Hey, guess what? I just remembered my plan to combat my negative personal narrative!
You know, those stories we tell ourselves about our own lives? The stories we also tell to others, albeit in an edited form?
They are foundational to our sense of who we are, and mine stinks.
It’s so negatively skewed. I have a profound sense of being a victim of life and its strife and toils, and my entire worldview is like a giant inverted pyramid with me at the very bottom and everything coming down on me.
Gee, Atlas, what’s wrong? You look like you got the weight of the world on your shoulders. Ba dum tish.
But that’s ridiculous. Nobody is a total victim of circumstance and no matter how I feel the universe is not and cannot be against me. I may have had some bad luck but so does everybody. My problems are my own.
My main misfortune is that I am mentally ill. Everything else flows from that.
The specific aspect of my negative self-narrative I want to tackle right now is that idea that I have done nothing with my life.
False. I may not have done anything in terms of a career or relationships (because of mental illness) but I didn’t just stare at the wall, either.
I’ve done things. I’ve gone to conventions and met people there. I regularly hang with my fuzzy friends online and have an effect on them – a positive one, I might add.
As Fruvous, I am. quite honestly, amazing to be around. Arf!
And of course. I’ve spent copious amounts of times with my friends Joe. Julian, and Felicity, and that’s not “nothing” either. We’ve talked, we’ve laughed, we’ve watched many thing together, and we have socialized.
This is what keeps me from letting the Trog take over and make me disappear into my cave forever. These fine friends of mine save my life every day.
So I shouldn’t let my depression use its own long term effects to convince me that for the last 20 years I have done “nothing”.
It may not have been enough. And I certainly wish I had done more. A lot more.
But there’s a vast difference between “not enough” and “nothing”. .and I need to hold on to that truth and clasp it to my breast until it finally enters my heart.
Because I want to get better, damn it. These doldrums are beneath me.
And I can’t get better with an absurdly tragic internal narrative constantly dragging me down into the cold and dark waters of the Arctic again and again.
Heck, this blog alone represents something a lot more than nothing about my life. I’ve written a thousand words a day for 11 years now.
That’s over 4 million words! That is a lot of typing, all to finally release some of the thoughts in my head by capturing them on the page.
And it’s been great. Gives at least a little bit of hope and purpose to my life. Without this outlet I would lose my mind.
But it’s not enough. It hasn’t been enough for a long time. I need more places to put my mojo so I can approach something like a calm internal state.
I posted a video to TikTok today. And I plan to keep doing that every day. Doesn’t matter whether I have something important or interesting to say or not.
Just three minutes of video of me talking a day.
Yeah, I think I can handle that.
More after the break.
Of or pertaining to wooz
Another dizziness attack. Yay.
Just getting to the kitchen to make supper and then back again was an adventure. One with pulse pounding action, in that my pulse was pounding in my temples the whole time. It’s ever so much fun.
It’s probably once more due to dehydration. It can happen so fast Two meals without drinking a big glass of water and I am in this absurd and hazardous state.
In a weird and off-kilter way. my Decaf Diet {Pepsi habit is to blame. Often, that little 330 ml can of DDP makes me forget to drink my usual 1.2 L of water because the DDP satisfies my thirst, but not my actual hydration needs.
Bodies are dumb.
To top it off. I am going to have to get to the bathroom and back in order to fill my water cup so I can drink it while I type.
Here I go. Wish me luck.
Well that was unpleasant but thankfully uneventful.
Thank Whoever that it’s only six steps there and six back. Even so, I was sagging rather alarmingly while I filled my cup.
And I am having my usual problem staying focused on the screen. It’s kind of hard to stay on target when you are swaying in your seat like a palm tree in a stiff breeze.
But I am being a smart boy and drinking my water now, so hopefully the wooz will go away soon and I can return to my usual level of unobtrusive misery.
Not that anyone is neglecting me in any way. On the contrary, I am being well cared for by Joe and Julian.
It’s not at all their fault that I have such a hard time speaking up for my needs. Like I said recently, at a certain point I just gave up on the whole idea of being helped, and that’s a hard thing to reverse.
And my social anxiety/ avoidant personality/ timidity plays a central role as well. Makes it very hard to believe that asking for help will result in getting it instead of people acting like I just popped out of dark alley and demanded a live chicken.
Everything is sudden when you routinely forget I exist, and hate being reminded.
As a result of all that, I have trouble even conceptualizing my own needs. I just keep bop bop bopping along no matter what. That’s how I survived such a cold and negative childhood without becoming a serial killer just to get some goddamned attention.
People pay a lot more attention to you when you have a body count.
And I know that this inability to speak my needs makes me frustrating as hell to look after because I could be metaphorically heading for the waterfall and it would not even occur to me to cry for help.
But I’m always so afraid to interrupt other people’s lives with my needs.
I guess I need to work on that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.