Thanks to my extraordinary level of insight, that is.
I’ve always been able to see right through people, although it didn’t surge to Hannibal Lecter levels until somewhere around grade 4 or 5 .
For me, other people’s emotions are simply present to my mind. They always have been. And that forms the basis of my ability to “read minds”.
Or at least it sometimes seems to others like I can.
And to be perfectly blunt, they have no idea.
Because, as patient readers know, I learned at a fairly young age that people do not like it when you speak casually about their innermost secrets.
Seems to make them feel vulnerable for some reason.
To me, I was talking about obvious truths about people. And I was only trying to help. But of course, part of the very foundation of what lets human beings get along in a world full of strangers is the privacy of our own souls.
So I had to eventually learn to keep my observations to myself and to at least try to act as if I had the same barriers to understanding as everyone else.
And that’s not easy for me. To be honest, I have a very hard time imagining what the world would be like without my X-ray mind.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to have other people be these opaque black boxes whom I could only understand through that which they openly express.
I mean, if you think I’m reclusive now….
And maybe that’s a big part of why I did not end up on the autism spectrum despite a childhood that seemed almost tailor made to produce it.
I’ve never found the behaviour of my fellow shaved apes baffling. I have never been limited by the confines of logical reasoning and deduction in how I understand people. To me, it is intuitively obvious that everyone does what they do and says what they say for reasons that make sense to them and in the context of their own lived experiences.
And that’s why I am such a passionate humanist. I can feel in my soul how everyone is vulnerable and weak and foolish and incomplete, and it only makes me love them more.
We truly are just a bunch of wounded souls stumbling around in the dark trying to find that door into happiness.
There ain’t one. Nobody has ever been happily ever after, and the only way to be happy until the day you die is to die in the middle of an orgasm.
There are worse ways to go.
Things can get better, though. But happiness is always going to take work. There is never going to be a point where you can just be happy all the time.
Even billionaires have bad days.
Hence why it is so toxic to view effort as the enemy, as depression forces you to do. The tragic inner conviction that most things are not worth the effort keeps you unhappy.
The big problem is that thanks to anhedonia, for you, it’s true. Only the most extreme positive reward to effort ratios can penetrate depression’s numbness. Everything else is, to you, unrewarding in the extreme.
So whether you get your extremely low effort reward stimulation from alcohol or drugs or gambling or risky sex or even video games, we all self-medicate in our own way.
A neurosurgeon once suggested that we could treat depression with a sort of emotional pacemaker implanted in the brain that provided a low level of stimulation to the reward center of the brain at all time, or perhaps in response to low levels.
I’d be willing to give it a try.
Now where’s the closest trans cranial magnetic stimulation place…
More after the break.
Video Era 2024
That’s what I hope to launch soon, once I get the technical issues ironed out.
Which probably means paying Corel for the update from Video Studio 2020. Grr.
There are probably freeware video editors out there, but unfortunately I only like the Corel one. None of the others have the hyper efficient “mark and cue” editing style that I have grown to adore.
Compared to it, everything else is weird and clumsy and overcomplicated.
Unrelatedly, I have finally made an optometry appointment. I have needed one for quite a while as it’s getting harder and harder for me to read text.
Especially the text in paperback books. And most of my books are paperback.
So clearly the issue has reached crisis levels.
I booked an appointment for next Tuesday, and then someone from the place (the pathetically named FYIdoctors) called me, and it’s a good thing she did.
Because apparently I have to pay half of the fee for the appointment, which means I will need to show up with $65 in my pocket.
Nice of the province to give me money to live on then claw it back with a copay.
What is this, the USA?
Oh well. At least I will leave with a new prescription and be able to buy some glasses online that do NOT make me farsighted and that therefore I will be able to wear them all the time like a normal nerd.
My phone conversation with the person from SkillUp will be happening Monday morning at 11:15 am and I am extremely nervous about it.
Like I’ve said before, I know that’s irrational. It’s not a job interview, for crying out loud. I am just going to talk with this person about my educational options.
And I can do this. I’m very good at education. I am positive that I can take an online course then ace the certification process and acquire an actual job skill or two.
Right now I am aiming for system administration. I am positive that I can learn how computer networks are run and do a good job of it.
I have a good head for systems.
I could try other things they offer, like online bookkeeping, but meh.
I’m very, very good at accounting. But it’s so incredibly boring.
Even with spreadsheets to do all the math.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.