That’s what I feel like my mind is doing right now.

It formed a protective shell around itself when I was being raped and went to sleep like a hibernating animal (complete with cold environment) and now at long last it is starting to stir in its slumber and move around a little in an attempt to wake itself up.

Of course, it helps that it’s actually spring out there.

The weather and the season could not be more thematically apropos.

I’m so glad that I am through with trying to solve my depression logically. Now I am reaching deep into my emotional core and feeding as much of my coruscating mental overcharge right back into the heart of my darkness as I can and I will keep doing that until this lonely frozen heart of mine thaws out, heats up, and comes back to life.

I can feel the warmth of dawn on the horizon and I am going to keep on striving until I make it there and can let myself relax and trust that the sunlight will keep me alive.

Because right now, it feels like I am racing death. Like my exit from my latest infection really made me realize I am, in fact, alive, and I want to stay that way.

And not just in the sense of my physical health.

I don’t just want to be alive, I want to feel alive. I want to look forward to life and view the world as a good and happy place and reach out to give life a great big hug.

Just go with it, life. Don’t make this weird.

And this is more than just aimless longing or wistful dreaming. I can feel this new consciousness stirring within me and it feels like a homecoming.

Like I am finally going to turn into the broad shouldered and expansive person who spreads sunshine wherever he goes that I have always been on the inside.

Very deep inside. So deep that I had to become a fox to let it out.

And I know I can become a more expansive and joyful and life affirming version of myself. One with a full range of human emotional responses because I have finally dug down deep enough to find my id and hook it up.

One who can feel the sun on his face and in his heart and who can truly enjoy his own gifts instead of treating them like a weird roommate you get along okay with but don’t relate to at all.

They are me. I am them. We are we. We are all together.

And as I grow in the sunshine, I will reclaim all these lost and frozen parts of me that never got hooked up and activated because my development was so arrested.

Well, you know what I say : better latent than never.

Fuck the past. It’s dead, it’s gone, it’s forever lost. All that matters is the future because that’s where you will be spending the rest of your life.

So let’s try to have fun with it, okay?

More after the break.

---

Sleeping weirds time

Just woke up from a nap and it’s 8:45 PM and totally dark outside and that, as usual, is kind of messing with my head.

The human mind – or at least my model – does not like it when you go to sleep when it’s light out and wake when it’s dark

That’s not how it’s supposed to work! insists my circadians.

Oh well, it’s no big deal. Everything will right itself soon enough. And in the meantime, I can revel in the thrilling novelty of a slightly different brand of stumbling incoherence.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

---

Yeah I would say I am not particularly well brained at the moment.

So the words are not coming easily. Having a hard time thinking of something I want to write about, so here I am, babbling in text.

Oh. In case you were wondering, the problem I was having in my current game got resolved eventually. I just needed to extract my cranium from my anal cavity.

And it made me realize how often I have ended up in similar binds because my mind is very good at following a train of thought to its logical conclusion BUT extremely bad at backtracking from a dead end in order to find the right path.

It’s like I hop from logical lilypad to lilypad extremely fast and in a blaze of intuition and inspiration, logical associations clicking like relays in the telephone system, and usually that gets me to the right conclusion at lightning speed.

But if one of those lily hops is in error, I won’t realize it until I suddenly come upon a brick wall and have to come to a screeching halt and now I have no idea where the hell I am or how to get back on track.

Genius lets you screw up in ways ordinary minds can’t even conceive of, I guess.

Kind of suggests there’s a link between my high speed mental capacities and my usual state of confusion, doesn’t it? Like I am always popping off on these long journeys that follow a particular line of reasoning without thought as to finding my way home again.

I just go baying after the insight I seek or the truth I am after like a pack of hound dogs and I don’t come back to what passes for local reality till I have found my prey.

Only then do I look around and realize I don’t know where the fuck I am.

No wonder I never end up writing about whatever it was I starting out planning to write.

Oh, that old subject? That’s like, a million lilypads ago. I am way over here now.

And I think I enjoy the exploration involved too much to ever want to slow down and follow some boringly linear path.

After all, if I know exactly where I am going to end up, what’s the point of going?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Specifically, this one, straight from the summer of 1987 :

And the perfect summer sound message, both lazy and judgmental. The perfect thing to get your backdoor party feeling good.

Woke up with this song playing in my head and decided that was as good a place to start blogging as any.

And I need those good vibes because between getting stuck in a weird problem in Pathfinder and whacking my nose on my tablet while rolling over in bed and the fridge freezing a big portion of my leftover Poke Okey, I am feeling a bit besieged.

Oh well, at least I seem to be over whatever infection I had. I still feel pretty tired, but that could just be my usual background level of depression reasserting itself after getting rudely supplanted by an infection for a couple of days.

Plus my nose is running, insert stupid joke here. That’s annoying. Plus there’s an ominous cloud bank of cumulus headache lurking on the horizon of my consciousness that has me feeling squirrelly.

Overall, I seem to be building up stress in way that is both unpleasant and unfamiliar. Perhaps this is part of the process of getting in touch with my id type emotions and I am going to have to face the fact that a healthy, emotionally intact, and functional me will constantly be struggling with the same high strung and reactive nature that made my father such an impatient and intolerable prick.

Well then so be it. Gives me a chance to prove to the world that I can handle it a lot better than him by not feeling like I have the right to take it out on those I love.

But I get it, Dad. If crankiness can build this fast in me right now, in my zero pressure life, I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had like, a job or something.

That doesn’t excuse anything, mind you. You still owed your family the basic decency to learn to control your temper like a grownup instead of throwing a tantrum all the time like a spoiled toddler just because you never learned to stand up for yourself at work.

Yeah I got you all figured out, the late Larry Donald Bertrand.

Still, if this buildup of stress is something I am going to have to deal with in the future, it is incumbent upon me to find some healthy way to deal with it.

And “just keep suppressing it forever” is not, I must emphasize, a healthy plan.

That’s the kind of thing that has led to my being a bit over a month away from turning 50 without having gone anywhere or done anything with my life.

I’ve been so damned sick for so damned long.

And I am going to do something about that in the future.

But in order to do so, I may have to accept that there were things I could have done about it in the past.

And of course, at long last, and by the most circuitous of routes possible, I will work my way back around to the scariest thought of all :

All the things I could do about it right now.

More after the break.

---

A message from the other side

Of our weekly trip to Denny’s, that is.

Sorry, but as far as I know, I have not yet begun to commune with the dead.

Though that would explain a few things.

Not that I am eager to open a line of communication with the departed. Most people aren’t that interesting to talk to when they’re alive, I hardly see how being dead would change that in the slightest.

If anything, their anecdotes would get even more boring.

“So what did you get up to today, dearie?”
“Oh, you know. Haunted my harlot of a daughter for a while, then had fun freaking out the cat. Then I tormented the soul of my still living ex husband. ”
“Really? And how did that go?”
“Quite well actually. I think he almost noticed this time.”
“Well keep up the good work. As for me, well, you know me. Spent the whole afternoon in the men’s shower room over at the Y. “
“You still doin’ that? What’s the point, it’s not like you can do anything with them. ”
“Yeah, but what can I say? It makes me feel alive. ”

Oh, but what about the secrets of the afterlife, you ask? Think of all you could learn!

Look, darling, the only secret of the afterlife that’s worth a damn is whether or not there is one and if they’re talking to me there clearly is and that’s all I really need to know.

So unless they’re bursting at the seams to tell me where they buried their gold or hid the will or what King Arthur was really like, I’d just as soon wait till I’m dead to know, thanks.

After all, I’ll have plenty of time to hear all about it then!

---

Everything from the period after “that is” to this point is preferentially to be read in the voice of Madeline Khan.

Ya know, I know I have said this before, but I really should go off on comedy tangents like that before. It was loads of fun to write and it’s quite acceptable mainstream comedy that would work quite well as part of someone’s one woman show or the like.

And I wrote it just for fun, on a whim.

I’m so talented that stuff like that just rolls off me like water off a duck’s back.

With a little modification, it would suit Hettie from Ghosts perfectly. It’s exactly her kind of New England robber baron aristocrat bitchiness and it would work wonderfully with her carefully crafted mid-Atlantic accent.

I could totally write a hilarious and bankable TV pilot script.

I could probably even direct it. I get on great with actors.

Hell, I could even edit it, in a pinch. Or play some minor part.

But that’s about it. For everything else I’d need…. other people.

Other people ruin everything. 😛

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Which is bad. Because it means I don’t eat.

The last 36 hours have not been great. I do seem to be on the mend, which is good. I feel a lot better than when I was writing to you good people yesterday. It is way easier to make the words come out.

But I haven’t eaten much. Kind hard to eat and sleep at the same time. Going to the kitchen and back with my usual meals has until now not seemed like a good idea, but luckily I have managed to eat some of the stuff I keep in my room so I am not in the level of low blood sugar hell I could be in.

But I have still eaten way less than usual and this concerns me.

And then there’s the sleeping. At the moment, I can manage maybe an hour of continuous consciousness before it’s time to lay me down again.

Kinda suggests my body is fighting off something pretty nasty.

And as usual, I hate sleeping all the damned time. Makes me feel like my life is slipping away from me.

And that happens enough without sleep accelerating it.

Of course, I am considering a trip to the ER. Technically, this sort of thing should go to the ironically named Urgent Care Center but by this point the ER at Richmond Hospital feels like a second home to me and the UCC just can’t compete with that.

Plus Richmond Hospital has slightly better parking.

Not that I Want to go to the ever loving ER. It’s always a tedious and unpleasant process. But if I don’t feel better by tomorrow afternoon, I’m gonna have to.

Any infection that lasts more than 48 hours demands medical attention, after all.

And I certainly don’t want to be the moron who ignores an illness until it becomes something far worse than if it bad been nipped in the bud.

The weird thing is that the extreme energy drain/fatigue is the only major symptom this time. There’s a tiny bit of scratchiness in my throat and I am slightly dizzy, but otherwise, there’s nothing else going on.

Hopefully this means I’m winning.

Especially because I am about to embark upon a potentially very stupid journey to the front door and back to pick up my Pokey Okey order.

What? Sometimes I do dumb shit. I need to learn to make peace with that.

And I really want that Pokey Okey. After under-eating for two days, that wonderful bowl of delicious nutrition shines like a beacon in my mind. It is the perfect thing for maybe getting my nutrition back in line.

Because it’s not only mega healthy, it’s so appealing that it can overcome whatever vestiges of lack of appetite I have left.

Off I go.

I can’t believe I never put all this together before.

Of course I’ve been stuck in “freeze” mode for a long time. That’s where all my talk about being cold, feeling frozen, wanting warmth, and so on comes from.

When I was being raped at the age of 4, I dealt with it by freezing up inside. I went limp in hopes that the predator would lose interest and go away. I disappeared into the depths of my mind because that was the only place I could go.

And that’s when my system became hostile to its own adrenaline. In freeze mode, the directive is to hide and stop moving. To basically disappear.

That’s the exact opposite of what adrenaline normally wants you to do. So in order to create what it thinks of as safety, my mind had to scrub all the adrenaline from my system and lock me in a mode that told me the only time I am safe is when I am alone and nobody notices me.

If you’re having trouble visualizing this mode, imagine a scene from a horror movie where the killer is chasing someone and that person hides in a closet and goes completely silent despite the loud beating of their heart.

That person is in freeze mode. It’s the third F from fight, flight, or freeze. They aren’t fighting and they aren’t fleeing but they aren’t exactly relaxed and calm either.

And that’s me. I’ve been hiding from the killer in my head for my entire adult life and I am going to turn 50 next month.

Still not looking forward to that.

And it makes total sense to me that the solution to being frozen is to move your body around. Not only does that pull your consciousness out of the deep freeze and make you deal with the here and now, it of course generates adrenaline and that is exactly what you need to counter the freezing effect.

No wonder exercise works so well as a way to combat depression.

Or so I am told. Overcoming my fears and depression’s anti-action bias is not easy. But what I have learned from the video linked above will help.

And of course my depression will fight me on this. It will continue to repeat the same old song about how I can only be safe if I am silent and still and how all this motion will only lead to unnecessary pain and suffering and my feeling stupid for having done it when I could have been “happy” doing next to nothing.

Physically, that is. Mentally, I’m constantly turning cartwheels.

And fighting it will take energy and commitment and willpower, all of which I have considered to be in very short supply until quite recently.

And who convinced me of that? My fucking depression, of course. Trying to save its own unwashed and unworthy ass.

What I want to glean from all this, at the fundamental level, is a reflex that responds to that frozen feeling with the urge to get up and move.

Or at least move. My leg issues make getting up more… complicated.

Which reminds me. I think ending up in the hospital last August when my legs stopped supporting me entirely and all I went through as a result has turned my mere laziness into fear of doing anything that might make things worse.

And while there is wisdom in that – I probably shouldn’t be trying to run any marathons any time soon – exercise is also my salvation and I can’t afford to ignore that,

Who knows, with enough exercise, my legs might even start working again and I could return to the unbelievable luxury of being able to fucking walk.

Oh, and here’s the reference for today’s title :

---

How to reheat

It’s time to declare war on being frozen.

I feel I need to do that because the truth is the deep freeze is part of how my entire psyche operates and that means it will not die without consequences and sacrifices.

I’m going to need to trust that I can handle things in real time, for instance. No deep freeze means no icy detachment from the here and now and therefore no setting aside what I am feeling in the moment to be dealt with “later”.

Because “later” never comes. The emotions just pile up in the deep freeze. And the longer they are in there, the more toxic they become.

So it’s time to clean out my freezer and throw away all the inedible stuff from so long ago the “best before” date is in Roman numerals.

Luckily, I know there is a raging wildfire within me eager to bust out of its tiny compartment and melt the fuck out of some ice.

It’s my long suppressed id. It contains my rage cage, which is full of all the deferred anger I have never let myself feel except for occasional bouts of bitter rage.

That helps but it doesn’t really get the job done.

It also houses my stifled libido. A long time ago, I more or less resigned myself to the fact that the only sex I was going to get was of the strictly solo variety.

I mean, given my intense social anxiety AND my mobility and health issues, random hookups are not possible and going to “the baths” would be very tricky for any number of reasons, like claustrophobia.

If it’s too crowded, I can’t go, period. Even if it’s crowded with dudes fuckin’.

And online dating is so depressing. It forces me to face the fact that I am, in fact, extremely picky when it comes to with whom I want to spend my time and the minimum qualifications for my boyfriend include being smart enough to understand me, and seeing as we’re already drawing from pool of homosexual and bisexual men, the number of potential mates for me is awfully small.

And it’s not like my urban hermit lifestyle brings me into contact with new people at all.

These days, if I meet a new man, he’s probably a doctor treating me.

And I mean…. I could do worse.

But I imagine flirting with one’s doctor is frowned upon by civil society.

Especially for us gay dudes. Could get really awkward.

And we can’t have that, can we?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I come to you today, gentle readers, in a pretty shitty mood.

Mostly for video game related reasons, or at least that’s the proximate cause. The game I have been playing and loving called Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous apparently doesn’t love me back because the fucking thing keeps hard crashing on me causing the signal from my computer to my fancy monitor to drop completely (???) and thus forcing me to reboot my computer.

And wow does that piss me off.

There I am, right in the middle of playing the game, immersed in its intricacies and its world, when suddenly and without warning I am thrown back into harsh reality and have to wait for my computer to reboot fully before I can play again.

Usually I just say “fuck it” and lay down for a nap, possibly preceded by masturbation, instead. Not the healthiest response but what I can I say, I get discouraged.

And flouncing off to bed gives me something defiant to do to give the metaphorical middle finger to these foul events.

Whereas when I tried just patiently sitting there while my computer reboots and then resuming play, I felt like it was me who was getting played instead.

I guess that, in a strange alchemy of my male brain, if I do that, the game wins. It made me do things its way instead of doing what it’s supposed to be doing!

Grr, growl, seethe, pant, etc.

Plus I have encountered some petty obstacles in the game itself (when it works) that have also worsened by mood.

Nothing major or objectionable, just the usual thing where each individual thing makes you a little more irritable until it feels like the world is determined to fuck with you on a deeply personal and quite frankly extremely worrying level.

Hey, remember this song?

Now see, that made me feel better. I am still kinda pissed off, but a lot less so.

I rediscovered the gem linked above because it was linked off of this Internet classic :

It’s an Internet superbomb because not only is it an amazing video for an amazing song, it blew up SO FREAKING BIG online that it was like it was everywhere all at once, playing on every screen and speaker.

This despite containing the word “pedipalp”, which is a scientific term for the sort of foot/hand appendage some spiders have that can, when needed, turn into a sort of penis, and well, the rest of the story you know.

Finally, there is this video that took the furry world by storm :

The song is meh, but that video is pure gold. Tells its story so well and with such charm.

And with such a furry sensibility!

I should boost my mood with nostalgia more often.

More after the break.

---

Stirring the ashes

Still feeling the leftover remnants of my earlier pissed off state.

Either that, or it’s the early signs of congestive heart failure.

But it’s probably the first thing.

So let’s start with this :

I resemble this.

I was the baby left to cry, after all. Her remarks about trauma from before you even had words from being a baby left far too long in a dirty diaper really hit home for me.

I was emotionally abandoned before I was on solid foods. Before I had object permanence. Before I could sit upright.

And I have definitely flown off the handle over very minor things which made me feel abandoned, neglected, and/or ignored. It hasn’t happened very often due to the mild sort of life I lead where I mostly deal with my awesome friends, but that beast has crawled out of its cage to stir up trouble now and then.

And when I was in my late teens and into my early twenties, it was a regular occurrence. I was so bad at expressing anger that it would just build up and fester inside me until some small thing set me off and then on came the tears, the accusations, and the rage.

Luckily, I got that shit under control by learning to express my emotions better. No buildup of pressure means no bomb, after all.

Then again, maybe I would be healthier if I had the occasional meltdown. At least my emotions would be released now and then.

Sounds better than my current system, where they just keep building up inside me, becoming more and more toxic and dangerous over time, with no end in sight.

I don’t think I could explode like that today even if I wanted to. Over the years, I have become far too good for my own good at just making more room for repressed emotions when the existing structure starts to fill up.

I think some form of compression is probably involved.

But yeah, I got massive abandonment and neglect issues. I really want to grow out of them but I don’t have the inner strength to do that yet.

I still feel so weak and scared and tired inside. It’s getting better but it’s still not very good. I want to be able to power my little seacraft out of these doldrums that have held me hostage for 25+ years but instead all I can do is drift in vaguely the right direction more often than not and hope to strike land somewhere nice some day.

There are so many things I could do with myself if I could escape this listless life.

But my mainspring is busted and I can’t be wound up. The energy has nowhere to go because my transmission is shot too.

And there is nobody who can fix me the way I need to be fixed.

Nobody except me, and that’s debatable.

SO as usual, I am left on my own to face a big bad world I am in no sense ready to handle and so I just hide away and rot.

Welcome to my reality.

It kinda sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, some times the hardest thing about writing my blog entries is slowing my brain down enough to produce coherent, expressible thoughts.

My usual mental speed doesn’t always allow for that. Often my mental state is more like a planetarium show on fast forward, or a merry go round running out of control.

Normally, I don’t consciously notice this. For me, that’s normal. Sometimes my mind is normal-ish (double ish) but other times it’s moving at hyper speed and trying to get so much as a topic out of it feels like trying to grab one bullet out of a stream of bullets fired by a machine gun.

But I can do it. I can tame and harness my hyperactive hamster wheel of a brain when I need to do it. That’s not the issue.

The issue is that I worry what this superheated state of consciousness means about me and my state of semi-sanity.

Because it certainly isn’t normal. Not for most human beings.

Not without mind altering chemicals being involved, anyhow.

I mean, I seem to do all right, at least externally. By societal standards I am more or less sane because my mental illness doesn’t cause me to misbehave.

I just waste away quietly, not bothering anyone as I stand over my own grave.

I am almost fifty years old and I am still staying out of the way.

This world of mine – my personal reality – is very good at keeping me content and distracted but lousy at actually making me feel good about myself and my life, and at giving me any hope for the future or acceptance of the past, and at making me feel whole and alive, and basically absolutely anything else.

An argument could be made that society should care about all the incredible things I could be doing for it that are locked behind a wall of mental illness, but society doesn’t give a shit out that kind of thing. Not really.

At least, it doesn’t care enough to come looking for you. If you’re a terminally timid sort like me, too scared of the world to venture out in it, you’re pretty much screwed.

Not that I can see a way for society to fix that. Not until we have some sort of mental potential detector that the government can use to detect untapped geniuses like myself and send government agents around to force me to be productive.

Wouldn’t that makes so many lost souls like me happy?

I bet the Soviet Union had something like that.

But no, it’s all up to me. It always has been. I’ve been on my own in the world without guidance or discipline for my entire life.

Not that providing either of them to me would have been easy. I was a very unusual child and it would have required a very specific kind of teacher to get through to me.

But it’s not a child’s job to accommodate the adults in their lives. I was just being myself. It was up to them to figure me out.

But they couldn’t. Maybe they could today, but they couldn’t back then.

And so it is, in fact, all up to me. I am the only one who can rescue myself from this deadly trap I call a life.

I deserve so much more than this. But nobody is going to bring it to me.

I’m going to have to go out there and get it, and that means leaving the comfort and safety of this unkempt little nest of mine.

I can’t make the fear go away.

So I will have to be scared and do it anyway.

Pardon me if I whimper a bit.

More after the break.

---

A place for me

I guess that’s all I have ever really wanted : a place for me.

Someplace where I feel like I belong. Where I am wanted and needed and appreciated. Where I can contribute. And earn. And add value. And all those other good things that most people take for granted because they have always had them.

Even really crappy jobs give people a level of deep validation. They are our bizarre society’s way of telling you that you are doing your part to contribute to the collective and that you are, in that sense, okay.

You’re a taxpayer, and therefore society is fine with you. Your tribal instincts have been satiated. You can relax and live your life.

But for those of us for whom that is not readily achievable, we are left to be gnawed at by those same tribal instincts that drive us to crave some kind of way to be a part of the tribe and contribute.

Long term unemployment is bad for the soul.

That goes triple when it’s permanent.

But no, god damn it, I started out trying to write something positive and life-affirming where I talked about my dreams, and almost right away went all sad instead.

That has its place too, of course. Venting the negative helps me a lot, actually.

But I need to be able to feed the positive too.

So. What I want. What I dream of. A place for myself. Right.

I would love a simple office job. File clerk, mailroom, answering the phones, whatever. I think I could do a job like that quite well.

In fact, given my enormous capacity for work, I could probably take over some of the other employees’ least favorite jobs.

Which is how I would make myself indispensable. Anyone brings up the possibility of getting rid of me and every sees the looming possibility of having to do the parts of the job they hate again and the resultant feeling of loss of status and they say NO.

I am so goddamned devious it’s spooky . N’est-ce pas?

I could be happy as a cashier as long as I got to sit. No sitting, no me. That was true even back when my legs worked.

But now, well, my walker kind of speaks for itself.

OF course, what I really want is to write for TV. It’s a job I am sure I could not only do but totally kick ass at.

I would blow people’s MIND with how well I write TV.

And there is really nothing keeping me from trying it. I could write for TV writing contests, apply for open call jobs, try to network with people.

I just wish there was some kind of psychological prosthetic, the equivalent of my walker, but for my weak and trembling soul.

Something to keep me steady and calm and focused even when things get scary and I start to feel lost and panicky.

I suppose that’s why some people turn to liquor, drugs, and sex.

I don’t need any of that shit in my life.

But I could get myself some edibles. Pot, I trust. It’s not chemically addictive, it’s now government regulated (and legal), and I hear great things about its ability to give people both pain relief and emotional support.

Hmmm. Maybe better living really IS through chemistry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I have, in previous blog entries, built my rhetorical ship up to the point where I can ram into a big revelation like this one :

I am not a failure.

Or a loser. Or incompetent.

I have, in fact, done extremely well given my circumstances, and I should be proud of the fact that I have made it this far with as many of my marbles intact as I have.

I have done extremely well.

This might not seem like that big of a revelation to you, my faithful and devastatingly attractive reader, because you likely never though of me as a failure in the first place.

Or at the very least, not a culpable one.

But from where I am sitting, this is huge. I have thought of myself as a total failure for my entire life and the notion that I am not one shakes the very foundation of my being and calls into question my entire sense of self.

I even felt like I was a failure while getting stellar marks in school.

I took that shit for granted because it had always been absurdly easy for me. And socially I was clearly a failure because nobody liked me OR loved me.

Even my teachers could barely stand me.

But those people were all wrong to treat me that way. I was not a failure then and I am not a failure now.

I am someone who has successfully navigated the perilous dark waters of suicidal depression and come out the other side with a very good chance at recovery.

All I have to do is keep challenging my assumptions like I am doing right now and doing my level best to get my leftover emotions out through writing et al, and take care of my physical health to the best of my ability, I will make it out of this storm and finally get to experience a glorious dawn shattering the shackles of the night.

Just as soon as I am ready for it.

Or possibly slightly before.

But yes. I am not a loser. I am not a failure. I am not broken. I am not a mistake. I am not unsuited for survival. I am not a shameful and disgusting thing.

I am not toxic. I am not radioactive. I am not poisonous. I am not a blight on all who know me. People do not wish I would just go away and die somewhere so that they wouldn’t have to pretend to like me out of pity any more.

I have no reason to apologize just for being alive and taking up space and resources. I have just as much right to exist as anyone else. And the fact that I was treated otherwise for so long is a tragedy and a crime.

In short, I am a perfectly wonderful and amazing person with nothing to be ashamed of and every possible reason to love the heck out of myself, amen.

There. That should be enough affirmation for now.

Any more, and I might pass out!

More after the break.

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So much adventure

I am beginning to really question the parameters of my life.

But first, a story :

When ordering my groceries last week and perusing the microwavable convenience foods, I was delighted to find that Real Canadian Superstore has those individual microwavable pot pies from Swanson that I love so much.

So I ordered some last Friday.

But for one reason or another. I did not get around to actually making one until Monday night, which is tonight.

And that…. was not fun.

You would think that something that only requires being microwaved for five minutes to be as easy as…. well, pie.

And that’s true but only if your legs work. Mine don’t, and that means that there is a limit to how long I can remain standing even with the walker.

Turns out that limit is a lot less than five minutes.

So despite the fact that putting my pot pie in the microwave was the very first thing I did when I got to the kitchen and I then did everything else I had to do, I was still stuck with around 3 minutes of staring at the microwave timer as it counted down.

And that starting to really hurt starting around T minus two minutes.

So those ended up being some pretty long minutes, subjectively speaking. Yay, another everyday adventure for Gimp Boy.

That’s when the thoughts about the parameters of my life came in because I am getting really sick of dealing with my absurd limitations all the time.

Like not being able to stand for three minutes without intense pain in my legs. Just to pick a random example.

That would be far less of a problem if I could have somewhere to sit in the kitchen. But our kitchen is pretty dang small and so I would need to find some sort of very sturdy collapsible, portable stool to go in there when I need it and to fit somewhere out of the way when I do not.

This is not impossible.

But the real way to get around these problems would be to do the one thing I really don’t want to do, and that is ask for more help.

Joe and Julian already do a lot for me. I would hate to ask for more. I already feel like I am a burden to people, though I know they do not necessarily mind.

And I prefer to do things myself. I’ve always had to do that in my life and it has become my preferred mode of being.

But that doesn’t mean I can live that way. So I have to choose between simply doing without anything I can’t do for myself, or asking for more help.

I don’t like either of those options.

Normally I would simply do without. Oh well, guess these pot pies are something I just can’t have any more.

And who knows. Maybe walker-ing to the living room to sit down and wait for the microwave to beep then walker-ing back would, despite appearances, be a net gain.

But I don’t want to have to live that kind of life.

I want more, god dammit, and that means I need to ask for more.

And I don’t wanna.

But I am going to have to. And soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Turns out Doctor K and I have similar thoughts on this subject.

And trust me, I’ve tried

I’m not even faintly surprised to hear him say there is a direct correlation between IQ and depression. That sure as fuck tracks for me.

And as patient readers know, I agree that the problem is that we high IQ types have a strong tendency to try to use our powerful brains to do everything, even things for which they are the wrong tool entirely.

It’s like, I am not saying that isn’t a really great hammer you have there. I am just saying there are way easier ways to toast a sandwich.

Personally, I think there might be a correlation between high IQ and this ability he mentions to shut your emotions off and/or shunt them to the side.

Perhaps that is the very thing that allows for the sort of mental clarity needed to focus in on the symbolic logic that is the foundation of modern intelligence and get good at thinking in those sorts of abstractions.

Maybe too good at it, in fact.

Because being able to shut off your emotions can mean never having to deal with them. And over time you accumulate this vast trove of unprocessed emotions, each of which costs a tiny bit of your mental resources to keep frozen and therefore each of which slows down and drains your mind your mind just a little.

Not hard to see how a habit of doing that with your emotions leads to a mind increasingly burdened with all this dead weight until eventually it can’t even maintain mood any more and depression sets in.

This is also the root cause of depression’s sense of numbness. When you get into the habit of deep-freezing your emotions, it starts cutting you off from the emotional reality of the world and you can no longer receive the inputs of love, pleasure, acceptance, warmth, and so on that the human mind needs to survive.

It isolates you from your very humanity, and thus, the humanity of others. You are severely dissociating and you don’t even know it. It’s been so long since you felt things fully that you’ve forgotten that it’s even a thing.

And that’s pretty fucking depressing.

For me, it all started with dissociation and the trauma that was causing it. When I was being raped I escaped the situation by fleeing in the only direction open to me – inward. I dissociated from what was happening HARD and to tell you the truth, I have never fully left that place I fled to way back then.

I guess that deep down, my primitive mind is not convinced that it’s safe yet.

Not sure what I can do to convince it. I suppose a very strong source of emotional warmth could do it, if it was reliable.

But it’s not like I can just buy an emotional space heater.

I suppose that’s what religion is for. But that’s not an option for me.

Unless I invent my own….

More after the break.

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Still more from Doctor K

Another thing Doctor K says in the video I embedded in part 1 is that us high IQ types with depression end up making things worse for ourselves because we think that we should be able to solve our depression ourselves.

And if you think you should be able to do something but can’t, then like Doctor K says, you think that you are a failure.

And that resonates so hard with me. I have felt that way for so long. Like I should have been able to get over my depression by now.

Based on what, though? Nothing rational, let alone scientific, that’s for sure.

Take it down to its essence and you find it’s based on nothing but the cock-eyed self-confidence that comes from being able to overcome so many things quite easily with this giant overcharged brain of mine.

As if my depression was an academic question that would crumble when faced with the almighty power of my towering intellect.

Um no. And I wasted a lot of years of my life in an irrational attempt to out-think my mental illness instead of realizing that I was going about it the wrong way from the very beginning and that I had to stop thinking about it and start feeling about it.

Ever since I fully accepted that truth, I have been doing much better. I am concentrating on strengthening and expanding my capacity for feeling my emotions in realtime, and that is also unlocking a lot of those old emotions…

…AHEM…. those old emotions that I have stored up over the years.

And every one of those I can thaw out and experience and release gives me back the mental resources it was using, plus the little bit of myself that was cut off from the rest of me when the chill set in.

But back to feeling like a failure. As patient readers know, I struggle with a massive amount of guilt over how my life has turned out versus all that “potential” that has always been hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles.

Because you see, the greater your potential is, the bigger a loser you are when your life turns out to be a great big nothing!

It’s the subtle oppression of high expectations.

And while I am over the big hurdle when it comes to negating my self-loathing and opening myself up to the much healthier self-pity, those old emotions (NOT DO SONG AGAIN) are still there, struggling against their bonds.

I may not believe them any more, and I don’t let them wreck my self worth any more, but they are still there, straining at the bars of their cages.

I still want to find a good way to handle the part I am left with, which is the feeling of intense grief bordering on stark horror that I feel when I try to process all those empty years and where they have left me now.

I am trying to see them differently. Not as lost years, but as the long larval stage of what I will become when I finally emerge from my chrysalis.

I don’t know what I will be when I am done.

But I know it will be amazing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

God, am I tired of being goddamned tired all the time.

I just got back from the kitchen, and boy are my arms tired. Along with the rest of me.

Going to the kitchen and spreading peanut butter on some Triscuits should not take this much out of a fella. But I feel like I just barely escaped a pack of wolves here.

And that’s not just me whining. My heart does not feel right at the moment. Feels like it is working awfully hard given that I have been seated comfortably for fifteen minutes.

And I don’t deserve this shit. I’m a sweet guy. Super nice to almost everyone. Fun to be around. Funny and wacky and silly. And so on.

And now my ass has started hurting pretty bad. I’m going to have to lay down and I have not even gotten half way through part 1 yet.

My life is an acid bath.

---

Well that was weird.

Things are more or less normal now, thank Dog, but the last time I sat here, my literal butt was hurting. It was this weird throbbing intramuscular pain right at bottom of my butt cheeks. where they meet the skin of my legs.

And I think it went deeper than that as well, which caused me to wonder how the hell I had managed to injure my coccyx (tailbone) in my freaking sleep.

Just another day in this condemned building of a body of mine. It’s like living in an old house. You never know what will break down next.

And moving out is not an option. Fingers crossed for the future, though.

It would be highly amusing to get to the ripe old age of sixty and then just as my body is getting ready to break down completely I get to jump ship to a new robot body and keep on being me forever.

Take that, motherfuckers! I got away with it.

But would that really be me? It’s a hard question. Am I a physical flesh and blood being? Or am I just, as C.S. Lewis put it, a soul wearing a body?

If I think of myself, my real true self, as a complex pattern currently stored in the wetware that is my brain, then in theory said pattern would be me no matter what medium is carrying it.

But that violates individuality. Because if my pattern can exist somewhere else, then it could be copied to a dozen different robot bodies all of whom think they are me.

And if the original meat and bone version of me is dead, all their claims are equally legitimate and things could get pretty ugly.

I can’t help but think my robot clones would start killing each other off just as soon as the orgy was over.

Because hey, who doesn’t want a lover who’s into all the same things they are?

Buit once we’re all fucked sucked and bucked out, THEN the identity conflict begins and drives me to murder my other selves.

Might keep one or two around though, for company, and for backup, and for insurance.

But mostly for the sex.

More after the break.

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i cant do anything

Let’s talk about the heavy burden of my feeling of total incompetence.

First, we will start with the root of the problem :

I am, in fact, very clumsy and uncoordinated. Always have been. And I am not just talking about just being bad at sports and ballroom dancing.

I mean like, it makes everyday tasks difficult because I am such a spaz. Between my uncoordinated muscles and wonky eyesight, I honestly think that I am clumsy and messed up enough that it would qualify as a disability all by itself.

I am so many different flavours of fucked up. Just call me Baskin Robins.

So my sense of my own incompetence is not entirely illusory. I have a lot of trouble with things that most people can do without a fuss.

But in a sane and compassionate world, someone would have figured out that I had serious problems and done something about it when I was a kid.

As to why these problems exist in the first place, I think the main problem was that nobody played with me in certain ways known to be key to developing one’s motor skills when one is a toddler.

That and the fact that nobody knew how bad my vision was until I was six or seven, and how can you develop proper hand-eye coordination when your eyes don’t work?

And then there’s the elephant in the room : Dumbo.

Butt seriously, the elephant in the room is the way my siblings treated my clumsy and uncoordinated self when I was in those tender preschool years.

They got frustrated. I got nervous. They got mad. I got scared. And due to the magic effects of adrenaline, the more nervous and scared I got, the more timid and clumsy I was, and you can see where that leads.

It leads to me being told that if I really want to help, I would just stay out of the way.

And that’s what I did, thereby never actually improving my bad motor skills because nobody would let me do anything.

Nobody to play with, nobody to teach me anything, and me too scared to try things on my own and teach myself because I felt like if I did, someone older than me would instantly materialize and get mad at me for screwing things up and making things worse just by trying.

Emphasis mine. Obviously.

This did not keep them from giving me responsibility for things like my own laundry and doing my clothes shopping at a fairly early age.

Well, what mattered was what was easiest for them, obviously.

This sense of my own utter incompetence at damn near everything practical, then, was a product of a number of factors, and has cursed me all my life.

I have this pervasive fear of something happening where my total spazziness will be revealed in all its inglorious weirdness, and I will be cast down and alienated, and feel like used food all over again.

No wonder hide from the world in the realms of the mind.

I kick ass there!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because it’s all I can do.

I guess when you don’t fight the depression, it’s easy to imagine that you totally could kick its ass if you wanted to.

You could just get up, brush off the cobwebs and dustbunnies, square your shoulders, and finally get around to starting your life.

It’s just that simple. And you are totally going to get around to it any day now.

But ya know. There’s no rush. These things take time. You have to prepare.

Better to do it right the first time then rush into a disaster, right?

And as long as your depression keeps feeding you that line of high test bullshit, you’re its bitch, and it can control you for decades and have you all to itself while your youth melts away and you get older and slower and weaker and sicker.

Trust me on that.

It took me many years to even pull my head out of my own ass enough to look around like a scat obsessed groundhog, see my shadow, and realize I had a fucking problem.

I just kept bopping along playing videos and hanging out online while my life timer ticked away, never giving a thought to the future, let alone foreign concepts like plans, ambitions, and desires.

And now I am going to turn 50 in a month and a half and I have done absolutely nothing worthwhile with my life – there’s tweens with more life experience than me – and that’s an incredibly hard thing to deal with.

The healthy response cycle would be for these feeling of impending doom and time running out to light a fire under my ass and make me frantically try to make up for lost time as I launch myself into a full tilt effort to get a job and a boyfriend and so on.

But that’s for people with the right chemicals in their brains.

My chemicals suck.

And that means that my interpretation of the situation is to feel utterly crushed by all those wasted years and that only makes it even harder to do anything about it.

So I spend most of my time and most of my days squashed flat under the burden of time, unable to do a god damn thing to help myself.

Or at least that’s how it feels. Which means it’s true nevertheless.

My mind is a cold numb lifeless place where things like focus and drive and ambition die long horrible lingering deaths in the Midnight Tundra of my internal landscape.

No wonder the ticking of my life clock doesn’t motivate me. It can’t. The emotion simply cannot penetrate all that cold dead flesh that fills my mind like so much suet.

And no wonder the days where I can’t do a thing but keep holding on vastly outnumber the days when I can actually swim upstream a bit.

It takes me forever to save up the energy and motivation to do one small thing to help myself, like apply for something on UpWork.

And it kills me to feel so helpless as I watch the days go by and see the life force drain from me like blood from a carcass and my body slowly grinding to a halt.

The best that I can do is try to keep the taps open so that said suet can very slowly makes its globby viscous way out of me drop by agonizing drop.

It isn’t nothing.

But it isn’t much.

And I frankly don’t have enough time to wait for it to work.

But it’s all I can do.

More after the break.

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The art of expansion

The problem with expanding your mind is that it’s kind of hard to prove.

I mean, I can tell you that after that unpleasant but necessary expectoration of negativity in part 1, I feel a lot better.

Then I watched Arrival with Joe and Julian and holy shit, is it good. Now THAT is science fiction done right.

So I am feeling pretty good right now. Feeling relatively light and clean. Mental fog is thinner than average. I’m feeling bright and shiny.

And that’s allowed me to reinterpret my current state of affairs (mind division) as going through a period of mental expansion.

But not merely in some hippie dippie “far out, man” way that feels like it’s blowing your mind wide open but actually produces nothing tangible or useful besides a trip.

I’m talking about the real deal here. I am expanding my mind like I am filling up a balloon in the center of my mind and as the balloon expands, it stretches my mind and makes more room for my thoughts.

This notion is partly inspired by something that happened in therapy yesterday. Doc Costin challenged me to come up with a way I could improve my life, and I drew a complete and total blank.

Could not think of a damned thing. It’s like suddenly my mind was full of chilled syrup,

And that’s not me. I don’t get stumped by questions of that nature. I am smart enough and creative enough and insightful enough to come up with an abundance of answers to that kind of question.

But depression made me stupid.

And that pisses me off. 

The question has answers, dammit. I know it does. And I know that if I can just clear the gunk out of my head, I will be able to see them quite easily.

It’s not an easy question. I will stipulate to that. Figuring out a path to what I want that only goes to places where I can go and involves doing only things I can do is hard.

But I have solved much trickier puzzles before. It’s just a matter of letting the problem fill my mind and then keeping my antenna out listening for the crackle of connection.

We’ve all been there.

But the main thing I am trying to say is that I am pissed off at my mind for not being able to spit out an answer for the most important question of my life, and so a good deal of the expansion of my mind is fueled by rage. Rage and wounded pride.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.