You know, the on that hangs over me and blocks the sun and leaves me in midnight tundra conditions all the time.
The one that keeps almost all impulses from getting through and leading to (shudder) actually doing things.
Imagine that. Voluntarily exiting my standing wave of blessed and deadly self-hypnosis and opening myself up to that big bad world full of overstimulating chaos and a mind-crushing number of options for something as meaningless and worthless as not dying.
Arnie as T2 pulls up in a car.
Arnie : Come with me if you want to live
Me (not getting in) : Yeah. If.
Because why would I want all this (gestures to his pathetic life) to end?
I have so much more absolutely nothing to do with my life! Why I can’t wait to be an even bigger loser at 58 than I am at 48!
Just kidding. No way I’ll live that long.
I might not even make it to 50.
After all, How can I be sad when I have so much to live through? Years and years of silently smothering like a victim of a slowly spreading paralyzing disease.
Which is what I am, metaphorically speaking.
All those fun years ahead of me of my health just getting worse and worse while I am surrounded by the means to save myself – CPAP machine, glucometer, insulin – that I can’t make myself use because a very big part of me hates me and wants to die.
Because let me be clear. It’s not just a “lack of motivation”, whatever that means. The bad part of my mind and soul is so filled with self-loathing that it wants to see me suffer a slow lingering horrible death from preventable causes while making everyone who loves and cares about me suffer helplessly and horribly as they watch me fall apart.
It would like nothing more. It would be the ultimate act of pure fucking hate.
And as long as this self-annihilating part of me can stop me from doing all the simple and undoubtedly super effective things that would keep me alive and healthy, its victory is inevitable. I keep trying to find the part of me that wants to live and hook it up to the main system but instead all those healthy natural impulses just die, die, die when they meet up with that cold dark numbness inside me.
There’s no amount of motivation that can make a paralyzed limb move. And that’s what I am dealing with here, though the paralysis doesn’t always show.
Because it’s not a paralysis of the body, it’s a paralysis of the will. I have all this mental firepower but it’s worse than useless if the motivations just can’t get through because they are being intercepted by the enemy within.
And it makes me feel so helpless. And I can’t see a way out. The only way I will get better is if I get sick enough to end up in the hospital for a long time and therefore I am under the care and supervision of nurses and doctors and no longer in charge of myself and my care.
Because I am one shitty caretaker.
I barely do a thing.
Either that, or on some deep level I need to truly wake up. Eschew the killing comfort of the sleepwalking lifestyle and shake myself awake, consequences be damned.
My god, that sounds horrible.
Existential growth is so hard to justify to the hedonistic mind. All it sees is a lot of pain and fear and suffering for gains it can’t even say for sure will come, let alone be worth it.
That’s why it’s good that healthy people just do it by instinct.
It’s us intellectual sickos that need everything to “make sense” that fuck it up.
How can you convince a tadpole it’s better to be a frog?
More after the break.
Kill the committee
A group of fussy, tightassed bureaucrats are seated around a boardroom table. The chairman is standing, and pressing the clicker on a PowerPoint deck. Various documents with words like “permission” and “initiate” and “urgent” appear on each slide, and the committee intones a bored “No. ” at each one even though they are on screen for barely a second.
Suddenly, the door flies open and a very large man with a very large shotgun enters almost before the door is completely open. Without pause or hesitation, he starts slaughtering the bureaucrats. The booms from his mighty stainless steel shotgun are so loud they make loose objects on the boardroom table jump. Within seconds, everyone at the table has been ruthlessly shredded, and now look like so much potted meat.
The big man surveys his work, turns to leave, then pauses thoughtfully before walking to where the remains of the chairman now lie. He picks up the clicker and presses a few buttons on it, and a brief bit of feedback indicates speakers being turned on.
big bad mike, 21 Feb 2022
“Meeting adjourned. Forever. ” says the big man into the PA. Then he nods to himself, turns around, and leaves without ever looking back.
Now don’t flip, people.
That was a purely metaphorical mass shooting. It was me killing off the part of my brain that blocks nearly all of my impulses and keeps me trapped in passivity.
And I am pretty sure it’s still legal to kill your mind.
At first I was just going to talk about this idea of “the committee” as an image I use to represent the punitive, life-denying, hateful part of me that blocks almost everything I want (and SHOULD) do. It’s a useful image I have had for a very long time.
But as I began to gear up to write it, something inside me told me this needed something more than my usual navel-grazing.
And I am quite glad I listened. That was fun to write, and quite cathartic.
I won’t claim the Committee is now gone for good. It would be awesome if hacking my mind was that easy, but it ain’t.
But I’ve made strides in the direction, at least.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.