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.