They fail at step one because I am just not going to be executing any ambitious long term plans any time soon. And the bar for “ambitious” is set very low.

So I continue to float through life, full of potential and with enormous talent and ability but without the strength of spirit to pick a thing and commit to it and do it.

I am just not stable enough for that.

Oh well. It’s story time. Here’s the blurb from the client :

“The Micromanager – I recently worked with a client who insisted on emailing 3 to 5 times a day simply to say, “Are you making progress”. Of course, each time the email comes in, they expect an instant response. This would require a complete stopage of work each time the “You’ve Got Mail notice goes off. Solution, we work with our clients in advance to establish specific lines of communication and deadlines. We go the extra mile to teach them HOW to delegate and how to work with a VA team. This is a new experience for many and they usually don’t know what they don’t know.”

Hmmmm. I think I get the basic idea.

Hello again, and welcome to It’s A Soloprenuer Life, where I share my experiences of being a solopreneur in the digital age.

Here at Virtual A-Team, we encourage our clients to take an active interest in the work we are doing for them. However, occasionally you get a client whose interest is a little TOO active. You know what I mean?

We’ve all been there. You get a client who emails you three to five times a day to ask if you’re making any progress.

Yes we are, and we’d be making a lot more of it if you didn’t keep interrupting!

Because of course, it’s not enough to email. They expect you to answer instantly, and to do that, you would have have to drop everything you’re doing to reply.

Do that enough, and the next email will ask why you’re behind schedule!

Luckily, we here at Virtual A-Team go the extra mile to make sure that our clients understand how to delegate tasks and how to work with one of our teams. We also set up clear lines of communication with the client and provide them with detailed deadlines for each phase of the job.

That’s it for this week. Join us again next Friday morning for another episode.

Well that’s that. Another week, another $35 or so. Yay me!

I am trying to gather the energies needed to do another round of job hunting. My goal is to some day have enough work to get off Disability and be self-supporting for the first time in my life.

That would take about $1200/month in work, and that means getting (and doing!) a heck of a lot more work.

And I don’t expect to get there any time real soon. I will have to grab for new work while passing through the eye of my inner storm, and hopefully get enough regular work that I can finally grow the fuck up and be a man.

Who knows, maybe by this time next year,. I will be there.

And maybe then. I will actually get my shit together to actually look for work in television. What a wild idea.

I know I can do it.

But I don’t know if I can get it.

Story of my life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have so much stuff going through my mind every moment of the day (including sleep) that it’s a miracle that I can get anything done.

It’s like a busy construction site in this skull of mine. Many loud noises all happening at once with no coordination or predictability. Dangerous tasks being completed with little regard for safety or caution. The need for a constant start of alert awareness in order to keep from suffering grievous harm.

And a foreman that scoffs at the very concept of safety and thinks only wimps take emotional considerations into account before deciding to act.

Real men plunge foward in pursuit of the truth no matter where it leads and no matter how much damage that path might do to me.

And I wonder why I never feel safe. It’s cause I’m not!

And I am not sure there is anything I can do about that. I find it hard to even imagine slowing down and thinking about the personal consequences when I am in pursuit of the truth. The very concept makes my head hurt.

I can’t slow down because then I wouldn’t know. And I have to know.

For some reason. .

The important thing is that so far, all I have been doing about all the noise in my head is to hide from it and refuse to listen. Do my best to just block it out of my mind.

That’s not a solution. It is, at best, a maladaptive defense mechanism. After all, if you had noisy neighbours, you would not be content to simply ignore the noise.

You would want that noise to fucking stop NOW. And that requires direct intervention with the risk of confrontation and spending an exended amount of time outside of my teeny tiny comfort zone.

That’s where the metaphor breaks down, though, because if I had noisy neighbours you had better believe that I would stay angry and active as long as it took to get them to STFU. The battle lines  would be clear and I would not relent until I won.

Trying to get your brain to be quieter is a much more complicated situation.

This whole issue came to light as I was fighting a difficult boss in the game I have been playing, Witcher 2 : Assassins of Kings.  Not only was the fight itself frustrating but I became increasingly aware that I was losing because I could not get myself to fully focus on the game and what was happening in it.

Even in the middle of pitched battle. my mind would repeatedly retreat from the here and now into its usual retracted position and thus break up the stream of sensations from the game and that was making me slow and confused.

And it was such a frustrating thing to have my mind refuse to comply with my will even though I was safe and enjoying myself that it really got me to thinking.

In a sense, the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking got me to thinking. Ah, the irony.

It made me realize how badly I wanted better mental discipline. In this case, the exact kind of discipline I want is a little tricky to define.

That’s because in many ways, I have superb mental discipline. My thoughts are highly organized and focused and my data bank of knowledge is very efficient and well maintained. When my brain is really cookin’, the whole thing works like a mighty machine, relays clicking away smoothly, numbers going up and down on mechanical registers, the whole thing run by a system operator with such superb skills that the whole thing is like a symphony of precision and order.

Until I have to interfacre with reality, at which point everything goes to hell.

That big old fashioned computer of mine is a whiz at processing what it has but is very bad at handling input in realtime. I get confused and overwhelmed by reality quite frequently and often wish I could slow things down so I could keep up.

As is, the whole system pauses to process all the time, and that is why I am so bad at handling reality because reality, funnily enough, doesn’t pause.

And that’s not even taking the emotional aspect of an escapist personality into account.

And I am fucking sick of it. I want to be able to sync up with reality whenever I choose to do so. I hate having this relentless inward tide pulling me back into my mind at any and all opportunities regardless of the consequences.

It was particularly bad recently. I was lapsing into reverie while talking to people, and that is never a good thing. I could tell people that I am not choosing to do so but I wouldn’t believe me if I was them.

And I would hate for anything to think I was ignoring them and saying they were boring and not worth listening to because of my lapses.

It’s just that sometimes the stuff in my head gets so intense that it takes up all the resources of my mind, with almost nothing left behind for consciousness.

And I can’t stop it. At least, not yet. I am giving serious consideration to taking another stab at Eastern meditation practices and other forms of mental housekeeping.

As far as I know, these practices, when shorn of their mystical trappings, are the most sensible way to get your mental poop in a group around. They are designed to calm down what they call the “monkey mind” – mine is more like a monkey orgy – and let the practitioner assert control over their minds by uniting thought and will.

It’s more or less what today’s “mindfulness” craze is about. Bringing people out of the mess of their modern minds into a world where they can be more in harmony with their surroundings and strike a healthy balance between the inner and outer worlds.

I see it as a kind of equalization of pressure. Right now I have too much thought pressure in my mind and not enough input from reality to equalize it and thus create a stable environment inside my mind.

I wish I could simply open a valve and create one pressure zone instead of two and thus let the system reach a new and better equilibrium.

But brains are not as simple as pressurized systems.

I will just have to muddle through the best I can.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.