It’s a very good question. What is it that I cling to so hard that is worth all the hating of myself for being a non-productive citizen?

I htink it must be frustratin talking. I have a lot of pent up ambition and will. All those urges that make younger people want to go out into the world and find their place in it and make a name for themselves run strong in me, but in my case they are crippled by my depression and therefore find no expression.

That has to be at least a large portion of it.

Logically, my lack of productivity is no different than a similar lack in someone who is blind, in a wheelchair, has cancer, or is paralyzed from the neck down.

And I certainly don’t think those people are terrible and should be ashamed of themselves Instead, I am glad they are still with us and want them to concentrate on having as good a life as they can.

And yet, on another level, I am jealous of them, because their handicaps are obvious. Nobody is going to ask a bedridden cancer patient why they don’t have a job.

And yet, many of those people get all the help and support they need in order to lead a mostly normal life.

So what’s so different about me?

Is it simply that they have the nerve to ask for what they need, and I am too shy to do it? Maybe they are more realistic about their illness. Perhaps that is because their handicaps are too obvious for denial and therefore they have to be pragmatic and realistic about what they need in order to function.

But then again, that same obviousness attracts nurturing. Lots of people want to help the obviously handicapped. They tend to suffer from too much help rather than not enough. And their problems have more obvious solutions.

Missing a leg? Artificial leg. Paralyzed from the neck down? Wheelchair you can control with your mouth. Weak heart? Pacemaker.

But there is no such thing as an emotional prosthesis for the weak of soul. There is no device that can make me functionally sane and no form of help from others that can make it so that I am not carrying all this bad juju around.

The drugs help. But they treat the symptoms, not the disease.

My illness is invisible. Both to others and, sometimes, myself. It must be invisible to me if I can both accept its existence yet also blame myself for its symptoms.

Perhaps the real villlain in this story is hope. Specifically, the hope that comes from feeling that I could be doing better. That all I have to do is get my shit together and “snap out of it” and I will be able to go join the world and have a normal life with a job and a husband and everything, just like that.

Well that’s not going to happen. I am sick. Broken. I need to fully accept that, and adjust my life expectations accordingly. It’s not that I will never make anything of myself. I can be one of those handicapped people with an almost normal life.

But I am not going to get there if I keep this toxic dream of “one day I will wake up and it will be over” alive.

Sometimes we have to murder our dearest dreams in order to truily be who we are.

So goodbye, you dirty little dream. I love you but you are holding me back, and everything that is holding me back must go.

Let me make it official : I hereby declare that I have a serious illness that is not going ot go away if I just find the right insight or make the right connection in my head. It will take many years and considerable effort to get better and it is by no means guaranteed.

I might as well face it : this might be as good as it gets. A life spent playing video games, chatting with the fuzzies, and masturbating. ^[1] No job, no spouse, no status, no respect, no “functioning”.

Just this, till the day I die.

It’s not what I want, of course, but I have to admit it’s a possibility. And as it’s a possibility, it behooves me to examine it and plan for it.

That is, after all, how us Taurus bulls deal with our fears. We plan.

And if that turns out to be the case, I guess I could live with it. Like I have said before, my life is not that bad right now. It might not match all of my dreams and ambitions, but it is pleasant and comfortable and I could do a lot worse.

A lot of dreams would die, though, and dreams are precious. Dreams give us hope for the future. Dreams gives us a reason to hang around.

Dreams give us hope.

So perhaps I should take my vision of a life exactly like this one till the day I die and use it like Scrooge’s vision of Xmas future : as something to work as hard as I can to keep from coming to pass.

It could work, as long as I don’t think too hard about it.

Story of my life, really.

What do you know? We’re back to my frustrated ambitions again. If only there was a way I could clear the clog in the line connection ambition to action. Then I could spend my days acting on my ambitions and maybe even getting somewhere in life.

But even if it got me nowhere, I would at least feel better about myself. Better to be a struggling writer than a limp nothing, right?

But still, there is that great mass of sadness and suppressed rage inside of me that turns my face to the wall and says “no”.

It needs to go.

And some day,it will.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve got a case of it right now, and it’s driving me nuts.

I’m eating and I have taken my diabetes meds, so it should clear up soon. But it’s got me worried because, well, what if it didn’t clear up? What then?

I suppose I could eat more food and take more of my meds. But I am not sure that would be safe. And what if even that didn’t work?

I am pretty sure I would end up calling 911. After all, as patient readers know, I only get this way when my body is literally starving on a cellular level because of poor insulin response. So if food and drugs didn’t do it, something else had better do it ASAP.

And it’s not impossible that this might happened some day. I do not take care of myself properly and that includes my diabetes. I take my pills and avoid sugary foods, but I still eat too many carbs and I don’t monitor my levels and I don’t take my insulin.

I suppose I could try to cure the hunger with insulin. For some reason, though, that idea scares me. I suppose it’s because I feel like taking insulin when I am feeling like my bloiod sugar is alreadyway too low seems like it would kill me.

But that’s not rational. What I am experiencing is due to the glucose in my blood not being carried into the cells by my natural insulin and the cells freaking out and flooding me with hunger signals as they starve.

Additional insulin could only help that situation. But I guess I can forgive myself for not being at my most rational when I feel like I am starving in realtime.

The fact that this has also triggered a panic attack isn’t helping either.

Then again, who knows. Maybe a panic attack is exactly what I need right now. Sure, it sucks to be me when the attack is happening, but I must admit it tends to burn through a lot of tension and worry really fast and afterward, I feel a lot calmer.

And maybe this is the sort of thing I should be panicking over because this is some serious shit, dawg. I treat it like it’s merely a recurring nuisance, but it’s not.

It’s a seriously bad state to get into and I should be doing everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t get this bad ever again.

But then again, there’s a klot of things I should be doing and I don’t do any of them.

What the hell is wrong with me?

I guess it sucks to have depression and other illnesses, because the depression is what keeps me from taking care of myself properly.

And of course, that means I feel sick all the time, and that leads to… more depression!

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

Well the good news is that I am feeling somewhat better now that I have eaten. I will think about injecting some insulin to help things along.

It’s four hours later and I feel mostly fine. I can still feel a tiny bit of that crazed hunger at the very edge of my consciousness, but it’s easily ignored.

The important thing is that I am not counting the minutes until it is time to eat because that’s when my agony will end.

Diabetes is rough, y’all. Especially when you are too depressed to take care of yourself.

I really do need life help. Someone to look after me, check up on me, remind me of things I should do and make sure I do them, and so forth.

A parent, really. They would be my first.

I have never had anyone maintain a sustained interest in me. People have always seemed like they were eager to get rid of me. For me to stop bothering them. For me to stop reminding them that I exist.

So I did.

And its a self-reinforcing thing, because after being abandoned when I became work enough times, I started to react to anyone asking about me with thinly disguised panic. Superficially, I was my usual friendly and polite self,. but just under the hood, I was beaming out a vey strong “I am freaking out, leave me alone” message.

To this day, I feel that kind of panic in that kind of situation and it’s radically counterproductive. I guess that, deep down, I can’t bring myself to believe that anyone actually cares about me.

At least, not to the extent that they are willing to invest any serious amount of time or energy or other resources into me.

They care when it’s easy. When it doesn’t feel like it’s costing them anything. When it’s easier than just telling me to go away.

As a result, I have never had supervision. Like, ever. Not that I can remember, anyhow. I suppose someone must have been keeping an eye on me when I was a toddler to make sure I didn’t wander into traffic or whatever.

But certainly from the first day of first grade, I felt completely alone. Abandoned to a cruel and incomprehensible world of savagery and despair.

Otherwise known as elementary school.

I never had the slightest feeling that there was someone looking out for me. The teachers were completely apathetic to my suffering. None of them would have even gotten up from their desks to help me.

After all, any energy consumed to help a completely worthless person is by definition wasted, right? I mean, sure, I was the smartest kid they had ever seen and it would have taken just the tiniest bit of investment in me to make me a true academic superstar (as opposed to a half-assed one),. but I was of extremely low social status and therefore people were incapable of seeing any worth in me.

So I suffered in silence and grew up to be a very broken man.

Do you suppose those two things are related?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here it is, hot off the presses, your anti-depression mantra for today :

“How I feel does not change who I am. ”

Repeat until believed (RUB).

This mantra came to me during therapy today. I was pondering the question of staying positive even when I felt terrible, and that sentence emerged from the chaos.

And I think it’s one of the most powerful things that has come from this recovery process of mine. So much of depression depends on a link between your mood and your identity. You feel horrible, so you conclude you ARE horrible.

Note that this does not happen with other illnesses. If you have the flu, you feel gross, and odds are at the moment you ARE gross, but it doesn’t make you feel like you are inherently a gross, awful person who deserves to suffer.

At least, I hope it doesn’t.

So if this link between mood and self can be broken, it would devastate the depression. It could no longer tear your self worth apart based on how bad you feel.

You are not how you feel. You are who you are and the feelings change NOTHING.

This revelation is, I think, the culmination of years of my trying to separate my identity from my depression. To go all the way from “I am a depressed person” to “I am a person who happens to have a case of depression right now”.

Wow. Typing that last bit felt great. Good job, me!

It’s a tricky distinction to make because, in a sense, being depressed has been my full time job for my entire life.

But wait, no, that doesn’t scan either. That’s the exact kind of thinking that needs to stop. I do NOT spend all day being depressed.

I spend all day doing things to entertain myself. Some of those even involve other people who are happy to have me around and whose days I brighten. I also learn a lot of things from what I read and improve my already outstanding mind by reading books and playing stimulating video games.

Depression might currently be circumscribing my life by limiting what I can and cannot do and keeping me from the larger arenas of life, but it does not rule my life and it is not what I do all day. PERIOD.

Now that I have settled that imaginary argument, back to the subject.

It’s so vitally important to make the distinction between one’s illness and oneself because otherwise, all attempts to attack the illness run into all kinds of identity roadblocks because an attack on the illness is an attack on yourself.

Well fuck that. My depression is not me. It is, as my therapist says, “ego-alien”. ^[1], i.e., not part of who I am. I reject it utterly, as if it was a hostile foreign organism that my immune system can safely destroy. ^[2]

So goodbye, depression. Consider yourself evicted. I don’t care how long you have been here. You have no squatter’s rights. You are a temporary aberration which I will now very firmly correct.

The fever has broken. The virus has been defeated. All that is left now is for my body to clean the dead cells out of my bloodstream.

I can wait.

Part 2 : the Partening

Now where was I? Oh, right. Die, depression, die!

If only there was the pschological equivalent of an antibiotic that would kill all the unhealthy parts of the psyche, leaving behind only the good, strong, healthy parts of the mind that now can use all the resources freed up by blasting out the deadwood to rebuild what was lost with good, clean timber.

Hmmm. That sounds uncomfortably like the sort of purity ethic thinking that leads to eugenics and ethnic cleansing and all that.

Well, you need both kind of thinking. The kind that grows and the kind that purifies. The kind that adds, and the kind that subtracts. The kind that adds to the total worth, and the kind that increases the average worth.

The kind that sews and the kind that reaps.

And if you are talking about personal health, then it is the reaping thinking that is needed. The diseased tissue must be excised. The infection must be killed. The poison cannot be allowed to spread.

I suppose the other half is there too, though, in that total health requires adding and strengthening  the good things as well as subtracting the bad.

I wonder about that myself. I feel like my latest bout of positivity is very much about strengthening the good parts of my mind. Increasing the power of my positive side in order to increase its ability to overcome the potent but static forces of depression.

One thing that came up in therapy today was my problems with not being able to go back and continue to work on a piece of writing after I have completed it.

In emerged that what I was really talking about was the fact that it took inspiration to push me forward enough to get something written and when that inspiration runs out, my happy little rocket crashes hard.

Being the determinedly thorough person I am, the usually does not happen until I have finished the damned thing. So I get the thing done. But after that, it dies. And for whatever reason, once that happens, I never want to see it again.

No more inspiration, I suppose. It’s the act of creation that inspires me. To return to a previous inspiration is the exact opposite of that.

But it’s more than that. To return to something after I have completed it is disgusting to me. It’s like using a used Kleenex. Totally gross.

But why? I think I know the answer.

It’s gross to be because it is now a part of me. It reminds me of me. It smells like me.

And I have self worth issues, so my own scent nauseates me.

And that’s why I need there to be someone else in the process to freshen things up.

Which means sharing my writing with someone who might edit it for/with me.

And that’s the one thing I just can’t seem to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Most people, at some point in their life, ask themselves “Who am I?”

But I am pretty sure most people never ask themselves “What am I?”

Just me and all the other aliens, I guess.

It sounds ridiculous but it’s true :feeling like an alien is (brace yourselves) due to alienation. I have never truly fit in anywhere. The closest I come is with groups of friends, and while that is beyond wonderful, there is still a part of me that feels like I am not part of a whole but merely visiting from another planet.

It would explain a lot.

And so, many times in my life, I have asked myself what the hell I am. What kind of creature am I? What’s my natural habitat? Is there someplace that could feel like home? Are there others of my kind?

So far, the answers are

1. Strange, possibly unique
2. Not sure, quite possibly academia or entertainment
3. If there is, I will probably have to invent it myself
4. Not so far, but there are plenty of compatible species

I’ve never gone so far as to actually wonder if I am an alien. That’s too obviously absurd. Science and logic clearly indicate that I am a human being born of human parents right here on Earth.

But I totally grok why some people would think so. It is less painful to think yourself an alien than to think of yourself as a human being who is fundamentally broken in a way that makes you seem like an alien.

In fact, belieiving yourself to be an alien turns being unique into something that makes you special and not just lonely. Often these functional delusions also come with a sense of mission or purpose, and of being part of a higher community in which the individual is valued and appreciated.

It functions a lot like a religion.

Anyhow, back to me. I am getting better at this returning to the topic thing.

The question of “What am I?” is a very personal one to me. I have never met someone quite like me. Like I implies with my species analogy. I have met people with whom I am fairly sympatico. My fellow nerds, for instance. They are my tribe.

But not all of them. Just the ones with lively, active, creative minds. The ones I think of as true intellectuals.

The kind that are curious about everything, and like viewing things from different angles, and are capable of truly considering ideas for their merit instead of just deploying talking points like a squid suirting its ink.

I have nothing against other kinds of nerds. And all nerds are my people.

But it’s the lively ones with whom I feel a connection. The ones who really think about things. People who are intelligent and articulate and interested in how things work.

People like me, in other words. Big surprise there.

And most importantly, people who will understand me when I talk. Words cannot contain the degree to which that is important to me. I spent a lot of formative years dealing with people who looked at me like I was an alien for saying things which seemed perfectly natural and normal to me.

Presumably, a lot of that is due to the fact that I grew up in such an intellectual home. My family didn’t look at me like I was an alien when I talked like that.

They got a little annoyed with what they called my professorial tone, but they didn’t look at me like I had started speaking moon language.

You know, it just occurred to me. Of course I had a “professorial tone”. After all, that was how they talked to me.

Well, that plus apparently having inherited my mother’s didactic impulse along with her big pores and shy personality.

Regardless, it’s pretty clear to me now that some of my social issues came from growing up in a highly unusual household.

But not all of them, because my siblings all grew up in the same household and all of them are way more functional than I am.

Then again, as far as I know, they weren’t raped at the age of four.

Regardless of the reason, I ended up being a much odder duck than the other three. While they had good friends, I either had no friends or bad friends. While they had a sense of life momentum (especially my sisters), I drifted through life like a ghost. They were strong and vital and connected. I was weak and sickly and rejected.

And the sad truth is, nobody knew. Because nobody cared to know. It’s funny that I have abandonment issues out the wazoo because in most ways the abandonment actually happened to me.

I know I talk about that a lot. But I have a lot of deep dank coldness from all that isolation running in seams like permafrost in my soul, and talking about it melts them a little and it is by such small victories that my sanity is repaired.

Because I am not crazy. That’s not who I am. I am a perfectly sane and function human being who happens to have suffered through a long bout of being crazy, and I am recovering from that as we speak.

And the biggest part of that is this blog. I thank you most profoundly for reading it.

If nobody read it, I wouldn’t do it. I could never do all this writing if I thought that all I was doing was putting messages in bottles and releasing them into an obscure inlet and thence into a vast and uncaring sea.

I like it when I get to use words like “thence”.

Like I said to one of my VFS teachers once, I have a powerful need to communicate. If nobody read this thing, I would not be communicating a damned thing.

So thank you from the bottom of my heart, patient readers.

By reading this, you are helping me to become whole.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It just occurred to me that I have been trying to do the “smart” thing for my enttire life and it um… has not worked.

It hasn’t worked because despite my efforts, I make poor decisions anyhow. And that’s what they are :decisions. I think I have pretended otherwise for far too long.

Smart is as smart does, after all. I might have a brain the sizeof a planet when it comes to things like intelligence and creative problem solving and comedy and stuff, but when it comes to living life, I am not so smart at all.

Now I am not beating myself up about that. Honest! I am just trying to get at the root of my problems and be realistic about them.

After all, that’s the smart thing to do, right?

The important thing for me to cling to as the maelstrom of my fragile and unstable emotional state roils around me is that if I have been making poor choices, that means I have choices and that means I have agency,.

It is within my power to improve my life. I can do it. I can make things better.

That doesn’t mean I have to do it. I need to reassure myself of that so I don’t get that feeling of loss of control.

It just means it’s an option.

Like I said before, this life of mine is fine. I have friends, food, shelter, internet, fun video games, an active solo sex life, and one heck of an amazing mind.

So there’s no crisis. It’s not an “improve or die” situation. No stress, no strain, no going insane. It’s just an option. One item on the buffet of options for living the rest of my life.

And here’s the thing to remember when contemplating that menu : there is no wrong answer. Pick something and try it. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it. Try something else.

It is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all.

Repeat until believed.

Because if you try and fail, you learn something. The experiment has produced a result. Maybe you have found that whatever it was is not for you. Or maybe you learned that you like it enough to keep trying for a while. Maybe even long enough to get better at it.

One of depression’s biggest lies is that if something doesn’t work out, it was a mistake, and you should not have done it.

It’s a product of the way depression’s adhedonia leave you starved for the pleasure that you need in order to even feel sane, let alone be happy.

This imposes a siege mentality on the person. Resources are scarce and therefore every expenditure of them must produce a large and concentrated amount of reward or be seen (and felt) as a horrible waste of said precious resources, and therefore a terrible mistake akin to Jack trading the family’s last cow for a handful of beans.

Of course, the very sense of scarcity that engenders this response is a lie.

Fru drains his brain onto the page, part 2.

The scarcity is a lie because I know damned well that the energy to do these things is there and that using up that energy is a benefit unto itself, so even if I spend time and energy doing something that does not pay out, I am still ahead of the game.

Obviously, I would prefer things I try to do work out. I am just saying that even if they don’t, I have still learned something and I still got some useful dissipation of energies out of the deal.

God, I wish I could have a home gym. And by gym, I mean a “Universal Gym” style gym, with all the various forms of lifting weight using different muscles of the body.

Ya know, this kind of thing

If I had one of those, whenever I felt tense and cooped up and restless, I could just pick a station and do that until I felt better.

And yeah, sure, there are plenty of ways to exercise that don’t involve thousands of pounds of very expensive equipment. I could go for walks or jog in place. I could do push ups or sit up or curls. ^[1] I could use heavy objects around the household as weights and lift and move those around for exercise.

But it’s not the same. Using a universal type gym is the one form of exercise that I have tried that I genuinely enjoy. There is something about that kind of exercise that feels right to me. Like that kind of thing is what I am built to do. Like I am some kind of farm animal that needs to pull and push weights around in order to feel fulfilled.

Like, say, a bull. Or an ox.

Other kinds of exercise hurt too much. Like anything involving walking or running. In addition to my being in terrible shape, the hard truth is that I can’t take a single step without pain. Walking hurts my feet. And the more I walk, the more it hurts, until it feels like I am walking on razor blades.

There is not much walking in using a universal gym. Just a few steps between stations.

I suppose I would also need at least one aerobic station. I am thinking an exercise bike would do the trick, although I have enjoyed using a rowing machine before too, and rowing machines exercise every damned muscle in your body.

Aerobic exercise is way less fun for me than weight training, but only a fool builds up muscle all over his body without strengthening the heart and lungs that have to support that muscle at the same time.

And just think, if I really got my metabolism charged up and built up my muscle and cardio, I could eat whatever the hell I wanted.

In fact, I would actually eat a lot more because muscles are way hungrier than flab.

If I only had a gym. (Ya da dada da da… DA!)

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Fun fact : when I do curls, they are called “fruit roll ups”.

This new positive mindset of mine is taking some getting used to.

For one thing, despair is habit-forming. I have spoken in this space before about failure being addictive because when you give up and give in, it immediately releases the tension of the moment and the relief that brings can be quite intense.

Intense enough, in fact, to be addictive, and like all addictions, it convinces you to sacrifice your long term best interests in favour of immediate gratification over and over and over again until your will is so weak that it can’t even motivate you to do very basic things any more.

Embracing positivity, therefore, means breaking that habit. It means making a point of blocking the negative but enticing thoughts of despair and release and staying true to the idea that yes you CAN do it. You totally can.

If you want to.

No more declaring those grapes to be sour without even a sniff in their direction. No more giving up without even thinking about trying. No more assuming that whatever it is, if it is the tiniest stressful or scary or hard or intimidating, it is not worth doing because you would only fail at it anyway.

That’s a heck of a big leap of lack of faith. To draw such a massive conclusion based on no direct evidence and only the handful of life experiences you have had is clearly illogical to the point of being indefensible.

Worse than that, it’s just plain nuts.

It’s a classic case of that whole “justifying the emotion” things I have been rattling on about for gosh knows how long now. You know, when someone deduces what must be true based on how they feel?

There is plenty of room for that when one is being introspective. It is, in fact, the preferred method and the only truly effective tool for it.

But it doesn’t work with actual objective reality. You can’t assume that your feelings about something reveal something relevant about the nature of that thing.

The example I use is racism. A racist old lady is scared by black people, ergo those black people must be dangerous and bad.

Because that’s how they make her feel.

Hmmm. My “get back to the subject” alarm just went off. Where was I?

Oh right, positivity. One of the things people don’t take into account is that when you shut down one way of coping – in this case, despair – you have to find another, healthier way to get the job done.

So right now, I am doing a very good job of shutting down the negative thoughts but I have yet to dream up a new way to cope with stuff.

And it’s a nontrivial question because without a new and improved coping mechanism, the emotional work will build up until the negative thoughts come flooding back into the mind all at once and wreck some of the progress I have made.

I know this because it’s happened before. At least twice, possibly a lot more. I have been to the darkly absurd place where thinking the horribly negative thoughts after suppressing them for a while actually feels really good.

Why? Because it releases the tension There’s that big sense of relief again, rewarding all the wrong behaviours.

Well if despair and giving up are not options, what else is there?

Actually, I think I need to correct that. It’s not that giving up on things stops being an option entirely. That would be equally nuts.

What I am giving up is the luxury of despair – specifically, the luxury of assuming that if I don’t want to do something, it is impossible to do and therefore it is okay to give up.

That means owning up to the fact that there are a lot of things I am perfectly capable of doing but choose not to because I get scared.

Note my emphasis on the word choose. It is a choice I am making. I could choose to do the scary thing anyway. That is entirely within my power. I am not the helpless victim of natural forces, with no more control over my fate than a rock or the sky.

I can choose. The idea that I can’t is and always has been bullshit. It’s a cheap dodge, a way of ducking the responsibility for my life by pretending I had no choice.

Well fuck that shit. I am officially declaring myself to be in charge of this crazy life of mine and it’s my job to make it better for myself and nobody else’s.

Nobody can save me from myself. And nobody should. Not if I want to grow up and become a real person and not just a freeze dried adolescent who can fool the world into thinking he’s an adult with his big bad brain but in reality never even made it into puberty on the psychosocial development scale.

Hmmm. That started out okay but turned into negativity really fast. Clearly, this new mindset is going to take a lot of work.

Let’s start the the question : what did going on about my lack of development accomplish for me? Because it definitely relieved something in my mind. I actually feel better for having typed it.

So what gives?

I think it released some fear and maybe anger. Perhaps it did so merely by expressing my own fears and worries about myself. The subject of my own lack of development is one I return to over and over because I find it a very hard thing to process and maybe expressing the worry helps with that.

It didn’t feel like I was beating myself up or beating myself down. It felt more like acknowledging a suppressed truth. Like the relief you get when someone says what everyone has been thinking but were too afraid to say.

I truly feel that only by talking about that kind of thing over and over will I get to the place where I can do something about it.

SO expect more soul-revealing messages in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once more, I am blogging in a state of mind scientifically known as “crappy”.

Extra crappy, actually, because I took my sleeping pill, Trazadone, before going to bed last night. I hardly ever take it any more because it makes waking up a lot harder and I can sleep without it.

But I hadn’t been sleeping well at all lately, so I figured I had better make sure I got my solid five hours of sleep.

And that was probably a very intelligent and grownup thing to do.,

But it sure as fuck doesn’t feel like it at the moment.

Been pondering my physical health. A depressing subject, to be sure, but one any enlightened hedonist like myself must dealt with.

After all, I am on a mission to make myself happy, and feeling ill all the time is like, the opposite of that. So I am pondering reasonable, well defined, achievable improvements in self-care that might makes me a healthier and happier fellow.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, and not just because my brain is all clogged up with sleep and drugs right now.

There’s the obvious stuff. Test my blood. Use insulin to adjust it. Exercise. Spend more time on the balcony soaking up some sunshine so that I both get the light my circadian inputs get calibrated and so my body can make some vitamin D.

And I really need the D. I need it bad.

And all these things seem easy enough to do on paper but it is hard to ponders how realistic they are in practices because there is always that terrible fear waiting in my psyche to shut things down when it comes time to actually do things.

Or even think about doing them in any but the most abstract of terms. As soon as intention is formed, the whole idea dies a horrible and strangulated death.

So the trick is the think smaller, and that’s not something that comes naturally to me. I am a big picture, big ideas kind of dude. Focusing down to that level of smallness gives me the mental equivalent of an eye strain headache.

Perhaps I am making things too complicated for myself.  I do that a lot. my mind wants puzzles to solve so bad that I can end up generating problems for myself that make life a lot harder than it needs to be.

Sometimes inventing your own fun can be hazardous to your mental health. Especially when you forget that it is you making things difficult and not life itself.

I often find myself pondering the emptiness of my world and my life. How very little real world content there is in my soul. How empty my life has been.

It is a depressing subject but there are too many big emotions buried there for me to ignore it. I have to feel all that isolation and loneliness and recognize and accept that I have missed most of life in favour of hiding away from the world and consuming media.

In fact, I want to do more than recognize is,. I want to embrace and accept it. That’s the only way the healing can begin.

Time for a nap.

I guess that nap was worth it.

So here goes. I hereby embrace and accept all the isolation I have experienced, along with all the pain and fear that comes with it.

Come to me, pain. I love you too. Come inside and stay a while.

I know that I have structured my entire life around ignoring you. you were always there, trying to get my attention, but I kept myself isolated and distracted in order to keep you all locked up inside me.

It let me pretend you were not there or that you did not matter.

Boy, does that sound familiar.

So I froze you out. But I know who you are now. You’re the pain from all the loneliness I have suppressed. You’re all the healthy instincts I was too scared to even recognize as existing  let alone actually act on. You’re the social creature inside me that has been desperately trying to be born for more than forty years.

You’re all the tender tendrils reached out to connect with other only to be clain before even truly being born by a killier frost.

So know that I know you, pain. And that the wall has come down and the door is open and it is time for you to come inside and tell me what you want me to hear.

I even made tea.

There, that should help. A lot of the walls inside me have to come down and that which they separate has to be allowed to flow together and combine, as uncomfortable as that process may turn out to be.

I know that when I finish blogging today., I am going to want to go back to sleep yet again. But I can’t. I just don’t have the time. I have to get into the shower to get ready for FRED in less than an hour and a half, and after that will be FRED then hanging out with my friends till midnight.

So I am not going to get another chance to sleep fot at least eight hours, and that suuuuucks. It sucks because it means I have to do something I hate to do which is to force myself to stay awake when I am sleepy.

Says something about my life that I rarely end up having to do that.

I hate doing it because it’s so stressful. And it puts mne in a mind state I hate, namely being too sleepy to think but forced to deal with reality anyway.

I suppose I could skip FRED this time. The idea is very tempting. I really do not feel up to going. but I know that there is only going to be La Gang plus Teresa, so as far as I know, there’s only going to be 5 people there.

I would feel guilty if I reduced that to 4.

Maybe I will find my alarm clock so I cna take a napo. I dunno.

But I am sure I will figure something out.

After all, I’m a genius.

But I sure don’t feel like one right now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think mine have been going rather well lately.

I am learning to banish the negative voices and concentrate on a feeling of clean white light flooding into my soul and washing all the bad stuff away.

That means I am very carefully easing up on my death grip on reality and being absolutely,. totallly, completely logical accurate and realistic at all times.

I have loved The Truth for a very long time. It is the ultimate intellectual virtue. And it’s one that is hard to argue with. One cannot consciously choose to believe a lie.

You either have to decide the lie is true or discard the lie entirely as bullshit.

But as much as I have loved and sought The Truth, it has never really loved me back. All my devotion to the pursuit of the truth has gotten me is a certain degree of mental discipline and a lot of insights I am too psychologically damaged to use.

And speaking of psychological damage….

My headlong and relentless pursuit of the truth has damaged me in so many ways. I have never, ever allowed myself the comfort of denial. I have been relentlessly realistic and took everything on head first and heedless of the cost.

But denial is, as it turns out, rather important. It takes the hard edges and sharp points off of life and allows one’s self-worth to protect itself against the harshness of life.

Denial and delusion are the shock absorbers of the psyche. Without them, you end up all torns up, battered, and bruised on the inside, just like me.

But you’ve heard all that before. I’ve got to cool it with the reruns.

My point is that I have been easing off on myself, and that’s marvelous. The voices of negativity are, as they must, losing ground every day..

There’s no wall strong enough to withstand stready, unrelenting pressure applied over as long a period of time as it takes to crack it.

Victory is inevitable.

It’s just a matter of time.

We resume our story after Pizza Hut pasta and PVR-age with J&J.

The real proof to me that my recent psychological progress is the real motherfucking deal is that I have felt physically better lately.

In fact, there have even been some happy little periods where I barely felt bad at all. And for someone who normally feels like shit 24/7 (only the intensity varies) that’s a pretty big deal.

I think ridding myself of the idea that I am inherently toxic and flawed will help. My biggest leap of faith of late is to dare to believe that I can be clean. That a clean, strong, healthy, whole me is even a possibility.

That I can be something good.

Back when I was far, far more depressed and had massive hygeine issues because it was very hard for me to take the sensory intensity of showering and I had become, essentially, afraid of it, someone in my therapy group asked me why I didn’t wash more.

I said, “Because there’s no such thing as a clean turd. ”

Well, I knew what I meant.

But it speaks as to just how horribly toxic I used to consider myself to me. People with a healthy self-image don’t compare themselves to shit. And it was true that I often felt like cleaning was futile back then due to my twisted sense of efficiency.

After all, the minute you step out of the shower, you start sweating and shedding skin calls and coming into contact with the dust in the air all over again, so what’s the point?

The idea that it might be worthwhile to embrace an artificial state which would require a repeated and regular investment of time and energy to maintain would not have occurred to me at the time.

Even now, I feel anxious at the thought. Part of me still feels like to do that would be tantamount to self-annihilation.

But that’s the old energy-miser thinking that has cost me so much in life. Since then, I have embraced the knowledge that you can have a lot more energy than you feel like you have, and that often the body only generates the energy it needs when it needs it, so the energy you need to do something will only be there once you commit to doing it.

I am now fully committed to learning to open my arms and my heart to life so I can enjoys its many gifts, including the gift of true inspiration.

I used to think I had lots of inspiration. But all I really had was lots of ideas. Ideas that never go anywhere and never leda to any actual activity are not inspiration.

Inspiration implies action. You are inspired to do something.

And for decades, that’s been the stumbling block for me. My profound emotional inertia and heavy resistance to doing anything that involved a large investment of energy with no guarantee of returns and no defined end point meant that most of my ideas resulted in nothing more than a brief, amusing thought before getting dropped right back into the bubbling brew that is my creative subconscious mind.

But from this point forward, I will open myself up to being prodded into action by a notion or a thought or a brilliant idea. I mean, why not?

Would I really prefer to keep just playing video games all fucking day when I could be doing something way more fun like writing?

Because I really do have a lot of fun writing, at least when I am doing it right. It’s a lot more work than burning through the precious remaining hours of my life playing video games, but my new motto is, “Easier isn’t always better!”.

Repeat until believed.

I have a lot of energy that never gets expressed and therefore hangs around my head increasing my mental tension and turning into anxiety or depression or both when only the slightest of provocations.

I would be a lot better off if I found my way to using more of that energy and leaving less of it around to cause me pain.

And all I have to do is get over the whole energy miser thing.

And that is well on its way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how my stomach feels right about now.

Funk soul brother.

It’s the usual. Freshly awoken, feel like cfrap, life goes on. I will feel better soon, although I reserve the right to say  “not soon enough'”.

“Not soon enough. ”

As a result, I do not have a lot on my mind right now. At least, not much in the way of thoughts coherent enough to put into words. So I really have no idea what to blog about right now. hopefully something will come to me.

I really love cucumber.

To me, cucumber is the watermelon of vegetables, and I absolutely ADORE watermelon. Have since I was a wee sprog.

My mother likes to tell the story of my introduction to watermelon. I was very young – barely up off the floor – and I had to be coaxed into trying it because, you have to admit, watermelon looks kind of weird.

but eventually, she and my babysitter Betty talked me into it, and it was love at first bite. I sat there under the table with my slice of watermelon and alternated between taking bites and going “mmmm!” very loudly.

That must have been cute. At first.

Gah, it’s so hard to concentrate. It’s like trying to juggle and hold on to your helium filled balloon at the same time. The slightest break in my attention and my mind floats off into the sky and I have to yank it back down to reality by its string all over again.

It just happened again.

Oh well, I shouldn’t worry so much about such things. As long as I rotate back to reality now and then, the writing gets done. I might not be at my most coherent at the moment but I can still string the words together for you nice people.

But I will definitiely be doing today'[s entry in two parts. There is no way I have enoughb rocket fuel to get me all the way to 1000 words in one sitting right now. I need like, three or four more hours of asleep and I plan to get them as soon as I am done with part 1.

Heck, maybe after a good nap, I willl actually have something to write about.

I have a vague feeling that my dreams have become darker and more disturbed lately. A vague feeling is all I have, though. I have not remembered my dreams mcuh for a very long time now, and I used to remember them fairly frequently.

I wonder what’s up with THAT.

While I ponder that, please enjoy this musical interlude.

And now it’s progressed to my starting to nod off when my mind wanders. Definitely a sign of sleep deprivation. They are called “microsleeps’ and it’s how your brain cope with getting far too little sleep.

It basically forces the issue. You sleep for a few moments whether you want to or not.

And if it happebns fast enough, you don’t even know it happened.

Which can be bad if you happen to be driving at the time.

Well that’s my 500. See you on the flipflop.

It’s three hours later and I feel a lot more human.

And I am doing something I almost never do. Something bold, something exciting, something that will tqake your breath away with its groundbreaking audacity.

I’m having a between meal snack. 

Okay, now calm down. Calm down. Remember to breathe. here, breathe into this paper bag. That’s it. Thaaaaaats iiiiit.

OKnow.Are weready to go on? Good.

SEriouslyh though, patient readers know that I almost never eat between meals. It’s a habit from back when I barely had enough money to feed myself and over time it has turned into a compulsion that I mindlessly follow for no reason.

We have plenty of food.I’m not going to starve if I increase the amount I eat by around twenty five percent. I can afford to buy that much more of my snacky type foods.

And yet, I had to struggle with myself just to get to the point where I would eat absolutely anything between meals. Even things paid for by our collective Costco purchases are a no go area according to my ferocious compulsions.

The result is that if I get hungry between meals, there is nothuing I can do but try to put it out of my mind as I suffer in silence.

This is not consistent with my freshly adopted “maximize my happiness” philosophy, and so it has to go.

On a broader scale, I think this compulsive self-denial leads to a lot more than mere hunger in me. I think my whole personality is focused around blocking out the 99 percent of reality that I feel I cannot have in order to hyper-concentrate on the things that I trust to be available to me no matter what.

This is the same pattern that drives all forms of addiction. even relatively mild ones like mine. The focus of the addiction – be it video games or crack cocaine – looms ever larger in the addict’s mind and drives out all other sources of pleasure and reward.

Luckily for me, it’s impossible to develop a high level of tolerance for video games so they will not lead me to the ultimate deadly cul-de-sac of needing to take a fatally high dose of them in order to not feel like I am dying.

But it should be noted that my other addiction, food, causes Type 2 diabetes precisely by raising my body’s tolerance for its own insulin.

So I am not exactly out of the woods there.

Anyhow. I think I have spent a lot of time very, very closed off to all that life has to offer. I did it because I thought that the only thing that can come from thinking about things that you want but cannot have is making myself miserable.

And that’s true to an extent. But only if your sense of what you can and cannot have is based on reality.

Mine is not. Depression has had its finger on tghe scale for a really long time and so I cannot trust my sense of what I can and cannot have.

To me, that means that the next thing is for me to explore my boundaries and see whether or not they represent reality or the dark delusions of the depressed mind.

How will I do that? Dunno. Try stuff, I guess. New stuff. Cool stuff. Whatever seems to be within my ability to stretch.

And maybe I will get burned more often than not, but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is figuring out what makes me happy, and then doing that a lot.

I just want to be happy. Everything else is negotiable. Everything else is method.

And I don’t give a shit about method. All I care about is results.

And the result I am looking for is a happier me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is going to hurt. But it;s got to be done.

Ahem. To whom it may concern :

My life as it is right now is fine.

And if this is what my life is going to be like till the day I die, that’s fine too.

I have a good life here. I have video games to play, good friends to hang out with in the real world, still more good friends to hang out with online, enough money to cover my needs with enough left over to indulge myself from time to time. I have this blog to use as an outlet for my creative talents.

And I still have many years of life in which to enjoy all those things.

So this is good. This is fine. I hereby embrace my current life and accept it for what it is. For what I have, I feel truly grateful and consider myself to be truly blessed.

I open myself to all my blessings and love myself for doing so. I am raising all the blinds to let the sunshine into my soul, and opening all the windows so that the cool breeze can make me feel whole and good and clean again.

I immerse myself in clean waters so that my sins may be washed away and I might be born anew in the fresh light of a new dawn.

I sing my joy into the heavens.

I speak my truths into the wise old ears of trees.

I gallop laughing through green and open fields so that I am child and beast again.

I wrap my loving arms around the warm sunrise so it can lift me higher as I press its holy warmth and love into my soul

I weep my sorrows into the river Lethe which bears them to the silent sea

I hurl my anger into the sky and split the heavens with its power

I shiver my fear into the warm strong earth and let it be consumed in life’s furnace

I feed all my bits and pieces of broken thoughts and frctured feelings and dreams that died a-birthing into the eternal fires of the void to be utterly consumed

I surrender all that I have in order to become who I am.

I am allowed to be happy.

I deserve all the good things life has to offer.

I am a good and wholesome thing and the world welcomes the light I give

People are happy to see me and want me around.

I am a splendid shining spinning star, and my colors are the colors of hope

My heart is a bird that soars through cloudless blue skies and dwells in strange climes on perches nobody else can see

My mind is a wizard with a hat full of wonders and miracles to spare

My soul is golden song sung by a lone minstrel on a cool summer morning as he roams

And my body is a forgotten temple to an ancient god who is ready to return

Life is a good and happy place and I am glad to be here and glad to be alive.

And I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Some of us have no choice but to invent our own religion.

Well that went to an interesting place, didn’t it?

There’s some pretty good poetry in there. More importantly. I think this exercise in positivity has been good for me. I think I opened some doors in my mind that really needed opening and laid the foundation of a brighter, stronger, happier me.

And it starts with believing – truly believing – that it is possible.

And that means moving away from thinking of myself as a flawed, broken, diseased, and toxic thing, and learning to think of myself as something good and pure and strong and wonderful to behold.

And under that, believing that I deserve to do so.

because there is nothing wrong with me. Repeat until believed : I have nothing to be ashamed of. I am a good person who makes people happy just by being around and being myself. People like me, and for good reason. I am an amazing kind of guy.

Most people can’t shine like I do. I need to remember that.

I am blessed with an abundance of natural gifts like intelligence, creativity, and wit, and to top it all off I am also a heck of a nice fellow who truly cares about people.

The things I hate myself for are things beyond my control and what is worse, the very act of hating myself for them keeps them in place.

So I forgive myself. For everything. Carte blanche. I have done the best I could with what I have, and will continue to do so till the day I die.

And that’s all that can be expected of anyone.

Maybe some day I will find my way out of this darkly enchanted forest of mine and finally emerge into the light of day and feel the sun on my skin.

And maybe I won’t. That’s okay too. I accept my life and myself as they are, without reservation or judgment.

Because I am worthy of love. I deserve forgiveness and compassion. I am entitled to the mercy of the court. I have earned my place in the sun just by making it this far.

And I cna be the strong, happy, and joyously free person I feel inside me. That’s the real me. Depression is just something that happened to me, it doesn’t define me.

I am more than my emotions.

I am more than my bad memories.

I am more than the flawed chemicals in my head.

I am more than my disease wants me to be.

But I am tired of living according to the rules imposed by my anxiety.

And I am sick of waiting around to be happy.

So from now on, I will devote myself to making myself happy.

Or i will die trying.

I will talk to you nice people again toimorrow.