Still thinking about this whole “feeling like I am never doing what I am supposed to be doing” kind of thing.

First, let’s do some important affirmations.

There is nothing I am “supposed” to be doing.

I am perfectly free to live my life entirely for my own pleasure.

All that really matters is my own happiness, and if worrying about that ends up being too much of a hassle and becomes a liability to said happiness, I am free to ditch that too.

The last thing I need is to constantly worry about whether I could be happier. That would be even worse than feeling like I am never doing the right thing.

The main thing is to freaking relax. Live life for fun. Be a kid again. Stop worrying about what I should be doing. Stop thinking about all the things I could be doing too.

Basically, if it’s making me unhappy, fuck it.

It is perfectly acceptable to live life for fun. If I feel up to it, I can also listen to my own soul in anticipation of the day it produces one clear signal for me to follow and then follow said signal as far as it takes me.

But if that becomes a liability, it too can be discontinued until I feel up to it again.

Yes, I have ambitions. And yes, I have some pretty big dreams too. I dream of being able to live a normal life, with a husband and a job and a place in life, instead of having this big supercomputer brain that isn’t hooked up to anything.

But those ambitions and dreams are my own, to do with as I please. If they motivate me to do things, great. If they only serve to make me feel better about my current life, that’s perfectly fine too.

But if they are only cudgels my overactive superego uses to beat me, then they too can die a thousand deaths.

Essentially. my overactive superego needs to fuck of and die in a chemical fire. It is what has become toxic, not me. I am fine. In fact, I am downright amazing.

So I hereby command my overactive superego (who works for ME and not the other way around) to back the fuck off. You are terrible at your job and you try my patience and if I could, I would get rid of your completely.

But the human psyche kind of needs one, so instead, I am warning you to learn to behave or face the consequences.

You, too, can be judged and found wanting. In fact, you just were. Fucker.

This means you are no longer free to feast upon my own flesh and take my hidden anger out on myself. That shit stops right now.

There are worse things in life than taking it out on others, especially if that can be done in a constructive way.

And it is perfectly fine if my life isn’t going anywhere because I am sick. I swear, I am going to keep telling myself that until it sticks. In as much as it matter, all society really expects of me is that I do my best to get well.

That’s why I am going to stop myself when I start to feel bad about myself for being this giant brain with such enormous potential that I am “wasting” and remind myself that it’s my potential and ergo serves my own needs and my own happiness and that I don’t owe the world a god damned thing.

And as for all those things I feel like I “could” be doing and therefore “should” be doing, am I really being realistic about it? Could I really be doing these things given how unwell I am, or is that just something that I tell myself to feel better?

If so, those dreams need to be thrown out because they have gone bad and been subverted by my evil superego into just another way to harm myself.

Well I am done harming myself. Fuck that noise. All that matters is my happiness. All these other concerns that swarm around my head like gnats from hell can go fuck themselves to death with a rusty razor blade.

If I want to play video games all day, I will. But not because it’s the only way to escape the inner torment of my evil superego.

It will be because that is my current best guess as to what will make me happy. But that’s all it is, a guess. I am free to try other things without worry or care because I am not betting my entire escape on it.

Because there is nothing to escape. The demon at the door is gone. He was never real in the first place. He was just a puppet I used to scare myself. But I don’t need to do that any more. I see through his bullshit and have kicked his ass to the curb.

Sure, I am opening the door to a lot more possibilities in my life now that I am no longer going to give in to this feeling of never doing what I am supposed to be doing.

But that, too, is subject to change if it interferes with my happiness. The door is open for when I feel like going out to explore, but I am under no obligation to do so.

Now let’s finish up with a great big primal id statement :

I AM HERE.

I AM ALIVE.

I AM REAL.

I DESERVE TO BE HERE.

I DESERVE MY FAIR SHARE OF THE GOOD THINGS IN LIFE.

I HAVE NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF AND I CAN HOLD MY HEAD UP HIGH IN THE WORLD WITHOUT FEELING LIKE I HAVE TO APOLOGIZE FOR LIVING.

LIFE IS EITHER GOING TO MAKE ROOM FOR ME AT THE TABLE OR I WILL MAKE IT MAKE ROOM FOR ME AT THE TABLE.

IT IS TIME FOR ME TO GET MINE.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been reevaluating how I value things.

Or rather, how I value things. As opposed to, say, experiences. And it’s made me realize how apparently reasonable, rational, sensible thought can lead to heartbreak, misery, and starvation of the soul.

Here is my current scenario to use as a jumping off point :

Last weekend was VancouFur. As often happens at conventions, I overspent. That makes that, by my usual rubric, I can’t afford to order in tonight.

But I ordered in anyway, and here is why.

For some reason, even though I have skipped my Saturday night meal many times before with no ill effects, this time the prospect of doing it again was really depressing me. I was actually dreading the moment I would have to make it official by preparing my more usual kind of meal.

So I made the command decision to order in anyway and worry about the $ later.

This is not my usual mode.

I usually see the world through the lens of my poverty and how it means, or so screams my superego, that I have to be super careful and sensible and pragmatic about how i spend every single penny of it or disaster will ensue.

And that can be a very powerful way of looking at the world.
It can lead to a positive hedonic equation in that you are careful to get as much pleasure and joy from each dollar that you can.

And that sounds great on paper, but in practice, the fine distinctions disappear and the message turns into a more generalized sense of constant fear and insecurity about your money and makes it very hard to keep yourself happy because you end up with a very rigid and unforgiving mindset that equates being sensible with being safe.

And that just ain’t so. You can be so “sensible” that you makje yourself utterly miserable. Human thriving requires a more flexible sense of value that includes (for instance) the possibility of spending more than you “should” in order to treat yourself when you really need it and simply accept that this will mean going without something else in the future.

And that said outcome is not the end of the world. Nobody is going to lock me away for the crime of imprudence.

The real test will come Tuesday night, when my friends and I go out to eat and I can’t afford to order anything.

Anyhow, I finally remembered what I meant to talk about tonight.

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What I should be doing

Nothing. Or a lot of things. Depends on how you look at it.

I shall explain.

I realized recently that I have been “shoulding” all over myself lately. I had fallen back into the bad habit of feeling like I am never ever feeling that I am doing whatever it is I am “supposed” to be doing. The number of things on the list of things I am “supposed” to be doing is functionally infinite thanks to the magic power of neurosis and so the programmed outcome of all this is that I feel like there is no way I can choose which thing to do so I choose to do nothing.

Well, nothing substantial, at any rate. Nothing that matters to me or anyone else. Instead, I play video games all fucking day in order to escape this omnipresent sense of doing the wrong thing, and that’s pretty much how the ecology of my depression works.

And the hub of it is my sense of “should”.

Patient readers know that I have been here before. I wrote a blog post saying more or less the same things once before, years ago.

But right after I wrote that post, I started wondering where I was going to go from there. Because the thing is, it’s one thing to realize that there is this huge irrational force ruining your life and quite another to get rid of it.

Because to be honest, I have no idea what to replace it with. Even as I made all my bold statements about ridding myself of my bad case of the shoulds, I could feel the massive gap it left in my mind and I could feel the substance of my mind starting to slowly ooze into the hole, where if left unchecked, it would simply revert back to my previous way of thinking over time.

It was left unchecked.

And all for lack of a replacement. And the truth is, I still have no idea what to replace it with. It is beyond my considerable imagination.

I feel like a convict who has just been let out of prison and is standing there at the bus stop wondering what the hell to do NOW.

I suppose I would need some sense of direction and purpose to my life, and those are things I have never really learned to supply for myself.

The next best thing would be, I suppose, to somehow attach myself to something that could give me that sense of direction and purpose.

Like school did. The great thing about going to Kwantlen and VFS is that I always knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing : going to school and doing my school work. And I knew that as long as I got that done, I was okay, and the rest of the time, I could goof off and do whatever because I had the obligatory part of my life covered.

I was doing what everyone would agree was what I was supposed to be doing.

But then that ended and I was released into the unbstructured wilds with no mentor willing to help me take the next step. For a while, I coasted on the momentum from school and that helped me get the Uno gig.

But then I stupidly took that for granted and even more stupidly quit the job and still more stupidly did not immediately start hunting for another.

And so I lost all my momentum and drifted back into the doldrums and that’s where I was when I discovered Skyrim and everything went all to hell after that.

I still haven’t fully recovered from that.

So here I am, wondering how I hook myself up with another source of direction and purpose. Like school, but not school, because I am done with school.

I suppose that means I would have to join…. something.

I will have to think about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.