Repeat until believed.

In a sense, I have always been lazy. ^[1] I think it’s just one of those basic settings in our temperaments, like introversion or curiosity. Some people are born full of verve and ready to take on the world and some of us are born to, shall we say, conserve energy.

And it’s not a depression thing. Not entirely, anyway. Even if I imagine myself to be very happy in my dream life, I would still be someone who avoids what seems like work to me if I possibly can.

And if I can’t, I will devote a lot of my copious mental energies to figuring out a clever way to get the work done with the least amount of effort possible.

That’s not just a part of being lazy. For me, it’s also a point of pride. I love exercising my own cleverness and basking in its glow. Any job becomes easier if I feel like I am doing it in a cooler, cleverer, more awesome way than the default.

In fact, thay’s more important than the actual effort involved.

And it’s not like I am incapable of putting in the work when I feel like that’s the only solution. My deep pragmatism takes care of that. If it’s got to be done and I am the only one who can do it, I do it.

But still, I am a man who enjoys his lassitude. My ideal world would be one where all I have to do is provide the vision, leadership, ideas, and the writing, and all the actual “work” would be done by others.

It’s the same dream I have had since I was a little kid : a life is which all I had to do was be brilliant all day,

Now, from a certain point of view, that’s still work. But it’s a matter of your personal resources. I have an abundance of mental resources like imagination, ideas, problem solving skills, curiosity, enthusiasm, and so on.

So for me, this hypothetical cleverness based lifestyle would not really be work at all. It would be getting paid to do what comes naturally to me anyway.

And isn’t that the dream we were all raised on? The job that isn’t work? The career that suits your natural abilities so well that it’s like getting paid to have fun?

The reality is, of course, a lot more complicated than that, but that’s still the idea.

Anyhow, back to laziness and effort and work. I define “work” as “doing things you do not want to do. ”

You have to define it that way instead of by effort because people do all kinds of effort intensive things of their own free will because they find them fun. People go hang gliding, hike nature trails, play sports, or read up on their favorite topics without ever having to be paid.

In fact, they pay for the privilege. The difference between work and play can be (crudely) defined as the difference between that which they have to pay you to do and that which you would pay them to do.

Even my beloved video games involve a great deal of mental effort. And I am certainly willing to pay to do it. In fact, I have, many times.

Sometimes I think about how long it hs been since I pirated a game, and I feel a mixture of pride at living honestly and shame at being so lame at the same time.

But what about my being a l33t h@x0rz stealing from the Man and justifying it by the fact that I had no money and therefore was not depriving the creators of the game of any money by getting their shit for free?

Seems like a pretty threadbare rationalization to me. But whatever.

My point is that I voluntarily put both money and effort into my video game hobby because it is something I find inherently rewarding.

So perhaps the real difference is a matter not of laziness as it is traditionally defined and simply having a philosophical objection to the idea of work.

Or maybe it’s a matter of a preferred default state. Like some people are set to prefer a state of leisure by default and need a reason to leave that state, whereas others default to a state of action.

Man, just thinking about that makes me tired.

I sometimes think of myself as being like a big lazy predator, like a lion or a tiger or a bear (oh my), happy to bask in the sun or sleep most of the time and only invest effort when I grow hungry and need to hunt.

Except I don’t need to hunt to eat. I am, after all, a modern pampered predator. So I end up just doing the lazy part.

But I know that part of me is not happy with that. Part of me knows there is a lot more to life than what fits in my little cage. It also knows that the need to hunt operates on a lot more levels than mere feeding and that therefore I will not be a happy predator unless I leave the comkfort of my cramped cage and go prowl the savannah,.

But the fear holds me back like a radio shock collar. Whenever I think of walking out that cage door, the fear wells up in me and freezes me in my tracks.

Not for very much longer, though. I am building a fire to burn down the walls of my cage and let me go wander and experience things and learn the way a normal person does, by experiencing life instead of always being outside it.

I don’t know when the final breakthrough will happen. I feel like I have been making the wall between me and the world thinner and thinner for a very long time but the fear keeps it intact…. for now.

But some day soon I am going to break through into the light.

And once I get there, I am there to stay,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s go a few more rounds with this topic.

Ready? Let’s begin.

I have been in a podcast-listening mood lately and the Cracked podcast only comes out once a week or so and so I have been in the market for something similarly stimulating to listen to while I kill stuff in Elder Scrolls Online, also known as ESO.

Then I remembered that the CBC has all their radio shows available online as podcasts, so I decided to get caught up on one of my fave CBC shows, namely Ideas.

I mean, talk about the perfect show for me. I am all about ideas. I am a highly ideological person and there have been times when ideas seem more real to me than reality. I am a creature of idea-space and ideas are what really get my attention.

So it’s like the show was made for me. More or less. I love the show so much that I don’t even find its occasional lapse of preposteriously ponderoud pretentiousness and stuffed shirt earnestness to be particularly offensive.

In fact,. I think of them more as endearing flaws.

But sometimes has become clear to me as I have been listening to these shows and it’s something I have always known but never quite consciously articulated before now :

There are areas in which I am one cranky, angry, curmudeonly motherfucker.

I mean, at least half the episodes I have listened to lately have made me super angry. The exact reasons vary, but it can all be boiled down to my frustrations with what I think of as sloppy, myopic, hopelessly limited and illogical thinking on the part of people claiming to be some kind of expert on something.

Well you’re not an expert, you’re a fucking dingbat, I cry out.

This is the sort of thing that used to get me in trouble in philosophy courses because we would be reading the thoughts of some Very Famous Philosopher and I would see the obvious flaws in their argument and their thinking and in what we will call my “passion” I would get upset and express my opinion in my usual, um, “unfiltered” way,

Now imagine being my poor philosophy professor. You are trying to teach the material and get the students engaged in the material. Usually, this is not a problem. But now you have this big dude with zero respect for authority and tradition getting agitated and tearing apart the very arguments you are trying to teach as well as expressing disdain for the philosophers associated with said arguments.

And the thing is, they can’t do anything about it, because philosophy class is all about open inquiry and challenging existing paradigms and all of that good stuff and so you can’t very well tell me, “stop thinking about those things!”.

Luckily, I did figure this out eventually and did my best to compromise between my white hot burning need to express myself and the nerves of my professors.

But listening to a podcast by myself means I have no such need for restaint. And so I get quite sore over petty stupid limited thinking that, to my mind, obviously makes no sense whatsoever and is absurd on the face of it.

Like this episode I listened to about AI and the future of world. It sounded pretty interesting from the description. But in retrospect, I could have spared myself the rage if I had realized that could mean they were going to talk about automation, and people are saying some incredibly dumb shit about automation these days.

And sure enough, one of the experts had written a book about the (get this) “jobless future”. Oh right, because of automation, nobody in the future will have a job because machines do all the work – for free, apparently, seeing as with universal unemployment, nobody will be able to to afford to buy anything and there will be no money to pay for the care and upkeep on all the automated factories as well as nobody to run them and nobody even deciding what they make and….

It’s a stupid fucking idea and I am ashamed that the CBC gives it credibility by having not one but two experts balther on about it for most of an hour. The only thing necessary to insure that jobs will exist in the future is for it to continue to make money by hiring people to do things.

And I don’t see that changing any time soon, do you?

If a businessman buys a machine hat can do the work of ten men, he doesn’t fire nine people. He keeps the same number of employees and does ten times as much.

And so forth and so on. I have talked about this stuff here before. My point is that when I listen to crap like that, I get really mad and worked up over it.

It’s not hard to see why. I have a lot of latent anger to start with, and like I said before I am very much a man of ideas, and a radio show can’t argue back or be hurt by what I say, so it’s like a perfect triifecta of rage release when I listen to a show like Ideas.

I mean, people are just so fucking stupid!

I focus on this aspect of my persobnality tonight because it illustrates how I am not quite the super friendly mellow happy dude I think I am. And I want to face that, and give myself permission to be a cranky, angry dude some of the time,.

Specifically, when that is how I am actually feeling. It’s not healthy the way I smother all but the most acceptable emotions in myself. It’s okay for me to be in a bad mood. Other people, more healthy people, get cranky sometimes and it’s not the end of the world for them. Why should I be any different?

So maybe I need to loosen my iron grip on myself a little bit. Maybe I would be a lot healthier if I let my inner hothead out for exercise now and then. maybe there are worse things in the world than being short with people now and then.

All I know is that my contents are under too much pressure and something, somewhere has to give before I explode.

Now is the time to make sure what gives is not my sanity.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yeah, that feeling is back again.

But I am not going to let it become a reason to hate myself like I used to. I mean, what would the connection even be, logically speaking, between hating my life and hating yself? I’m a terrible person because my current life is unsatisfactory to me?

That doesn’t make a lick of sense.

And I am not going to strongly, thoroughly, and firmly suppress it like I have been doing lately either. There must be a reason why this thought keeps coming back and as a sensible owner of a fully armed and operation brain, it’s up to me to figure out what this feeling is trying to tell me and what I can do about it.

So let’s start from the core and work outwards.

The core is the feeling that I do not like the life I am currently leading.

Why, though? What’s so bad about it? Haven’t I been trying to tell myself it is perfectly fine and it would be okay if the rest of my life was just like this?

Yeah, bull SHIT it would be. Saying that was a necessary step in my learning to separate how I feel from who I am, but it did not last. I am not at all happy with how my life is going right now and burying that fact in favor of more time spent distracting myself with video games is not going to change the fact.

In fact, it will only make it worse.

So I am calling it. This is officially a crisis. Fuck my usual policy of maintaining maximum calmness all the time in order to fight the anxiety/. Some things are emergencies and anxiety is the necessary appropriate response.

Okay, so I don’t like my life. Why?

Because it’s not enough. This fucked up tiny coffin of a life of mine is far too small for me and I need to get out of the damned box so I can spread my wings and fly. I have all this talent and intelligence – I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet. – and all I do all day is play video games and masturbate.

Not at the same time. I don’t know where to get those kinds of games. Not since I quit playing Skyrim. anyway.

And the thing is, it’s not that I think I am a terrible person for living the way I do. That shit’s old news. how I live my life is my own business and that’s final.

No, it’s that when I look at my life I am not happy with it. I am keenly aware that I want so much more out of life than what I am getting now. I want to live, dammit, and maybe even grow up.

I want a life I can be proud of. And I deserve one, too. I have suffered unjustly for far too long and I deserve something better out of life.

And nobody can get me a better life than me. I am the only one responsible for my life. I am the one who makes the decisions. I am the one who either endures ot surrenders. I am the one wuith the standing and the agency to improve my lot in life.

And when I say that, I am not talking about improving some absurd and worse than meaningless variable like “success”.

I mean making myself happier.

That’s the only meaningfing definition of success anyhow.

All that is holding me back is the fear. The fear that hold me down like gravity and that makes even the smallest things so hard to do.

But the real problem is the fear behind the fear. The fear of what would happen if the main fear wasn’t there any more. The fear of true exposure to reality, in realtime. with things coming at my faster than I can think them through and come up with the “smart” solution, and therefore have to go on my gut.

That’s how people of normal intellect get through life. They go with their gut and learn from the mistakes it makes. It’s not learning in the sense that a liberal intellectual like myself would recognize – more like an intuitive sense of how the world works made of categorical intuitions thna anything  you could write down in a book – but it gets most people through most of life perfectly fine.

It’s just us mental perverts who have to figure out how everything works that suffers.

So the fear behind the fear is the real bugbear of the whole desultory dungeon that is my depression. I can remove a lot of layers between myself and the world – and I have, and it’s lovely – but the final battle will not be won until I can truly face the facts.

This will not, however, be a conventional kind of war. I think the primary mission must be to secure better sources of reward and encouragement and other healthy emotional nutrients so that I can build up my strength for that final assault.

And that means stepping out of my own shadow, at least a little. It goes without saying that I can’t get more social rewards out of a totally isolated life. That well is bone dry and coughing up dust when the wind blows. I am going to have to raise my level of exposure to the world.

Because what I am really after is a sense of meaning. I want to do things which matter to me and which I can be proud of and which make me feel like I exist and have worth and mean something to the world and to myself.

That means looking for new playgrounds. I am increasingly convinced that treating life as play is the only way to go for me, and that means I need to find places where I can play and explore and have fun in a way that is, at least vaguely, productive.

Again, that’s productive in the sense of making myself happier.

Because that’s all that really matters to me now – my happiness.

Everything else can go fuck itself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

They call it evening but you never see it even.

Anyhow, I just woke up so I feel like crap. Nevertheless, I must blog now , as I will be busy in the evening hanging with my friends, and that got me to thinking.

The inevitable future scholars of this august publication will no doubt note that there is a distinct difference between the entries written while I eat lunch having only recently awoken^[1] and the ones written as I eat supper and have been awake for a while.

There’s certainly a big difference to me.

Whether said difference would truly be detectable on a literary level is debatable. For all I know, it’s the same deathless prose no matter when I write it.

But writing it fully awake and raring to go is sure as heck a lot easier then trying to cudgel my brain for words when I am barely awake and feel like crap.

Oh well. Like Mikey says, I’m not happy about it, but I’d rather feel like shit than be full of shit.

Damn I love that song. Even though Mikey looks like a cross between Axl Rose and Bobcat Goldthwait in that screenshot.

The song speaks to me. I feel like that is how I would have turned out if someone had cared enough to try to control me.

Instead, I had to raise myself, knowing there was absolutely nobody out there trying to keep me from hurting myself (and some eager to hurt me themselves) and absolutely nobody to pick me up if I fall (and someone all to eager to make it happen then laugh at me while I bled).

It’s hard to describe just how profoundly damaging that is. No discipline to internalize, no rules to protect me, no opposing will to test myself against and learn from, no social group to fit into, no faith to lean on, and absolutely nobody to kiss it better.

Just a sad little boy with a big, big brain.

Sometimes it seems weird that nobody could see how miserable I was. But then I remember that I was very good at hiding it. I still am.

When people are paying attention to me, I am all smiles and jokes and such. To let them see my sadness and loneliness would be the opposite of that. I want them to keep paying attention to me. Making them sad via empathy will make them go away.

Or at least, that’s what my bad programming tells me.

And because I have had so little nurturing in my life, when I do open up to people I tend to go to the opposite extreme and dump everything on them.

I suppose I am also testing them by doing that. I want to see if they will abandon me when I become too much for them to take and therefore more effort then I am worth.

That’s what I expect of the world. That people will abandon me when they get close enough to me to get beneath the song and dance on the surface and start having to deal with my sorrow and pain.

And it’s not entirely irrational for me to feel that way,. It has happened in my life. My contents can be quite toxic to those without a lot of experience in dealing with depressed people. Even those who have that kind of experience can find me hard to take because of all the negative vibes I contain and conceal.

I mean, I even hold back when I am with my therapist because I don’t want to end up destroying him with my pain. Even with him, there have been times when I have seen that “lost at sea” look in his eyes when I am truly unloading my pain.

I don’t think he will abandon me. Not really.

But I don’t want to break the poor man either,.

Maybe I am not giving him enough credit, though. Maybe I could go supernova right in front of him and he would be fine.

But I can’t take that risk. And I always have to worry about scaring people because of my size. A therapist can totally abandon you if he or she feels like you are a threat.

Ain’t that a kick in the nuts. I didn’t ask to be a big bear of a dude. I have the same emotions and needs as anyone else. If you prick me, do I not bleed?

And yet, I have to worry about  scaring people away when I express my emotions in the exact same way everyone else does.

Being a gentle giant ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

So even with my therapist, I hold back. Nobody gets to the real me, unshielded and unfiltered, in all my radioactive glory, pain and sadness and rage and bitterness emitting from every inch of skin, naked and wretched and toxic as hell.

That would kill most people. Not physically, of course, but psychologically. People cant handle exposue to that kind of pain. It would dissolve the walls that they have and I don’t, the ones that keep them sane, the ones that they have and I don’t.

Oh no, not me. I am He Who Walks Through Walls. I am the magical dude who sees that social reality is optional and consentual and therefore I can take it or leave it as I see fit. I am the Other, the one who is outside the normal rules and who can use that detached vantage point to see things more clearly than any of the rest of you zombies.

Lucky me. Despite my rationalist materialistic mindset, I am a powerful mystic. And I have mjy own kind of magic, though I don’t always know when I am using it. I know secrets about how things really work that would blow most people’s minds.

And that would be great if I was content to being that dangerous weirdo lurking around the edges of society, tempting the young ones into my web with forbidden knowledge.

But I want love.

I want someone to care for me.

I want to live my life.

And that’s going to take a lot of work,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still fine tuning this whole “I’m always awesome” thing.

The fear keeps coming back. The fear of choosing from all the possibilities in my head. The fear of getting into something I can’t get out of if I start freaking out. The fear of creating expectations in peoples minds that I can’t live up to. The fear of getting into a situation that requires a constant input of energy when mine is intermittent at best.

The fear of change.

The fear of the unknown.

And biggest of all, the fear of growing up.

But that’s all to be expected. All that fear is just the existing systems resisting change. I have been a very scared person ruled by fear for a very long time. This self-worth thing is brand new. It’s bound to be incompatible with the legacy systems.

The secret is to just keep pushing. Nothing can stop me now. However long it takes, I will grind my way through all my obstacles and reach the real world and finally be a full and valid person and not just a partial portrait of a potential genius.

And if all the old fears keep getting in the way,. they will just plain have to go.

I think, on some level. depression makes you cling to your fears. After all. as horrible as it is to have a panic attack and as soul-crushing as a life made far too small by anxiety can be, those fears also protect the depressive from having to deal with the real world by throwing up a big wall of fear any time depression’s reign is even questioned.

It’s like what I have talked about regarding excuses. Only more so. The thing about fear and the other kinds of negative emotions that depression uses to enforce its dominence is that they take advantage of a kind of loophole in the human meta-consciousness that causes us to trust negative emotions more than positive ones.

After all, a negative emotional response immediately bypasses the first filter of meta-consciousness, which is “am I just doing this to make myself happy?”.

Well obviously not, because it’s making me UNhappy. So it must be legit!

It takes a particularly robust meta-conscious mind – like mine – to be able to look past the immediate emotional response and think, “yes, but what does this reaction ACCOMPLISH? What is really happening hear?”.

And the answer is that depression is getting its way because while you are scared out of your freaking mind, the last thing you looking to do is challenge depression’s rule. In fact, in the future, you will be even less likely to struggle against your depression precisely because of how this fear response punished you for it.

And the more important thing is that the larger fear stimulus – the fear of change and the unknown – goes away. The negative emotion swamps it out. It floods your mind and pushes out whatever thing was making your depression feel threatened.

So on one level, you are terrified.

But on another, you are relieved. At least you are “safe” now. Safe from having to face that yawning existential void called “facing reality”. Safe from having to grow up. Safe from exposure to the cold harsh world.

Safety in you tiny little prison cell.

Fuck that. Fuck my fears. I am not going to let them run my life any more. In fact, I am not even going to fight them any more.

Instead, I am going to invite them in for drinks and ask them what they are trying to ttell me and what all they feel the need to say.

The rest of their energy and power can arc across the sky of my mind like lightning – and to the same effect.

I just don’t give a shit any more. Beat me, hurt me, call me names. Cause me pain. Make me lame. It means nothing to me any more. No matter the consequences. I remain in control of myself and I am more powerful than any transient emotion can ever hope to restrain.

The worst depression’s enforcers can do to me is make me wait out the storm.

And when the sky is clear again, I will continue on my journey without pausing or looking back, because where I am going is so much more important than where I have been. And even more important than where I am going is THAT I am going.

Forward. Always moving forward. Eternal momentum. Remember that.

So hello, fear, my old friend. You and I have been through a lot together, haven’t we? And I could say that it is all your fault that I am 45 years old and lost at sea without having even gotten a start in life, and that would be mostly true, but…

It’s also true that I chose to listen to you. I accept that now. I accept that because that is the price I have to pay in order to have the power to choose to ignore you now.

You were there for a reason. In your own crazy way, you were protecting me. That is what fear is for, after all. Keeping you out of danger.

But now I am done with you. You got too big and too strong and started attacking me like some kind of autoimmune disorder. And now I am shoving you side so that I can finally get on with my life.

I know I womn’t shake you right away. In fact, I am pretty sure you will be with me for a long long time. I have no delusions of a fear free life.

The only difference will be that I am not letting you call all the shots any more. I am going to strengthen my will and my spirit and my wherewithal to the point there pushing you aside is so easy it’s not even a thing any more, and then you will wither on the vine, dry up, and blow away, because I am not feeding you any more.

So thanks for the help, fear.

Now get the fuck out. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s tiring. But rewarding.

I think I am beginning to get the hang of this believing in myself thing. The secret, I am discovering, is to attenuate the rising self worth so that it comes through not as pressure or guilt or any of the other broken and malapaptive responses I have had before.

Instead, it comes through as excitement. Possibilities. Things I can do, but don’t necessarily have to do like it’s some kind of moral obligation and I am a bad person if I don’t got do it RIGHT NOW.

Because as patient readers know, that shit don’t work. Guilt, pressure, obligation, whatever form the punitive measure takes, all it does is destroy my will to do anything and put me in that state of hopelessness I know all too well.

The sad truth is there is a kind of comfort in hopelessness. If there is no hope, then you don’t have to do anything and you are justified in shutting out the world.

I typed that as “shitting out the world” the first time. That’s Marvin Crackbaby talking.

I’ve written before about the meaning of despair. Its biological purpose is to be a mode where an injured animal stops wanting to move around and goes into a mode that places the least physical demands on the body and hence lets the body devote the maximum amount of its resources to healing.

Well the thing is that the lassitude and pain-blocking can be quite comforting and even addictive to the wounded soul. Especially one as wounded as mind.

Depression happens when the psychological wound(s) are too big for the mind to heal and therefore the mind gets locked into this despair mode.

It is really as simple as that.

Anyhow, back to what I meant to talk about. Seeing my talents as an open doorway leading to exciting and fun things is way, WAY better for my mental health. It makes me feel lucky instead of guilty and excited about life instead of terrified of it.

This is especially true because I am not putting any pressure on myself to do any thing in particular. I am not interested in forcing myself into anything, even if it is good for me. What is achieved by force disappears once that force is removed. Sooner or later, I would fall back into despoair mode just to take a rest.

No, what this is about is opening my mind to possibilities outside my current life. And that’s all they are : possibilities. Options. New fun things I could be doing instead of the usual fun things I do.

Again, with no pressure. I am opening the door to my cage. That’s all. It is still up to me to decide whether to take a peek outside the cage and look around or not.

Basically, I have to handle myself like I am a very nervous and scared animal.

Which is what I am. When you get right down to it. Sorta kinda.

If I set my mind correctly,  things look pretty great.

Here I am, this massively gifted individual who has so much to offer the world that he has trouble deciding which gifts to go with.

As problems go, that’s a pretty good one to have!

Plus I am internet savvy enough to know that there is so much opportunity out there these days in the gig economy for someone like me to exploit. I could shine in a dozen different fields and not even break a sweat. I have everything I need for success.

And, he tells himself, that is not, as you might think, something scary.

Yeah it’s hard to choose. But only if you are obsessed with finding the “right” answer and you view life as an infinite corridor with infinite doors, only one of which is correct.

That’s bullshit and I know it. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Almost all of that corridor and every one of those is an illusion created by the funhouse mirrors in my mind that reflect the same image over and over.

That’s just one of depression’s little tricks. And it only works if you believe its lies.

My possibilities are quite finite, thank you kindly. There’s a lot of them, but not an unmanagable amount. It can be done!

And what’s more important is to keep the fact that there is no such thing as a single “right” answer firmly in mind. There’s tons of right answers. And it’s not like I only get one shot and if I pick the wrong thing, that’s it, my life is over.

I will have plenty of opportunities to try this that and the other. All I have to do is keep trying. The tickets for this lottery are free, so why not keep playing?

Doesn’t that sound exciting and fun and a great way to spend my time? Almost as much fun as video games, and way more fulfilling.

There is no reason in the world why I can’t treat the whole issue of being paid for labour as a great big game with fabulous cash prizes and nowhere to go but up.

Fuck taking things seriously. I have tried it and it did not work out. Time to give treating life with a comedic disregard for solemnity a try.

Fuck outcomes, too. That’s a pretty radical thing for a pragmatic utilitarian like me to say, but the problem is that outcomes are not always controllable, but how you deal with things always is.

That’s why the best life strategy is to simply concentrate on being yourself. That way, you are not emotionally investing in controlling outcomes. You are instead emotionally investing in yourself, and that is something you can control.

And the more you invest in yourself, the stronger and more capable you become, and the less those outcomes matter because hey, guess what…. you’re happy!

And that was the point of the whole thing in the first place, right?  Finding that door that leads to happiness?

And if you are happy, what else could possibly matter?

And all you (I) gotta do is cross that bridge between me and life and walk out that door that I have been looking at for so long and start a new day.

And have fun doing it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It really does.

This is what no angry and/or punitive father either could or would articulate : that they are trying to teach you self-discipline because it really does make life easier.

From the victim – ahem – the child’s point of view, all this shoulder to the grindstone shit is just an excuse for one or more adults to make them suffer. And what makes that even worse is that the suffering comes with criticism for being lazy, weak, or the like.

Well gee, Dad, either you need to teach me these things, or you get to be mad at me for not knowing them already, but NOT BOTH.

If you designed a system to make sure your kid is a loser, it would look just like that. It teaches the kid that hard work is a pitiless villain and self-discipline is a synonym for abuse and both of those things are to be avoided like the plague because that’s the only way to even preserve your own identity against the parent(s) who are trying to overwrite it with their own idea of who you should be.

If you’re a parent who thinks this might apply to you, I ask you to do this simple exercise – imagine your child is absolutely perfect in your eyes. Does absolutely nothing to make you mad. Imagine that they are the exact child you want them to be all possible ways.

Now tell me : does this vision make you happy? Or anxious? Does life seem like it would be better that way, or do you feel a rising panic like that would somehow be very very wrong. Even though, by definition, everything is as right as it can be.

If it makes you happy. great.

But if it makes you anxious or angry or restless or agitated or anything like that, ask yourself why. How could that scenario possibly evoke negative emotions? What could possibly be so wrong?

I think if you are honest with yourself, you will find that it was never really about teaching the kid(s) anything. It was about having someone to abuse. Someone to hurt who could not fight back and therefore was a safe target for your impotent rage. Someone you can violently dominate whenever you are feeling inadequate.

Now does that sound right to you? Remember, you are supposed to love and potect your kids. You’re supposed to protect them from the bogeyman, not BE the bogeyman.

I am not saying you don’t love your kids. I am sure you do. I am sure they are the most important thing in your life and you would do anything for them.

I’m just saying one of those things might be getting yourself some therapy so you can learn to deal with your issues in a way that doesn’t hurt the people you love the most in this world or the next.

I’m sure you have your reasons for being so angry.

But there’s no excuse for taking it out on the ones you love. Right?

Well that went in an interesting direction. Pretty sure I just worked out some of my issues with my father.

Whatever works, man, go with it, I guess.

Back to the self-discipline thing. From the kids points of view, there is no benefit to hard work and doing the things their parents want them to do. It’s a total liability.

What the parents know but can never explain is that things get easier the more you do them. So if it’s something you will need to do in life, practicing it beforehand makes sense. Get some practice in before you have to do it for real as an adult.

Like budgeting. It’s not about spending your money the way your parents would. It’s about getting the most of what you want out of your money.

But more importantly. you get used to overcoming yourself in order to do things you want to do but don’t feel like doing.

And that’s like, the most important skill in the world.

Seriously. Developing that skill is the only path to truly growing up. And that’s not all. Like all forms of self-discipline, it makes life a lot easier.

Just imagine how nice it would be not to have to struggle with yourself to get things done any more. Instead of having to drag yourself to work every morning, you would just go. If there was some unpleasant task ahead of you, there would be no procrastination and no inner waffling. You would just do it and then it would be done.

In essence, it’s about making yourself subject to your own will. Like I keep saying, doing what you want to do instead of what you feel like doing.

Those are not the same thing. You can want to do things you do not feel like doing. Or at the very least, you can want the results of doing the thing you don’t feel like doing.

And seeing as you are no longer an infant, nobody is going to come along and do it for you. It’s up to you. You know what you want. So it’s up to you to get it.

And that’s not a punishment. It’s life. It’s no more a punishment than the fact that you have to pick up food and put it in your mouth in order to eat it is a punishment.

It’s just how life works.

And you are free to choose whether or not you will continue to wait for someone else to see to your needs and desires so you don’t have to do it. You can keep that up until the day you die if you want to. Nobody can force you to grow up.

All anyone can do is tell you that you will be, legit, a hell of a lot happier once you learn to overcome yourself and get things done.

And that is all our parents, in their clumsy but well intentioned way, have been trying o tell us all these years.

Turns out they actually knew what they were talking about.

Who would have guessed?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at least it is when I am recently awoken and feeling like, during the night, someone replaced my blood with used motor oil mixed with the contents of a thousand ashtrays.

Now there is something I have seen disappear in my lifetime : ashtrays. They are victims of the highly wonderful trend of people simply not smoking indoors any more, and I am glad to see both them and the behaviour they enabled disappear.

I still bear the scars of a Seventies childhood filled with adults smoking like chimneys – it was mandatory back then – indoor and out, and poor little me acting like someone in a fire safety video, ducking down to get under the smoke so I don’t choke.

Seems like absolute madness now. And so uncivilized. Hard to believe that we used to just let anyone who felt like it put a constant stream of toxic smoke into the air we all breathe just because it was “normal”.

I mean, there used to be smoking and non smoking sections on AIRPLANES. Including ones that flew high enough that they cabin had to be pressurized and the air recirculated, so people got to breathe that smoke over and over!

Savages, man. We were all savages.

Well the good news is that the millennials barely smoke at all, so if I hang around long enough,. I might just live to see the tobacco industry go the way of the video store and the old school arcade.

That would be awesome.

Sometimes I feel so crappy when I wake up that I wonder if it’s worth it.

I mean, sure, consciousness is where it’s at, but I would definitely like to have the option of staying asleep till I can wake up feeling okay.

Kind of like the ultimate snooze button.

But alas, that is never an option. I am usually awoken by a need rather than waking up because I don’t need any more sleep.

Usually, it’s the need to pee or the need to eat. Sometimes it’s the need to get up and move around a bit.

And sometimes I wake up incredibly tense and agitated and it takes hours for me to calm down enough to even think about trying to go back to sleep.

Man, I hate that shit.

I keep telling myself that I should pick one of the days when I have a clear schedule (like Saturday, maybe) and just sleep and sleep and sleep until I am not sleepy any more and I can actually get on with my life.

But I am too worries that my depression would take that opportunity to keep me in bed for days and days and have me all to itself

Might be worth it if I am well rested at the end of it all. But I have no faith in the probability of that outcome. Odds are, I would just end up incoherent and confused and quite thoroughly lost at sea.

Hard to see that as progress.

Most of my power has always been…. latent.

I know for a fact that nothing in my life has come even close to drawing on my full capacities. I know that I am capable of so much more. Not just more than now – that’s a very low bar indeed – but more than most people can imagine.

Not in a “superhuman powers and abilities” sense. Probably. But in the sense of what I can put into motion and make happen.

I’ve always held so much back.. Partly because I feel like a giant among pygmies and I don’t want to hurt people with my full strength and power.;

But deeper than that, I am terribly afraid of losing contact with reality by going on some massive manic ego trip and getting sucked up into my own mind like Ziggy Stardust,.

I can feel the craziness in my head when I think about uncorking my bottle and letting the full genie of my intellectual gifts out into the world. It represent my perfect mirror image – far too confident where I am far too self-doubting, arrogant as hell where I am too modest, not concerned about other people’s feeling at all where I am, perhaps, too concerned with them and not concerned enough about my own issues.

And who knows, maybe after letting the pendulum finally swing in the other direction and letting the whole thing oscillate for a while,. I would calm down enough to be sane again, maybe even a lot saner than I am now.

It’s tempting. But for now, – right now – I am growing my ego slowly and carefully, treating it like a convalescent.

Which it is. It truly is.

And as much as any convalescent might tire of the sickbed and want to jump up and run to play outside in the sun, that doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea. IF theyu are not truly ready, they might make theoir illness a whole lot worse.

Then again, who knows? Might be the best thing for me. Maybe I am long overdue to get out of my sickbed and get on with my life.

But I sure don’t feel ready.

Still, my barriers are coming down faster than ever lately. The layers and layers of scar tissue and frozen emotion that have cut me off from the world (and protected me) are coming off and it’s only a matter of time before I finally emerge into the sunlight.

And I know that I am fearless. I will tackle any inner demon I find, no matter how scared or uncomfortable or sick to my stomach it makes me feel. I am well and truly sick of all this bullshit and only serious self-exploration will free me of it, and any temporary negative emotional experiences are irrelevent.

Bring it on. I have a lot of hate, rage, and bitterness powering me and I can’t wait to focus them on a truly healing task.

So make peace with your maker – that’s me – inner demons, because Papa’s coming home and there will be a reckoning.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The subject of excuses being more precious than gold to a depressive came up in therapy today, so I figure that’s what I will talk about.

First, some theoretical groundwork. The main reason depressives cling to their repertoire of excuses (which can be formidable) is that they resolve the tension between the idea that they should, could, or even want to act and the overwhelming force of depression’s anti-action bias.

That’s why depressives are so quick to shoot down any hopeful suggestions as well. Hope leads to action and action is the enemy ergo hope must be killed.

That’s the power of the anti-action bias. It convinces you that taking action is the worst possible thing you could do and that therefore everything…. everything… that leads to the desire to act must be ruthlessly destroyed.

That includes things like lust, joy, inspiration, restlessness, curiosity, the desire for the company of others, the need to prove yourself, ambition, excitement, anger, and literally anything else that might trigger an adrenal reaction.

The only emotions pemitted are the kind of diffuse and diffident emotions that can be safely isolated from any possible connection to actual action and enjoyed for themselves and not what they might lead to.

Dreams fit this bill perfectly. It can be very pleasant to dream of all the great things you are totally going to do some day  – while, of course, doing nothing to actually achieve said dreams in any way.

Because that was never the point in the first place. The dreams were meant to make you feel better, not to lead to action. If they could lead to action, the anti-action bias would kill them with extreme prejudice. It’s only when these dreams are completely divorced from any potential for action that they can endure long enough to give you feeling your life is going somewhere.

And you can see how important that is when the idea is to keep you from doing anything at all. Action is the enemy, after all.

Damn, I never should have let myself wander off into theory,.

I told you that so I can tell you this : I am hereby declaring myself to be out of excuses.

Let me be more clear : I have no excuse not to pursue my dreams.

From this point on, any lack of progress is a choice. I could do more, but I choose not to because my depression makes it too hard.

I could totally be spending every afternoon on UpWork looking for work, or making my presence known on some influential forum, or writing some seriously amazing fiction, or tightening up some of my stuff to make it ready for submission to places that might actually pay me for it, or fucking around with music and/pr video, or any one of the zillions of other things that are totally within my abilities and just require a little more focus, energy, and drive than playing fucking video games all the god damned time.

But is also way, way more rewarding.

I am taking responsibility for it all. No more excuses. My life is mine to control and it is up to me to make myself happy.

And you know what? I’m going to do it!

I am learning how to drive doubt out of my mind via the awesome power of my id.

It’s quite the revolution. I have been overly intellectual (another thing that came up in therapy today) for most of my life, and the very thought of asserting something unilaterally and without proof via sheer force of will would have seemed like the worst kind of intellectual crime.

But now? Fuck logic, man. Fuck reason. Fuck science. All that matters to me is maximizing my happiness and if that means thumping my rational mind into unconsciousness with the thick strong club of unreason, so be it.

I mean, why do I have to be the one who knows what is really going on all the time? What good has it ever done me? What has the “Truth” ever done for me?

Nothing matters more than my own happiness. Nothing. Whatever gets in the way is going to get seared out of me by an orbital laser and vaporized. I am in no mood to be gentle or careful about it either.

The bad stuff in me has to die, die, die.

Only then will I be free.

Proud of myself for Doing The Thing today.

See, I had a problem. I ran out of two of my diabetes meds, Metformin and Glyburide,  a couple of days ago. And that is BAD. When I don’t get all my pills, my health degrade and the Demon Hunger is unleashed to torment me with an unstoppable appetite that normal meals cab barely dent and that is so intense it feels like I am going insane.

It sucks, but it does act as a very good punishment for not takinhg my meds. Any time I am thinking of skipping them because I don’t feel like I need them (lame, I know), the memory of being that particular kind of hungry stops me in my tracks and drags me over to the side of sane self-interest.

Anyhow, after therapy and cashing my check, I stopped by my pharmacy and asked for an emergency supply of the two drugs. Turns out, there was actually ten days worth of both of them remaining on my account.

No wonder I ran out!

I have to keep reminding myself that, despite how I have been treated by life, I am worth looking after with the same care and caution I would take with someone I really love and care about.

Because I am someone I really love and care about.

I just forget sometimes, and listen to the bad voice in my head that tells me to do as little as possible and even has the nerve to make me feel clever about it.

Yeah, clever like a brick. I’m so smart I hate my life.

Remember, stupid is as stupid does.

Who cares. I’m awesome. I’ve always been awesome and I will always be awesome. That’s all that truly matters. I am a truly amazing person and I deserve all the love, success, money, and happiness in the world.

Especially the money part. Hint hint, universe!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

OK, so here’s my basic problem :

I have great dreams and ambitions and loads of talent and capacity, but they are all strangled in the crib by this enormous weight of psychological damage that sits in the very center of my psyche.

Ambition versus damage. That’s the problem and that’s the fight. Everything else in my life is secondary. The main issue is this struggle.

And I am working on it.

Mostly by writing these blog entries and going to therapy once a week. And that is definitely having an effect. An effect I can feel.

But it takes so long. And there is no way to track my progress on a daily level. I can only feel said progress in terms of distance from a previous, worse mental state.

Kind of like trying to watch a tree grow. You know that it’s growing and it’s clear to see how it is now far taller and thicker than it was a long time ago.

But you can’t actually see it happening. And sometimes that makes you, against all reason and knowledge,. like nothing is happening. Or next to nothing.

And wow, does that suck.

My newly awoken id rails against the slowness of it all. It wants to tear into my problems like a lion tearing into a zebra and kill and kill and kill until there is not a single motherfucking shred of that big pile of damage left.

And boy, do I wish it worked that way. And maybe some day, it will.

But not now, because it’s not that kind of problem. You might as well be beating your fists bloody on the side of a glacier. Frontal attack is not going to work.

Instead of hot rage, then, the solution is one of my favorite things : grim determination. I use all that energy of my id as a battery to keep me going through the difficult process of trying to recover from all this bullshit.

Hot rage is flashy but it’s grim determination that gets shit done.

And that’s how I kinow that, no matter how slow the process of recovery is, I am confident that my victory is inevitable.

Because if there’s one thing I know, it is that I will  NEVER stop fighting.

Right now, I am experiencing a very familiar feeling of coldness in my chest in patches on my forearms. It’s a highly unpleasant feeling. It feels like I swallowed an icicle.

I revel in it, though, because I know exactly what it is, now, and I want all of it I can possibly get. Bring it on, motherfuckers!

Because ya know what it is?

It’s the feeling of my pain dying. It’s the feeling of my glacier melting. It’s the feeling of my psychological immune system doing its goddamned job for once.

It’s the feeling of recovery.

And man, do I love it.

Think I will try to lean into it.

So where were we? Right, the damage is the enemy and whatever I can do to melt that glacier that sits on my heart is a good thing.

If I had a button that would melt the whole thing all at once, I would push it with no hesitation. Bring on the flood.

Has it been long enough since I linked to that song?

Fuck it. I don’t care.

I would happily trigger a total psychological meltdown in myself if I thought that I would come out of it with all my bullshit washed away. I am willing to trade temporary sanity for long term happiness. That sounds like a fair deal to me.

Though I recognize that it would be, to put it very mildly, not the choice most sane people would make.

But fuck it. I know I’m a lunatic.

I know that I have this kamikaze streak that contrasts sharply with my usual cautious and logical self. It is the side of me that would get a maniacal gleam in his eye then push the button, consequences be damned.

It’s also the side of me that might well be willing to do some pretty crazy shit in order to prove a point or exert maximum defiance or just to fuck with someone who has pissed me off enough for me to consider them my enemy.

And that takes a lot. I am not one for nursing grudges and I fundamentally refuse to devote the mental resources necessary to declare and maintain someone’s “enemy” status in my mind when it’s a person I can easily just forget about.

Usually, the worst that can happen is that I, metaphorically speaking, cast the person out of the light of my consideration and into the darkness of my no longer taking them into consideration except to route around them.

I don’t care whether I “get them back”. I don’t care if they “know they fucked with the wrong guy”. I don’t care if they think they “got away with something” or that they “won” and I “lost.

I just want them out of my life and out of my mind as smoothly and cleanly as possible. From that point onward, they are “off the list” of worthwhile people in my mind and they can have a ten day orgy for all I care, as long as they don’t do it around ME.

But I do not claim any degree of moral superiority based on that fact. It’s how I operate but I would never say it is somehow superior. It’s what works for me.

And I suppose if somehow these people could feel and understand just how thoroughly I have dismissed them as people, the sheer brutality and finality of it might serve as some kind of revenge.

But that would involve me having to continue to deal with them for that long, and if I have made it to that point, the person is disgusting to me and I don’t want to touch them for any reason ever again.

Unless, of course, they threaten people I care about.

In which case, watch the fuck out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.