I seem to be near the bottom of my long mood cycle right now.
I can tell because the nihilistic thoughts are creeping in. Thoughts like “I hate my life” and “fuck everything forever” and my personal fave, “everything is stupid and nothing matters”, which I swear I’m going to put on a T-shirt some day.
The edgy teen crowd will love it.
Generally speaking, this lower limit of the sine wave of my mood happens when enough frustrations and unexpressed anger has accumulated in my nervous system to start being really burdensome and it drags my mood down till it reaches a very low-key kind of crisis and that discharges enough of this dark energy to make me feel better.
In a way, I kind of wish it led to something more dramatic, like a nervous breakdown or a big confrontation or warrants for my arrest.
At least then it might actually resolve some of my inner conflict and make me substantially more whole instead of making progress drop by infinitesimal drop.
But I am just too goddamned stable. My mind is programmed to always keep me on an even keel no matter what in order to better facilitate this dead end video game based lifestyle of mine, and that means catastrophic change is just not in the cards for me.
I can’t just surrender myself to the chaos within and let whatever happens, happen. That’s asking too much of my belabored psyche. There is no way that I could trust that such a step would not end up harming me or others.
And that’s very important to me. I can’t absolve myself of responsibility for the consequences of my actions, even if I might be better off if I could.
It could very well be that mentally healthy people have a limit to how much responsibility they take for their part in things and everything outside that limit is somebody else’s job and not their problem.
And it’s only developmentally stunted weirdoes like me who try to live entirely by principle, without any little island of mercy carved out in which to be human and put my own emotional wellbeing first.
And that’s a cold and stringent way to live, without any forgiveness for myself, and I know that I would be a lot better off living a warmer and more human life, but this icy, brutal, strict ethos is all I know.
When I try to imagine what lies outside that way of living, all that comes to mind is my adopting a FEBM (Fuck Everybody But Me) lifestyle of selfish self-gratification without any thought to the consequences to others.
All that would matter was what I could get away with.
No consequences for me? Then I fail to see a problem.
Obviously that’s just my mind’s way of going to the opposite extreme, and sanity, as always, lies somewhere between those poles.
And that happy medium is far more difficult for me to achieve. I seem to be naturally drawn to one extreme or another.
All I can do is do my best to keep healing and growing and letting my mind and my soul expand with all the parts of me that have been dormant for so long
And sooner or later that is going to require a loss of “control”. And that, in turn, requires something I sorely lack : faith.
Faith that I can do that and it will be okay. Things will get better for me. I won’t end up in jail or my grave. I will be fine, or something like it.
I have no reason to believe that. I live life on the high wire with no safety net. There has never been anyone to catch me if I fall.
I am not sure there even could be such an individual. I am a lot to handle and not even my therapist can handle the true unfiltered me.
I am downright megalithic.
And nobody knows what to do with a guy like that.
Least of all me.
More after the break.
More DoorDash follies
Until further notice, I will not be ordering in on Saturday night any more.
That’s because apparently our building’s buzzer system is completely broken, neither me nor any other resident of Manhattan Towers let someone in the building without physically going down the lobby and opening the door.
So for the second Saturday in a row, my meal is sitting outside the door to the building and I am helpless to go get it.
And this time, I can’t complain to DoorDash and get a refund because this time the driver definitely did not do anything wrong.
He got it as close to me as he could.
And I am not the type of person to lie about a thing like that.
Or nearly anything else, for that matter.
I actually called Julian to see if he could come home from playing board games at Joe’s parents’ place long enough to bring it to me, but he understandably said no.
It was a pretty big ask.
I’m going to have to complain to someone about the buzzer system, though. I need that thing. What if I had an emergency and had to let the EMTs in?
And I can’t be the only person in this 120+ unit apartment building who uses the buzzer. Admittedly, not many of them would have it hooked up to a landline, but that’s neither here nor there.
This whole thing has me kind of bummed out. I was really looking forward to having a nice treat tonight only to have it snatched away by cruel fate.
And as patient readers know, I don’t handle disappointment well. So I am probably going to be sad for a while.
But I’ll bounce back eventually.
Julian will pick up the meal for me whenever he gets home and I’ll have him stick it in the fridge and I will heat it up and eat it Monday night.
By then, this will just be another lesson learned the hard way.
And that’s better than learning nothing at all.
I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.