OK, I guess I am ready to discuss it now.

Plus I have no other ideas, so this is it.

Here is the vid :

Now to start off, you must ignore a whole section of that video because he goes off talking about dysthymics that are hard working and reliable and excellent in their field but find there to be no joy in it for them.

That’s clearly not me. I never got a chance to do that. My illness took me before I could even get my first job.

And I was never the one my parents could rely on because they never gave me any responsibility, or anything else for that matter.

I guess they could rely on me to stay invisible. Never ask for anything, stay in my room most of the time, rarely even watch TV with them.

Because I was dead inside.

Now for the rest of it.

He talks a lot about learning to generate your own joy, and that jibes with my own observations about it seems like healthy people have a faculty inside them that generates the right emotional input to keep their mood from going below a certain level.

So far so good.

But when I try to apply this to myself, I hit a dead stop. My brain screeches to a halt. I literally cannot imaging pleasure coming from inside me.

So like Doctor K says, I rely entirely on external stimuli, and in my case that’s video games, and to a lesser extent food.

I’ve cooled out on food for the most part. I eat, obviously, and the foods I eat are ones I like, but I don’t think about food or plan my life around food and I certainly don’t use food to improve my mood.

That’s a dead end street. Emphasis on dead.

I can’t even imagine pigging out like I used to now. I know where that leads and it leads to feeling ill for a much longer time than it made me feel good.

But video games are my doom still. They are my “dominant other” and I rely on them almost exclusively for my emotional needs for :

1. A safe and acceptable level of stimulation
2. A sense of accomplishment and, god help me, productivity
3. An outlet for my intellectual energies
4. Something to occupy my time
5. An escape from having to be me

And pretty much everything else, too.

Or at least the needs I recognize and experience. As we all know, I have ruthlessly suppressed every goddamned emotion that did not fit in my addictive lifestyle and that is a lot of freaking emotions.

I don’t even feel horny any more. All I feel is a certain tightness in my balls that suggests I should at least try to masturbate to get some relief.

Then again, I suppose there’s nothing in my life to MAKE me horny.

There I am, putting all the onus on an exterior source of pleasure again.

That’s really where the bullet hits the bone. I can only see the world through the lens of a perpetual need for external stimuli to keep my mood afloat.

The idea of being able to be OK just on my own, unstimulated, seems utterly foreign to me. Alien. Like it comes from a very different universe than my own.

And I’m sorry, Doctor K, but I don’t rely on external things to make me happy. Maybe this is the depressed Gen X in me, but I don’t believe in “happy”.

Nothing can make me happy. At least not yet. Even if I am enjoying myself greatly, that layer of ice around my heart never melts and I am, at best, okay.

And that’s all I really want out of life. Contentment. Fulfillment. I just want to feel okay instead of feeling like I am always fighting oblivion and barely producing enough thrust to keep myself out of the black hole at my core.

And you want me to somehow generate my joy internally?

That’s not in the cards.

At least, not yet.

More after the break.

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Cancel it out

That’s what I am trying to do with the negative thinking displayed above.

And it’s not easy. It’s like there’s a massive flywheel in me that’s been spinning in one direction with enormous force for a very long time and I am trying to get it to spin in the opposite direction now.

And that means that the first thing I have to do is kill all the momentum going the wrong direction and that means applying an opposing force.

I don’t have it in me yet to stop the wheel all at once. I can’t just slam on the brakes and have it grind to a halt in a shower of sparks.

Instead, I have to apply little bits of opposing force that slow down the wheel just a little each time. Eventually, I may be able to stop it and then start it spinning positive.

Until then, I feel kind of like I find pockets of negativity in my mind when I do things like write here and by writing them out, I excise them.

I can let go out those emotions now. They have been transmitted.

Other times, it’s more like grinding the barnacles off a ship’s hull. The negative thoughts and attitudes stick out from my actual natural mind and so, with a small concentration of will backed by my massive rage battery, I can grind them down to nothing.

And that feels good. Like a hot shower when you’re really dirty. You can feel all the sweat and grime and nastiness just melt and slide off you and down the drain.

Like I keep saying, it’s a slow process. Perhaps I am too cowardly and/or cautious to make the big moves I really need. Maybe I don’t have the strength yet. Maybe I have not built up enough frustration and rage yet.

Still can’t get mad and stay mad. I’m just too naturally mellow.

But I will grind my way out of here sooner or later.

If I live long enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.