May I have your attention please?
I’d just like to announce that there continues to be no emergency.
Everything is fine. The sun is warm, the grass is green, and life is good.
I continue to be an awesome dude with great friends and a truly epic brain. I have fun games to play and tasty food to eat and delicious beverages to drink.
I have a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in and my days are spent having fun.
Things could be one heck of a lot worse, and I am grateful for all I have.
Life is pretty damned good and I am one amazing person.
Who could ask for more?
Well, me, for instance. But it’s always good to count your blessings. Reminds you to count the good things in life, too.
It’s hard for me to be positive. I am so accustomed to cringing in the dark that it is hard for me to remember there is any other way to be.
Like, I get, intellectually, that not everyone has my issues, but it’s hard for me to imagine my own happiness in anything but the vaguest, dreamiest, flimsiest way.
You know, all that “walking in the sun” business.
But if I put my mind to it, I can imagine a version of my life that is not radically different from my current one but which is far more satisfying and fulfilling.
I just have to take a couple of those video game playing hours and replace them with writing stuff that might actually sell.
But that’s the easy part. It’s the actually selling whatever it is that is the hard part. That is the big step I have never been able to take.
That’s why UpWork worked for me. Easier for me to write for someone else, according to their desires, than to take my own little darlings to market.
And I might get back onto UpWork some day. It feels more possible now than ever. Sure, I messed up before, but I am still the highly competent and intelligent guy with mad skills that I have always been, and it would do me so much good to be able to earn money that way.
So I will move that to the front burner.
Of course, even better would be to get an agent. Or at least a mentor. Someone who could help me through both the hurdles of being a writer and all my mental issues.
Its so hard to do everything alone all the time. I have never felt up to the task, and yet, I have never felt like I had any choice either.
So I have felt, very deeply, like an abandoned child for my entire life. One who, instead of reacting by becoming a scrappy and rugged individualist type (and probably a huge asshole), reacted by withdrawing from the world into the safety of his own mind.
It always comes down to this : there’s so many things I know I can do.
But I lack the wherewithal to get to where I can do them.
More after the break.
The illusion of luxury
How bourgeoisie[1] a subject, am I right?
But seriously, what I am talking about isn’t pretending you are richer than you are. I don’t give a flying feathery fuck about status, success, or any other form of living your life to impress others and make them think highly of you.
Fuck that middle class “keeping up with the Joneses” bullshit.
No, what I am talking about is a lot more personal than that. What I am talking about can be described as doing favors for yourself, or maybe being your own spa.
That makes no sense. Let’s try an example.
My shower takes a little while to warm up. While it does so, I go get the clothes I want to put on when I get out of the shower[2] and lay them out on the corner of my bed closest to the bathroom so that they are waiting for me when my shower is done.
This started as just something do to while the water warmed up. but then I discovered that I actually liked it. It made me feel good.
In fact, it made me feel like someone cared about and/or was caring FOR me, despite the fact that said person was unquestionably myself.
Suddenly, self-care makes a lot more sense to me.
Not that I ever wondered why people cared for themselves, of course, but now I know more about what people get out of it.
If we can “fool” ourselves like this, then self-care becomes its own reward. You don’t need to get your care and nurturing from another purely theoretical person (nobody looks after you when you’re a fully grown man) in order to feel loved.
Like with erotic love, it’s perfectly possible to do it yourself.
And this is huge for me because I know damned well that a big part of my inability to look after myself properly is that my inner child stubbornly refuses to do the things someone who loves me is “supposed” to be doing.
As a powerless child, I weaponized my neglect. Unable to ask for what I needed, I instead bore mute testimony to my neglect by not taking care of myself and let the world see how badly parented I was.
That’s why, when I start to think about taking better care of myself, that stubborn inner child refuses to let me because then, they will have “gotten away with it”.
News flash, kid : they got away with it. They neglected the crap out of you and never suffered any consequences for it. One parent is already dead and the statue of limitations ran out long ago for the other one.
No matter what I say or do (or fail to do) from now on, they will still have gotten away with it and that’s the bottom line, sucker.
Neglecting yourself as a child might work. It might show the world you are in trouble and need help even when you can’t ask for that help yourself.
Neglecting yourself as an adult just makes you a slob who’ll die young.
And who the hell wants that?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.