The main takeaway from today’s session was the old familiar “do it anyway”.

That’s what it’s going to take to get myself out of this mile deep rut of mine. I am going to have to let go of the security blanket of video games long enough to look around online for something new for me to do.

Something more job-like. Something to give my life purpose and focus and drive. Something to make me feel like my life is going somewhere at long last.

Something to act as the tugboat to tug me out of these god damned doldrums that have rotted my soul and my mind and my body to the point where I feel like one of the walking dead waiting for death to finally finish the damned job.

That got dark quick.

Something to make me feel like a legit adult and not just an overgrown infant.

Whatever that something might be, it is going to involve me having to feel the waves of anxiety and fear and not let them stop me.

I’ll have to go up, over, or through those waves so I can smash through to the other side and maybe even grow some fuckin’ backbone while I am at it.

I am almost completely lacking in what we used to call “character”. Or “grit”. That ability to grit one’s teeth (hence the name) and fight back against adversity and by doing so overcome it and show it who’s boss.

I have done very little of that in my life.

I haven’t had to. Emphasis on HAD. When I did “have” to because I was going to Kwantlen and then VFS, I got it done.

Of course, I was seven years younger then.

But no… no more god damned excuses. No more always looking for a way out.

Stop trying to escape!

What I am getting at is that I have shown that I can overcome myself and get things that are very difficult for me done when I commit to something.

But the ride has always been on someone else’s bus. Like I said way back even before Kwantlen, the nice thing about school for a wet noodle like me is that once I have enrolled, I don’t have to provide the forward momentum myself.

I just have to show up and be a student. The days of deciding what to do with myself are over until I graduate.

I just have to go and do what I am told. Which is, in both cases, school.,

And I am very good at school.

Everything else is a challenge.

But see, that’s the thing about regular unemployed life. It’s all up to you. You have to provide forward momentum. Not only that, you have to keep trying despite failing over and over and over again until someone finally hires you.

That shit is downright alien to me. I can’t imagine it. I don’t have anywhere even close to the kind of energy and intestinal fortitude that would take.

And yet, to improve my life, I am going to have to find it somewhere.

And that’s going to be incredibly painful and scary and hard. My mental illness is going to fight me like a bear every step of the way and I am going to have to drag it kicking and screaming into the light for this to work.

Come to think of it, it might be kicking and screaming to. Man, this is going to be loud.

More after the break.

There ain’t no easy way out

There ain’t? Shit.

Well then I’m fucked.

What a terrible thing to have to say about yourself, am I right? When you always take the easy way out, you become helpless without one.

Doing things the hard but effective way ain’t even on your radar any more. You will tell yourself the task or challenge is”impossible” when deep down you know damned well it is perfectly possible.

It’s just not easy. Doing it is going to cost you. It’s gonna hurt, be scary, and require an open ended commitment of energy.

As in, “I will do whatever it takes for however long it takes to get X done” kind of thing.

And that has to include the vitally important potential to if it gets harder, you try harder.

As far as I can tell, that’s the difference between losers and winner.

Losers quit. Winners try harder.

I have had it in my head for a long time now that there is always a choice being made when you give up,

You are in effect saying, “This hurts too much or costs me too much. I surrender. ”

Inherent in that is the option to endure instead. It might feel like you had no choice to give up, especially if you have given up so much that you do it without thought, by default, but there is always the possibility of staying in the fight instead of turning tail and running away whimpering.

I have been talking, both here and in therapy, about feeling like I know where I want to go but I can’t find the road that leads me there.

Therefore, I have talking about things like imagination and transcendence and needing to have some kind of crisis or breakdown in order to transcend my current self and finally turn into a god damned butterfly.

But maybe there are all kinds of roads to where I want to go and I just don’t see them because they are all too gosh darn hard for my fragile little self.

So I need to toughen the hell up. And that is going to hurt. And I can waste more years of my life looking for and waiting for an easy way out that does not exist or I can set my sights on finding a painful and scary route that I can live with.

No matter what, it is gonna suck.

But sooner or later, you may have to gnaw off that limb to be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.