Bad sleep. Bleary. Confused. Disoriented. Sweaty.

Really frigging hungry too. Luckily, I have lunch.

Tried the Cheesy Garlic Bread flavour of Lay’s. Can’t say I taste the garlic much, to be honest. Then again, I tend to like my garlicky things to be very garlicky.

So it’s probably fine for most people.

And they are still tasty. Just not quite how I would want them.

I have already tried thw other two flavour-of-the-month offerings, Onion Rings and Pizza. The Onion Rings flavour tastes pretty much like you’d expect – oniony.

In the best possible way, natch.

The Pizza flavour is amazing, though. It really tastes like a slice of pepperoni pizza – including the crust.

In other words,. yum. 

The half hour before noon was rough because I was so sleepy and hungry. Too sleepy to do much of anything at all, even read Facebook or watch a Reddit thread video.

Video games were out of the question. Waaaay too little ability to focus and concentrate available for even a very simple game.

But now that I have some food and Diet Coke in me, I am at least marginally awake.

Got one of my appointments to have the dressing changed on my wound this afternoon at 2 pm. Shouldn’t take long, it’s not exactly a complicated procedure.

Then again, there’s my compression stocking to deal with, so it will take a little bit longer than before. First they have to take the old one off, change the dressing, and then, potentially, put an even tighter one on.

My current one is only a Level 1 squeeze tube. There’s at least one more level, with stronger pressure. I will move on to that level if Level 1 seems to be working.

I kind of hope it isn’t. I am not at all confident that an even stronger compression version won’t set off what I call my claustrophobia.

It would probably be better described as “fear of being trapped”. but even that doesn’t really get the idea across.

I am just worried that they will put the Level 2 compression stocking on and I will flip out like I’m an animal caught in a leg-hold trap.

I am free to tell them to take the fucking thing off, of course. But I would rather not have the psychotic level panic attack at all.

Cause ya know. They suck.

I can’t really say for sure whether my current compression stocking is helping my circulation or not. It kind of feels like it is and the attached foot feels less asleep.

I guess I will just have to wait and see.

Honestly, right now I would rather be asleep. But it’s only an hour till I have to leave for that appointment. Normally I would not bother with that short a nap.

But I think I will this time because god damn it, I am tired.

Honestly wish I could blow off the appointment. But that would be dumb. Besides, it won’t take very long and then I will be back here and sleep the rest of the afternoon away if I so choose.

Looking forward to it.

More after the break.

---

Still tired. But can’t sleep. It’s too hot. my head hurts (must acquired more Advil), and I feel logey and depressed.

It’s always struck me as ironic that summertime, the best time for doing awesome outdoor type activities, comes with heat that sucks the energy right out of you, making it kind of a moot point.

That’s why summer nights are so awesome. It cools off to something livable and, at least when you are young and energetic, that’s when you have fun.

I vaguely recall having energy. Makes me tired just thinking about it.

Did the appointment. Was a tad worried, because shortly before departure I had a difficult defecation, the kind where it feels like my digestive system is a wastepaper basket and someone is stomping down the contents to make room for more trash.

“Everything must go” and all that.

So I was worried that I would have another attack while I was at the health center. That would have been especially bad because the clinic is on the ground floor and the bathrooms are on the second floor (oy), and it would be a very bad situation to have a dash to the bathroom involve stairs or the elevator.

Luckily. I was able to keep calm and get my dressing and compression stocking changed without any dark emergencies.

I finally got the nurse with the cool Eastern European accent. Turns out her name is Yanna, and she introduces herself as a “home care nurse”.

Which made me want to ask, “So you live here?” .

But those are the thoughts I keep to myself.

It did the job of telling me she was qualified, at least. Not that my needs are particularly complex or difficult. I imagine changing dressings is like, Nurse 101.;

The compression stock is more complicated. It felt weird when she took the old one off. Not bad, exactly. Just weird. Like it wasn’t really my leg, in the sense that it felt unlike the leg I knew. ^[1]

But then she put the new stocking on, and I felt “normal” again.

Sometimes I think I am too adaptable for my own good.

One of these times, I want to ask them if they have a way of telling whether the compression is working or not that does not rely on my self-reporting.

I have swarms of neuroses clustering in clouds around my ability to communicate the right information to medical professionals.

I just don’t communicate the same way most people do. Ergo I do not give them the sorts of answers they want.

This, I fear, compromises care and outcomes.

It’s like a hyper potent example of my inability to give people the responses they want and expect no matter how hard I try.

I’m one strange beastie. And there’s nothing I can do about that. I missed the boat on being normal the day I was born.

The trick, therefore, is to make it work for me.

I am working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Starting with the affirmations today because I forgot them yesterday and that is just the kind of slip-up the forces of evil in my mind are waiting for.

I matter. I count. I am good. I am not toxic, poisonous, radioactive, or high in cholesterol. I am a wonderful person who is loved and valued by many people and I deserve the same seat at the table as anyone else and my share of the pudding, too.

And I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Repeat until believed.

Set me free!

Now that the pleasantries are off, I am gonna rant about something.

I really, really hate that in so many modern cars, I get locked in by default.

You know what I am talking about. The fact that all the doors lock the second the vehicle is in motion, and so when I want to get out, the driver has to let me out.

It’s a fine line that divides passengers from hostages, and that shit crosses it.

Because they never remember. Why would they? It’s so weird and unnatural. For almost a century, everyone in the car could get out whenever they liked.

But now, for what I assume are safety reasons related to not wanted your kid to open the door when you are doing 90 klicks on the freeway, cars come with this automatic locking thing turned on by default.

And sure, there’s usually a way to turn that shit off. But most drivers are not going to bother, because after all, it doesn’t bother them.

I feel like this is an unwarranted intrusion on my autonomy. And I am the sort of person who values his autonomy quite highly.

Come to think of it, if they can make the doors all lock when the vehicle is in motion, why not have it unlock them when the vehicle stops?

Answer me that, auto industry!

---

The Prince of Nothing

Today is Therapy Thursday, and so you know that I had a session today.

One of the things we talked about was how full of nothing my childhood was. And I struggled to get across to my therapist how that differs from a lot of difficult childhoods because there was no obvious enemy I could engage and defeat.

Had anyone bothered to oppose me^[1], I might have learned some things from the struggle and developed a sense of who I am and where I fit in.

Instead, there was just…. nothing. No friends. No teachers I felt close to. No attention paid to me at home.

I was basically a robot that went to school and played video games.

And it’s the same now, minus the school.

There\’]s more to it than that, though, because the question remains as to why I didn’t do things to fix my situation.

Like get mad and demand my due, for instance.

All I can say on that is that there was something fundamentally wrong with me that kept that from being an option. A particularly deadly form of passivity that buried all that anger in order to maintain the status quo.

Low self esteem had a lot to do with it. Back then, I didn’t feel like I deserved better. I just got through every day, accepting what I was given and making do with whatever I happened to get.

Asking for more would have been unthinkable to me back then. After all, my family made me feel so unwanted that I felt like I was lucky to even let me stay.

So who was I to ask for more?

More on this later.

---

Make up your mind

Sometimes my executive dysfunction is so bad it takes me half an hour just to decide to get out of bed.

Or go to the bathroom.

Or really to decide to do anything at all, even stuff I know I will enjoy.

I dither over whether or not to masturbate, for fuck’s sake.

It’s like being the nice Kirk from the two Kirks episode of the original Star Trek. I don’t have the vitality and drive to be decisive. I am missing a key component of will and it means I dither over the most inconsequential of things.

I think part of the problem is that decisions lead to actions. Once I decide to do something, it’s time to do it, and there’s always a strong minority voice in me that never wants to do anything ever.

Dithering, therefore, is a way to delay decision and therefore action.

Plus there’s the obvious : lack of connection to my id. When I was raped at the age of 4, that connection was severed almost completely, and I was left with very little in the way of motive power or will.

Even inspiration has a hell of a hard time moving me. So much inertia.

Deep down, I have a fundamental fear of letting emotion move me. At some point, I came to feel that only well thought out moves can be trusted at all and that letting emotions drive me only leads to madness, chaos, and error.

That’s not how a healthy person operates. And I know this. I know that I would be a much happier and stronger person if I let my emotions drive me some of the time.

But still, I fear the chaos.

I would love to be able to dedicate myself to my own happiness and use that as a primary driver of activity, but I’m scared of that, too.

I mean, who knows where that would lead? Once more, I face having to take a road without knowing where it goes.

And that, in turn, leads to my utter lack of faith/trust in the world. You kind of lose that when you are raped at the age of 4. Exploration is chaos to me. On a deep deep level. I feel like voyaging into the unknown means instant annihilation.

That is, of course, also not how healthy people live.

And so here I sit, waiting on that back order of life force I was denied via rape to finally show up so I can get my life going again.

I am stuck here waiting for my ship to come in.

But the truth is that fucker sank ages ago.

And there is nobody to rescue me but myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s not easy.

Like I’ve talked about in this space before, the human mind is built for action. Built to make decisions. And that means it is always assumes that the information that it has is complete, even when it patently is not.

So people extrapolate. This is what leads to, among other things, the fundamental attribution error, where we tend to assume that other people’s behaviour is the result of permanent attributes of their character but attribute ours to any number of factors and circumstances depending on the situation.

For example, say you just got cut off in traffic. What do you assume? That the person who did it is an asshole.

This is not logical. You know almost nothing about the person. For all you know, they are a perfectly lovely person and that’s the only time they have ever cut anyone off and they are currently delivering kittens to orphans.

But you conclude that this person is an asshole anyhow, because based on everything you know about them, they are.

You see how that works?

Now, in our traffic example, the error is harmless. This person will never know what you think of them, and calling them an asshole makes you feel a little better.

The problem is that people do the same thing in much more important situations and about groups much larger than one shitty driver.

It becomes especially problematic with people, usually conservatives, who lack faith in their ability to figure things out rationally and methodically, and their solution is to make broad sweeping snap judgements and then stick to them in blind desperation.

This would be like if, in our traffic example, you were shown reams of definitive proof, including video testimonials by Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, and Pope Francis, that the person who cut you off is a wonderful, angelic person who only cut you off in order to avoid sideswiping a busload of nuns, and you still insisting, “Nope, they’re an asshole! End of story!”.

Sound like any conservatives you know?

And the root issue is that they do not feel like they can examine all the facts and reach a well thought out, reasoned conclusion. So from that point of view, they have no choice but to rely strictly on snap judgments and emotional and/or magical reasoning.

In their minds, the only thing that can come of opening up their snap judgments to new information is them becoming hopelessly lost and confused and maybe even having to face the stark and horrifying possibility that, despite being adult citizens of an individualist society, they are not smart enough to understand what is really going on.

And that, in a society where every citizen is supposed to be a rugged individual who makes up their mind about everything and contributes that point of view to the collective decision making process, would mean that person is a profound failure.

Think about it. Imagine if someone actually said, “Oh, I’m not smart enough for politics, so I leave that up to others.”

You would feel contempt for that person, wouldn’t you? Like they were letting everyone down by not doing their part.

You would probably also assume they were retarded.

So the stakes are high. That’s why that person who insists the driver is an asshole despite all evidence is not merely being stubborn – they are terrified. As far as they are concerned, they are besieged by chaos and oblivion on all sides, and the only course of action available to them is to cling to their life raft of preformed opinion until the flood waters recede and they can relax again.

More after the break.

---

The tenuous position these theoretical conservatives of mine find themselves in when it comes to figuring out what is really going on also explains their dependence on right wing “news” sources like Fox New.

For one thing, like I have said before, the underlying message of Fox News et al is that you are NOT too stupid to understand the world, things really are as simple as you need them to be, and anyone who says different is an evil person trying to confuse you.

This message is very soothing to conservative types. It keeps the demons of fear and doubt at bay. It keeps them from ever having to truly face the facts.

Problem is, their rational minds keep trying to wake up and take over. So they need this steady IV drip of reassurance to keep it at bay.

Because of this, the people at Fox News actually have to work quite hard to come up with the bullshit and lies they spew. ;Everything they say has to fit neatly within their audience’s existing preconceived notions, with absolutely nothing truly new or startling, or they risk breaking the spell for their viewers, causing them to wake up cranky.

That’s also why so much of what they say is not merely offensive but seemingly laughably absurd right on the face of it.

Sure, it’s absurd to us liberal intellectual types who are used to figuring things out. But we are not the Fox News audience.

They want to be fooled, and are therefore not exactly hard to convince – provided, of course, that the message stays soothingly unchallenging to their existing beliefs.

I am starting to repeat myself. Time to change subjects.

---

Here’s a stab at figuring out what, exactly, my problem is :

My problem is that I have all this talent and intelligence and creativity and so on that desperately wants to be expressed into the world, but there is something in the way.

That something is the psychological damage from my rape at the age of four. And whatever subsequent damage I have accumulated in the same place.

My fabulous potential pushes to be released, but my damage refuses to budge.

And that…. hurts.

Like trying to pass a stone, it hurts.

And the pain makes me stop. But the pressure to express pushes from the other side and makes me start again.

And little ol me is squished in the middle.

Not bad! Best one so far.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I ran out of my Reactine antihistamines on Saturday. Look my last pill on Friday.

Two days later, on Monday, my sleep went all weird and intense and draining. This suggests a direct link between my hay fever and my sleep apnea.

Makes sense. A nose full of snot makes it hard to breathe in your sleep.

Oh fuck. Just found my Reactine. I have a ton of it left. Must remember to tell Joe not to buy me more. I told him I was out. Now I feel totally stupid, because it was right in front of me. And yet, when I went to look for it Saturday, could not find it.

I hate that my life includes so many incidents just like that. Absentminded and clueless to a “what the fuck is wrong with me?” level.

I try so hard to keep it together and yet shit like that just keeps on happening. I am beginning to wonder if I qualify as mentally impaired.

Come to think of it, I was a impaired genius as a kid. Like I have said before, I was quite the conundrum for school system. Showed up already knowing how to read and do math and so on, but my writing was terrible and I was very uncoordinated and clumsy, way more so than other kids my age.

I was pretty hard to teach too. I still feel bad about how I treated that Jamaican lady assigned to get me up to speed in terms of writing and coordination.

Not that I knew what I was doing. I was seven. But looking back, I drove that poor woman to tears because my mind would wander while she was talking to me, I was defiant and difficult because she was making me do things I didn’t want to do and didn’t like doing, and therefore I made little progress and what progress I did make, I would seemingly lose when I didn’t feel like cooperating.

I remember her crying. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s how frustrating I was to that poor woman. I must have been the worst kid she ever had because I couldn’t be bullied or intimidated, I had no inherent respect for adults or authority, and I was far too young to realize this was all for my own good, let alone realize what effect I was having on her.

You don’t think about the effect you have on adults at that age. They seem like gods.

I was just too smart and slippery and willful for my own good. I think that was my problem with all the teachers too. I was pleasant and eager to please, and quite obedient for the most part, And yet, I was always off in my own little world as wrell,. and usually only half paying attention as a result. And they never knew when I would simply choose not to obey.

So I was a very difficult kid to have in your classroom.

Hell, my little “seems like I am not paying attention but I can repeat what you just said verbatim” trick alone was enough to make them hate me.

And yet, at the same time, I was sweet and polite and eager for their approval.

In conclusion, I was one extremely odd and difficult child. I wanted so badly for people to like me and yet, there I was, all weird angles and booby traps.

Not my fault, of course. It’s just how I turned out. And it doesn’t justify all the ways in which I was mistreated.

But it sure explains a lot.

I will be back after the break.

---

I am finding it hard to process the truth abhout what I was like as a child.

The obvious take would be to add it to the long list of reasons to hate myself. But I a, beyond that shit now.

Yeah, I was one odd little duck. Clearly the system and the adults in it had no idea what to do with me and eventually they gave up on me because it was too draining and confusing to try to deal with me.

I know for a fact that I wear people out sometimes. It can be exhausting being my audience. So even if you like me, I can be a bit much sometimes.

But back to my weird childhood as a weird child. The paradox of being so articulate and bright as a kid is that I gave off all the signals of being someone who was smart and bright beyond my age and certainly smarter than you, whatever adult is trying to deal with me, but I was still just a kid.

Like the 80’s Twilight Zone version of the omnipotent kid who puts people in the cornfield. That one ends with the protagonist, who is a social worker who was sent to that home to see why the kid hasn’t been to school in a long time, managing to tget through to the kid so he will accept her authority and do what she says.

I’ve always been strongly drawn towards any kind of story where someone has far more power than they know how to handle. Like that Star Trek : TOS episode, with the guy who gets some kind of alien zap and ends up super powerful and it more or less drives him insane. Or Secret Wars II, where the Beyonder, who is nigh-omnipotent, tries to learn what it means to be human and mortal and alive.

Wow did I identify with that.

Because that was life for me. I was a kid with enormous intellectual powers who could read people’s emotions and see their deepest secrets like they were written on their forehead and was generally both quantitatively and qualitatively smarter than any adult by a wide margin.

I was a Weird Alien Kid.

And yet I always meant well. All my damage was accidental. And there was nobody in my life who knew what to do with a WAK like me.

There was certainly nobody who could give me the guidance I needed.

And so here I am at 46, still trying to figure out what to do with all this power.

No wonder I tend to just hide from it most of the time.

I think I will go do that now by playing video games.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been watching this video. WARNING : Very gross in places.

And what struck me about it is that so many of them involved poop.

Just so many stories of people pooping in all the wrong places. It boggles the mind, and challenges even my very expansive and forgiving understanding of humanity.

Where to poop is LITERALLY the first thing people learn, god dammit. You learn that before you even learn to talk.

That’s why stories of people pooping in the wrong way and/or in the wrong places have always fascinated me. It’s such a profound taboo learned at such an early age that something has to go seriously wrong for someone to violate it.

So as a student of the human mind, erroneous pooping represents an extreme version of abnormal psychology.

When it’s voluntary, that is. Incontinence is a whole other phenomenon.

Leaving feces behind, what I want to know is : is there something about Walmart that attracts extremely marginal people who are more likely to do horrifying things, or is this just the Florida Effect?

I call it the Florida Effect because I know that Florida has this internet reputation as being basically the Walmart of the USA. And I also know that it’s bullshit. It’s just that Florida has laws that make absolutely everything the cops do a matter of open access legal record, and so it’s easier to find stories of grotesque hilarity there than anywhere else in the USA.

Similarly, it’s possible that Walmart has no more incidences of human horror than any other chain of businesses, but because it has this (rather classist) reputation as a working class hellhole, stories confirming that bias spread fast online.

Having covered that, let’s move on to the more fun possibility, that there really is something about Walmart that makes it attract more of these weird events.

If so, then I have so many questions. Like…. is this a phenomenon of the sort of people Walmart attracts? If so, who are these people? What is it about Walmart that attracts them? Is there something about Walmart that makes these people feel safe and accepted when they do not feel that way anywhere else?

If so, bravo Walmart.

Or is it that Walmart makes people act in a way they do not act anywhere else? Like, do the stars of these horror stories do these things everywhere they go, or only at Walmart? If it’s a Walmart only thing, what signals are these people picking up that tells them the rules are different there?

I’m thinking it’s pheromones. But then, I always do.

More seriously, I wonder if it’s actually more like the “one broken window” effect, where it starts with one window that stays broken, which signals people subconsciously that this place isn’t worth taking caring of and that leads to other destructive behaviours which make a place look even worse, and so on and so forth till the place is a total disaster area that’s pure hell for all who live there.

Recontextualizing for Walmart, perhaps it started with something simple – say, a few people shopping in their bedclothes, or even their undies – but that signaled to others that the rules were different here, and then it was one fast ride down a slippery slope to the bizarre carnival of horrors we know and love today.

Note : Canadian Walmarts are nothing like the American ones in that respect. So American culture has to figure into it somehow too.

That’s enough for now. Papa needs a rest now. When I return : Medical Misadventures – The Mummy Returns!

---

Whoa. Just woke up from a very deep sleep. My naps don’t usually go that deep. Especially not at night.

Maybe I should nap with classical music playing more often.

Anyhow, on to today’s medical misadventure. Had my appointment at the clinic today and there was the usual changing of dressing and whatnot.

But in addition to that, they also tested the circulation in my legs. Finally. It was supposed to happen last Friday, and also the Friday before that, but that whole “understaffed” bullshit put the kibosh to that.

Like I am going to tell some nervous newbie nurse that she is supposed to be testing my circulatioin when she is shaky enough just changing mky dressing. Poor thing.

Anyhoo, so today it finally got done. And it got done in a way that was both interesting and, in a way. stupid obvious.

Because whar it involved was putting four blood pressure cuffs on me, on on each arm and one on each ankle, and then letting the machine squeeze and release till it had finished its little routine and had all the readings it wanted.

Ended up having to do it twice because the first time, one of the cuffs popped loose. And I felt it happen, but I couldn’t get up the nerve to tell the nurse.

The upshot is that I now have two layers of compression stocking covering my legt leg from knee to ankle, and it’s giving me a bit of a squeeze.

The idea is that this will improve circulation in said area. That seems counterintuitive at the moment as that’s not the usual result from being squished like this.

But I trust they know what they are doing.

The bad news is that with this huge amount of cloth on my leg, I can’t shower unless I somehow can cover the whole frigging thing.

So once more, I can’t shower. Motherfucker. I will try to imagine a way around this, but for the time being, I am back to sponge bathing and pit scrubbing.

Other than that,the thing is easy to ignore and actually feels sort of cozy, either from the thermal insulation of the stocking or because it really is improving circulation in my leg and foot and that’s the feeling of proper bloodflow for the first time in decades.

Probably a bit of both. I’m good either way.

So that’s the medical update. Oh, and the wound is looking much better. The apeture is decreasing, and it really does seem like it’s doing its best to close up.

Who knows, in a couple of months, I might even be rid of the damned thing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling more than a tad off at the moment.

I think it all started last night, when my dinner was a Bacon King (think Baconator but from BK) and a poutine from Burger Thing.

In retrospect, that was probably too much grease.

But dammit, sometimes my French blood cries out for cholesterol!

Anyhow, then I took a very large poop – so far so good. Better out than in and all that. But then my body wanted to just keep on going.

So since then, I have have two diarrhea poops. Nothing that threatens the bedsheets or anything, but still mildly unpleasant. Felt…. wrong, somehow.

And now I still have this weird cold crampy feeling in my digestive system. Like my guts are full of greasy ice cubes.

Not fun, folks.

So I consider myself to be on yellow alert, irritable bowl syndrome wise. I know that I might get worse at any point if I am not careful. So I will be monitoring my situation, especially when I go eat at Denny’s later.

Think I will get a salad as my appy instead of my usual chicken noodle soup. The last thing I need right now is a fat-bearing fluid like my beloved chicken noodle soup.

What I need is a good layer of cellulose from a salad to give my stomach something solid and resistant to digestion to work on for a while.

My IBS is always a little worse in the summer, when it can team up with my tendency towards dehydration and heatstroke to make me truly miserable.

Plus, I ran out of my antihistamine, and I have been sneezing, and that means that the whole system-wide inflammatory response that comes with my hay fever is also in play and ready to make me still more miserable.

So things are rather tricky at the moment.

Oh right, before I forget : I count. I matter. I contribute. I help. I am not a burden or a liability. People are very happy that I am around and would hate for me to go away. I bring joy and fun and warmth to people. They value me highly.

Lots of people want me around. They are happy to see me and sad to see me go. I am welcome in their presence. I fit in just fine with them.

I have value, I am worthy. I am wanted. I am needed. I am good to have around.

I assert these truths to banish my dark delusions and bring myself into the good clean pure wholesome light of day, and let the sunshine disinfect me.

I am glad to burn for this purification. I eat this pain. Bring it on, I hunger for mere suffering. Pain is good, it reminds me that I am alive and cuts through all this god damned fog in my head.

I decided a while ago that I would rather feel pain than feel nothing. And somewhere deep inside my psyche is a new me waiting to be born.

And birth is never easy.,

But god, am I ready,.

Back after the break.

---

I still feel resistance to these affirmations of mine.

That’s kind of the point, though. If there was no resistance, I wouldn’t have to do them. The idea is to keep affirming the truth until I fully accept it.

And a lot of resistance is mere friction – resistance to change. Change is scary. It requires us to explore and claim new territory instead of staying with the familiar.

And that remains true even when the familiar sucks.

Call it the “the devil you know” effect.

We always fear the unknown. It acts as a blank canvas on which we can project all our hopes, wishes, dreams…. and fears.

So for a person like me with severe trust/control issues, unknown = bad, no matter how illogical that is. I only trust the known and because my sense of safety was shattered at such an early age, I automatically assume only that which I know to be safe is safe.

But I am repeating myself.

Loving and valuing myself represents the unknown to me now,. so as positive and wonderful and joyous as it is, still, I fear it as well.

But there is definitely no going back now. These worms cannot be re-canned. Once I am fully conscious of the truth, it can’t be suppressed again.

There is no reverse gear on my train of thought.

So it’s just a matter of persistence versus resistance. My conscious mind is fully on board and it’s just a matter of slowly and steadily pushing the truth through all the layers of my subconscious mind till it is truly,.deeply, and completely believed.

As I have said before in this space long and ever ago, knowing and believing are two entirely different things.

And they operate on their own set of rules.

It’s possible to believe something without knowing it… that’s called faith.

I’ve heard good things about that.

And it’s possible to know things without believing them – that doesn’t have a name that I know of, but it’s extremelty common.

The most base form of knowing I can think of is “knowing the right answer”. That means that, if asked, you will give the “right” answer, but absolutely none of the emotional connections that answer should logically have are active or present.

So if someone asked me, “Are you an awful thing?” , the previous version of myself would tiredly say no, because that is the “right” answer and the one that will result in the least social complications, but I wouldn’t feel it at all.

As things are now, I feel it, but the feelings are a thin and threadbare thing. A tender shoot pushing up through the snow to signal spring.

As I continue to strengthen and nourish it, it will grown thick and strong, and one day it will be a mighty towering oak of self-love that acts as shelter, support, and nourishment for a hale and heart soul, and my long winter of the spirit will finally be over.

I died when I was raped.

But soon, I will live again.

SO IT SHALL BE!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First : I contribute. I am not a burden. I am a worthy human being who has nothing to be ashamed of and who deserves everything good in life. My illness might make me an invalid sometimes but it doesn’t invalidate me. I am just another person with burdens.

Like I said before, I am going to keep on affirming that stuff daily until I am convinced that I have pounded it deep enough into my skull for it to take hold and grow.

Right now, I want to tackle my fee;ling of not being a real person. Of illegitamacy.

We will start at the basics : obviously, viewed from the outside, I am as real, legitimate, and as much of a person as anyone else.

I know this feeling of mine is crazy. That doesn’t make it go away.

Clearly this belief is the product of my mental illness. But let’s parse it a little deeper and see what we can discover.

One layer : that deep feeling of emptiness that is the core of depression. This is a result of lack of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. In a healthy mind, this lack would simply be the root of motivations as it creates a feeling of lack that directs people towards making sure their needs are met.

But depression breaks that healthy cycle, and the craving becomes all-encompassing and universalized and impossible to satiate.

Going a little deeper, the next layer has to do with the terrible soul-crushing numbness that depression creates. This numbness has deep consequences beyond simply being a constant unpleasant feeling.

Reality tells us who and where we are via the feedback we get from our environment. It’s a complex feedback loop which would take a long time to explain, but for our purposes, we will just focus on the fact that the numbness of depression damps down that environmental feedback and leaves the depressive with a feeling of unreality.

Some depressives response to that numbness via self-herm, like cutting. This extreme self-therapy works because the pain and shock cut through the numbness and that gives the depression the long-craved feeling of reality.

Never went there myself. Glad I didn’t hear about it till I was an adult, though. I might have tried it when I was a depressed teen and there were times when I was so numb that I was capable of anything.

I feel the same way about school shootings.

My response to the terrible numbness was to question my own reality. That seems extreme,but the alternative was to doubt reality itself, and that seems like a much scarier and more dangerous path to me.

Thus we arrive at the next layer down : my own personal issues. My numbness resulted in my doubting my own reality because for a lot of my childhood, I was treated as if I was not there. I was ignored, and given the clear message that I should just be quiet and not remind people of my existance and try to stay out of the way at all times.

So no wonder I question my own existence. How you treat your kids becomes their entire reality, and so if you treat them like they don’t exist, they will believe you.

Nobody planned it that way and nobody ever told it to me either. But how you treat your kid weighs a hell of a lot more than anything you say to them.

Words can fuck them up too, though. Like being told you’re useless.

So from that craptastic childhood came a deep feeling of illegitimacy. Between my family, my teachers, and my classmates, so many people made it clear that they wished I didn’t exist that I started to imagine that I didn’t exist purely in self-defense.

In effect, they nullified me. Negated me. I had absolutely no right to exist.

And that’s the kind of thing that can really fuck with a guy.

This feeling of illegitamacy. ergo and therefore, has very deep roots in me. It goes all the way back to my early childhood and everything in my life after that seemed to confirm the notion that I didn’t exist and I wasn’t important and I deserved absolutely nothing , not even existance.

I mean, just think of all the other, worthier lifeforms that could be using the organic molecules currently being wasted by being forced to be me.

Part of me still feels that way. And excising that part of me will require giving it voice now and then, partly for emotional release, and partly to expose it to the powers of my rational mind and watch it wither and die in the sun, like a vampire.

It’s my favorite show, that. Would binge.

SO I hereby declare myself to be officially legitimate. Consider my life passport to be stamped, punched, and verified. I deserve to be here as much as anybody else, and at the risk of repeating myself, I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Not even the fact that I ended that with a preposition.

I have spent a lifetime feeling like I should be constantly apologizing for my very existence. I was an unplanned child and was treated like an unwelcome intrusion once the novelty wore off and people stopped being amazed and amused by how bright and cute I was.

No wonder I have such a strong drive to please and entertain and fascinate people. The withdrawal of attention at such an early age left me with a desperate need to get people to pay attention to me any way I can.

Attention is something I will crave till the day I die, more or less.

Part of me is trying to recapture that golden time where I got tons of positive attention and praise just for being myself.

Well. okay, maybe not. That actually sounds super creepy and irritating in an adult context. As an adult, I’d want praise for things I actually do.

I mean, sure, I want people to think I am brilliant and amazing, but there’s got to be more to it than that.

So in conclusion, I feel illegitimate for a lot of legitimate reasons.

But the feeling itself is as illegitimate as hell.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Went and got my dressing changed today. At 11 am, even though my original appointment was for 2:30 pm.

That makes two Fridays in a row that they have called on Thursday to change the time of my appointment due to “understaffing”.

If it happens a third time, I am going to complain. I mean, are they competent to keep an appointment or aren’t they?

I resent these little disruptions and it gives me doubts about my care that I could do without, thank ye kindly.

Still, the nurses there are all highly competent and pleasant. So I don’t really have an issue with my care per se.

Still, get your shit together people.

The good news is that it does look like my wound is healing. It’s smaller than before and it looks like my body is making some kind of attempt to close the wound.

It’s gone to be a long time before it is fully healed, but the outlook is good.

I choose to attribute the progress to my cutting out a lot of the carbs from my diet. That has to have had a good effect on my blood sugars.

Intriguingly, since I made the switch, I have been a lot less hungry. That goddamned nagging hyper-hunger that I have dealing with for months totally disappeared, which suggests that my theory of its origin is possibly flawed.

There’s so much I don’t know about endocrinology.

Right now, that fucking hyperphagic hunger is back because I thoughtlessly bought some Ritz crackers for snacking, totally forgetting the anti-carb thing.

No carbs = no hunger.
Carbs = hunger returns.

I’d say the principle is proven.

Obviously, I need to get off my ginormous buttcheeks and get myself a glucose meter already. But alas, it remains in what the fabulous Felicity calls a “gumption trap”.

It’s a kind of motivational sinkhole that we depressives fall into where we reach a step in a process that is too complicated, scary, or hard for us, and that robs us of all motivation to continue the process, and so we stall out and end up stranded there.

Kind of like having your car go into a ditch.

Hopefully, I will eventually generate the necessary burst of horsepower to free myself from the ditch and get the goddamned thing done some time soon.

Too bad I can’t just call CAA and get them to send a tow truck.

Affirmation time : I contribute. I count. I am not a liability. I make people happy just by being around. I make the world a better place by being in it.

Repeat until believed.

Seriously. I am going to keep typing that into my blog until I am sure I believe it fully.

it has the power to crack my depression wide open and cauterize some very old wounds and free me from a lot of deep existential guilt.

As in, feeling guilty just for being alive and inconveniencing everyone.

Because if I am not a liability, I am not a burden anymore either.

I pay my way in my own way.

And that, my friends, is huge.

---

I’m sure if you asked the people who know and love me, they would say I am definitely worth having around. They don’t see me as a liability or a burden.

Well, maybe a bit of a burden,. But worth it.

In fact, I like to think they see me as the unique and amazing critter I am. Charming, cute, silly, witty, funny (not the same thing), and sweet, and unlike anyone they have ever met before.

Plus I have a mind that flashes and crackles with intelligence and a unique way of looking at the world that pierces the bullshit and finds glitter gems of truth hidden in the fog of the social illusion.

I can feel part of me resisting all these uncomfortably positive truths. It wants nothing more than to crawl back into its hole and forget all these strange and disruptive thoughts in favour of the cool dark comfort of depression’s chill embrace.

Well fuck that. I am going to build an entirely new sense of self out of these thoughts, and anything that resists or gets in the way shall be burned out with the eye of the sun itself as it puts all the poison and filth inside me to the flame.

Burn, you son of a bitch. BURN. Burn until you DIE.

I’m setting my mind on PURGE. Everything that is not part of healthy happy me must go. It’s like a find-and-delete for my soul.

I’m a good person. I am worthy. I deserve my fair share of the good things in life. I have spent most of my life in cringing apology for being alive and having wants and needs and desires that might, in theory, take away from those more worthy than myself.

Which is everybody.

Well the apologies end here. I have nothing to be ashamed of and I do not have to live on whatever happens to fall from the heavens when people feel like throwing a few scraps to the dog they only occasionally remember they bought.

So my family never made space for me or made me part of the family. So they never ever treated me like an equal or even a worthy inferior. So they made me feel like they wished I would just go away forever. So they never even redistributed all the good things so that I got some, too.

That was then. And it was awful. But it was a long time ago, and I don’t have to keep thinking of myself the way they did.

I’m a strong, tough, capable, useful person who is perfectly able to take care of himself and make his way through life with some dignity and pride.

I don’t have to always rely on the kindness of others.

I don’t have to advertise my patheticness in the hopes of garnering pity.

I don’t have to accept that I am not built for survival.

Whatever problems I have can be overcome, just like any other disability.

And some day soon, I will feel like a real person for the first time in 42 years.

And it will be glorious.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There is no culture war.

It has never truly been one. The media likes to imagine the struggle as being like two cultural nations at war with one another.

That makes it simple and emotionally driven for media types to understand.

So they sell it as not just liberal versus conservative, but car versus truck, rock versus country, kale versus steak, or any other completely irrelevant difference between the two camps they can seize upon and say to both sides”They hate you for being yourself! Are you going to take that from them?”.

But the thing is, neither side is actually trying to destroy the other. Most people, when they have a chance to cool off, agree that people should just live and let live, and that differences in taste are simply a difference in personal preference, and not morality.

So it’s not, at its heart, a culture war. Both sides think they are acting in self-defense and have little to no interest in forcing their culture on the other, merely defending their own from the supposed attacks of the other.

But difference is not an attack.

This is the gravest failure to distinguish between morality and taste I can think of. It’s a fake war, a phony conflict, and the stakes are very high.

The real conflict is purely an ethical one. And even that is mostly fake, because if you put it in neutral terms, you would find both sides feel the same about most things, and it’s only media fueled madness that causes that to get lost.

It is therefore up to us to learn to see beyond this dangerous delusion and see the fundamental humanist truth of the situation – that there is more that unites us than divides us and we have far more in common than we could ever differ.

That’s even true genetically. Every human being’s genetic code is 99.99 percent identical. All our differences lie in that last 0.01 percent.

But oh, what a fuss we make over it!

This phony divide between people is currently tearing America apart, and doing a lot of damage to the rest of the world’s democracies as well.

So here is what I propose : that as many prominent people from both sides sign a symbolic document saying that they are not looking to force anything on anyone, that the culture war is media bullshit, that they don’t hate the other side or want to destroy everything they hold dear, and that with this symbolic act, they are declaring a ceasefire so that both sides can figure out what the hell they really believe, and do their solid best to remember that people are not their politics, people that are mad at each other say all kinds of crazy shit that they don’t believe, that the media thrives on conflict as stokes it whenever they can, and that at the end of day, we’re all just people with jobs trying to make our way through life.

We could stop this crazy train dead in its tracks.

We just need to remember that we are human.

---

Wow. Sometimes I look at the sort of thing I write when I am in Jesus mode and wonder who the heck that guy is.

My better side, I suppose.

But I am no saint. Instead, I am just another human trying to make sense of this era of blood and fire and pandemonium.

The truth is that, as much as I want peace as outlined above, another part of me is a hardcore truth warrior who wants to come roaring out of the gates and kill the shit out of all the filthy and hateful lies I see.

And if that hurts the people promulagating those toxic ideas when it happens, I am one hundred percent okay with that.

Next time trying thinking, asshole. And caring.

Listen to Jesus, at least.

This is a great and terrible era to live in. We live in interesting times. No doubt future historians will be pouring over the records of this era and asking themselves how it got this way and how they can keep it from ever happening again.

I know how Trump got elected despite the fact that nobody, including himself. thought he could win.

Forgot about the ideological issues for the moment – he won because he hired very, very good political flunkies.

Ones who know all the in and outs of the electoral college and all the dirty tricks you can pull to get your candidate those sweet, sweet electoral college votes even though they did not really win them.

Now of course, none of that would have mattered if Trump had not found fertile ground for his xenophobic message. But it was not that everyone who voted for him is a racist, or even semi-racist.

Because you have to remember that, just as with Brexit, the voters did not think he could win either. So they saw no harm in voting for him as a way to tell the system that had forgotten them and told them they were wrong for being who they were that it can go fuck itself sideways with a rubber cactus, thank you kindly.

Once Trump won, though, everyone on the right felt they had to line up behind him and stick with him to the bitter end because loyalty is a huge part of the conservative character and he was “their guy”, so they owed him their support.

Backing the guy no matter what is not without its costs, though. Trust me, they are hurting. That’s why they are so touchy and sensitive. Part of them knows exactly how terrible he is, and suffers like a sick animal because of it.

That’s why he has lost a lot of his base.

The remainder are the people who simply see no way out and so they are going to keep fighting even as history rolls over them like a steamroller.

They are simply not capable of the sort of mental flexibility it takes to turn on one of their own. There is a level of coldblooded calculation involved in doing so, and a lot of people just won’t (or can’t) go there.

So here we are, in the realm of the mad king, wondering what fresh hell comes next.

If only we could all agree to ignore him.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the thing.

I make a lot of people happy. Just by being me.

I make people laugh. I warm them with my affectionate nature. I shine for them. I fascinate them with the things I say and my unique perspective on things. I amuse them with my oddball charm. And I give them someone warm and soft and safe in their lives.

I am saying this not to boast but to remind myself that I am not as worthless, useless, and pointless as my depression insists that I am. And that I am not a liability on this world, a world that would be better off without me.

I contribute. I matter. I do things that make the world a better place. The fact that I do it by simply doing what makes sense to me doesn’t detract from the value of my contributions at all.

Nor does it matter that none of it is the kind of thing one gets paid for.

I am a part of things. I need to remember this. Depression lies, and it’s been tell me I am nothing but a drain on society and all who know me for a very long time.

And I have known that it was a lie…. technically… for a while too.

But it didn’t feel like a lie. My depression did a good job of keeping me from connecting the dots emotionally even though they were connected intellectually.

But that’s over now. Fuck that noise.

I think the difference is the one between knowing people don’t hate me and in fact life me and realizing that I actually contribute something by being around and being me.

Knowing that gives me a sene of worth, and I desperately need that. I have felt less than worthless for a real long time, and as a result, I felt guilty just for being alive and being such a burden on everyone.

Shades of my childhood there. Being told by my sister Catherine that I was useless, and that if I wanted to help,. I should just stay out of the way.

And boy did I get good at staying out of the way.

That’s a tape that has never stopped playing in my head. It’s lead to my feeling completely incompetent at life and trying to do the right thing by not trying to help and just staying out of the way.

And it’s true that I have certain hand-eye coordination and general visual difficulties. But I am sure that if I could just keep cal and keep trying on something not too challenging for me, I could work through them.

My brain would route around the damage and I would develop my own way of doing things that works for me.

It would do me so much good to feel like I can take care of myself.

Maybe that’s the real reason I keep wanting to move out on my own.

After all, if I lived alone, I would have no choice but to look after myself, right?

Let’s leave it there.

Back after the break.

---

Been to comedy at the Kingwood and back.

Plenty of comics tonight. A couple of rude assholes who insisted on talking loudly and trying to insert themselves into the show.

Sign up if you want to talk during the show, assholes. We will give you a whole ten minutes to say whatever you want all by yourself!

Unless, of course, there’s an asshole like you in the audience.

Then you’ll be lucky to get a word in edgewise.

As is usual when I have been to said open mike night, I feel the urge to do stand up comedy myself slowly creeping up.

I know I can be funny. I know I can tell jokes. I know that I can connect with audiences. Really, name a stand up comedy skill and I probably have it.

So it’s really just a matter of working up the nerve to actually do it.

But then again, that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Courage.

I am working on it.

I contribute. I matter. I am not a liability. I am an asset.

Trying to make sure I don’t forget it.

Really tired at the moment. Oh, that reminds me, something unusual and nice happened this morning.

As usual, I laid down in bed around 1:30 am after watching stuffwith Joe and Julian. Usually, what happens is I rest for maybe 45 minjutes, then get up and play video games for a couple of hours.

But this time, I feel asleep and just kept sleeping. All in all,. I slept from 2 am to 8 am, with a couple of breaks to get up and pee.

But then, right back to bed.

So I got 6 hours of constant-ish sleep in a row, and that is utterly unheard of around here. I usually can’t sleep for more than three hours tops.

And when I wake up from that kind of sleep, going right back to bed is out of the question. It takes me a long time to cool down enough to sleep again.

But not this time. And I am pickled tink about it. I can easily tell that it did me a lot of good. I feel less tense and more relaxed than usual, and it’s easier to think and (surprisingly) easier to feel as well.

It feels like my whole mind has more room to manuever, if that makes sense. Probably because I took a big bite out of the backlog of half-processed memories that usually take up so much space in my cognitive workshop.

Picture boxes everywhere.

How did this come to pass? Well I have cut way back on carbs, so that’s a step in the right direction. Junk food as a side dish has been replaced with almonds and peanuts. I have gone a few days sans bread.

So that might be a factor.

Plus my recent revelations of my actual worth probably helped clear some garbage out of my head by breaking up some of the logjam.

I will not give up this recent progress. I can feel the sticky fingers of my depression trying to pull the positive truth away when I am not paying attention, and I simply will put up with it. I won’t allow it.

So I will do whatever it takes to keep the information alive. I will resist the gravity pull of my depression and when it comes to me with its lullaby about how good it will feel to just let go, I will blast it in the face with a flamethrower and tell it to fuck right off.

Never give up. Never surrender. This is the new normal. Get used to it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.