As opposed to who I really am.

The subject came up in therapy today. I was talking about how frustrated I get sometimes and that led to talking about how, compared to me, most people are idiots.

Not you, of course, gentle reader. You know. Others.

That not the kind of thing I would bring up to anyone but somehow who I trust implicitly to see things I say in the best possible light, of course.

And after I had said it, I felt embarrassed. Such smug elitism!

I detest elitism and felt the need to establish my egalitarian bona fides at that point, so I told my therapist about the time when a well-meaning teacher saw how bored I was in class and gave me a pamplet for Mensa.

I read it. And I hated it.

It was dripping with that selfsame smug elitism and that made me react to it with uttery disgust. It made me want to puke, to be honest. I can still remember the visceral digust I felt after reading it.

I have him the pamphlet back and told him I was not interesting. Thankfully, he read the expression on my face and did not ask why.

I finished the anecdote and then added something about how I don’t like feeling like other people are idiots – like I am a grownup in a world of children – because I wanted to be an egalitarian.

Then my therapist asked, “But what if that egalitarianism is not the real you?”

And that made me realize that a whole lot of what I think of as me is what I think I should be according to my own ethics and judgment. I have contructed myself out of my ideals and paved over who I really am to achieve it.

But you are who you are. Even the parts of you that you do not like.

Like, say, the part that now and then wants to scream,. “You’re all a bunch of idiots and I am taking over!” into the sky.

This is how dictators get started, I am sure. I’m conquering you idiots for your own good!

What this all boils down to is that I don’t know who I really am. It’s a heck of a thing to realize that a lot of your sense of self is not you.

It’s a reflection of you. It’s something you made according to your own ideals. As prosthetic parts go, it is sturdy and reliable.

But it’s not really you.

I can’t help but link this with my emotional malnourishment and spiritual underdevelopment. Without a social connection to rely on, I had to provide my own social stimulation towards growth and I was not very good at it.

Things people learning from experience I figured out on my own, in this big egg of a head I have. Most of those things never got put to the test because I was far too isolated from the world to have to make moral decisions very often, and I had very little responsibility to shoulder as well.

So a whole lot of me is, as it were, hypothetical.

I knew that part of my current karmic mission was to figure out who I really was and build something like a functional identity for myself.

But until today. I didn’t realize I would have to cut away a lot of false ideas about myself in the process.

Written down, it seems super obvious. Of course I would have to replace these false beliefs about myself with the real deal. And that was always going to be a major surgery that required a lot more than just fixing the obvious bits of self-loathing self-talk.

But we are talking about the unformed and inarticule world of emotion now, and that plays by different rules. Rules I don’t understand.

But I can feel them.

Anyhow, so now I know that there is very hard emotional work ahead of me. I have always found it easier to create than to destroy, and that means I am ill suited to the task of chiseling away the BS in order to reveal the splender of the real me.

That generally requires someone a lot harder than me.

But it’s got to be done. Now that I know this falseness exists, there is no way I can tolerate it. I have to free my true self from its false encumberances.

In fact, I better be careful not to think about it too much because I might end up giving myself a case of the heebie jeebies on an existential level.

I don’t know if I could survive an attack of claustrophobia of the soul.

The image in my mind now is of myself as some sort of anime giant robot, and the kids inside me just found the button that puts me in “cleaning” mode, where all my exterior surfaces heat up with shiny blue-white energy and burn away all the garbage that got stuck to my chassis over the years.

That sounds a lot better that self-surgery, to be honest. Way cleaner, too.

I somehow doubt it will be that easy, however, because the stuff that has to go is not just debris stuck to the outside of my robot. It’s the very nuts and bolts that it’s made of. And you can’t fix THAT with a quick and cleansing heat-up.

I feel like this is all wandering vaguely in the direction of an anime script. Something superficially superficial but actually deeply metaphorical, like Neon Genesis Evangelion or Ghost In The Shell.

But nah. I am not into that stuff enough to write it. I would have to get a very specific inspiration for a story that could not be told any other way.

Dragging myself bodily back to the point, I don’t see any alternative to doing some serious hardcore soul searching in order to find out who I really am.

And the first step will be the hardest : learning to tell what is really me versus the stuff I filled in based on what I believe.

In thery, there could be a lot of me that has to go so that something real and true and healthy can take its place.

And that’s not an easy thing to face.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Depression’s been pretty bad today.

Which fits with the trend. It’s been pretty bad lately. That ghost I have been talking about that I keep almost running into is closer than ever and I lack the strength of will to turn and face it and get this shit over with already.

Actually, to be fair to myself (for a change), it’s not just strength of will that is missing. I have been doding and hiding from this goddamned for my whole life and the instinct to do so is so finely honed and well developed that I do it without thinking.

So in order to open myself up to the thing. I will have to catch myself in the act of suppressing and dodging it and deliberately refrain from doing it.

Maybe during therapy tomorrow. Who knows.

The good news is that I am starting to fight back. Today, when I had an attack of fear and rage and pain and the sort of emotions that make me think “I hate my life” (never a good sign), I found the strength to mentally roar back, “THEN CHANGE IT. ”

Nothing actually changed, of course, but it’s an excellent start.

The logical case is so simple and obvious that it’s practically a tautology. If I don’t like my current life, I should do things to make it more to my liking. Ipso facto QED.

But of course, with depression, nothing is ever that simple. I currently lack the faith to think I actually can change my life for the better. I feel so weak and feeble and helpless and small. When I try to think of ways to make my life better, I just come upon the same tired old cognititve roadblocks that tell me all possible solutions are too expensive, too scary, too hard, or just plain too much.

It’s all right here on this list I got off Facebook.

I love that list because it is something I have been meaning to write myself and now I don’t have to do it.

And I am sure that I have discussed every one of them in this space at least once, both in myself and in others. I can see my logical errors quite clearly from time to time, and believe me, that helps a lot more than you would think.

The cognitive approach does work for some of us. It’s not a solution by itself, but it can really help with the rest of the work.

But the fatal flaw in the cognitive approach that makes it need other appoaches to supplement it is that it is so cerebral that one can easily fool oneself into thinking you are making progress when emotionally, nothing has changed.

It’s one thing to identify the lie. It’s quite another thing to believe the truth. Sometimes all the cognitive approach does is bring you face to face with your own insanity because now you know your perceptions and beliefs are wrong yet you can’t change them.

That’s because we humans, for all our logical prowess, are fundamentally emotional beings and it is far easier for our emotions to change what we think than it is for our thoughts to change how we feel.

And I am very much including myself in that statement. I might act like I am some kind of hotshot robot, all cool and detached and analytical and able to see ever so much more than others because of it, but I am just as guilty of defaulting to what my emotions say as any Trump loving redneck.

So I might well make an airtight logical case for why I should love myself and be kind to myself and forgive myself for being alive, but unless the emotional work to change how I feel about myself is done, I will default to my usual self-loathing the moment I stop concentrating on the change.

Turns out the Antidepression Fairy only exists if you believe in her. Go fig.

Hence my never ending quest to express my emotions. It’s all those frozen emotions that keep my internal emotional temperature at subhibernation levels and make it so hard for any warmth or light from the world to reach me.

So I dig and I explore and I unearth various strata of frozen emotions and let them melt in the sun and sometimes it feels good but most of the time it’s painful as hell, like trying to pass an icicle through my navel.

Right now, I have an intensely cold feeling in the core of my torso, centered around the middle of my chest and a cold clammy congested feeling around my heart. It feels like my organs have been removed and packed in ice for transport to a transplant. I feel like if I burped, it would come out as cold as a blast of freon.

That’s what it feels like when I am melting those frozen emotions. I feel all frostbitten and raw inside, and no part of this process feels good.

But it has to be done. And I know that later, once I have thawed out some myself, I will feel better for having rid myself of a portion of the emotional backlog that is the root cause of my mental illness.

I will probably feel the exact same way during therapy tomorrow, if the session is any good. Luckily I have a vast reserve of sheer bloody minded determination to keep me going in this process despite the pain and the cold and the indigestion.

It’s dirty, painful, thankless work but all of my progress in overcoming my mental ilness has come from it.

All the words and the logic and the poetry is there only to facilitate the process in lieu of any kind of religious or mystical tradition to offer me shortcuts.

It’s hard to gain transformation from revelation when the revelation has to make sense.

So I have to do things the hard way, through words. It’s not the easiest or most direct path, but it’s all that I have.

Thank you so much for making that possible.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve never really known what to do with my emotions.

I certainly don’t express them. Not most of them. I can see now that for most of my life, i have treated my emotions like they are the weird mutant kid a rich family keeps locked in the basement out of shame and when he starts banging on the pipes and raising a fuss, everyone just freezes in place and waits for him to tired himself out.

Then again, that’s kind of how life has treated me.

So it fits.

Well, Cousin Wally, the door is open and you are welcome to come and sit with us at the dinner table and be a part of the family again. We don’t care if you are ugly or gross or have bad table manners. We love you and accept you for what you are, and want you to know you have nothing to be ashamed of. It is us who are shamed for how we have treated you. Know, then, that this is your house just as much as it is ours, and from now on, you are just as much a part of our family as anyone else.

Come eat with us. It’ll be fun. We have dip.

Wow, I am tearing up at what I just wrote. I think I have needed to tell that to myself for a very long time. And I am glad I finally did.

I have felt like the ugly shameful misfit for a long ass time. The Thing Most Horrible, the involuntary nightmere, the shame that lives beneath the stairs.

But I have nothing to be ashamed of. Any ugliness I might have accumulated is the result of mental illness and/or how I have been treated. None of it says anything about who I am as a person and I don’t have to “own” any of it.

It’s not me. It’s just something that happened to me. Like ending up in the hospital with pneumonia. It was just bad luck.

Same with getting raped at the age of four. That’s just something that happened to me. It’s a very BAD thing to happen to someone but it doesn’t mean I am something gross or shameful or diseased.

It just means I have problems, like everyone else.

And the horrible shambling Lovecraftian horror I imagine myself to be is not the person the world sees. They just see a fairly average looking beardy fat dude. There are a lot of guys who look more or less like me out there.

We’re a popular model of dude.

Sure, my appearance is a tad slovenly. But not extraordinarily so. Some people are messy and some people are tidy and I am a messy guy.

It comes from being so intellectual and cerebral. All of my mental resources are tied up in thinking the big deep thoughts. There’s little left over for personal grooming.

And I am not saying that’s not an issue. But it’s nowhere near as big a problem as I imagine it to be.

One of the main drivers of my social anxiety, I now see, is this feeling that I am just plain not fit to be around people. Like I am some kind of horrible beast that should never be looked upon by decent folk.

So in the bad old days when my problem was far, far worse, I could not go out in public without an intense feeling of danger creeping up on me pretty fast. it really felt like at any second, someone was going to point at me and scream that I was not of the body and then everyone would be shouting at me about what a horrible person I was and how dare I make people sick by subjecting them to the sight of me and how I should be ashamed to ever be seen in the light of day.

Oh trust me, I was. I still am, to be honest.

But I am working on it. And I have come a long long way. On good days, I can remember that I am a hugely talented creative genius.

Sometimes I can even do it without wincing!

The wincing comes from the depressed part of my mind turning even that kind of good news into something negative by treating it as just another loud annoying voice in my head screaming at me to do things and making me feel bad for not doing them.

So let me get out ahead of this thing I hereby state that it is perfectly fine if I never end up using my considerable gifts to make any kind of splash in the world. They are an opportunity, not and obligation, and I am free to use or ignore them as I see fit without guilt, shame, or feeling like a failure.

They are my abilities, god damn it, and I will use them as I see fit.

Treating them as a source for things I should be doing just makes them part of the enormous mass of things I ignore and actively avoid thinking about by deep diving into my distractions to escape them.

Somehow, I am going to learn how to switch from depressive mode to happy mode at will. In happy mode, I can embrace the world and enjoy it, and look forward to the hours of the day instead of dreading having to fill all that empty time.

And happy mode is a real thing. I have experienced it. Not for very long, sadly, but for long enough to recognize it as a real possibility for me.

It’s the real me shining through all of depression’s oppressive smog. This self-loathing bullshit isn’t the real me, it’s just a symptom of a mental illness I had forced on me .

The real me is happy, funny, cocky, daring, and full of laughter and love. He is relaxed and confident and determined to get the most out of life. He is charming and sweet and leaves a trail of big smiles behind him wherever he goes.

And he isn’t ashamed to just be himself.

Because that’s a perfectly wonderful thing to be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been feeling really homesick lately.

I miss the land of my birth. I miss Prince Edward Island. And not just in the sense of missing my family. I miss the place itself too.

The only thing weirder than saying that is how long it took till I was able to say it. I think that, on a deep and wholly irrational level, I felt like if I admitted to missing the actual place, it would somehow reach out and haul me back.

If you aren’t from a small town. that might sound like total insanity to you, especially considering that my own home town is more or less the entire breadth of the contient away. How could it possibly pull me back in?

Comedian Jake Johanssen caught the flavour of it when he said that he did leave his home town till he was 26 years old because it “took him that long to figure out that he was free to leave. ”

I laughed like hell at that joke because I know exactly what he means. But again, if you didn’t grow up in a small town, that joke doesn’t even make sense.

The key to the whole thing is that every small town is its own world unto itself in the minds of its inhabitants. The town limits are the walls of their world.

And the amazing thing is that this is equally true for a village of 150 people as it is for a town of 10K people like the one I grew up in.

In fact, I would love to know where the psychosocial point of transition is between small town and city. Sure, it’s easy for geographers to slap some arbitrary population number on it but I am talking about the population point where the people go from a small town mentality to a metropolitan mentality.

From my own personal experience, I would say that one major factor that changes a town into a city is when it escapes the “one of everything” business model.

When I was a kid, there was one of everything : one movie theater, one mall, one hardware store, one McDonald’s, one KFC, one department store, one dry cleaners, one old folk’s home, and so forth and so on.

And there is definitely a certain wholesome coziness about such an arrangement. Everyone has the same frame of reference and you get to know the people who work in and/or own each business in your community.

There is also a tidy orderliness about it. It is very much a “a place for everything and everything in its place” kind of feeling.

But it isn’t exactly capitalism.

Capitalism requires competition and my town didn’t have any. If you didn’t like the price of the chainsaw parts at Canadian Tire, too bad, because nobody else sold them. Not happy with the service at the dry cleaner? Wash it yourself then.

Most of the business owners most of the time did not take excess advantage of this because while they did not have to compete on price with anyway, they were still part of the community and had to face all their fellow citizens when they did their shopping at all the other small businesses.

And then again at church.

But some places knew they were the only place around to get things, and acted like it.

I am looking at you, Holman’s Department Store!

But all this began the change when the burg got big enough to support multiple businesses in the same Yellow Pages category.

Arguably, things got a lot less personal, but they also got a whole lot more efficient and they really appreciated your business.

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh right, homesickness. Once more I have started out with tender personal emotions then taken the first offramp to theosophizin’.

I have been feeling homesick for my home town and its culture, and in my experience, there is no form of homesick more potent than being homesick for food.

No matter how cosmopolitan you become, the food you grew up on will always hold a special place in your heart. That will always be the food that the animal part of your brain will recognize as officially FOOD, especially if it’s food your mother or father fed you because all animals learn what things are food from their parents.

So I really miss stuff my mother used to make. Like our family’s unusual interpretation of sloppy joe’s, which was more of a tomato stew than anything else, but which still tasted damned good every Saturday night with mashed potatoes and corn.

I tended to combine all three as I ate them, much to the horror of my sister Catherine who sat opposite me at the dinner table.

I also miss our Sunday meals of roast beef, green beans, and rice. I have fond childhood memories of eating that meal then watching the Muppets and the Carol Burnett Show then going to bed.

But what I miss most, of course, is the Acadian food. That’s the sort of thing that really says home because you can’t get it anywhere else.

So I miss the rapure , the pote’, and especially the chicken fricot.

Chicken fricot is a very rich, hearty, and nourishing chicken stew that I could not love more if I married it. I love it so much that it’s what I think of when I heart the phrase “chicken soup for the soul”, because to me, that’s soul food.

And it’s certainly nothing I can get here. I have checked and it’s not available for love or money online. I can’t just order a case of Campbell’s Chicken Fricot or anything.

So I had to make due at Denny’s last night with chicken soup as an appetizer and getting chicken gravy to go with the chicken sandwich I ordered.

If you combined the richness and goodness of all those three things, you would have some idea of how good chicken fricot is.

And if I want some, I guess I will have to make it myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been really feeling the badness today.

I keep getting these brief but intense attacks of rage, frustration, fear, and self-loathing. My internal surge protectors deal with it in a heartbeat but it’s still harrowing.

And it really feels like my mind is trying to do something. Something important. It’s like my brain is trying to throw up but my vastly overdeveloped emotional suppression circuit keeps shoving everything back down again.

So I am thinking that I should just let whatever it is happen. My mind knows what it needs to do in order to heal, and I should probably get out of its way and let it do what it needs to do, even if that means experiencing a lot of negative emotions.

If you keep suppressing your negative emotions – you know, the ones that aren’t fun to feel – sooner or later, they are going to kill you.

They are going to accumulate in your bloodstream like heavy metal poisoning and things will get worse and worse until one day you have a massive toxic shock reaction and lose your freaking mind.

You end up feeling bad all the time, and all because you won’t endure the bad feelings that you are suppressing. People like me end up total emotional cripples because we picked up the emotional procrastination bug and now don’t even realize just how much of a tab we’ve run up.

And in those rare moments when we do realize it, all we do is suppress those motions even harder because they scare us shitless. It seems so massive that to open the floodgates even a little would totally obliterate us.

So it can seem like a total impasse. A problem that will only get worse if you don’t deal with it, but dealing with it would destroy you.

And it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s not that bad for as long as it takes to go back to ignoring the whole thing and burying yourself in your maladaptive coping mechanism once more and returning to your life of misery and denial.

That’s where I would be if I didn’t have therapy and this blog. Hell, that’s where I was before therapy and this blog. I spent twenty years of my life in that terrible pattern.

So if this sounds like your life, dear reader, please please consider doing whatever it takes to break the pattern. Find some way to let those emotions out. It is the only means of salvation until we invent a way to delete our suppressed emotions from our minds with drugs.

Actually, that’s a pretty interesting science fiction concept. And it is not that far fetched. These suppressed emotions must be stored in our minds and in our bloodstreams. In theory, a drug could destroy them.

But my guess would be that if you did that, the patient would rapidly go completely insane. These emotions are part of our psyches, after all, and not just excess fat we can safely liposuction away. If they simply disappeared, odds are that the patient’s mind would simply unravel, and they would end up in a vegetative state – if they are lucky.

The operation would have to be far more than a simple find and delete. We would need a picture of the entirety of the patient’s psyche. Only then could we consider removing the troublesome emotions with all the skill and care of one of those expert demolition jobs where they building falls in on itself.

Still, it might make for a decent science fiction story. Probably a mystery.

Anyhow, my point was and is that you need to let those emotions out. And that meas feeling them. There is no escaping that. You need to stop suppressing them, which I know can feel like utter madness because you have been ducking, dodging, and fleeing these emotions for so long that it seems normal and natural.

But it isn’t. Normal and natural people feel things. Pain, sorrow, frustration,, anger, and all the rest. They feeling them as they come and even (shock!) act on them in order to maintain their healthy emotional state regardless of what logic and reason dictate.

That’s one of the hardest things for me to come to grips with – the prospect of having to do things that are illogical or unwise by the standards of my icy isolating intellect in order to serve emotional needs that I cannot justify rationally.

The prospect of doing things without knowing why other than knowing it’s what my emotions are telling me to do chills me to the core and makes me feel like I am going insane. How can it be right to do things for purely emotional reasons that I could neither explain nor justify to another human being?

Luckily, I am fundamentally a pragmatist and that means I have to go with whatever works. If my goal is greater mental health, then I have to do what I feel to be whatever it takes to achieve that goal, even if that means occasionally abandoning the very sort of rational reasoning that led me to that conclusion.

It would be so much easier to do all this if I went someplace new so I could remake myself. With nobody around who knew the current me, I could be as emotional and irrational as I needed to be and in the process, I would find out who I really am.

If I tried that in my present life, it would end up hurting and confusing a lot of people I care deeply for and that is just plain not acceptable to me at this time.

Were I a classic individualist hero, I would do whatever is best for me and to hell with the consequences for others.

This is the new me and you will just have to deal with it!

But I can’t be that irresponsible. Not even for self-actualization and my mental health.

So I will continue to do it the hard way, one day at a time, little by little.

Oh well, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And by this shit, I mean being sleepy all goddamned day.

It was bad enough when I would not really be awake until 3 pm. But now it took until 6 pm, and I am still kind of sleepy even after sleeping all day AND drinking a liter of Diet Coke with my dinner.

Don’t even get me started on why I don’t seem to be able to get the same alertness boost from caffiene that everyone else gets.

I feel like it must be related to why sleeping pills don’t work the same way for me that they do for everyone else. Nothing I have taken actually helps me get to sleep.

It just helps me stay asleep. Which would be good if it did so at a reasonable level, but no, it has to keep me sleepy for half the freaking day.

So you can bet your buttons that I am not taking either of my sleeping pills tonight. Fuck THAT noise. I can’t afford to not be awake till 6 pm tomorrow because that would give me less than an hour to get my blogging done before I go out to Denny’s with La Gang.

Ergo, I will aschew the medication and go to bed at a reasonable hour and hope for the best. Maybe I will get enough sleep. Maybe not.

But those very recent times when I could barely stay asleep for an hour and a half at a time and the depths of my consciousness were filled with glittering psychosis are starting to look pretty good to me right now.

At least I was awake and enjoying life instead of sleeping the sleep of the dead half the day back then.

I wish I could be mellow about the whole thing. I would love to be able to take this whole thing philosophically. I dream of being able to just shrug my shoulders and says “Well, that;s how she goes, eh? ” and just enjoy the sleep and take comfort for it.

But I want to live, god damn it. I want to live and breathe and think and enjoy and weep and cry and gnash my teeth and do all the other things that vital, alive, present people do without even knowing that the peace of the grave is a thing.

I mean, fuck this shit. I’ll be mellow when I am dead.

So it is going to continue to piss me off solid when I end up in this state for the foreseeable future. I hate all this goddamned sleep and deeply resent the amount of my life it takes up and all the minutes of the day I am missing.

What can I say, I am an ornery cuss deep down and sitting still has never been particularly fun foir me, and I would rather be in pain than asleep.

So suck all this goddamned sleepiness. One way or another I am going to get my life back, even if I have to drag my ass out of bed and force myself to stay up to do it.

And that is super stressful for me to do.

OK, now that I have gotten my rant on. let’s talk about causes.

One might well be the fact that I ran out of antihistamines recently. That might not seem to be related but hear me out.

See, my antihistamine is also the medicine that prevent sinus congestion from my allergies. Without out it, I get nasal congestion, and that restricts my airways even more than my sleep apnea does, and that, in turn, can make my sleep apnea worse, which would lead to my needing way more sleep in order to get the necessary REM time in.

Complicated, isn’t it?

I have also quite recently upped my Paxil dose. I have gone from 40 mg a day to 50 a day. I am not noticing a huge difference but it has only been a week and change since I started taking the higher dose and these things take time.

And while hypersomnia is not a known side effect of Paxil, anything that messes with my fragile brain chemistry has to be considered a suspect.

Which leads me to my final suspect, plain ol depression. I have been more depressed and nihilistric lately and while subjectively it seems more likely that the sleepiness is causing the depression and not the other way around, I could be wrong about that.

Whatever the cause, I am frigging sick of it. I have my antihistimine now, so I can at least test that theory. The bump in Paxil dose will be much harder to rule out (or in) as a contributing factor, and my depression is such a multivarible turbulence-level complexity type phenomenon that any serious logical analysis out it can’t help but turn into such a twisted ouroburous of causation versus effect questions that it beggars the mind.

Even a mind like mine.

And who knows, maybe it’s all due to some unimaginable confounding variable completely unrelated to any of the factors I just listed.

All I know is that it has to stop. And I am incresingly willing to do whatever it takes to get some decent, healthy, relaxing, non-punishing sleep.

Maybe even leaving the apartment and going for a bit of a walk to get some god damned fresh air into my lungs to displace the miasma of my tiny filthy room.

That would be huge for me. Leaving the apartment and going outside by myself without any particular task or goal in mind would be unprecedented. I have enough trouble pulling myself enough to go outside with my friends to a place I already know with the distinct goal of food and pleasant company in mind.

But the fact that it is so crazy a thing for me to do actually makes me a lot more likely to do it because I love doing crazy things.

That’s how I ended up writing a million words in 11 months, after all.

Maybe I should do it again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still no sign of the mouse that was supposed to be here by 9 pm last night. As of this moment, it is 17 hours and 45 minutes late.

Quelle shoc. I knew there was no chance it would arrived after 5 pm, and I had my doubts on it arriving today too. My Spidey-sense was tingling and telling me that this is one of those times when the thing that was supposed to be simple, easy, and awesome would turn out to be complicated, difficult, and frustrating.

Luckily. Julian lets me use his mouse when he is not sing it, so I am not totally stuck in a Mouse Keys wasteland. He’s off doing his dog sitting work, so I have the luxury of using his ancient Lenovo mouse for the time being.

Son of a bitch.

I just logged into my Amazon account to track the package and not only does it say that they attempted delivery yesterday at 1:59 pm (if so, we did not hear of it and they didn’t not leave a slip) but the website actually has the gall to tell me it is now “delivered and available for pickup. ”

Well which is it, motherfuckers? Because it can’t be both!

I suppose what they mean is that it was delivered TO the place where I am going to have to go to pick it up, but that’s not what I paid the extra eight bucks for.

I paid to have it delivered to me, in person, where I am right now. Or at the very least to my frigging building. And if they couldn’t get a hold of us because the buzzer doesn’t work properly, they should have left a slip like they did with Joe’s package.

Maybe they didn’t leave a slip because there was already a slip there? Whatever.

So now I have to call Joe and get him to take me out there to Jericho Road in/on Sea Island again, this time showing up without a slip and hoping my ID is enough to get my frigging package finally.

But what really pisses me off is that my package was already there when we went there yesterday. If I had just thought of going in with J&J and asking if they had anything for me, I would have had my mouse already.

But no, that only occurred to me on the way home, and by that time I was in no fit mood to ask Joe to go BACK.

I’m in no fit mood to ask him today, either, but it’s that or ask him to take me tomorrow and that appeals even less.

So now I have to call him at work again and ask him to drive me out there. again.

I think I will give him the option of taking me tomorrow and see which he prefers. Because to be brutally honest, I really do not feel like going out there right now.

Because on top of all this mouse poop, sleep is really kicking my ass today and despite having had seven or eight hours of slepe already, I am still quite sleepy.

And fitting a trip out there AND the other half of my blogging for today into the time between now and going out to dinner with Le Gang seems like way too much for me at this moment, and all I really want to do is nap.

Le sigh. I will muddle through somehow, I am sure.

Time to call Joe.

We’re doing it today. Wow, I think that’s the smallest amount of time that seperator line has ever represented.

I will plug away as hard as I can to get as much blogging done before he arrives as I can. So much for my nap. I will have to squeeze it in between the time we get back from motherfucking Purolator and the time we go out to eat.

I might have to ask for a delay in our depature for feeding in order to accomodate my advanced sleep needs.

And god damn it am I sick of that shit.

It’s like I only have two options : I can either not take a sleeping pill and end up slightly psycho from not enough deep REM sleep, or take a pill and end up with way too much sleep. There is no comfortable compromise.

And I am a comfortable compromise kind of guy. I am always happiest in the middle.

At least I finally got my shit together and got my Metformin and Glyburide game going again. For a long time, I was running out but kept putting off doing anything about it because it would involve having to go see my GP and that’s like…. hard.

So instead I was taking them only once a day, with lunch,. and shipping the dinner dose entirely. This was objectively stupid, but depression makes even intellectual titans like me quite stupid sometimes.

Stupid is, after all, as stupid does.

So instead of dealing with making an appointment and then going to see my GP, I instead volunteered to be tortured 24/7 by the Demon Hunger that makes life so damned difficult when it is around.

It makes me so hungry that I can eat an entire pot roast dinner and STILL be hungry.

I shudder to imagine how much food it would take to actually sate me when I am in that sate. Let along whether I would survive the meal.

Luckily, I know better than to binge. Especially when I know I have had a perfectly adequate amount of food – the same amount that sates me fine when I am healthy.

Thank goodness I have my drugs now and I am getting back to that healthy place where I can have something like a normal hunger/feeding cycle.

Still, it’s fucked up that I let it get this far. Let us once more take up the old refrain : I am not fit to look after myself and could really use some help keeping it together.

But that help does not exist.

So I’m fucked.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a little time between now and having to get into the shower in preparation for going to Paragon tonight, so I figured I would get some blogging done.

So, last night, in the wee hours of the morning, my backup mouse died. At first, I thought just the battery had died, but then I tried a bunch of different AA batteries in it and it was still deader than disco, so, RIP, mon petit souris.

No big deal. This is the modern era, so I just hopped onto Amazon.ca and ordered a new one. Nothing fancy, just your basic $10 three button USB CORDED mouse.

Because seriously. Fuck wireless mice. I was excited when I got my first one and the feeling of freedom was intoxicating, but that faded fast and then it was just a mouse that might die on me any second.

So to heck with that. Wires work. The only way I would buy a wireless mouse now is if it was USB chargeable. And if I am going to be plugging it in to charge it,. I might as well just leave it plugged in, and at that point I might as well have gotten a wired mouse.

So I ordered the mouse and I threw in an extra eight bucks to have it delivered today.That’s right, today.

Ain’t modern technology wonderful?

Amazon.ca promises that they will have the thing in my hot little hands by 9 pm tonight. Well, they have a little under 3.5 hours left.

I have my doubts. It wasn’t here by 5 pm and seriously, what are the odds that they are going to send someone after normal business hours to get it to me?

Well if I don’t get it on time, I want my eight bucks back. Especially if it turns out I won’t get it until Monday (grrrrr!!) because that’s when I would have got it by standard Amazon Prime shipping.

And at that point, I might as well have just gone to Best Buy and bought myself the mouse in person. The whole reason I bought it on Amazon.ca is that I wanted it ASAP without having to leave the apartment (agoraphobia!).

So if they give me some bullshit about not being able to get it to me till Monday. I feel perfectly comfortable in telling them to cancel the order entirely.

I will take the bus to Best Buy or whatever and buy the thing in person.

Or get Joe to give me a drive, if he’s willing.

Speaking of Joe, I just went on a tiny adventure with him. See, there WAS a slip from Purolator (those fuckers) on our mailbox when I checked at around 3 pm, and naturally I assumed that this was my package.

So I arranged with Joe for him to drive me way out to Jericho Road (no Joshuas or brass instruments allowed) which is way out in a neighborhood called Sea Island (wow, what a distinct name for an island!) and is the main current reason I hate Purolator.

I swear these places don’t even try to deliver packages any more. Why would they, when they can get their customers to come get it themselves? Being a delivery driver for them now consists solely of writing those little sticky slips and slapping them wherever it takes the least work.

Pretty soon, they will skip the delivery people entirely and just mail you the slip.

Luckily, Joe was already planning to pick up Julian at local nerd mecca Imperial Hobbies, and that is also in and/or on Sea Island, so it was not that big a deal for him to pick me up along the way and stop at Purolator.

Then why, you may ask, am I still sans souris? Because it turned out the package was for Joe, not me.

I had wondered why his name was on the slip and not mine, and had hoped that it was because of some kind of administrative screwup and not that it was actually FOR him.

Oh well. I had a nice little drive, chatted with Joe. and no harm was done. If I had stayed home, all I would have been done is rot my brain playing the one video game I can still play using MouseKeys anyway, so nothing of value was lost.

MouseKeys, as the name tells you, is a function of Windows 10 that lets you control the mouse pointer with the numerical keypad. It’s slow and clumsy and absolutely useless for playing any WASD style 3D first person game because those games use the mouse to control the camera and that would be extremely hard to do via the keybord in realtime like in the type of games I tend to like.

But whatever. It’s only video games. Via MouseKeys I can manage to do my blogging and anything else that just takes using a web browser, and that’s what is important.

A time with fewer video games in my life might do me some good, honestly. They are my main addiction. Food is way up there as well and it’s the obesity and its related effects that re going to kill me, but in terms of immediate effect on my daily life, it is the video games that are killing me.

They are, by far, my favorite crutch. And the thing about crutches is that they are absolutely indisposable when you are recovering from trauma and need them to help you get around.

But they become the problem when you keep using them as a way to avoid having to get better or deal with the trauma.

After all, why do any of the hard work and therapy it takes when you still have the critches? Crutches are fine. Crutches are a perfectly good option. Crutches are part of a crutch-based lifestyle and you are an offensive bigot if you so much as suggest that maybe I should use my crutches less or do some physical therapy.

I’m not broken, I’m just different, you fascist!

That got weird fast. But in a good way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s more complicated than you would think.

Because the ruth is, the oral retentive definition of comfort is woefully inadequate for assuring actual happiness.

It is not enough simply to be free of strain and pain in a life where very little is expected of you and you are free to do nothing but entertain yourself.

That might seem like Heaven to someone who works hard all the time, but take it from one of the inmates here in Camp Happy, it can also be Hell.

Patient readers know the spiel. Healthy people do not realize how much of the structure of their life comes from outside : their job, their kids, their social commitments, their extended family, their collaborative hobbies, and the needs of their pets.

Ergo, most people have never faced the challenge of figuring out what to do with all the empty hours of a day.

Even the unemployed have their job search to provide structure and direction. They have a goal, they have the Internet, they have their boredom and lack of purpose to goad them into looking for a new position.

But I and those like me are completely adrift. We are not just unemployed but unemployable. ergo there is no job search to keep us moving.

It’s the doldrums, and sometimes it makes me want to scream.

Of course, says blind logic. you could always make your own goals. Pick a task,. and direct yourself to complete it. When you finish that, pick another.

What could be simpler? But it just does not work that way.

Not if you have depression. Depression interferes with many cognitive processes and one of the big ones is executive function. That’s the part of the mind that strings together a series of actions that will lead to a desired result, and when that is all clogged up with depression’s no-feelies juice, it is hard to think of any steps that would reach any goal at all.

Even in my best moments, the best I can do is imagine a series of steps that would achieve that goal for someone with motivation, drive, focus, and energy.

Me, I am fresh out of all of them. So when I try to imagine myself actually doing the things I have imagined, the picture splinters and falls apart and turns into so much ash gently gathering around my feet.

There’s that image of a planet with nothing but barren rock and huge boulders and a rain of ash, gentle and constant and quiet like snowfall, and me there. inexplicably happy about it all.

Still haven’t figured that one out.

Anyhow. my point, and I do have one, is that most people have no idea how dependent on the externalities of their lives to give their lives structure and direction.

They also have the luxury of imagining that a life of leisure would be bliss. Those of us living such a life – even at a low economic level like I do – know that there are far more complex needs that such a life simply cannot fulfill.

Human consciousness is composed of layer upon layer of complex interconnected drives that extend far beyond creature comforts and basic animal needs.

I mean, look at this thing :

I mean sure, I got the bottom two layers covered but that’s it. Well, plus half of the yellow layer, because I do have friends, but intimate relationships are a foreign country to me. I have never been there.

I think part of why I have suffered so much in my adult life is that I was in active denial of these truths.

After all. if I fully acknowledged and embraced the fact that I need one hell of a lot more than the emotional starvation diet I keep myself on, then it would immediately follow that I should be doing a lot of things to fix that.

And because of depression, all roads which lead to action – real action, the kind that actually engages my adrenal system – are permanently blocked, so the only way to avoid the pain of trying to force a blocked system is to pretend everything is fine.

That means pretending that this life of mine is fine, just fine. It’s perfectly okay to ignore and suppress all the human needs I am not addressing let alone satiating. I can go one and on like this forever!

Yeah, bullshit. I need more. I want more. I don’t care of that upsets the petty order and harmony of my hermetically sealed life. I don’t care if that means I am going to have to leave my cell and explore the world more, even though the idea terrifies me. I don’t care thart the routes are blocked, I am going to force my way through or die trying.

So let me make it official : I am going to work as hard as I can to find a way out of this cage of mine and find a way to connect with the world that scares me so much.

Call it a New Year’s resolution if you like. I think I will call it an Honest Intention. I honestly intend to scrabble at the walls of my cage with all the patience and industry I can muster and to remember that no matter how many times I stop, I still have to keep going when I get better.

There’s a use for all my frustrated energies. Keep that hamster wheel spinning!

All I really want is a clear and open channel between my drives and my actions. A way to simply let life flow into and out of me without needless restrictions and pointless bottlenecks and other such garbage.

To let life come spilling out of me in big warm wet waves instead of always constricting and restricting and conflicting with myself. To live life joyously open instead of pinched off and emotionally constipated.

To truly live, god damn it.

But I am going to have to resurrect myself first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Turns out, reverting onself to primordial goo in order to facilitate spiritual transmogrification takes a while.

After finishing yesterday’s blog entry, I turned the lights out in my room. put on that certain song that means so much to me, and willed myself to formlessness.

And it worked…. a bit. I could feel myself kind of melting inside. I felt like I was getting closer to a primordial state.

But it turns out that is not the sort of thing one can merely will. It will take some kind of massive spiritual event to trigger the sort of transformation I desire.

The pysche, it would seem. does not surrender its structure easily, which is probably for the best, if you think about it.

But without any spritual tradition to point me in the right direction, finding that trigger is going to be a very arduous and extremely intimate process.

I am going to have to dig very deep into myself – to go under, as Nietzsche would have put it – in order to find that trigger, and that means leaving the cold but comforting light of my overweaning intellect and goings into that deep dark forest of emotion, instinct, and drive that scares me so much,.

But fuck it. I want to escape this messy little cage of mine and I am willing to do whatever the hell it takes – even risk my sanity itself – in order to do it.

I’ll even write poetry, for fuck’s sake. Official poetry, that is. not the odd poetic jaunts that I go on within the prose of this blog.

Clearly, I have poetry in me that needs to come out. Might as well make it official. All I’ve got to do is give myself permission to do it and ignore the voices in my head telling me it is both self-indulgent and pointless.

I can see those voices for the bullshit artists they are. They just say those things as a cover for my fear of that deep dark forest of real emotion that poetry would access.

Well I am through with that bullshit now. For years I have been saying that there is nothing inside me worth keeping if it gets in the way of my mental health, and that statement of existential readiness remains true.

But I can see now that it did not go far enough, so here is the updated version : there is nothing inside me that I am afraid to show the whole fucking world if that is what it takes for me to escape my cage.

That bypasses all that pointless and unjustified shame I have been holding inside since the day I was raped at the age of four and makes it clear to myself and the universe that I no longer give a damn if people flee screaming from the real me.

Damn, that’s a scary thing to say. But it feels real good too.

I’ll be a motherfucking troll under a bridge living all by myself in a cardboard box and being used by parents as a bogeyman to get them to behave if that is what it takes.

“Eat your vegetables or the FRUVOUS will get you!”

I will turn myself into a public pariah – leper outcast unclean – if that is what it takes.

Hell, I will even become that raging arsehole I have been holding back for decades if that is what it takes, and he is my worst nightmare of my worst self.

Well, journies of self-actualization sometimes go through some very ugly terrain and I might have to become a lot worse before I get a lot better.

Certain, I need to bridge the gap between me and him. Or me and me, if you want to get anal about it, because unpleasant as he is, he’s me as well.

And one of the lessons I have taken from tales of serial killers and spree killing shooters is that the extreme and crazy part of my mind is directly related to my being passive and meek and unable to successfully set boundaries in my life or express my anger at all.

So I wouldn’t have this side of myself trying to come out who is this rage filled, viscious, bullying, battering, smug trickster of a self-centered prick if I did not bottle everything up, especially my rage, and create the exact conditions that create such an ill representation of myself as a response.

There would be no Mister Hyde if Doctor Jekyll wasn’t such an id-denying intellectual. Ditto with the Hulk and Bruce Banner. I bet both of them could be cured if they would simply acknowledge that their alter egos are them too and that it is their ferocious battle with their own ids that creates the monsterous sides of themselves.

We cannot let the beast inside rule us but suppression is not the way to achieve that aim. In fact, it produces the opposite effect – the beast rages when ignored.

The only long term solution is a negotiated peace, and that starts with a confession :

That aggressive, abusive asshole is me. I am the one who wants to unleash my full intellectual powers on the world without any regard for the consequences to others. I am the one who dreams of being an intellectual ogre who doesn’t give a shit about anything but his own amusement and is perfectly willing to bully, dominate, manipulate. or even eviscerate whoever is unlucky enough to cross his path to get it.

I’m that guy. That is me. There is no “him”. He is me and I am him, just as much and to the same degree that I am the Fruvous everyone knows and loves.

The real me is someone I have yet to meet because the real me lies at the geographical statistical midpoint between all these different versions of myself, and if I want to reach a state of happiness, all my shadows will have to merge and become one entity.

And then it will be just me, the real me, naked, defiant, and alone, ready to face the world as an army of one and make a place for myself in the light.

That is what I am fighting for and that is what I believe.

And may the Metaconscious have mercy on us all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.