So here’s the update on my life.

Today has been busy. Had therapy at 12:30 pm. Fairly average session. Told him all about that thing I wrote and how I cried my eyes out writing it, much to my surprise.

It was intense. I’m glad it happened, because clearly I needed a good cry.

Heck, with how emotionally congested I am, I could probably use ten more just like it.

But I am still a little disappointed that I don’t really feel any different afterwards. Then again, I still haven’t caught up on sleep. So we will see.

I told my therapist that I am going back on the Trazadone. I was foolish to go off it, really. I thought I didn’t need it any more but the evidence is clear : I haven’t gotten more than 2.25 hours of sleep in a row for at least a week, maybe more.

And that’s very bad. Lack of sleep fucks up every single system in your body. You need good, deep sleep[ in order for your body to do very important maintenance work. If it can’t, things begin to unravel pretty damn quick.

And as with other periods of hyposomnia, it is accompanied by a deep yet subtle cold feeling in my mind that feels as if my brain is suspended in ice so pure that it is invisible.

And that makes it easy to pretend it isn’t there. You could even imagine that everything is fine because you’re not in any profound pain and your thinking is crystal clear.

But deep down you can feel the cold biting at the flesh of your soul and a teeny tiny voice is screaming from the pain from very far away.

So I know the gig is up and I had better get some decent sleep soon or I am going to just plain collapse any minute now as my instincts wrestle the wheel away from my stupid dum-dum conscious mind and go straight for what I need.

It’s good that I have that capacity. Makes me feel a little more secure. Because I know how crazy and stupid and self-neglectful I can be and how my very strong ability to suppress my own emotions can lead me down a very dark path where I ignore all the signs that something is seriously wrong.

I’m like Paf the fox not telling anyone how sick he is and slowly falling apart as a result. That might seem crazy to some people – and it is – but it makes perfect sense to me.

It’s kind of part of my otherworldliness. ^[1] I am not quite of this Earth, metaphorically speaking, and so I go wrong in ways that seem downright alien to others.

There have been times when I was sick and nobody knew until it got really bad because I was too scared and shy to tell anyone about it.

That has to be pretty scary to whoever is taking care of me. They can’t trust the usual systems to warn them that I need help.

Imagine dying of shyness. My tombstone would read, “I didn’t want to interrupt. ”

And looked at objectively, that’s goddamned creepy. It makes me feel like I was born with important safety features missing. It’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t even be possible. And yet, here I am.

Well, things grow strange in the dark.

What else… oh, after therapy I had an appointment with my GP to get my next Vitamin B12 shot. Have I told you about that? Short version : my bloodwork showed zero B12, or at least, too little to measure.

And that’s like….. bad.

And apparently. when levels are that low in someone who gets plenty of animal protein in their diet. the problem is almost always a problem with absorbing the stuff from the meat I eat.

That means there is no point in taking a supplement or upping my carnivory because my body won’t absorb it via digestion at all.

The only cure, then, is to inject the b12 directly into my bloodstream. Luckily, the amounts you need are quite small and you go through it quite slowly. so once a healthy level has been built up, you only need to top it up every three months or so.

I am not there yet. So I had to go see my GP.

My appointment was at 2:15 pm. He didn’t see me until 3:10 pm. Almost an hour late. I told him about it and he was. of course, totally shocked and apologetic.

Fat lot of good that does me. It’s not like that will keep it from happening again.

Oh, did I mention that Joe dropped me off for my appointment at around 1:45 pm? So I had already waited half an hour before my appointment time. And I was extremely sleepy and I had forgotten to eat lunch before I left so my blood sugar was crashing in slow motion while I waited.

God damn it, how do I keep ending up in these situations? Where I am too tired to be able to think properly and hence quite miserable, even aside from the ticking time bomb that is my blood sugar crashing.

At 3 pm. I got up and went to the receptionist with the full intention of telling her I could not wait any longer and I was leaving.

And I am proud of myself for sticking up for myself and setting boundaries, especially considering the extremely bad mental state I was in.

But the receptionist told me I was next in line. So I very reluctantly sat back down and hoped like hell my blood sugar would hold out.

About ten minutes later, I’d had my shot. And I must admit. I do feel better. I feel warmer and stronger and more alive. My body is happy to fibnally get its b12.

But the whole thing fucked up my blood sugar. So I will have to fix THAT now.

It never ends.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, so, more about that thing I wrote today.

The paralells to my own life are obvious. Paf isn’t me, but there’s a lot of me in Paf. There;s also a lot of me in Reg.

This is how writers deal with their issues. by making them characters and having them interact.  Reg and Paf are two parts of me that needed to get together, in a sense.

The Wolf Brothers are like my childhood bullies. Paf fleeing them is like me fleeing my bullies, although unlike me, Paf found comfort, protection. and solace in the simple folk of Crooktail Junction.

Helps to be cute, I guess.

Speaking of which, everybody loving Paf is, obviously, a fantasy of mine. What lonely child has not dreamed of a world where everybody is nice to him or her? Where there are nothing but good vibes, love and happiness and joy, and where they feel warm and welcome and worthy and loved.

I sure as heck did.

As for him having to leave to eat, that’s clearly a metaphor for the fact that I have been emotionally starving for a very long time because this life I lead, while safe, does not contain all the emotional nutrients to survive.

So I need to go out there and face the big scary world and become an adult in order to get what I need to go live on my own.

So that’s the metaphors. I hope that didn’t spoil the story for you.

I am encouraged by the fact that I felt compelled to write it. So compelled that I sat there for over four hours doing nothing but writing in order to get it done. I’ve always wanted to be the sort of person who gets stirred into action by inspiration, but I have been too much the action-repressed depressive for it to happen.

So I take the fact that it happened and happened so strongly to be a sign that I am healing up nicely inside and that I am shedding my heavy emotional burden and finally getting the lightness of spirit I need to really fly.

So far, I have not had some kind of big feeling of catharsis or any massive psychological revelations resulting from writing the fucking thing. I am, however, very very tired. This all happened after three days of only getting poor, shallow sleep – possibly not a coincidence.

Dunno what got into me that made it so hard to sleep and even harder to stay asleep. mental overstimulation, perhaps, or some kind of psychological change that started in the lowest levels of my mind and then had to keep me awake as it worked it way up through the layers of my mind to the conscious mind and made me write the damned story in order to get heard.

All I know is that right now, I am sleepy as hell, despite having gotten five hours of sleep already. Think I will go back to bed now.

Might write more later, might not.

Either way, I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, today’s application report :

I applied for a number of things via UpWork today.

1. I applied to ghostwrite a book based on someone’s outline and character list. That could be fun. Other, lesser writers might chafe at doing something that will go under someone else’s name, but I am okay with it as long as the money is good. And it doesn’t bother me at all to start with someone else’s outline etc. After all, that’s only the starting point. The rest is up to me.
2. I applied to help someone with “suggestions” for their manuscript. There’s red flags all over this one for me. It instantly gave me a vision of suddenly being entrusted with someone’s precious manuscript that they have been laboring over for years and being asked to “give my honest opinion”. Um, no. My honest opinion is quite often devastating to people. Not because I am some kind of raging prick, but because my perceptions and analysis go way, way deeper than most people’s and my therefore hit them hard where they are the most vulnerable. I don’t do that any more. Anyhow, I would go into the job with great caution and exercising the maximjum possible sensitivity while still giving them what they want.
3. I applied for a job writing stories for a chat-style storytelling app. So the stories would take the form of a text-based chat between two people, and they are looking primarily for thriller-type stories. I super want this job. I have been dying to get into that kind of storytelling ever since I first read a pretty amazing example of it. It’s so modern and immediate and powerful. And because it is based on existing but relatively new technology, it bypasses people’s usual defenses. Kind of like how footage that looks like it’s shot with someone’s phone but has special effects used to be able to do. And I would love to write stories to thrill and scare people and keep them on the edge of their seats. What fun!
4. Why didn’t it space this one properly? Argh. Anyhow, last but not least, I applied for a job being someone’s text-based chat companion. The idea is that lonely people would pay the service for someone to talk to. Someone who is compassionate, sympathetic, understanding, caring, supportive, comforting, and wise. In other words… someone like me!! I want this job so bad I can taste it. I feel like it’s the job I have been training for without knowing it. I would love to be the person to shine some light into the lives of sad and lonely people and give them some of the love and respect society has denied them. Every nurturing instinct in me cries out for this job. And I’ve already gotten a nibble! Oh please please please let me have this!

So that was a lot of fun. I had forgotten how much fun applying for stuff can be. It bring out the positive, confident, go-getting side of me and that’s a way happier side than my usual sluglike ennui. And it makes me feel like getting somewhere is possible, and that’s something I tend to forget.

Now, on to the topic.

All this applying for things has reminded me of a dread phrase from my childhood, one far worse than talk about my potential : “…if only you’d apply yourself. ”

Usually it came in the form of, “I know you’re doing well in class. but just think what you could do if you really applied yourself. ”

And that always left me confused and hurt because the idea makes total sense as stated and yet on some level I knew that was not possible for me.

And I couldn’t explain why. I would think about it but just ended up chasing my own tail in circles till eventually I would give up and say to myself “I get great grades without trying hard at all. Why should I exert myself to make my grades just a little better? It’s not worth the effort. ”

Things like future scholarships were far, far from my young mind.

I took a few baby steps in the direction of applying myself a few times. I tried to study and concentrate on the material and think a lot about the test beforeheand.

But all I got from these experiments was a rush of tension and worry and neuroses that made me feel like my head was one of those control-room scenes where everything is going wrong and all the alarms at various stations are going off.

Suddenly. I understood why my overachieving sister Catherine was so neurotic. That must be how it was for her all the frigging time. I am glad I had a choice.

Fast forward to university, and as patient readers know, I end up in conflict with my brother Dave because he would sweat bullets over a test, doing all the things you are supposed to do if you are taking things seriously, and I would do absolutely nothing to prepare, and I would still walk out with a higher mark than me.

That os obviously completely unfair from the point of view of labour. We like to think that you have to work hard to get good things and a genius like me violates that rule HARD.

And he wanted to know how I could do it. And all I could do is shrug helplessly and say that maybe I could do it because by staying so relaxed about everything, I avoided wasting a lot of energy on worry and self-doubt and pressure and therefore could bring all my powers to bear when it came time to do the work.

That did not compute for my brother at all. He’s a Capricorn and they are the sign of getting things by working really hard. The idea of getting better results by working less is a null set to them. So that didn’t help.

But that’s when I figured out that talent isn’t fair.

And now, here I sit, 45 years old and trying to finally become a grownup, and facing the idea of applying myself again.

Being able to support myself is something I really really want. So I should be working really hard to make it happen. Right?

Wrong. I just don’t work that way. I am far better off surfing a wave of cockiness and ego through life, smugly sure of my own amazingness, and staying the big lazy beast that I am right until the end.

At least that way, I get shit done.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I took a step outside my comfort zone today.

I applied for this :

Dear the world : oh please please please please

And my application reads like this :

Dear Ins and Kevin :

No, that’s too familiar.

To whomsoever it may concern :

Nope, too far the other way. Um.

Greetings, fellow Earthlings!

Nope, wrong audience.

Hey there…. um…. you :

Eh, it’ll have to do.

My name is Michael Bertrand, or if we’re going by porn names, Hercules Thunderpants.

I am a product of childhood neglect and the VFS Writing for Movies and Television program.

Those two things may be related.

Attached you will find that I have included a spec script for Bob’s Burgers I wrote when I was at VFS. I welcome any and all thoughts about it, but if you have issues about how I have characterized Lousie, I will fight you.

Also included are two episodes of the original show I developed at VFS, a series called Sam. It’s about a boy genius who has to go to elementary school for the first time at age ten. And hilarity ensues.

I have not included a resume because I have absolutely no industry-relevant experience besides VFS and what irrelevant job experience I have is from so long ago, it would depress you.

And that’s no way to start a professional relationship, is it? With sadness?

Here’s my bio, though

Michael Bertrand is a real live human being who lives in Richmond, BC and writes things. Originally from a town you’ve never heard of (Summerside) in a province of which you are only peripherally aware (Prince Edward Island), he has lived in the GVRD for almost exactly 20 years and used to miss snowy winters but then remembered they suck. His hobbies include video games, overthinking things, brain science, thinking super snarky things without saying them, and eating food. While he is, most tragically, both white and male, he is also gay, obese, and suffers from depressions, so perhaps he can be forgiven. He loves cats.

Tell me if that is too long. I do tend to go on and on.

Now what am I forgetting. Oh right! Cover letter thingy.

This workshop will help me reach my professional goals and aid my development by giving me the opportunity to rub elbows (platonically) with other people in the industry and learn how the real professionals do it (platonically).

I think that’s everything. I can bang together a resume if absolutely necessary but it will be tragically short on content. Anything else you need, just ask and if it is within my power to grant, it will be yours.

No, YOU are trying too hard!

Wow, that is 415 words. I really DO go on and on.

Anyhow, I am quite pleased with myself both for applying and for the way I did it, because I did it my way, dammit. I was bold and silly and funny and weird and hopefully charming as all get-out in my efforts to win a seat in that writer’s room.

Whether or not I actually get it is secondary. Obviously, I really really want it, but only on my own terms. I have realized that I have been acting like a mouse cowering in the shadow of my enormous personality, and I will be a much happier rodent if I start using said charm juggernaut (bitch) to conquer the world…. Fruvous style!

After all, I’m an amazing and uncanny and fantastic guy. Sure, illness took me off the playing field for a very long time and I am hardly off the injured list yet, but I am super smart and crazy talented and I am sure that if I can get my name and my work in front of enough gatekeepers, someone will recognize this and give me a break.

And then my adult life can officially start because I will finally have a job.

Plus, of course, a crazy little thing called money. Imagine that. I have been so poor for so long that trying to imagine having even a minimum wage income is almost like a blind man trying to imagine color at this point. Or a starving man suddenly having access to a huge buffet. It definitely seems like a wonderful thing but there are are so many things I’d want that it’s kind of overwhelming as well.

Heck, just imagining finally being self-sufficient and no longer a burden on anyone makes me feel a little giddy.

And I fully intend to use these facts as part of the sales pitch for myself. I am basically going to tell potential employers, “I’m currently living on a little under $1200/month. If you can meet or beat that, I’m yours. ”

There are probably legal reasons they can’t pay me that little, but it should get them interested in the potential profitability of associating with me nevertheless.

And should they hire me, I would be incredibly grateful. I am not some clueless millenial with only the haziest understanding of what working for a living entails. I would be grateful and loyal and doggedly protective of anyone willing to hire me.

And with my powers, that loyalty could pay off in many, many ways.

So yeah. Super glad I applied and mega glad that I did it my way. Maybe they really will be charmed by it. Maybe they will decide that I am easily the most obnoxiously overbearing and over-eager person in the world and they would rather move into the middle of a toxic waste dump than come anywhere near me. I don’t know.

Funny thought : it would be hilarious if my application came across as so obnoxious and wrong that it ended up going viral.

Hey, I’ll take it. Whatever gets my name out there.

Now that I have put myself out there in such a fun way, I am prepared to make a (tiny) commitment : I am going to apply to one thing a day for the next week, starting today.

That means that I will apply for six more things before this little jaunt of mine is true. I suspect most of them will come from UpWork, but I have finally joined the VFS Alumni Facebook group now, so they might come from there too.

I wish I had the strength to make a larger commitment now. Something with my signature brand of insanity, like applying for a thing a day for a YEAR, or somesuch. But I am not quite there yet.

Maybe after I do a week, I will be able to commit to something bigger. We will see how it goes. But for now, it’s a week.

And that’s one thing a day even if I applied for like ten things the previous day. That’s a real possibility. When I am on a roll, I tend to want to keep going. I might log in to UpWork and go nuts. It happens.

But the things do not have to be jobs to count as applying for something. In fact, apply is the wrong word. Submit might work better, and be far kinkier.

I will submit something to some gatekeeper – whether they are offering a job, running a contest, or picking Hottest Bear on Welfare – every day, up to and including next Tuesday, which is September 25.

And for verification purposes, I will report what I apply for here.

It’s high time that I show the world what a wonderful creature I am, and dazzle them with all that I can do with this amazing mind of mine.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet…. surely that’s got to be worth at least some kind of living wage and a nice office somewhere.

I’d take a really shitty office too, but there would have to be a LOT more money.

The point is, I’m flexible.

This could be the start of something big.

But at the very least, it’s the start of something more interesting and fun to do than mindlessly play video games all the goddamned time.

And that’s quite enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not really. But it’s what I want to start telling people because it is actually a lot less scary and confusing than telling them I am just amazingly intelligent.

I’ve gone on and on about this subjects in this space before. About these weird moments in my life where people ask me weird questions, like….

Q : What makes you so smart?
A : I don’t know. I just am.

Q : Why are you so smart?
A : I don’t know. Why aren’t you? Why are any of us how we are? Why are some people bigger, stronger, faster, or more talented than others? I have no idea. As far as I can tell, I was born this way.

Q : How come you did so well on the test?
A : Because….that’s what the teacher said. The test asked questions about what the teacher told us and I remembered what they said. I’m sorry that I don’t have a trick I can teach you. I just do it.

…and my all time “fave”….

Q : How could you know that? You can’t know that! Nobody’s that smart!
A : Nobody but me, apparently.

That’s what happens when you are gifted with a genius IQ in a sleepy little backwater town, folks. You’re so much smarter than others that they refuse to believe you are real.

Back then, I was, of course, just trying to answer these existential questions as honeslty as I could. I know my answers might come across as snarky and sarcastic to some, but I swear to go, I was just trying to answer the question.

Questions like those have haunted me for my entire life because I can’t answer them to my own satisfaction, let alone the satisfaction of the average person.

And being the nerd that I am, questions I can’t answer have a way of lingering in my mind. On some level, we nerds know that our job in the metaphorical tribe is, on a basic level, to know things, and therefore questions we could not answer make us feel like we have somehow let down our tribe.

At least, that’s my theory.

And when it’s a question about oneself, the feeling of wrongness cuts deeper. In short (too late), questions like those can really mess with our minds.

Those questions and their ilk are what eventually, via a long and tangled path, to my thoughts on why high intelligence frightens people so much. It in, in short, the ultimate power to have over someone.

People can understand someone being stronger, faster,  more talented, or better at mechnical things than them.

But being smarter than someone means you see and understand more of the world than they do and that kind of power is terrifying. If someone is both quantitatively and qualitatively smarter than you, there’s no defense against that. It’s like being a two dimensional being trying to grasp a three dimensional one.

Damn it, I promised myself I would not explain the whole thing. Patient readers know what I am talking about. I hope the rest of you ger the general idea.

My point is that, having realized how scary someone like me can be to average folk, I then understood some of the ways people had reacted to me in the past. To a teacher, I was an unpredictable threat who might lurk in the shadows for a long time before suddenly asking them a question they can’t answer and thus challenge their authority, or openly defy them knowing there was nothing they could do about it, or otherwise upset the whole polished applecart of the classroom seemingly without effort.

It must be crazymaking to be teaching a kid who is smarter than you.

The fact that, at the same time, I was a mess of a kid who was pathetically emotionally dependent on my teachers only made things even worse because not only was I an unpredictable threat, I was impossible to respect too.

Damn it. I got sidetracked again!

Point is, me scary smarty guy. Want to get along with normal folk. Spend lots of time thinky on problem. Get frustrated. Come up with magic thing.

It’s sort of a joke and sort of serious. It’s an obscure as fuck joke to me because it is the punchline to a joke that would go something like…

Q : How do I get along with average folks?
A : Well, I could… no… there’s always…. no, that wouldn’t work either… how about I… hmmm…….fuck it. Tell them I have magic powers.

I gues you had to be there.

It’s serious in that it is meant as an answer to at least part of my life long quest to somehow justify my existence and explain myself to the world.

A lifetime of being a social outcast for many reasons and on many levels has left me with a giant looming question mark where my identity should be. Who am I? What am I? Were I not so rigorously realistic and pragmatic, I might have taken the route of imagining myself to be an alien or some other kind of otherworldly being.

As explanations go, it is not without merit.

But no, I am much too smart for such blatant and obvious a form of self-delusion. I see right through such childish emotional coping mechanism and instead deal with my issues in the most mature and adult way possible.

By ignoring them. And thus having virtually no coping mechanisms at all.

Except, of course, for silly ones like saying I have magic powers.

Yay, I made it back to the point!

I sometimes wonder if, historically, some of the people who actually did go around claiming to have magics powers, like psychics, mystic healers, sorcerors, witches, channelers, and so forth and so on were actually in the same pickle I am in, and “discovering” their powers was their minds’ way of making sense of it.

After all, from the point of view of the average person, I “see” things they can’t see, understand things which are beyond their comprehension, and know so much that it can seem like I am some kind of oracle or sage.

So in a Clarke-level sense, from the point of view of the average Joe or Jane, I really do have magic powers.

Now if only I knew what to do with them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Call this a thinkpiece, because these ideas are not yet fully formed and I am writing them down, in part, in order to help complete their birth.

The basic idea is that modern life revolves around people getting the feeling but not the substance of things.

Take these macho “truck” ads. Please. The whole marketing of these vehicles is designed to sell the message that these trucks are for manly men who do things like haul cattle and drive upo twisty canyon roads and go “offroad” a lot. People to whom the important things are towing capacity and horsepower, because god damn it. there’s work that needs doin’ and Missy’s new gingham dress ain’t gonna pay for itself.

The message, obviously, is that if you buy this vehicle,  you’ll be a manly man too.

But you won’t. Not at all. Nothing about you, the proud new dipshit of a vehicle owner, will change. You will still be the same milquetoast middle aged Dad with a sensible job and a crippling mortgage that you were before you bought the damned thing.

But that doesn’t matter because buying and owning that thing makes you fee more manly, and that’s what matters. When you look at it, when you drive it, when you image what others see when they see you in it, you will feel like a big strong manly man, and that is what counts.

In fact, if the product actually did change you into a manly man, you wouldn’t want it. Because that would fuck up your life. It would be a total character change. You’d end up quitting your job and getting your welding ticket and moving to a ranch or some shit.

So what you are really buying is a life size toy that helps you pretend to be a big manly man without actually changing at all.

That makes it the equivalent of your kid’s fake light sabre. Just a tool for the imagination for your Muppet Babies world, where make believe is real until Nanny says it’s bedtime.

And the women have the same kind of shit going on too. Products marketed to them as though they have the magical power to turn you from a real live woman, warts and all, into a glamorous, beautiful, universally desired goddess.

And you know they can’t,. of course. But that doesn’t matter because, like with the trucks, if the products could actually do that, you wouldn’t want them because they would wreck your current life.

They, too, are only props for the imagination. Toys for big girls and boys. And the more you think about it, the more you realize that absolutely everything is marketed this way. It’s almost as if the actual properties of the actual product don’t matter. What matter is the land of make believe to which their product is the only key.

And the more media saturated we become, the more of our personal reality is composed of media we have consumed and thus the more of our lives we live in exactly these imaginary worlds.

Meanwhile, the real world is going all to hell.

Pause while I lay down. I do not feel at all well.

Another idea I have been meaning to explore is the problem of status competition in the modern era of communications.

Here’s the problem : as the global village grows, so does its population. And our status instincts have no limit to how many people it will feel we are, on some level, “in competition” with, and so we are rapidly reaching the point where we are in social competition with the entire world.

No wonder low self esteem is rampant. Who can beat the entire world? How can people not feel like they are at the bottom of the heap in that situation?

To make this more concrete, let’s talk female beauty. In the old days, a woman looking to attract a man only had the other gals her age in the village to compete with and thus stood a fair chance of being one of the prettiest girls around.

But then the village becomes a town, and suddenly she’s competing with two or three times the number of ladies. Then the town becomes a city, and the odds get even worse. And now we have a global village of billions.

And what makes it worse is that thanks to mass media, everyone has access to the highest status people in the world (celebrities), and can and will compare themselves to those illuminaries, and of course come up short.

It’s especially stark in the world of beauty, because in that case, the perfect women making real women feel ugly aren’t even real themselves. They are a quarter silicone and half Photoshop and the rest is the world’s best makeup, hair, and fashion professionals, plus of course perfect lighting and expert photography.

But it works on all levels. We all know the names of the richest (and therefore the most “successful” ) people in the world. We know of the top atheltes, the most famous rock stars and actors, the funniests comedians, and so on.

And because we always compare ourselves with the highest status members of our communities, we look upon these mighties and despair. They seem so high above us that we lose all hope of ever reaching their Olympian status.

It’s an unintended consequence of the internet and mass media in general, and I am not at all sure what can be done about it. You can tell people not to compare themselves to others until you are blue in the face, but they are still going to do it. It’s human nature.

What is needed is some kind of social machinery that lets us build a wall between our self worth and the teeming masses in terms of competition.

I don’t know how that would work. But it would save people a lot of misery.

Well that’s my rambling for the day. Now, I need to lay down and rest and hopefully feel better by the time that FRED rolls around.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There’s so many people I could be. ^[1]

I’m serious. I contain multitudes. I’m a protean mass of multi-n-dimensional neospace writhing with virtual particles chomping at the bit to exist for just long enough to truly piss physicists off by being absolutely necessary for things to balance out and completely unable to be detected.

Well, okay. maybe not, but that was really fun to write.

It all boils down to that evil, evil word : potential. The human kind. The kind that makes people tell you how much potential you have when you are a kid, which turns into them carping at you for squandering your potential when you completely fail to become a keener eager to kick the world’s ass and instead continue to be a coaster who naively figures that if school is easy for you, why make it hard by getting all Type A about it?

Because some day you’ll want money, you little idiot.

But enough about that.

I have had this notion of my great potential my whole life, and it ended up settling into one of the cracks in my mind as the notion that no matter what I do, it’s wrong. I live in a continuous state of feeling like I am making the wrong choices, and eventually you have to learn to just tune that shit out or you won’t even be able to move.

I mean, it’s a bug burden to put on a kid to tell them of all the amazing things they could (and therefore should) do. At least, if you’re somewhat responsibility-averse like me.

I would love to go out into the world and do amazing things, and I am fully confident that I can do it, too.

But of course, first I would have to choose which amazing things, and therein lies the rub. As I have written here before, the science is clear that giving people more than a certain number of options makes them less happy with their choices, because what are the odds they have chosen the “right” ones?

And past that point, the more options there are, the unhappier people get.

Now imagine you are me, and in every choice in life you can see ten times the options of the normal person, and you begin to get an idea of why I have such problems picking a path in life and why I keep talking about a million hallways with a million doors each and other such metaphors.

That might be a scam, though. Let me explain.

This whole option paralysis bullshti is probably just one of the tools my depression uses to keep me in my place. I’m thinking that’s the whole reason it generates all those options and all those potential versions of myself.

I’d be lying if I said I knew how to make my mind stop generating a gazillion possibilities all the damned time. But surely (hi Shirley!) there is some kind of solution.

Of course there is. It’s called growing up and growing a pair. It’s called being capable of making a decision and sticking to it without constantly doubting myself. It’s called connecting with my Evil Kirk so Good Kirk can finally make up his mind about things.

But that would involve actually, ya know…. doing stuff.

So that can’t be right.

Seriously though, I think I am making progress there. I am finding it easier to imagine myself as a joyously engaged in and connected with reality, with days full of doings and a solid feeling of productivity to justify my existence.

It helps enormously to imagine it all as a game. Fun stuff I do in order to get out there in the world (online) and try to trick the world into giving me money.

That makes the whole thing way, way less scary. I’m practically gamifying life. That way the gap between playing video games all day and actually being productive seems a lot more like something I could actually leap.

And it keeps reality from getting too real for me to handle by putting it on the other side of this here computer screen. If I do it all online, I can probably handle it. If it’s online, that no matter what the emotional and social content is, the physical content is still just text and pictures on my computer screen.

And I can handle that.

But again : what to do, specifically? Everything is so simple and easy when you speak in generalities but what will I actually do? Which of the billions of possibilities I contain will I choose to become real?

That makes it all sound like some bizarre existentialist reality show.

The problem is that I come up with a possibility, like all that talk about becoming a public speaker in yesterday’s blog entry. And it all seems righteously possible and like a wonderful idea that would totally work, and I can even feel myself beginning to engage with the idea as a possibility and starting to think of how I would make it real.

And then my mind says “Yes, that would be nice. ” and hits the pause button HARD. Because now, it’s a real battle between my desire to act and move forward and my depression’s desire to keep me right where I am, where it can control things.

It just wants to keep me safe. in its horribly misguided and fucked up way.

So nothing ever comes of it. But I have hope because those dreams might still be getting put on pause, but they are getting bigger and brighter and more real every single time I dream one up.

And some day, I will dream one so vivid and perfect it will become reality.

Because it will then become..a quest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The subject of introversion versus extroversioncame up in therapy. I had to give my therapist the gentle update on the difference between being an introvert and being depressed, or antisocial, or socially anxious, or whatever.

I described myself as an introvert, and he began insisting that I wasn’t one, and that it was my depression that made me think I was, and so forth and so on.

And I suppose a less naturally combtive person could have let that slide, but uh… I am not that kind of person.

But then he, quite rightfully, brought up the fact that I had said that I was outgoing and charming and liked being around people as a kid.

So that got me to thinking about the whole thing.

Like I said to him, I will always be an introvert in the true sense of the world : someone who generates their own energy rather than taking it from the environment like an extrovert would, someone who finds social engagement draining rather than stimulating, someone who can be quite happy curled up with a book all alone, someone who prefers a small close group of friends rather than a large shallow group of friends. etc.

That’s the kind of thing that does not change. That’s firmly established science. They can figure out whether a baby is introverted or extroverted when its only six months old, and then track that child over the years and verify that it simply does not change.

That said, there can be some motion within the categories. An extrovert can become more introverted, and vice versa.

And I do feel that, on a fundamental level, I am a lot more extroverted than it might seem. I think that, sans depression, I would be a much perkier, brighter, more outgoing and above all friendlier person.

I would, in essence, be Fruvous in real life.

Just thinking about that possibility makes me feel dizzy with excitement. Because like I said yesterday, Fruvous the Fox is amazing. He’s lively and adorable and full of love and life, and people really like him.

The very thought of my actual life being like that gives me goosebumps.

And it could be argued that he is certainly an extrovert. Or at least, a lot more extroverted than me.But he’s the version of me that is entirely my creation where I can be what I want to be and act like I want to act and in that sense, fictional and biologically improbable as he is, he is arguable the most genuine version of me around.

A scenario has been growing in my mind. In it, I go to a gay club and just plain let loose.  No more hiding myself or hesitating at the edge of the diving board or any of that shit. Just throw myself into everything that is going on, and follow my crazy instincts to do things like sit down next to someone and ask them if they are interesting. Approach any guy who strikes me as attractive without worrying about rejection because I am not betting the farm on a positive reaction.

I’m just testing and expanding my charm and charisma. If he lights up and we get something going on, great. If not,. meh, there’s plenty more dick in the sea.

And I know that, at first, I might fail spectacularly. People would probably be laughing at me and wondering who the fuck this crazy fat guy thinks he is and thinking I am the most pathetic loser in the world.

And I am totally fine with that. I am a pretty unique guy and that means it sometimes takes time to get an audience tuned to my frequency.

And some, of course, will never get there. They will continue to think I am an atrocious boor and an embarrassing spectacle. That’s fine too. I don’t need everyone to love me (though it would be awfully nice), I just need a small group of people who like and appreciate me. And in return, I give them all my love and warmth and wonderful wacky cute cuddly vibes.

And once I gather this little group of mutual awesomeness, I will be fine with more or less just hanging out with them.

That’s how it works online. I know a lot of furries online, and I consider them all friends in a general sense. So in that sense, I am an extrovery there.

But my real friends are the regulars at the particular hangout where I hang out who I like and who like me and who are interesting to talk to and not adverse to having a cute fluffy fox cuddle up to them looking for attention.

That’s also kind of an extrovert thing. The constant need for attention. So chalk that one up as a point for Team E.

As Fruvous,. I am always looking for affection and attention and other forms of positive interaction. To be honest. I am actually extremely needy. I just hide it by being cute and lovable and such.

In that way, I feel like I balance the books with people. I get the attention and affection I crave so much and they get all my fluffy cute lovin’. I make them feel good, they make me feel good.

All of life should be that awesome!

So I dunno. Am I truly an extrovert in disguise? Maybe. But for every point in favour of that proposition. I can come up with half a dozen in opposition.

So maybe the real lesson is to not get too hung up on labels. Labels describe what’s in the jar, they don’t define it. They can be useful signposts on the route to developing one’s sense of identity – something to add to your sense of who you are.

But you should never let them constrain you. The moment you start cutting off parts of yourself because they don’t fit the label is the moment when that label has to GO.

So am I an extrovert or an introvert/

Who cares? I’m a ME.

And that’s all I ever need to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.