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.

Realized that the feeling like I am never ever doing what I am supposed to be doing had crept back into my life.

No surprise there. I predicted it the last time I was at this point of realization, even. I knew the odds of my changing the pattern were low.

Because the sad truth is that it is the only way I know how to live. My life only makes sense to me when I am hiding like a villain from a powerful feeling of error, inadequacy, and underlying it all a deep and terrible shame.

I wish I could ditch the shame. I don’t have anything to be ashamed of.

I don’t have to be ashamed of my total lack of life progress – I have been quite ill for my entire adult life. In many ways, it’s impressive that I have made it this far without ended up in the psych ward for either doing seriously crazy shit when my depression makes me so numb that I will do anything just to FEEL SOMETHING^[1], or because I attempted suicide and somebody noticed.

But no. My depression would never allow that. It’s entire mandate is to hide me from the world so I will be “safe”, and therefore I am not allowed to do anything crazy because that would only attract attention and maybe even the sort of serious sustained medical attention that would threaten the depression’s whole regime.

So instead, I just make it through every day the best I can while the clock ticks on any attempt I might make to get an actual fucking life.

Thank goodness nobody really cares how old an author is. At least in “print”. ^[2] I could be seventy years old and confined to a sickbed and as long as I can write the sort of things people like to read, I have a chance.

And I can. I write things people find hilarious and delightful. I need to remember that.

But that’s the trick, isn’t it? How to appreciate all my considerable gifts without it turning into that feeling like I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing. ^[3]

After all, if I have all these gifts, then I should be using them, shouldn’t I? Why, it’s a crime to let such talents go to waste. I should be ashamed of myself!

Oh, I am. And it just makes me avoid dealing with the whole situation all the harder.

It’s such a tricky, fussy thing to try to disarm. No wonder I go long periods without even trying very hard to free myself. I am so goddamned sick and tired of getting my fingers burned every time I try.

Clearly some kind of paradigm shift is needed. I think the last time I discussed this, I had the idea that I should just get used to my overweaning superego’s punishments.

Endure it. Tell my superego to go fuck itself, because I am going to do whatever gets me ahead no matter what you do.

Signed, my weak but feisty id.

That would certainly upset the applecart and piss off the mustard wagon.

That would involve, essentially, manning up. Getting over myself. Conquering the demon who guards the first gate to adulthood, Fear of Pain.

It’s a testament to the progress we have made as human beings that the modern person can have such a fear.

In previous, more primitive eras, pain was part of everyday life and there was little to no way to avoid it. Those people who could not adjust to that were selected out by evolution and, presumably, starved to death.

But we have done such a magnificent job of making our lives more pleasant and less painful that now, fear of pain can not only exist but thrive.

How many people today are stuck in dead-end lives that do not make them happy at all simply because they refuse to do whatever painful, unpleasant, scary, or “weird” thing it would take to get them out of it?

Besides me, that is?

Answer : plenty. People are all bottled up by pain our ancestors would not even notice. It’s an unintended side effect of progress.

Turns out all those unreconstructed macho types are not entirely wrong when they talk about people getting too soft and wimpy.

They just completely miss what the problem is with that. It’s not the failure to live up to some macho ideal that is the problem.

The problem is that being wimpy makes your life suck. You would be much happier if you got tougher and stronger. That’s what it is all about.

But the people delivering the message don’t get that and so they completely fail to convince us modern creampuffs that they are anything but sadomachoistic.

If someone had made the case for me when I was young that if I push through difficult and unpleasant things in order to get what I want, said things would become easier over time as I toughened up, I might have had a very different kind of life.

It’s the hedonist’s argument for self-discipline and the cultivation of strength, and it actually makes a hell of a lot of sense.

These people are not sadomachoistic. Just inarticulate.

As it stands in my life now, I am ever so slowly moving in the direction of seeking and acquiring strength in all its forms. Courage, health, toughness, horsepower, and the deep down irrational stubbornness that refuses to back down or quit no matter what.

Just to name a few.

Only by gathering and preserving strength can I acquire what it takes to pull my life out of this decades long rut and get my life going somewhere again.

I don’t know where I will find it.

And I don’t know what to do with it once I do.

But I know what I am looking for now, and that’s some major progress right there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.