Today we take on the whole introvert versus extrovert thang as it pertains to moi.

I’ve spoken here before about how I deeply suspect that I might be a lot more extroverted than I previously thought and that it only seemed like I was extremely introverted because I was so depressed.

Well I have pondered the subject further and I have realized that there are a lot of things about me that simply are not consistent with my being a near-total introvert.

For one thing, I really crave attention and affection. In very large supply. And that’s not very introverted of me. Most of the time I spend RPing as Fruvous on Tapestries is spent either seeking or receiving attention and affection.

And I get it by being all bright and cute and lovable, which is also not very introverted of me. I have a strong drive to shine for people and charm them and see my glow reflected in their pleasure, and in a brutally reductive way, that is what I trade for all that love and affection and attention I need.

It’s a fair trade. I make people happy, they make me happy. It’s a balanced transaction.

And I have always had the strong urge to perform for people. Despite my shyness, there are still times and situations where I absolutely love being in the spotlight.

Like I have said before, I am exactly the sort of person who is shy and nervous when off the stage but once that spotlight hits me, I am completely confident and relaxed.

Needless to say, that’s not real introverted either.

And I have a strong desire to connect with people. Perhaps this is just a manifestation of my extreme emotional isolation, but I don’t think so.

Above all, I want truly understand people. I want to grok them. And not just understand as in comprehend them, but also understand as in being an understanding person.

And not just understand but truly help them. To shine a light from my lonely little world into theirs and show them that they are not alone and that someone “gets” them and wants to help guide them through the land of shadows into the light.

That’s why I wanted to be a therapist. Still do.

Seems fairly unlikely now. At least, by most conventional routes.

And yet, I know that, deep down, I am fundamentally introverted. I find social interaction draining, not stimulating. Even when I am having a great time.

Ditto with noise and hubbub. After enduring them for a while, I seriously need to get away from them till my batteries recharge, and that might take a while.

And I think that even at the peak of mental health, I would still be somewhat shy. I might learn to handle it better and cut down on the fear and limitations of my shyness over time, but I can’t imagine ever being the sort of person who is happy to see strangers.

Especially unexpected strangers. Shudder.

Go the fuck away!

More after the break.

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I don’t know how to handle this.

Yay, more trauma.

For months, I didn’t check the balance on my reloadable VISA because I had forgotten my password and getting it back involved calling the 1-800 number during Montreal business hours and that was a hassle so I let it slide.

Bad idea, as it turns out.

Tried the password thing again today. This time, I was able to get into my account by answering a bunch of security questions, and could finally see my balance.

I was expecting it to be slightly more than $2K.

It was $1415.

And I dunno where that money went. When I have had more time to recover from the shock, I will go through my transaction history for every month I missed to see if there is anything hinky in there to suggest I got robbed again.

That would be the more merciful option, because the other option is that I have been overspending by a lot and that would devastate me.

Not sure how to explain why. But my ability to spend my money sensibly and correctly is extremely important to me, and knowing I fucked up and spent $600 more than I meant to and thus wasted a big chunk of that $2000 I got from my father’s life insurance on dumb shit like ordering in too much.

I should at least have been keeping a running tally.

And I was. Sort of. Loosely. Basically, I added up the spending I was doing per month and it came up to less than the $200/week I had budgeted so I figured i was golden.

In fact, I kind of thought I was saving money. I mean, I only go out to eat once a week now instead of three, so mostly there’s my groceries ($60-$100) plus one McD’s meal ($15/week) plus my Saturday ordering in ($30), leaving…. hmmm…. $55/week.

That should be enough to cover ordering in Tuesday and Friday nights. And most of the time my grocery bill is nowhere near $100.

And the $200/week is solid. My cheque is around $1400/week currently. Take off $600/month to Joe for rent, groceries, et al and that leaves $800 a month, known to its friends as $200/week.

Or $160/week on those nasty five week months. I suppose I could have fucked up with those, but not by $600 for fuck’s sake.

So by all rational measurement, I should have over $2K, and yet here we are.

Clearly, a thorough audit is called for.

One other possibility : they are taking student loan payments from my bank account. The whole reason I got the bank account in the first place was that the student loan people required it as a place to put my loan, so they definitely have access.

That would be fine, to be honest. Then, at least, I would know the money went to something productive, namely paying down my student loans.

I would still do my best to stop it, but emotionally, I would feel much better.

I would be fine with paying $100/month on my student loan. A drop in the bucket compared to the balance, but it might placate them.

I will get to the bottom of this, that’s for sure.

Thanks for listening. I feel a lot better now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The fire is only scary if you are afraid to burn.

Me, I’m ready. Feed me to the flames. Burn my flesh clean. Let all the garbage in my soul go up in smoke. Let the flames drive out all impurity and scourge me of all my accumulated toxins like a sudden fever.

Purify my essence so that I might walk tall and free again. Purge me of my accumulated residue and drive my demons screaming into the night with the purity of my loathing for them. Let me vomit out of every pore and orifice until all my hate and fear and rage and contempt and venomous resentment is gone and I can finally be who I really am.

I am not my illness.

i am not my pain.

I am not my inabilities.

I am not my lack of progress.

And I am not my chains.

I am a magnificent golden spirit. strong and proud and beautiful, and decades of imprisonment cannot change that.

I am a deep and powerful wizard, with abilities never seen by anyone before. No term of isolation in my windswept keep can alter that truth.

I am a merry trickster who loves to entertain and delight all with his illusions, tricks, jokes, and charms. And no amount of time between gigs can erase that fact.

In short, I am fucking amazing.

And all the small and petty bullshit in the world can’t hold me back any longer.

Why hello world…. glad to finally meet you.

Now let’s get it ON.

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I suppose that’s sort of a poem. Or at least, it would be if I threw in a bunch more line breaks. And maybe a bit of fancy wordplay.

It is what it is. Like I give a shit.

I like how I started from a negative space then ended with an ego trip. That is more or less the path I am learning to tread. Take the negatives and use them as the raw fuel to boost up to a more positive place.

And if that means nudging the edge of mania, so be it. I am building a whole new me here. There is bound to be some risks.

And to be honest, I’d rather be super crazy and happy than depressed and miserable.

At this point, a descent into cackling megalomania sounds rather refreshing.

I’m sure I would return to sanity eventually. If there was something in it for me. A scholarship, perhaps. Or snacks.

Gotta have my snacks.

Feeling sort of bored and diffident at the moment. And a little restless. And kind of horny.

Basically, I feel like I really want something, but can’t think of what it is. Nothing I can think of appeals to me.

Well, nothing I am actually allowed to have, anyhow. Sucks to know you will never have the things you really want because society mindlessly oppresses people like you.

But the walls are beginning to crumble. Maybe Gen Z will take up the cause of my people like the Millennials did with gay marriage.

Probably not. But a man can dream.

More after the break.

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Our southern neighbors

I think I speak for all Canadians, and indeed the entire modern democratic world. when I speak from the heart and say :

America, you drive us freaking crazy.

Because we love you. Never doubt that. Don’t take our bitching and complaining and rolling our eyes over you to mean we don’t love you and don’t care about you.

In fact, if we didn’t care, the things you do to yourself wouldn’t bother us so much.

But we like you, so they do. You’re brave and strong and generous and passionate and have great big hearts that make you a joy to be around.

When you’re sober. But you ain’t always sober.

And the truth is, America, that you’re a mean drunk. You get a skinful of false patriotism and stirring music and bold statements that make no sense and you get awfully high on yourself and then you get real self-destructive.

You start listening to all the worst voices in your head and start siding with the yahoos and hillbillies who want to tear down everything America stands for and destroy the country they say they love just because they are too dumb and barbaric to actually understand how anything works.

And all we the people of Not America can do is stand on the sidelines and watch you trash your own country and hurt your own people, and cry for you.

We can offer our advice – but we know you won’t listen. It’s not in your nature. You are too individualistic for that.

We can offer you our own example as you struggle with problems we solved a long time ago. But you are too proud to listen to that either.

We can even step in and help you clean up your own mess sometimes. As long we we do it quietly and draw no attention to ourselves.

We’re not fixing it FOR you, we’re just helping YOU fix it!

But mostly all we can do is watch, and cry, and shake our heads as we wait for you to sober up again.

Which brings us to today. It’s February of 2021 and about a month ago you finally sobered up after the worst bender you’ve ever gone on.

We Not Americans watched in horror as the ultimate drunk and abusive father did his best to run the country into the ground, and the only reason he didn’t succeed is that the American people stood up to him and pushed back when it really counted.

I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but now that you’ve sobered up, we all have great hopes for you. This is your chance to finally catch up with the rest of the world and finally give the American people the standard of living they deserve.

You can do this, America. We believe in you. It will mean some pretty big changes, but we know you’re not afraid of big challenges and hard work.

Make America great again, people. Make it strong and gentle and kind again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy Thursday.

Not as good a session as last week’s. I was sleepier and had less to say. Putting my thoughts together was much harder. So I more or less just reported recent progress.

Nothing wrong with that, per se. But I didn’t do a lot of digging. So it paled in comparison to the previous week.

Oh well, better luck next time. They can’t all be gems.

One of the things I ended up talking about was something I have discussed here before : my plan to spend some time outside in order to get away from the computer and experience real life and my environment for a change.

You may recall that the point of that is to make my world (as represented by my senses) more stable and real and less virtual and unstable.

Living inside your mind and imagination like I have been doing by spending most of my waking hours in front of this here computer of mine is, as it turns out, bad.

Like, really really bad.

Because it’s so unstable. The world inside my mind can radically change with a single thought. The ground that I stand on is constantly shifting as I process thoughts, ideas, emotions, and so on.

It is not a safe or happy place. It just seems that way because I am used to it.

So the plan is to wait until the weather is nice and then make my slow and gentle way to tiny little park-type area that is part of our apartment building and sit on one of the old fashioned wrought iron benches there. Maybe bring a book. Maybe not.

And then just watch the world go by as I open my mind to my environment and let my mind find equilibrium with it.

As I have said before, it’s something I used to do on the way home from VFS without understanding why, but knowing it always made me feel a whole lot better.

Now I get it. And it also explains why I felt so good after having walked outside alone in the past. It makes my world so much more real.

And surprisingly enough, that’s a good thing. Very good.

So I am choosing to see it as a way of nourishing myself on a spiritual level, a need I have ignored for most my life.

Turns out that soul starvation, like regular starvation, is something you can do something about. Go fig.

Hungry? Try eating!

Hopefully, executing this plan will stabilize my inner world and strengthen my ties to reality and relieve me of some or all of the feeling of always walking tightrope over the abyss of total insanity.

I mean, no wonder I’m not keen on taking risks. People on tightropes tend to be averse to anything that might rock their boat.

Yeah, that’s a mixed metaphor. Figure it out.

Turns out, what I have really needed all this time is more reality in my diet.

I’m as surprised as you are.

More after the break.

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Pour it out

I also talked with Doctor Costin about my newfound resolves to express whatever the hell it is I am feeling and thus avoid retaining it.

No emotions are all that bad if they are expressed, not suppressed, and so on.

And right now, I feel crappy. Just got up from a nap and the moment I was vertical I have felt dizzy and nauseous and disoriented.

AKA The Three Horsemen of the Frupocalypse.

This too shall pass, of course. I probably just need to cajole my sinuses into draining, and that’s usually just a matter of cleaning my nose and my ears.

All that fluid has to go somewhere, after all.

Once more, I wish my upper perinasal sinuses had some kind of emergency release button so that when I get stuffed up like this, I could just press a button and everything would be flushed out.

While over a sink, naturally. Otherwise, ick.

But it’s not that big a deal to clear the gunk from my ears, I suppose. And it’s definitely wonderful to know that is what the root cause of the problem is most of the time.

Life was ever so much worse before I know how to nip this sinus pressure BS in the bud. Back then, I suffered in ignorance, with no idea why I felt so bad sometimes.

Turns out it’s a nose that never quite stops running and sinuses that tend to get stuffed up as a result.

I suppose I should tell my GP about the runny nose thing. I am pretty sure that’s not normal. And there might be a way to stop it, for all that I know.

I know my mother once told me that her father, my Pepe (pronounce pay-pay), had terrible sinus issues until he got an operation to fix it.

Perhaps I inherited his issues. I am pretty sure she said the operation fixed his “malformed” sinuses that didn’t drain properly.

That sounds familiar.

There they go, relief at last. Now that terrible pressure that makes it feel like my eyes are going to pop out of my skull (if my forehead doesn’t explode first) is gone.

I’ll have to keep an eye on the situation for a while.

The worst part is that I am pretty sure that the pressure puts the squeeze on the frontal lobe of my brain. And that’s probably not good.

It would explain the level of dizziness and the sick feeling I get from it.

Then again, the real culprit there might be my ear canals being full of fluid and that throwing off my inner ear.

That would be preferable to my other theory and the image it puts in my mind of my poor forebrain being kneaded like a lump of dough over time.

Probably should not think about that too much.

Well there you have it. I expressed what I was feeling. Mission accomplished.

I never said it was going to be interesting.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Note the lack of comma. That’s intentional.

Because what I am going to address here is state of constant cringing apology for even being alive, and even worse, compounding the crime of my existence by being generally hapless, clueless, clumsy, and incompetent.

A walking disaster. A constant embarrassment. A disgusting display. And a total failure as a human being who makes people flinch with contempt when they think about him.^[1]

You know. All that bullshit.

What it all totals up to is a feeling like I am a net liability to the world. That the little bits of good I contribute to the world from my bunker come nowhere near to canceling out all the ill I do just by being alive and stinking up the joint.

Note that this worldview puts a lot of weight on negative about myself that are nebulous to the point of being existential.

Like, how, exactly, does being myself make the world worse off? Do I give off some kind of Lovecraftian radiation that warps and twists time and space into unleashing non-Euclidian horrors upon the unsuspecting world?

Actually, that would be kind of cool. But only if they obey me.

All of this negatively is delusional, of course. As I recently established, I am in fact a pretty amazing dude. And not just for my abilities. I’m also very sweet and kind and compassionate and empathetic. I truly care about people and want them to be happy.

And I am funny and interesting and a great conversationalist. And gosh darn cute.

So what if I am kind of pathetic when it comes to life skills and physical things and am quite a spaz in general, to the point of having trouble doing even fairly simple things?

There are worse things in life than needing help with the basics. Whatever strain that puts on those who love me is minor compared to all the good I do them by being my merry magical self.

Because that’s the thing. I’m a magical creature, rare and special and amazing. There aren’t a lot of people out there like me and I make people happy in ways that other people cannot. I love to spread sunshine, and I have gotten pretty good at it.

There’s nobody else like me out there. And I should treasure that.

My disabilities and inabilities don’t cancel out all my positives any more than the late Stephen Hawking’s quadriplegia canceled out his. Lots of famous, important, and beloved people were not very good at life and needed help with basic things.

And nobody cares. It’s not like anyone is saying “Sure, George Clooney is an amazing actor, activist, and philanthropist, but none of that matters because he can’t make a proper Bundt cake. ”

Neither can I, George. They always burn in the middle.

So I hereby let myself off the hook ^[2] for all the petty little meaningless things I usually use to justify low self esteem.

And that includes never having had a job or been in a relationship.

Because guess what? I’ve been very sick.

But now I am determined to get well.

More after the break,

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(Too) High on life

The cereal. I smoke it. It’s fantastic.

Well the good news is that I am in a pretty good mood. Got my recently acquired heavy metal and heavy metal music pumping. Stuff like this :

God I love that song. And the video is fucking amazing too. It’s like all the coolest tattoos, graffiti, and album covers of the 90’s came to life.

And I have a bow of tasty chili, plus some veggie chips for dipping.

One little quibble with the Sav-on bulk veggie chips : while it’s all veggies, a lot of it is either not chip shaped or chip shaped but too small for dipping.

That stuff is not so much veggie chips as veggie kipple.

And I got these veggie chips specifically because I was really missing chips and the dipping thereof. Most forms of chip are carbs, of course, and I don’t eat carbs much any more. But I really missed the chip experience.

So it’s a bit annoying to be partially denied dipping opportunities.

Anyhow, I am in a good mood. Life seems pretty decent right now. Got my games and my blog and my snacks. So why sweat the rest?

What’s more, I think I might just have a handle on how to yank my head up out of the depths of despair now and then. It’s not a gentle or painless process, at least not yet, but i can grab a hank of my hair and pull now.

And that’s, ya know, big. Finally, I can get my mood up off the ground by throwing some energy into it. Finally, my boosting thrusters kind of work.

It’s more of a modest jump than takeoff at Cape Canaveral, but it’s a start.

Besides, I am done bemoaning my fate. I’m going to work on enjoying what I have instead. Not interested in bitching about how badly my life turned out right now.

But that doesn’t mean suppressing all my darkness and sadness in order to slap a patina of cheerfulness over my emotional landfill either. I will still howl out my demon’s screams and barf up my shrapnel on a regular basis.

The difference is that I’m no longer act like my mood is my reality. When I am happy I will sing a happy song full of blue skies and sunshine. When I am sad, I will sing a song so sad it makes the angels weep a sky full of rain. When I am angry, I will scream till fire falls to earth. And when I am depressed, I will spill my darkness like ink across a virgin page and drown the world in my pain.

Whatever I’ve got, I will express. And by expressing, let it pass through me, no more or less real than the shadow of a passing cloud.

I think that is the lesson of Mediterranean culture I have been looking for : no emotions are all that bad if you let yourself express them.

After all, why hold on to them? Let it go. Let it ALL go.

And some day we may be clean. Amen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s take another crack at this one.

I’ve got amazing abilities. Incredibly intelligent – I am smarter than most people can even comprehend. Very funny – got comedic talent coming out of the tenderest area of my wazoo. Loads of creativity talent – I can create anything you want with my words. And speaking of words, I got massive verbal talent too.

Plus empathy, insight, vision, blah blah etc.

Which brings me to my question : how come when I think about these things, it doesn’t make me feel good about myself? Why is my reaction not one of pride but rather irritation? Like my talents are a loud noise or a bright light making me wince?

It’s so wrong, at least according to the usual set of rules. Good things about yourself should make you happy, right?

When I have wrestled with this conundrum before, the conclusion I have come to is that my low self-esteem is so entrenched in my mind that no amount of positive input can actually penetrate it and instead my mind tries to tune out the emotional effects of my excellence like it would any other over-strong stimulus.

And this remains true. But I think there’s more to it than that.

For one, there is fear attached, not just annoyance. This is going to come across as a humble brag, but I am frankly terrified of my own power. When I feel the difference between myself and others – truly feel it – it chills me to the bone.

I just can’t handle it. It makes me feel like my ego is going to send this poor unworthy soul of mine rocketing into the sky and into some impossibly rarefied state of towering superiority that is so close to utter insanity that you can only tell the difference between the two states with an electron microscope.

And I don’t want to go to the crazy place. Just thinking about it rouses a deadly strong coldness in my mind. One far colder and sharper than my usual coldness.

It’s like the difference between a winter’s day and liquid nitrogen.

And it’s a coldness that beckons. It tempts me with the promise of leaving all those messy and confusing emotions behind as I ascend into a worth of pure mind.

So like in those nightmares where I am stuck on a narrow ledge overlooking a deep abyss, I am scared precisely because part of me wants to let go and give in.

It’s possible that what is really going on is a failure to evolve, though. Maybe if I let myself go, I would come back down to Earth eventually, regain my humanity, and be a much stronger and saner person as a result of finally letting myself ascend.

After all, to a caterpillar, becoming a butterfly is indistinguishable from death.

And a plausible logical argument can be made that therefore, the caterpillar should do everything it can to keep that from happening.

But either way, some day the creature will die.

At least as a butterfly, it will get to spread its wings and fly first.

More after the break.

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Ready to ascend

Well it seems I have convinced myself to let my ego take me to the skies. Cast off the land anchors, release the ties, and dump some of those beanbags, this balloon is up up and away into the wild blue yonder! Adventure and excitement awaits us!

Wow, look at it go. Imagine if we’d been on it. That… that would have been something.

So um, yeah. When I said I was ready to let go of the ground and allow myself to rise, I might have been overstating my case a touch.

What I should have said was that I had decided to let go. More or less. For what it’s worth. And so on.

I’m still terrified of the implied heights. My instincts are still demanding that I cling to the ground like a barnacle when the big hand descends from the sky and tries to pry me from my cozy little nook.

That’s been my reaction for all the years of my depression and, well, it’s what got me where I am today : nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.

But lately it’s occurred to me that the big hand coming to take me away might just be the big strong adult hand I need to hold my tiny hand in its own and help me calm down and tell me everything is going to be okay, I won’t be left out in the cold any more, and it is time for me to finally come home.

Could I have been blindly resisting my own salvation this whole time?

It certainly makes sense dramatically.

Maybe it’s time I let….

I certainly could use the lift. I’ve been gravity’s bitch for far too long. Barely crawling along the ground at a snail’s pace out of fear of falling when I should could be striding confidently forward, determined to chase the horizon and try to touch the sky.

But as that previous sentence demonstrates, in order to do that, I have to transcend rational limitations. I crave liberation from the world of justification and cause and effect, where everything needs a reason to be and has to *shudder* make sense.

I’ve made enough goddamned sense. Time to make myself happy instead.

And that means no longer looking for happiness from something external to myself. Those things will always be wonderful and helpful but no matter how great the joy they create. it fades with time and leaves you hungry for more.

At best, worldly achievements and acquisitions can help treat the symptoms, but only making the inner journey can cure the disease.

So maybe my trip into the sky is also a journey into myself. Maybe that big blue sky that wants to see me fly is really my own soaring soul discovering itself.

I don’t need a reason to be happy.

Happiness can be the default.

And I’m tired and I want to go home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling kinda crappy right now.

Which is actually an improvement over when I first woke up around 45 mins ago. I felt like day old crap then.

Sleepy, but not in the relaxing wholesome way. More like the kind of sleepiness you get when you are sick and your body is using all its energy and resources to fight the infection and there’s precious little left for such frivolities as consciousness.

Tired, but in a tense and fitful way, like I am trapped in a bad dream and I am groping around in the dark looking for the exit.

And confused. Always the confusion.

So I clearly have entered the part of my “getting caught up on sleep” cycle where I start whining about how I am sick of people sleepy and I want to stay awake and have fun and do things.

I knew this would happen back when I began this journey. The first part is always all nice and relaxing and warm and even downright snuggly, but eventually I end up in this wretched state and I start to regret taking the pill that started me down this path.

So then I don’t take the pill for a long time, as if it’s to blame, and I end up in the equal and opposite wretched state where I can’t stay asleep for 90 minutes and that blank white space in my mind keeps growing and I end up anxious and overstimulated.

Then I take the pill and it starts all over again. Sigh.

I could probably escape the cycle if I just took my sleeping pill once a day, like I am supposed to, and stuck with it until I got totally caught up on sleep instead of wimping out when I reach my current sleepy-sick phase.

Admittedly, if I have been taking my sleepy pills, this stage is way worse. To the point where it kind of feels like I am dying.

So hmmm. Probably not going to be able to just bulldoze my way through that.

Speaking of dying, I have a heavy, scratchy feeling in my lungs that has me worried. Being in an immuno-suppressed category, I am especially vulnerable to all kinds of nasty shit, Covid definitely included, and so I am justifiably paranoid about absolutely any flu-like or respiratory symptoms.

So I will be watching this chest shit very carefully, as well as being alert for other symptoms and/or bodily weirdness.

There’s things I need to get back to. Like those eye measurements I was supposedly to get done like a month ago but didn’t because I was sick.

Not going to get my cataract surgery without them. And I am pretty curious about what the world will look like when I have TWO functioning eyes.

Right now, my right eye is fine, but my left eye is super blurry. All I have to do is close my right eye to understand how messed up my left one is.

I try not to do that very often. It’s scary.

Then there’s the stress test I was assigned to try to figure out why I am so damn weak and tired lately. I had to cancel that because my foot was all fucked up by the ulcer. That’s about 80 percent healed up now, so as much as I dislike the entire concept of a stress test, when I think it’s fully healed I will arrange the test again.

And of course, I will keep grinding away at my psychological scar tissue and doing my best to melt the iceberg on my heart.

At least I keep myself busy.

More after the break.

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Inside versus Outside

Note : not about agoraphobia. This time.

While making supper, I got to thinking about, in a way, schizophrenia.

My basic definition of schizophrenia is that it is a malfunction of the part of the brain that determines whether a psychological phenomenon is coming from the outside world or is self-generated by the brain.

Terrifying thought, n’est-ce pas? Things you imagine seeming real? Real things seeming like you dreamed them up? Never knowing for sure which is which?

I got a lot of scary shit in my head. I want it to stay there.

Anyhow, I bring this up because it occurred to me that all mental illness has some aspect of the same phenomenon, just at a much lower level.

Take my own sub-psychotic lunacy. Granted, I don’t hallucinate in the classical sense. I don’t see things that aren’t there or hear voices or anything like that.

But I, in a sense, hallucinate on an emotional level. I spontaneously generate conversations in my head that I completely understand to not be real, but I process them emotionally as if they are.

So all my negative self-talk, internal persecution, and imagined judgments have some of the same impact as if they had actually happened.

It’s kind of like how seeing a murder on TV has a tiny fraction of the impact of seeing a real one. Things you know are not “real” can still have an impact.

And when these negative thought patterns are deeply ingrained, the negative thoughts feed almost directly into our emotions with only the barest of flickers of awareness in our conscious minds.

This means our ability to stop and correct these irrational thoughts with the conscious mind is highly limited.

They just move too fast for us to catch.

Still, forewarned is forearmed. In the future, I will know to question the source of emotions. In particular, I want to seriously audit the part of my social anxiety that tells me what other people think and feel about me.

Pretty sure it’s been lying to me for a very long time, falsifying my empathy and telling me that people hate me and think I am a vile disgusting thing that should crawl into the sewer and die ASAP.

I’m beginning to think that might not be true.

I mean, all the evidence supports the opposite conclusion.

I wish I could debug my brain.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Another big question : why have I been content (ish) to live the same lifestyle for the last 25 years, AKA my entire adult life?

Why hasn’t any force, interior or exterior, roused me from this stasis and forced me to go out into the world and find a new, better home?

Why haven’t I gotten royally sick of this shit until quite recently? And why hasn’t this growing discontent stirred me to action yet?

What is this perplexing holding pattern that has held me down and held me back for 25 god damned years and what makes its sinister magnetism so hypnotic?

I guess it all boils down to safety.

When you are super scared on the inside all the time due to a severe trauma in the past, you prioritize safety above all else. To the point where any move in the direction of less safety – in other words, towards risk – becomes unthinkable.

The very idea fills you with paralytic panic.

And so you fixate on what pleasures you have. In my case, video games, with a minor in snack food. You bury yourself in them so deep that you can’t feel the outside world at all any more and thus they become your reality and your shelter from reality.

Maybe somewhere in me are the instincts that would normally lead an adult to go seek their fortune and try to find a place for themselves in this great big busy world. Maybe part of my heart yearns for new pastures and greater challenge and a chance to prove to the world just how astoundingly awesome I am.

Maybe part of me wants to leave fear behind and finally grow the fuck up.

But that part of me is surrounded by the thick fog of paralysis and layer upon layer of cold dark fear and thus stands no chance of actually motivating me to do anything.

Almost nothing can move me to act. My inertia is gargantuan.

So I hunker in my bunker and let the days go by while I get older and sicker and depression eats away at my soul and all my gifts go to waste.

It’s not what I want. I don’t know what I want, to be honest, but this life ain’t it. I’d much rather have a job and a husband and my own place. The ability and opportunity to earn instead of sponging off the government would do me a universe of good.

Or maybe I will go back to school. At least then I would be doing something with my life. And I would be in a place where I excel.

The question is, what would I study? Something practical, that’s for sure. Something that isn’t anyone’s dream job and therefore I would not be competing with a thousand other starry eyed losers for every position.

Maybe I would study being a network admin of some sort. Or train for some low level, non coding job in video game production.

Whatever it is, it will aimed directly at future employment. None of this academic bullshit. And it will be a quality education at a place that actually impresses potential employers when they see it on my resume.

I’m gifted as fuck and I deserve a high level education.

The kind that will get me a job.

More after the break,

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Not another excoriation!

Well, time to rake myself over the coals again. I don’t want to do it, but I will feel a whole lot better once it’s done.

The precis : I done fucked up again.

You know that pleasant little dream I had of going back to school earlier today?

Right there, above the line?

Well it didn’t live very long because as I was taking a shower today, I suddenly remembered that I have been ignoring the student loan people and their increasingly aggressive demands for many years now and they are unlikely to front me another student loan any time soon.

So, no education for me, unless I can wrangle a full ride scholarship somehow.

There goes that hope. And like the man said (don’t ask me who), despair is easy, it’s the hope that kills you.

So here’s a list of things this realization made feel like doing (but won’t)

1. Gouge my heart out with a rusty grapefruit spoon
2. Find a nice quiet grave to crawl into and die for a while
3. Beat my head against the wall until a subdural hemotoma brings on sweet oblivion
4. Set myself on fire and leap screaming into the void (so visual!)
5. Run naked through the streets cackling madly and groping everyone I meet
6. Punch Mitch McDonnell in the dick (so, business as usual)
7. Weep softly in a corner. Look, it can’t all be flaming void leaps
8. Embark upon an aggressive campaign to land me a sugar daddy (or mommy, what the hell) who can refuse me nothing and get them to pay for my schooling
9. Finally yodel the secret yodel that will tell my alien brothers it’s time to invade

insert your own colorfully nihilistic thoughts here.

But don’t worry, folks. Like I said above, I’m not going to do any of those crazy things, or anything like them. I just like writing them down because it makes me feel better.

Plus, it’s fun.

I will get over this, of course. Writing my self-annihilating thoughts down helps speed that along. The initial burn of imploding self-loathing is pretty intense but I know that if I just hang in there, it will end, and I will move on.

So whatever. Pissed off at my own stupidity, but it’s nothing new.

Technically, I should have taken care of the whole thing years ago when I was told that it was fine to not make student loan payments as long as I was on social assistance PROVIDED that I go through this whole complicated and confusing rigmarole every month to remind them that I am still on social assistance and therefore they are legally required to refrain from taking a bite out of my big juicy jugular for another month.

Well I tried to jump through the flaming rolling hoops provided me, got hopelessly confused, and (this is the bad part) gave up.

I figured they wouldn’t get my money either way, so why bother with the administrivia?

So I have completely ignored the student loan people ever since, never thinking that I might want another student loan some day.

Oh well. There is still hope. I might be able to work my hapless charm and get them to forgive me. I might get a scholarship and/or bursary package together that would pay for my education someplace.

And who knows, someday I might even apply for TV writing jobs.

What a radical idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Easier said than done.

It’s occurred to me lately that I have always considered myself to be both more than and less than fully human.

More than in that I have always held myself aloof, above, and apart from others of my species. I’ve felt like I could, with the heavy head and heart of a disappointed angel, judge them for their pettiness and smallmindedness and coldness of heart, and feel like I, at least, cared.

And there’s the whole intellectual superiority thing. While I have studiously and strenuously avoiding embracing any and all forms of elitism, the truth is that I am way, way smarter than most people, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and that inevitably leads me to view the average human being, well, from above, as it were.

Throw in things like talent and vision and such so we can move on.

I’ve felt less than human because of how weird I am. I just don’t “fit in”. I can understand my fellow humans very well… eerily well, to be honest.

But I can’t relate to them on a personal level.

And I’ve always felt so weak and fragile compared to my fellow yard apes. Like they are real people and I am just some pale cipher cowering in the shadows wishing he could be a real little boy for once.

The ghost of a lonesome child, timid and full of panic.

So in both senses, I have never felt truly human. Hence my statements about not being a real person. Statements which make perfect intuitive sense to me but make no sense to those who do not live inside my skull.

And that’s most of you.

But the thing is, I am human. As human as anyone else. Objectively speaking. Two arms, two lung, two gametes, and a pimped out brain. Bipedal locomotion. Opposable thumbs. A social insurance number. The whole nine yards.

So there is no question as to whether I am, in fact, a human being.

And yet it feels weird even saying that. In fact… come closer, this is the hot goss…

In fact, it feels like a let down. A demotion. Like it’s bad to be “merely” human.

What did I think I was, you ask? I don’t know. An angel? An alien? A holy man? Some kind of secular saviour? I couldn’t really tell you.

Maybe it’s just a manifestation of all that keeps me apart from others, positive and negative. My deep and terrible maladjustment makes it hard for me to imagine myself in there with all the other sweaty beach apes even intellectually.

I fear (and yes, sometimes even hate) my fellow humans on a deep primal level.

Kind of makes it hard to imagine myself as one of them.

Where I should be feeling human connection, I feel pain and fear instead. On that one level, I’m as autistic as Rain Man. And I don’t know if that can ever be fixed.

So not an alien, just alienated.

And it makes me feel oh so cold.

More after the break.

Sad little monkey

Let’s talk about one of the world’s most depressing experiments again.

Namely, this series of experiments. You know the ones, where little baby monkeys were raised in isolation from their peers, which caused them to develop a lot of strange compulsive self-mutilating habits, then when they were introduced to a troupe of monkeys who had been raised normally, freaked the fuck out, went to the part of the enclosure furthest away from the troupe, attacked any other monkey that came near, and remained reclusive, paranoid, and fearful for the rest of their lives.

i can relate.

I was raised in isolation too, little monkey. Not total isolation, thank goodness. In my preschooler years, I had my family, and friends, and all that good stuff.

But once I entered school, I was isolated. No friends. Very little attention back home. Beaucoup de bullying. Teachers didn’t like me either.

And so forth and so on.

And you know what? That just shouldn’t happen to anyone. I fell through the cracks so hard I left new cracks behind. Nobody wanted to deal with me. I was this weird hyper-precocious slobby little fat kid that nobody liked because I was kind of a handful.

My extraordinary IQ made me highly unpredictable. People literally had no idea what I would say or do next. And the methods one normally used to control and guide children all relied on an intellectual superiority adults did not have over me. I was innocently contemptuous of my school work because it was absurdly easy for me, which endeared me to neither students or teachers. I had no fear of adults whatsoever (after all, I was smarter than them) and occasionally even corrected my teachers in front of the class. And I was always a mess.

These days, when a kid is always messy, they realize that means they are neglected.

But who is going to think the super smart kid who talks like an adult is neglected? He seems so god damned sure of himself.

And I was, and am. And yet, I wasn’t, and am not.

Intellectually I am incredibly confident.

In everything else, I am a twitching pile of human refuse.

In other words. one sad little monkey.

And I don’t want to be that way. Who would? I want to be the friendly, lovable, sociable person everyone loves that I am when I play Fruvous. I don’t want to freak out when I a around people I don’t know. I don’t want to be paranoid and panicky. And I definitely don’t want the feelings of helpless rage that comes with the fear sometimes.

But social damage can run mighty deep. Sometimes it feels like there’s me, and then there’s the cross-wired berserk over-sensitive alarm system that is my social anxiety and general social maladjustment.

And I wish I could just shut all that shit down. Rip out the whole system and replace it with something normal and sane. Finally rid myself of this cacophony of demons.

But it’s not that simple. These reactions are programmed into my frigging endocrine system. They happen on a level far beyond the reach of the reasoning mind. No matter what I tell myself about how irrational it all is, my body dumps those chemicals into my bloodstream anyhow, and then I have to deal with them.

So there I am. one fucked up little monkey, in a raging whirlpool of fear and dread, helpless to stem the tide.

Poor little monkey.

Someone really needs to take him home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been catching up on sleep today.

I’d reverted to my malfunctional default mode of not being able to stay asleep for more than 90 minutes or so, and even then, the sleep was fairly shallow and poor quality.

And I could feel that telltale brightness growing in my mind. That bright blank space that displaces real thought and makes me increasingly tense even though I am technically alert and awake.

But it’s a bad kind of alert. A too much caffeine and not enough sleep kind of alert.

Now excuse me while I take a long deep drink of my diet cola.

You know, it just occurred to me how weird it is to think I need drugs just to be able to sleep more than 90 minutes. Kind of suggests there is something deeply wrong with me on a deep level.

Well there’s the sleep apnea. But I think that’s a separate issue.

I assume I need chemical assistance because of all the shit going on in my head all the time. My mind is always full of cognitive fireworks and there’s always an enormous number of background processed grinding away and things being created as other things are dismantled and information being reduced to its essence in great bubbling cauldrons like the kind they use to pour molten steel and always the endless grinding, and who the hell can sleep in a place like that?

That might be a bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea.

My point is that I have a hyperactive mind that is always overstimulated and as full of lights and noise as a busy arcade, and I figure that’s why I suck at sleep.

Anyhow, so I realized things had gone out of whack and I was now operating on emergency whack supplies entirely, so I knew it was time to take one of my chemicals, melt the ice that forms in my mind on these occasions, and get some freaking sleep.

So I took an alprazolam before going to bed at around 2:30 am, and it worked like a charm. Slept soundly till 6:30 am, got up to eat, went back to sleep at like 7:15 am, and minus one pee break, slept till 2:30 pm or so.

And I look forward to going back to sleep when I am done eating and blogging. I am perfectly willing to sleep however long it takes to get caught up.

It’s not like I was going to do anything important anyhow.

Kind of sad when sleeping is a lot more productive than what you usually do.

So far it’s been good sleep. Peaceful, relaxing, not waking up super groggy and disoriented and miserable. That might change but for now, I am grateful for whatever little island of peace I can find in the storm wracked seas of my mind.

I don’t care if I sleep for days. I probably should. I have been putting off taking a sleepy pill for way too long so my need is probably dire.

And sleep deprivation makes everything worse. Even when it’s my usual kind which has no obvious conscious effect.

And now, to return to the land of Nod and get another dose of dreaming.

More after the break.

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Exciting adventures in sleep, part 2

Got some more sleep in the afternoon. Feeling better. Calmer, less drained, sharper.

Probably will sleep more after this blogging session. But whatever.

I’ve decided that my attitude for now is that I am open to sleep. I’m not asking for it nor will I try to force it, but I won’t fight it either.

I’ll just leave the door open for it, and it can come and go as it pleases.

Meanwhile, I am doing my best to imprint how much better I feel now onto my brain and set it up as something I want to get and keep.

It’s not motivation per se, but it’s a place where motivation can grow.

Giving a 7-11 Personal Pepperoni Pizza (PPP) a try. It’s okay, I guess, but not great. I’d rather be eating a Personal Pan Pizza (PPP) from Pizza Hut.

I mean, the 7-11 PPP basically tastes like the frozen pizza you would buy at the supermarket. Higher quality than those Pillsbury dough pucks, but with that same subtle something wrong with the sauce that puts me off.

Must be something to do with make a tomato based sauce you can freeze. Or something. Because I don’t like pizza pops either.

Then again, I’ve never liked various Chef-boy-ar-dee products either. Again, they don’t taste totally gross to be, there’s just something… off about the flavour.

And yet, the same global megacorps make pasta sauces like Prego and Classico and I like those quite a lot.

I wonder what the difference is?

I was especially disappointed when I finally tried Pizza Pops when I lived in the USA. They were heavily advertised on all the cartoons I watched as a kid and they always seemed so fun and cool in the ads but when I finally tried one I was like… eww.

Sometimes I hate having somewhat non-standard taste buds. I want to enjoy things like cheesecake and blueberries and pizza pops with everyone else, but they are completely disgusting to me.

I can’t think of any at the moment, but I am sure there must be weird foods I like that most other people do not.

At least, if there’s any justice in the universe, that would be true.

Only thing that comes to mind is when I was a wee sprog and went for fluoride treatment for the first time. They had the regular old treatment that most kids loathed and the new ones that had flavours like strawberry, cherry, and banana,

I liked the old school flavour. To me, it was a little sour, but in a refreshing way, like a kosher dill fresh from the fridge.

The new flavours were vile. Waaaaay too sweet and too strong. I gag a little just thinking about that goddamned cherry one.

The ladies at the health center who administered the treatments were, of course, beyond amused by the weird little kid who liked the old stuff.

Sadly, after that, they unsurprisingly phased out the old stuff and I had to make peace with the new flavours.

The banana wasn’t too bad. So that was my choice from then on.

So basically I was a weird kid from the very beginning. I’ve said it in jest but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s true :

There was never any possibility of me being normal.

The best I could have hoped for was a healthier kind of weird.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

wp:paragraph –>

Today was Therapy Thursday.

Was a good session. Doc Costin let me do most of the talking without feeling the need to interrupt me for once, and that let me cover a lot of ground and get a lot of things off my chest and do a lot of venting, albeit via my usual intellectualized route.

Really, I just need someone to listen to me. Someone who understands what I am talking about and who can ask good questions when I run out of steam.

Does me a world of good, that. I have so much emotional information to transmit.

Anyhow, one of the (many) things that came up in today’s session was my spiritual journey from being stuck in an irrationally rational cage of logic and reason to understanding there is so much more to life and learning to be human.

My billion lumen spotlight of an analytical mind might illuminate reality with startling clarity but it sheds precious little light on the world inside my head.

And that’s the world I live in.

In talking about it, I brought up my oft repeated image of their being the bright cold light of reason that my logical brain projects, and the darkness outside it.

That darkness scares me because I don’t know what’s in it. As cold as my circle of light can be, I can still see everything that is in it and I know what is there.

But in the darkness…. I can’t see a thing. There could be anything in there, anything at all. And whatever is in there, I will not see it coming and I won’t be able to prepare for it and I won’t be safe.

Not in the usual way, anyhow.

In the course of discussing this with the Doc, I said “I don’t trust my emotions, because what do emotions know? Nothing. ”

But of course, that’s not true. Emotions know a hell of a lot, in fact, especially when it comes to things like what will make me happy and what I truly need, and it is only my blinkered blindness to this kind of knowledge that has kept me from being able to seek and find my own path.

I’ve talked here before about never following my emotions and by asking myself, “What do emotions know?”, I think I produced a clearer picture of why than ever before.

Clearly I need to make peace with idea that some valuable information is not so much “known” as felt. The fact that this brutal truth machine of my mind can’t isolate and examine and verify everything about this emotion based information does not render it invalid or untrustworthy.

And that is something that will be difficult for me to accept on a deep level. Right now, I accept it as true, but I don’t believe it yet.

Truth is information. Belief is emotion.

So I have a lot of evolving to do in that direction.

Luckily, I have total faith that I can do it. My urge to evolve spiritually is very strong, and I think I have the basic idea of how to grow as a person now.

Spoiler : it ain’t by thinking.

Maybe there is no darkness outside the light.

Maybe the darkness comes from my willful blindness.

Maybe it’s time for me to open my eyes.

More after the break.

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Into outer space

Another topic that came up in therapy today was the whole changing my entire way of relating to the universe…. thing.

You know, the stuff where I called myself an infant. But then I calmed down and regained my powers of reason and declared myself a preschooler instead.

It’s a fair cop.

Part of what makes changing my mode of being so hard is that it essentially means moving into an entirely new universe. The world of taking responsibility for myself^[1] and being a strong independent grownup who is no longer waiting for some greater power to rescue him from himself is so outside my consciousness that I feel like a fish about to take its first step onto land.

Or as fish call it, “outer space”.

In order to make this extremely important transition, I will need to do the spiritual equivalent of evolving lungs. My transition into adulthood was shattered when my parents took me out of school and thus made me move back into my childhood home and right back into my childhood bedroom.

As a result of this developmental abortion, I am a strange critter indeed. Not really suited for land or sea, I just sort of flop around like a landed fish, never living but not quite dying either.

All this talent and capability and it all languishes because the engine that is supposed to drive the whole machine died.

Or well, mostly died.

At least now, I have more faith that I will get better than ever before. I can see that far off light at the end of this Chunnel, and I know which way to go to get to it.

It’ll be a long hard slog, but it’s not like I have anything better to do.

So in my own slow way, I will make it there. In matters such as these, I don’t have the luxury of being able to use my enormous mental strength to overpower the problem like I do with so many other things.

It’s not that kind of problem. This is real change, not mere analysis.

So I will trudge through the winter swamp of my suppressed emotions and all that icy numbness and scar tissue. Sometimes I will go faster and sometimes I will go slower and sometimes it will seem like I am barely getting anywhere at all.

But I will never, ever stop. And even the mightiest of challenges will crumble into dust against that kind of persistence, given time.

I might go slow but I never go backwards.

I don’t even have that gear.

So I am going to make it there some day, just you wait.

But um…. don’t hold your breath.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.