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.