It’s never been particularly…. stable.

How could it be, when my inner life dominates my outer so strongly?

Today, I realized that when I retreated in response to being raped when I was 4, it didn’t just make me awkward and timid.

By cutting myself off from reality to such a large degree, it left me in a permanent state of mild dissocation. I am never quite all here, wherever here is.

Even when I am out in the world and talking to people and interacting with reality to my fullest extent, I am never more than around half present.

The rest of me is still hiding inside the labyrinth of my mind, extending puppets on tentacles who pretend to be me.

View in this light, it is no wonder my personal reality has always been somewhat unstable. Not to the point of psychosis, thankfully…. it’s how reality feels to me that changes all the time.

So far that hasn’t bled over into actual hallucinations yet, knock on wood.

Although I dunno. I might go for the occasional psychotic break if I felt better the rest of the time. It’s this constant dangling on the brink of madness that wears me out.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll just jump.

The thing is, it doesn’t take Freud to figure out that if one’s personal reality is unstable, it tends to make one rather insecure. I honestly don’t know how the world is going to feel to me at any given moment, and that goes double in regards to how it will feel when I have just woken up.

That’s made me a very conservative (as in risk averse) person. When your interior landscape is constantly in flux, you end up in the conservative trap of focsing on safety above all other concerns.

That always turns out badly. The great irony is that focusing on safety is very dangerous. A healthy life involves a certain degree of risk, and concerns for personal safety must be balanced with other concerns or you end up in a very bad space.

Like I am in right now. In order to be “safe”, I isolate myself rather severely and cut myself off from a lot of vital emotional nutrients, and that leads to my living in a state of near constant starvation.

By any rational definition, my current life is anything but “safe”. But it feels safe because it’s familiar and has extremely low physical stimulation and so it is “safe” only in the sense that is does not provoke anxiety.

Well, not much, anyhow.

Anxiety riles up my chaotic inner world,and causes it to demand even more of my mental resources, thus pulling me away from reality all the harder while I desperately cling to whatever connection to the real world remains.

This happens all the time. To me, it’s normal. Fighting the forces inside me that try to drag me down into my own personal hell of no more connection to reality is something that I do without even thinking about it.

Like I have said here before, my absolute worst fear is to be trapped in my own mind, with no more connection to the real world to use to stabilize myself and reassure myself that it, and I, are real and not going anywhere.

Kind of puts my hardcore rational materialist POV into perspective, doesn’t it?

I don’t just use illusions to escape reality.

I use reality to escape my illusions.

I will be back after a break.

---

I don’t know what to do with all this.

I feel so frustrated and angry at this moment that I could scream.

Relax, though, nothing serious has happened. It’s just my fucking video games.

In Neverwinter Nights(NWN), everything was going swimmingly as I made my way through Hordes of the Underdark, an official expansion module for it. My little female dwarf kung fu monk was kicking amazing quantities of butt along with my compansions, a half-demon fighter and the cutest little lizard-boy bard/sorceror ever, Deekin.

I am seriously attached to that little guy. Here’s some of the reasons why :

Anyhow, everything was going great, then suddenly the game got way, way harder. As in, one minute I could take out damn near anything as long I was cautious and played my cards right, and the next even the most basic monsters could take me out fast.

That should not happen. Gamers like me hate that shit.

Over the last few days, this has given me more than a few moments where I felt like the fight I was on was impossible for me and I was tempted to quit my current campaign and start over with a different kind of character.

Like a sorceror, for instance. With fireballs.

Today, that culminated in a fight I have no idea how to even begin to win. My mind boggles at how frigging unfair it is. I get jumped by five super powerful characters with no chance to avoid them or escape and I have tried so many things but still, nothing.

It doesn’t help that before that, I was playing a recent acquisition, Lords of the Fallen (LOTF) , which is made in the style of a series called Dark Souls (DS) which is notorious for its sharp learning curve. LOTF is not as hard as DS, but it still ain’t easy.

I die a lot. This is normal.

After rage-quitting NWN, I stupidly decided to play Doom (2016) to blow off some steam, having forgotten that my current game of Doom is stalled at a super hard fight just like my NWN.

Then, to top it all off, Joe pokes his head into the room to tell me that he’s talking with Felicity about us leaving to hang out with her at 6 pm when the last I had heard was us leaving at 7:30 pm.

Don’t DO that to me. Patient readers know how badly I react to sudden changes. That kind of disruption can throw me off for a whole evening.

I told him I couldn’t go before 6:30 pm as I still needed to do Blogging Part 2.

As it turns out, I am almost done, and it’s not even 5:30 pm yet. So 6 pm was doable after all. But better safe than sorry.

I feel better having told you nice people all that. So I guess I did know what to do with it.

Write it out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am having a heck of a time trying to sort some shit out.

So let’s start here :

Postulated : my feelings of sadness, anger, and frustration are real, legit emotional reactions to all the pain stemming from my desire and attempts to grow the hell up.

Ergo : Suppression of these feelings in an attempt to make my life more comfortable, easier, and more predictable are doomed to failure. One way or the other, I want to make peace with these feelings by cutting some sort of deal with them.

Underline this : Said deal must contain actual action, at least in potentia. There is only so much that can be done via rearranging the symbols in my mind like I have been doing all this time with all my blogging and therapy, and I am not going to find the liberation I seek unless I open myself to real action.

As in, doing stuff. Not just thinking about things, or analyzing them, or expressing some of my pent up emotion in order.

Real, actual, actions.

This thought terrifies me, of course. I have been a scared little animal desperately holding still and hiding while my predators sniff around for a very long ime, and disabusing myself of the deep-wired feeling that action means being caught and being caught means the end of all things is not going to be easy.

But it’s better than drowning on the inside as life passes me by with a vengeance.

The trickiest part is learning to redirect my energies inot fruitful action instead of what I have now, where the energy, with nowhere to go, just hangs around in my systems making me sad, angry, depressed, and just plain lost.

Thing is, when I am feeling that way, I want to do things even less than normal, and that’s when that part of me that turns away and cries and keeps me from truly doing anything productive is at its strongest.

So in order to get past that will probably take an extraordinary act of will. And that will take some time to get together given how scattered my will tends to be.

This is not a solution I like. It is crude and brutal. I would prefer something more efficient and elegant, but for now, it’s the best solution I have.

I keep feeling the urge to become a harder, less sensitive, more selfish person. An asshole, more or less.

My dark side is making a lot of noise and telling me only it can set me free.

And it’s getting harder to argue against it every day.

Maybe my whole problem is that I keep trying to force myself into a mold of my own ideals instead of finding out who I am and working from there.

I am my own brutal alpha dom.

Perhaps this urge to be more selfish and hard is not as terrible as it sounds. Maybe all it means is that I need to move in that direction. Not that I have to go to the opposite extreme, like I so often do.

And I don’t know why.

Neither does Billy Joel.

I will be back after a short nap.

---

And I am back. Nap taken. I am not exactly jumping for joy or anything, but I am at least awake enough to finish this dang thing.

I’ve been trying to cut down on the napping. I know that sleeping in two to three hour bursts instead of the tradition eight hour block is not good fo me.

And while I can’t even imagine sleeping for an entire eight hours in a row (how to people do it?), I can at least make the naps bigger, less frequent, and preferably always at night not during the day .

That would be practically natural. Weird, I know, but at least point, I’ll try anything.

Right now, I am in my default state. On many things. That is what happens when your depression makes it so hard to take any kind of focused, coordinated action.

Despite all my intellect and talent, I just keep drifting along, letting the days go by.

Oh, but this rabbit has a much deeper hole. Because when I try to get myself to perk up and steer this fucking canoe of mine, or at least paddle, that’s when the real demons of my subconscious mind come out and hit me with waves of paralytic anxiety and that all too familiar icy cold feeling of doom and dread.

Result : total inaction. Eventually, I give up trying, because trying to force my will through this paralysis hurts, and going back to passivity makes it stop.

If I could summon up all my stubbornness and bloody-minded determination and use it to just keep moving forward when the interior blizzard blows in, I might get somewhere.

And that’s what I want. Sorta kinda.

That’s the real problem, of course. I am conflicted about the whole thing, much to my shame. As much as the conscious me wants to good forward with my life and finally get to grow the fuck up, my subconscious mind is not at all convinced and does everything it can to keep me in my place.

Stalemate. That’s what my life has been for 25 years.

I want freedom. But I don’t want to abandon safety.

Clearly, this is a major conflict in my psyche. Freedom always comes at the cost of risk. In order to truly be free, you have to be willing to abandon a fixed definition of safety that comes from hyper-controlling your circumstances and switch, instead. to a dynamic version of safety that comes from confidence in your ability to handle whatever life throws at you.

Problem is, I totally lackthat kind of confidence. I always feel extremely vulnerable to the cruel whims of fate and have no faith in my ability to handle whatever.

Maybe I could “fake it till I make it”. I don’t know.

But right at this moment, I just want to retreat from reality all the harder.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You guys are still out there, right?

Another sleepy fucking day. I am getting a little worried. So far, it’s within known parameters – I have had periods like this before.

And hated it each time, god dammit.

But this weak, heavy feeling is new. And I don’t like it, either.

Maybe it’s not new. Maybe it’s always been there during these periods and I just never noticed it before. Abnd now that my neuroses have attached to it as somethng to obsess and worry about, they are quite reluctant to let it go.

After all, torturing me is their only hobby.

Right now it’s bad but not too bad. I am more awake than I was at this time yesterday. I am still quite likely toi lay down for a nap when I take a break, but at least today, it feels somewhat optional instead of as inevitable as entropy.

Yesterday it was taking all the thrust I could muster just to resist the pull of my deep gravity well enough to stay in one place. The second I let up, boom, sleep.

My metaphors are so nerdy.

Right now, I am not finding staying awake super hard. Part of me still wishes I was safe and sound in the loving arms of sleep^[1], and the words are definitely not coming easy for me right now, but it ain’t too bad.

It’s just that there’s so much to do, and I’m tired of sleeping.

I’ve been getting lots of sleep, but it’s the kind of sleep that kicks my ass. The kind that leaves me feeling worse than I did when I went to sleep. Like I have run a marathon in the cold then taken a severe beating.

Smothering in your sleep will do that for you.

Oh well, I at least I have FRED to look forward to, and after that, when I do my Sunday shopping, I will have the tiny adventure of only buying non-carb-loaded snacks like almonds, peanuts, and whatever kind of dried-pea snacks I can find at Sav-On.

I hope they have wasabi peas. Those are my favorite.

Been pondering my damage. The wall within. I feel that being able to conceptualize it as a seperate and distinct aspect of my mind is a huge leap forward in my recovery.

In my stronger moments, I can even direct my will against it and in doing so, cause it to melt and crack and start to crumble.

It’s slow now, but the process will get faster as it goes.

I think of escape often. Running away like I have discussed here. Or dreaming of being able to just check myself in to a mental health institution and have them take care of me in a thorough and intensive way until I am healthy enough to make it on my own.

Fat chance of that. They only care about psychotics. Us mere depressives are not worth their time unless we do something exciting, like try to kill ourselves.

Nobody gives a shit about us quiet crazies.

I will be back later.

---

The thing about becoming conscious of my damage is that now I know exactly how and why I am crazy.

And from my current POV, it seems strange that I went so long not being able to see or feel this terrible injury of mine.

I suppose I had to be strong enough first. Strong enough to handle the shock, strong enough to make the seperation, strong enough to pull this scab off and look at the nasty mess of compacted and infected scar tissue underneath.

Strong enough to strain against this new barrier and push it back like an incoming tide.

Slow but inevitable.

I certainly can summon lots of rage against it. I never have any trouble getting angry at being trapped, limited, or restricted. Now that I have successfully conceptualized it as a wall of ice wrapped around my soul, my inherent loathing of anything that dares to think it can hold me back can do its work.

Of course, then I run into the container conundrum – a liquid like me inherently fights being contained while also being terrified of what would happen if we did not have a nice safe cozy container to keep us together when we get tired.

Retaining a shape can be very draining. We need Odo’s bucket to relax in.

Right now, I am perfectly willing to shatter this container of mine. The one getting raped at 4 forced me to build around myself. The one that cuts me off from the rest of humanity and strands me in the cold and the dark as I starve for affection and approval and simple human contact.

Everything I have ever wanted is waiting for me on the other side of that barrier.

You’re damned right I am going to smash it.

And if that means I lose my shape and end up spreading out like a puddle till I evaporate, that’s fnine by me.

Like I said before, I no longer believe that it is possible to harm oneself via any conscious act of the mind. Even if I dry up, I will still be around.

Heck, maybe all that will really happen is that the true me that has buried under all that water and ice will finally emerge, and know what it is like to be dry and warm for the first time in 42 years.

I am amazing with metaphors.

Whatever it takes to escape my lonesome prison cell, I will do. I have reached the point where animals gnaw off a limb to escape a trap.

If I have to cut off a big part of me to get out of this cage, I will do it.

I have nothing within me that is more important than my liberation.

I will change whatever I have to in order to be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Having a super, super sleepy day.

And hating it, natch. It seems like no matter how much I sleep, I stay sleepy. Like I am just plain accomplishing nothing with all my napping, and yet I don’t have a choice either. I am too tired to stay awake.

I suppose I am catching up on REMs or somesuch. That would be the prudent and sensible explanation. Between sleep apnea and depression I have more than enough reason to have sleep difficulties and this is probably just a matter of sleep debt coming due and deamnding I at least pay the interest charges.

But it feels different, somehow. Yesterday afternoon, not long after I got home from wound care, I felt very very weal. Like I was being sucked towards the ground. Like even just standing up seemed burdensome and insane.

It went away after a nap, but it was pretty scary. And now I am having this day where I sleep for hours and hours without getting any less sleepy.

I mean, it’s 7:20 pm, I have slept all day, and yet I am fighting sleep just to type these simple words to you wonderful people. I only have to stop typing for half a second and I start to fall asleep.

This is verging on narcolepsy.

And like I always end up saying, I wish I could be all cool and calm and Zen about it. I wish I could just accept that this is what my body needs and take it as a chance to becalm myself and enjoy the relaxation.

But I can’t. I want to be awake, dammit. I want to be awake and aware and doing things, not sleeping all goddamned day. I want to live the sad little life I have, not sleep through it like I am fucking hibernating.

Or estivating. Whatever.

And so I fight it and resent it and grumble about it on my blog.

As is, I am starting to worry that I won’t be awake to receive the Indian food I ordered. Skip the Dishes says it will be here in 47 minutes, and that seems very far away at the moment. Like a season away.

Oh well, I will keep myself away somehow. Maybe I will do something radical and start in on my Diet Coke before my meal.

Trust me, in my predictable life, that is pure outside the box madness.

What’s next, eating between meals??

One thing I should do is just get up and move around some. It’s easy to be sleepy when you’re basically being a barnacle on the hull of the ship of life.

Moving around a bit might wake me up enouigh to make this whole dealie easier.

Being super hungry will help too. Maybe too hungry – I will have to see how I feel after I have eaten my lamb rogan josh.

If I am still crazy hungry, I will know that I need to inject some insulin so that the glucose in my blood ends up feeding my cells instead of just circulating and damaging my organs and blood vessels and such.

I’mma gonna take a break to get dressed and play some video games and chill.

I’ll be back after the break.

---

I am now full of curry and rice and a banana. And yup, still hungry. Insulin time.

I think I am getting closer to being able to just pick a glucometer and order it without worrying about if it’s the “right” one.

After all, as long as it performs the basic task, it’s good enough, and it’s not like there’s a lot of possibility for bells and whistles anyhow.

Especially since “alternate site testing” – in order words, being able to get blood from someplace OTHER than the densest nerve clusters in the human body – seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth.

And I don’t know why. If I could still get the blood from my arms or thighs, my compliance level would skyrocket. Having to lance my fucking fingertips is the exact issue that made me stop testing in the first place.

And I am not happy about having to go back to that either. Makes me wish once against that the new blood-free system was not so goddamned expensive.

I could buy the meter. But the sensors come to like $150-$300/month.

Which is bullshit, by the way. No need for them to be disposable like that. Except, of course, that they can gouge more money out of us disabled people that way.

Maybe I should put up a GoFundMe for it. That would be hilarious, a Canadian looking for help with medical expenses. How scandalous!

I can’t quite call it a necessary medical expense. The other meters work fine. I could get the same results without it.

But I can make the argument that it will improve my outcomes because I will not have to force myself to do a horribly painful thing in order to get a damned result.

In fact the new system produces a result once a minute, and saves all that data so you can download it to an app and, presumably, play around with it some.

I love playing around with data.

Oh well, I am sure that any day now, I will suddenly snap out of my funk and leap onto UpWork and start earning the big bucks as a freelance writer.

Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Sleep is calling for me again. Son of a bitch, it never ends, not even when I have a liter of Diet Coke in me.

All that does is make me more sharply aware of how tired I am.

Hopefully I will catch up on sleep at some point and this will be behind me for a while.

For the record, the insulin has made me feel a lot better. That psychotic hunger that means I am out of whack is almost totally gone.

Now to once more sleep the sleep of the dead.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I find myself increasingly imagining myself as someone who is explaining something to a group of adults in the style of a lecturing professor.

Like I am giving a TED talk, or making an “explainer” video with a live audience.

I have always had a sort of inner lecturer. A voice that explains my thoughts as part of my inner monologue. It helps me process what I am thinking about, as well as, I just realized, being pretty good practice for being a writer. ^[1]

It is all about developing your organ of articulation. That magic machine that turns thoughts into words and words into the written word.

Anyhow, what has changed recently is that this phenomenon seems more real an specific now. Instead of it being a half-formed inner voice talking to nobody in particular, it is now my actual voice and there is a distinct image in my mind of an audience and the “slides” (or whatever) I am using to illustrate my points and even the way my voice sounds over the PA.

At least it’s a functional delusion.

This all has me pondering making videos where I explain my ideas. Proper ones, with lots of pictures and captions and other fun stuff, not like those very dull ones I made ages ago where I am just talking to the camera and looking naked.

In fact, the easiest thing would be to just take those videos and add all the visual kibble necessary to make it a video worth watching and not just an audio lecture with an entirely superfluous bearded dude cluttering up the screen.

There are all kinds of videos I could make where I maximize my personal magnetism and trade hard on my inherent appeal, but these ain’t them.

And I would have to have at least a little visual kibble there, too.

The appeal of turning my boring static talker videos into something more fun to look at is that it’s something I can do on my own.

It’s not that I am against working with others. In fact, I desperately want to do so. I am so tired of doing everything myself. I am tired of being limited to only what I, personally, can do. I long for the day when I can just do the bits I am good at and/or enjoy and then leave the rest to others I can trust to get it done right.

That last bit might be tricky. But I’m game.

But the thing about doing things on my own is that I am able to work at my own speed (fast) in my own way(idiosyncratic) in my own time (afternoons, mostly) and thus the distance between my mind and finished product is minimized.

And, at the risk of sounding antisocial, if I am working on my own I am not dependent on anyone else to do their part before I can move forward, and that means a hell of a lot to someone like me.

You know…. someone with so many trust issues that they came with a free football phone and a year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat.

And it’s not people’s character I do not trust. Its their competence.

That might seem a tad rich coming from a low life competence (and general low life) like me, but it nevertheless applies.

I don’t trust others to be as focused, pragmatic,and responsible as I am. Essentially.

It’s a hard thing to pin down with words. I think, at root, I don’t trust other people to care as much about getting things done as I do.

In my experience, that’s true. I try not to be too judge-y about it – after all, everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses, and anyone I might judge for “incompetence” is probably good at tons of things I can’t even do.

It is by remembering that truth that, by and large, I keep myself out of the Hank Hill “Am I the only one around here with any dang sense?” Taurus zone.

However, that still leaves me with the problem of not being able to trust others to feel as I do, and the simplest solution for that is to work alone.

The other solutions all seem to involve dominating the hell out of people in order to make them think and do things my way, and I find that a very depressing thought.

That would turn me into a much darker version of myself, and to say I don’t wanna go there would be a celestial understatement.

---

Medical update : Bad.

Went in for wound care today, and when the nurse took the dressing off, not only did my wound look no better than last time, I had developed two more problem areas.

Not sure what to call these new skin features. They are halfway between being a blister and being a skin tag. They are painful to the touch and flabby, but don’t seem to have fluid inside them.

Skin tags with attitude, I guess.

So now I have two dressings. Things are getting worse, not better, and that is pretty fucking depressing. I feel like things are sliding out of control and it is freaking me out.

I will need to get that new glucose meter ASAP. Right now I am stuck in the gumption trap of not being able to pick one. I am going to have to power through that bullshit and pick the first one that seems like it will work.

Because this shit is getting crazy. I need to get my diabetes under control being I end up in the hospital full of tubes.

That should be enough of a nightmare image to motivate me to get things done.

Yeah. Should be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So ya know how sometimes I can’t think of any topics for my blog posts?

Tonight, in the five minutes it took me to throw together some supper, I thought of like, ten. All in a row. And now I have to pick.

Thanks a lot, brain!

Seeing as this is Therapy Thursday, we will start there.

Storming the Citadel

Wasn’t the greatest session today because I slept through my alarm and therefore had to get dressed and go directly to therapy with no time to fully wake up.

So I was super sleepy through the whole thing.

Still, we talked about the rape that broke my life and I told him that I thought I would have to actually remember the incident in detail in order to breach that wall of damage that keeps me from truly being alive.

And he agreed, but was worried, because recovering primary trauma is kind of a dangerous thing to do according to established, sensible psychology, and he doesn’t want me doing that when he will be going away for a month in September.

Odds are I am going to do it anyway, though. Chalk it up to my strange nature. Now that I have consciously recognized recovering that memory as the next step in my recovery, I have to do it, and it can’t wait a month.

Plus when it comes to things like this, what one might call intimate healing, I really prefer to do it all by myself, when I am all alone, with nobody else around.

Kind of like an animal dragging itself off into some remote hiding place in order to heal.

So much of my inner life is made of sad little animals.

I’ll have the apartment to myself Saturday night. Might do it then.

Then again, I might forget the whole thing until something reminds me of it years from now, and then I will be like, “Oh right,. I was going to do that thing. ”

Oh well. The wheel of fate spins onwards.

Hell, I might do it tonight, when I lay down after blogging. Ya never know.

One intriguing somatic aspect of this : as I was talking about the rape and the memories and such with my therapist, I felt this phantom pain in my anus.

Almost like something was being forced up there quite painfully. Or had been, anyhow.

Did that motherfucker fuck little four year old me up the ass?

Signs indicate yes.

It’s a wonder I could hold my poop after that. Son of a bitch.

Um,. trigger warning, anal rape of a small boy.

Here’s a nasty dark question : would I be gay if I had not been raped? Did I achieve homosexuality by having it thrust into me?

No definitive answer is possible, of course. Human development is extremelty complicated and tracing the origin of any facet of it is speculative at best.

If we take homosexuality to be entirely the product of genetic predestination, then I was basically born gay and nothing could have changed that.

But the science and statistics don’t support that theory.

If we instead consider it entirely a product of nurture – upbringing, environment, family dynamics, all that crap – then it’s entirely possible that without being violated by the cock of a stranger at the age of four, I might have turned out straight.

The science and stats don’t support that theory either.

So as usual, all we can say is it’s a complex phenomenon that is no doubt the product of many complex factors interacting on a. blah blah blah etc.

That’s scientist for “we dunno”.

I am honestly not worried about the danger involved in recovering the memories. Perhaps I should be, but I am not.

I no longer believe it is possible to ruin one’s own mind via a conscious mental act. Even if you are a wild-eyed psychonaut like me who routinely goes where others fear to tread and allows himself no excuses when it comes to the search for the truth.

Whatever happens, I can handle it. My faith in that is solid.

So it’s just a matter of very carefully moving myself into a position where I can do it. It’s a delicate and intricate operation, to be sure.

Makes me feel like I am trying to sneak up on town with an armada. At night.

But I can handle it. I am ready. Ready to plunge a dagger right into the heart of my depression and kill it at the source.

It won’t cure me in a blinding flash of white light or anything, but it will mortally wound my inner beast and after that, it’s just a matter of waiting for it to die,.

That incident is what caused me to withdraw from the world and set up walls of crystal clear ice between me and reality. All the clumsiness, isolation, and inability to connect with others I have suffered came from that withdrawal, and all the things that got compartmentalized along with the memories and traces of that horrible event.

It’s the traumatic injury that my little mind was too young to be able to handle at all, let alone heal, and so it just packed the memories away somewhere and flooded my mind with parasympathetic coldness to keep those memories hibernating.

And that’s what makes me so numb, folks. That’s what makes it so hard for me to feel the love I know is there in the world for me. That’s what alienates me from my own emotions, instincts, and desires, and strands me instead in a phony cold-circuit-only world of icy intellectualism and boy-genius naivete and gormlessness.

So intellectually smart and yet…. so emotionally undeveloped.

If i can recover those memories and break their hold on me, I stand a very good chance at true recovery and a chance to actually live my life for once.

Well, it’s time for me to lay down for a while.

I wonder what I’ll think about?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We keep talking about the gap between the rich and the poor.

But that’s not the real problem. The poor, while deserving of all the help we can give them to better themselves, are a relatively small minority.

The real problem is the gap between the rich and the average person.

When we talk about the rich versus the poor, we are unconsciously accepting the rich person’s definition of poverty, which is basically “everyone who is not rich”.

And yet, us middle class types don’t think of ourselves as poor like the rich people do. When we think of the poor, we think of people living in squalor in some terrible slum, or living in a shotgun shack on a mountainside somewhere.

That, in turn, gives us permission to think of the problem as something that affects someone else. People we may well feel for and wish all the best for, but at the end of the day, they are Not Us, and so we don’t feel like we are the ones under attack.

This exploits a serious loophole in middle class thinking : the inability to ever think of ourselves as poor.

Take my own case. My income is around $1300/month. That translates to around $15,600 a year. By all rational standards, I am not merely poor, I am dirt poor.

And yet, because I was raised middle class, I have enormous difficulty thinking of myself as poor. I can’t be poor. I know what poor people are like and I am not like that. Poor people are other people. The Venn diagram of me and the poor has no overlap and it never will.

And it’s not like I was raised in some kind of gated middle class enclave full of snobbery and privilege and presumption.

I grew up surrounded by working class families and never saw any sort of separation between us and them. My parents have (and had) absolutely zero snobbery^[1] and so neither do us kids.

And yet, that inability to think of myself as poor is there.

And this has serious real world consequences because it blinds us to the fact that we, too, are being oppressed. That to the one percent, we are all dirty peasants, and that we also suffer when they gut our social programs so that there is more money left over for them to steal.

And they dare to call the poor (and remember, that’s all of us) parasites!

That’s why I want to re-frame it as the rich versus the average person. The rich versus everyone else, essentially, but phrasing it as the average person does a better job of including everybody without invoking any ghosts of socialism.

Because working class, middle class, or no class, everyone thinks they are average.

And we need that kind of populism. We need to unite the working class and the middle class against our common foe, the rich, and show them that all their money means less than nothing if the populace unites against them in their own defense.

Thinking of ourselves as in separate camps or even as competing with one another only provides aid and comfort to our oppressors.

So does that pernicious infection known as upward mobility. As long as middle class people keep wanting to be like the rich people who live on the hill, and who therefore traitorously identify with people who see them as less than shit, the rich will continue to rob the poor (all of us!) to pay themselves.

Politics and government are both riddled with reverse Robin Hoods.

And only when everyone who they think of as poor unite against them to topple their towers of gold and bring them down to our level that we can take our government back and make this a true capitilist democracy for the betterment of all once again.

By the people, for the people, motherfuckers.

---

Wow,. I really do write, like Nietzche said, with words of blood and fire across the sky.

I could be a rabble-rousing firebrand, like my hero Martin Luther, if I could get my words out there somewhere where they might catch fire and spread.

I would be happy to be known as the person who started the fire than burned all the corruption and sin out of the body politic like a fever. I think the average person should be good and angry about the state of the world, as well as being made fully aware that this is not something outside of our control.

The people killing us have names and addresses and need our continued compliance in their wickedness in order to maintain their power.

But they don’t own us. We own us. This is our world and we are perfectly free to change whatever rules do not seem to be working out in our favour and cast down anyone who has accumulated a freedom-threatening amount of political power by corrupting the system as easily as a surgeon cuts out a tumour.

And for the exact same reason.

Their continued parasitism is dependent on keeping up thinking we are powerless. That there is nothing we can do because really, what can one person do? And we dare not interfere with the economy, because economies are complicated things that we idiotic drudges could not possibly understand, so we have no choice but to let the rich people’s pet economists write our laws and control our lives.

Well that is bullshit. We know damned well what is right and what is wrong, and if we decide the rules have to change, we can change them, and capitalism will simply have to adapt to the new reality.

That’s the beauty of capitalism. It’s so responsive and adaptable. As long as people still want to make money, capitalism will adapt to any new ruleset we choose.

And to hell with the economic priest class telling us that they are the only ones who understand the will of the Great God Mammon, and that if we do not do what they say, Mammon will strike us down with poverty and ruin for our heresy.

Fuck that. Mammon works for us, not the other way around.

And it’s about time someone boxed its ears till it understood that again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

New metaphor : the gap between me and the world has now been reimagined to be a wall, just like the one Pink Floyd did a whole conceptual album about.

I got thinking about the subject when I was looking at a pleasant summer day that was right outside my window, mere inches away, that I knew I could not enjoy.

In theory, there is nothing keeping me from throwing on some clothes and going outside to enjoy the sun and the warmth of the sort of day we humans dream about.

In practice, however, that just plain can’t happen. My goddamn damkage prevents it. I have certain ways I can convince myself to overcome my social anxiety and go out into the world, but “just because I want to” is not one of them.

And that hurts. It really does. Wanting to do something – craving it, even – but being blocked by your own mind is a terrible, terrible thing.

There was also this on Facebook :

That’s the hard stark reality of it, yup. The fact that I am compelled to isolate myself does not mean that I am not lonely as hell in my cramped little cell.

Just like how the fact that I am gay does not mean I have no biological clock. Part of me really feels like I should be raising children by now.

Obviously, that’s not going to happen.

What I want to get into today is where that pain goes and how I interpret it. The pain and frustration I feel at all that I want to do but cannot is one thing…. anyone might feel that in their life.

The troublesome part is that it then makes me sad – which is bad – and more depressed – which is worse – and makes me hate myself – which is the absolute worst.

In fact, I think this whole frustration to sadness to anger to self-loathing pathway is very well established in me and that if I wish to speed my recovery, I need to take it apart and figure out a healthier outlet for these feelings.

Self-pity would be a nice start. Feeling sorry for myself sounds one hell of a lot better than hating myself.

But as I have mentioned before, I am a stranger to self-pity because in order to pity oneself, one needs to believe that their negative circumstances are undeserved.

And I have a problem with that. I find even trying to think about what I do and do not deserve very trying. It’s simply not a mode of thought I engage in much.

Part of me is at least marginally capable of viewing myself as the victim of a lot of bad shit I did not deserve happening to me and putting me in a position where I can’t help myself and I can’t ask others for help either.

I am just too weak. Too broken. Too god damn damaged.

But for the most part, I simply default out of the whole question. I used to think that my extremely negative biased mind meant I thought I deserved anything I got.

But I don’t. Deserve, not deserve, whatever. Whatever I decide, it won’t change anything, so who the fuck cares?

The whole topic just makes me feel incredibly tired.

So the self-pity angle is problematic. In my better moments, I can see myself as a victim of cruel circumstance and a lot of people failing me utterly, but even then, that is less self-pity than a deep and vituperative bitterness.

It’s sort of the same thing, but then again, not really.

---

Ran out of words. Took a nap. Now I’m back.

Well, if self-pity is, at best, an incomplete solution. what else?

Anger, I suppose. As patient readers know, I have a very hard time expressing anger, especially on my own behalf. My basic nature balks at the thought of getting that up close and intimate with it.

I feel a little ill just talking about it.

But I cannot deny that I have vast amount of latent rage. And as ugly and destructive as said rage can be, anger is energy and energy is what I need.

Seems weird to get mad because I can’t go out in the sun, but it might work. Rage can melt through walls when focused. Maybe that rage can get me out in the sun.

Maybe that’s why it scares me so.

I know that I have done some good for myself by summoning and unleashing my rage. There was a time when getting good and fucking mad at my depression sustained a furry of positive actions.

But my depression adapted. Fucker. It moved closer to the core of my mind, where it was harder to seperate it from myself, and as it stands right now, trying to focus my rage on the depression feels like trying to look into your right eye with your left.

I am working on making a new seperation, but it’s way harder this time.

There’s also rage’s cozy cousins, arrogance. That, at least, seems fun. More fun than rage, anyhow. I have all the material in the world to sustain a pretty stratospheric opinion of myself.

There’s two problems with that, though. One, my extremely highly developed sense of irony makes me downright nauseous when I imagine taking myself that seriously.

Comedy and self-seriousness are mortal enemies, after all.

But I think I can dodge that problem by re-framing it as not arrogance but cockiness. It’s a sublte shift but it makes a big difference.

Comedy and cockiness get a long way better.

My other problem is a long-standing fear that if I open my mind to that kind of ego rush, I will end up going too far in the other direction and end up a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur in a loony bin somewhere.

And that could go in a pretty dark direction. I get glimpses of that darkness from the occasional thoughts about my own superiority and other people’s inferiority that manage to make it through my internal filters.

There are times when I want to stand on a tall building with a bullhorn screaming mad scientist shit like “None of you idiots are worthy of even licking my boots! I am so much more than you that it’s like you are mere barnacles on the tail of a whale and I am the ocean the whale swims in! You are all pathetic worms who should be begging me to solve your problems instead of leaving me to rot on the bootheel of society!”

And so forth and so on. I don’t like these thoughts. I don’t want these thoughts. They make me depressed and sad and freak me out because they make me feel like I am on the edge of utter madness.

But they exist for a reason, and it’s because my id is struggling to emerge and lacks the sophistication to modulate itself in a balanced and sane way.

It’s a direction I need to move in.

I just hope I don’t go totally batshit on the way.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The wound, that is. It’s bigger than it was last Thursday.

I knew something was up because after the wound had almost stopped discharging entirely, suddenly it was discharging a fair bit again.

Warning, this is going to get a little gross.

Because this was not the same discharge as before. I could tell, because the previous discharge turned the dressing black, and this new stuff only turned it medium-gray-ish.

So maybe it’s the same stuff, but more dilute? I dunno.

But while I was worried about the renewed discharge, the idea that my wound may have actually gotten worse in a serious and obvious way had not occurred to me.

So when the health care worker removed my dress a couple of hours ago, I was shocked. The thing is like twice the size it was before.

CLEARLY I AM STILL FUCKING UP.

The health worker scolded me about not taking care of myself, and she was right. Obviously, if my blood sugar is fucked up, the damn thing is not going to heal property.

She also recommended something I had not thought of but totally makes sense, which is to increase the amount of protein in my diet.

Well duh, I say in retrospect. What, exactly, is my body going to use to patch the wound if not protein? That’s what flesh is made of!

Luckily, I have a plan that fixes both problems.

NO MORE JUNK FOOD AS A SIDE DISH!

Lemme confess my semi-terrible diet to you.

My typical meal is a peanut butter sandwich, a bowl of something snacky and carb-loaded like chips or pretzels or whatever, and a piece of fruit.

Most of the time, there is also a sugar-free dessert item, usually some form of cookie.

It’s the snacky carbs that have to go. That shit is killing me. Kicking my carb addiction will not be easy, but I am trying to save my own life here, so I will do it.

The only remaining use I will have for that crap will be as a mix-in for the bag of microwave popcorn I have with my midnight snack on the nights when I am home.

And even then, I will be trying to get rid of that too, once things settle down after I kick the main carbs.

However, being a wise (or at least clever) fox, I will not merely kick the carbs, I will replace them with snackable PROTEINS.

Like almost, or peanuts, or those sugar pea snacks, or wasabi peas if I can find them, and so forth and so on.

That way I still get snacky foods, just ones that do not contribute to high blood sugar.

I will put this plan into action the next time I do my Sunday shopping at Sav-On. Possibly before that if I can get my energies together to go to Sav-On on my own.

So the junk I bought yesterday is the last of its kind.

One of the concerns I have had about cutting the carbs out of my diet is that I worry that I will end up with low blood sugar as a result.

So I am also finally getting around to getting myself a new glucose meter. Yes, that means lancing my fingertips (for fuck’s sake) but I need this information.

Information soothes me.

Plus once I know where I am in terms of blood glucose, I can plan what to eat. That should both improve my physical health and make me feel more in control of things.

It would even let me have the occasional naughty treat so I don’t feel left out on holidays, because it will let me figure out how much extra insulin I need to take, and aftger the treat, I can see if I need more.

So that’s the golden prize at the top of the mountain, I guess. Something to motivate me to make all the painful adjustments in my future.

At things point, I would do almost anything just to feel better. I tend to blame my lethargy and inability to act on my depression, but who knows how much of that is actually just shitty physical health?

Besides, I feel the need to suffer. Not out of guilt or anything. More like a desire for purification by fire, as well as something to wake me the fuck up and make me feel alive and aware and awake.

Pain’s good for that.

I am very sick of being so numb inside. So sick of it, in fact, that brutal agony actually seems like it would be an improvement.

At least I would be feeling something!

Of course, physical bliss would perk me up too, and it sounds a lot more fun.

I am pretty sure cumming super hard from amazing sex would do me a hell of a lot of good in both the short and long terms.

Kind of hard to arrange though.

And besides,. I would still crave the purifying effects of pain. I know how psycho that sounds, but I have my own unusual sense of spirituality and it goes beyond the usual sense of pain and pleasure into something deeper and more profound.

Pain is temporary. Purity lasts. As does the growth it brings.

Wow, am I getting sleepy. Geez skip one afternoon nap and suddenly I feel like I am going to start to hibernate.

Which reminds me that I don’t take care of my sleep apnea either. Hell, I don’t even take my damned sleeping pills. I have lapsed back into napping, pretty much.

And I know that’d not good for me. I am probably way behind on deep REM sleep. What I really need is to spend at least eight hours sleeping, preferably in a row.

And it’s not like I have a super busy schedule and just can’t find the TIME.

So I have really got my work cut out for me in the future. And I know one thing – I have to been on serious lookout for that cold and empty screaming void feeling that comes to destroy my progress when I am actually getting somewhere.

So fuck you, screaming void. You won’t get me this time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling very blah right now.

My life seems gross and unpalatable to me. I have nothing to look forward to. Just more of the same as things slowly get worse and I stare, transfixed, at the setting sun of my soul, unable (or unwilling, same thing) to move a muscle to fix my situation.

Here’s my situation as I see it :

I have recovered enough to be at least partly alive. My id is activated and all the instincts and impulses that normally drive people towards self-actualization are awake within my tortured soul.

But when I try to follow those instincts and reach out with my energies to finally connect with the world and become a part of it, I encounter my damage and the whole thing shuts down entirely.

It’s a dead circuit that can bear no voltage. A short circuit that instantly pops the fuse the moment any power is applied to it.

And I don’t know if it can ever be repaired.

If not, then the only alternative is to route around it. Find an alternate path for my energies so they can get where they want to go despite the damage.

This will involve a lot of heavy work because whole new tunnels will be needed to be bored through the rocks and dirt of my mind in order to make a way for the necessary cables and wires and pipes to get around the damage.

It’s a classic judgment call. I can keep drilling away at the diamond hard damage as I try to force my way through it, making very slow but steady progress, and hope that one day I will break through to the surface and be free, or I can completely switch tactics and look for a different route to my goals.

Or maybe this whole metaphor is flawed and the real secret is to just relax and concentrate on being myself to the fullest possible extent.

And then, I suppose, doing what comes naturally from there.

That sounds both correct and useless to me. Correct in that as stated, it makes sense and is plausible.

But useless because that’s not a route I can take right now. It’s hard to explain, but when I try to imagine going in that direction, everything freezes up inside me and I get a “dead end” feeling that is overpowering.

Maybe I will get there someday. But not today.

There’s just so much coldness inside of me. I feel it keenly when I am digging around in my psyche like this. And it’s painful and unpleasant and sometimes makes me so sad that I have to shut down and grieve for the parts of me that died of frostbite and neglect.

I keep coming back to wondering why I never learned to actually seek and acquire what I needed to thrive.

All I can think of is that I was far too adaptable for my own good. Instead of changing my circumstances to suit me better, I changing myself to make due with whatever I got, and thus avoided have to confront said circumstances and fight to change them.

So it all comes down to cowardice, in a sense. But that doesn’t seem like a sufficient answer. There is something behind the seeming cowardice.

Not sure what to call it. But it takes the form of a lack of vitality and strength.

In fact, now that I have it under the microscope, it’s that same tripped circuit breaker feeling I was talking about earlier.Instead of my energies surging outward to confront the problem, some plug gets pulled and it all just drains away.

I guess we’ve switched from an electrical metaphor to plumbing now.

Right now, I am thinking that this somehow connects with that primal retreat into the depths of my own mind that happened when I was raped.

As in, that disconnection happens when to go forward would take me too far from my tiny central core and so instead of pushing forward, I retreat back into myself.

The image in my head is of my hauling a tentative pseudopod back into myself with a comical “fishing line retracting back into the reel” sound effect.

Because that is how I visualize myself sometimes. As a sort of amoeba like creature that never actually leaves the crack or crevice it lives in, just extends pseudopods into the world that then can be morphed to simulate my actually being there.

And I do such a good job of simulating it that even i can’t tell the difference until something breaks the connection and I realize it was VR the whole time.

The truth is, I retreated into my mind for good when I was raped. I am still in that place I went to when I took my mind away from the situation. My whole life since that horrible day has been lived while crouching in my little cave, and that has resulted in my being an awkward and clumsy person who stumbles through life despite his prodigous intellect because it’s very hard to live one’s life like that.

Viewed in this light, my dreams of emerging from my shell and walking naked and free in the warmth of the sun take on a somewhat desperate undertone.

It’s no longer just a dream of getting out of my current life. It’s a dream of overcoming the very primal trauma that has shaped my entire psyche for most of my life.

It’s about finally leaving my shell behind and walking into the wider world on two strong legs, head held high, determined to go off injto the big wide world in search of adventure, experience, pain, and growth.

I’m sick and tired of that goddamned shell anyhow. I have been there far too long and it’s beginning to smell pretty bad. It went toxic a long time ago as it rotted around me, and the sooner I can leave that rotting hulk behind, the sooner I will grow healthy and strong and ready to take on the world.

So fuck the shell. I am leaving it far behind me, and I ain’t looking back.

It’s time to get on with the rest of my life.

And I don’t give a damn if that is safe or not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.