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.