With Dr. Gabor Maté and some chick with a bad perm.
Ignore the title because they don’t cover any of that. At least not directly.
But patient readers know that I am very familiar with suppressed anger. I am full of it. As of this writing, it still awaits me gathering the nerve to vent it.
In my case, it goes deeper than having to suppress my anger because expressing it would have made my situation worse.
That’s for targets of direct abuse.
No, to me the really galling thing is that I went the first 25 years of my life without even being able to recognize that I was being mistreated.
I was miserable, and depressed, and heart rendingly lonely, and yet I did not come within a country mile of blaming anyone in my life for that.
I just blamed myself and my being so fundamentally fucked up and broken.
And even that, I kept clamped down inside of me. As now, back then I never let the misery show when I was around others. They got only my smiling, friendly self, mask strapped on so tightly that it even fooled me.
The few times I tried to express my pain and problems to a parent or a teacher, I got shot down brutally and efficiently by people who were disgusted by the idea of a horrible thing like me trying to get closer to them in any way.
Both groups wanted to pretend I wasn’t there. Instead of helping me with my problems, teachers acted like I was holding them hostage and my parents acted like I was an alien from another dimension.
So I stopped trying to reach out and gave up on the world outside my head and retreated to the world of media consumption.
And I am, of course, still there. I never got to develop any further than being a robot who goes to school and recharges with TV, books, comics, and video games.
Mostly just video games now.
To this day, I can’t let my depression show to others. And by that, I don’t mean “I dare not do it” or “I work hard not to do it”.
I mean I literally can’t. It’s not an option. That mechanism seized up in the closed position a long time ago and decades of icy cold conditions have only frozen it even more firmly closed.
Maybe I will be able to someday. But personally, I cannot imagine trusting anyone enough to do that. Try as I might, I can’t see it as anything but a recipe for doom.
Because no matter how much they want to help me and how much they love me and how good and pure and righteous their motives are, exposure to even a small portion of my darkness and pain will destroy them.
My experience with Doctor Costin proved that. He’s been a therapist for almost fifty years and yet when I try to TRULY let loose with my emotions like you are supposed to do he was overwhelmed and terrified and left speechless.
So yeah. Fuck that. The world has never been able to handle the real me.
Instead, I am a creature who must spread his personal truths very, very thinly amongst the manifold layers of masks and illusions I use to protect my wounded self.
And then of course, there is here. Here, on these pages, I can do my best to express whatever I can and at least get some of it out of my system.
It’s by no means a complete solution. But it’s all I’ve got.
More after the break.
A TUF challenge
So the full AKC registered name of my new graphics card is the
“Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 ti”.
But don’t let the cute name fool you. It’s a monster.
Did a little research into cases, motherboards, and power supplies. Should be able to get all three for between $300 and $400.
A lot more than it used to be, but that’s true for everything. And I can afford it, if I must.
But must I? Doubts have crept in. Where, exactly, did I get the idea that Mister TUF would not fit in my current case? Other than the fact it’s big?
Surely the makers of these things would not make one that doesn’t fit into the average computer case, right?
That’s at least a possibility.
So I have decided it is time for me to face my unfounded fear of messing with the inside of computers and open this PC up so I can look around and see if, in fact, this mishugana beast will fit in there.
As far as I know, I don’t have a lot of other stuff plugged in. A lot of the usual culprits like network card and sound card and such are built in to the motherboard.
There might be literally no cards plugged into this thing’s PCI rail.
In which case there should be plenty of room.
While I am in there, I might as well clean the dust out. I will attempt to do so gently so as not to stir the dust up too much and give myself an allergy attack.
Dust and I are not compatible.
But it must be pretty dusty in there, seeing as the case has not been opened in the eight years I have owned this PC.
Man I wish I had a Dustbuster. They’re made for this kind of thing.
It’s right in the name!
The traditional way to clean the dust out of your PC is with a can of compressed air, but that would damn near kill me.
All that dust flying everywhere. I’d be risking anaphylaxis.
If I decide there'[s room, I will take the plunge and plug the damned thing in all by my little old self.
I will still want to upgrade everything piecemeal over time, but there will be less of a rush because using my new toy isn’t depending on it.
One complication : TUF boy only output in HDMI, and my computer does not have an HDMI input, as far as I know.
I think my monitor does, though. Perhaps this output need not pass through the computer directly at all.
I will check it out, anyhow.
Things are afoot!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.