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.