Was sick and in the hospital all day. Details tomorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty sick.

For one thing, sleep is seriously kicking my ass. I am very very fried right now and the sad thing is that this is still better than I felt earlier, after Sleep Part 1.

Not by a lot, granted. But by a small, measurable, noticeable amount.

I got all the old familiar symptoms.

I feel like I was squished flat and am but very slowly regaining my third dimension.

I feel very hot all over, like I have a sauna inside me.

I feel quite dizzy and have vertigo. When I move my head, I can feel stuff sloshing around. No surprise there : I have been out of my antihistamine for days now. It’s Friday. Took my last dose Tuesday morning.

Presumably, by now I got a head fulla goo.

I’m also pretty disoriented and dissociated. Focusing on making the words come out is very hard for me right now and I feel quite lost.

I really wish the world would stop shifting around while I’m not looking.

Dunno if I will make it out to McD’s tonight. Prognosis is poor. Right now all I want to do is crawl back into bed and go back to sleep.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. What I want to do is wake the fuck up. But I don’t see that as an option right now.

I wish it was. As usually happens after sleep apnea has been truly abusing me, I’m actually kind of scared of my bed right now.

After all, I just got my ass kicked there.

There’s bound to be some negative associations made.

Makes me wish I had set up that little nest on the patio. A nap in the fresh air sounds blissfully wondrous right now.

But no such luck for me. It’s back into the Sarlaac pit for me now.

More after the first break.

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Feeling somewhat better after Sleep Part 3.

Now I merely feel like I just ran a marathon underwater. So ya know… progress.

Still pretty hard to stay focused on the screen, though. I have drifted away three times already and I am barely fifty words in. I can tell that when I am done, i am doing to have to sleep still more.

I ain’t out of the woods yet. Thank god this path only goes one way. I will get there eventually but for now, all I can do is keep my head down and keep plodding along.

Luckily, I’m very good at plodding. I’m an excellent plodder.

Right now I am chalking this suffering up to my usual catching up on sleep debt bullshit. That seems like the most probable explanation.

Bit I also feel like there’s some gunk in my lungs and i get this weird sucking feeling in my bladder when I pee.

So there might be something else going on at the same time. it could also be that this particular round of catch-up was kicked off by something worse.

And of course, being a potentially serious medical issue, it had to happen on a Friday so that I can’t take it to my GP, Doctor Chao, so it’s the ER or nothing.

Well there’s always walk-in clinics, but I don’t trust those at all.

More after the second break.

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There can be no more doubt

I am definitely sick.

I know I’m sick because, having slept all day, I am finally awake enough to realize how terrible I feel.

My appetite is gone. Which is a bitch because it’s 8:19 pm and I really should eat supper around now but I can’t even imagine food without feeling like I wanna barf.

So that’s going to be a challenge. I get the feeling that I am in that unenviable position of having no choice but to do something I know is terminally stupid, namely skip a meal.

I am not giving up yet, though. Not before going out to the kitchen and trying to strategize a meal for myself.

That means looking at the food available to me and figuring out what nauseates me the least and making a meal out of that.

About the only thing I can imagine eating\drinking right now is a Slurpee or Mister Freezie or the like, and that’s probably only because they sound soothing to my rather unhappy stomach lining.

Yeah, I have a serious case of the grumpy tum right now.

Sorry if my use of the proper scientific terms is confusing you.

At least my tummy is quiet right now. There’s just a dull ache in the pit of it, and a vague but menacing feeling of pre-nausea when I move and the contents shift about.

Also pretty sure I am running a fever. I sure as fuck feel hot. Which is why I am going to to what I can to stay hydrated. Not only to keep from getting dehydrated – because there’s nothing dehydration can’t make worse – but to keep myself sweating.

Time to go make my rounds.

---

Rounds complete. Got up, took a pee – still feels kinda weird. Opened the window in the bathroom a little more in order to lower ambient temp.

We will see how that works out. Right now I am in the loathed state of feeling cold on the outside and hot on the inside, meaning that turning a fan on myself or otherwise cooling shit down might make things too cold for my outside and the cold will not reach my overheated inside.

Clearly, my layers are not communicating.

Then I went to the kitchen and refilled my water and got myself a nice cold crisp apple. It’s hardly a meal but it’s infinitely better than nothing.

I mean, that’s just math.

I tried to get myself interested in other foods, but nerp. Not even the pre-cooked bacon looked good to me, and that shit’s awesome.

So I am going to eat my apple, take my Metformin and Glyburide plus maybe some Tylenol just on general principle, then (heavy sigh) lay down again.

Times like this, I feel like the best thing about being rich and living in a mansion would be having dozens of bedrooms at my disposal so when get sick of (and in) my own bed, I can go sleep in another while they change the bedding and air out the first.

Some people dream of hobnobbing with movie stars and driving around in a limo.

I dream of fresh bedding whenever I want it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy Thursday and I have a few more things to forgive myself for as a result of my talk with Doc Costin.

But first, about him. There I was, unloading my thoughts about my recent campaign of forgiving myself for stuff, and he starts fucking arguing with me.

He says he didn’t think I had anything to feel guilty about and that it was other people who should feel guilty about what they did to me.

And I tried to just move past it. I told him that whether or not he felt I deserves all my guilt and shame, I had it any way. And it seemed like he understood, but a few minutes later he would be back at it and still not getting it at all.

And I really need him to get me.

So I confronted him on it and he kept defending his attitude and I grew increasingly frustrated. It escalated to the point where, and I swear I am not making this up, I said “Why are you arguing with me?”

And he replied, “I don’t think that I am. ”

Things only got worse from there.

I am starting to think that the real issue is that he gets overwhelmed by the power and complexity of what I am saying and how I am expressing it and picking an argument is his way of defending himself against it by making it stop.

Well I am not fucking putting up with it any more. And I am proud of myself for asserting myself on the issue.

Hell, maybe I make him feel insecure with my big ol brain. Or maybe he just gets bored.

All I know is that if he wants to argue, I will give him more argument than he can handle. I have been merciful and restrained so far but he is really starting to piss me off.

Anyhow, on with the forgives.

---

I forgive myself for being absentminded. It’s one of my biggest problems and it has been there my whole life. I have been a dreamer with his head in the clouds since I was in elementary school and would read while walking to and from school.

That is not easy. And is ultimately not worth it. Thank goodness the Walkman came along to easy my journey in a less hazardous fashion.

Until I started wearing it on my bike….

Anyhow, I forgive myself for my absentmindedness and all the trouble it has caused me over the years. It was the inevitable result of my hard retreat into my mind as a result of being raped, and like I said, that wasn’t my choice either.

So to be clear, I forgive myself for being raped, too. Should not be necessary to do so seeing as I did absolutely nothing wrong, but one of the cruelest aspects of rape is that it leaves the victim feeling guilty and dirty and ashamed whereas the rapist might feel absolutely no shame at all.

To me, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

To him, it was Tuesday.

So yes, I forgive myself for being raped. I was four. I was helpless. I did nothing wrong, there was nothing I could have done to prevent it, it’s not my fault that I didn’t even have the words to tell anyone what happened, and I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of or otherwise feel bad about myself about.

It didn’t make me a dirty boy who was inherently spoiled and rotten. I was a perfectly pure and innocent child and a good, good boy who deserved – and deserves – all the love in the world and then some.

I am not inherently toxic, dirty, radioactive, poisonous, or bad.

I am a good, clean, wholesome, worthwhile human being.

And I deserve love.

More after the break.

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Bonus content! Check this out :

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The fire down below

I almost regret adding that GIF up there because I keep watching it over and over.

Dang you, WYSIWYG!

Anyhow. Stay on target.

I forgive myself for being so full of bitterness and rage. As much as I still fear the rage and the bitterness and the fire inside me from so many years being victimized without any way of defending myself or striking back, I refuse to be ashamed of it any more.

And I am working on the fear thing too.

Right now, I am still scared that if I don’t handle that anger very very carefully, it will blow up in my face and take my sanity with it.

Highly unlikely, to be honest. My fears of going on some kind of spree of violence and rage are probably just bullshit bogeymen conjured by my depression.

Getting back to forgiveness, I forgive myself for all that rage and hereby declare that having said darkness within me does not make me a terrible or monstrous person except inasmuch as thinking of myself as such makes me feel more safe.

Sometimes, you want to be the monster. Or at least have that as an option.

But it doesn’t make me a bad person. I’m still the same sweet lovable wacky funster that I have always been. I’m a good person and a nice guy.

I just have this burden of rage to work through because of my lifelong difficulty expressing anger and the resultant amount of bullshit that “should” have made me angry that I passively absorbed instead.

It made me sadder, not madder. At the time.

But the anger didn’t evaporate. It was suppressed and hence locked away in an underground lake of molten lava and pyroclastic clay.

At least I have walked my road enough to know that I cannot throw off my old burdens without addressing this liquid ire. Like my guilt and shame, it doesn’t matter how it got there or whether it’s justified or not, it’s there now, and I have to deal with it.

Luckily, all is not grim, The energy locked away in all that bitter rage can be used for many things, not just wanton destruction.

It is the stuff of life, the primal id, the wellspring and driving force of all action. Sure, it is the driving force behind anger, but it also can power passion, joy, enthusiasm, levity, empathy, and even our old friend lust.

I love lust. It’s so innocent.

So while I no doubt will have to work with my rage and bitterness as themselves, as I uncork my id I will be increasingly able to drain some of its energy away and put them to more constructive use.

To hell with rage.

How about bliss?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been having a very sleepy day. I think it’s because I started using my fan when I sleep again and that really helped. So now I am catching up on that sleep debt.

So I am feeling pretty brain fried right now. No wonder I have a tendency to put off taking my sleeping pill even when I know I should. I know that the path back to wakefulness is going to involve a lot of this muzzy headed bullshit.

Dunno if I will make it to th 500 word line this sesh. Caffeine, work your miracle!

Definitely having a hard time focusing. My mind keeps wandering off like a toddler chasing a butterfly and so I keep having to corral it and drag it back to the keyboard.

The words, they no come easy right now.

I probably have more forgives to do. Still feel all that guilt hanging off me, not letting go, just dangling off me all cold and gooey and heavy like half-frozen treacle.

It will drop off eventually, I am sure, when I have cut off enough senseless guilt and shame that the remaining connection to it can’t support its weight.

Or at least that’s what makes sense metaphorically, and that’s good enough for me.

---

Been pondering the notion of looking forward to things. One thing about the very flat affect of my largely unchanging life is that it doesn’t give me much to look forward to.

Or dread, for that matter.

But looking forward has never been my strong suit. Ironically, between fear of the future and my past being either a minefield or exactly like the present, I tend to stay in the present just like all the mystic masters say I should.

Gee, that must mean I am enlightened, right? Except no, because then I would be at one with the universe and beyond all the petty strictures of the counting and dividing mind and in tune with the heartbeat of the universe.

And I’m not. I’ve checked. Twice.

Things to look forward to are definitely good for my mental health, though. They erk me up and make me feel better about life and excited about the future.

It’s so hard to set them up for myself, though. The only way I can imagine doing it is to buy stuff from Amazon or wherever, then wait with bated breath for it to arrive.

Which is sort of sad, but it would work.

Of course, that takes money, which is a problem, and smacks of depressive spending, which is far worse.

Spending money to make yourself feel better leads to feeling terrible about the money you have spent which leads to even more spending to make you feel better which leads to feeling even worse which leads to….

It’s just another dead end addiction, only this one can spiral out of control faster than any drug or lifestyle addiction.

You can cripple yourself with bone-crushing debt in the space of a long weekend if you really go nuts.

So I ain’t going there. I’d be better off doing drugs.

More after the break.

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Dig down and find faith

Got this stuck in my head right now :

Believe me, Less Douchey Bono, I am trying.

Throwing off the limitations of false reason is a good start. I am – and life is – so much larger and stronger and more vital and alive than the pitiful products of reason’s underpowered understanding can contain.

Life on Planet Earth is so much more than mere facts.

And humanity cannot live on the truth alone.

So I have started on the journey but I haven’t gotten too far yet. I still have trouble understanding the worth of faith even as I recognize its desirability.

My legacy fact based system has not yet been fully replaced by something far more modern and robust, and so I still have a lot of trouble imagining something having worth when I cannot scan, analyze, and verify with my high powered supercomputer brain.

A priori truth – things that are taken as true without the need for verification or evidence, basely purely on imagination and will – is still a very hard thing for me to wrap my head around. I keep wanting to reject it.

But I am a humble student willing to wait for illumination. I might be quite arrogant about my powers of reason but I know that when it comes to spirituality I am not even an acolyte and will supplicate to any from whom I feel I can learn.

Admittedly, my standards for that role might be pretty high. But again, humility. Someone does not need to be smarter than me to be wiser than me, or even to have some insight into things I lack.

Even the dullest people know things you do not, and have a perspective you can learn from if you take the time to listen.

Of course, I am not going to find my sensei if i don’t start going out into the world and looking, and that will mean overcoming all my bitterness about never having had any guidance in my life because I was always smarter than everyone around me and nobody in my childhood could handle even the tiniest percent of my true power.

Even my therapist can barely handle a third of my output. If I was to truly open up like you are supposed to do with him, I’d shatter the poor man.

I know this because the times when I have tried upping my intensity just a little, he had sounded like he was on the edge of hysteria.

I pack a hell of a lot of raw energy in my seemingly peaceful and gentle personality. But it’s all parkland over a power plant, folks. A well landscaped reactor pile.

At my core lies a billion screaming megavolts of churning, burning, yearning insanity.

And one day, it might just go critical.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There’s probably a ton more things I could and should forgive myself for, but right now I am too tired to think of them.

So I am just going to blog like usual and if one occurs to me, I’ll just plop it into the text.

Right now, I feel like all the stuff I forgave myself for yesterday – especially the big stuff, like forgiving myself for being an “accident” and for getting raped – is still on its way out. These changes are huge and will take a while to process, but waddy fug, I got time.

Lots and lots of time.

Right now, it feels like I cut ties with an enormous weight of guilt and shame and now it’s just kind of hanging off me by a thread. Like it’s a big cold mass of something viscous slowly sliding off my chest but not actually detaching yet.

There’s no way it can ever return…. gravity doesn’t work that way,

But it may be a while before it finally falls off.

If I get impatient, I’ll just give my hips a wiggle to shake it off.

Got a call from my cataract surgeon’s office today. They potentially had a cancelation which would have opened up the possibility of my getting my surgery on the 22nd of this month instead of the 26th of April.

Luckily, she realized mid-call that I had not done my eye measurements yet, and so surgery was a no-go.

That was lucky because it saved me from having to say no because that’s way too sudden and way too soon and I don’t handle sudden change real well.

Would have been embarrassing to admit that to someone who doesn’t know my psychiatric history. I prefer to maintain the illusion of sanity where I can.

I forgive myself for being insane. It’s not my fault that I have a head full of bad wiring and it does not reflect on my worth as a human being or the quality of my character. My mental illness is the result of severe emotional trauma and as such does not have any more bearing on my inherent worthiness than a missing limb or leukemia.

While I am at it, I also forgive myself for healing so slowly because my illness makes it so hard to face reality. It took me many years merely to get the courage to ask my GP for individual therapy and it’s taken many years of individual therapy and blogging to get as far as I have gotten.

This is not my fault. It’s a bitch to have an illness that prevents its own treatment and that’s what depression is like.

Besides, fuck all that “could\should have” bullshit. The past is gone, it’s deader than dead. It doesn’t matter what I could or should have done or what the optimal path might, in retrospect, have been.

So I collectively forgive myself for absolutely every suboptimal decision I ever made.

Or more succinctly, I forgive myself for being suboptimal. For being so much less than the theoretical maximum I can so clearly perceive.

That’s one of my depression’s oldest tricks to keep me down and I reject it wholesale. I am always going to fall short of perfection and I will always be able to imagine having done better but “not optimal” and “not good enough” are not and can never be the same thing. That’s just a fancy way of stacking the deck against myself and the fact that it uses some of the machinery of my powerful analytic abilities does not make it one iota more valid or sane.

Enough of this pseudo-rational bullshit. My powers of reason can go sit in the corner and think about what they’ve done.

More after the break.

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Just keep on forgiving

I forgive myself for forgetting to actually type “More after the break” then drop the line into the text until now. Oops!

And I forgive myself for being a victim. All through my life I have been the victim of people’s malfeasance, ignorance, injustice, and contempt.

And it didn’t matter that I was innocent, because my real crime was being low status and therefore ran afoul of people’s total inability to imagine a low status person to have any inherent worth or even qualify as human.

You can do what you want to low status people. Nobody cares. Ask them why they did nothing when people were getting brutalized right in front of their eyes and they will shrug because they can’t face the truth that to them, some people don’t matter. At all.

Back to self-forgiveness. Bitter rage can wait, I have plenty.

Point is, I forgive myself for being the victim all my life. I was left with very little basis for self-preservation and the advocacy of my own self-interest by the rape and the resultant withdrawal into the world of the mind.

Retreating from reality severely limits your effectiveness in it. To this day I barely know what it going on around me and I doubt that will ever change.

So I forgive myself for escaping into my mind and never coming out again, too. It was my best option when I was raped by a stranger at the age of 4, and it preserved what was left of my sanity.

Not too shabby given that I invented it when I was four years old.

I forgive myself for being weak and feeble as a result. My retreat into my mind severed my connection to my id almost completely. This cut me off from the wellspring of strength of spirit and soul and the drives that keep living beings going, and I am only just now beginning to repair that damage and power up my full personality.

And I forgive myself for having to go through all I have gone through alone. No support network, no confidants, not a single person who truly gave a damn about me. No one with even a casual interest in my wellbeing.

Just endless emotional isolation. Midnight tundra stretching to the horizon in all directions. Me naked and alone, and not a stick of shelter to be seen.

Guess I will just keep wandering.

It’s either that, or finally lay down and die.

And I don’t want to do that. Any more. Much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, time to shed some dead weight.

I forgive myself for being sick. For not being able to cope with things. For being depressed and isolated and anxious and disorganized and messy and all the other unpleasantness that comes from being so sick.

I forgive myself for never cleaning anything in this bedroom. It’s utterly filthy here and I forgive myself for that. Sick people often have trouble looking after themselves and their immediate environment. I forgive myself for letting it get this bad.

I forgive myself for never getting my life started. For never even becoming an adult. For not being able to crawl out of the deep dark hole being taken out of university threw me into on my own.

Relatedly, I forgive myself for hiding from life all these 25 years. For living inside my computer and shutting out the real world entirely. I’ve coped the best I could for all these years and it’s pretty amazing that I have made it as far as I have given my problems. I should be patting myself on the back for surviving, not kicking myself when I am down.

I forgive myself for those l25 lost years entirely. Hating myself for them only adds to the forces that caused them in the first place. I have not failed and I have not wasted time and I have no reason to feel guilty about how my life turned out.

I’ve done the best I could with what I’ve got.

I forgive myself for being fat. My depression makes exercise kind of tricky. I barely have the motivation to get out of bed every day. Finding the motivation to torture myself with painful exercise for as long as it takes to get skinny is so far out of the realm of possibility that you would need a dozen Hubble telescopes to see it from here.

I forgive myself for not taking better care of myself. I do what I can do. I know everything I “should” do. Means nothing. I fundamentally do not feel like I am worth the effort of caring for myself because of my neglectful childhood, and combined with my low motivation levels, that means self-neglect.

I don’t want it but I can’t help it so forget it.

I forgive myself for being weak and timid. Being raped when I was four years old left me with a simply massive emotional wound that crippled my entire being and left me with a terrible soul sickness that was then left to fester for thirty years as I kept the secret of it so well I forgot about the whole thing (sorta) until I was in my thirties. It was and is a wound far too deep and terrible for me to ever have been able to heal by myself.

I forgive myself for hating myself. I didn’t know any better. It’s taken me a long time to make enough room in my mind to separate my self-image from my illness.

I forgive myself for healing so slow.

There’s probably tons more but right now I need a nap.

I forgive myself for that, too.

More after the break.

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More self forgiveness

Yes, I am actually resuming a topic. Quelle surprise. Quel shoc.

I forgive myself for being somewhat trying to be around sometimes. For being kinda gross and smelly sometimes and disheveled and shabby pretty much all the time. For having gross visible medical issues that are hard to ignore, like the wound on my leg and the issues with my scalp. For making my friends worry about me because they see me getting sicker and sicker but can’t do anything to stop it. For sometimes being somewhat distant due to the depression. For being somewhat clueless and needing to be rescued from my own distractedness sometimes. For being a goof.

I also forgive myself for being a burden. Somewhat of a high maintenance pet. Sure, as the above paragraph shows, there are certain costs to associating with me. Not unreasonable ones, and I am under no obligation to be as user friendly as possible at all times, but still. I feel bad about it.

So I hereby forgive myself for costing people whatever it costs to be around me. Phew, that’s a big one. I really feel the weight of that one as I pick it up to lay it down. It might take a little while for that one to fully leave my system.

But with a voice firm with resolve but also trembling with effort, I declare that I deserve my place in the world as much as anyone else does. And that includes my share of resources, such as (but not limited to) love, attention, affection, patience, hassle, consideration, inclusion, and even food water oxygen and shelter.

Yes, even those.

I don’t have to apologize just for being alive and I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I forgive myself for being ashamed of myself, though. It’s how I was raised. Resented since the day I was conceived. Never treated as an equal member of the family. Grew up feeling like a guest who overstayed his welcome.

You all know the drill.

So while I am at it : I forgive myself for being an accident. Wasn’t my choice. Wasn’t my idea. I didn’t ask to be the product of a highly improbable tubal ligation failure. I didn’t show up in my mother’s womb demanding to be born.

And I didn’t choose to disrupt an already settled family dynamic, either.

So I completely forgive myself for how I entered the world.

And I forgive myself for how I was treated as a result. I didn’t deserve the neglect, resentment, disdain, and hostility I received. I should have been treated with love and care and attention and acceptance and given my full share of all the good things in life, and the fact that this did not happen is not my fault.

I also forgive myself for being raped, being bullied, and being a wimpy whiny kid.

Like I said above the line, I did the best I could with what I had.

And I didn’t have much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling pretty bad right now.

I feel cold and isolated. Like I’m a million light years away from the Sun or any other star. I feel numb but it’s the painful kind of numb that feels like some icy beast is biting into your flesh with teeth made of ice, and slowly gnawing on you.

For my West Coast friends, that’s what frostbite feels like when it’s happening.

And of course, along with the cold comes darkness. Midnight tundra, represent! Feels like I can’t see anything, and yet at the same time, like I can see everything with a harsh and painful clarity.

Maybe I just wish I couldn’t see anything.

This is what happens when because of depression, the only light you have is the bright but savage light of supposed logic and reason.

So much power, and yet it gives no warmth.

And of course, with all of that, I feel so very very alone. Like the entire human race is impossibly far away. Like they are on a completely different plane of reality from me, and only cold logic tells me they are still out there somewhere, all seven billion of them, living their lives in the sunshine and warmth they have always known, oblivious to the darkness that surrounds them,

And that’s a good thing. Let strange folk like me patrol the shadows. They can stay in the light and never know what lurks in the dark.

Hmmm. Idea : a group of (super)heroes known as the Shadow Patrol.

The good news is that at least now, these chemical based negative states of mind don’t overpower me. They don’t corrupt my entire sense of reality. I know that it’s just random neurochemical bullshit that means nothing about anything.

And like the weather, it will soon pass.

Most importantly, I know it means nothing about me. Any negative feeling I might have towards myself when in this state are merely depression’s distortions of that mirror image of the false self and reflect absolutely nothing about the real me.

After all, funhouse mirrors don’t make you any fatter. Or taller.

I am still the amazing and astounding critter I have always been. No amount of fog or darkness can dim the bright and shiny star of my overflowing outpouring soul.

All they can do is get in between me and the mirror.

And my mirror sucks. It’s all bent and cracked and warped from all the contortions my depression has put it through in order to keep the image of me congruent with its self destructive agenda and dogma.

It preserved its pretensions of accuracy by hijacking my powerful engines of analysis and insight and saying “See? These are highly accurate. See how good a telescope and microscope this mirror makes? Well then everything it shows must be true!”.

Yeah right. I will keep the crystal clear photographs but you can throw the rest out the window because it’s all a fucking lie.

You might think you have me pegged, Depression, but you don’t.

You don’t even know me at all.

More after the break.

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Told ya so!

Feeling somewhat better now. As I predicted.

Was somewhat tricky getting the motivation together to get showered and go out to do my usual Sunday shopping and socializing.

Managed to scrape together enough fuel to achieve escape velocity on Planet Depression this time, but one day soon I know gravity’s gonna win and I will be too depressed to go out.

And I will say something vague about not feeling well, and it won’t be a lie, exactly. Because I will feel unwell.

But odds are, the real culprit is depression. Physical ailments might contribute to the depression, but it will be the depression that makes me feel like leaving the apartment is pure shrieking madness and therefore absolutely impossible.

I mean, gun to my head, I could do it. But that’s about it.

And that’s why it’s so hard to be close to someone with depression. Sometimes those steel shutters will come down and we will be off in our own private hell and if you happen to be connected to us at the time, you might lose a limb. We will freeze you out completely whether we want to or not, and nothing you can do will prevent it.

There was this insipid post on Facebook where someone said something like, “Break a leg and people line up to sign the cast. But tell someone you have depression, and everybody pulls away. ”

They’re not the same thing, Helen. A person with a broken leg doesn’t suck the life out of you just by being around. They don’t give people a glimpse of the infinite darkness that surrounds their well lit world. They don’t make people feel helpless and hopeless. And most importantly, they don’t make them feel like you will take them down with you.

Insanity is terrifying, even in the relatively undramatic form it takes with depression. Even very casual contact with someone involves a mental connection, and the vibe people get from that empathic connection when they are around depressed people makes them fear for their lives.

It’s not right. But they’re not wrong.

It really is dangerous to be around us. Insanity is not literally contagious, but it can be psychologically contagious because being around insanity can drive you insane.

No wonder some of us learn to bury that shit really deep and only show the world the happy shiny face of someone who is funny and cute and fun to be around.

Like I have said many times before, it’s not that Fruvous is not the real me.

He’s just not all of me.

And under the fluff and the warmth and the cuddliness lies the all-devouring darkness of the interstellar void. And in that void there is a tiny little planet. And on that planet there is a tiny little fortress. And in that tiny little fortress there is a tiny little room. And in that room there is a tiny little box. And in that box there is a tiny little cage. And in that cage is a tiny little man, sitting all alone in that cold dark box.

That tiny little man is the real me too.

Turns out there’s more than one.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tried a few more of my Humble Monthly picks. ^[1]

First one was Trine 4. Aka The Nightmare Prince. It’s a puzzle platformer. The puzzles are what are known as “physics” puzzles as they rely on things like gravity and momentum and other real world-esque principles.

I did not expect to like this game at all. Puzzle type games of this sort just aren’t my bag, baby, and I figured my time with the game would be brief.

Just a quick look to confirm that, yup, hate it, and then I’d move on.

But the game won me over and it wasn’t easy. But the gorgeous and colorful graphics, gently silly sense of humour, and fun puzzles that are just challenging enough to be fun won me over.

Plot is simple. Three legendary heroes (a mage, a knight, and a thief) must band together to find a magically talented but incautious prince who performed some kind of spell involving shadows and got himself dragged off by them.

Each hero has puzzle-type abilities (mage can levitate objects, knight can reflect things with his shield, thief shoots rope arrow, etc) and the puzzles involve their use.

There’s combat too, but it seems arbitrary and tacked on. This is a puzzle game.

Like I said, I did not expect to like this game. But it’s just too appealing to dislike. The art style I would call broadly storybook, but with cartoon-y elements and graphics that are colorful without offending your eyeballs.

And everything is so beautiful. Check it out. Fullscreen recommended.

And the gameplay is fun. Some of the puzzles have been tricky to solve, but not unfairly so, and there is great pleasure in figuring them out.

So much to my surprise, I heartily recommend this game. It is delightful.

I also tried a game called Outward. Supposedly to be a hardcore survival game (ick) in a fantasy setting. Only rates a 67 percent on Metacritic. I did not expect to like it.

But it wouldn’t run on my system, so I will never know.

Finally, I played the demo for a recent hot game called Ghostrunner.

And wow, is it impressive. You are a recently awoken robot ninja in a cyberpunk setting who has to rescue a mysterious voice in your head named Whisper. You can do cool stuff like run along walls and slow down time and so on. And you have a sweet katana.

Sounds like a kickass action game, right?

Wrong. It’s actually a puzzle game. Gameplay consists of figuring out how to get from A to B, with possible brief bits of combat thrown in.

That’s not why I uninstalled it though. I turfed it because there is no way my old dude reflexes can handle all the tricky jumps and precisely timed button pushes and so on that the game demands.

Very impressive, but not my cup of tea at all.

More after the break.

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So much for the easy stuff

I like it when I have reviews and such to write because the mental overhead costs for that kind of thing are way lower than my usual freeform stream of consciousness prose you all have come to know and tolerate.

Because I don’t have to think about what I am going to write. It structures itself, more or less. Just review or comment on the next thing. Easy.

Possibly not as illuminating or therapeutic as my usual fare, but nice for a change.

Makes me wonder if I should start reviewing things on Vocal. Patient readers will remember that Vocal is a blogging platform that pays bloggers if they get enough views of their blog entries.

I have to admit that the place intimidates me.

Which is silly, because I know I’m a very good, funny, relatable writers who can write stuff even relatively stuffed shirts recognize as hilarious. I really have no reason to fear the place. In fact, I “should” jump in with both feet and a tail and prove to the world what a god damned amazing writer I am.

But I’m scared. So I don’t. Story of my life, really.

So much for “should”.

Depression’s usual thugs stand in the way.

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Option paralysis : what do I write about? There are billions of possibilities! I can’t possibly choose! Well clearly all I can do is nothing, then.

Fear of failure : what if it turns out nobody likes my writing? What if it turns out I suck? As long as I do nothing, I keep the dream that I am amazing alive. Why risk that?

Fear of success : what if it turns out that I really am as amazing as I think I am and people instantly love my writing and suddenly I am plucked from my cozy hidey hole and thrown into the spotlight of public scrutiny and people are depending on me and wanting things from me and expecting things of me and this safe little life of mine would be shattered forever? OH GOD NO.

The Unnamed Dread : That general feeling that I am just barely keeping my head above water and barely holding my guts in after severe abdominal trauma and anything, absolutely anything, that rocks the boat will sink it fast and deep. The feeling that Something Terrible is going to happen. Something so terrible I can’t even bear to look at it long enough to figure out what it is.

The guaranteed loser : the feeling that if there’s competition, I lose, especially if there is a lot of it. With a million people all trying to make it on Vocal, what are the odds that I will be able to beat them all?

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So, ya know, all your favorite characters, both new and old, in an all star craptastiganza sure to please the whole family… even little Mikey, and he hates everything!

Lately I keep telling myself to just focus on doing whatever I can to get better, and that there is nothing more than I am “supposed” to be doing.

I tell myself this over and over and over. No matter what potential I have, no matter how powerful I am, no matter how badly I want to get out into the world, the only thing that matters right now is getting better.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s try starting from a positive angle for once.

I think I am getting better at remembering that I’m actually a pretty amazing creature. A rare and magical creature quite unlike all the other critters in the zoo.

Not the hardiest of specimens, I require special care and handling, but with my wit and charm and imagination, not to mention my warm and affection personality, I can be a highly rewarding friend and companion for years to come.

All that and I’m cute too!

So adopt a Fruvous today. Act now, supplies are running out. Guaranteed to appraise for double the value as long as the appraiser is him.

My point in all this, besides healthy ego-building, is to reframe my self-image in a more positive light. This is no mean task, as merely mindlessly boosting myself will not cut it.

Repairing the heavy structural damage to my self-esteem will take a heck of a lot more than a crowd of generically nice people waving signs that say “Go you!”.

Thanks folks, but um, I’mma gonna need something a lot stronger.

The new structure had to be made of actual solid truths about myself, and is thus an act of synthesis by which disparate elements of my being are brought together to form an entirely new whole.

This, too, is kind of magical.

It’s tricky to explain the process because from a thuddingly thick point of view, I am fashioning this new me out of things I already know about myself. That I am crazy smart, creative, charming, and all the rest. If I already know all these things about myself, what else is there to do?

Well for one, there’s a vast difference between knowing and believing. Like I have said before, knowing is a cold and remote thing. There is little emotional investment.

Belief, on the other hand, takes investment and commitment, because the things we truly believe become a part of us on the deepest level.

But there’s also the synthesis factor. The synthesis as described above is the final step that creates something new. It’s the difference between the paint on the palette and the finished portrait. The difference between the script and opening night. The difference between the ingredients and the cake.

This is the sort of thing I am talking about when I go on about dreaming myself anew, or coming up with a new version of myself. A fresh synthesis that incorporates all that is known but in a stronger, more solid, more efficient form. One without the flaws and defects of the previous model.

Me 2.0, as it were.

And like any complex engineering job, it’s a slow and careful process. Because so much is riding on the end product, everything must be tested, verified, and then carefully integrated into the grand design, and that takes time,

It’s like NASA.

Maybe once I free enough of myself from rational restraint and the confines of my overweaning superego, I will be able to transform and transcend my current self into something far healthier, stronger, and more magnificent.

Something entirely new.

I think I have enough magic in me for that.

More after the break.

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Hothouse flowers deserve to live too

Shit’s gonna get weird. Even for me.

I realized something a little while ago. I have always resented hothouse flowers. Like, how dare they be so delicate and weak and high maintenance. How dare they demand so much time and resources and attention just to keep their pathetic selves alive. Think of all the hardier plants those resources could support. Those goddamned hothouse flowers should just die, die, die.

Patient readers will recall that I have referred to myself as a hothouse flower many times in this space.

This is not a coincidence.

Clearly, a deep and viscous part of me hates myself for being so weak and self-insufficient and feels like fragile specimen like me should just die so people can stop wasting resources keeping such a worthless creature as myself alive and move on to supporting more worthwhile plants.

Not a surprise to realize this lay inside me, but still a shock,.

It’s such a stridently virulent strain of self-loathing. A distillation of all my feelings of making the world a worse place just by being alive and of not being worth what it costs worthier people to keep me around and my death making the world a better place.

In a word, yikes.

But I’m glad I dug this up. Once unburied and aired out, potent negative potentials in my soul like this lose most of their power, and the rest fades away in time.

I mean, so what if hothouse flowers require a lot of TLC and resources to survive? The owners of said hothouses clearly think their delicate little orchids and violets are worth it. They certainly would not consider themselves better off if one of their little potted pets died and left them with a space to fill.

Similarly, my friends online and in the real world clearly consider me worth the cost of admittance, and who am I to disagree? Am I really so sure of my own judgment that I think I know better than them what is good for them?

Yes, kinda. There’s still a big part of me that feels like if I were to die, people would be sad for a little while. but quickly get over it, move on, and forget all about me.

Because I was simply never very important to people. I was nice, but also pretty pathetic to be honest, and so my death was probably for the best.

A mercy, really. For everyone.

I know that isn’t true. My life and my light have touched a lot of people. I’ve brought sunshine and warmth and merriment into their lives. A lot of folks really like having me around and my death would devastate them.

Especially if it was by my own hand.

I know this is true. But I don’t think I believe it yet.

Give me time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have the urge to dig deep into my psyche’s dead flesh and find myself a truly deep and painful bit of shrapnel to painfully excise and expel.

I crave the pain. And the fear, and the confusion, and the resistance, and all the other forms of suffering such surgeries can provide.

I’ve reached the point where I will welcome pain as a blessed relief from the silent savage scream of silence that is my numbness.

Fuck you, paralytic paranoia : I want to live.

So let’s see what painful issues I have lying around, waiting to be exploited.

Well, there’s always….

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A question of character

Today was Therapy Thursday.

I talked about my lack of character, as I saw it. Doc Costin, of course, reflexively argued against this negative characterization of myself. which was annoying as always.

But I understand. He’s trying to keep me from tearing myself down. I still don’t want him arguing with me when I am trying to pour out my soul to him, but I understand.

The negative prerogatives of depression are not so easily usurped.

Anyhow, it got me thinking further on the subject. Why this lack of character (or grit or backbone or whatever)? Why have I always been so weak and timid?

At the moment, my best theory is a lack of a suitable father figure.

I mean, I had my Dad and in his way he tried to help me man up. He took my brother and me target shooting, We went to hockey games. He got us Playboy subscriptions.

But he was always too angry and impatient to be a real guiding figure in my life. I needed a lot more patience and hand-holding and guidance than he was capable of giving. And like everyone else, he ignored me most of the time.

And I was fine with that because he scared me. And you just can’t have a warm, close, loving relationship with your kids if they are terrified of you

Without a proper father figure, I had nobody to encourage me to take risks. Explore boundaries. Expand my little world. Teach me that getting a little hurt is not the end of the world and that life’s better when you can bounce back from things.

Hence, I was the classic “mama’s boy”. That’s the nugget of truth in that hoary old idea. Science has confirmed this. Without a proper father (or someone who can fill that role), a child grows up cowardly and afraid of the world because they never got the message that some risks are no big deal and learning to take risks makes life way better.

So there’s nothing to counter the natural fear that the “maternal” parent who puts the child’s safety above everything ends up instilling.

Both are necessary. Sure, a lack of a “paternal” figure makes the child cowardly. but the lack of a “maternal” figure makes them reckless.

As in all things, balance is the key.

The other, secondary factor is whatever complex concatenation of visual and physical (possibly even neurological) issues made me so clumsy.

Actually, clumsy isn’t strong enough a term. Even “physically uncoordinated” doesn’t seem to cut it. It’s a system wide disconnect between my brain and my body, and it’s always been there keeping my body from doing what I want it to do.

Some of called it “motor dyslexia”. Which is a terrible term for it, but it’s nevertheless the best one I have come across.

I never knew why I was like this, but recently I came across a clue. A YouTube commenter mentioned that she thought her absolutely lack of coordination came from nobody having played games like catch and tag with her in her early childhood, and therefore those important neural pathways were never primed and activated.

And that never happened to me, either. I don’t remember ever playing that way. I don’t remember anyone even trying.

That’s where this gets tricky, though, because as far as I can recall, I never liked that kind of play. Was that because I was bad at it from the very start? In that case, it’s something I was born with, not something that is a result of neglect.

I certainly remember being very frustrated by certain physical tasks as a wee one.

So I dunno. Maybe was born with some kind of neurological defect that stunted my neurophysical development right from the very start.

Maybe that’s what put me on the path of developing the abstract reasoning parts of my brain to such an extent that I became a little smarty pants precocious kid.

That would explain a lot.

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Wasn’t I like, doing something?

Well it seems I have, predictably enough, strayed very far from my original intent to dig up a truly heinous bit of shrapnel.

Oh well. I rarely end up at my original destination, but I usually end up somewhere worth going, at any rate.

I guess I’ve always operated in a kind of mental fog, too. I suppose that’s part of the depression, or maybe it’s part of my messed up neurology, I don’t know.

Actually, now that I am thinking about it, I am sure it mostly has to do with that profound retreat into my own mind that took place when I was raped.

I fled deep into the forests of my mind to escape that rape while it was happening, and like a WWII soldier who doesn’t know the war is over, I’ve stayed there ever since.

And I really can’t imagine ever coming out again. There’s my weighty hunk of mental shrapnel. I closed my eyes on the real world when I was raped when I was four, and ever since then this dense forest has been my home. My world. My fog.

This fog does more than cloud my mind. It obscures the real world enough for me to be able to function, inasmuch as I do.

This means the fog won’t go away until I no longer need its numbing chill and thick obscuring mists to keep my all encompassing fear of reality at bay.

Until then, this foggy forest of mine will remain my home.

And it’s not so bad….is it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.