Another Patrick Teahy video :
And anothner set of notes taken while watching it :
My signs of survival mode :
Tiredness and lethargy
Not thinking I am able to ask for help
Depression and anxiety
Brain fog – just getting through the day
Numbness and stuckness – so much stuckness
Active strategies : vidya gamesWhat led me to survival mode : getting taken out of college
The key is to re build a sense of security. Daunting.
1.What is triggering survival mode? I am waiting for things to get better without actually thinking things will get better. What triggers me is hard to say because I am triggered more or less constantly.
2. Do something physical to release the trigger, Beat something up while voicing our pain to release it. Scared to do so. Maybe I can do it here.
3. Connect and talk about it – I find myself feeling that this would be pointless. Which suggests a lack of faith in Doctor Costin, I suppose. And/or humanity.
4. Come up with a reasonable plan (???).
Oh, the usual crap about goal setting. Goal setting requires hope. He wants me to come up with something like, “I will look for jobs on UpWork” or “I will try to meet new people online” or ‘I will clean my room”.
Yeah bullshit. No I won’t. I won’t do a god damned thing and it’s pointless to pretend otherwise. All that can lead to is disappointment and depression. I am stuck as fuck, like a bug trapped in amber.
As you can tell, I am not in the best of moods.
Let’s go through this bit by bit :
My signs of survival mode :
Tiredness and lethargy
Not thinking I am able to ask for help
Depression and anxiety
Brain fog – just getting through the day
Numbness and stuckness – so much stuckness
Active strategies : vidya games
Nothing revolutionary there, though seeing it all in one place like that is sobering.
What led me to survival mode : getting taken out of college
No duh. Happened more than 25 years ago and I am still fucked up by it. I managed to pull myself out of a total nervous and physical breakdown to get to the level of sanity I have now, and have gone no further.
The key is to re build a sense of security. Daunting.
Daunting indeed. But I don’t feel like it’s impossible. Safety is the truth, after all. I am safe, I am fine, there are no bullies in my life, everything is cool.
So it’s just a matter of convincing my scared little animal of that. Poor pet.
1.What is triggering survival mode? I am waiting for things to get better without actually thinking things will get better. What triggers me is hard to say because I am triggered more or less constantly.
Well that’s not true. I might be depressed all the time but I am not triggered all the time.
The one thing I can think of that triggers me is disappointment. That can send me on a downward spiral like nothing else.
So I try not to get my hopes up. But that’s toxic too. I need inspiration and enthusiasm. I smother under wet blankets.
The only other solution is to just get crushed enough to get used to it. To build my faith in my own ability to get right back up and keep fighting.
That seems doable.
2. Do something physical to release the trigger, Beat something up while voicing our pain to release it. Scared to do so. Maybe I can do it here.
I am gonna try this tomorrow night, when I have the apartment to myself. I will beat up some pillows and vent about my shitty upbringing.
I agree with Patrick about the kick starting thing. But I am still terrified of my own anger because there is so much of it and it is so volatile.
But if I have to go a little crazy with anger to become sane, it’s worth it.,
3. Connect and talk about it – I find myself feeling that this would be pointless. Which suggests a lack of faith in Doctor Costin, I suppose. And/or humanity.
It’s true. I have very little faith that connecting with someone and explaining my problems to them will be rewarding enough to be worth making myself vulnerable like that. All I expect from the world when I do that is terrified incomprehension.
Even from Doctor Costin. Even he can’t withstand the power of my darkness and I have never even shown twenty percent of it to him.
That’s why I vent here, alone, in nice safe words that are not amplified by my megawatt power of personality and projecting empathy.
There’s nobody to disappoint you if you’re talking to yourself.
Sorry for the format break :
4. Come up with a reasonable plan (???).
Oh, the usual crap about goal setting. Goal setting requires hope. He wants me to come up with something like, “I will look for jobs on UpWork” or “I will try to meet new people online” or ‘I will clean my room”.
Mostly covered it above. I don’t make promises to myself that I know that I can’t keep. Whether or not I have any motive power is a matter of chance. Neurochemical roulette. Most of the time, all I can do is hang on.
My main hobby is not killing myself.
Takes up a lot of my time.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
The quest for the card
Whoa doggie, what a hassle a free gift can be!
So as I mentioned before, a very nice fur named Jaekob is donating his old graphics card (GPU) to me.
Turns out it’s an ” Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 ti”, whatever THAT means.
Well I caught him online today and it turned out he had already sent the card to me via UPS but it was stuck for some reason.
Turns out it was two reasons. The big one was that the import tax and duties had to be paid on it.
To the tune of $255. Yikes. Kinda makes me wish I knew someone in one of those towns near the Canadian border with BC so I could have had it shipped to them then got them to quietly smuggle it up here for like $100.
There was brief hope of not having to pay that because Jaekob recalled that you didn’t have to pay import fees on gifts.
That was quickly dashed when I looked up the regs and a) it would have to have been declared a gift when he shipped it, no changing it after, and b) it only covers gifts up to $60 CDN in value anyhow.
And as it turns out, when I looked up the “Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3080 ti” on Amazon, I learned that they go for between $1200 CDN and $1800 CDN .
So the decision to pay the dang fees was a pretty easy one. Holy crap.
Luckily, I had just barely enough money left on last month’s credit card to cover the fees, so that hurdle was cleared.
That left the other problem, namely that something had gone wrong with the address. They needed to have it updated.
This time I made extra special sure to give Jaekob my address properly, and he was able to relay it to the UPS person he was on the phone with.
So in theory, everything is green for go now.
But on this side of the border at least, I am still getting “address info needed”. So I can’t relax about it just yet.
Because of course I can’t. That would be too easy.
I am probably going to have to call the 1-800 line. And I don’t like phoning.
I like emailing. Way less socially stimulating.
Update : Found the email address. Yay!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.