That’s always the biggest question for me. Now what do I do?

It becomes all the more complex when you take out the idea that there is nothing that I am supposed to be doing.

Even though I never had a clue as to what that was, the belief that I was not doing it filled in a blank space in my mind where purpose was supposed to be.

It did it in a very negative and destructuve way, but it still did it.

Now that I am (once more) trying to rid myself of every “ought to” and “supposed to” and “should have” in this capacious noggin, that space is no longer filled and so that entire enormous category of potential answers to the question of what to do is gone.

That leaves only what I desire to do.

And I have no fucking clue.

I mean, I have my dreams and desires. I want to write for TV. I want to have a famous and lucrative blog, I want to launch a political movement based on both compassion and common sense. I want to start a new religion. And so on.

But those are all castle in the sky and do not motivate me to action.

They are just nice ideas to think about, I guess.

At least until I heal my pathways to action. Nothing is going to change until I can let my emotions motivate me into action, even when that action is something I have never done before and therefore scares me.

I can’t go through life playing video games all the goddamned time. It’s not enough any more. I need more in my life. More challenge. More drain on my energies. More purposeful actions. More mental investment in life.

And more work, dammit.

And yet, when I think about deviating from my tiny itty bitty sad little life, I feel such terrible fear. Meaningless fear, really.

In the sense that it is fear without reason or justification. I could not even tell you what I am afraid of.

Exposure, I suppose. Being vulnerable to the world. Leaving the “safety” of my little cave. Having to deal with all that anxiety-provoking overstimulation overwhelming my ability to think rationally and my ability to cope, throwing me into total chaos.

Hmmm. That felt like progress.

Exposure could cure that if I could stick with it. Stimulation levels that seem overwhelming at first become less so over time because the nervous system automatically tunes out repeated or continuous stimuli if you let it.

Hard to do when you are freaking out, but not impossible.

But there is still that deep down fear of the real world that I have had ever since I was raped at the age of 4.

It’s the fear that caused me to retreat into my own mind and just keep going. i have spent my life putting more and more distance between myself and the real, honest to goodness, live and in 3D realtime world and as much as I dream of freedom, the thought of taking all that distance away scares me to the bone.

I am so god damned scared right now, it feels like my heart will freeze.

So that’s how it got frozen in the first place.

More after the break.

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Then there’s the thorny issue of whether or not I truly want to be free.

The answer is a definitive “kinda?”. Most of me does. But a big part of me does not. it views freedom as the worst possible outcome because it equates freedom with exposure and exposure with vulnerability and vulnerability with annihilation,

It’s hard to escape when you are afraid of reality.

And when you are not one hundred percent sure you want the result, the small percentage of you that is resisting can come up with dozens of ways to sabotage your progress without you knowing.

It can convince you that you just “don’t know what to do next” or “don’t know where to start’. I fell for that shit for way too long.

So look it up! The internet is packed with advice on how to do anything. If there is no clear consensus on what to do, try the first one that appeals to you, or alternately, the one you hate the least.

Whatever floats your goat.

And the thing is, you know this. You know these problems have solutions. That’s how you know that what looks like a roadblock is in fact just a depressive excuse – defined as being something that does not truly block you, merely provides an excuse to stop trying and go back to the “safety” of depression.

It can stop you with distractions. That’s the one wrecking my life. There is always going to be something easier, more fun, and less scary you could do instead of actually trying to pursue your dreams.

And doing so does not even provide any form of excuse.

It’s not like you can say to yourself, “I totally would have applied for jobs today, but dang it, videos games are still a thing” or “I would have studied for that exam but this universe still contains Netflix” or “I was totally going to pick up that thing for you on the way home from work, but they don’t’ sell milk and eggs at the bar”.

Making your dreams requires doing the harder, scarier, less certain thing.

If all else fails, the bad part of you can simply throw up a massive wall of mindless and unjustified fear to block your path.

That’s another big one I am dealing with. Between distraction and fear – the carrot and stick of my dissolution – the path from me to my goals is so narrow as to be invisible.

And it’s the one that provides the least excuse of all.

All I can do is helplessly say, “I can’t. I just…. can’t. ”

And it’s true. And yet, also kinda bullshit.

Because I could do it if I could learn to penetrate that wall of fear and see it for the bullshit it is.

I am totally capable of doing that.

But do I really want to?

i will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.