Sleepy as hell. Trying to blog. Bleary and incoherent. Makes writing feel like trying to swim upstream during a flood.
Every fucking day. Same old shit. Getting pretty fucking sick of it.
And it can be avoided by just not taking my sleeping pill. Works like a charm. All that sleepiness goes away and all it costs is me slowly losing my mind.
What a set of fucking choices.
I was such a strange child.
Self-possessed and independent of mind, and yet, desperately lonely as well. Masterful of mind but pathetically eager to please. Friendly yet detached. Polite and pleasant yet capable of incalculable levels of insolence and disrespect. Absolutely no fear of adults and no belief in their inherent authority, but terrified of my fellow kids, and for good reason. Always more comfortable with adults than my own cohort.
Otherworldly wise and eerily intelligent. Spooky to hear a small child talk like an adult. A previous era might have declared me to be possessed by a demon, or perhaps some kind of changeling child left to be raised by humans as one of their own.
There are worse families to be left with. Much, much worse.
Still, I wish they had been a tad fussier on my behalf.
There must have been times when I must have seemed like a robot, or a puppet, or a ventriloquist’s dummy. Surely those words could not actually be coming from a little boy. It had to be some kind of trick.
But it was. The kid was me. I was there. I remember it all.
But I didn’t understand. Why were people so mean to me? Why did my family treat me like I didn’t exist? Why was I a ghost in my own life?
I didn’t deserve it. Heck, I still don’t.
And I feel so damned old already.
Guess I’ll just die, then.
My word, am I cranky in the mornings. Anyhow.
There is no crisis
This is another big one, I can tell.
I have lived the entirety of my depressed adult life as if there was constantly a crisis underway and therefore my withdrawal from everything to avoid said crisis was justified.
But there is no crisis. There never was. There was a feeling of crisis due to my anxiety disorder, but no real crisis ever emerged to justify that emotion.
Sure, my life as I am living it right now is unsatisfactory (to say the least), but that is not a crisis, an emergency, or a disaster.
It’s like I have been living in a fallout shelter for decades even though the sirens stopped and the all clear had been given out a long time ago.
The sad and bitter truth is that if the crisis truly and totally stopped, I would miss it. It’s all I know at this point. It’s the closest thing my life had to any purpose or meaning.
Some day, I told myself. Some day, when this crisis is over, I will emerge from my stale cocoon into warm sunny wonderful world where everything is wonderful and I finally get my chance to truly shine as the bright resplendent butterfly I am.
And it was safe to dream this because I knew deep down that it would never happen.
The best and most toxic dreams are the ones that reality cannot destroy.
I knew it would never happen because I knew the crisis would never be over. Those sirens would keep on wailing for me and providing a nice warm safe feeling of security by giving me a blanket excuse for not dealing with life at all.
Murder your excuses.
But now I can see that this sense of crisis was merely another puppet of my depression’s devising. A tool my depression uses to keep me in line in its misguiding attempt to keep me “safe”.
Miserable, lonely. cut off from the world, dissatisfied, unfulfilled, and only tenuously connected to reality…but “safe”.
But is it better to be safe in hell than to risk heaven?
Those who never fly never fall.
However, those who never fly never soar, either.
Is it better to try, fail, and learn than to never try?
Yes, it is. It has to be. There are worse things than failure. Failing means you tried and trying means you learned.
And learning means you will do better next time.
But that doesn’t make trying much easier. Knowing I should try – that trying is the smart thing to do – does not impart upon me the emotional resources to do it.
As far as I can tell, healthy people have a stubborn, persistent little spark inside them that compels them to keep moving forward in life and that goads them into action even when they are not sure of themselves.
Depression kills that spark. And without that primal spark – that spark plug, the id – the whole engine of the psyche grinds to a bloody halt.
This spark doesn’t wait for justification or any other form of justification or approval from the ego’s centers of rationality- it just sparks away no matter what, and that prods healthy people into healthy action according to their instincts.
But dumb ol me, I trained myself to ignore my instincts and that little spark inside in order to better focus on the cold rational products of the mind, and gained vast and extraordinary powers by doing so.
But it doesn’t matter how powerful and amazing this computer mind of mine might be if the power supply doesn’t work.
If all these thoughts have no chance of becoming actions and instead just go to give me the feeling of having done something without having to actually do anything, then they are worse than useless because they keep me from moving towards self-actualization of even the most basic sort.
So that has to go too. No more living in or on dreams. No more accepting that the comfort of the though of something is as good or better than actually doing it.
Sooner or later, all this mentation has to lead somewhere, otherwise what’s the point?
Sooner or later, I will run out of “some days”.
And that’s the real crisis.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.