Therapy Thursday. Doc Costin and I hit upon some seriously fertile soil.

The precis : my inner world is so turbulent and unstable and unsafe precisely because it’s the world of the mind, with very little input from anything real.

I mean, think about it : my environment never changes, and thus it faded away a long time ago. Plus it’s such a toxic mess that I don’t like looking at it anyhow. So clearly the mature option is to just stay fixated on my screen.

So I effectively get zero conscious input from my real environment.

And by spending all my time in the world of video games, I reinforce that sense of unreality. My world is so cerebral that ideas, emotions, stories, and the products of the imagination are a lot more real to me than reality.

That is not good. No wonder I feel so insecure. The world of the mind – the intra-cranial universe – is chaotic and unstable compared to solid reality.

So if I want to escape the cacophonous madhouse of my mind – and I do – the thing I need to do is spend more time away from the computer and my bed and make a habit of sitting out in the real world getting physically grounded in extra-cranial reality.

At least now I understand this thing I would sometimes do when I was going to VFS.

Sometimes, when I was on my way from school to the Skytrain, I would stop and sit somewhere on that stretch of Granville and just kind of… let the flow of traffic, both pedestrian and automotive, wash over me as I sat there and soaked it all up.

And contrary to what my social anxiety would have predicted, I found this very calming. When I finally got back up and continued my journey home, I felt a whole lot better about this crazy old world.

Now I know why. By sitting there while the Granville Street chaos flowed around like I was a rock in a river, I was giving myself a chance to acclimate to my environment, and reach a kind of equilibrium with it.

In doing so, I made peace with my surroundings and stopped feeling so scared and eager to get home to escape the chaos.

More importantly, I grounded myself physically by taking myself out of the claustrophobic chaos of my inner world and into the much more stable and “real” world of physical reality.

This is important. It means I know the way to calm myself down and escape all the bullshit in my brain and it’s as simple as going downstairs and sitting in the lobby while I read, or maybe going out to sit on a nearby bench when the weather is nice.

Reality, and especially nature, is my anti-depressant.

I’m as surprised as you are.

There’s also the balcony, but Joe tends to get pretty defensive when I ask him to clear out a section for me to sit in – hoarders get real grouchy about that kind of thing. Plus there’s so much stuff piled everywhere that it’s hard to even get to the balcony.

So I am going to set that option aside for now. Start with the lobby sounds like a smart move. It’s a very short journey and a quiet environment most of the time, but with enough stimulation from people’s comings and goings to keep it from fading out of my sensorium like this room has done.

At long last, I’ve found the way out.

Turns out, it’s going out.

More after the break.

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The Humble Giant

Time to take a crack at the (for me at least) complicated issue of “humility”.

On one hand, I am all for humility – my version of it. To me, humility means remaining humbly realistic about yourself. It is the virtue of knowing that you are just another beach monkey stumbling through the darkness trying to find your way home, no better or worse than another in terms of intrinsic worth.

It’s the virtue of knowing that despite our vanities and the lies our social status instincts will tell us about being better than other people, we’re just frail conglomerations of organic chemicals putting on airs.

This does partially map to the religious definition of humility – being humble before God does have something in common with being humble because you know the universe is large and you are small and the cosmos doesn’t care if you live or die.

I mean, how could it? It is not a conscious entity. It cannot care about anything.

And humility in my terms is the necessary counteragent to pride. It’s the force that keeps pride from taking us to crazytown as our swelled heads take us up into the stratosphere like hot air balloons and leave us there.

I’ve had to resist that force hundreds of times in my life. Humility is my anchor.

On the other hand, I vehemently oppose the version of humility that says “you are crap, you are nothing, hang your head in shame for just being alive, and never ever have pride about anything about yourself ever!”.

That’s not humility – that’s humiliation.

See what I did there?

Well fuck that shit. I was born extraordinary and I refuse to be ashamed of it. I’m not the sort of person to deliberately shove someone’s face in the dirt in order to make myself feel superior, so I feel no obligation to keep it from happening from mere exposure to my superlative attributes.

Plus, that kind of humility might score you bonus points for Heaven but you know what it doesn’t get you? Dignity.

I used to sidestep the issue of dignity. It never seemed like much fun to me, and ran counter to my strong tendency to be a goofy, wacky clown.

But now I know that people need a certain amount of dignity in order to function. And I want some. I need some.

Which means I need to learn to pull myself together and stop being such a hot mess and learn to carry myself with at least a soupcon of gravitas.

And I don’t care if my standing tall makes someone else feel small.

I’m a giant. Deal with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.