As my standard joke goes, if it wasn’t for jumping to conclusions, I would get no exercise at all.

I just went through this and I thought it was time I wrote down one of my experiences with being so “jumpy” so I can examine it in this space.

I was in the kitchen about to make my usual PBJ for lunch when I realized I could not find the big 2 kg jar of Kraft peanut butter that I bough last Friday.

This is where the madness starts, because I immediately leapt to the conclusion that Julian had hidden it from me in order to get me to use the peanut butter left over in one of the like ten mostly empty peanut butter jars sitting on the counter.

At almost the same time, I realized that I really needed to pee.

So I walkered back to my bedroom and into my ensuite and started taking an angry piss. All the while, I was fuming, and thinking angry thoughts about how dare Julian try to make me do things his way and how this was NOT HIS CALL TO MAKE. If I wanted to “waste” the little bit of peanut butter left in a jar because it was not worth the effort it would take to scrape it out of there ^[1], that was my business, especially now that I am paying for my own peanut butter.

This went on for the length of one of my always lengthy pees (hello, aging prostate) and then I went back into the kitchen to take another look.

And thank God I did, because the goddamned peanut butter was 90 degrees and three feet from its usual spot, sitting on the stove between the elements.

And I felt very, very dumb. Extra dumb, in fact, because this is far from the first time I have gotten angry or upset or freaked out over something being “missing” when it’s just in a slightly different place than usual.

Going over my memory of the incidents, it seems like the problem is that I have a strong emotional reaction instantly and once that emotional reaction kicks in, I can’t think logically or critically about whatever I am reacting to or about.

Why does this happen? Well I think I have a lot of latent emotion just waiting for the tiniest spark to set it off most of the time.

As I was telling my therapist Doctor Costin on the phone today, I think that when I clawed my way out of the nervous breakdown I had in my early 20’s, I froze a lot of things inside my psyche in order to get back to sanity and what was left unfrozen seemed functional in that I could make it through the day without a lot of pain or fear, but under the hood things were a frozen mess of arrested development.

Amongst the things frozen was a bewilderingly wide section of my emotional response spectrum. I truly was not the same young man that had headed off to college in 1991.

I was a crippled remnant of that bright young man. I could eat and drink and enjoy TV and video games again but that was it.

And that’s the person I have been for the last 30 years.

And all of this has me wondering what my life would be like if I didn’t repress so much. What if I just went with my emotional reactions come what may? What if I stopped trying to create hyper-predictability by keeping myself under “control” (ha)? What if, like most of humanity, I just did what my emotions told me to do, without question?

I’d be a very different dude, that’s for sure. I would probably be a lot harder to be around. especially at first. But maybe it would settle down after a while and I would be the same person I am now, but with a far more emotionally real and enriched life.

It’s a tantalizing prospect. I don’t think I could ever completely let go of emotional “control” but I could ease back on the brake a little, at least.

Maybe then I would know what it’s like to truly be alive.

More after the break.

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I love this guy

Here’s his latest video :

And since he brought it up, let’s talk about procrastination.

Here’s the secret of procrastination : you don’t really want to do it.

Whatever it is, deep down, you do not want to do it. You may think you should want to do it. You might tell yourself over and over how it’s no big deal to do it. You may even convince the grown up part of you that you really want to do it.

But deep down, you don’t wanna. So you don’t.

Imagine that there are two teams, Team Do It and Team Don’t. Imagine they are in a tug of war. But here’s the trick : team Don’t wins as long as you don’t do the thing, and that means that Team Don’t does not have to overpower Team Do It, it just has to keep your will divided enough so that you can’t decide to Do It or decide to give up and it still wins.

Hence procrastination. Procrastination thrives by keeping you in that middle, undecided zone where you still consciously think you will do the thing or at least might do the thing eventually, but subconsciously know you never will without ever having to actually own the fact that you won’t ever do it.

Because you never decided not to do it. But you never will.

The solution. then, is to make up your mind. Either decided to do it and do it, or decide not to do it and do something else.

You may find that the decision to definitely do or not do it will be exactly what you need in order to find out how you really feel about it.

If deciding to do it makes you say, “OH GOD NO!”, then guess what, you don’t wanna do it. And now you know it.

And if deciding to give up on it fills you with a sense of sadness and loss. guess what, you really do want to do it and now you know THAT.

Bottom line, though, is that nothing external to you is going to force you to decide. And your psyche is clearly fine with leaving you wandering lost in indecision forever because again, that way not doing it still wins.

You have to decide to decide. One way or another.

Only then can you exit the procrastination loop.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had a phone appointment with Doctor Chao this morning.

And the good news is, he wasn’t late for it.

The bad news is, he was early, WAY early. The appointment was for “between 11 am and 1 pm”, because apparently only a doctor’s time is actually valuable.

Well he called at frigging 9:30 am! An hour and a half early.

But luckily, I was not doing much of anything besides hanging with my fuzzy friends, so I was able to take the call.

But that’s the second time in a row he’s pulled this calling early shit. In retrospect. I kind of wish I hadn’t rewarded this behaviour by taking the call.

Maybe next time, if I am feeling ornery, I will say, “No! Call back at the right time!”.

And then hang up.

OK, no, I probably won’t do that. But it’s an amusing thought.

Oh, and one more slightly galling thing : he asked me what he could do for me when it’s his office that made the appointment.

I kind of assumed you had something you wanted to talk to me about, Doc.

Anyhow, I knew what I wanted to discuss. First we talked about this disturbing thing where I get attacks of shortness of breath when I lay down.

Like I’ve said before, it’s like my heart is having trouble switching gears. The attacks are fairly mild as long as I don’t lie on my back, but seeing as I am 51, already have two stents in my heart, am quite obese, and have a long family history of men dying from heart disease, it makes me more than a little worried.

He said that what can happen is if you have sluggish circulation (check), blood pools in your legs when you’re sitting down. If you then lie down, that fluid now rushes back from where it was into the heart and the heart gets overwhelmed by it, and thus, I end up having trouble getting enough air for a little while.

And that seems plausible enough although that last bit confuses me. Why would too much blood in my heart makes me feel like I’m not getting enough air?

I have so may more questions.

What I really need is a doctor I can email.

We also discussed what’s wrong with my fucking legs. I am proud of myself for mentioning that as of last week it has been two years since I landed in the hospital and I still don’t have a diagnosis.

So he reached into his back pocket and pulled one out of his ass.

He said that when you lose sensation in your feet, your body is not getting all the feedback from your lower legs it needs to keep you balanced properly and that can lead to issues with the legs over time.

I don’t buy it. It’s plausible but unsatisfying. There is definitely something wrong with the muscles in my legs, especially the tendons, and that same thing has been making my arms weaker as well.

But I guess that’s all I will get out of him for now. But this is definitely not over. I need treatment, not just explanations. I don’t want to lose my ability to walk without a fight.

I figure what I need, assuming his theory holds, is physiotherapy. The right kind of physio could boost the circulation in my legs and feet and build the muscle tone back up in my limbs to combat the apparent atrophy.

And who knows, my physiotherapist might be a sassy Jamaican lady with whom I will argue a lot but ultimately form an unlikely bond.

What? It could happen.

More after the break.

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What we choose to believe

We the “smart” types tend to act and feel as if all our beliefs are the only logical conclusion possible given the facts and that therefore choice doesn’t enter into it.

Which is pretty damned hubristic, when you think of it. And it’s also a dodge. Oh, of course I don’t have to defend my beliefs on a personal level. I can just stand back and pretend all my conclusions to be foregone and that therefore to argue against them would be to argue against logic itself.

What a load of crap!

And the truth is that there a lot of different equally valid ways to look at things and we are fully enabled and empowered to choose the POV that works the best for us.

“But that’s cheating! And/or delusional! And/or lying!” you shout.

But no, it isn’t. You are not choosing to see black as white or day as night. You are just adjusting your view within the confines of observed reality.

Take that old saw about the cup being half full or half empty. Cocktail party conversation aside, the truth is that it’s both. Both statement are equally true and apply to the exact same object so we are free to choose to see it as half full.

After all, you’re not wrong.

And the half full POV is a much happier one, so why not choose happiness?

Of course. there’s a lot more going on. For one thing, pessimists tend to fall victim to a negative bias every bit as delusional as Pollyanna optimism, where they have subconsciously decided that only bad things are real.

This is an understandable overreaction to a loss of innocence but the trick is not to get stuck there, but to let the pendulum keep swinging back and forth till it reaches equilibrium in the middle somewhere.

Or even deliberately let it swing towards the positive, just more informedly so.

I am convinced that we can change our negative outlooks to something more conducive to living a happy life.

But it’s going to be hard, especially at first. We have a lot of negative momentum to kill. Getting that flywheel to stop dragging us under will not be easy.

But I am determined to do it.

Fuck all that negativity telling me I have to be sad.

I choose to be defiantly positive!

Take that, world!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.