In a word, bleh.

It’s 4 PM and I am still not fully awake. Part of me would like nothing more than to crawl back into bed and sleep for another week or two. I feel so darn groggy and mentally disorganized and generally bleary as all fuck.

But I can’t go back to bed and snooze because I have blogging to do and Ithen I have to get a shower before going to FRED and doing my best not to fall asleep and end up faceplanting into my pulled pork sandwich.

Sleep disorders make life so hard sometimes. Le sigh.

On the plus side, I have been successful in my efforts to cut way down on the napping. The less I nap, the better I will sleep, or at least that is the theory.

When I abuse sleep as a way to escape reality, I end up depriving myself of the really good, deep, restorative kind of sleep that I really need.

It’s bad enough that I have sleep apnea doing that to me as well.

Adding to my sleepiness is the fact that I just took a dump. For whatever reason, defecation almost always makes me sleepy. My theory is that it has something to do with the release of the tension that comes with full bowels.

Or maybe it’s something left over from my infancy. In general, if you are examining something unusual involving bathroom functions, you look to infancy and toddler… cy for the answers.

A lot of super important programming happens then. Freud had that right.

Anyhow, the net result is that I am struggling to stay focused on the blogging while my mind keeps wandering off and trying to fall asleep on the down lo by hijacking my usual thoughtful nature to do its dirty work.

Damn brains never doing what they are told. Who do they think is in charge, anyhow?

I have been playing quest mods for Dragon Age : Origins lately. Some of them are quite good. One in particular, a mod called Thirst (dunno why), really impressed me. It was in all ways as good as the original game, and in some ways better. The only thing that differed was the scale.

But it could totally pass for an official expansion of the game.

So yeah, still spending most of my time playing da vidya games. But I am refusing to stress about it. I am one awesome dude,and as long as I keep that in mind, and let the restlessness I feel that makes me crave something more grow, I am confident that I will outgrow this stage of my life and move away from the video games when I am ready.

Until then, I am enjoying myself. And there is nothing wrong with that.

I can still feel tension and depression trying to convince me that I am nightmare garbage person and all that other bullshit. But I am not going to let it. I will continue to be a pretty amazing guy no mater how bad I feel.

I am not being punished for something via this pain. The pain doesn’t mean I am a bad person. I am merely the innocent victim of bad brain chemicals.

And it sucks and it’s not fair and I wish it would all just go away.

But it says absolutely nothing about me.

Time for a nap. Back after FRED.

Post FRED nao. Proud of myself for getting off my ass multiple times to go out and see the goddamned Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse instead of being my usual lump on a log then feeling terrible about myself after.

Big thanks to Barb for being our little sparkplug and/or cheerleader, encouraging us with all her heart to come look at the eclipse.

I sincerely appreciate it, Barb. You reminded me of my mother when she would be trying to get us kids excited about something she was excited about.

I kind of feel bad about how resistant I was to her encouragment back then. But no matter what age I am, “Quick! Get up right now and do this thing!” is always going to have a low rate of success no matter how I will feel about it afterwards.

I don’t do “sudden”. I wish I did, but I don’t. In war, I would be a strategist par excellence, but maybe not the best guy to respond to a sudden night time raid on our position or a seemingly peaceful advance turning into a hell of bullets and explosions.

Our position would be overrun before I even got my bearings, let alone decided what we should do in response.

Anyhow, so I got to see the Super Ultra Hymen Blood Cocktacular Coyote Pumpkin Spice Eclipse With Two Scoops Of Raisins In Every Bos tonight, and it was pretty damned cool. Such things always make me think of pre-scientific peoples and how huge an emotional impact it would have on them.

The moon is disappearing behind a thick black shadow and you have no idea whether it will ever come back. Your cosmology says the moon is a goddess, so what the hell is happening to her? Is she dying? Is she losing a battle against an evil spirit? One of the things you base your life around is undergoing a crisis and you can neither understand what is happening nor impact the outcome.

Then when “she” starts coming back, the relief must have been enormous. And when everything went back to normal, it was up to your shamans and such to come up with an explanation as to what the fuck happened.

And would it happen again??

Compared to that, all in all, I would rather know what we know : that it’s just the shadow of the Earth falling on the Moon for a little while, and it will be cool, but it will pass.

But it’s still nice, on these occasions, to imagine what it would be like not to know.

Makes me all the more grateful that we do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup, we’re back to talking about the lack of challenge in my life again. I should keep a list of the topics I keep coming back to so I can show it to my therapist.

Might be productive.

Anyhow, what is on my mind tonight is how easy a lot of important things have been for me all my life. Too easy, one might say.

There’s the academics, of course. Patient readers know the dril. I have never studied for a test in my life. And yet I was a straight-A student for my entire academic life. School – the academic part – has always been super easy for me, from the first day of elementary school to the last day of high school.

And I appreciate how big a gift that is… in theory, at least. I understand that school was not that easy for must people and that struggling to do well at school was a big part of a lot of people’s childhood.

So I don’t want to sound dismissive or disrespectful.

But the truth is. when something comes super easily, it is very hard to assign it any real value. I’ve taken my academic gifts for granted for my entire life. That’s just how I am.

It’s not like there was anyone encouraging me to try harder. I got A’s already, so clearly I had no problems. (Ha ha ha.) I recieved absolutely no guidance from my parents, my siblings, my teachers, or my so called guidance counselors.

What a useless bunch of gits THEY were.

And so I just floating through academic life like a cloud. In a way, none of it ever seemed real to me. Not the way it did for others. It was all just words flowing through me with minimal effort.

So I never had to learn to really buckle down and work hard. It was never required of me. And I am many wondrous things, but a self-starter is not one of them.

More of a self-stopper, to be honest.

So I was never one of those bright kids who studies their favorite subjects voraciously and pours themselves into self-betterment and spends hours accumulating useful job skills for future resumes.

I just did my school work and entertained myself. The idea that I should be doing more never would have occurred to me. I almost never thought about my post-school future and I certainly never thought I would have to figure all these things out before I even went to college.

I assumed college was where you figured that shit out.

Skipping over the life-destroying trauma that was my parents taking me and my brother out of school so they could take early retirement…..

Actually, no. Fuck that. Let’s talk about that.

It’s clear to me now that it was that trauma that broke me. I was doing great as a college student and was starting to sort my life out. I was planning on graduating from UPEI with a double major in philosophy and psychology and from there I was going to look around for the best place to get my post-grad psych degree so I could be a licensed therapist of some sort.

But then my Dad convinced my Mom that they should both take early retirement together and that meant that, according to them, they could not afford to pay for my brother and I to get the degrees we’d been promised all our lives.

How fucking selfish can you get.

To top it all off, we couldn’t even get student loans. We didn’t qualify. Why? Because of the lump sum payments they had gotten as part of early retirement. That meant that according to the government, they totally could afford to pay for the other two years of our frigging degrees.

Not according to them, though!

So I had to move back to Summerside and live with my parents for a year and change before I would qualify for a student loan.

There was no chance I was going to survive that, psychologically speaking. Unemployment is high in Summerside, always has been. There were very few job opportunities and the ones that existed got hundreds of applicants. I was a young dude with no job skills to speak of.

So there was no way I could get a job.

And that led to a very bad state : cashlessness. My parents wouldn’t give us any spending money, supposedly so we would have an incentive to go out and find work, but honestly it was more like they had already decided we were not worth spending any money on and felt like they were doing us a huge favour just by giving us room and board without charging rent.

And cashlessness is extremely depressing. No money means no power means you can’t ever do the slightest thing to please yourself. All of the things people take for granted, like their Starbucks or their cool car or their fave music, are inaccessible when you have no money.

You end up feeling cut off from the world. You are stuck on the outside looking in at all the pretty things you can’t have. Consumer society is inacessible to you.

So it’s no wonder I had a serious nervous breakdown and became a misterable malnourished dehydrated shadow of my former self that couldn’t eat and could barely make himself drink water and washed his hands 10 to 12 times a day because the second his hands were dry he could feel the germs crawling back onto him.

And nobody really cared. So it was up to me to pull myself out of that state by sheer force of will and bloody minded determination.

And it looked like I was back to my old self. But I wasn’t. I was the weak, depressed version of myself I have been ever since.

Time to pull myself out of my sorry state by sheer force of will and bloody minded determination again, I suppose.

In the end, there is really nobody you can rely on but yourself.

Guess I should stop waiting for rescue and save myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today we’re going to start off with this :

1. Definitely. Even pleasant surprises throw me for a loop, and might not get someone the reponse they seek. If I am really thrown off, it might even seem like I am rejecting them and/or their surprise even when I am not. It’s just that I don’t like surprises and don’t handle them well. That’s why I really don’t like it when people visit unexpectedly. Oh, a surprise AND social interaction? Um no. Not ready. Go away. Next time, phone ahead.
2. Somewhat. My hot take on it is that while I don’t like people making choices for me, I am capable of evaluating the choices they have made for me and choosing to go along with it because I approve said choices. I will still resent the presumption, but I can quash that in the name of social harmony.
3. Um, totally no. I love getting gifts. And I love giving gifts even more. It’s a social interaction I enjoy and embrace because not only is it full of the positive social input I crave, it is easy to understand.
4. Yes, but wow, what a dickish way of putting it. It’s true that I don’t care for small talk and prefer to talk about ideas, I am not some spoiled intellectual whining about having to participate in something not entirely to my tastes for even a few seconds. I cam handle small talk just fine because while I am not interested in small talk qua small talk, I am extremely interested in people and their lives, and you can learn a lot about that by listening to small talk. Problem solved.
5. Oh yeah. Hell year. You can disagree with me all you like. In fact, I encourage you to do so. You can tell me I am wrong, wrong, wrong. You can even say I am the sort of person who is ruining the world. But don’t you dare impugn my integrity and/or honesty. Saying I am stupid is bad but not that bad. Saying I am incompetent might well be true depending on the area of endeavour we are talking about. But don’t you DARE attack my honesty and/or integrity. I am a one hundred percent honest and sincere dude and don’t you forget it!
6. Well yeah, but who doesn’t? Nobody likes to be manipulated. Personally, generally I am annoyed by attempts to manipulate me because they are pathetically obvious to me and thus insult my intelligence.
7. Yes and no. On paper, I definitely loathe insincerity and hate lying. Insincerity is like fingernails on the blackboard to my empathy. At times it can even make me nauseous. And lying bothers me the same way manipulation does. But in practice, I know people have a lot of reasons to lie and some of them are ones with which I have great sympathy. So I reserve judgment. I don’t take being lied to as a personal attack and go on the offensive. In fact, on the personal level, I might do nothing at all and let myself be lied to and even let the liar think they tricked me if I think it’s what’s for the best. Most social lies are harmless bits of psychosocial self-defense and as such challenging them is unjustified and cruel. Insincerity, on the other hand, will always piss me off.
8. Oh yeah. I definitely need my alone time to ever have a chance of keeping my marbles together and so if something is keeping me from getting that alone time, I will grow increasingly agitated. Kind of like when something is keeping me from blogging, come to think of it. Now usually I am too shy and/or timid and/or sensitive to tell someone to fuck off so I can get my solitary time, although I am pretty sure I would have to speak up if it went on long enough. But one of my “things” is that I never, ever, ever want to make someone feel rejected. That makes telling people to go away tricky. Oh, and I have never had to deal with someone who I felt wasted my time on a regular basis because, in general, I don’t have any big time commitments. I can do whatever whenever. But if I am working toward a goal with a time limit, it’s a totally differeny story. Plus there is the fact that I hate to be interrupted, so just by breaking my flow, the person has already pissed me off.
9. Yes yes yes. If you are chronically late, we might not be able to be friends. I dislike uncertainty and that extends into intensely disliking people who are unreliable. If we agree to do thing X at time Y, you better be ready to do thing X at time y, or I will lose respect for you, and if it keeps up, I will lose all regard for you entirely and you will be struck from my list of associates and become just someone I know. I know that sounds quite harsh, especially to flaky people, but I can’t deal with unreliable people. Maybe you would understand if you could feel how hurt I am when someone flakes on me, I dunno. But I gotta do it.
10. More or less yes. Yes if we are talking the classic chatterbox type who just goes on and on and on incessantly without thought or substance to anything they say. That would drive me crazy because I am strongly keyed to pick up verbal information but there isn’t any. On the other hand, I love to talk and I am very verbal and if I am not governing myself I can reach near-chatterbox speeds. I am a person who perpetually has a lot to say. So I try not to judge others too harshly if they too have a lot to say.
11. Um, yeah. I get bent out of shape by the incorrect usage of language all the damned time. It’s definitely a thing with me. Less so on the personal level and even less so in person. Basically, if I am not reading it, it’s…. well, not good, it will still annoy the heck out of me. But it won’t be too bad.

Well that was fun. I should do listicle reply articles more often. That was way easier than my usual form of blogging.

Oh, and I feel I need to say this out of loyalty to my fellow INTJs : this guy is not representative of our personality subtype and should not be allowed to color your opinion of us.

We’re very nice people. Honest.

Just maybe rethink that surprise party, okay?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am, so far, maintaining belief in my own amazingness.

But it isn’t easy. My mind is bending into a new shape and the desire to give up and let everything snap back into its usual shape is strong.

But I have successfully engaged my sheer bloody-mindedness and that is a very good thing. As a Taurus, I have enormous reserves of stubborn refusal to quit, especially if I am angry, and I am angry at all the unjustified self-loathing I have endured for all this time and I am sure as fuck not going to let it win.

So I will bend myself to my own will.

Even if I have to summon up a near psychotic level of determination.

Essentially, like I’ve said before, I am holding on to the truth of my own amazingness as hard as I can and not letting it get pulled away by the icy fingers of depression that are just waiting for me to be too distracted and/or demoralized to resist so they can put everything back to the way things were when it ruled the place.

Fuck that. I’m in charge now. And there are going to be a lot of changes around here. The new regime has arrived. The revolution was a total success and now the real me – strong, powerful, dazzling – is in charge and things are going to go MY way.

I’m amazing. I’ve always been amazing. For almost my entire life, I have been a wizard and a wonder and one heck of a guy.

Only now, I can finally see it. Even feel it a little. It’s the crack of dawn and the birds are waking up and the air is starting to warm up and chase the cold of night away.

And I have already had a few successful skirmishes with my demons. Earlier I felt quite bad. Very depressed. And the easiest thing in the world would have been to let that make me hate myself all over again, because it takes no sustained energy investment in order to believe you are how you feel.

But I am not my mood. Feeling bad and being bad are not the same thing. I am drawing a line in the sand and then planting my flag smack dab in the middle. And the flag reads, “I AM AWESOME”. and nobody is ever going to change that.

So no, I am not going to fall apart any more. My outer layers will always be protean, ready to be shaped into whatever I need at the moment. I will always be the same old shapeshifting trickster that I have always been.

But on the inside, everything stays the same. The inner sanctum remains stable, safe, comfortable, reliable, and nice. I hereby mark it as off limits to the ever-shifting shimmering mirage of my mind. My tentacles can no longer cannibalize vital mood and identity processes in order to support whatever background process is hogging all the working memory at the time.

Enough. No more..My core processes are now protected and any tentacle that tries to violate protected memory space will be cut off at the root and burned/

The shit can’t be negotiable. It has to be rock solid stainless steel. with no give, no flex, and absolutely no wriggle room.

And it is.

Anjd maybe establishing this protected zone in my mind makes me less smart on some level. I don’t give a fuck. I have always been too smart for my own good anyway, and I would rather be dumber and happy than smarter and miserable any day.

Had a good therapy session today. Wide-ranging. A little too wide ranging, actually, as my therapist brought up politics of all things.

He actually used the term “social justice warrior”. RED FLAG.Oh HELL no. I went from relaxed to “bull right before the gate goes down and lets him at the matador” in less time than it takes to say “Trump sucks”.

And that surprised me a little. I had no idea I was that wound up about stuff. It’s a sign of these politically charged times that I was carrying such a huge charge of anger without even knowing it.

Anyhow, I shut that shit down RIGHT AWAY. I told my therapist we were NOT going to talk about politics, period. He was quite shocked at my reaction. But there was no way I was going to let politics hijack my therapy.

So I told him NO, then when he tried to explain and justify I told him NO on that too. Nuh huh,. Not gonna happen. Not on my watch, pal.

So THAT was unpleasant. But he knows how I feel now, and we were able to get back to the usual therapy without much fuss.

I mean, I know I am a fascinating guy to talk to, but I am not there for that.

He did help me get a better grip on the difference between being real and present with people and when I am merely intellectualizing by sharing my thoughts, theories, ideas, stories, and so on.

He said I am far more charming and engaging when I stay away from that shit. And that makes sense. Intellectualizing is the exact opposite of connecting with people. When I go off on a tangent like that, it’s to distance myself by retreating partly into my own little world of safely intellectual things.

And that is when I lose the average person too. My mind moves too fast and too nimbly for the average person to keep up. So I lose them.

And I don’t want to do that any more. I want to stay real. I want to connect with people who are not like me so I can learn from them.

I want to be close to other humans dammit.

So I am teaching myself to recognize when I am switching into intellectual mode and ask myself if this is the right time and place for that.

I will still be my braniac self with my friends because the prime requirement for being a friend of mine is being able to keep up with me.

But with others, I will be staying real and in the moment as much as possible,. and relying on my winning personality and easy charm to see me through.

And that sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

I will talk to you nice peopl again tomorrow.

Yeah, we’re going to be talking about that tonight. I have my hook stuck in that particular hunk of shrapnel and I am going to haul as long and as hard as I can to get it out.

I am, very clearly, addicted to video games. I play them for the majority of my waking hours. My mind is set to maximize my video game playing time, a habit I picked up when I had my breakdown and was hardcore addicted to Skyrim.

And I suppose, in the background of my mind, on some level I assumed that once I kicked the Skyrim habit, things went back to normal.

But they clearly did not. The games may have changed but the addiction remains the same. I still play video games compulsively and constantly.

And like any good addiction, it has hollowed me out. Addictions by their very nature displace all other forms of pleasure.

My online life used to be far more diversified. I did all kinds of stuff. Hung out on the MUCK, hung out on Facebook, read news websites, you name it.

And I still do those things. But only while I am eating. Meals are the big loophole in the compulsion that I have maintained despite the addiction. It’s nearly impossible to eat and play most video games at the same time, so when I eat, I stop.

And that’s all well and good. In general, while I am eating, the compulsion leaves me alone, and I can do all the fun stuff I used to do.

The drama doesn’t start until I am finished eating.

That’s when the compulsion rears its ugly head and the urge to disconnect from everything and either nap then play games or go straight for the games begins to build.

I grow increasingly uneasy and jumpy. I start to sweat. My agitation level climbs. It’s like a maddening itch of the soul. One that just builds and builds, knowing that when it gets bad enough, you will have no choice but to scratch.

And so from the moment I stop eating, the clock is ticking. It doesn’t matter what I am doing or how much I am enjoying it. Sooner or later. I will have to flee.

That’s a huge change. I have always loved video games and played them frequently in my pre-Skyrim days. That’s not new.

But I would always spend many hours doing other stuff, perfectly content. Video games did not dominate my life like they do now.

If I tried to do the MUCK and Facebook thing for three hours or more today, I would be feeling the compulsion the whole time. I would have the urge to quit and go back to games or napping building the whole time and a voice in my head would be saying “What are you doing? You could be playing video games!”.

And when I finally relented, that voice would still be there, berating me for “wasting” all that precious video game playing time.

The fact that I have way more time for games than I need is irrelevant. Addictions don’t understand the concept of “enough”. The ferocious hunger burning inside me cannot be satiated or even placated.

It’s stuck on “optimize this variable regardless of cost”, like the brooms with the buckets from Disney’s The Magician’s Apprentice in Fantasia.

The freshest example of this is the3 fact that I don’t chat on the MUCK while I blog any more. Blogging used to be another time when I was my old self and not the video game junkie I am today.

But at some point I told myself that chatting while writing was compromising my work and that I wrote better without that “distraction”.

Bull shit. The real reason is that I write faster when I am not also hanging with my fuzzy buddies on the MUCK, and that means I “waste” less video time and hence maximize that goddamned variable all to hell.

All you patient readers know why I am so addicted. While I am playing a video game, my mind is too occupied and engaged for me to be neurotic, self-conscious, or depressed. As long as I am playing a good game, I am safe from all the chemical bullshit going on in my brain.

While I am playing a game, I feel safe, and warm, and protected. The game becomes my own little world where I understand the rules and know what to expect and where nobody else can get to me

Its the exact same thing I used to get out of books and TV when I was a kid. As long as I was actively engaged in media, my world was small and safe and comprehensible. I could let the media product fill my mind and displace all other concerns while I curled up inside a warm coccoon like a fuzzy caterpillar.

Remember, whenever someone is unhealthily absorbed in something, whether it’s video games or sports or even religion, it’s never really about the addiction’s focus, it’s about what indulging said addiction shuts out.

And what it replaces.

The thing is. my addiction wouldn’t matter if I thought I could be content leading the quietly meaningless sort of life I lead now till the day I die.

But I want to get out of this cage of mine and become a real adult human instead of being frozen forever somewhere between childhood and adolesence.

And that is not going to happen with this fucking addiction sucking up all my time. When would I do any of the things I would need to get somewhere in my writing career when all the hours of the day are taken up by this bullshit?

It would be great if I could just quit. But I am too scared to do that. I don’t know how to cope with that any more. There are a lot of lonely hours to fill in a disabled person’s life and the thought of being alone with my thoughts to any extent scares the hell out of me.

Still, maybe I will give it a shot. Challenge myself to go 24 hours sans video games. See what happens in my mind when I don’t have that outlet.

Could be something good.

Might be something bad.

But I think it’s worth finding out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The skinny : I think I am in the process of shifting from thinking of myself as this hopeless tragic wreck of a human being to thinking of myself as a really great amazing person overflowing with goodness who just got lost for a while but who now is ready to start thinking about leaving his cozy coffin and going out in the world.

The fat : me. Ha ha ha.

This new vision of myself will hopefully lead to a new version of myself. All the changes in my life started out as that kind of little germ of an idea.

I can change into almost anything if I dream it first.

And I think I am slowly coming around to being able to think of myself in a positive and optimistic way. To say to myself, “You know. I am a pretty amazing guy, and I know lots of people who would back me up on that. I am a truly unique and appealing person who is highly intelligent, extremely gifted, very articulate, and I make people happy just by being around them. There is nobody who sees me in the way my depression sees me, and I am going to take their word for it that my depression is full of shit. I am a very special. unique, amazing guy and I have nothing to be ashamed of. There is no reason I could not go out there and conquer the world with my gifts when I am ready. I am an asset to society and a joy to those who know me. And it is high time I use all this power I have to make my life better, because I deserve it. ”

“Use that power responsibly!” rasps a shadow in the corner of my mind.

“Oh, I will. ” I reply. “But I am broadening the definition of that until it is something I can actually live with instead of just using it to justify my self-limitation. I know in my heart that a happy, active, engaged me will make the world a better place and if that takes loosening the rules on responsibility, so be it. ”

The end, to a limited extent, justifies the means.

Oh, and this bit is super important : “I am going to let my light shine as hard as it can, and anyone who can’t handle my light is free to leave. Or maybe, if I really like them, I will hand them some sunglasses. But I am no longer willing to let the limitations of others set limitations on me.

I’m amazing. Deal with it.

And that definitely includes not letting other people’s ego issues slow me down. If my excellence makes you feel bad because it makes you feel inferior, that is not my problem in the slightest. You need to deal with that shit yourself. I am going to share my amazingness with the world no matter what, and even more importantly, I am going to enjoy the fuck out of it myself.

I’m not saying I don’t care about your pain. I am just giving myself permission to set limits as to what kinds of pain I should worry about and which are not really my problem because I am doing nothing wrong.

So if the mere fact that I am so amazing bothers you, that’s your problem.

Me, I am going to climb as high as I can and shine the hardest I can and do my best to spread sunshine and happiness wherever I go. ‘

And who could argue with that?

I have enormous positive potential. I have thought of myself as this hideous worthless toxic nightmare for a long long time but it just isn’t true. And nobody else in the world sees me like that. I have a lot to give the world and a lot of ways to prove that I don’t just have worth, I am a million dollars in the bank, baby.

And that remains true no matter how bad I feel. Sometimes my depression is going to make me feel really crappy, and it will be tempting to fall back on the old pattern of thinking I am how I feel, but I am not and will never be.

I have always been a brilliant shining star ready to fill the world with my radiance and warmth. I am full of love and light and happinesss and I want to use it to make the world a better place with all my gifts.

Sure, I was sick for a while, but there is no shame in that. And I am getting better every day. Before too long, I will be ready to be taken off the injured list and get back into the game where I belong.

I am strong. I am pure. I am magnificent. And I am going to light up the world.

I think that’s all the egotizing I can manage tonight. It’s quite draining.

The darkly ironic part of this is the little voice in my head saying “Aww, being awesome is hard! Can’t we go back to hating ourselves? It’s way easier!”.

My plan so far is to imagine myself as being someone who just realized they won the lottery and is going to spend the time simply enjoying being rich without pressuring themselves to do something with the money right away.

So I will just bask in the glow of my own freshly minted ego and do my very best to keep that spark alive and let it thaw out as much of all that frozen crap inside me that it can. I am going to hold on to the truth of my amazingness as hard as I can until my mind finally takes the hint and accepts it. I am going to think highly of myself without the slightest care over who that bothers.

I am one heck of an amazing human being, and it’s high time that I started truly believing it and acting like it.

And if that makes some people think I am a smug prick, so be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still trying to make peace with my awesomeness.

You know the drill. Super intelligent. Ultra talented. Funny as hell. Sweet guy. People like me. Charisma. Presence. I’ve got it all, baby.

And yet, the minute I stop actively thinking them, all those good thoughts slip silently back into the shadows of my mind and I got back to passively hating myself and thinking I am a worthless sack of shit.

And the unspeakable truth of it is that it feels kind of good when they happens. It feelz like a cozy return to a familiar position where the world makes sense to me again and nothing is expected of me.

Anjd that’s the real dirty little pecker of the problem : I can’t hold that thought in my head because it makes me want to do things,and on a deep emotional level, I’m against that.

I don’t want to be. I just am.

It’s that ol’ anti-action bias working against me again. That paralyzing fear of my own adrenaline. Anything that hints at a possible raise in arousal level is brutally suppressed by the fascism inside me that says that all that matters is safety and it is its job to keep me safe, no matter the cost.

And it’s one hell of a cost. It costs pretty much all of my human potential as well as my chances of having a normal life. The kind with a job and a husband and white picket fences and a high probability of cats.

Well it’s not like we are going to start a family.

My depression’s vastly overzealous interpretation of safety is, in reality, a far worse threat to me than most of what could happen to me way out there in the big bad world.

Really wish that wasn’t the preview for the vid.

Anyhow, sure, my ultra stifling life is worse than that big bad world out there, but at least it’s safe. That’s how crazy the depression’s totalitarian thinking is. When safety is the most important thing, safe misery is preferable to dangerous happiness.

There is so much fear inside me that it stretches from horizon to horizon. I can’t see the end of it. And I have lived at the beck and call of that infernal fear for so long that it is hard for me to even imagine it not being there.

I mean, my God, without that fear being in charge, I would have to actually figure out what I want to do with my life instead of being a full-time depressive.

And that can’t possibly be right.

So that’s part of it too. My fear of facing the existential wasteland that is the infinite hallway of infinite doors. Just thinking about trying to figure that shit out chills me to the bone and making me cringe inside like the scared little animal I really am.

There are so many possibilities. How could I possibly choose?

Perhaps the secret is to develop one of my highly specialized and custom tooled patches of apathy. And not the ennui kind, the kamikaze kind, where I decided I just don’t give a fuck what happens to me and leap head first into the dragon’s mouth.

It’s a good trick, although a tad extreme. But it allows me to turn my fear into a kind of maniacal self-confidence that can really get the job done a lot of the time.

It’s been something I have been pondering lately for some reason. This emotional alchemy of mine. You should see how amazingly self-confident I am as Fruvous sometimes. People would think I never had a fear in my life.

But it’s just the opposite. I hesitate on the edge of the action, torn by fear and hesitation that builds and builds until my “fuck it” switch kicks in and I go in the exact opposite direction of the fear.

So as Fruvous. in text-based roleplaying, I will walk right up to a hot male character and sit in their lap, making myself comfy there, and only then looking up and saying high.

Or I will break the ice with some silly joke about the character’s name, or I will sit next to them at the bar and strike up a conversation, bold as brass.

And the key part of the equation is this ability to reach the point where I don’t give a shit any more and leap screaming into the fray.

Of course, that’s within the safety of a very low stimulus text based version of reality where I am free of the burden of having to be myself and can make myself into whatever it is I want to be.

I can make the outside match the inside and it’s as easy as typing.

The real world is much harder to deal with and has all these arbitrary limitations based on how I look and my gender presentation and my sexual orientation and things that have nothing to do with myself as a person, they were assigned to me by fate.

And there is so much more stimulation in the real world. On all levels, not just the intellectual. There is physical stimulation, and social stimulation, and the problem of navigating the environment, and just thinking about it makes me want to crawl back into bed and hide from the world by taking a nap.

I can’t even.

And that’s why I am this riduculously gifted person who does nothing but play video games all god damned day. Depression freezes me in place if I even start thinking about an actual course of action, let alone choosing one.

And until I can escape that frosty prison that I outgrew twenty years ago and squeezes me so tight it’s a wonder I can breathe, that’s how it’s going to stay.

I can’t pretend that is acceptable. Not if I want to escape.

And I do want to escape.

I just want to stay at the same time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Another one already? Didn’t we have one just yesterday? I wasn’t done with that one yet.

Well it’s what I am thinking, anyway.

Feeling fairly shitty. Welcome to morning – the subjective kind – chez moi. I feel dizzy and disoriented and faintly short of breath, and part of me wants to just crawl back into bed and sleep till the world is not so damn hurty.

That might take a real long time, tho.

And the sad truth is that sleeping for a really long time – basically being in a coma – really appeals to the sick part of me. The idea of making it through all that time without having to deal with anything feels like it would be a victory to that part of me.

It would be so darn…. efficient.

After all, my life mission appears to be to make it through each day with a little pain as possible. How better to do that than a coma?

Look at me and my big big dreams.

So that is the bloom of my degeneracy, folks. I have become envious of people in vegetative states. They must be so happy with nothing to deal with.

I’m only partly joking.

I feel so weak lately. Like I can’y deal with anything in any other way than to bury my head in the sand with my video games and endure time rather than enjoy it.

I need to find my fire again. Generate some momentum. Find a really good outlet for all this surrendering sadness inside me.

That’s the sadness that turns, crying, from the world and says “no.” Not defiantly, either. Passively. No rage, no resistance, no sorrow even.

Just a sad little voice saying “No. I can’t. ” as it turns away from the world.

It’s the same voice that said it while I was being raped at the age of four. The voice of the part of me – a very big part – that never came back from that day. That withdrew deep, deep inside my mind to that little island in my sea of sorrows and has lived there in fear and loneliness ever since.

And it’s cold and it’s dark and the sun is a pale grey disc in the sky and the seas are dead except for some wretched sea grasses and the occasion shoal of depressed fish darting through them listlessly.

They don’t have anything better to do either.

And I want to leave this little island. But then again, I don’t. I think I like the idea of being free to walk the mainland with everyone else in the sunshine and warmth and being healthy and strong and good.

But at the same time, the very notion of letting go of my precarious perch fills me with a deep animal terror that borders on total screeching madness. It feels like it would kill me, like without my perch I would shrivel up and die.

After all, it’s all I know of the world. It is my world. My entire universe. How could leaving that behind be anything but death?

And obviously, you can’t leave somewhere and stay there at the same time. It’s a logical impossibility. So it’s a conflict that must be resolved before I can move forward.

Once more, I am asked to just pick an option and stick with it. Either make peace with staying or make plans for leaving. But choose.

It ain’t that easy. Maybe it should be. But it ain’t.

I guess I have come to rest in a position where I take comfort from the idea of leaving and getting on with my life and that comfort is just enough to keep me going as long as I never ever act on it.

So I, like so many others, am stuck living on the idea of something wonderful that I am sure will happen in the future while taking absolutely no action toward that outcome.

And thus, the goal remains the exact same distance away. Like it’s nothing but a decal stuck to my windshield, or a distant horizon.

It’s a toxic dream. I would be better off without it. I should replace it with something concrete and achievable and just try to make some kind of life for myself.

But it’s all I got. And I would die without it.

One way or another.

Besides, in order to make changes you need energy I don’t have. And by energy, what I really mean is motive power. Will. The ability to push against the world instead of just turning away from it again.

And we’re back to the sad little voice that says “no.”. If I knew how to make that voice and the dozens like that happy, maybe I could find my courage and my energy and start building myself up away.

But I don’t know how. Or maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe it’s one of those things that my depressed mind hides behind my head so I can look around all I want and never see it, and tell myself that I must not know it.

Works out about the same either way.

I feel like there is a sea of icy cold tears inside me. A great and terrible sadness that makes me feel helpless and hopeless and lost.

So very, very lost. Lost forever. Lost where I can never be found.

And if someone ever did find me, I would be so damned scared I would run away and hide somewhere new and the whole thing would start over.

Because I want to end my loneliness and yet remain alone and safe on my island at the same time, too.

I am just full of paradoxes today.

I wish I could just calm the fuck down and open my heart to people and be a happy waggy little critter that everyone loves.

That’s what Fruvous is like, and that’s no accident. He’s the ideal me.

But not the real me. That’s somebody else.

I hope I can meet him one day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been pondering my myriad n-dimensional layers of avoidance today.

It’s exausting just to contemplate it. And the worst part of it is that I am not choosing to avoid. It’s instinct, bred to bone in me. Sunk deep into the deepest and most primitive layers of my operating system.

That makes it kind of hard to stop.

But I haven’t been trying very hard lately, I have to admit. Seems like I can’t handle anything these days. Somehow I lost whatever spark I had and most of the time I am just tired and listless and limp.

And I don’t know what to do with that. Should I just indulge it for as long as its lasts, and call that self-care? Or should I fight it with all of my dwindling light and try to reignite my pilot light b sheer force of will?

That sounds hard.

I really feel like I have fallen apart again. And that makes me feel like a failure. And that makes it even harder to get myself moving again.

Depression’s fun like that. Full of clever Catch-22’s.

I want to at least get back to the place I was when I was looking for work on UpWork and ended up with three jobs, none of which panned out larely because they took long enough to get going that my depression came back and took me away from it all.

The other fraction of the equation is complications. Each of the jobs involved a lot more complicated steps than I was used to or expected, and that is the exact kind of thing that kills the fragile motivation of a depressive like me, and once the motivation is gone we slip right back in to that oh so cozy black hole in our soul, and it will be a long time before we can try again.

Sad but true.

RIght now, what is keeping me from getting back on the horse and trying again is shame. I am deeply ashamed of myself for flaking out like that. And even thinking about getting on UpWork again and looking for work makes that shame leap up and scream directly into my face about what a goddamned fucked useless loser I am.

Old tapes played at high volume.

Eventually, I will crawl over the flaming wreckage of who I used to be and give UpWork another shot. Writing about it like this helps a lot.

So many of my problems boil down to some chunk of emotion lodged in the system and clogging everything up until I finally get around to expressing it.

That’s why no matter what else is happening in my life, I always keep digging for cathartic treasure by blogging things out every day.

And I just express my thoughts as they come, more or less. It’s not the sort of thing you can plan. It’s whatever is on my mind when I sit down to write.

I often think of potential topics for blog posts during the day, but I almost never remember them when it comes time to blog and even when I do, the moment is long gone and I don’t feel like writing about that thing any more.

The river has flowed onwards and it is no longer the same river that delivered that first idea to me.

So it is rare that I think of a topic, remember it when the time comes, and still want to write about it.

Well, it’s all part of the process.

Part of me feels like I should apologizes for yesterday’s tearful breakdown blog post.

But I won’t. It needed to happen. I had a good long deep cry while I was writing it and that helped a lot.

And I know that most people who know me were left wondering WTF I was talking about when I talked about being artificial, manufactured, and aloof. Most people who know me think of me as a sweet, smart guy and not the kind of emotionally detached robot I talked about yesterday.

All I can say is that I know what I know, and it isn’t pretty.

I may have hurt people and they don’t even know it. It all happened on a deep subconscious level. If they were conscious of it all,. it was as a vaguely unsettled feleing, like something was wrong but they couldn’t put their finger on what.

If that sounds crazy to you, you do not understand my world.

That’s the thing about the weird mixed signals I emit. Those warm happy positive vibes are so pleasant that it is easy for them to mask whatever else I produce.

And some of what I produce is like…. bad. Toxic. Unhealthy. Unwholesome. My darkness and pain have to leak out somehow or I will go completely insane, and it leaks out in ways that, quite conveniently, can’t be traced back to me by 99.99 percent of human beings on Earth.

It’s like a very funny street show that makes most of its money from pickpocketing from the suckers watching the action on stage.

Except they are pickpockets. More like nastly little gremlins injecting my poisons into others and hiding the corpses out of sight of the madding crowd.

That’s the exact sort of victimizing others with your own pain that I detest. And yet, I don’t think I could possibly stop.

Not without being a lot more healthy, anyhow.

I feel like a venomous reptile that has to bite peole and inject the with my pain and darkness and filth or I will choke on it myself/.

But I don’t want to get caught, so I hide it in my act. People walk away from the show entirely unaware that I was anything but wonderful to them.

But I know. And it’s a source of deep and terrible shame.

I have a lot of those.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve always wanted one.

But honestly, I have always had one.

In my mind.

And I do everything from there. It’s the place I went to when I was being raped and telling myself, “this isn’t real, this isn’t happening”.and I have never come back. I live there as I am typing this sentence, and I don’t see much hope for rescue any time soon.

And it makes me very hard to reach. I see that now.

It would be different if I were an overtly antisocial person. They do the world a favor by making it very clear that they are not emotionally accessible nor are they inclined to cozy up to you, so back the fuck off.

I am not saying that is a wonderful kind of person to be, but at least people know exactly where they stand with that particular sort.

But not with me. I’m friendly, kind, sweet, sensitive, and a good listener. I can get quite close to people and do a very convincing job of pretending like I am wide open.

But I am not. Nobody really gets in. I can’t actually be reached.

Like I have said before….

This subject came up because my roomie wanted me to watch something with him, and when he told me about it, I brushed it off.

And I feel terrible about it, especially because he keeps digging up things he thinks I will want to watch with him and I never actually do it.

I am so sorry, Julian. I know we used to watch stuff together during mealtimes all the time, and then I had my big emotional collapse and started eating in my room, and I have never recovered from that.

And I know that is bad, and that it must be so hard for you to just keep trying like you do, and I wish I could take it all back.

I just want you to know that it was never anything about you. You are a wonderful person and an amazing friend to have kept it up for all these years. I’m sorry I frozen you out, I am sorry if that ever made you sad, and I wish from the bottom of my heart that I could go back in time and say yes every single time.

I love you very much, Julian Castle, and wish I could have been a better friend.

The whole thing reminds of this. Warning, one of the saddest songs ever.

Again, it was never anything about you, Julian. It was the depression. I fell into a deep dark hole that destroyed everything I had of value and made me unable to function like I used to do, and while I have made a lot of progress since then, I still have a long way to go, and that;s hard on everyone who knows me.

I seem so friendly but it’s all a lie.

I miss our times together, Julian,. I really do. We watched a lot of good stuff together and I miss sharing things like that with you.

And it was very good for me. You need to know that. It took me off my own little island and let me be social in a way I could handle, and that human contact meant the world to me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

And I knew – as a rock solid fact – that starting to take my meals in my room, in front of this goddamned computer, was a terrible idea. I could feel the emotional bonds being ripped away as I did it.

But I did it anyway. The Skyrim Hole demanded it. I had a powerful new addiction and like all addictions it made me do terrible things.

Skyrim is gone. But I am still as addicted to video games as I was back then. And I can’t seem to stop myself from structuring my life to maximize video game playtime.

The names have changed but the addiction remains the same.

So when you bring something to me that you would like to watch with me and maybe entice me back into our old routine, Julian, the brutal truth is that it’s my addiction that says to me “Nope, that would cut video game time” and slams the steel doors shut.

Again, I am so sorry that I have hurt and disappointed you like that so many times.

And that goes for anyone else reading this whom I have hurt by seeming aloof, detached, uncaring, uninterested, or rejecting. It was never about you, and it is killing me to know that I most likely hurt a lot of people who know me and care about my without even realizing it.

I am so sorry, people. I love you all. Don’t let my depression tell you otherwise. There may be times when I just can’t say yes to something, and I don’t blame people at all for giving up trying to engage me.

But please please know that it was never about you and I wanted to say yes so many times but my illness would not let me.

God, I have been such a dick to so many people. And in such a fucked up confusing way, too, with all the mixed signals and false openness and simulated connections.

I’d rather be
The person I pretend to be
He lacks the real me’s
Toxicity
So I pretend really hard
That he is me
Play that role
Continuously
Forget that he’s
A facsimile
Suppress my own
Identity
But now I see
That he is not me
He never was, and never will be

So where does that leave me?

Michael bertrand, 2019

So I hereby offer my deepest and most authentic apologies to any and all who have felt hurt, confused, rejected, unsettled, or otherwise bad because of this strange game of friendly evasion I have been playing all these years.

I honestly didn’t know until now.

And now I have no freaking idea who I am. I have manufactured so much of myself that I wouldn’t know the real me if it bit me on the ass.

And that’s a hell of a place to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow