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.