I’m feeling sluggish and tired and hence a bit cranky. I feel a weak but constant burning in all my muscles and my head hurts in that spot directly in that “third eye” spot in the middle of my forehead and I feel foggy and confused.

So I’m not doing too great right now. But this too shall pass.

Until then, I will use this negative mood in order to vent some more of the toxic garbage that has accumulated in my soul and maybe ease my burden a bit.

Basically, the crux of it all is that I hate my life and how it’s slowly falling apart along with my aging and sedentary body and yet I feel utterly helpless to change my destination.

I know it doesn’t seem that way. On paper there are loads of ways I could improve my life. But they all require something I just don’t seem to have.

They all require me to stop crouching in the corner with my face turned to the wall. I need to finally stand up, turn around to face the world, and enter that big bad world out there in order to finally deal with things properly.

And I just… can’t.

Even thinking about it hurts me. It gives me this feeling like my frostbitten and snow scarred body is being dragged painfully over rough and dirty ice. Like something raw and broken in me is trying to come to life but I am just too damaged to complete the circuit so I fall apart instead.

I am very good at falling apart. It’s getting my shit together that I fail at.

And it makes it so hard to avoid my self-loathing. That anger turned inward is a hell of a demon to try to exorcize. I have so much bitter contempt for myself and the pathetic worthless trash heap I’ve made of my life that it makes it hard to remember that I have any worth to anyone at all, let alone that people love and support me.

There’s still a terrible gap between me and others. An almost total lack of connection with the rest of humanity. I live in my own little walled off realm where I don’t connect with anybody on any deep level and thus I feel very, very alone.

And I know there are people who want to get closer to me. But I can’t let them in. I may have opened up a doorway inside myself, but I am still standing in that doorway and not letting anyone in, like an overzealous bouncer.

The truth is that I don’t know how to let people in. Or rather, I have no idea what being close to people is even like, and that scares me.

That part of me is frozen shut and has been for a long, long time. Whatever capacity I ever had to open up and connect with people died of a thousand winters deep inside me a long time ago, when I just plain gave up on people.

I went through my period of trying to reach out. Trying to make friends, connect with others, be a part of things. Even trying to be normal in my extremely clumsy fashion.

But due to lack of kindergarten (among other factor) I completely missed the bus when it came to socialization and normalization. I have been locked in this frozen realm of mine for a very long time and in here, I can’t touch anyone and no one touches me.

And that’s not enough. My soul has been starving for what feels like forever. All my gaming and blogging can do for me is keep me busy and/or amused. They can’t feed my spirit or help me grow.

So I feel trapped. But I’m not trapped. Except that I am.

I am just trapped by very inobvious and deeply personal issues that make no sense to the world outside myself as I see it.

I am broken in a way for which people don’t even have a word.

And I don’t know how to fix that.

But venting like this certainly helps. Thank you for listening.

More after the break.

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The long dream

Been sleeping a lot today.

Must be time for the balloon payment on my sleep debt. It’s been a little frustrating because I’ve been only getting to play my video games in little 20 minute intervals and that’s an unsatisfying amount of play.

Feels like I am just getting started when it’s time to stop. Dammit.

But the real sleep problem that is on my mind right now is how a big part of me has been asleep and dreaming ever since I was raped at the age of 4 and how it has just occurred to me that in order to get better, I am going to have to wake that poor boy up.

And that’s not going to be easy. He’s been asleep for so long that there is no way that he is still healthy and whole as he slumbers away. He’s going to be a very sick child when he wakes up and that makes it seem like waking him is downright cruel.

And yet, awaken he must. In time, he will recover from his long, long nap and be able to truly wake up and take deep, cleansing breaths and then get up and face the day.

And on that day my psyche will be more whole than it has been ever since that terrible man raped me, and I will have all my faculties at my disposal instead of having to drag the dead weight of my sleeping self around behind me.

He doesn’t want to wake up. As far as he is concerned, there is still a horror beyond all comprehension waiting for him in the real world, and therefore waking up is the worst possible thing that could happen because then the monster will GET him.

And I don’t want to wake him up. It will not feel like I am doing him a kindness, at least not at first. Not only is he going to wake up sick, he will have to face a lot of very harsh truths when he does wake, including the horrible fact that he has been asleep for 47 years and most of his life has passed him by.

But somehow we will both get through it.

Because on the other side of all of that lies freedom.

And that make it all worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Those five tabs continue to haunt me.

They are : Notd, a truly excellent forum for writers which would make a great springboard for, at the very least, network with other writers and all I would have to do is summon the self-confidence to upload my stuff to it…

FlexJobs, a site specializing in remote work jobs which might be perfect for me if I could only pull myself together enough to page through the listings until I find one I am actually qualified for…

The March of Dimes Employment Services page, which has all kinds of resources to help gimps like myself find the employment we need to become more independent…

The March of Dimes Skill Up page, which would enable me to acquire the skills needed to actually qualify for stuff…

And this video, which promises 15 juicy remote work opportunities.

All five of these things are wonderful opportunities that could very well be the golden ticket I need in order to finally enter the magical world of employment.

And then I would be a real honest to goodness grownup! Golly!

And they all just sit there like wallpaper with me almost never even thinking about them and when I do notice them there, I immediately avert my attention from those terrible things that make me feel tense and scared and guilty.

Which is why these golden tickets go unredeemed. I am far too prone to fleeing things that scare me by diving deep into my distractions (video games) until I forget all about whatever it was that set me off.

And what sets me off in this case is, I suppose, fear of growing up. Fear of changing. Fear of entering an environment, however virtual, with which I am unfamiliar and therefore one that would be far more stimulating that my usual life and it’s that jump in stimulation levels that scares me.

I associate all such jumps with anxiety attacks, and that’s why I am still on this long smooth flat road to absolutely nowhere because when you can’t choose anything that increases your stimulation you end up at the bottom of a steep ravine.

If you can’t go up, your only choices are to go down or go nowhere.

And while my road seems flat, I’m actually going down a very gradual but fatal decline and at the bottom of this hill lies my early, stupid, pointless grave.

And ain’t that a kick in the nuts.

And I know it’s my own cowardice that is keeping me trapped on this long and lonely road. I am a hostage to my own extremely overactive fear responses and it does not seem like they will let me go any time soon.

So I find myself increasingly contemplating my own kind of “lean in” strategy where instead of trying to quiet my fears or somehow overcome them in a macho manly way (yeah right), I simply endure the terror.

Just walk right into it and let it wash over me. Let it discharge like so much static electricity. Wait for it to wear itself out, then go ahead and do the thing anyway.

And if that fails, pop a Xanax. What the hell.

Something has to end the chokehold my fears have on my every moment. There has to be some way to get past that massive wall of fear and it’s seeming increasingly likely that the only way out is through.

Maybe that’s how I teach my soul to fly. I keep talking about not being limited by the logical and the sensible, but I am still driving around looking for an exit.

When I know that the only way to get there is to fly. Leave logic and common sense behind and just go there even if it doesn’t make sense at all. Even if there’s no logical connection between what came before and what I want to happen.

Even if there is no road to that holy place at all, and the only way to get there is to fly.

It is truly a handicap to need things to always make sense. It can lead to a remarkably well integrated and robust understanding of things, but it’s no good for the soul.

Sometimes reality simply does not furnish what we need.

And then, we have to be able to make it ourselves.

More after the break.

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Leave this world behind

Perhaps it’s because my subjective world is so unreal, but I cling to what connection to reality I still retain with a fanatical deathgrip for fear of the vast and hungry canyon of total mental oblivion over which I am dangling.

Madness lurks below. Or so I’ve always thought.

But maybe that is all bullshit. Maybe I could let go and not only would I be fine, I would actually be way better off because now my mind can find its natural equilibrium and I could learn to relax and not be so freaking anxious all the time.

Ah, but can I afford to risk it? What if I’m wrong and I do end up utterly mad?

That is how paranoia always works. It sets things up so that the consequences of disobeying it just might be far, far worse than any benefit – might, in fact, be fatal, either literally or metaphorically, and thus makes it seem “not worth the risk”.

It’s the perfect scam, because it keeps you from ever testing whether or not it’s valid.

I mean, if there’s a real possibility that turning on your light will cause an explosion that will kill you and your entire family, you’re probably going to just get used to the dark.

But is that a real possibility? Or rather, is it in any sense at all likely?

And if it isn’t, why do you keep scaring yourself with the possibility? What does that cycle of fear keep from happening? What are you REALLY scared of?

Anyhow. This tight grip on my connection to reality might be partially to blame for why faith seems so impossible to me.

Because to have faith, I would have to let go. For the first time in my life, I would have to leave the tightly integrated structure of my rational model of the universe and enter a world of pure emotion and intuition, and that scares the shit out of me.

I can’t verify emotion. I can’t test intuition’s reasoning. I can’t examine their justification and see if it checks out. I can’t be sure of anything at all.

Or maybe I could be sure of all of it if I could just believe.

But I can’t, or at least, not yet. I can’t believe something (or in something) without having a reason to do so. It has to make sense to me.

But belief without the need for justification is the definition of faith.

And I don’t know if I can do that.

I just know that I need to.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Julian drove me to an orthotics center today so they could push my feet into foam.

In order to make a cast of my feet, of course. This is one of the many wonderful things my case worker Galina has put into motion for me, and should eventually result in my getting new shoes with offloading orthotics inside them.

The idea is to take the pressure off the wounds on my feet so that they can heal.

One surprising bit of info : going around in my socks all the time might be the very reason the wounds on my feet haven’t healed.

It makes sense when you think about it : when you go around barefoot or in just socks, the flexing of the muscles tears the wound open with every step.

Harsh, I know. But accurate.

That’s especially true with wounds like the one on my left foot, The wound is smack dab in the middle of the muscle right above the heel, and wounds like that do not heal well even in the best of circumstances because pretty much anything you do with that foot will flex that muscle.

I am pretty dang curious as to how orthotics will get around that.

Well, I will know in 2 to 6 weeks. I fully expected that. The wheels of government turn mighty slow and I most definitely did not think I would be leaving the orthotics place with new shoes today.

As always, I do what’s asked of me then forget about it till I need to do something else.

The orthotics place is in Vancouver, so it was a bit of a road trip to get there. Plus it’s located in this big rehabilitation center which is itself located in a cozy, tree lined Vancouver residential neighborhood, so it’s a tad off the beaten path.

Something occurred to me while we were in that neighborhood : everyone knows that people love those tree lined neighborhoods.

What struck me is that this basically means we like living in the forest. We want to be surrounded by trees. And then every lawn is like a little meadow of our own.

We’re still forest animals at heart. And I say this as a person who grew up on a tree lined street, and so that kind of thing is especially powerful for me.

I find it comforting to think that we complicated humans are basically forest animals who seek our natural climate.

Makes me think of those adorable British children’s books about anthro animals living in forest neighborhoods, like The Wind In The Willows.

The orthotics specialist was a very nice British lady who did the pressing my feet into the foam thing. The foam was firm but yielded when the lady pressed down on my feet with her hands, and voila, two remarkably high resolution impressions of my tootsies.

It was a very interesting sensation. Like stepping into crusty snow, only much warmer and drier. To be honest, it made me want to have a bunch of that foam to play around with and make impressions of various things.

Now the whole thing has to make a stop at my GP Doctor Chao’s office so that he can add the shoes to my prescription, then it’s off to the government to await their holy benison so the orthotics people can make my frigging shoes.

One thing that concerned me was that she was clearly implying that I should have the new shoes on all the time, and that would be a major adjustment for me.

But then I realized that there would be no reason for me to wear them when I was sitting at the computer or lying in bed, and that’s 80 percent of my waking hours, so I guess I would only have to slip them on when I stood up.

And I can live with that, I guess.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

More after the break.

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The long haul

I feel so damned tired sometimes.

Especially after a day like today, with an unusual amount of moving around. Right now my legs are aching. More worryingly, so are my arms.

I am terrified that my undiagnosed and hence untreated muscular degeneration is going to take my arms next. Having legs that don’t work right is one thing. It sucks but most of the time I am sitting or lying down anyhow, so it’s not that bad.

But if my arms become as stiff and weak as my legs, that could fuck things up big time.

If that happens, I am going to demand answers and a treatment, because that could make my life intolerable.

Just leave me the ability to type and use the mouse.

Anyhow, so I feel sore all over and that is not ideal because I still have wound care tomorrow where I will need to make another subjectively long trip via my walker.

I feel my destiny in a wheelchair looming larger and closer than ever before.

I get the feeling I might not make it to wound care tomorrow. Depends on how I feel when I get up.

I really don’t want to miss tomorrow’s appointment, though, because the orthotics lady had to remove the bandages on my feet in order to do that neato foam thing and then stick them back on again.

They’re not a wound clinic. They don’t do that kind of work. I have the feeling that she’s more of a medical technician, like a physio, then an actual part of the medical system.

And I was not super happy with that, but as long as I make it to wound care, they can change the bandages to ones that are put on there properly and all will be good.

But will I make it? I dunno. Right now it doesn’t seem likely but maybe if I lay in bed willing my legs to recover from their ordeal faster, I can make it.

I frigging hate my life sometimes.

It’s just so god damned stupid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We introverts tend to generate our own energy.

As opposed to extroverts, who take their energy from their environment.

Now obviously I am not speaking of literal energy. Whatever energy you’re using to walk, talk, and masturbate as you read this comes from inside you no matter how you are wired because it’s a product of your metabolism.

So what we’re really talking about is the emotional side of motive power. This includes that magical, mystical substance called “motivation”, but also things like the elevation of one’s mood, inspiration, the urge to socialize, and so on.

Both introversion and extroversion have their pluses and minuses, and the world most definitely needs both kinds of people.

But both sides can also go too far, to the point of becoming pathological.

Extreme extroversion can lead to someone who is monophobic – in other words, they hate to ever be alone – as well as hyperactive and reactive and who simply cannot function without people to perceive them and react to.

Extreme introverts, like myself, can end up very depressed and unmotivated and anhedonic because when their internal generation of “power” isn’t enough, everything grinds to a gruesome halt.

And the thing about depression as a mental illness is that it creates a kind of friction that enormously increases the amount of “power” needed to do even the simplest of things, and that’s bad, bad news when you are limited to only what you generate internally.

The result is persistent depressive disorder as we know it, with the lassitude, lack of motivation, and dependence on whatever in our lives we have gravitated to as the activity that provides enough reward for the effort it requires.

All depressives are addicted to something, in my opinion.

All this leads to my own case and my thoughts about this whole energy deal. Clearly, I need a lot more of the stuff if I am to escape my own rather nasty gravity well.

Luckily, I know that it is at least possible for me to get some energy from external stimulation. For example, I often feel quite awake and alive when I have been hanging out with my friends at Denny’s of a Sunday night, as I will be doing in 2 hours and a bit.

But for the most part, I have been far too closed off and insular to get much from my environment except through screens, and screens are not enough.

I mean, obviously, in a literal sense, video games are stimulation from outside of my skull, but to me they are more like extensions of my mind.

But a good game can motivate me to play it for hours on end. So there’s that.

My catastrophic passivity is part of this equation as well, because it rarely occurs to me to actually seek the sort of social stimulation I clearly need in order to stop feeling so cold and lonely all the god damned time.

So what I clearly need to do is gather my meager motivational forces together and go hunting for greater social stimulation of a positive variety.

But more fundamentally, I need to open myself up to the world and all its potential stimulation instead of huddling in a corner with my screens and shutting the real world out as much as possible.

I need to become a real human being and not just a broken simulation of one. I want to find all my long neglected instincts, emotions, and drives, and enable myself to let them take me where they will no matter how unpredictable the journey might be.

Because the thing about healthy people is that it doesn’t matter how surprising life might be because they are confident that they will be able to handle it.

That is their form of predictability – confidence in themselves. And the more they successfully endure, the greater that confidence becomes because they now have the experience needed to make even better decisions in the future.

Seems like an impossible and distant galaxy from where I am right now. And yet I know the potential for that sort of self-affirming life lies within me.

I was a very open and optimistic and enthusiastic kid before the rape.

I can be that kind of person again.

I will find a way to get back to that.

One word at a time.

More after the break.

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Dig, dig, dig

And I will get back to that happy, positive place by swinging my psychological pickaxe and digging deep into into the substrate of my psyche in order to excavate all those old fossilized emotions and release the energy bound up in that deep black rock so that it can return to powering my actual generators again.

Can I work a metaphor, or what?

And I have seen little hints of light breaking through the clouds lately. Moments when I can feel a certain lightness and buoyancy threatening to lift me up and actually make me feel good about life and the road ahead of me.

A warm, sunshiny feeling is a-stirring, and so I am desperately tunneling through the rock still holding me down in order to become light enough to start floating again.

I don’t care if I float off into the stratosphere and disappear into the sky. Nice place, the sky. Could be a nice place to live.

And it sure as fuck can’t be any more cold and airless than how I feel down here.

So I am throwing every sandbag I got over the side of this hot air balloon of mine and I will keep doing that until I finally lift the fuck off.

To hell with having my feet on the ground. Staying firmly grounded in the here and now has always been a purely theoretical idea for me anyhow. I’ve talked big about it but the truth is that I can’t handle the here and now in the slightest.

I will always retain my fundamental pragmatism. That’s immutable. But I no longer give a shit if I am being “logical” or “realistic”.

I just want to be happy.

And absolutely nothing else matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a surprisingly slippery question.

I will always recall the moment I realized that there was such a thing as nerds and nerd culture. I remember I was sitting around playing D&D with some fellow students in junior high (in my school district, grades 7 through 9) and it suddenly occurred to me that I had more in common with the people there than just D&D.

Somehow, I knew that if they were into D&D, odds are they were also heavily into science fiction, heavy metal, and Star Wars.

The odds were also very good that they did well in school. That wasn’t a lock, because not every nerd is academically gifted – just most of us – but if you’ve the wit to play D&D at all competently, you’re no dummy.

Most importantly, I realized there were other people like me.

Of course, now, with the rise of the Internet and internet culture. we are all aware that there are millions of us nerds out there and that there is a vast and varied geek subculture that supports us in our nerdity.

But my revelation would have come in 1987 or so, so all of that hadn’t happened yet.

I imagine a lot of my fellow geeks went through a similar journey.

Eh, nerdy kids these days don’t know how good they got it.

Anyhow, enough biography. Let’s address the question : what is a nerd?

I don’t know, but I know one when I see one. Ha ha ha.

First off, we are a subset of the naturally occurring intellectual class. This is the percentage of the population that naturally develops a higher than average IQ and hence does well in school.

Nobody has to create this class of person. The human race seems to simply produce them without the need for any kind of intervention.

Now, whether any given society encourages and/or exploits this higher level of intelligence sadly varies wildly depending on culture, both societal and family.

But that’s outside the scope of this think piece.

Depending on how broadly one defines nerdity, it could be said that all the members of this naturally occurring intellectual class (NOIC?) are nerds of some sort.

But someone bound for law school is not just a “law nerd” by any stretch of the imagination. The line has to be drawn somewhere.

One of the defining characteristics of nerdity is a love for learning and the accumulation of knowledge. Nerds love to know things, and when it’s something they like, like Lord of the Rings, they will want to learn everything there is to know about their fave thing.

I’m not that kind of nerd myself. I’m a lot more omnivorous than that. I take in all kinds of information and it all gets sorted and formatted and reduced to its pure essence and that essence become part of my working model of the world.

There are lots of things I love. Like science and video games, both geeky. But I can’t imagine that making me want to learn everything there is to know about either subject.

I will definitely enjoy learning about them. An article or YouTube video about those subjects has a higher likely of attracting my attention than one about trains.

It’s the obsessive drive to collect that I lack, whether it’s merchandise or trivia. I love to learn and I enjoy having knowledge to draw on, but I get bored far too easily and I am far too restless to stick with even one of my favorite topics for a long time.

So I am more of a generalist. That’s my specialty.

More after the break.

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Topic what topic

You have to admit, I kept trying to return to the topic of what a nerd is.

But it’s so hard for me to make the words go where I want them to go. I can’t be restricted to a topic. My mind refuses to be constrained by even its own ideas.

There’s a lesson for me in there somewhere, I think.

Now, there are worse sins than not being able to stick to a point. All that really matters is whether a writer keeps you entertained (or amused or engaged or whatever) with whatever it is they wrote. Whether they prove their thesis or not is secondary.

This was true of some of the columnist of old. Like my hero Dave Barry (sp?). He managed to get to a point where all he had to do was come up with 750 funny and engaging words a day, and everything would be all right.

I want that kind of life. Sure, having to come up with those 750 high quality words every day would be way, way harder than producing 1000 words of my usual drivel, but I know I would be up to the task.

And sure, the fame would be nice, and the money would be very very nice. But what would be the most appealing thing about it to me would be the simplicity of it all.

No more infinite corridor of infinite doors. No more option paralysis. No more constant, gnawing feeling that there’s something I am supposed to be doing and I am not doing it.

Just 750 little words and you’re done for the day. And you know what you’ll be doing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on.

That would be amazing.

Piers Anthony, another hero of mine, also talked something similar. He said he got to the point where he felt he owed the word 1000 proofread and edited and polished words a day toward whatever he was working on (and it could be any one of several projects) and as long as he got those words done, all was right in the world.

I wonder if that’s where I got the !K words a day idea?

And most importantly, absolutely nothing could change that obligation. Even if he missed that target 100 days in a row, on day 101 he still owed the world those words. Failure was absolutely no excuse to quit.

And that might seem harsh to some. But to me, it’s genius. Because it changes the equation so that failure is no longer an escape from the problem. In that case, the path of least resistance becomes to just do the damned thing and get it over with so you can do whatever the fuck you want with the rest of your day.

It’s a way around the laziness and procrastination endemic to us creative type people.

Shit. That reminds me. NaNoWriMo is coming up in 5 days and I don’t have an idea for what to write about yet.

I could just improvise my way through it like I did with my previous November novels. There, too, what I ended up writing bore little resemblance to what I had meant to write.

But I still need a good, solid, inspiring point of departure.

Time to start brainstorming!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, frantic might not be the right word. But busy.

Wound care at 9:15 am. Had a “it sucks to be sensitive” moment when my nurse came to get me in the waiting area just as some other client, a rather confused old lady who did not speak English, and her care worker who barely? spoke English started a hubbub with my nurse about an appointment they thought was at 8:30 am but was in fact at 9:15 am just like mine.

There was much confusion and stress hanging in the air for me to walk into because of this, plus the disorder of it all upset me, and I was left walking into the Community Care Clinic feeling rather off kilter and upset.

It really sucks to be as sensitive as I am sometimes.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My nurse was a lady with an African accent and dark skin, and that was kind of fun. I love the interesting rising caDENCE of her acCENT and the unusual empPHAsis she placed on some sylLABles, see.

It’s not impossible that it was actually a Caribbean accent. After today, I can really hear how the Caribbean accent relates to certain African accents.

Her skin tone and bone structure said Africa, though.

The usual bandage change happened despite the occasional tiny language snafus (“You have wounds on both your…. legs, right?” My feet, actually, but I am pretty sure you know that. ), and then we were on our way to the bank for my monthly bullshit.

The banking bullshit went great. There was absolutely no line at all so the whole thing took very little time and I didn’t need Julian to be my placeholder in line or anything.

I made the usual withdrawal. I still need to deal in cash because Van City still does not have a way for me to spend money via Visa Debit so that it acts just like a Visa card but the money comes out of my account instead of accruing as debt.

If I could only get that service, I would never need to go to the bank again. The money would be deposited in the account and I would spend it from there too.

There’s probably a way for me to do that and I am just not clever enough to think of it.

I can be very, very clever like any good fox, but it’s sporadic. Inspiration either strikes or it doesn’t and I don’t really have any control over that.

One silly thing : after we left the bank, we headed home, and it wasn’t until we had pulled into our parking spot that I realized we had forgotten to get my credit card.

You know, the preloaded credit card I buy every month so that I can buy things online like a civilized human of today.

Without it, I could not order my groceries, and that’s a no go. So off to Sav-On we went.

I registered the card then ordered my groceries when we got home. The groceries were $87 this week, ouch.

Normally I budget around $60/week but I was out of a bunch of things, including canned pop, and I had decided that to jumpstart my canned pop supply I would need to buy two “fridge buddy” 12 packs, and those are like $9 each.

Plus I decided I wanted to get my hard candies, and that was another $10.

So, ouch, but I knew it would be a costly week.

Then later on came shower time. I am enjoying these little excursions more and more as Albert and I get along quite well and always have a pleasant chat as we get the job done, so to speak.

Well, mostly him. But I help.

More after the break.

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Permission to live

It’s what I am trying to give myself, more or less.

I could even go as far as calling it “permission to exist”. I have lived with the burden of subconsciously being ashamed to be alive for my entire life. Whatever recovery I can manage is going to require me to overcome that somehow.

No wonder I spent so much time alone in my room when I was growing up. Or watching TV by myself in the living room, when everyone else was busy.

I was such a nervous and timid little thing. Like an overwrought mouse.

I somehow need to learn to believe that my being around is a good thing. That means forever banishing that evil, evil voice inside me that tells me that I am a blight on all who know me and the world would be better off without me.

I know that voice is wrong, wrong, wrong.

But that doesn’t shut it up. For that, I suppose I would need to expiate whatever emotions that voice is expressing.

I am still working on being able to figure out that kind of thing. I know that all those evil thoughts come from a place of pain and rage – rage turned inward.

Depression makes us our own tormentor. We are the sadist and the victim. We are the torturer and the sinner. We are the plague and the stricken.

We feast on our own flesh.

This is getting pretty metal.

I guess the obvious solution is to find another outlet for all that fucking rage. And I agree with that objective in principle but I still shy away from it emotionally.

I’m afraid of my rage and where it might take me and what it could make me do. The urges it produces are absolutely psychotic sometimes.

I won’t go into details. I don’t want to scare you.

But I get how depression leads some people into depraved acts, I just know better and thus I can’t pretend like such acts are justified in any way.

I know the seduction of rage, and how easy it would be to follow whatever path leads to that rage being expressed.

And um, fuck that noise.

If it’s be miserable or be evil, I will stay sad, thank you very much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Some videos I have been watching and commenting on over on YouTube have got me thinking Gen X thoughts.

Every generation starts where the previous one left off, even though they neither know it or do it on purpose, and Gen X started where the Boomers ended.

And where they ended was bad. Very bad.

Their youthful exuberance started in the psychedelic 60’s but ended in the Age of Disillusionment. aka the 70’s, and that’s when a lot of us X’ers were born.

The 70’s saw the tie-dyed pie=eyed drug-fueled hippie revolution turn into the social apocalypse that followed. Drugs ran rampant and destroyed lives on an industrial scale , because much to the shock of the hippies, it turned out that drugs are bad, mmkay?

All those hippies came down from the high to find their lives destroyed, often along with their bodies, and many of them came out of it with crippling addictions to things like heroin or morphine.

And because of this explosion in the number of junkies, a tidal wave of crime followed as millions of former hippies had habits to feed.

Throw in Vietnam, Nixon, pollution, inflation, OPEC, poverty, and the stress of trying to start a family amidst all this degradation, and the hippies came to a very bad end. They saw all their great big psychedelic dreams turn into absolute dogshit, and their peace love and harmony turn into cheap thrills and street crime.

Oh, and the divorce rate also skyrocketed as the spoiled and cranky Boomers decided they didn’t feel like being married any more.

So they weren’t.

And that’s the milieu into which we were born. It’s like we of the subsequent generation absorbed the Boomer’s newfound cynicism and disillusionment with our mother’s milk and it became foundational to our entire worldview.

So we inherently distrust big dreams and grand schemes and societal machines. We have a natural immunity to hype and drama and idealism. We grew up with absolutely no illusions about drugs or music or anything else.

We had to deal with the harsh realities the Boomers had created by refusing to face reality for half a generation.

Remember, folks, reality always wins.

I will never forget the conversation I had on IRC with a bunch of ex-hippie Libertarian types where they couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that I didn’t trust ANYBODY.

Not government, not religion, not corporations, not education, not charities, not the shining idiots on the TV, and definitely not our selfish Boomer parents.

The same parents that had kids without realizing that kids actually have their own needs and desires that could potentially impinge on the Boomers’ precious freedom and autonomy and prerogatives, and clearly that was unacceptable.

I’m sorry, but I didn’t know having kids would mean less for ME.

So instead of being real parents, they just did whatever the hell they wanted to do and us offspring had to just fit ourselves in whenever and often basically raise ourselves.

Hence being the latchkey generation. The first (and in many ways last) generation to grow up without a full time parent. To come home to absolutely nobody and be left to fend for ourselves at least until suppertime.

To never have anyone to turn to when you needed a parent because they were busy and what they were doing was far more important than you are and really, they’re doing this all for you, so just shut up and leave mommy and daddy alone, OK?

And we did. And then they wondered why we grew up to hate them.

Maybe that’s changed now. Maybe it can no longer be assumed that kids will grow up to hate their parents, at least for a while.

After all, kids aren’t raised by Boomers any more.

I’d like to think we did a better job, at least a little.

More after the break.

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The Therapy Thursday Report

Today’s session was pretty good.

We talked about how I have spent most of my life staying in my bedroom most of the time because that’s the only place I felt “safe”.

When I was a kid, it meant I was “safe” from my family and the pain of being ignored or feeling like I wasn’t even there or the anxiety of dealing with people in general, which I now recognize as stemming from feeling like everyone was always at least a little bit pissed off at me.

Back then, that was normal. I lived with a constant background of people’s annoyance. And that extended from my mother through my siblings and all the way to my teachers.

Nobody really wanted me around because I was such a gross pathetic mess. It is painful to be around someone like that. And disgusting.

The difference is that someone in my home life should have taken it upon themselves to get me to clean up and pull myself together so that I was at least inoffensive.

But I was the Christmas puppy, the cute kid who everyone got tired off and then nobody wanted to take care of me or bear any responsibility for me whatsoever.

Like a big dumb smelly dog who doesn’t know why he never gets pets any more.

Another thing that came up during today’s session was the idea of trying to fixate on my pre-rape self when I was a very happy, charming, adorable kid who was often the center of attention wherever I went without even trying and whom everybody loved.

I can be that person again. Well, an adult version of him, anyhow.

That’s the person I was supposed to be before that evil man raped me. And it’s the person I can be again once I rid myself of all these demons and learn to stand up and shake off my fears and face the grown-up world head-on.

Hopefully without whimpering.

I know that I have to rescue and resurrect that very large part of me that is still back in that shower stall where I was raped.

I need to heal him and the wounds he carries, and that won’t be easy or fun.

But I am working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

After all, it’s what I’m good at.

It’s a shocking thing to realize you’ve spent your whole life curled up into a ball with your back turned to the world as you tried hard to ignore brutal reality in favour of screens.

Like I am just waiting for reality to go away and leave me to my pain.

And because of the trauma that put me into this fixed position, I became extremely passive. I guess you could say that I dealt with being raped by going limp and waiting for it to be over.

I assume I’m not the only one to do that in that situation.

And I have spent the rest of my life doing the same thing. I have felt so powerless for most of my life that it would never have occurred to me that I was supposed to be steering this life of mine all this time.

But it’s clear to me now that much of that powerless is delusional. I have all kinds of power that I have never tapped into. If anything, I have actively (if subconsciously) dodged thinking about the true extent of my abilities in any but the most theoretical of ways for a very long time.

Them : But Mister Bertrand, you’re actually powerful beyond all mortal ken.
Me : I guess. Can I go back to crouching in filth now?

So why do I deny the truth of my own extraordinary abilities?

I think it has a lot to do with not wanting to take responsibility for them. After all, if I truly “owned” my incredible faculties, then I would be obliged to do something with them and that would take me out of my “safe” position of cringing in the dark.

And that would be the worst thing possible, at least according to that tiny child inside me that left the world behind in order to escape the unthinkable thing happening to him.

He’s still hiding deep inside me. That scared little animal at the heart of my psyche fears exposure most of all because he associates concealment with safety and discovery with terrible things happening to him.

Many, many bullying incidents taught him that, as well as an emotionally cold and distant and disdainful home life.

Obviously, accepting one’s true power as well as one’s limitations is a key part of growing up, and I’ve been afraid to do that as well.

Once more we come face to face with my “failure to launch” and that deep conviction that adult life would destroy me.

Or maybe just change me into something unrecognizable, which is worse.

Normal people don’t even think about this shit. They just go on to the next thing their instincts tell them to do without even knowing that is what they are doing.

They’re just doing what feels right and/or makes sense at the time, without the kind of overbearing metaconscious awareness that cripples the likes of me.

They have innocence, at least for a while. And it protects.

But me, I knew far too much far too soon. I couldn’t just innocently do normal kid things for the usual kid reasons because I “knew better”.

Sometimes having perspective can be downright toxic to your wellbeing.

I guess you could call it cosmic self-consciousness. At no point could I let my guard down and believe or do the things kids normally do.

My paranoia ran far too deep. Any sense of control over my existence I felt (and feel) is entirely dependent on tackling things with my over-muscled brain and trying to understand and anticipate everything.

It all seems so futile to me now. But it’s still all I’ve got.

It’s going to take a hell of a lot of growth to get over that.

More after the break.

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Failure to launch indeed

Gave masturbation a try.

As usual, it was a lot of fun, and it felt good to fire up my engines and run them for a bit. But sadly, as is alas also usual, I didn’t get anywhere near takeoff.

And that is always a bummer. I don’t know how it works for females of our species but for us men when we don’t get where we’re trying to go, we die a little inside.

What isn’t usual is that this time, that punctured finale came with a tidal surge of pure black depression. A wave of sadness flooded my mind and for around ten minutes I was feeling pretty bad.

The fact that I also developed a sick headache – the kind that comes with nausea – at almost the same time did not help at all.

But the depression came first. Pun intended, I guess.

That raises the stakes on my little erotic excursions considerably. Frustration is one thing – I have gotten somewhat used to that.

But being punished for my aborted orbital mission with black dog depression is a new wrinkle and one I very much wish to iron out.

Luckily, the flood waters receded after around ten minutes and I was left just feeling a little sick and a little bit, um, sore.

I pretty much have to completely abstain for weeks at a time in order to have any really good chance at reaching blastoff.

And way back when Paxil was pretty much completely nullifying my libido (the first few years after starting it) that was not a problem. Don’t want it, don’t get it, it’s all good.

The problem came when my libido returned but orgasm did not. Dammit.

I figure it must have something to do with the way Paxil dampens one’s emotions in general. That’s how it keeps people with social anxiety/Avoidant like myself from freaking out so much but it also keeps me from having other emotional extremes.

Jesus, what if the numbness I have been blaming on the depression has actually been the fault of my antidepressant?

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants?

Good thing Doctor Costin has me slowly reducing the dose then, I guess.

Sure would be nice to feel things strongly again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this whole idea of elevating your own mood.

The very concept of being able to do things that make you feel better for longer than the thing itself lasts is alien to my excessively introverted mind.

All I know how to do is keep my mind too stimulated and busy for me to be sad. While I am blogging or playing a video game, I’m not depressed and I don’t hate myself.

Maybe because I am actually using a substantial fraction of my energies by doing a task and that leaves precious little room for my dark ruminations.

Either way, I guess you could say I self-medicate with video games. And like all non-prescription ways of treating the chemical imbalance in the head of a depressive, it has become a paralyzing addiction.

Could be worse. I could have taken up drinking.

Anyhow, back to the supposed topic.

Of course, I know that other people do things to make themselves feel better all the time. It’s one of the most basic forms of taking care of your own mental health, Or, put less cerebrally, making life not suck so much.

So the fact that the concept is alien to me personally is just plain weird.

Somehow, my mental malfunctions make it seem beyond impossible for me to take responsibility for my own mood.

I guess I have deeply internalized the idea of my mood being a thing that fluctuates all on itself own, and all I can do is deal with wherever it goes.

Like it’s the weather.

To be honest I do not take responsibility for much in my life. I am stuck in that “helpless and hopeless” mode of just reacting to whatever happens to me (mostly nothing) and doing next to nothing to actually pilot my own vessel.

It scares me to even think of taking full responsibility for my own fate because that would me the horrible mess I have made of my life is all my fault and I don’t think I could survive the spike in self-hatred that would trigger.

I mean, obviously it’s my fault, or at the very least, my responsibility, because who else’s fault could it be?

I don’t even have a boss or a parent to influence and control me.

It’s all me, baby!

But knowing it’s my fault and actually taking on the responsibility for the sad state of my wasted fucking life are two radically different things.

They shouldn’t be, but they are.

I guess I’ve lived my life like I am a helpless leaf in the wind. Which must be a spiritual issues on some level. Some part of me is bone-chillingly scared of taking control and that’s why my strength and energy seem to just fade away when I try to get going.

I feel weak in spirit. Like my soul has a fatal flaw, or maybe just a terrible disease. Something at my core sinks me far faster than I can bail and swamps my boat any time I try to get anywhere.

If I could only plug that metaphorical leak, I might be able to get somewhere in life. But I am clinging to my current life with too much of a death-grip for that, I guess.

If only I didn’t feel so very alone all the time. If only I could make myself believe both that I can be helped and that help is available.

But that will take a lot more thawing out on my part.

And the ice gets denser and colder as I get closer to the heart of things.

But the fire is getting hotter too.

Spring WILL come.

More after the break.

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The paralysis of helplessness

At some point, I guess I just kind of gave up on life.

Must have been when I was crawling out of that deep dark hole I fell into when I was in my early 20’s and my parents took me out of college and made me move back home.

The version of me that emerged from the rubble of that total breakdown was built to survive what was the current conditions at the time but nothing more.

So I can watch TV, play video games, and read, and keep myself from going utterly insane that way.

Those were the resources I had at my disposal back then.

Clearly I need to reconstitute myself again. Only hopefully without having a total nervous breakdown that leaves me malnourished and dehydrated and miserable on the couch for four months this time.

Although I dunno. Might be worth it.

I don’t think I could let myself completely fall apart again. I would be far too scared that I would not be able to put myself back together again.

But it may come to that anyway. I’ve spoken before in this spot about how the path to greater sanity might take me a lot closer to insanity than my current static safety system would normally allow, and that is why.

Sometimes the only way to remake yourself in the needed way is to first shatter yourself into a million pieces and make the new you out of those.

And I hate that idea. It seems like such a waste of existing human potential. And if that’s the only way to get better, the case for going on exactly right now gets much much stronger because at least I won’t get worse.

But I need to grow. I need to change. And that change may have to be radical, not incremental. At the very least, I may need to let go of everything I think I know about myself in order to make way for the new me to be born.

Death to the false self, and all that.

Too bad I am too old, sick, and poor to go backpacking across Europe or to go climb Machu Pichu or whatever.

That seems to be what other, healthier people do in order to “find themselves” and presumably build a solid foundation for their lives as adults.

I’ve built my house on shifting sands and then wondered why I am so unstable.

I have so much I have to unlearn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Starring Run DMC and Rock and Hyde!

Just kidding. It’s about being so damned avoidant.

I’ve been making little attempts to reverse that avoidance by deliberately forcing myself to stay with things that normally make me retreat or run away.

Like those five tabs for various ways that I might find remote work that have been taking up space in my browser forever.

And no wonder, when even looking at the tabs fills me with guilt and self-loathing that makes me immediately flee into some distraction or another to escape my own inner wrath and persecution.

Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem.

And because of the nature of this self-excoriation, I have of course been blaming myself for it and hating myself for being too weak to resist it and do the thing I want to and/or should do anyhow.

And that’s insane. It’s like an entirely internal version of a kind of prisoner’s syndrome, where the prisoner finds it far easier to blame themselves for the abuse they are suffering from their jailors than to blame the jailors themselves.

Because when you are truly beaten down, the idea of rebelling is far too scary to contemplate. Directing the anger towards the right target means confronting the very demons who control your life and have the power to punish you, or worse, even if that confrontation is entirely in your head.

It’s far easier to direct the blame inward.

And yes, this observation has vast political implications.

But I don’t want to go there right now.

So to free myself from this self-flagellating cycle of internalized abuse would require me to essentially confront my inner prosecutors and deny them their power and authority over me and reject their corrupt and sadistic rule.

Sounds good, right? But it’s a lot to ask of oneself.

Because the way down dirty truth of it is that even these demons of mine serve my real agenda, which is to give myself ample reason to continue to not grow up.

Without these tormentors, there would be nothing keeping me from finally growing and rising and becoming a genuine actual certified grownup, and deep down I am convinced that this means utter annihiliation somehow, so it must be avoided at all costs.

And boy are there a lot of costs.

It’s a crying shame to be so at war with one’s own growth. Cue my usual routine about how every time a butterfly is born, a caterpillar dies. With a fixed sense of self, any significant change really does seem like death because it does mean the death of ourselves as we currently conceive of ourselves.

But it is only the false self that dies. The true self can only die when we die. The real me – the person I have been since I was born, the one that has always answered to my name – is as green and eternal as the springtime.

And not just because my birthday is in May.

So I should let myself grow up already. Get the hell out of my own way, beat my inner prosecutor to death with a fucking shovel, and allow myself to soar up into the sky like the majestic fabulous scintillating wonder I am.

Emphasis on should. There’s a hell of a lot of things I should do and I never do them because of that avoidant shit I talked about in the beginning.

Clearly the fascist government within has to fall, and as to what will replace it, I guess we will just see what springs up when its gone.

Maybe then my long dormant seeds of adulthood will finally sprout and grow.

More after the break.

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Coming out of hiding

One of the biggest struggles in my therapeutic journey is to overcome that urge to hide from everything and everyone.

I talked yesterday about how that came about. A childhood full of being resented just for being born, where it seemed like everyone was always at least a little angry with me, taught me that existing out loud meant danger and I was only truly, truly safe when I was alone in my room.

He typed while sitting alone in his room like usual. Sigh.

That brought up a rather large morsel of my loneliness and pain.

Good. The more of that shit I process, the better off I will be. It might not be fun while it’s happening – kind of feels like I swallowed a big lump of ice and it’s stuck right over my torn and tattered heart and melting very slowly – but when it’s gone, I will be all the lighter and happier for having rid myself of it.

Anyhow, where was I? Right, coming out of hiding.

It’s going to be very hard to convince myself that it’s safe to be seen. I have fled the light like a startled cockroach for my entire life.

In my early life, people meant danger. That is the brutal and terrible lesson etched deep into my soul starting from when I was raped and continuing all through school as I got bullied and neglected and socially ostracized.

All that did was drive me even further into myself. And along the way learn to remain retracted from reality into the comfortable confines of my own mind as much as I can.

The fact that school was easier than your average fuck for me did not help either. So much time spent just sitting there, bored out of my gourd because I had finished the school work in a couple of minutes while the rest of the students took twenty or more is absolutely staggering to think about.

Not to mention sitting through the teacher repeating everything so that it hopefully got through to even the slow kids.

Yeah, I know that, teach. I heard you the first time. I was right here.

So even while the teacher was teaching, I was mostly zoned out.

No wonder I grew up seeing my enormous IQ as a burden not a gift.

And I still kind of feel the same way. I mean, at the present moment, my prodigious intellect isn’t doing me much good.

Doesn’t matter how much brains you got if they’re all crazy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.