For the record, I feel a bit better than normal today.

I want to record that fact because I know my depression has a way of erasing and/or negating that kind of truth. It hijacks the cognitive function that keeps the contents of our mind balanced and consistent to negate the truths that are not consistent with its darkness maximizing agenda.

It’s quite obscene, really. That there is a very strong function in my mind dedicated to killing anything that might make me happy or improve my self-esteem purely to protect the evil regime of my depression.

Well fuck that. I am burning those foul circuits out of my brain. And I am doing it with pure, potent, implacable contempt.

Hmmm. Once more, I set out to talk about something positive and instead a whole bunch of negativity came pouring out.

Well like I said before : better out than in.

I felt especially good this morning. Apparently,. playing Fallout 4 for six hours really hit the spot. I felt a lot more alive, awake, and emotionally warm than usual.

I think it was the result of simply expending enough of my pent up energies to clear the blockage for a while.

And that’s another thing I need to remember despite my depression’s evil agenda to make me forget : large quantities of energy expenditure are actually very good for me and when I feel down, I should look around for something I can really sink my teeth into.

Depression wants the opposite. It wants me to respond to feeling down by doing less, usually in the form of sleep.

And if depression wants it, it has to be bad, and I want to go the other way.

Another possible plus if that I had a very meaty meal last night. And it’s possible that this eventually corrected my extreme vitamin B-12 deficiency for a time.

Admittedly, that’s a long shot. The meaty feast and the feeling fab were like nine hours apart, and according to my doctor, my B-12 is so low because of a digestive issue and that means that no matter how much I take orally, it won’t get through.

That’s a depressing thought. Moving on.

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That other world

I got this song recently and I really like it :

What’s more, it has given focus to my thoughts about that other world – the one where the happy healthy people live.

It first came to me as the thought that whatever universe John Denver songs take place in, I want to go there and live there forever.

I know why his music has such power over me as I age – it is an extremely strong dose of the exact opposite point of view from my usual dark musings.

Concentrated sunshine for the night-clad soul.

Plus, his music embodies the positive, wholesome, celebratory and joyful aspect of the Seventies, and that evokes those enormous waves of pure uncut nostalgia in me that overwhelm my defenses and swam my mind.

And that’s some powerful mojo there.

Especially when you consider that it is that very era in which the life-spring of my recovery – those precious first four years of my life before the rape – took place.

I am positive that it is those years that generate those sweeping waves of nostalgia. My mind is trying to heal itself by drawing on the one time in my life when I was not depressed at all.

That’s the one time when I lived in the sunlit world, before a stranger’s cock drove me deep underground into the sunless subterraneanTartarus that is depression.

So I find myself having a better notion of that sunlit world on an emotional level lately, and that might also be why I feel a little better today.

Because the stronger my connection to that other realm, the easier it is to imagine myself as not only being there but belonging there.

And that is super important.

Because as we’ve discussed before, I have a deep deep sense of shame and unworthiness, as if I was some horrible living toxin that doesn’t eve deserve to live yet alone stain the world of the healthy and the strong with my existence.

And that shit has to go, and that means opening my heart and letting the sunshine in.

And the thing is, that will hurt. When you are as sick as I am, the toxins of the soul do not go quietly, and the holy fever that burns the infection from my blood does not come without a certain amount of suffering.

It hurts to have this crap burned out of your blood and purged from your flesh. And the depression will protect itself by trying to convince you that said pain means it’s something that is bad for you and you should flee the light post-haste.

Thus, the disease convinces you to avoid its cure.

Well there are worse things than pain. I will gladly and proudly burn like a Roman candle on a starless night if that is what it takes to make myself whole and clean and strong again, like I was before the rape.

Bring the pain. I welcome it. I have seen beyond the illusion and now know that what hurts is not always what is bad and that even the pure clean sunshine of total love can be painful without it meaning that it was something bad pretending to be good.

Transcending pain is, I think, the beginning of the liberation of the soul. I’ve talked before about how maturity starts with the ability to choose pain in order to get the results that you want.

My go-to example being going to the dentist when you have a toothache. You know being at the dentist will be unpleqasant and painful, but it is the only way to get rid of your dental pain, so you go.

Well I think I understand that better now. It’s not just a matter of serving your long term best interests – in order to become truly human, we must move in the direction of our higher selves, and thus transcend the animal world of fleeing pain.

Some pain is worth it. It’s a truth many do not want to hear because they are trapped in the fantasy of a world where everything is easy, non-scary, and painless.

Liberation, therefore, begins when you can slap your chips down on the table. look life straight in the eye, and say “I know this will hurt. DO IT ANYWAY. ”

Life is suffering, as the Buddhists say.

So suffer. And live.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Trying hard to learn to be positive.

My hope is that if I try hard enough, I can reverse the downward spiral of my depression and turns it into something that lifts me up instead of pulling me down.

After all, healthy people stay more or less happy (at least compared to me) most of the time and don’t seem to be the victims of the terrible and terrifying gravity that holds me down and keeps me from getting anywhere.

That means that either/or they lack the gravity (depression) in the first place, or that said gravity is present in all people but in healthy people there is a countervaling (sp?) force that acts in the opposite direction and keeps things more or less “up”.

Again, at least as compared to me. I am certainly not suggesting that everybody but us depressives walks around in a constant state of bliss as if they wore a golden nimbus made of meadow sunshine and angel farts.

They just don’t have a black hole where their soul should be that sucks up all the love and joy and happiness inside and locks them away forever, leaving only a gaping wound behind where there should be flesh and blood and real human emotion.

Myself, I am such a queer duck (actually a pigeon with a fetish shhh) that if I ever catch myself feeling real, honest to goodness full on human emotions, it makes me incredibly happy because it means I am not entirely dead yet, and it feels so good to finally feel something for a change.

Even if it’s “negative”. Like I have mentioned before, many times, when you have been numb for along time that even the pins and needles pain of blood returning to a limb that’s fallen asleep is a blessed relief.

Because while pain hurts, it at least reminds me that I am alive and kicking,.

The numbness is just plain wrong. Wrong like a broken arm is wrong. You know something has gone drastically wrong in your body on such a deep animal level that all youir animal instincts are crying out for you to fix it somehow.

But you can’t fix it. Not like you would a normal wound. The wrongness persists and your body and mind are stuck in a constant struggle with it.

And I would gladly call the whole war off and tell both sides to go home without supper and think about what they have done.

But that’s impossible when one side is trying to annihilate the other.

Hmm. I started out talking about trying to learn to be positive and ended up releasing some of my negatives instead.

Well, better out than in. Sometimes, in order to let the sunshine in, you have to let the darkness out to make room.

People don’t get this, and that includes me most of the time. The gut-level reaction to a person being verbally negative is to interpret that as unhappiness and try to fix the problem when the only problem is the depressive is being misinterpreted.

Sometimes the best thing anyone can do for us is just sit and listen quietly, without interruption, while we disgorge whatever vileness is haunting us and thus exorcize an inner demon or two.

That’s a lot of what therapists do. They listen.

It’s odd (and tragic) that, as a global society, we are still so ignorant of people’s need to relate what has happened to them that we rarely are even cognizant enough to see that our own needs are met, let alone accomodate the needs of our loved ones.

Instead, we are so jaded from a constant diet of entertainment that we can only see our own thoughts and emotions through that filter, and tell ourselves that our thoughts and feelings don’t count as content because they are not entertaining enough.

The idea of this kind of communication having intrinsic value is alien to us.

I mean, how can something be worth anything besides what we can “get” for it?

Commercial consumer capitalism at its best, folks.

And so we keep things to ourselves because we don’t want to “bore” people with the mundane details of our lives, and we act as though for anyone to suggest that to be less than totally entertained for five minutes is akin to asking them for their heart, both kidneys, and their firstborn fetish.

I mean child.

Eh, either/or.

And so we end up locked up inside our self-centered individualist cul-de-sacs, not even knowing that there is a bigger, brighter, better world outside our cages if we only open up our hearts and souls to see it.

I am such a mystic poet. Especially for a rational materialist.

I think the millennials are fixing that, however. They travel in groups and are super into mutual consultation and do things like become bronies and do experiments in radical trust and all kinds of other things that warm my bitter. sullen Gen X heart.

I cling to the notion that our kids will learn from our mistakes and reach out to one another to create community and mutuality and other great stuff like that.

It’s all very Seventies, come to think of it.

History really does repeat itself.

But things do get better.

I feel like I need to have that playing in my head on an infinite loop. Things can and do get better. It just happens in a way that we can’t see because we are inside the vehicle as it changes and lack the vision to see it from an outside point of view.

I am one hundred percent sure that I am the first person to ever say this breaktakingly original thought : what the world needs is a spiritual awakening.

But not the kind they sell at the various variations of revival tent meetings that take place all over the world. This is not about finding Jesus or whoever. This is not about repenting for our supposed sins. This is not a violent awakening.

It’s more like waking up from a pleasant and restoring afternoon nap on a beautiful summer day and looks out the window at the sunshine and the grass and the big blue sky and realizing that the world is a pretty wonderful place after all.

Amen and pass the lemonade.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.