First, the vid :
I am glad I have reached this crossroads of revelation about the role chaos and order play in my mental health issues.
Now, I am attempting some cognitive reframing by looking on my immobile soul as a case of order run rampant, like a cancerous tumour of the sole that multiplies and spreads till it compromises the entire organism.
That organism being me.
Within that framework, I can begin desensitizing myself to the chaos and strive to achieve some kind of spiritual balance instead of letting my out of control ego and superego convince me that the only safety is in remaining hidden.
That’s just plain not true. Nobody is hunting me. I am not that scared and upset kid hiding from the rest of the student body in elementary school any more. I am an adult of formidable talent, intellect, verbal muscle, incisive wit, and what the hell, size.
I’m a big boy now. Very big. Elephantine, even.
If someone tried to bully me today, they’d be in for a world of hurt because not only would my cutting remarks leave them standing there with their metaphoric guts hangout out, if they tried getting physical, they would learn that you don’t have to stand to fight if you are large and vicious and dangerously unstable, with a lot of pent up issues they would love to work out on your fucking face.
I’m not kidding.
So yeah. I have nothing to fear. Yeah, I am weird and socially awkward. So are millions of other nerds. There are far worse things to be, and it certainly doesn’t justify being an urban hermit and a recluse who’s afraid of the world.
Plus it’s one of those things that goes away if you just keep trying.
Anyhow, now, on to the actual subject for today.
When I was making my lunch, a tiny thing happened that happens to me all time, but this time I managed to observe it directly immediately after the fact.
What happened was that I was getting an orange out of the crisper of the fridge when the crisper drawer stuck and I had to tug it a few times at different angles before it opened, and in that split second where I was struggling to open it, this entire cycle of humiliation and failure and shame flashed through my mind.
In that flashbulb moment, I tried and convicted myself of being a failure and sucking and felt humiliation and shame at being “caught” and shrank out of public view in order to drag myself off to somewhere I could be alone with my shameful conviction.
All of that in the blink of an eye and all because the crisper drawer did not immediately open for me.
And that’s just plain crazy.
No wonder my self-esteem is crappy when I have that shit playing in my head whenever anything I do is not immediately successful.
I am back at the point of insanity where if you can imagine how it could have gone better, then it wasn’t good enough and you are an abject failure for even trying.
And I can always think of a way things could have gone better.
That is very clearly utterly unacceptable and incredibly insane. And yet I don’t immediately know how to evict these terrible thoughts from my head.
It all happens so fast that cognitive capture seems impossible. By the time I know it’s happening, it’s happened.
I will have to have a good hard think about it.
But for now, I need to take a dang nap.
More after the break.
Relinquishing conscious control
Let’s see if I can articulate this properly, or at least sensibly.
I was a very clumsy kid. As in, tripped over my own feet, walked into walls, dropped things a lot, you name it.
This was one of the things that clued in the administrators that I might have developmental issues of some kind.
Give them credit, they tried to fix me.
Anyhow, I told you that so I can tell you this : my own personal response to my clumsiness was, I think, to try to use what I did have, namely a powerful mind, to dominate my body by concentrating really hard on my movements.
And take it slow, plan things out, anticipate difficulties, etc.
And that helped a lot. But it came at a terrible cost.
Because it meant that every little action I took came with this massive intellectual overhead. Things that in a normal person would be relegated to peripheral consciousness and therefore done without even thinking about it by their patterned reflexes, I was doing by concentrating on it like a chess grandmaster.
Well recently, I have actually started getting over that.
I’ve found myself doing little things without involving the conscious mind at all. Simple things like repositioning my walker when I am making food in the kitchen or checking to see if my phone charger is plugged in happen with so little conscious input that it almost feels like someone else did it.
Stick a pin in that, it probably says something profound about the nature of effort.
And this is a wonderful development. The more these little things are taken over by the body, more or less, the less of a stress and a drain on my mental resources they become, and the easier my life is.
And that reduces my overall stress level and with it my anxiety. So I hope this trend continues and lets me live a less anxious and more comfortable life.
Turns out the conscious mind doesn’t have to do everything. We have reflexes and muscle memory and peripheral consciousness to handle some things.
Turns out the body knows stuff. Imagine that.
Getting comfortable in your own skin is a complicated process.
But lordy lordy, do I need it!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.