Lately, in quiet moments, I have been catching glimpses of a far off mystical land.

A land in which I am okay. Where I can simply relax and enjoy my life for what it is and maybe look for more and maybe not, but no matter what, I take it easy and I am forgiving and kind to myself.

In this magical kingdom, I finally learn to take life less seriously.

It’s only life, after all.

Life is too important to take seriously. Too much seriousness renders one rigid and fearful because the mind lacks the suppleness and strength to roll with the punches and handle life’s curveballs.

You are driving a car without shock absorbers. Instead, you end up like me, all curled up in a ball on the inside because you’re so scared of the bumps in the road that you stay off the road of life entirely and end up watching the world go by without you instead.

Holy crap, am I good with the metaphors.

Let me drag this back to the first person to avoid further intellectualizing.

I am just getting to the point where taking a far more relaxed and engaged attitude toward the world seems doable. It’s no longer a distant hazy and unreachable shore, like my very own mist-shrouded Avalon.

It’s a very real place and I am getting closer to it every day.

Slowly I am uncurling and stretching my mental limbs and trying to get the stiffness and soreness out of muscles long locked in place by fear and anxiety and the desperate need to blot out reality that result from them.

Maybe reality ain’t such a bad place after all. Maybe this big crazy world has a place for little ol’ me and there’s nothing out there waiting to eat me alive and I can finally relax, get comfortable, and dare I say it, even feel safe.

Feeling safe. What an astounding thought.

I mean, I know that I am safe. There are no predators after me. I have a modest but stable income that meets my modest but stable needs. I am free to live my life purely for the fun of it all and feel safe in feeling safe.

I can let my guard down now. I mean, what the fuck am I even guarding against? Life is not “just waiting for me to let my guard down so it can GET me.”

And hell, even if it was, there are worse things than getting got.

What I should be worried about is being worried about everything. That kind of inner stress is toxic and unsustainable. The engine of life, the id, has been fooled into working against itself like I’ve got both the accelerator and the brake pushed down all the way and it’s tearing my vehicle apart.

I won’t pretend that I can wave the proverbial magic wand and be straightened out and relaxed and well adjusted just like that.

The unbending process will take a while. It’s not easy to be your own chiropractor. Allowing myself to resume my natural shape will not be a linear process and there’s bound to be some dead ends and wrong turns on this trip of mine.

But I have a goal now. I know where I want to focus my limited energies. I am in pursuit of a feeling of health and I finally know what’s been blocking that for all these years.

It’s been Paxil. Ain’t that a bitch.

But now that my dose is lower, the great thaw is finally coming and I will finally have my long deferred springtime, maybe even in time for the real one.

But there’s no rush. Things will unfold as they should. Healing is natural and, like a houseplant, just needs sunshine and love to thrive.

Waiting is fullness.

More after the break.

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This ain’t good

Well (literal) crap.

I have been forced to come to the conclusion that I am unwell.

Moreso than usual, that is.

The evidence is as such :

1. My appetite has greatly diminished. It’s not to the point where it’s impossible for me to eat yet. I can even enjoy the taste to a limited degree. But making myself eat requires an act of will, especially at the beginning, and I have absolutely no enthusiasm for my food. I should have known the retreat of that damn Demon Hunger of mine was too good to be true.
2. I’ve got the chills. I’m starting to wonder if it’s been as cold in my room as I thought it was because my feeling of refrigeration has definitely risen to the point of feeling actual chills now. Mild ones, all told, but once you’ve had the chills you will recognize them every time as they are awful. These spasms of coldness that wrack your body and make you feel like you can almost hear the arctic wind blowing through your soul. Ghastly.
3. Nausea and a burning sensation after defecation. I felt quite ill after my most recent trip to the toilet. I felt this very strange and unpleasant hollow feeling in the middle of my lower abdomen along with the usual nausea, headache, and dizziness that I seem to get whenever anything goes wrong in me. And a very warm feeling all over my butt, like I was sitting on a heating pad. Wish I had looked into the bowl as that might have netted me some medically important information but I was too nauseous to even think about it.

So I don’t think I will be going to Wound Care tomorrow. Even in a mask. My dressings are both doing okay and I don’t wanna expose the other sick folk to whatever is going on with me right now.

And I sure as fuck don’t want to experience actual cold either.

Oh, and finally, because my life loves irony, all of this illness has come to me on the very day that I talked with my GP, Doctor Chao, and told him that besides the coloration issue with my feces I felt perfectly fine.

And when I said it, I did!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, like Hoth.

But yeah, it’s a cold world here at Fru Central. Cold air keeps leaking in from the gaps around the window panes of this big beautiful window right in front of me, and while I love the natural light it lets in, I’m not as fond of the natural coldness.

So I am probably gonna buy a space heater off of Amazon soon.

Yes, I know, it’s obscene the way Bezos is cozying up to Trump, but that prick knows he has us all completely dependent on Amazon now so he can do whatever the fuck he wants and we’re still gonna buy from him.

Like Colbert said recently, what else are we going to do? Go to the store?

Do they even still have those?

Back to heating. A space heater is an inefficient solution to the problem of this computer station of mine being too fucking cold. I’ve dealt with space heaters before and yes they are very good at heating space but the trick is getting that heat to where it needs to go.

So I will be looking for a unit with a fan. Like a giant hair dryer. But for rooms.

Even with a fan you have to be super careful with those things. Put them in the wrong place or point them in the wrong direction and you can end up melting the paint off a wall, utterly wrecking a poster, or even end up setting the place ablaze.

Plus there’s the fact that we will be paying for the electricity to run the damned thing when this room should be properly thermally sealed instead.

Insert my standard grumble about how nobody on the Wet Coast knowns how to deal with the cold.

Anyhow, as inefficient a solution as a space heater is, I don’t see another alternative. I can’t tape up the gaps around the window panes myself, and I am not going to rearrange my room so that my computer desk faces the opposite wall.

As nice a thought as that is right now.

And this is how cold I am with the heat in this room turned all the way up. I shudder to think of how cold I would be if I turned the heat down.

Luckily, this is BC, we have hydro, it’s cheap, so the power bill is not that steep.

Still, having to have the heat up that high just to survive galls me.

I keep having to crawl into bed just to get under the covers and away from that window so I can warm the fuck up.

And of course, I end up sleeping because that’s what I normally do when I lie down and get under the covers. It’s a patterned reflex.

So I have slept for most of the daylight hours of today so far, and a good chunk of last night too. And I know I will go right back into bed when I am finished with my words.

I’ll probably end up napping until it’s time to go to Denny’s.

Another cold place, come to think of it. They always have the AC turned up to “arctic spring” levels for some reason.

So we all just keep our jackets on when we’re there. Which is kind of weird but what the hell, we love Denny’s and they love us.

We’re there every Sunday night and we’re pleasant, easy to get along with, understanding customers who tip well, so we’re favored customers.

And they give us good food at a good price and great service so it’s our little “third location” home away from home.

Well, second location for us unemployed folk.

Some day, I will climb out of this pit and join the world.

But for now I just need a nap.

More after the break.

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So damned tired

And all I did was go to Denny’s.

But that involved getting dressed (damn coat zipper) , walkering down to the car, then making it from the car to our seat in the back of Denny’s, then doing all that in reverse to get back home, plus a trip to the Denny’s handicapped washroom to pee. and all this done under the adverse condition of it being frigging cold.

All of that combined is enough to make me feel very tired and my lungs are hurting and my heart is pounding and I feel like I have taken a light but thorough beating.

All from what was, for most people, a negligible amount of activity.

I mean, pampered celebrities living in the lap of luxury do as much as I did.

So it’s been one of those times when the painful truth of being disabled really hits home for me. When I am not pushing myself, it’s easy to forget how sick I am most of the time.

But at times like this, and to a lesser extent every time I come back from the kitchen, the fact that I’m a cripple is painfully emphasized.

Which is why I dream of having a personal assistant some day. One I am paying out of my own money. That would greatly increase my feelings of empowerment and independence and competence and decrease my feeling of being a dependent burden on those around me.

It kind of helps to think of myself as my roommates’ pet. Cute and lovable and a valuable part of the household even though I cost them time and labour.

At least I mostly pay for myself. Well, the province does, anyhow.

The important part is that I’m not a financial burden on my friends.

Anyhow, the fact that my disability subjectively disappears while I am doing my main two activities, namely using my computer and lying in bed, makes it very easy to forget that I am any different from everybody else.

Physically, that is.

But experiences like tonight scare and depress me because it brings it all home to me. My body does not work right and that’s only going to get worse, not better, with time.

It makes me feel like I am on an island slowly becoming submerged as the water levels rise and I can fool myself into forgetting about it because hey, my house isn’t flooded yet, but the truth is I am going to drown sooner or later no matter what.

Anyone know where I can get a houseboat?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at the very least a briskly edited one,.

I know that my extremely negative internal negative is toxic and that if I want to get well (do I ever!) I will have to dream up a whole new story of my life and myself. One that supports hope and growth and especially health and healthy choices.

I mean, my current internal narrative is that I’m a 51 year old complete and total loser o is rightfully deeply ashamed of having done absolutely nothing with life except hide from the world and play video games for the last 30 fucking years and who is desperate to escape the rancid tomb that is his current life and actually get around to becoming a grownup before my health gets so bad that I become truly incapable of work.

Which puts a lot of pressure on me. And I don’t handle that kind of pressure very well. In fact, I tend to hide from it in my turtle shell and, what else, play video games.

So clearly that view of things is not functional. I need to dig deep and find some hope and through that find something to look forward to. Something that can make me feel like there is actually something to live for.

Mostly, I live by default. I live by not dying and not thinking about the future much.

But I know I can do better. I know that I have so, so much to contribute. I could be not only functional but phenomenal. I have a quite frankly astounding IQ and loads of creative energy and talent and a sweet and lovable personality plus I am capable of an enormous amount of work.

I could be a major asset to any office type situation. I could be amazing in any writer’s room or other creative hub.

And I am totally capable of making my own thing and making it work.

YouTube is my current destination. I have this pretty decent quality webcam that I have barely used. I have loads of creative talent and I am funny and fascinating and I have a lot to say. I have a unique point of view and a lot of insight into life and the world.

And I’m cute, too.

Enough pumping myself. The new narrative starts now :

I am not a loser. I am just disabled. I have been very sick for a long time and that has kept me away from the world and I have done the best I could with what capacities I had remaining to me.

And I have not spent the last thirty years only playing video games. That whole time I have been interacting with my fuzzy friends, informing myself and feeding my head, writing on this blog, and continuing to think and observe and formulate and analyze and make my unique and powerful insights even deeper every day.

So I have not wasted my life. My life might not look like other people’s lives and I wish it had been different but that doesn’t mean my life has no meaning or purpose.

Maybe this whole long journey was simply an extended larval stage whose entire purpose was to give me the time I needed to become the absolutely stunning and incredible butterfly I know I can be.

That I know I will be. I just have to let things unfold as they should and do my best to support my own growth while the fabulous being I am on the inside finally unfolds its wings so they can dry in the sun.

And when the time is right, I will fly.

More after the break.

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The ocean of sadness

Now we move on to the real issue : the ocean of sadness inside me.

Because that’s what I am left with once I take the unhealthy ways I express that sadness away. Just a vast sea of tears I need to shed and a stereotypical North American male difficulty in shedding them.

Maybe my lowered Paxil dose will help. Maybe it’s been the Paxil that has kept those tears frozen for over 20 years and lowering the dose will continue to let my emotions flow out of me and thaw out the ice-jam that has been clogging up the system for such a long time now.

It’s not like I want to be emotionally constipated. It’s something I neither believe in or desire. I want to be the sort of person who can express whatever they are feeling freely, preferably in realtime, and thus avoid accumulating deferred tears as well is impotent rage, stymied lust, isolated compassion, and all the rest.

Basically, I want to be more French.

And that means being way, way, WAY less concerned about being “in control of myself”. There’s a choice bit of Anglo-Canadian repression. Oh, there’s nothing worse than “losing control” don’t you know. If you “lost control” then you might express something less than perfectly pleasant to the world and make other people uncomfortable and that would be so dreadfully embarrassing.

Even worse, if I “lose control” I might not be able to predict what I am going to say and do well enough to stop myself from doing things purely on emotion, and then what would become of me?

They’d lock me up.

That’s what this whole control thing boils down to : predictability. Knowing what I will do. Put that way, it really seems like an insufficient justification for cauterizing my emotions.

But I suppose I have internalized the wrong lessons from mistakes I have made in the past. I blamed listening to my emotions, essentially, and acting upon them,

That’s the rational mind bullying the id about in an unbalanced way. Highly intelligent people have an overdeveloped emotional suppression circuit in the brain and I think we end up neurotic messes because we lean on that thing way too much.

It’s supposed to let you defer emotions so that you can think clearly and listen to that all important inner voice that does all those fancy calculation, inference, and recall operations that constitute being “smart”.

It’s not supposed to be used to suppress emotions forever. Somewhere in my mind, all the emotions of the last 45 years of being alive are stored and waiting for me to have “time” to deal with them.

And I wish I could just declare bankruptcy and have that emotional debt expunged.

But it’s not that easy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is an expansion on something I put in a YouTube comment recently.

Us liberal intellectual types are quite fond of wailing and gnashing our teeth about Trump humpers and their tendency to believe all kinds of things which are clearly objectively wrong and honestly a very tall supply of hooey.

My response to that is, “so what?”.

Why should people care whether their beliefs about the world and how it works are objectively true or not? Whether or not they really faked the moon landing has no direct bearing on people’s daily lives, and that means they are free to believe whatever suits them best regardless of facts.

This is why evidence to the contrary has no effect on these people. Their beliefs were not arrived at via reason and therefore reason cannot dislodge them. Their worldview emerges from a steamy haze of emotional needs and their own life experiences plus their cultural programming and as long as their beliefs continue to serve those functions, especially the emotional needs one, they are not going to let go of them and will interpret any attacks on those beliefs, no matter how well reasoned or based upon the evidence they are, as attacks on themselves personally by evil people trying to take away their emotional safety blanket(s).

The virtue of getting closer to the Truth ™ means nothing to them. They are not on a lifelong search for true knowledge. They don’t pursue impractical goals like that.

They know what they need to know to work their job and take care of their kids and make it to Church on Sundays, and everything outside those critical beliefs is unimportant and therefore can be whatever you need it to be.

Obviously these people are not entirely divorced from reality. These kinds of things are rarely that cut and dried. Like all humans, they live in a world which is a blend of the objective and the subjective into what I call “human reality”.

We are neither robots nor lotus eaters.

But the ultimate truth of things is not of paramount importance to them. That’s why if you do happen to take away a beloved belief of theirs via logic and evidence, they will not thank you, they will hate you with the white hot passion of a thousand suns.

Just the fact that you have introduced the possibility of doubt into their mind is a good enough reason of them to hate you and everybody like you till the end of time.

Doubt is not good for these people. They have absolutely no faith in their ability to derive belief from their own intellectual faculties. The best that they can hope for is to use their people skills to figure out who seems trustworthy and then follow that person or people with undying, unswerving loyalty no matter what.

Thus we have Fox News. Their bread and butter consists of seeming trustworthy enough to their demographic to feed them the kinds of reassurances they need to quell their doubts and let them go back to their preferred state of artificial certainty.

If us left leaning intellectuals want to stand a chance of keeping hope and freedom alive in a Trumped up world, we will need to understand and accept these hard truths.

We will have to address the underlying emotional needs that their belief in Trump addresses and learn to address them better.

This requires not just paying lip service to these people and their concerns or talking above their heads in terms of lofty abstractions or distant ideals but actually going to these people where they live and truly listening to them and give them every indication that you are on their side.

They go to Trump because he makes them feel welcome. He does, quite frankly, a terrible job of it but it still makes him seem like the vastly superior choice over some college educated liberal who looks down their noses at people they see as their social inferiors and therefore can’t imagine possibly being important.

We have to become conscientious objectors in the culture wars. We have to open our arms and our hearts to Trump supporters and give them the love, reassurance, respect, and support they will never get from him and thus steal his supporters in a way that will not only be effective but highly ethical too.

More after the break.

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The spaces in between

I definitely feel like I am somewhere between two places lately.

I know that I am going in the right direction, the direction of greater emotional health and mental functioning and maybe even (gasp!) personal productivity.

Which is the only truly meaningful form of productivity. To feel like you have made something worthwhile is an incredible feeling and I want lots of it.

So some time soon I will start making YouTube videos again. It won’t be easy to get back into it – for one thing, I will need a competent video editing program that can handle both video capture and basic editing without screwing up the timing – but if I make a concentrated effort I can get going again and hopefully keep it going long enough for the fun and appeal of making stuff to kick in.

I’ve realized that I was making a classic mistake : delaying getting back into the biz by waiting for the “right” idea to come along.

Fuck that. It makes self-sabotage far too easy. Just never actually decide any idea you can think of is good enough and you can bullshit yourself right into the grave, the whole time thinking you are going to do your thing “someday”.

I’m for just plunging into things and figuring things out as you go. I know that according to practically everything that is the “wrong” way to do things, but it’s what works for me.

Fuck it, I don’t do anything the “right” way. I do things my way, which works for me and possibly nobody else ever.

I’m special like that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Therapy Thursday thang.

I told Doctor Costin that I think the greater emotional bandwidth I am now experiencing due to the lowered Paxil dose is allowing me to be more confident and self-assured.

Turns out it’s hard to really believe in yourself when you’re numb.

And presumably this effect will grow as my mind learns to make use of the greater bandwidth in order to support my mood.

Not that I am happy all the time. That would be insipid. I want to feel everything. Sadness, anger, frustration, even grief. I want to feel it all.

Because what I really want to feel is alive.

Turns out it’s also hard to feel like you’re amongst the living when you’re numb.

I feel like things are starting to really flow in me. The emotions are moving around like water in your plumbing, and that is making it far easier for my mind to flush out the waste products of my overbearing mentation so that the inside of my mind feels nice and clean and fresh and I can think more clearly.

I have longed for this greater sense of flow for a long time without really being able to articulate it. All I can do is relate it to water : I was frozen by the Paxil and now I am starting to thaw out and that means my rivers are running high.

And that makes me feel so much healthier.

Right now, I’m a bit sleepy. I am going to need a nap when I am done blogging. That’s not unusual for me. Blogging uses up a lot of brain energy.

If you’re doing it right.

I’m start to feel more socially bold, too. Last night I actually logged in to Discord and even did a little voice chat with some European dudes who were playing Fortnite.

I didn’t know I would be logging into voice chat when I logged in to that server. It just started up. And I was tempted to immediately log right the fuck back out due to social panic but I stopped myself and hung around for a while before actually introducing myself to the Eurodudes.

They even invited me to play Fortnite with them but I’ve tried that game and it is way too chaotic and overwhelming for me.

There’s a reason I like turn based RPGs so much. I was never any good at multiplayer FPS games in the first place.

It’s hard to shoot straight when you’re battling social anxiety.

And Fortnite is an FPS where you can build like towers and castles and shit on the fly, so that is WAY beyond me.

And speaking of overwhelm, Discord still kinda freaks me out. Individually the different aspects of it are easy to comprehend but as a whole you have servers and channels and DMs and voice chat channels and messages coming in on all levels and it’s so hard to keep up.

So overall I think I might have lasted 45 minutes before the overwhelm got me and I had to log off and play video games while my anxiety levels returned to baseline.

I know I have no reason to get freaked out. I’m a lovable fellow with great social skills when I can get out of my own shadow enough to actually use them.

Maybe next time I will take a Xanax before trying to be more social. It might be just what I need to get some positive social interaction that can overwrite those ancient anxious tapes from my bullied and isolated childhood.

Repeat until believed : I am just as good as everybody else and I have nothing to be ashamed of so there’s no reason to freak out in social situations.

Yeah. That seems about right.

More after the break.

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Yup, that tracks

I’ve been playing around with a tracker called Psycle and having a lot of fun.

A tracker is a very old school way to make music. When it’s on the screen, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was some weird programming language, and it kind of is.

But how it works is not important to our tale. Which is good because I have no idea how I would explain it.

The important thing is the nostalgia factor for yours truly because using a (far more primitive) tracker is how I first got into making sample-based music WAY WAY back in the early to mid 90’s. ^[1]

So messing around with one of these programs REALLY takes me back.

And the thing is, I had just been waxing nostalgic about the things that were so much easier to do in a tracker when I came across a mention of Psycle Tracker in a YouTube video (where else?) about freeware programs everyone should know about and I thought what the hell, this is obviously fate, so I grabbed the thing.

Dunno how much I will end up using it. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. It’s easy to imagine myself launching into this whole lengthy magnificent exploration of the whole world of sample based composing but we both know that ain’t likely.

And it’s not necessary either. It’s perfectly fine, I am telling myself, to just play around with something then stop when I get tired of it. Not everything has to be some grand epic achievement or else it means I suck.

That’s a classic example of rigging the system against yourself, because of course you will inevitably stop doing the thing at some point and if that means you instantly lose then the only way to win would be to keep doing it till the moment of your death.

And that seems like a bit much.

So who knows. Maybe I will dig deep, hook the program up to my ancient collection samples, get back into making music for fun, and have a whale of a time.

Or maybe by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten all about it.

And both of those outcomes are fine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time for me to get super pissed off about it being a five week month again.

The worst part is that I was right. Last night I got to thinking along the lines of, “Well, I have $120 leftover from last month (mostly due to Xmas money), and there hasn’t been a five week month in a while… ergo…. ”

So I asked Microsoft Co-Pilot to calculate the number of weeks between deposit day for this month (Jan 15) and deposit day for next mont (Feb 19) and sure enough, there are five weeks and a day between.

Meaning I am going to have to use my Xmas money to pay for my basic expenses on that last week. Son of a bitch.

There goes my Xmas gifts!

Good thing I still have that $200 on my Amazon.ca account from my sisters. The government can’t steal that at least. I still haven’t decided what I am going to get with it. Maybe just a whole bunch of books.

Actual, physical, real books. On paper and everything.

What can I say, I’m an old school bibliophile. I love books, not just the words in them.

Just did the calculation. I will have $155/week this month. Normally I have closer to $200/week. Le sigh.

Like I always say, it’s not like I’ll starve or get evicted or anything. I will be just fine. Depending on how expensive my groceries are in any given week, I might even be able to afford to order in now and then.

But this still pisses me off. It would be so simple for them to simply increase the non-shelter portion of the check by 25 percent in months like these in order to reflect the fact that we will have to live 25 percent more days on the money.

Makes sense, right? But we’re just a fairly limited number of helpless cripples, so what are we going to do about it?

No matter where you go, there are predators hunting the weak.

I think the worst part for me is the feeling of actually being ahead for once only to have that money snatched away by this five week bullshit.

It just seems so cruel. For me, disappointment is always far, far worse than mere deprival and this shit is as disappointing as substandard fuck.

To be honest, I should probably plot out the whole year in advance so I know when the five week months are coming way ahead of time and then they at least won’t come as a shock to my system.

But that sounds depressing. Or maybe irritating. You can never tell with me where that particular die will fall. Not any more, anyway.

It used to be depression each and every time. But as I have plodded down my long road to recovery, I have become more and more capable of anger and hence more capable of being in a bad mood.

It says something about my somnolent state that crankiness and irritability is actually a sign of progress because at least I’m frigging engaging in basic self-protection.

That’s what anger is for after all. Defense of self and others. To become angry, therefore, is to take an active role in defending your own wellbeing.

And I am still new to this whole “taking an active role in my own life” thing. For decades I have been all wrapped up in myself and withdrawn and completely disengaged from reality except as mitigated by my screens.

And you can’t row your own canoe when you’re like that. I’ve been locked in a rictus of passivity for so long that I find it hard to even imagine being truly alive again.

It’s so much easier to just keep drifting towards the grave.

Not better. Just easier.

More after the break.

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A greater bandwidth

That’s what my emotions now have access to. Both frequency and amplitude have more room in which to operate, although it’s the amplitude that is more noticeable. 

My emotions are LOUDER. 

And it’s not all fun. I have a lot more “bad moments” lately. Moments when the sadness or anger or anxiety or emotional coldness seems to surge and I have to struggle to maintain my equilibrium. 

Although I dunno. Maybe equilibrium ain’t all it’s cracked up to me. Maybe I would be better off if I just let myself fall so various energies could sort themselves out instead of constantly rebalancing this house of cards I call my mind. 

But like all my talk about unleashing the flood within and seeing what still remains after the waters recede, it’s probably not going to happen. I don’t think I can just throw stability out the window in hopes of a brighter tomorrow. 

It’s more realistic to keep hacking away at my issues and waiting for that tipping point. 

And I can feel it coming on. This emotional awakening of mine from the lowered Paxil dose is loosening things up enough for me to feel more confident and self-assured or even downright cocky, and I am going to keep encouraging that in myself in hopes of eventually taking a huge ego trip to actual employment. 

And I’m taking you all with me! 

I did some poking around on FlexJobs recently but everything there, despite their ads, seems to require some form of experience and/or certification. 

Which is a huge bummer for someone like me. 

As an aside, I think we need a legal definition of “entry level” because a lot of employers out there seem to be extremely unclear on the concept. 

Anyhow, as usual, I was far too easily discouraged. If I had hung in there and kept looking, maybe I would have found something. 

But I didn’t even last half an hour. Le additional sigh. 

It’s gotten me back to thinking about needing to invent my own job. Which at this point in my life pretty much means becoming a YouTuber. 

Or maybe a Vtuber? That’s a YouTuber who makes videos with an avatar, either a 3D modeled one like for VRChat or just a serious of pictures in various expressions and poses to kind of get the idea across. 

It’s almost like paper puppetry but without the paper. 

I’m divided on that option. On one paw, it would make sense for me to start by using an avatar in order to kind of ease my way into things. 

And hey, I could get closer to actually being Fruvous! 

On the other hand, like I have said before, the product is my personality more than anything else and I can best express my irrepressible personality as myself and all my megawatt charismatic wonder. 

I suppose there’s no reason I can’t do both. Do furry and furry-adjacent stuff as a Fruvous avatar and everything else as lil ol me. I know I can make that work. 

Because you know what? I’m a star, baby. A great big shiny star. 

And stars gotta shine. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

 

I have some very high level empowerment to do.

The long dormant state of my spirit (id) and my feral childhood plus my early almost total withdrawal from reality has left me feeling utterly powerless and led to the unfounded feeling of being unable to make things better for myself.

Like, in any way. Even if it’s just a matter of moving a few things.

My disability has only magnified this issue because it gives me this rich well of excuses for not doing anything or going anywhere in my life.

And those work… up to a point. But they don’t really stand up to scrutiny. The fact that my legs don’t work right does limit my options – I’m not exactly going to sign up to be a longshoreman any time real soon – but it’s hardly a total life-crippling issue.

There’s still plenty of things I can do. I just have to do them sitting down.

So let me state this as my baseline for this discussion :

I am physically capable of all kinds of remote work jobs and there is no reason I can’t actively and energetically pursue such employment.

Or even volunteer. Honestly, I just need meaningful things to do. Something to make me feel good about myself and less like a drain on society and those around me.

I must remember : I make things better when I’m around.

My point is that my physical disability is no excuse for remaining so detached and withdrawn from the world that I can’t do even little things to help myself.

Like clean off my bed so I can flip the mattress and save myself from the tyranny of those spikes poking up from below from the bedsprings poking through.

My upper legs and hips are covered in punctures and scratches for those things. One look at that and someone would be forgiven for thinking that I have either been self-harming or subject to torture.

And the thing is, I know I can fix this problem. It will take some work to clear off my bed but it can mostly be done while sitting or even laying on the bed and I don’t have to do it all at once either.

So all that is really keeping me from doing it is this deep and deadly and destructive desire to hide from the world and spend as little time and energy on life outside my screens as possible.

But there’s something even deeper and more toxic than that going on. It’s a terrible fear – a dread, really – of leaving the warm but fetid bunker I have built in my mind for the cold and exposed real world, with its overstimulation and exposure and other people.

I feel like at some point I was supposed to develop this hard outer layer to my personality that would protect me like a wetsuit or a knight’s armor as I navigate the physical and social world out there, and it just never happened.

I guess I never had the stimulation that leads to growing one. We tend to only develop the defenses we need in order to cope and by staying out of the real world entirely I ensured I would never “need” to toughen up.

That’s not a normal way to live. Most other people, even some of my fellow failures to launch, will feel the impetus to go out and find their place in the world. Especially, of course, when they are young.

But not me. I just kept hiding. Never with any sort of plan. It’s not like I made a conscious choice to stay in my cubby hole of a life forever.

I just couldn’t do anything else. Or so I thought.

But now I wonder if there’s something I could do to give myself a chance to start climbing out of this rotten hole of mind to face the world at last.

I can do this. I can fix things. I can make things better.

So why don’t I?

More after the break.

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It’s my responsibility

Part of the problem is definitely a fear of responsibility.

Taking responsibility for my own life and my own happiness sounds like a no-brainer. It’s one of the basic foundational virtues of modern society – self-reliance.

We are considered, by default, to be responsible for ourselves. That’s the hidden price of maximizing autonomy, freedom, and choice.

You have more options than ever, but you’re the one that has to choose among them.

But for me, self-reliance never fully arrived. There was that period when I first moved to this region in 1998 when I lived on my own in a bachelor apartment.

And I did fine once I was on welfare. Paid the rent, shopped for groceries once a month, hauled my laundry to the laundromat (ick), did the very minimal amount of cleaning needed when one lives in a closet, and got by thanks to, what else, the internet.

And I hope to go back to an expanded version of that some day. I know I have been amazingly lucky to have the awesome and supportive friends that I have, and there is definitely nothing wrong with them.

But ever since I moved out of said closet, I have had roommates, and ended up leaning pretty heavily on them for like, reality issues, and that’s not ideal.

I think I will need to live on my own for a while just to build up my confidence in myself and my ability to handle the real world.

Like I always say, I am perfectly capable of doing all the tasks involved in living on my own. So it’s just a matter of getting over myself first.

Not that I am expecting to strike out on my own any time soon. This is a medium term plan, for when I have my own earned income.

So I suppose I am only afraid of responsibility in the abstract. The idea of having to face that infinite corridor of infinite doors scares the hell out of me.

How could I possibly choose?

But realistically, our choices tend to be fairly limited by things like opportunity and location and vocation and such.

It’s still a pretty big corridor.

But a manageable one, I think.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have had this YouTube post from my man Patrick Teahan up in a tab for almost a week now because it’s given me a lot to think about and digest.

He says things like this :

” Many of us don’t have a reference point for what⁠ it looks like to be free of our trauma narrative that runs us.⁠ – Patrick Teahan “

And how. I have no solid recollection of mental health in me. I think that’s because, in the strictest sense, I have only truly been sane for the two years of my life when I was going to UPEI and the fours years of my life before I was raped.

And I suppose being a sane infant or toddler doesn’t count for much.

And that phrase, “trauma narrative”, is really resonating with me. I know that my personal narrative of neglect and isolation is not a healthy one. It is, in fact, quite toxic, and yet I don’t really know how to overcome it so I can replace it with something far more conducive to a healthy happy life.

I’ve been chipping away at it by reminding myself that I am, actually, magically delicious and one heck of a guy, and that while my life is unfulfilling it could be a lot worse.

I have a safe and stable home in which to try to become sane, with wonderful supportive friends without whom my life would be so much harder.

And I am grateful for all of that. I truly am.

Perhaps I can overcome the surfeit of bitterness that made me unable to be grateful for what I have before, and that could do me a heck of a lot of good.

I need an antidote for all those psychological toxins in my bloodstream.

I need a way out of needing a way out.

Patrick also says this about being the opposite of your trauma :

1. That it’s okay to be seen.⠀⁠

I have a lot of trouble with this. My maladaptation has been isolation for so long that I have lost my tolerance for real social exposure and as much as part of me craves attention another part of me wants to disappear underground forever.

Part of me hates feeling like I am invisible and another wishes I truly was.

2. That it’s safe to be you.⠀⁠

I don’t even know who that is. My total lack of emotional adolescence means that I went on almost no part of the journey of self-discovery we are meant to experience on our way to becoming our own authentic selves, in our teens and twenties, so all I can do when faced with the question of who I am is throw up my hands and say, “I dunno. ”

I have a version of me going that people seem to like and that might actually blossom into something healthy and useful in time.

It’s not the only person I could be – I contain multitudes – but it will do for now

3. That people want realness⁠ and not our false protective selves.⁠

I’m not so sure about that. It sounds good in theory and it’s what anyone wants from someone they care about, but in practice they might like the real me a lot less.

From where I stand now, it feels like the “real me” would be a lot angrier, pushier, more demanding, more domineering, and a lot more selfish and self-satisfied.

Maybe not a monster but way harder to deal with. That might not be the worst thing in the world if it leads to greater happiness for myself.

But at what cost?

More after the break.

---

So many winters

The image of my heart being buried under the snows of many winters popped into my head a little while ago.

It seems apt. It would explain why it’s taking so long to excavate myself. I didn’t get buried this deep in the permafrost overnight and I am not going to unbury myself overnight either, so I must be patient with myself.

But being patient sucks. I want freedom now, god damn it!

Fast forward into summer, let the flood come. Whoosh. Wash everything clean and let my poor frozen heart melt free of the icepack and dry in the sun.

But I guess that’s not in the cards either. Inasmuch as I have designed myself at all, I have made myself, the person you know and love, with stability in mind. The brief, such as it was, was, as always, to be able to just keep trudging forward no matter what.

Not that I ever get anywhere, of course. So in a way it’s an eternal treadmill, or maybe my very own hamster wheel. It satisfies my need for the feeling of progress without all that “things actually changing” nonsense.

Stability in motion, folks! Rolling monotony.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the image of myself as being strapped in and tied down to my current life, a la Clockwork Orange, and I think I can use it as a way to motivate myself to change in order to “escape”.

It really does feel like there’s a force like gravity that keeps me in this same magnetically locked and bonded position. When I try to resist, the forcefield surges with a menacing hum and I slam back down and get plastered to my seat like I am riding the Gravitron.

Only a lot less fun. I love the Gravitron. It’s my favorite ride.

I am tempted to call this mystical force something like my fear of change, and that’s correct as far as it goes but it does not go far. It’s a valid but incomplete answer.

I guess we’re basically back to the caterpillar and the fixed sense of self. To my mind, changing who I am is way too much like dying and I don’t have the kind of courage it takes to surrender all form to be remade anew yet.

So I am going to have to continues to creep up on change incrementally, passively awaiting the passing of some deep tipping point to change everything without me ever having to choose to change.

Death by natural causes, in effect.

I am a thing that changes.

Repeat until believed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks to the lowered dose of Paxil, my sexual response is waking up a bit more and I feel more capable of orgasm than before.

Yes, it’s going to be one of THOSE blog entries. The ones where I get uncomfortably intimate with my so-called sex life like I have no boundaries.

Which is not far from the truth, come to think of it. Generally speaking, if I don’t speak of certain topics openly, it’s because I don’t want to offend people or gross them out, not out of personal shyness.

I’m not saying I’m incapable of modesty or shyness, but my goalposts for revealing myself are way further apart than most people’s.

I’m just happy people are paying attention to me and listening to what I say.

To that end I’d answer almost any question.

Anyhow, lately, assuming I’ve not been overdoing it and draining my very limited batteries, I can at least have what I am calling a “mini-orgasm”.

It’s almost cute.

What happens is I get a modest surge of pleasure and I ejaculate some mostly clear liquid which I am assuming is prostate fluid.

It’s not much but at least it provides me some release without my necessarily having to wait like two or three weeks of not touching myself in order to build up enough – let’s say “pressure” – to have any eruption at all.

I usually continue to masturbate afterwards just to make sure that this was, indeed, all I am gonna get and to make sure I get as much balls emptying benefit as I can.

But not too long after I am all out of mojo and beginning to chafe, so I stop.

I know I will never get back the wild stallion of sexual impetus I had in my 20’s. Like a lot of old people, I look back at those days and sigh and wish I had been more self-confident and in control of myself and understood myself well enough to know what exactly I have going, sexually speaking, so I could use it to sow all the wild oats I could.

Youth is wasted on the young, and all that.

I know that a completely “normal” sexual response with others is probably not in the cards, at least not any time soon.

There’s a very strong chance that for me, sex will always be a performance. A sort of sexy show I put on to please a partner, which in turn pleases me, but maybe not to the point of cumming myself.

To my romantic side, this is heartbreakingly tragic. But despite my vulpine vampishness and extreme and joyous openness, there is a terrible conflict in me when it comes to sex with other men where I both want and fear it.

It even comes up when I am masturbating or otherwise browsing porn. I’ll be lusting away and suddenly I will have this strong fear/threat reaction like “this is wrong/bad!”.

Weird, I know. But I know from whence it comes. It’s a strange and terrible cocktail of societal programming and the fact that my first experience with male/male sex was being raped as a toddler.

So there’s a lot of dark and complicated shit going on way down deep in my sexuality.

Maybe if I was to meet the right fella and fall in love and get close enough to him that my barriers come down to the point where I actually felt completely safe with him, sex could be more than a performance for me.

It could be the mutuality I have always dreamed of. Two people sharing pleasure in a cosmic circuit where their pleasure gives you pleasure and vice versa until it all builds to a truly incredible moment of explosive connection.

Just my modest little fantasy.

More after the break.

---

I make things better

You know what? I make life more fun when I’m around.

After all, I’m funny, silly, warm, charismatic, and I put out a pretty happy vibe. It cheers people up to be around me, and that means more to me than I could possibly express.

All I want in life is to make people happy. A life spent spreading happiness would be like Heaven to me. I would feel like there was truly a reason for me to be alive then.

And it’s occurred to me, just now, that I do that. Maybe not on a global scale – yet – but in my own life, I liven up and ennoble the mood wherever I go, uplifting people with my large output of sun-shiny vibes.

And my lowered dose of Paxil is only making that effect stronger. Turns out that I am much more effective a vibrational influencer when I have access to more emotions.

Huh. Go figure.

And this trend is set to continue because my therapist and I are pondering when to do my next dosage lowering, from 30 mg (instead of the usual 40 mg) twice a week to 30 mg three times a week.

I’m excited for this experience to continue but I don’t think I am ready for it to be in my next month’s supply of blister packs, so it will probably be the month after.

So somewhere in March, the dosage will likely be stepped down.

Right now, I feel like I am still slowly attenuating to the lowered dosage. My mind still have to find places for the new emotions I am feeling, and that’s a painstaking process, so I am not in a huge rush.

Despite that insane kamikaze voice in my head saying, “GO COLD TURKEY! Rip off that fucking Band-aid and FLY!”

Followed by an insane cackle and an explosion.

Anyhow, back to my latest attempt to pump enough air into my ego for it to float.

The thing is, I’ve known objectively that people like having me around for a very long time but, like happens so often with me, somehow that knowledge never penetrated the layer of ice around my heart.

I knew it, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t believe.

It’s like how I have known for my entire life that I am academically gifted (to say the least) and yet somehow that never made me feel any better about myself.

It all came too easy, I guess.

But now I am finally ready to celebrate my general awesomeness. I’m an amazing dude and it’s time I learned to embrace and enjoy that without worried that it will somehow lead to delusions of grandeur or me turning into a raging arsehole.

I’m incredible. And a big part of that is being the sweet, nice, caring dude I am.

I won’t be giving that up for anything!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Watched a video about how to identify and address the toxic beliefs that are holding you back and fueling your mental health issues, and while the video itself was forgettable (seemed mostly to be an excuse for some lady to talk about herself, which is.. special), the idea itself seems good so I thought I would give it to go.

And I know that this is a good idea because my mind really doesn’t want to go there, and it’s making feel anxious and disoriented and a little dizzy, almost like vertigo, so I know I must be on the right track.

Let’s start with the more obvious toxic beliefs, like that I am something hideous, pathetic, repulsive, and unlovable.

I have no evidence to support such a radically incorrect belief. It stems entirely from a need to express the bitterness and anger I feel by turning them inward, and that, in turn, only makes me angrier and more bitter.

Ultimately it devolves down to the fact that I feel horrible and disgusting and unlovable. And that feeling is so deeply embedded in my self-image that changing it requires the psychological equivalent of open heart surgery to fix it.

And that’s a hard thing to have to do to yourself.

Another limiting belief of mine is that I am weak and incapable and incompetent.

My dyspraxia plays a big part in that. Also known as developmental co-ordination disorder, it’s just like dyslexia except instead of making it harder to learn to read, it mkes it harder to learn motor skills.

I’ve had that problem for my entire life. It’s why I am such a spaz when it comes to doing physical things. Combined with my poor eyesight (even in glasses), it definitely functions as a disability all on its own and leaves me in need of someone who is physically competent more often than I would care to admit.

This was made into a psychological issue by my siblings being impatient with me not being able to do certain simple things and making me feel bad about even trying to do things myself, let alone giving me the time and space and help I needed in order to laboriously learn to do things.

I sometimes wonder if there’s something wrong with my mirror neurons. Maybe too many of them are devoted to empathy instead of motor skill acquisition.

So unlike the belief in my horribleness, my feeling of helpless physical incompetence does have some basis in reality. I do have a lot of trouble with some things, especially things requiring fine motor control.

To be honest, I’ve never controlled a fine motor in my life. Like a Bentley or a Jag.

But acknowledging my limitations does not require me to hate myself over it. That’s entirely optional and hopefully avoidable in time.

I might want to pursue an official diagnosis, though. It might help me to qualify for additional assistance, such as occupational therapy.

Who know, maybe it’s partly fixable.

Another very toxic belief is that I am worthless. That I am nothing but a liability to the world and to those who love me and, well, you can guess where that leads.

The very bad place.

I know that people like me and value me and want me around. And I know that I am actually a phenomenally talented and capable individual who has an amazing amount to offer the world if I could just get out of my own way.

I know these things and yet I don’t feel them. All my despair and self-loathing has no basis in reality and yet the delusional beliefs remain because they are my only way of expressing certain difficult emotions in myself.

So ridding myself of these toxic beliefs requires finding a different, healthier, less self-destructive outlet for those feelings.

And I don’t know where to go for that.

More after the break.

---

Missing the point

My intuition is saying that there’s toxic beliefs that the above text comes nowhere near addressing. That there’s much deeper and more fundamental delusional beliefs that need to be addressed in order for me to finally clear the bone from my throat and heal.

Obviously, I don’t know what those are yet. But it’s a solid lead.

Come out with your hands up

It just occurred to me that for a lot of my life I have felt surrounded.

Like, as in, cop on a bullhorn shouting, “You’re completely surrounded! There’s no chance you will escape! So come out with your hands up!”

And here I am hunkered down in the one room of the house with no windows, assault rifle in my hands, nowhere near ready to surrender to the god damn cops.

Of course, there’s nobody out there. I’m not surrounded by anything but my own fears and the need to escape them.

And the only way to escape from your fears when they have you surrounded is to withdraw even further into yourself and essentially pretend they are not there.

And I have done this many times over and so I am many, many layers deep into myself. By “choosing” to remain cut off from the world and living in the world of screens, I am fleeing my own inner prosecution and things just keep getting worse and that only makes me withdraw even more.

It’s a terrible cycle. It “works” in that it makes it seem like the bad things have gone away when I am really just filling my mind with video games to displace them.

That’s like the definition of maladaptive.

Practically the entire world of media, as one, yells that I should face my fears and conquer them and I will feel so great and free afterwards.

No doubt this is true. But it doesn’t make it easier to actually do that.

It doesn’t pry the icy fingers of fear from my throat so that it no longer fears like if I face those fears I will die… or worse.

Right now it feels like defying that circuit of fears and aversions that surrounds me would be like tearing off one of my limbs.

And I know that it would probably be worth it.

But I’m scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.