There has to be a comfortable middle gear between “ambitionless drifting” and “hating myself for being an ambitionless drifter”.

Once more I attack my crisis mentality. Like I’ve said before, I live my life like I’m in a fucking bomb shelter. As if there are hordes of radioactive mutant zombies hunting me and I can only stay “safe” by coming as close as I can to not existing at all.

Which doesn’t work, by the way. I spent my whole childhood doing that. On a deep level, I knew (without being able to articulate it) that everybody in my family seemed to be kind of mad at me all the time and that this anger could flare up at any second over practically anything that reminded people I was there, so my only “safety” (on the emotional level) was if nobody noticed me.

At the same time, I was desperate for attention. Starving for it, even. Kids need attention paid to them in order to feel validated and appreciated, and that does not change just because I was an unwanted kid.

I didn’t ask to be an odds-defying miracle baby. It’s not my fault that I was somehow conceived despite my mother having her tubes tied.

But you have to admit, that was a pretty neat trick.

Anyhow, my point – yes I have one – was to bring up the subject of this crisis mentality of mine. It’s this persistent notion that I am in terrible danger and that I really should be facing reality and getting on with life but I am not and that means I totally SUCK and am a LOSER etc. that I am hiding from when I play video games all day.

It’s a monster of my own devising, a mere sock puppet for my depression, but it’s kept me in check for 30 fucking years .

And I keep trying to address it. I tell myself that whether I am acting to better myself or just fucking around, it’s OK. I am okay. Whatever happens, it’s fine.

But that doesn’t work for me. And this is where all my frustrated energies and ambitions come into the picture.

Because of all that pent up life force and drive, I am restless and angry deep inside. There is that eternal spark deep inside me that I call my “pilot light” which on the one hand keeps me from surrendering to despair but on the other hand it makes me restless and hungry for stimulation all the time.

And that drive wants to DO THINGS. Important things. Meaningful things. Things that carry some goddamned weight in the real world.

Things that prove I am not completely worthless, a net drain on the world.

Because if I truly am a living liability, then the world would be better off without me.

And we don’t want to go there.

But that’s what my neglected and resented childhood taught me : that I made the world a worse place just by being born and that I was not welcome in this world and that the world would be a better place if I crawled off and died quietly somewhere.

And I know that’s all a lie produced by mental illness, but that’s my higher mind talking. The mind with all that intelligence and creativity and other flashy stuff.

The deeper self, the inner child, still carries the burden of all that neglect and resentment and still feels like I make life worse just by living, let alone taking up resources that should go to someone more worthwhile.

Defined as “literally anybody but me”.

That’s what fuels my endless self-persecution and it is that demon of self-loathing that I am fleeing by remaining buried in my distractions.

If I could only learn the love myself, that demon would die. I need to somehow give that deeper self permission to be alive, and the right to be loved and appreciated.

I still don’t feel welcome anywhere. Part of me is always ready to run and hide.

And that’s no good.

More after the break.

---

The storm is over

The storm is over
The war has ended
The wolves have stopped howling
And can now be befriended

The demons were banished
The ghosts are asleep
The enemy vanished
With nary a peep

The party concluded
The guests all went home
The house is vacated
And I am alone

Everything’s peaceful
Nothing to escape
I have nothing but freedom
So why don’t I feel safe?

---

I feel better now

There, I finally wrote some decent poetry. I feel better now.

And to answer my final question there, I don’t think I know how to feel safe. I have been in this state of cowering and cringing for as long as I can remember.

I know that I was a happy kid before the rape. I was bright and cute and effortlessly charming and therefore had a tendency to be the center of attention wherever I went and led quite a happy life.

But it’s hard for me to remember that. Not just because it all took place before I was 4 years of age, but because it’s kind of painful to remember what I lost.

To imagine the shining innocence that was shredded and scattered to the wind by my rapist, forever shattering my consciousness and turning me from that bright and shining kid into the fragile nervous wreck you know and love hurts like a bitch.

Like I like to say, I lost my innocence so young I don’t remember it.

But that’s not true. I do remember it. I remember what it was like to feel warm and loved and connected to the world.

And as much as it burns to think about it now, I have to make myself do it, because that’ where the uncorrupted copy of my personality lies dormant and if I am to become even a shadow of the person I was supposed to be, I will have to restore from backup.

No matter how old a backup it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I voted in the provincial election today.

And for once, my voting was fully informed.

You see, one of the local papers (I want to say… the Vancouver Sun?) put out a very excellent article containing a one paragraph summary of the three major parties positions on 15 key issues.

That’s 45 paragraphs total. It was quite a detailed read.

And I love, love, love that the fucking BC Liberals were not included in that article because they are just plain not a major party any more.

For decades, they were the center-right party in BC. But over the years they drifted increasingly to the right, no doubt due to the influence of the by the cunts, for the cunts right wing lunatics from down south.

Come on, join the driveling lunacy! It’s fun! You get to be all mad and stuff! And you get to say just the absolute worst things you can think of and get patted on the back and told you’re a patriot and a good Christian for it!

Every day, I wake up and ask myself – who would Jesus hate?

Ahem. Now where was I?

Oh right, the BC Liberals. As they drank gallons of the lunatic right’s Kool-Aid, they basically became the new Conservative party, leaving the actual provincial Conservatives with nothing to campaign on except, “What they said. Only meaner. ”

Remember, modern conservatism is always, at its heart, bullying.

As they became all things to no people, they lost their entire raison d’etre and failed in their important role of letting conservative yuppies pretend they have not sold out.

So they had their Election of Doom, where nobody fucking voted for them. And the already heavily left coast province I live in officially shifted to the left.

Now the three major parties are the mainstream left party, the BC NDP, and the further left people, the Green Party, and the surprisingly scrappy BC Conservatives, who have now cornered the market on frothing lunacy.

If I was them, I’d sell, because that brand of conservatism is dying fast as the actual non-yahoo conservatives remember that they want sane, sensible, responsible government and the frothy types alienate the entire modern movable middle by behaving like people no decent person would want to be associated with.

And the sub-lunatic right absolutely must think of themselves as decent people. Solid. Respectable. Reliable. The “right” kind of person.

And the right kind of people don’t take a shit in Congress.

Well, not in any but the most metaphorical sense, anyhow.

So… I voted. Right… that’s what I was talking about.

And I was able to vote over the phone, which was awesome. I had no faith that wherever our polling place was would have a distance between parking lot and voting booth that I could handle.

And of course, I would have had to wait in line, which is impossible for me.

So I did it over the phone. And there was a bit of a struggle because the first lady I talked to both had a fairly think East Indian accent and I had to strain to hear her over the usual cacophony of a call center.

There has to be a way to design one of those so that the conversations do not overlap so much. But I suppose that would cost more money.

Anyhow, so she got the usual deets – name, birthday, address, oh and the ID number on my “driver’s license”, AKA my BC ID.

She also got me to verbally certify that I did, indeed, have a disability or medical condition that kept me from being able to vote in person

As opposed to just being too fucking lazy, which is not a disability. Yet.

I actually had to do that three times. I guess they want to be absolutely sure. Then a different lady read the names of the candidates to me, I told her my vote (BC NDP), then a third lady came on the line to verify that this was, indeed. my vote before she cast my ballot for me.

And then we were done!

More after the break.

---

Sometimes there’s pain

Sometimes, my rock-strewn path to victory involves a lot of pain.

Growth often does. Rebirth doubly so. And I feel like I am working up/towards a very painful and bloody rebirth indeed.

Real change has to hurt. Not for some “you need to earn it!” punitive ethos, but because the hardest thing to change is yourself because it involves changing the very foundation of what and who you are and how you see the world and experience life.

That foundation is you.

In case I hadn’t made that clear.

So to change that requires something akin to performing surgery on yourself. The thing doing the cutting is itself part of what’s being cut. And odds are the existing structure of your psyche, however dysfunctional, will violently resist this change via the mechanisms that keep our minds intact and stable in the first place.

And that’s where the pain comes in. The existing structure of the mind is saying, “Ouch!” in very clear and unambiguous language.

Pain is nature’s way of saying, “Hey! Don’t do that!”

But I don’t care about the pain. It’s not like it would be keeping me from doing anything important. If it means I have to lie in bed and work my way through the suffering involved in getting rid of the bad and letting in the good, so be it.

Sometimes it does feel like surgery without anesthetic. Other times it feels more like dialysis. Like my mind is slowly clearing out toxins that have been in my bloodstream for so long that my body thinks it’s normal for them to be there.

The simplest definition of “normal”, after all, is “what you’re used to”.

Other times there’s a kind of thrill to it, or even a sense of adventure. Things are changing and growing and getting better, and it’s all so terribly exciting.

Wish it was like that more often, to be honest.

Well, maybe I will be strong enough for that some day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow;

Sadness : I woke up sick today.

And that’s never fun. I knew I was sick before I even opened my eyes. My head hurt, my nose was running, my throat was scratchy and raw, and so were my lungs.

Oh, and my muscles ached.

Of course. That’s what they do.

So no Wound Care or shower for me today, and that always leaves me sad. I didn’t want to stay home. I’ve come to enjoy my busy Fridays, what with Wound Care and showering at Rosewood and ordering my groceries.

Like I always say, I am happiest when I am busy. Which is why I favour video games that can absorb my entire attention.

Like the open world richly detailed RPGs I clearly favour. Ones with lots of quests to do and a deep storyline to become absorbed in.

Imagine what I could accomplish if I could bring that kind of concentration and energy and drive to something that is actually productive.

I need a video game that submits my writing to agencies when I level up. Or something.

Or to somehow convince myself to treat life like a game instead of taking everything so seriously that I am paralyzed by indecision.

Something along those lines, anyhow.

I did get my grocery “shopping” done. That, thank goodness, is something I can still do even when I am sick.

But I hit a frustrating but not entirely unfamiliar roadblock : when I went to pay for my purchases, DoorDash said insufficient funds.

And I was like, bullshit, I have at least 65 bucks on the card and my total is around 62 so I should be in the clear.

But the credit card companies pull this shit on me sometimes. It’s like the last $10 in my account are held in reserve or some shit, so I can’t spend it.

So I went from feeling all smooth and confident because of how well I had piloted my tiny little financial boat through the waters of a five week FUCKING month to being super irritated at having to take things OUT of my virtual shopping cart until it believes I have enough to pay for them.

Very annoying, and a little insulting. The result is that I may run out of a few things before the end of the week and have to hope my rapidly dwindling cash supply can cover Julian going to pick me up a few things.

Poverty never runs out of fresh indignities. Nor does disability.

And I deserve more than this sad little life of mine. I need more money, obviously, in order to make me feel empowered to truly be part of the civilized world instead of limping along near the bottom of the heap.

But I also need some form of employment. I mean, if someone offered to just bankroll me into the middle class I wouldn’t turn it down, but it would be far better for me to get a job using my outrageous talents to make wonderful things.

And maybe even make the world a better place. Who knows.

I still haven’t found my good webcam. I am starting to think it’s gone forever, which means I will have to buy a new one.

That would make the old one show up. But the joke would be on them because my computer can totally handle input from more than one webcam at a time.

Then I could record myself from two angles and be able to cut to the side angle when editing in order to create visual interest in my talking head videos.

The one I can’t find is so damned good, though. Excellent audio, crystal clear video that runs smooth as glass, gets along with my video editing program.

I guess I am going to have to just keep cleaning till I find the fucking thing.

Somehow, I will survive.

More after the break.

---

This made me LOL more than once.

I wish I could embed Instagram clips like I do with YouTube clips.

There’s probably a widget for WordPress that does it but I am too lazy to go look right now, so meh.

Oh, and there’s this, because sometimes Jim Carrey is actually awesome.

That’s the mode he’s in lately, and I must say, I really like it.

I hope being really raw and honest doesn’t go out of style any time soon.

Because I’m good at that.

Oh, and because I must do things in threes :

Our new fave kittycat song!

It’s clearly made with love and care and that means a lot to me.

Being funny is serious business!

---

The other end

Well, here I am at the other end of another day.

I feel better than I did this morning. That awful feeling of malaise is gone and the headache is mostly gone, as is the raw feeling in my throat and lungs.

I kind of feel like I am waiting to be reborn. And that maybe I have been waiting for that for a really long time.

Since I was 4, in fact.

I’d like to be able to believe that the last 30 years of my life were not a waste of time but a long and necessary developmental stage, like it was 30 years in a cocoon.

That’s the most positive spin I can think of for all the time I have spent hidden from the world entertaining myself instead of living life.

And it’s not like I’ve been dead or asleep. I might be stuck in my emotional infancy but I have continued to absorb new info and digest it and add it to my mental model of reality and think and connect and deduce and observe.

So I may not have grown up but I have become deeper and wiser and smarter over the years. I have developed an unprecedented level of insight and a certain kind of secular spirituality that the world desperately needs, and maybe none of that would have been possible for me if I’d had a normal life.

A lot of poets and ideologues and visionaries had weird lives.

Maybe I’m no different from that.

Maybe I’m the good kind of special after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I wonder if I could cynically pedal my most cynical and bitter observations as an antidote to corporate indoctrination to the young people of today.

It worked for George Carlin, after all. He spoke the hard and bitter truth to people and now he’s a saint to the young and idealistic.

Especially now that he’s dead, and can’t fuck up his legacy by turning anti-trans.

That would have been a bitter betrayal of his 70’s roots.

And maybe I could take his place as the bitter, angry guy who speaks truths that people don’t want to hear but need to hear. Truths that both set you free and piss you off. Truths that only a Gen X guru like me can discern and then share with those of later generations who are too idealistic and/or indoctrinated to see.

Because it’s occurred to me that the later generations did not have the benefit of Generation X’s thick layers of sales resistance and carefully cultured precision apathy to protect them from all the hypnotic noise the corporate media produces.

I think I could be, as Scott Adams used to say, a “ray of bitter sunshine” to them.

I could speak unto them about our delusions of democracy, the coming environmental apocalypse, the idea that nobody who is employed is truly free, the people who own you and are perfectly willing to sacrifice you for their profit, the futility of modern education, and lots of other dark, harsh things.

All true, and a clarion call to get pissed off and demand change.

Yeah, I could do that.

I wouldn’t want to get trapped in an angry persona. But I suppose I could do it if the money was good.

I’d love to get on that ever so profitable public speaking circuit. Get paid to come and talk to rooms full of people who paid to hear you in person.

I would enjoy that very much.

I will think about it.

---

The strangest feeling just washed over me.

It felt like someone dumped a bucket of ice water over my head and now I feel bizarrely cold and disjointed.

Honestly, I should probably quit typing and go lay down.

But not before I make my words.

The coldness is only on the surface. Only my skin feels cold. The rest of me is as hot as ever. And that is pretty weird too.

Plus I have a nauseous headache. Hopefully that’s just sinus pressure and cleaning out my ears will help with that.

As for the rest of it, though, I dunno. It doesn’t fit the profile of any kind of attack I am aware of, although I suppose it could be some sort of circulatory issue.

One that interferes with the blood reaching my skin alone

That doesn’t sound right, does it?

Could be neurological too. Though it seems too widespread for that. It’s not like there’s one nerve bundle that goes through all your skin.

I wonder where the tactile nexus for the brain is?

Regardless of cause, I feel unwell. And I was feeling pretty good up until that point. Now I am both nauseous and falling asleep, which is a bad combination.

Good thing I never sleep on my back. Nobody wants to die from aspirated vomit.

I will probably be just fine. None of this is new to me except its sudden onset. Well, and the weird chill that came with it.

---

Just had to make a run to the bathroom. Emphasis on had to. Apparently the contents of my lower intestines got liquified somehow.

I don’t fucking know WTF. I rarely do. All I can do is lay down and possibly take a nap and hope whatever this is passes through and out of me soon.

Maybe when I wake up, I will tell you all how therapy went today.

Why is my life like this?

More after the break.

---

Therapy post mortem

Well, post session, anyhow.

I’m pretty sure I’m not dead.

Today’s session went quite well. I was in a pretty good mood and I managed to spool out quite a bit of what my brain has been up to lately.

I told him about realizing that I have been helplessly crouched down with my back to the world silently waiting for the nightmare to end for my whole life.

Ever since that was my escape from the world when I was being raped at the age of 4.

And that’s been my response to stress ever since then. At the slightest hint of something I don’t feel like I can handle, I turtle up and withdraw from reality and keep withdrawing until I’m not scared any more, basically.

Hence my being so deeply withdrawn from reality. Ever time I feel overwhelmed I go deeper in, and I only come back very, very slowly and cautiously.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before, but that’s no way to live.

Talking about this has me quite verklempt. That’s a good sign.

I also told him, in very general terms, about how I went back on VRchat recently and made an attempt to socialize.

It’s so much harder in realtime voice. In text, I don’t have to fight to be heard and I can always get everything out because nobody can interrupt me.

I had actually forgotten the feeling of being small and ignored and powerless that I used to feel at the dinner table when I was a kid.

But I will return to the chat, this time after taking a Xanax to make my social anxiety more manageable so I can get me some sweet, sweet positive human interaction.

While pretending to be some kind of furry critter.

I was a super adorable otter with glasses for a while then, after forgetting how I found Mister Otta, I eventually found a very cute cartoon grey wolf form.

Once I figure out more of how everything works, I will go looking for a fox avatar.

Overall it was a pretty good social exposure exercise. I am glad I did it. I had some fun even if I could not really get into any of the conversations.

I am confident that I will get there. I’m a bright, funny, charming, charismatic dude when I can get out of my own way.

And when in doubt, I just need to remember that I am Fruvous and he is me.

And we are fabulous.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m such a strange critter.

Both unworldly and otherworldly and more than passing strange, I’ve always been both alien and alienated. Never really fitting in anywhere and hence forced to be a kind of world unto myself most of the time.

To the point where I worry that I can’t actually get any closer to people at all. That the fortress I build to keep the world at bay when I was raped as a toddler cannot, in fact, open its doors to the world or anyone in it and ergo I am forever doomed to be the sort of weirdo that uses the word “ergo” in casual conversation.

Which is what this is, I suppose. It certainly isn’t formal.

I am a naturally informal kind of dude.

I know that I have the potential to be different. I feel like if I had not had my world shattered by a stranger’s penis as a small child, I would have grown up to be a highly social and gregarious person with a wide group of friends and, to be honest, probably a pretty colorful love life.

I’d have made a heck of a good salesman as long as I was not expected to do the “hard sell” at all.

Where I come from, that shit does not fly, nor would it with I.

But as has always been the case with me, the potential is unquestionable. I have always had enormous reservoirs of untapped potential on so very many levels. Intellectual, creative, personal, performative, you name it.

Well, maybe not athletic.

The question is whether or not I can actually tap into all that potential, and at this point in life, it is looking like the answer is no.

Not by myself, anyhow. And yet I lack the capacity to obtain the sort of help I would need either. So the answer really is no.

For now, at least. I continue to hack away at the rock hard ice crystal, clear as glass, that encases my heart, and every day I get a little closer to being able to feel the light and love of the world on my cold and fractured soul.

But part of that liberation process is venting all the bad stuff. It’s like I have to let the bad stuff out in order to let the good stuff in, which I guess makes sense.

Metaphorically speaking, at least.

And I gave so much that needs to come out, and doing it through words like this is, quite frankly, doing it the hard way, but it’s the only way I have.

I have a thousand winters’ worth of frigid, rigid, uncompromising and unpromising solitude to overcome and I don’t even know where to start.

Once again I bemoan my lack of a capacity for transformation. All I can do is keep beavering away in hopes that some day I will reach some spiritual tipping point and things will finally slide into place.

Because if this slow, incremental progress is all I can ever hope for, I am not at all hopeful about living long enough to taste sanity.

And in all of this, I feel very very much alone. I know that is not technically true in any literal, objective sense, but it’s emotionally true for me nevertheless.

And it’s all because of that wall I put up 47 years ago to keep the evil world out when I was being violated in a way I couldn’t even understand let alone put into words.

People can’t really get close to me and I can’t get close to them either.

This fucking wall of mine gets in the way.

And it’s taking a long ol’ time to tear it down.

More after the break.

---

Pity the sleepwalker

Pity the sleepwalker
who cannot rest
and cannot wake

Who wanders eternally
through endless doorless halls
bumping into walls
taking enormous falls

as lost as a cloud in fog

---

I swear I had a lot more to add to that ten minutes ago.

Anyhow, my point is, I am feeling half-asleep and lost at sea. All alone in this world due to that stupid wall in my head that keeps me from feeling almost everything.

All that’s left of me is a very childlike consciousness that is utterly innocent of this world because he’s spent so little time in it.

I see so much but have done so little.

It’s almost obscene, really. To have someone who has developed so massively in one way – intellectually – but has nothing but a palsied and feeble soul to steer it with.

No wonder I often feel like I am not really here. Like I have said here before, it feels like either I am not real, or the world isn’t, and my unreality is far less scary.

I’d rather be a ghost in a world of men than a man in a world of ghosts.

And I know the problem is me either way. Something deep and terrible is broken inside me and it’s left me in this absurd position of being a wounded wizard with vast cosmic powers at my command but too weak a will to use them.

I feel so sick sometimes. Like I’ve been poisoned and it’s made everything in me toxic and all I can do is bide my time until the toxin passes from me naturally.

And I feel so weak. Like I have a bad case of detached id. At some level, the body and mind and soul need to be able to either generate all their own energies or be able to open up to take in the energies of the world and all that’s in it.

Somehow, there needs to be more. But I feel so feeble and helpless. Like I’m a turtle on its back, or a child trying to climb up on something but it’s just too tall.

Or like I am trying to grab on to something but I just can’t quite reach it.

Maybe it’s an emotional problem. Maybe it’s physical. Maybe it’s spiritual.

It’s probably all three, to be honest.

And I don’t know where to find the strength to rise.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

WARNING : This is going to get pretty dark.

Time for one of my “well, duh!” revelations : I can alter my own mood. I can do things to make myself feel better. I can cheer myself up.

At least in theory.

I’ve been living my life like I have no control over anything. My compulsive video game playing stems from that sense of helplessness. On some deep and terrible level, I decided a very long time ago that I have absolutely no power to make my life better whatsoever so all I can do is cling to my distractions and use them to hide from the world and pretend like I’m some kind of person.

Even though I don’t feel like one most of the time.

In my life – especially my early life – I’ve never had much power to do stuff, or so my depressed and febrile mind told me.

I mean, sure, I didn’t have much money as a kid but that didn’t keep me from taking a walk or a ride on my bike. There was a lot of things in my world that might have made me feel better, but they all involved going out of the house and being “exposed” and my extreme agoraphobia wouldn’t allow that.

So TV was my friend. And tutor, and life coach, and surrogate family.

At least the Huxtables and the Keatons and the gang at Cheers had time for me. They made room for me at the table. I didn’t feel like they wished I wasn’t there.

Sure, I couldn’t converse with them, but I was used to that from my real family.

But here’s the real dark and dirty underbelly of my passivity : what other thing happened to me where I was absolutely helpless and all I could do was burrow deep into my mind and wait for it to be over?

Yup. When I was raped at the tender age of 4.

And I have been cringing and flinching and cowering away from that big bad world that hurt me in such a terrible way when I was barely up off the ground ever since.

That’s how I respond to fear and stress. I curl up into a ball and play video games until it is over. Like I have no power at all.

Because I didn’t, back then.

And that’s why so much of me is asleep. And I don’t mean asleep like a kitten napping…

No, I’m talking about the “my hand is asleep” kind of sleep. The kind that is fundamentally alarming because our bodies know what sensations should be coming in and panic occurs when those inputs are not there.

I only noticed recently how much my attempts to rouse and motivate myself runs smack dab into this “asleep” feeling, like pins and needles of the mind.

And I feel now that I am conscious of this, it adds a new dimension to my internal struggles. I feel like this cuts my problem down to size and gives me a fairly basic target for my efforts.

I have to wake myself the fuck up, pronto.

But that deep part of me doesn’t want to wake up. It feels that waking up can only lead to pain and horror and violation. It’s been hiding out deep inside me and keeping me in this semi-comatose state specifically to avoid the monster that is the real world.

And I am not going to get better until I convince that shattered child deep inside me that it’s safe to come out now.

I mean, it is. Safe, that is.

But can you blame him for not believing it?

More after the break.

---

Why is it called “root beer”? What root tastes like that?

Maybe it’s the beer that roots drink.

---

My cower power

It’s strange to imagine that I have been internally cringing for my entire life.

But it makes sense. My trauma response was to withdraw from reality to a frightening degree and abandon or circumscribe any thoughts, ideas, or emotions that would lead to greater commitment to the real world.

Only my interior world was “safe”. Reality was at all times to be brutally minimized. Hence my long term unhealthily intimate relationship with screens.

Put your ass in front of a screen and it becomes your reality. A safe, comforting, enclosed reality that I control and that begs me to lose myself in it.

Because when you lose yourself, you don’t have to be yourself.

And I don’t like being myself.

That’s the brutal tragedy of it all. Deep down, I can’t stand being me, or rather, the person I have become. I have yet to fully tame the wild hurricanes of self-loathing and the whirlwinds of self-negation and the thunderbolts of searing self-judgment.

Hmm. Air imagery. Interesting.

And the thing is, I know that I have absolutely no sane reason to hate myself. By all external measures, I’m an amazing dude, at least in potential.

I have so much intelligence and insight and creativity to share with the world, as well as being a really nice guy when you get to know me.

Oh, and I’m funny AF.

The main weapon my self-hate uses to torment me is everything that falls under the category of being a “loser”.

Never had a job, a boyfriend, been self-sufficient, yada yada yada.

But like I was talking about yesterday, that requires that I judge myself by the standards of normal, healthy people who did not have to practically reconstruct themselves from nothing after a total nervous breakdown in their early 20s.

But that’s not fair and it’s not right. I’ve been very ill. I still am. All I can do is fumble my way towards greater mental health the best that I can.

What I really need is extensive psychotherapy, perhaps in an institutional setting.

Or a really good job I can do remotely. Something that I could take pride in.

There are so many wonderful things I could be doing.

But I have to build my own road to get there.

And I don’t even own a bulldozer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s what this auto-therapeutic journaling journey feels like sometimes.

The image I have used before, though grisly, still applies : it feels like I am a soldier with a gut full of shrapnel who is forced by circumstances to remove it all himself.

And every little piece of jagged metal removed does make me feel better, and enables my mind to heal itself just a little bit more, but there are moments when I nevertheless want to give up and just die quietly rather than keep doing it.

But I soldier on, as I must. True despair is alien to me. I have to keep moving. That stubborn unquenchable spark that acts as my pilot light will allow no less.

So I am restless. I have always craved mental stimulation in large quantities and of course, that’s something that my life of video games and the internet can deliver.

It’s things like purpose, direction, a sense of accomplishment, things to be proud of, a position in the community, or even some good ol fashioned fucking it can’t do.

Well, it can probably do that last thing via hookup apps, but meh.

Of course, when I speak of “it” I really mean “me”. I can’t provide those things for myself because I am still too dang crazy. I can’t stand the thought of stepping away from my entombment in games and YouTube for even a short period of time.

And maybe that’s the problem : thinking about it. I know that my mind is extremely unreliable when it comes to predicting how much something is going to suck and I have no reason to think it’s any more right about this than anything else.

Maybe that’s just the little fear that covers up a much bigger fear of the real world, then.

It’s that “failure to launch” thing again. Somehow, my fellow flightless birds and I become convinced that we cannot handle the real world and that if we were ejected into it by circumstances, we would die. It would destroy us.

But is that just a symptom of a fixed sense of self? To the caterpillar, the transformation into a butterfly might well seem like dying, and worse, being replaced by something entirely new and alien to its current form.

But that’s a word for that : maturation. Growing up. Our entire journey from conception to adulthood is one long radical transformation from zygote to taxpayer.

And yet we have no doubt that we are the same person all the way through.

Why is that, do you think?

And what happened to my unfeathered cohort and I along the way that interrupted that process and left us stranded on the precipice of maturity convinced that if we make that leap we will not fly, we will die?

Perhaps what the vast majority of humanity has that we don’t is full and unconscious access to their instincts and drives. They don’t question why they would do what their developmental programming tells them to do, they just do it.

But I’ve always wanted to know why, and rejected anything whose justification I could not see. And I think that is ultimately what has doomed me.

Sometimes if feels like I am under the influence of a powerful magic spell that keeps me in a trance and compels me to live as I live and do as I do.

And of course, the person casting the spell is also me.

Perhaps I have hypnotized myself into hypnotizing myself. Spooky!

But the truth is that I am terrified of what happens when this spell ends and I have to wake up and face reality.

It all seems so frighteningly intense and overwhelming and “real”.

I can’t imagine how I could possibly handle all that.

Not without someone to hold my hand and help me stay calm and centered and confident. Someone who can catch me if I fall and support me if I stumble and guide me when I once more get lost in the dark.

What I really need is a grownup.

This is what happens when you end up raising yourself.

More after the break.

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All about brains

OK, hear me out.

We all agree that we only have one brain, right?

And yet, if someone is killed via a gunshot wound to the head, we say it “blew their brains out”, not their brain.

Does injury somehow make the brain plural?

---

My favorite aunty

Aunty Histamine, that is.

I really need to get back on the antihistamines. Not only do they keep the sniffles and sneezes at bay, they block all my other allergy symptoms too, like sinus headaches, itchy palate, and a general inflammatory feeling throughout my body, sometimes accompanied by muscle aches.

Just another day in the life of a gimp.

Which reminds me : I think I have fallen back into the habit of judging myself like a normal person again.

Hence thinking of myself as a “loser” with all that entails.

There’s some truth to that. I have lost out on life, that’s for sure. I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet, and so forth.

But it’s not my fault. I’ve been quite ill. Mentally and, increasingly, physically.

And, arguably, the system hasn’t been all that successful in treating me. I talk to Doctor Costin once a week, and that helps, but I have him more or less cowed now so mostly he just listens to me drone on and on for 50 minutes.

And that does help but it doesn’t get me closer to sane.

It’s mostly been up to me. Hence this journal of mine. The whole point of this daily practice of mine is to remove that shrapnel I mentioned in part 1 and slowly work my way towards a normal life.

What I could really use is a therapist with balls of steel who maybe doesn’t like me that much and so is willing to push me and prod me and challenge me in order to force me to grow and mature.

Or maybe all I really need is a nice long cuddle. I don’t know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at least it is for me. Lately.

This morning was super rough. Woke up in a pool of sweat (presumably my own) and absolutely incoherent. For a few very long seconds, I knew nothing and thought nothing and could not have even told you my name.

Assuming I could still speak.

But then my consciousness booted up and I remembered what time of day it was and from there what day it was and from there the rest of the entity designated by the words “Michael John Bertrand” came back online.

But I still felt terrible. Like I have written here many times before, this hyper intense REM state sleep really beats the crap out of me. I wake up dizzy and incoherent and dehydrated and utterly disoriented and above all with my every brain circuit utterly frazzled and fried like I’m a mystic who just had a religious vision.

Which would be ironic, given my lifelong lack of any religion and my stubborn rational materialist point of view.

I still refuse to believe things just because if they were true it would make me feel better.

I recognize that this is quite probably a very stupid way to go through life. I have come to the conclusion that the human mind requires some degree of “faith” in something akin to “magic” in order to function.

You need to have something to fill in the gaps between what we need emotionally speaking and what the world is currently providing us.

Those gaps can get mighty wide sometimes. Trust me on that. And there I am, stuck on one side of the gap, unable to cross because I won’t accept things that don’t make sense to me.

Whereas normal people just fly across without even knowing it.

And that includes most current atheists too, I think. It doesn’t matter if you leave religious faith behind consciously for not making sense (how could it?), because the true payload of that faculty of self-balancing and a deep and unspoken sense that there is someone out there looking out for you has been delivered and installed.

And few people are so thoroughly atheistic as to be able to resist the urge to, for instance, when faced with some profound tragedy, say, “That kind of thing shouldn’t happen!”, or when good fortune comes our way to want someone to thank.

Not even I, and I am approximately as atheistic as it is possible to be. I have never had any religious indoctrination at all. I was raised by atheists in an atheist household.

And I am definitely not saying that it’s impossible to be religious and depressed at the same time, but I must point out that all four children of that household have mental health issues somewhere along the anxious/depressed spectrum.

I’m not saying a belief in God would have fixed that, but… maybe?

At the very least I might not have grown up feeling so goddamned alone and abandoned. It would have been nice to feel like someone out there was looking out for me, even if it was a made-up all-powerful imaginary friend.

I certainly didn’t have anyone real protecting me. Nobody protected me from jack shit. Like a lot of Gen X kids, I was left to fend for myself.

We’re a feral generation because of the self-absorbed Boomers who raised us. Their winning childrearing technique was to ignore their children completely while just assuming that we must be okay.

After all, if there was something wrong, we’d say something, right?

Note : Alienate and punish children for not being okay. Act like they just teleported in from Mars and took hostages should they ever say anything that suggests you should invest literally any more time or energy or love in them. Make it their responsibility to keep your selfish Boomer ass loving their children.

I mean, you can’t possibly expect us to actually raise you. That’s absurd.

We pay the bills and feed and clothe and shelter you. You know, the absolutely bare minimum amount of parenting you can legally get away with.

And now you want MORE?

How utterly selfish of you.

More after the break.

This is from a comic strip I keep seeing in my Instagram and Blue Sky feeds, and it’s not hard to see why.

The art could be better but the writing is as delightful as the little gator kid.

The world needs warm fuzzy vibes like this more than ever.

---

So what you’re saying…

I’d never seen this part at the beginning before. It comes across as her trying to counter the terrible impression she’s about to make ahead of time.

Too bad the world didn’t see it, for the most part.

Anyhow…. so what you’re saying, Madonna, is that you’re auctioning your pussy.

Wait, no, that’s too harsh. That would imply that a woman is ever, under any circumstances, obligated to have sex with a man.

You’re auctioning a chance at your pussy.

That’s what all this bullshit about wanting only rich dudes dating you boils down to. You’re so convinced of the market value of a ticket in your pussy raffle that you’re sure you can hold out for the highest bidder.

Not that I’m saying you’re a prostitute.

Prostitutes are more honest. You pay, you lay, every single time.

When ladies like you go off with whatever gent can “treat you like a princess” the best, that’s what you are saying. You’re saying that you are for sale.

Personality, intelligence, charm, good looks, sensitivity. sense of humour, and all the rest of that romantic bullshit doesn’t mean a thing to you.

He could be a demented toothless ogre with the IQ of a fencepost and open, weeping sores all over his body and as long as he bought you the most expensive gifts and took you to the fanciest places and thus flattered your ego, you’d fuck him silly.

Congratulations, you’re the dehumanized slab of fuckable meat worth the most money.

Wouldn’t Mom and Dad be proud.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

At least I think I’ve used that title before.

Anyhow, I was making my lunch in the kitchen just now when I realized I was in a fair bit of physical pain.

This is not unusual for me. My life involves a lot of pain. That is not news.

The novel part was that most of the pain was coming from my back, not my legs.

Specifically this area between my shoulder blades that has given me trouble before.For whatever reason, my back pain settles there some of the time.

The rest of the time it’s the lower back, but I am so used to that part of me hurting that if it stopped I think I’d faint from the sheer relief of it all.

But this other pain is new, and it has only occurred to me just now that it is one of those things that I should probably run past a medical professional at some point.

The thing is, I don’t have to. I have my muscle relaxant pills (cyclobenzaprine) and they have a pretty solid record when it comes to making my backpain go away.

They don’t always work. But almost always.

But it occurs to me that this pain may denote something going seriously wrong in my back, and that’s the kind of thing I should probably nip in the bud sooner, not later.

So I dunno. I guess I will make a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday.

Why do these things keep happening on long weekends? ^[1]

It’s like my body only really fucks up when it knows there will be someone around to drive me to the ER. ^[2]

Or maybe I am subconsciously picking up on the general party atmosphere of the weekend and that’s making my body want to gear up to have fun but I am a sickie and a recluse and terrified of the world so it just gets sick instead.

I have a lot of energies going nowhere within me. Recovery will therefore necessarily involve my finding someplace for them to go, and that, in turn, will end up creating a life for myself that is quite unlike my current malaise ridden existence, and that’s what I am afraid of at the core of it all.

The power of “changer danger” within me – the voice in me that tells me that life is trying to pry me from my nice cozy “safe” nest and I have to fight it with everything I’ve got – is still much stronger than my desire to make life better for myself.

So far, it’s been hard for me to counter that voice. The one that says we are better off not rocking the boat and staying exactly as we are right now because any real change will lead to total disaster.

You know. That asshole.

There’s a very strong element of the fear of the unknown in it. And that carries an undercurrent of that toxic belief that only that which I can control and/or predict is “safe”, ergo the unknown is inherently awful and wrong and can only lead to utter chaos.

This is nonsense, of course. But this is emotional reality we are dealing with here. Sense is by far not a requirement.

I keep coming back to conclusion that I need to learn to just ignore the fear when it comes for me. To listen to what it’s trying to tell me, but not let it stop me.

That would be a very wrenching transformation. Nothing would be the same after.

And that scares me back into inaction.

For now, at least.

More after the break.

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No way out

For whatever reason, I have an enormous phobia of being trapped.

Maybe it’s a side effect of having been trapped between “freeze” and “flight” modes for so very long.

For an animal in “flight” mode, safety lies in speed and maneuverability and unpredictability, and to be forced to stop moving – to be “trapped” – is the exact opposite of all three things and thus means a grisly death in the jaws of a predator.

For “freeze” though, things are different. When you freeze up, it’s because instead of fleeing the predator, now you’re hiding from it. In that mode, safety comes from immobility, concealment, and silence.

It’s not the total opposite of “flight” but it’s close.

From this you can safely deduce the existence of a “flight and freeze” pattern. If I expose myself to the big mean old world, it triggers a “flight” response which leads me to flee back into the “safety” and “comfort” of my hidey hole here in front of Mister Computer, where I “freeze”.

In my case, the pathology of this pattern has progressed to the point that no actual exposure to my “predators” is necessary. I only have to think about extending my tiny little worldlet by the merest of fractions and I run and hide with a vengeance.

They’ve got me whipped, that’s for sure.

And that’s not a tolerable situation. I don’t deserve to be stuck hiding from the world and whimpering because of a nigh all-encompassing fear of almost everything that has no basis in the world outside my mind at all.

Absolutely nobody is “coming to get me”.

My disguise is complete. I am flawlessly camouflaged. Almost nobody even knows I exist. And even fewer people actually care.

My “freeze” is very successful. I’ve pretty much got it mastered. I blend in so well that it’s difficult for me to “decloak” at all even if I want to.

Even if I really, really want to.

So once more I return to the idea of just learning to get the most out of my life as it is now. It would crush my spirit to give up like that but at least I would not be constantly spinning my wheels trying to get this bus moving when the fucking thing is up on blocks.

But I don’t seriously consider that an option. I have to keep trying, if only because I don’t know what to do with myself otherwise.

That’s what has kept me from true despair. I have that stubborn spark inside me that makes me restless inside and that restlessness makes true lassitude impossible.

Sure, I play video games all day and all night.

But at least I am doing something.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But without the body swapping.

Today, I’ve been super busy, and the day ain’t over yet.

Here’s a rough itinerary :

10 am – Julian wakes me up to tell me we have Wound Care in fifteen minutes. He had to do this because once more, my high powered musclebound beast of a computer could not handle being a fucking alarm clock so the alarm I had set for 9:35 am never sounded and thus I did not have sufficient time to get ready. Julian called ahead to warn them we would be late.

And we were, by about ten minutes. And this saddened me because I hate ever being late for anything. I feel that punctuality is a virtue. Shows you respect people enough to get your shit together and get there on time.

Oh well, No real harm done. Just some rushing, which I also hate to do, and a certain amount of stress.

11 am – We’re back home and I do my usual Friday grocery shopping.

Online, of course. It feels like forever since I was able to do my own grocery shopping in person, right there in the supermarket. That feels like it belongs to some kinder, gentler. more merciful plane of reality where the people whose legs work live.

As I have mentioned before, my remaining budget for groceries is quite tight because of that whole fucking five week month bullshit. Today’s bill came to $61.20 once tax and tip and so on were added.

That leaves something like $65 left on the card for next week, Should be enough.

1 pm – Therapy time. Not a great session because I was sleepy. Grabbing 20 minutes of sleep after the groceries arrived at 12:18 am clearly did nothing to abate the rabid sleep hunger I already had just from doing Wound Care.

It was a gamble. Head I feel refreshed and eager and insightful for therapy, tails I am half asleep and don’t really get anything done.

I got tails.

As booby prizes go, he ain’t half bad.

2:30 pm – We get to Rosewood Manor on time for my weekly shower. I am really looking forward to it as, due to my error prone mind, it has been two or three weeks since my last shower.

This time I skipped the shy bravado (you know, the kind where you suffer in silence because you don’t want to bug anyone with your problems) and got Albert to take me to and from the shower room in a wheelchair.

The walk from the lobby to the shower room and back is just too long for my malfunctioning legs to handle. The previous time I had my shower at Rosewood, my legs were hurting bad by the time I made it from the lobby to the shower room, and the end of the trip back from the shower room to the lobby was me basically falling into one of the lobby chairs as my legs gave out on me.

So it’s wheelchairs for me for the foreseeable future. Might as well get used to them, I am probably going to need my own one day.

Then home again at 3:30 pm or so and a brief gaming session was followed by my sitting down to write these very words for you lovely people

After this, a nice long nap until 7:30 pm, when Julian will ask me whether I want anything from McD’s.

Of course I do! Big Mac meal, please!

Said meal will be consumed while teledining with Joe and Felicity and Julian, during which we will watch YouTube stuff and gab.

After that, I finish the day’s blogging, then another brief nap until I hang out on Zoom with Julian and Felicity at midnight.

All in all, a very busy day.

Man am I gonna need more sleep!

More after the break.

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You’re not as alone as you feel

That’s a thought that popped into my head regarding a friend who is struggling with their depression but I didn’t quite get the chance to tell them so I am putting it here.

It’s a sentiment I need to remember. My own depression makes me feel so profoundly alone sometimes that it’s hard to remember that there are people in this world who truly love me and that it is the mental illness, not objective reality, that makes me feel so very alone and abandoned.

The fact that I can’t feel their love does not mean it is not there. It’s just not getting through. And that is brutally tragic, but it’s still a much better situation than if there truly was no love for you in this world.

All the love and acceptance and understanding that I have always craved is right there waiting for me on the other side of this wall of ice inside me.

And the wall is melting. It’s fading away. It can’t be broken down all at once like some glorious springtime dam burst – I am too “stable” for that.

It would take some kind of overwhelmingly profound ever that overpowers my “rational” mind to trigger something like that. Something from outside.

But barring something like that, it can only be an incremental process. That way, I have time to adjust to the long, deep change involved, as opposed to my instinctive response to overwhelming things which is to close down and withdraw.

Back into my turtle shell I go, possibly even deeper than ever before.

And for now, at least, I can’t help that. It’s too instinctual for me to be able to hold back via rational restraint.

It takes place on the level that takes over when reason fails me. That’s what “overwhelm” means, and I suppose that’s why being overwhelmed freaks me out so bad that it makes me shut down.

I am still far too emotionally dependent on being in a state of detached reason where I am able to rationally choose each move.

That puts an unconscionable and inefficient burden on the rational intellect. Instinct and “going with your gut” is a much better life strategy in most situations.

Hopefully it’s not too late for me to reprogram myself out of that crap.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.