Today is Therapy Thursday, and today’s session pretty much sucked.
My fault, in a sense. I was very tired and therefore not at my most insightful or verbose. I had gotten the usual amount of sleep but for some reason I was still sleepy.
God damn do I miss caffeine.
My therapist. Doctor Costin, would suggest that my subconscious mind was trying to sabotage my session in order to protect my depression and/or avoid talking about sensitive or touchy subjects.
And normally I dismiss such comments. Because they’re irritating.
But I think that was probably part of what was going on with me today. I think the deeper and less mature part of my mind didn’t want to have to come up with things to talk about with Doctor Costin or deal with my issues at all and so it clung to some leftover sleepiness from this morning and hid out in it instead.
Unacceptable. Next time I feel sleepy when therapy time is coming, I am going to do what it takes to wake myself the fuck up.
Get up and walk around. Splash cold water on my face. Punch myself in the dick.
Whatever it takes.
More reasonably, I could keep one of those 591 ml bottles[1] of diet cola in the fridge for just such an occasion.
Drink one of those like an hour before the session and I will be plenty perky and hopefully full of in depth and probing and therefore therapeutically utile things to bring up and discuss about myself.
The other part of the problem, though, is that I can’t use my usual method of just talking about whatever I have been talking about on my blog lately because I’ve not been writing the navel plumbing introspective stuff lately.
And I am not sure how I feel about that.
On the one hand, I am happy that my mind has started developing its defenses and using them to protect itself.
Believe it or not, a cranky sullen mind that passive aggressively defends itself out of sheer crankiness is actually a sign of progress for me.
It’s a lot healthier than a mind that just lays there on a slab as a subject for me to twitter and tweet about in a detached and clinical sense.
That shit can be therapeutic, true, but it comes from an unhealthy place. If I am to successfully resurrect myself from my frozen slumber, I am going to have to learn to deal with myself as a living, breathing, feeling entity in realtime.
God, its so much more complicated being alive.
Especially when you have spent so much time learning to avoid stimulation that you are no longer capable of making choices that would increase your stimulation levels.
Which leads to an increasingly low stimulus life that doesn’t even feel real any more, and therefore neither do you.
But now you are trapped at the bottom of a hill you can no longer climb.
Clearly something’s gotta give. Something’s gotta break.
Something’s gotta change.
And that means the old tablet of values must be shattered so that a new, better one can take its place.
I don’t know what comes next, but I know it won’t play by the same old rules as before.
My mental illness knows those rules too well.
It’s time to stop trying to solve the maze and start walking on top of its walls.
More after the break.
To simply live
It’s a lovely dream, isn’t it?
To be able to just live life without all the neurosis, destructive self-doubt, paralyzing anxiety, walls of fear and paranoia, and all the other junk that my mental illness conjures up in its misguided attempts to keep me “safe”.
Fuck being safe. I want to be happy. Even if that means skydiving in the nude.
But the dream is to live free of all that junk. To be able to calm the fuck down and lose all my self-consciousness and finally be able to just live in the moment like a real person and get the most out of life warts and all. Up AND down.
To be able to make a feast of life, instead of being one of the billions of poor bastards starving to death amidst plenty. With the right attitude, I am convinced, life can be a nonstop buffet of pleasures large and small.
But the first thing that has to go is this rigid devotion to a particular notion of “the Truth”. I have gathered more than enough evidence that my faith that “you’re always better off knowing the truth” is wildly misplaced and I can only conclude that in order to make it in this world, you need some way of being able to lie to yourself a little.
Or at least when there are multiple equally valid potential interpretations of events, to choose whatever one makes me the happiest.
The stubborn Truth-ist in me insists that to do so is “cheating” and that I should remain fanatically devoted to whatever interpretation is “the most true”.
But my ability to judge which one that is remains very unreliable, and often leads not to truth but to the interpretation which best suits my negative mental state.
That’s nowhere near the truth, and what’s worse, it’s lying in the wrong direction!
So who’s to say what the truest Truth is? Why not pick whatever version of things makes me the happiest? What’s wrong with giving life a positive spin?
Leave the cult of pain, which insists that the most painful is the most true, behind forever and learn to always have my thumb on the positive side of the scale.
Solve to maximize the happiness variable, damn it. Be happy without needing to justify it. Give yourself every emotion you have ever needed and to hell with whether that lines up with “reality” or not.
Fuck reality. I want to be happy. Even if that means being delusional.
Let’s try being the happy kind of crazy for a while.
It can’t be worse that what I have right now!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
[[1]] I love those things. They are the perfect one serving size for me.