Had an attack of “Is that really all I am going to do with my day?” this morning.
The “that” in question is, of course, play video games. And truth is that yes, that’s all I am going do with my day, just like every other day, and that truth hurt.
Hurt and frightened me and made me feel like I was teetering on the edge of the abyss because it made me realize what a meaningless void my life is.
All I ever do is entertain myself, and that’s such a sad way to live. Especially for a person with my extraordinary abilities.
The best thing that can be said about it is it lets me survive. It gets me through the day. It makes the time pass in a relatively painless way.
Then again, so does being in a coma.
And I know I want more out of life. I want a career and a relationship and a community. I want achievement and honor and respect. I want to be a real adult type person.
I want to finish growing up.
But in order to do all that, I have to pull myself away from my video game addiction now and then and spend time neither playing a video game or eating but actually doing scary things to advance my own interests.
And that’s like….. real hard for me. I mean, I call it a video game addiction for a reason. Even the idea of going without its comfort for even a short time gives me a feeling of cold sweat panic like doing so would literally kill me.
I’m not exaggerating. That’s what addiction does. It takes over the cravings center of your brain that normally keeps you alive by driving you fulfill your needs (the hungry animal eats, and so on) but installs itself as a need, and from that point on doing without that to which you are addicted gives you the same panicky feeling you would get if you were starving or dying of thirst.
That’s especially true for physical addictions because in that case your body really is missing some chemical it has stopped producing in response to your drug intake.
But it’s still very strong with purely psychological addictions like video games. This cravings part of the brain is very powerful and not to be denied lightly.
So I know what I am up against. And I know that I will never been content until I break the addiction and go find better things to do with my life.
And to do THAT, I am going to have to learn to swim upstream. To take the path of greater resistance. To willingly make life harder for myself.
That would be a very big change. I’ve spent so much time flowing down the river without so much as an oar in the water.
Heck, I don’t even row downstream.
But I can do it. I can learn and evolve and become more than I am right now.
For I am not all that I can be.
I can be so much more.
I can grow.
More after the break.
The haunted child
Watched (listened to) this video earlier today :
And here’s the comment I left on YouTube :
I had no imaginary friends. Did not play with toys at all. Only cared about books and video games and TV. Never played in the sandbox, didn’t care about action figures or LEGO or all the rest. I was a strange, serious child who thought and spoke like an adult from a curiously young age. In short, I was weird.
me, dropping a truth bomb y’all
And it got me thinking about what a strange and spooky child I was.
Actually, not spooky. Eerie. I was an eerie child because I had the body and voice and stature of a child my age but I talked like an adult even before I entered school.
And it must be mighty strange to hear adult words coming out of a child’s mouth, in a child’s voice. It must have been downright uncanny, like I was actually some kind of child robot trying to blend in with human children (sort of true) or that I was the puppet of a very strange adult who was feeding me lines through hidden earphones.
Then there was the fact that I just did not think like a child either. Or really like any other human being known to science either, really.
I have always seen things my own way. With startling, even troubling clarity compared to others. This made me not only uncanny but unpredictable.
It’s one thing for the robot child to say normal things in a professorial tone. That kind of thing people can get used to. They’ve seen that kind of kid countless times on TV.
But no, I saw right through people. I could ignore the shared social illusion at will and completely ignore its rules and restrictions whenever I disagreed with them, and that made me not just strange but extradimensional.
Positively alien. really. And the fact that I didn’t seem to know that my powers were anything special only furthered the effect.
Plus, I can’t forget to include my total intellectual self-confidence. Kids are not normally nearly that sure of themselves because they are aware that adults are wiser and smarter than that and so are sometimes willing to defer to them.
Not me. I was completely confident in my opinions and perceptions because, I suppose, I had never had a smarter adult to put me in my place.
Still waiting on that, really.
So in summation, I was a spooky, extradimensional, smug little robot alien who seemed to think he was a human child.
And I was. But then again, I wasn’t.
This is what happens when intellectual development races so far ahead of physical and emotional development that you do not even seem human to others.
No wonder so many adults threw up their hands in frustration and gave up on me. Life was so much easier if you didn’t have to deal with me.
And I was very unlikely to insist upon myself.
So I was one sad and lonely robot child.
Maybe I can be a real boy some day.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.