This is one of my fave bands of all time, but this sentiment pisses me off :

You know, all that “carpe diem” “seize the day” bullshit.

Sorry, Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society, but some of us are just not built that way. If I tried to live for the moment I would be a nervous wreck within seconds.

I need to consider the future ramifications of all my actions and choose what I think will be the best outcomes in order to be able to sleep at night. Without that, life becomes far too random and uncontrolled and I just want to run away and hide until things make some kind of sense to me again.

And what does “seize the day” even mean, anyhow? What day? Seize how? With what? A lifetime spent lunging for whatever seemed like it would make you happier for the moment sounds like a recipe for constant stress and inevitable disaster to me.

I need order and predictability in my life. I need to have at least a solid idea of what is going to happen or I would not have the courage to get out of bed.

I’m the sort of person who, when I was a kid and one of the kid’s shows I watched would say it took place in a world “where anything could happen”, my reaction wasn’t “yay!” but “OH GOD NO!”.

Because that means a lot of previously impossible things are now a possibility. Your mom could explode. Your teeth could all fall out. The world could plunge into the sun.

In fact, I have a lot of trouble imagining the mindset to whom that sounds good. It would require the assumption that only very, very good stuff has now been made possible , which is not what “anything can happen” means at all.

And patient readers know how I feel about Oprah’s “live your best life” horseshit.

That sounds like a formula for neurotic collapse to me. Oh, now I need to constantly worry and wonder if I could be living better? How the hell would I even know whether I am living my best life or not? By whose standards? What kind of empty brained Hollywood bullcrap are you selling, Oprah?

How about letting people just lead lives that seem good enough at the time? How about getting them to focus on eliminating things that make them unhappy instead of constantly trying to beat their own happiness high score? Letting them concentrate on living their life without crippling doubt about whether it’s their “best” one?

Same with “living life to the fullest”. What does THAT even mean? Fullest of what, exactly? According to whom? And how does one calculate this metric?

And what do you do when you realize you have been failing this test your entire life and will continue to fail it because it sets an impossible standard for “good enough”?

Oh sure, I am happy. But could I be happier? Probably. Well then you aren’t living life to the fullest ergo you FAIL FAIL FAIL.

God damn it, people, ignore the vacuous bullshit emitted by all the horse’s asses in the world who would die if they knew your kind of pain for even one second and just try to relax and find things you like to do.

It’s no wonder that I am still depressed when all the advice that is supposed to help me is this fucking STUPID.

And see, this is how I know nobody can help me because if I didn’t control myself, anyone who tried to help me would get this kind of response from me, and that would be a lot more likely to assassinate THEIR happiness than it is to spark mine.

None of you brain dead sheep can help me. So just leave me the hell alone.

More after the break.

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My point is….

… that I am a very angry and bitter person deep down.

And as my therapist keeps rightly pointing out, I am going to have to deal with that shit if I am to make real progress towards being mentally well.

And that’s a hell of a cross to bear for me because I very much do not want to deal with all that bitterness and anger. Those emotions frighten me with their power and their potency and the things they make me want to do.

And they clash violently with the Mister Super Nice Guy image I have of myself. Anger? Bitterness? Sarcasm? Me? No no, you must be mistaken. I’m just a cute little waggy tailed foxy, huggable and lovable and completely nonthreatening and harmless.

And like I always say, that’s absolutely true. I am that person. Everything you see there is a genuine part of me.

But it’s not all of me. Not by a longshot.

It’s my brilliant disguise. My smooth façade. The costume so form fitting and lifelike that I can forget I am wearing a costume at all and pretend that it’s the real me.

And it is. But it also…. isn’t.

And trust me, the “real” me, the scared little animal hiding in the deep darkness within my very core with its paws on the controls, does not like that I am talking about this and drawing attention to its existence.

Well too bad, lil fluff. I am emptying out my all too commodious Jungian shadow, and that includes your little hidey hole.

Trust that I am only doing this because I think it’s my only path to sanity, and that I will love and cherish and protect you through all the scary times coming for both of us.

We need to step out of the shadows and be seen.

Even though, to our core, it feels like that would be worse than death.

It is the fate too horrible to imagine. An annihilation level event. The total destruction of the world that came before it.

Time to tear down the Wall.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Sorry I didn’t warn you about the video containing some of the most brilliantly disturbing animation of all time, but it really would have fucked up the flow of what I was writing. Really shows just how fucked up the British warchild generation was, eh?)