I noticed that I was one microwave popcorn short of making it to tomorrow’s grocery order, so I decided to order some more from 7-11 last night, along with a few snacky type things to have for supper.
A chicken Caesar wrap and a Jamaican patty, if you’re curious.
When I looked up “popcorn” on 7-11’s DoorDash, though, along with the microwave popcorn, up popped (sic) the option for me to get some Smartfood popcorn instead, or something called 7-11 Movie Night Popcorn.
Memories of the sadly now long gone Orville Redenbacher’s Movie Theater Butter Popcorn (best popcorn EVER) swimming in my head, I ordered the 7-11 stuff.
What the hell, I haven’t had the pre-popped stuff since I stopped eating so much junk food a long time ago, so I figured I’d get myself a treat.
In retrospect, the very plain white packaging should have tipped me off that something was not quite right.
Turns out the stuff isn’t buttered at all! And I’m like, what the fuck kind of lame ass movie night have these people been having?
Instead all it has is salt and “seasoning”, which seems ominously vague to me.
Oh well, once more I get burned because I didn’t check the fine print before making an online purchase. I think I need to accept that without the crushing burden of depression, I’m a somewhat impulsive person due to my tendency to follow waves of enthusiasm.
Well, there’s two ways to go through life : carefully checking to make sure there’s no pitfalls waiting for you before you make even the smallest step, or revving around at top speed and learning where the walls are by bouncing off them.
I’ve always taken the first route and been an inherently cautious person – to a fault. I’ve been so “cautious” that I don’t do jack shit, and that’s taking it way too far.
As with all things, there needs to be a balance. Sure, caution is good, but you can’t live life in fear of bouncing off the occasional wall and so you have to get out there and try new things and explore, too.
After all, you never know how far you can go until you go too far.
That’s the sort of statement I used to scoff at, but now I see the wisdom in that approach to life.
It promotes a very robust engagement with life where you are fostering your impulses by acting on them and thus promoting a healthy and strong connection to your id.
My id’s a puny little thing. Kinda pathetic, really.
I’m working on it.
Of course, it’s kind of hard to get any serious amount of esprit going when you are half dead inside due to an early childhood trauma.
Correction, half asleep inside. Dead is dead, there’s no coming back from that, and now that I know that part of me has been missing in action for 47 years, I have started the very long process of waking myself up.
I have this image in my head of myself being on a slab like the one Frankenstein’s monster is on right before he gets struck by lightning, except my slab just keeps going up and up as it lifts me towards the bright light of consciousness.
I still plan on shouting, “It’s alive! ALIVE!”, though.
I know it’s not going to be easy. Birth rarely is, for mother OR child, and in this case I am both. And waking up has never been easy for me either.
But I keep coming back to consciousness again and again.
I have no choice.
It’s where all the snacks are.
More after the break.
Subtle and sad
That’s how I am feeling at the moment.
I have a definitely feeling of melancholy. A heavy but not crushing blanket of sadness envelops me and I have a feeling of rainfall and darkness and silence and cold.
That sense of silence seems to stick to me lately. Silence and emptiness and the feeling that something is missing.
In general, in our mind, something missing means something hidden. A feeling of emptiness can indicate that something vital to us is being masked or suppressed by our psychological defenses, and we think that we are broken when we are merely numb.
Hence my continued efforts to shake myself up to wake myself up. I am doing the psychological equivalent of flapping your hand and knocking it against something to wake it up after it has fallen asleep.
Right now, the effort it will take to wake my other half from its torpor seems immense and it’s hard to see, or rather feel, the end of that process.
But end it must because I know that no matter what, I will never stop pushing myself to wake up and get myself moving, in life if not in body necessarily.
I feel like I am still standing in the doorway of that door inside myself that I opened what seems like several forevers ago.
I honestly thought I would have gone through it by now. But I should have (could have) known better than that.
Sure, opening that door was an enormous step and it has made a huge difference to my inner environment. My soul can breathe and there’s a sense of direction, like I finally know which way is up and which way is forward and what it means to progress through one’s emotions instead of acting like I have no control over them.
So that’s one hell of a lot better than the airless interior I had before.
But actually going out into that big bad crazy world is a much, much, MUCH bigger step and right now I am still standing in that doorway trying to acclimate to a much more stimulating environment than my sterile tomb.
I need a new equilibrium, and those take time to find.
I’m working on it.
Sometimes I get the crazy urge to just throw myself to the wolves. To kick myself out of the nest and out into the world where I will either fly or die and hope that my instincts will kick in before I hit the fucking ground.
But I can’t do that because I might just decide to die instead.
Because it’s easier.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.