Been feeling particularly pointless lately.

Like, seriously… what the fuck is the point of my life. All I do is play video games all day. That accomplishes exactly nothing.

And yet, I am afraid to even think about stopping. That’s how addictions work. Even if part of you wants to flee them, the rest of you is far too scared of the world outside the addiction to make any serious escape plans.

And like I have said before in this space, I remember the alternative. Say what you want about my video game based life, at least I do not dread my life any more. I no longer feel the terrible weight of all those empty hours to fill. I don’t feel like my life is this vast sucking void any more.

I typed that as “a vast sucking avoid” the first time.

Man, that’s got to mean something.

So video games as a hobby is the perfect thing for filling all those empty hours. I can play games for as many hours as I like, more or less. Any spare time I have is fed to the highly agreeable demon of my video game addiction and in return my time gets filled and I am too busy and engaged and happy to be anxious or depressed.

It’s a pretty sweet deal in terms of mere survival. I get through life with very little in the way of pain (except for my health issues, which are mounting) and all it costs me is a little money for a new game now and then.

But it’s not enough. It can never be enough. I want more.

I want to get things for myself. I want to earn money and prove to myself that I can be more than a mildly amusing liability to the world. I want to stop being a burden on others and be able to stand on my own two feet, with nothing to be ashamed of.

I am still very ashamed of being nonproductive. It hasn’t gone away.

I want to project my will, my power, my talent, and my agency in the world. I am sick and tired of being so fucking passive and I want to be able to go get things I want and thereby pursue my own happiness for a change.

I want to express myself instead of being this moribund depository of pointless potential. I could do some truly amazing things in this world if I could only escape my own gravity well. I am a wizard, damn it, and could change the world with my wit and my words and my will if I wasn’t adrift in the doldrums of depression.

I want to show the world just how fucking amazing a creature I am, whatever the hell I am. I am a bright and shining star, and I want to shine so bright the whole world can bask in my glow.

I want out, god damn it.

But depression just keeps pulling me back in.

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Walls within walls

It started with Raymond.

Raymond is one of the security guards who works the front desk in the evening in my apartment building. That means I see him on the way in or out on those rare occasions when I am not leaving or returning inside someone’s car.

He seems like a nice enough fellow.

But I have….issues.

So I have not spoken to him much. It used to be back in saner times, that I would be with Felicity when I went past. Felicity would stop and have a bit of a chat with him. I would hang around the periphery not saying anything, but probably radiating impatience on an empathic level.

From this, I imagine Raymond concluded that I hated him. Or thought I was better than him. Or something like that.

And then later, when I would be passing him by myself, I still did not say anything I just slunk past without making eye contact.

This presumably reinforced his conclusion that I am an asshole.

But of course, that’s not true. It just looks that way because it is hard to tell at a glance what is genuine aloofness and disdain and what is actually painful awkwardness.

I am terribly, terrible shy. Got social anxiety up the wazoo. This has caused a lot of people to think I thought I was better than them, hated them, thought they were beneath me, and all that jazz.

And really, if you greet someone and they don’t even acknowledge you, what other conclusion can you come to?

How are you to know I didn’t reply because I was paralyzed by social anxiety? Or that I genuinely did not hear you because I was all wrapped up in my own little world?

Back to Raymond. Recently I have made progress : I now greet him on the way through the lobby of our building.

Big deal, he probably thinks, given how sullen his reactions to my greeting are. So now he gives me a big friendly hello. He still doesn’t even slow down for me.

If only he knew what those friendly greetings cost me. Every one of them takes a toll on me because in order to do even that tiny bit requires me to force the portcullis of my inner castle open for a second and man, that fucker is heavy.

It sounds crazy (and it is), but it feels like I am ripping a bullet out of my gut every time.

And it makes me realize just how thick and impenetrable my defenses really are. No wonder everything seems so faint and far away. No wonder I feel like my only source of illumination and warmth and life is the light of a dying star. No wonder I am so cold and so lonely and so painfully isolated even in a crowd.

I raised the walls. And I will be the one to knock’m down.

And I will knock down the walls behind the walls, and the walls behind those, and so forth and so on, walls within walls, until I escape through the center of the maze.

Ya gotta get in to get out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.