OK, let’s take another stab at this.
Today was Therapy Thursday and this is what I attempted to talk to Doc Costin about : I have realized that I carry around a massive burden of shame, grief, horror, and despair about how badly my life has turned out.
Patient readers know the litany by heart. Never had a full time job. Never supported myself financially. Never been in a relationship, barely even dated. Never had my own place that I could turn into a home. Never had to struggle with life and overcome it.
When I look back over all those wasted years of my life [1],. three decades of the prime of my life that I could have been using to build a life and become a full person but that I spent hiding from reality and playng video games instead, the pain and shock and all the rest that I feel seems insurmountable.
I don’t know how to get over a thing like that. The sheer wrongness of it all overwhelms me and makes me feel like I am going to choke on my own failure.
I am the biggest loser I have ever heard of. Even other “failure to launch” types have generally had some failed jobs or doomed relationships or SOMETHING. Something other than blogging and video games.
But not me, no. I buried myself deep in the social assistance program and thus was free of all pressures to find employment and make something of myself, and I sure as steel belted fuck wasn’t going to find that motivation in myself, so the years flew by.
Now I am going to turn 50 two weeks from tomorrow, and I keep getting waves of feeling like there is no point in going on. That my life is absolutely ruined and is far beyond repair and that all I have to look forward to for the rest of my life is getting sicker and sicker till I end up full of tubes and tied down in a hospital bed, eking out the feeble moments of a pathetic life in mindless terror, all alone.
I don’t want these thoughts. I don’t agree with them. I don’t want to harm myself. But the thoughts come from the emotions and the emotions come from a place of truth.
God, even articles about Failure to Launch are talking about guys who are 25, not 50.
I mean, surely by THEN they will have sorted themselves out,right?
Not if they are so fucked up inside they can’t cope with almost anything at all. Not if they are so terrified of the big bad world that they can do little else but cower in their urban bunker and entertain themselves, which is all they know how to do.
No set of natural instincts was going to lead me to leaving the nest and figuring out how to fly. Those instincts were buried until layer upon layer of fear and avoidance and stood no chance of even being consciously felt, let alone acted on.
Whatever shoots and tendrils those natural and wholesome feelings tried to push through the permafrost of my mind were ruthlessly destroyed by the killer frost of my icy detachment and implacable numbness in the name of “logic”.
A “logic” that said, “we’re never going to make anything of ourselves, so these instincts can only bring us pain., Ergo…. *CHOP.”
I have been my own demented captor for so very, very long.
More after the break,
Armor made of sunshine
One of my problems is that I don’t seem like I need help.
Blame my parents, I suppose. From them, I learned to put on a bright and cheerful face no matter how I felt because showing my distress could only lead to my pleas being ignored, which is bad, or to thuddingly awkwarrd conversations where they tried to pretend to care without any risk of having to actually get involved and remember I exist and have ot expend time and effort on me, which was worse.
So the conversation would be along the lines of, “But you’re basically fine, RIGHT?”.
It was not okay to not be okay. Not even remotely.
So I learned to use my perky, friendly, “no problem” side as my shield and my armor and my disguise. Whenever anyone asked (which was rare), everything was A-OK with me. No problems here. No sir-re jack. Everything is just fine.
Now go back to your self-involved Boomer life and leave me the hell alone. Forget I exist again. I know it’s what you really want to do.
I’ll just fade into the wallpaper once more and go back to my own little world of reading and TV and video games.
I know nobody really cares anyhow.
In this way, I was accidentally taught to hide everything dark or unpleasant aboujt myself, hence my never seeming like I have any problems.
And that goes so deep in me that I don’t even take off that armor when I am talking with my therapist. At best, I take out the heaviest outer layers but that is the best I can do.
I have no faith at all that anyone will still be there for me after I show them the real me. The me inside the armor. The me that suffers.
Nobody wants to see that. Least of all me. I spend all my time laying video games and such specifically to avoid having to deal with my real self and my real issues.
Much easier – in the short term – to just keep my mind so busy that there is no room for the bad thoughts and the dark impulses. Instead they get pushed out by all that mental activity involved in playing the kinds of game I like.
And this is why I can’t get into slow games like Beacon Pines. They leave way too much room for the bad thoughts to get in.
Well, back to playing Pathfinder, I guess.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
write about boundaries