But then again, you already knew that, didn’t you?

Here’s the latest reason why :

I guess that’s what happens when I am talking, slightly nervous, and my hands aren’t busy typing or using the mouse.

Anyhow, so, yeah. Problem not solved, god dammit. Turns out my current power supply matches the specs that website’s power supply calculator gave me, and does so at a higher rating than the one I bought, so back to Amazon goes the new one.

Once more I must remind myself that while brilliant, and deep, I am not wise when it comes to actually living life and I might just be one of those people that has to learn where the walls are by crashing into them at speed.

What the hell. Might as well keep on trying.

What I really want to talk about today, though, is my learned helplessness. I touched upon in yesterday’s blog entry and afterwards decided that, given how hard it is for me to talk about it, I should talk about it.

Nobody ever said self-therapy was easy.

I know that I learned my helplessness at an early age. As the youngest of four, giving up and waiting for someone to come along and do it for me was a viable strategy.

After all, odds are that someone was going to come along and take it away from me and do it themselves without having the patience to teach me to do it so they didn’t have to do it for me any more anyway.

But obviously this does not teach a person rugged self-reliance. Like I have mentioned before, I had no competent father figure to teach me to persevere, surmount obstacles, overcome my own limitations, and take risks.

So the helplessness pattern persisted. And now I am 52 and there is still some deep and vital part of my mind that feels like my only chance for survival is, like I said yesterday, to remain appealingly helpless and clumsy so that some adult might come along and rescue me from myself.

Not gonna happen, obviously, but that part of my mind that thinks that way is pretty major and it remains stubbornly stuck in that mode.

And it’s a major obstacle to my quest to become a real live human adult, with a job and everything, just like everybody else.

There is a soothing fatalism to helplessness. After all, if there’s nothing you can do, then you don’t have to do anything. You can end up like me, brain the size of a planet but stuck playing stupid fucking video games all day because your brain is wired for anxiety like it’s booby-trapped trenches and even the tiniest toe tap into new, grownup type territory makes you panic like your ass is on fire.

It isn’t. I just checked.

I know I’m not truly helpless in any logical, sane way. I have enormous power in this mega-mind of mine and there’s all kinds of things I can do. I could be a total whiz at so many things if I could just get over myself and get out there.

Even if it has to be through screens.

But I am just so scared of everything. And far too accustomed to this super passive life of mine. And too weak of character to do much about it but keep doing like I do and occasionally poking my head out to look for some way out of this hole I am in that would actually work for me.

I guess the real problem is that with my mental health burdens, merely longing for true adulthood does not provide nearly enough motivation to overcome the intense friction and inertia that depression represents.

And I am still far too withdrawn into myself, and terrified of extending myself into the harsh hard vacuum that lies outside my teeny tiny realm.

It all makes me feel so…. helpless.

And I am shockingly okay with that.

More after the break.

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The opposite of withdrawal

Let’s call it “advancement”.

That’s what I lack. I only know how to withdraw further into myself. What advancement I do manage on my own tends to be extremely tenuous and hesitant and my little tentacles are ready to retract back into me like a measuring tape when you press the button at the slightest stimulus.

And then, odds are, you will not see them come out again for a very long time.

Hence my being such a timid creature overall. Any moves I make towards that big beautiful world out there are opposed by this overwhelming inward tide that screams at me that out there lies only doom and only in seclusion can there be safety.

And it’s wrong, of course. But it’s also very loud.

It’s like having a smoke detector that is way, way too sensitive.

Yeah, you know full well that there’s no fire.

But you still ain’t making any toast.

When I visualize my frightened self, a very very harsh imagine of some fragile fractured creature with the stumps of tentacles burned all the way down to the nub sticking out of it just sitting there, shivering in shock and pain, unable to do anything else.

God, that’s harsh and depressing. But that’s the image my mind gave me.

And it fits. I wish it didn’t, but it does.

That’s how being raped when I was 4 years old left me and then being ignored and resented by my family and bullied in school only shriveled my tentacles even further until I was, like I have said many times, a robot who went to school.

And that’s how I am right now, too. Just a terrified and shell-shocked creature hiding deep within myself with my back turns to the world because the world is pain and badness and all I know how to do is hide away from it.

And until I can convince my critter it’s okay to come out, that’s where I will stay.

But it feels good to get a lot of that bad stuff out on the page, at least.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.