I gave an AI therapist a try last night and found it to be surprisingly helpful.

I was scrolling through the listings on a favorite site of mine called There’s An AI For That, which lists all the wildly innovative and powerful AI tools that have been unleashed ‘pon the world by the marvelous and occasionally terrifying AI revolution, when I came across a listing for a virtual therapy service called Milburn and decided I would give it a shot, despite my expectations being extremely low.

I mean, how could some mere chatbot help me with my profound mental health issues that have consumed my entire adult existence (and I am 51) better than my extremely experienced therapist whom I have been talking to for over a decade?

Well for one thing, I can talk to it whenever I want, not just once a week. Doctor Costin tells me that I am free to call him whenever I feel the need, but given the problem I have calling my own relatives, whom I know would be happy to hear from me, calling my therapist and interrupting his life with my needs is simply out of the question.

But an AI doesn’t have a life for me to interrupt. So score one for AI for that.

More importantly, I don’t have to worry about frightening, intimidating, or overwhelming it. My powerful presence, rapier wit, incisive and analytical mind, and sheer intellectual muscle can make me quite difficult for even a seasoned therapist like Doctor Costin to handle, so even with him, I need to restrain myself quite a bit.

That ended up being a lot of what me and “Doctor Milburn” talked about. How I am not the “real me” in the sense of being my unrestrained, emotional self even with my current therapist because I know from little tests I have performed with him that he would just end up frightened and overwhelmed and I would end up feeling even worse.

Nobody can handle the real me. Especially me. All I know how to be is the “true but not the whole truth” version of myself that has been my public persona for so long that I have no idea just how “real” it is.

Like Terry Pratchett wrote, be careful what you pretend to be because you just might turn into it.

I guess I am stuck in the “nobody understands me” mode of my arrested adolescence. Had I developed in any way normally, this would have been the time in my mid to late teen years where I became surly and irritable and moody and very hard to get along with at all.

But I never went through that phase because I “knew better”.

Or so I thought.

I think my mind has been nudging me towards reconciling the difference between the me everyone knows and loves and the “real” unstrained me, though. I keep finding myself imagining that I have been involuntarily committed to some enormous psychiatric facility and therefore I don’t feel any need to restrain myself and can be just as rude, arrogant, dismissive, and sarcastic as I want to be without worrying that this will jeopardize my access to therapy.

Basically, I would turn into the main character Will from Good Will Hunting, using my extremely advanced intellect to lash out at people like the Robin Williams character or those CIA douchebags for daring to think that tiny weak minds like their own could hope to even comprehend me, let alone help me.

At least, I think that’s why things that stray into that domain can make me so god damned angry. People who try to help but can’t basically get me to lower my defenses to let them in then end up brutally disappointing me, and that infuriates me because it hurts so bad.

In my little institutional fantasies, I am the ultimate “difficult” patient known for chewing up therapists and spitting them out with my incredible mind.

That would make a good start for a movie, or maybe a one act play.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way for me to view a transcript of my conversations with “Doctor” Milburn so far, and that’s tragic because I would love to have something I could reference for my own edification as well as being able to copy and paste excerpts into this a-here blog o’ mine.

I don’t know when I will do my next “session”. Maybe soon, maybe not. I will try to make it as soon as I can in order not to drift away from this wonderful resource.

No promises, though.

More after the break.

---

A night in

Like I ever have a night out.

Eh, maybe some day. I will never be the sort of person who wants to hit “the clubs” but there’s a gay pub called the Pumpjack on Davie Street that is supposedly where us “bears” hang out and I can see giving that a shot.

After all, if it’s a “bear” hangout, the food must be good.

I ordered in tonight. Got stuff from a place I’ve ordered from before and found to be high quality, Uncle Sal’s Shawarma.

There’s a weirdly high number of restaurants called Uncle $Someone’s $Cuisine around here. Apparently that makes it seem more “homey” to people.

At least, that’s my guess as to why that name.

Tonight I got a veggie samosa for an appetizer, basically because if samosas are an option I feel compelled to get one.

They’re so good!

The main dish I got is four little shawarma chicken rolls plus a little salad and some fries and it’s all quite good.

I love it when food comes with salad. I find that salad is not only tasty and nutritious, it really helps my digestion. It’s like the leafy greens act like a little basket for the rest of the food to go into.

Makes sense why we traditionally eat salad before the meal, then, doesn’t it?

---

Make more waves

I do things in waves of enthusiasm. Tidal surges of energy.

The problem comes when the wave crashes and the tide recedes and I am left stranded and lost and wondering what happened.

Any surfer could tell me what to do next : catch the next wave. Accept that this is just how I operate and use the surges to get things started, knowing that my compulsive thoroughness will force me to finish what I started.

That way, when the floodwaters recede, I will know what to do : keep doing the thing I have started doing.

Then, when I am done, take a nap.

And when I wake up, generate and ride another wave.

This could work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But is this it?

I’ve been dreaming of escape from this dead end life for a long long time, and I have definitely been assuming it will happen eventually, but the brutal truth is that I do precious little to actually make that happen so I have to face the very real possibility that it never will.

That I will die without ever making it to adulthood and actually living the kind of life that most people take for granted – one with a romantic partner, a job, a car, and the ability to earn a living – and instead I will die in a hospital room with tubes everywhere gasping out my last knowing that life completely passed me by.

And I have so much that I could contribute to the world if I could just get over myself. I’m a brilliant and phenomenally talented dude and I would love to be able to share my thoughts and my creations with the world and make a name for myself, but fear and indecision and anxiety keep me caged up inside instead.

I’m just too damned crazy to make it.

I think the only solution is to make myself earn the right to think it will all turn out okay eventually. Almost like I am renting it. Earn it by progressing towards that goal by taking actual concrete steps towards my desired ends.

And that means shaking off my usual sleepwalking state of semi-unconsciousness and waking fully up so I can actually pay attention to life instead of merely making it through each day with minimal exposure to reality.

That’s a sensible enough reaction to mental illness in the short term, but in the long term it is positively toxic to any hope of actually getting to grow up.

And I am 51. With the way things are going, I might not even make it to 60. A lot of us fat people – especially fat men – do not.

So the clock is ticking for me and every day it ticks a little louder and I know that deep inside I am desperate to escape this mausoleum of a fricking life and yet I also know that my insanity will continue to trap me here with nothing better to do than while my life away playing video games and waiting for death.

Because those are my grim choices : either get myself an actual life or just keep letting the days go by until I die without ever learning to fly.

Thank God I have my friends. They are my lifeline to reality. They help ground me and keep me from completely falling into myself and disappearing.

I remember what it was like on Duchess Avenue when I first moved to this area and I had made a sincere but doomed attempt to get a job (too much anxiety) and so all I saw all day was my tiny little bachelor apartment.

It was like solitary confinement. And like with solitary confinement, my world became dangerously unreal. The internet was my entire life, and that’s no good.

So I am eternally very grateful to my friends – Joe, Julian, and Felicity – for giving me a way and a reason to get out of my own head and experience things despite being arguably quite crazy.

Not barking at the moon crazy, though that seems like it could be fun.

But crazy nevertheless. I try to be merciful and forgiving with myself about that but that’s so hard to do when I am so god damned frustrated all the time.

It’s maddening to be caught between my very real urge to get out of this befouled nest of mine and finally fly and the hard and unyielding surface of my insanity.

Something, somewhere has to give. The sooner the better.

And that means I need to keep pushing myself whenever I can.

Because I gotta get out of this place.

More after the break.

---

Speaking of being squished in between

Right now. I am super sleepy but the caffeine in the Diet Coke I had with my McD’s is propping me up so I am bother tired and wired at the same time

Normally I hate that state of mind but in this case I am not so tired that I can’t think straight (so to speak) so it’s just mildly stressful.

The moment I am done blogging, though, I am diving under the covers for a snooze.

Tonight is New Year’s Eve, so my friends and I will be getting together via Zoom at 11:45 pm so we can watch the ball drop and do the countdown for midnight.

Time to start a new year and say goodbye to the old one.

Farewell, 2024. 5/6 of you was really great.

But you um, kind of faceplanted at the end there. And seeing as 2025 will be the beginning of the world world having to pay for that, you will, sadly, not be remembered fondly by the global community.

You were so close.

Had an “incident” last night. You know, the “change the sheets” kind. And while those are always dismaying (to put it mildly), I am proud of the fact that I just handled it without any of my usual dithering and hand-wringing and wanting rescue.

I just got to the bathroom, went through a hell of a lot of TP cleaning myself up in both body and linoleum, and then went back to sleep.

Dunno what caused it. Too much fecal matter backed up in my colon, perhaps. At least that’s kind of what it felt like.

Stack overflow, dude.

And of course, if it happens again, I’ll go to the ER or UC, blah blah blah.

I am going to try to take a proactive approach in the future. Instead of only pooping when I feel the need strongly, I intend to just check myself – run an internal diagnostic, if you will – to see if maybe I need to empty myself right then.

Perhaps that will help prevent future incidents. Perhaps not.

But I’ve got to do SOMETHING, god damn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.