A la Wile E. Coyote after he runs off a cliff.
That’s how the transition between playing Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous to blogging feels today. Like I was running full speed across an open plain when suddenly there was no ground underneath my feet any more.
Better learn to fly, I guess.
I feel OK today. Once more, the sunshine seems to help. I feel fairly “up” and my anxiety level is low-ish, so that is good.
It is hard for me to get both of those to be true at the same time. I have lived a sleeper’s life for so long that when I have energy, I don’t know what to do with it, and when energy has nowhere to go it turns into anxiety, at least for me.
And that ends up, in a deeply strange way,. punishing the raising of my energy level. And somewhere deep in the operating system layer of my mind, note is taken of this occurrence and I go back to sleepwalking through life.
It’s like I think I will die if the speedometer goes over 1. And you can see why.
And I know it’s largely a matter of interpretation. If I could recast the anxiety as exhilaration and the depression as a peaceful calm, I would be a much happier man.
But wishing does not make it so. And knowing where you need to go does not get you there, or even show you the route.
So all I can do is look across the chasm at all the nice places out there that I will never get to see because there is no series of moves that can take me there.
Only a leap of faith can do it.
And I have no faith at all.
And it’s not something you can consciously acquire. It doesn’t work like that. You cannot choose to believe something without the need for evidence.
Or at least I can’t.
Everything has to fit together logically for me, and that is my tragic flaw. We mere humans can’t come up with a working, healthy worldview without the need for something to fill the inevitable gaps so the whole thing can float.
But for me, there is nothing I can do to patch the holes in my boat and so it sinks and takes me down with it.
I really feel like there was a golden age in which one acquires the faith needed in order to be healthy in adult life and if you miss it, or something radically bad enough happens to take it away from you, you are SSOL.
That’s “sweet shit out of luck” for you kiddies.
And as much as I bitch about my past, I don’t know that I could ever have contracted a healthy dose of faith even if I had never been raped.
Because like I’ve said, I was a weirdly logical and sensible child from the very beginning. Things had to make sense and fit together rationally for me even when I wa a fairly happy, bouncy, charming lil toddler discovering the power of his own charm.
So even if religion had been there for me, I don’t know that it would have taken root. I would have had dozens of questions the religious teachers could not answer before I was 5 years old, and probably landed in a LOT of trouble for it.
Especially given how disinclined I am to back down in an argument.
So I dunno. Maybe this is the path I was destined to take ever since I was born with such an unusual mind.
Maybe I will be the one who leads the way to a single, coherent, consistent world view that sustains human thriving without the need for shortcuts at all.
I would go down in history as God’s gift to atheism.
But what the hell, I’ll do it anyway.
More after the break.
My god, it worked!
Ordered McD’s from Skip. Went off without a hitch. Phew!
This was in danger of becoming a “thing” with me. Ordering paranoia. And that could not help but turn into something ugly.
What can I say. I have trust issues.
But not the usual kind of trust issues where you donb’t know if you can believe what people say or count on them to be honest with you and that kind of thing.
I never worry about that kind of thing. Why would I, when people’s minds and emotions are so clear to me? I have complete faith in my ability to tell how trustworthy someone is and assess their reliability accordingly.
No, my problem is that I don’t trust people to be competent. Or to have my best interests at heart. Deep down, I always expect to be ignored, neglected,. treated a an afterthought, resented, and in general treated like a Christmas puppy on Easter.
Gee, I wonder where I got that idea.
Oh right, my entire childhood.
And I played, and play, my part in that. By being so passive and mild and unable to stand up for myself, I was and still am an active participant in my own social invisibility.
Normally, a vital part of how we humans regulate ourselves socially rests on the assumption that if we are doing something to harm someone, they will alert us to that fact by complaining.
Hey, stop that! Oh, I’m sorry. That kind of thing.
But a soft little critter like myself breaks that part of the social contract with our difficulty in speaking up for ourselves.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for me. But it has always been that way. I can remember being frustrated by how my high chair had developed a slight slant and was therefor pinching my poor lil bum, and yet, could I tell my father, who was two feet away and who could have fixed it in a second? Nope.
And when you are like that, the people in your life can become paranoid because they can’t rely on you to tell them if something is wrong and so they either have to watch you like a hawk or tune you out when they tire of trying to monitor you for everything.
It’s definitely connected with not wanting to attract attention to myself, which leads to my not wanting to get into conflict with people.
Well, that and being a peace loving critter who hates discord and conflict.
It is so much easier for me to be this fluffy little ghost who drifts around unseen unless he actively decides to be seen.
But that doesn’t attract nurturing, does it?
I think I have unearthed some hard but important truths here.
Of course people have ignored and neglected me for my entire life.
I made myself invisible!
We train people how to treat us.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.