I’m rather pleased with how bad I feel right now.

Because I know what it is : the urge to act is rising in me. And for once in my life, I am not pushing it back down and making it obey me. I am, instead. letting it fester and grow until Something Happens.

Hopefully something good, but right now, I am not feeling too picky. I will take what comes as long as it catalyzes some positive change within me and doesn’t end with me being homeless or in jail.

Because I al really fucking sick of this stupid life of mine. I want… no, I need to escape it. And that means that clutch of fear that has been holding me back has got to GO. That feeling of queasy panic I get when I contemplate going eventhe tiniest bit out of my miniscule comfort zone can’t keep being the boss of me forever.

And my loathing for the insipid voice in my head that keeps insisting everything is fine grows more potently poisonous every day.

Because it’s not fine. I need to grow and spread my wings and leave this fouled and fetid nest of mine and go out there to find my flock.

Or at least a job I can competently perform and get paid for.

And no more tormenting myself with what I “could” be doing. I’m wise to that trick now. My depression turns “could” into “should” and then “should” becomes yet another reason to hate myself because there must be something horribly wrong with me – I must be the worst person in the world – if there are all these things I “could” be doing and all I do is play video games instead.

Fuck off and die, depression. I hate you so much.

It’s no mystery why I spend all day playing ESO. It’s because while I am doing so, I am happy, or at the very least fully occupied and therefore not subject to the million and one torments my mind inflicts on me when it has spare CPU cycles to work with.

So I play ESO all day because it is a way for me to feel safe. I am safe from my inner demons as long as I keep my mind full of stimulation and distraction.

A therapist, hearing this, would no doubt consider themselves quite clever when they said that the solution is obviously to find a way for me to feel safe outside of my distractions and stimulations.

Well DUH. But I don’t see that happening any time soon. Not until I am strong enough to murder my fears and thus face facing the world in realtime HD for once.

I am working a different angle right now. I am trying the “energy absorbing villain” strategy from so many episodes of my childhood faves.

That’s where the hero or heroes realize that they can’t beat the energy absorbing villain the usual way because no matter how they attack he/she/it, they just absorb the energy from it then laugh cruelly.

So they switch tactics and start pouring all available energy into the villain and that overloads the villain’s ability to absorb and/or contain the energy, and they go bing and the heroes pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Well, depression’s my energy sucking villain, and I fully intend to pour more life energy into it than it can absorb, and overload it Blast it to pieces if I can. I have handed my id a blank cheque to gather all the energy it can from the world and from all that suppressed energy inside me and use it to blast that mass of pain and fear and other such bullshit that has been holding me back into teeny tiny pieces.

I might not be exactly the same person when all is said and done. This process is going to produce a new kind of consciousnss in me and that generally shifts identity along with it, or at least personality.

I am fine with that. It’s not like being exactly who I am right now is working out great for me anyhow. I’m over worrying that I will become some kind of terrible person. That was always just a ghost puppet my depression used to scare me away from overcoming it.

I have enough faith in who I truly am to see through such petty bullshit now. I know that I am a very nice fellow right down to my emotional core and that is not going to change no matter how shaken up my identity gets.

I just love being nice way too much!

But even if I did have to become somewhat of a dick in order to be free, it’s a price I am willing to pay.

Because when it really comes down to it, I would rather be a happy asshole than a miserable nice guy.

I have a lot of assertion of self to do. I need to set my limits and I can’t guarantee this will be done in a gentle and considerate way. Like any (much delayed) adolescent, I am figuring things out as I go as I deal with powerful and previously untapped forces within me, and total self control is not my highest priority right now.

Self realization is.

So go ahead, depression. Make me feel terrible. Make me scared of the world. Make me feel like there is no point to anything and that everything is too hard.

I eat that shit for breakfast now. And turn it into the fuel I need to fight you. I am learning to recycle, bitch, and that means all this stored up emotion is being turned into the ammunition I will use to slay you.

So burn, bitch, BURN. I will roast you out of me like I am sweating out a fever if that is what it takes. I will suffer the fires of hell if that’s what it takes. I will tear out my guts and stomp on them if that is what it takes.

In short, I will do whatever it takes to get rid of you.

So pack your fucking bags. You’re on the way OUT.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

The question is what to do with that information.

It’s all well and good to stand atop a rugged ediface of Western thought and say “Then you should question everything!” but that’s a very hard thing to put into practice.

Because we need to act. Even those of us with depression. We need to act on our perceptions of the world and it doesn’t matter how suspect those perceptions are because they are all we have to go on.

So yeah. I know that my depression makes me interpret reality in some very crazy ways that make no sense if subjects to even cursory logical scrutiny.

But that’s not enough.  Not enough to change what I believe – what I feel to be true.

And until belief changes, my reality remains the same.

On a good day, I can examine one of my delusions and feel the untruth of it, and on a very good day I can hold on to that feeling of falsity long enough for it to drive some of the bad belief out of my system.

Thus, progress is made.

But it’s just not possible to doubt everything all the time. The mere thought of it exausts me. The last thing I need is more mental bureaucracy.

What I wouldn’t give for ten minutes alone with the org chart of my brain. By the time I was done it would be half the size and SO much more efficient.

Surely, though, (Hi Shirley!)) there is no need to doubt everything. Depression doesn’t distort every single perception. It’s not psychosis.

So perhaps it would be helpful to narrow things down a tad.

What depression distorts is emotional perceptions. It creates emotional delusions about what people think of us, how they feel about us, what our status in society is, and pretty much every other emotional evaluation of which we are capable.

And we are emotional creatures, us humans. No matter how logical we might think we are, it is always emotion that is calling the shots and logic that serves to execute them.

For the most part, we feel our way through life.

So emotional delusions, while not as colorful or spectacular as the sensory kind, can have enormous long term implications for the individual with depression.

I often visualize my depression is being like an intense magnetic field that draws everything in my mind towards the negative. But because its pull is universal , constant, and even, it’s easy to lose sight of it and forget its there, like being in a fast moving airplane with no windows.

Sure, you can kind of feel the motion if you think of it. but for the most part the room could be completely stationary as far as you know.

Okay, so that analogy needs work.

My point is that depression’s distortions fade into the background most of the time, which is why it is so easy for the individual depression to conclude that how they feel about the world is how the world actually is, no matter how crazy that would seem to a theoretical outside observer.

I have only developing my own ability to tell the difference in the last month or two. And I would love to be able to simply impart that knowledge to my fellow depression sufferers and help them on their journey, but it is not quite that simple.

I know better than most that the wisest words in the world don’t help at all if you are not in the right place to hear them.

The jounrye out of the darkness is a long one and there is no way of knowing when you wil, at long last, l emerge into the light.

All you can do is keep moving in the direction of the light, and take the increasing warmth and understanding as your inspiration to continue.

My sleep’s been weird lately. Weirder than usual, that is.

I think I must have gotten way, way behind on my REM sleep because I was starting to get these periods where I found it very hard to think.

It was like my mind was full of some thick, heavy fluid that resisted all action. I honestly wonder if I accidentally experienced what it would be like to have a lower IQ.  The usual high arcing electrical charge of my megnificent mind was absent and the best that I could hope for was to muddle through somehow.

It happened before and during FRED last night. That made life a lot more stressful than it really needed to me. I spent a lot of the time fairly bummed out because I just don’t know how to cope with life in that state.

Luckily, it cleared up some and I was able to enjoy myself more once I had eaten and had some time for the ol’ vaccuum tubes to warm up.

But it frightened me. I worried that I was having some kind of stroke and that I was going to end up with a fucked up brain that was bot even good for the few things I manage to get done any more.

It would be the ultimate cruelty for me to lose all this mental might right when I am on the verge of being able to make use of it.

And while that it is still possible, I am thinking sleep had a lot more to do with it. I managed to get some good sleep this afternoon and felt a million times better for it. And I am giving myself permission to sleep as much as I need to from now on – to gorge myself at an all you can sleep buffet, if that’s what it takes – until I catch up on the backlog ad can walk around feeling human again.

Because seriously. What all do I need to be awake for anyhow? Making “progress” in ESO? Like that means anything.

I wonder what I would do with my time if I couldn’t play video games.

I might actually be productive.

What a terrifying thought!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.