.Say it with me now, “…and nothing matters.”
Yeah, I’m feeling nihilistic again.
This time, the trigger was looking at my open tabs and seeing Notd and FlexJobs still there, waiting for me to do something with them, plus a few new neglected tabs from the lovely people at March of Dimes Canada (MODC), who have a number of programs to help disabled folk like me get jobs.
Wouldn’t that be a hoot. Actual employment. I’d be a working pet then.
Maybe even get myself a cute little harness that says, “emotional support animal”.
I’d be really good at that.
But these things end up getting ignored, and I think I know why. It’s because I feel angry and frustrated and guilty and stupid when I think about them or see the tabs.
And far from galvanizing me into action, that just makes me withdraw and do nothing extra hard, and that’s the problem.
It’s a simple and terrible cycle. And it has to stop.
I think the vulnerable area of the issue is my emotional reaction to my “failing” to act on these boffo opportunities. If I can just calm the frick down about that kind of thing, I will not develop a phobic type aversion to dealing with them and I will be a lot more likely to actually get things going in my life.
And I think the heart of that problem is depression’s usual master, self-directed anger. I get angry and frustrated with myself and end up attacking myself internally.
And that’s bad.
Clearly I need to be more patient and tolerant and forgiving with myself. I am very abusive and harsh and even merciless on the inside, and that needs to stop.
The key to that, I think, is to simply accept that I can’t always push. There are rare times when I can pull my head down from the clouds and deal with the real world without getting too freaked out by how real it all is, and then there’s the rest of the time when the best I can do is float along like usual.
If I can just accept this truth, then I can stop putting extremely counterproductive pressure on myself to do these things already and relax and let things come when they come without trying to force things into existence.
It just doesn’t work.
It only leads to frustration, self-loathing, and absolutely no progress. If I want to move forward – and I do – I’m going to need to learn to let up on myself.
And patient readers will recognize the root problem with that : if I am not directing the anger inwards, then I have to direct it outwards, and I don’t want to hurt anybody.
And the anger does have to go somewhere. I can’t just delete it, as nice as that would be. I have oceans of untapped rage deep within me and the only way I am going to get rid of it is by doing something with it.
Use it as an energy source for ambition and curiosity. There’s a lot of great stuff out there in the world ready for me to take if I can just find the self-love and courage to go out there and get it.
But there’s still some vital linkage missing. The engine still won’t turn over and start, and I know for sure that the root cause is fear.
I am still more afraid of the world than I am eager to be part of it. My foot is on the brake and that makes my occasional tentative taps on the gas pedal futile and blocked.
I need to let myself out of this cave already.
But I’m afraid.
More after the break.
Got this off of Blue Sky and quite liked it :
I have a sick sense of humor.
And I’m loving it!
Now where was I…
How to relax inside myself
It can’t be done directly.
In fact, I think it might be like sleep – you can’t make it happen, you can only let it happen. Try to let go of everything, trusting that it will still be there later, so that it is safe to set it down for now.
Or maybe just let everything go, period. Fuck whether I can get it back. I probably don’t have anything all that important going on in my head anyhow.
Just thoughts and thoughts and even more thoughts. Whatever.
I suppose that in a way, I’m used to having a very cluttered mind. If all my thoughts on thoughst about thoughts went away, I might be cold without them.
But I’d get over it. Probably.
It would be worth a try, anyhow, if I could manage it.
I dunno, do I really use my thoughts as insulation against my inner chill factor? It feels like I do, at least right now.
And it would make sense. It’s not like I have anything else to use.
I mean, there’s a lot of other stuff in my head. Ideas, emotions, memories. But I guess I don’t really know how to derive warmth from them.
I dunno. Maybe I am just not feeling enough yet. I am so locked away in my inner morgue that I can’t feel all the genuinely good thing locked in here with me.
But I am trying, damn it. Trying to reanimate myself. To thaw out this frostbitten heart of mine by making my mind into a red hot laser beam melting its way towards that inviolate inner chamber, and the “real” me that has been trapped in there for all these years.
That will be the final boss fight for this mission. I locked myself away from the world for a reason – I was being raped. And I have been sealed off in there since then.
Will I be able to breach that sanctum santorum and set myself truly free, or will I lose my nerve because of all the alarms going off in my head tell me it’s not safe!
Yeah, well, safety is overrated.
I’d rather be alive.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.