That’s a Hamlet quote.

The full thing is :

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Hamlet, act 2, scene 2

…and what got me thinking about it (sic) is that always vexing problem of mine of thinking versus feeling.

I had been pondering something or other and found myself stuck in a sort of logic loop without any ability to resolve it, and then the Shakespeare line popped into my head.

A lot of things in my life have been bad because thinking made them so.

That’s the heavy price you pay when you take the whole “logical” point of view way too far. The very habits of thought that you once embraced as your salvation from the chaotic and unstable world of emotion end up being the weapons used by your mental illness to hurt you because you inherently trust them.

I’ve trusted my rational intuition and powers of analysis and especially my own judgment for my entire life.

In fact, it could reasonably said that I have trusted very little else. I certainly have never put anyone else’s judgment and/or understanding ahead of my own.

I will certainly put other people’s knowledge before my own. In the grand Western tradition, I know enough to know how little I know.

But I will make up my own mind about things every single time, with no exceptions. In that one sense, I don’t think anyone “knows better than me”.

In fact, when it comes to rational judgment, most people know a lot worse than me.

Compared to me, they are blind lemmings fumbling in the dark.

And what has all this ruggedly noble steel belted rationalism got me?

30 years of failing to launch. And counting.

Because in the end, it takes so very little into account while brashly acting as though it is the master of the fucking universe and understands everything.

And there is nothing quite like thinking you know everything to keep you ignorant of just how ignorant you are.

This brutal truth machine in my mind might be good at applying overwhelming force with pinpoint precision when it comes to figuring out how things work and how it all fits together, but that does nothing to make me any happier or healthier.

Rather the opposite, in fact. Its inherent lack of mercy leads me to brutalize my own emotional self over and over again as my headlong pursuit of The Truth ™ pulls me through knothole after knothole without so much as a pause to recover.

I can’t say that I know how to fix that. We are talking about the fundamentals of how I understand the world and my place in it, and that’s not easy to change.

But I feel like I have taken the first little baby steps towards true enlightenment by admitting to myself and the world that. to borrow from the Bard again, that there are more things on Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

And that means I am open to new forms of understanding that owe little to nothing to logical consistency, solid evidence. or any form of analysis at all.

If I am going to be happy I need to learn to see the world outside the cold and cruel cage of reason and embrace the technicolor warmth of the world outside my cell.

There are sun soaked summer days full of love and laughter waiting for me to get the fuck over myself and get out there to enjoy them.

I can hardly wait.

More after the break.

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What is Dark Disco?

This is, apparently.

I can dig it.

What do slugs speak?

For some reason, the moment I most recently stopped playing Baldur’s Gate 3, this wave of lethargy and sluggishness came over me.

It feels quite gross. Like suddenly my veins are full of cold maple syrup. Both my head and my heart feel heavy and dragged down, and it’s getting hard to think.

It’s also getting hard to… make the words with my…. brain… thingy.

I really hope this is not the onset of another attack of flu-like symptoms only a couple of weeks after the last one.

Each one leaves me weaker than before. I haven’t even adjusted to the last one yet.

But I feel distinctly unwell and that worries me greatly.

I did manage to make an appointment with Doctor Chao today, though. Next Tuesday, the 22nd, on the phone, between 3 pm and 5 pm.

I figured a phone appointment would be sufficient because I am not telling him anything new, just reminding him that he still has no idea what is happening with my muscles.

And this time, I swear, I will stand firm and not give in to make things easier for him and I will stick to my guns until I get some kind of satisfactory answer.

My needs come first, dammit, and his needs are his own responsibility.

The line between me and other people can get so blurry sometimes, and the urge to go for the quick empathic hit of making life easier for someone else at the expense of my own self-interest can be very hard to resist.

Which makes me hella tricky to be around, I guess. Because even someone with the best of all possible intentions can’t ever know if I am advocating for my own needs or just telling them what they want to hear.

I can’t tell the difference either. Not while it’s happening. That’s why it is so hard for me to advocate for myself and advance my own interests.

I’m like a reverse sociopath.

I wonder if I would be better off doing doctor’s appointments via email. Or Discord. Something that takes the pressure of immediacy away and lets me think about my answers and remember that I am a person, not a mirror empath.

Sometimes, advocating for myself will make people unhappy, and I will feel that unhappiness via empathy, but I will steel my heart against it.

Because I have needs, god dammit, and I am going to get them met for once.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.