My imagination has stalled. I am having the hardest time thinking of anything interesting to write about. I’m turning the key, but the engine ain’t turning over. Turn.
If this keeps up, I might end up having to talk about my “life” in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Instead, let’s attempt a sort of “where am I in life” report.
I know that there are plausible pathways out of my current morass. Writing contests, trying to get an agent, hell maybe even emailing some of my old instructors to see if they have forgiven me for being kinda gross yet.
Actually, I think my real crime with them was that I challenged their authority. Unlike the millennials who were my classmates, I wasn’t desperate for their approval, I had my own mind and my own opinions, and I even dared to disagree with them now and then.
Worst of all, I talked to them like we were equals. Not in a snobby way or a suck-up way, but the truth is that I was the same age or older than most of them, and I have always spoken with a certain kind of unstated self-assurance, and I think that made me seem like a threat to them.
They refused to recommend me for any jobs in their field because they were scared of me. Is what I am saying.
In my defense, I talk to everyone like they’re an equal. It’s the only way I know how to relate to people. I show deference to those “above” me but with the clear message that I am choosing to defer out of politeness and/or respect, not that I believe myself to be in any way inferior to them.
And that pisses some people – weak people – right off.
Some people simply cannot handle equality. Zero sum types who think everything is a matter of hierarchy or some such nonsense.
I pity those people.
OK, tangent over. I know there are ways out, is what I was saying.
And I know there’s never going to be an escape route easy and safe enough that it doesn’t require me to overcome fear, anxiety, and all the rest.
That whole “you can’t get there from here” thing I have talked about, where I feel like there is no route I can see for me to get from where I am to where I want to go, assumes a fixed sense of self where I could never acquire a greater ability to travel to my desired destination.
Either I can do it right now, and very easily, or it’s literally impossible for me.
What a depressingly limited and limiting point of view.
And I don’t have to accept it. I can do more. I can BE more. For my whole life, I have been told I had all this potential waiting to be used.
So why not use it? Why not expand both my self and my sense of self and what I am capable of doing?
There is so much more to me than what I am right now.
The real me is strong, confident, decisive, brave, and rolls with the punches.,
This sad creature that I am right now is just a temporary waypoint. A place to rest before getting back into the fight.
And I can – and will – be better than what I am.
In a sense, I already am.
More after the break.
To live is to grow
Therefore, stasis is death.
That’s something that I have always believed. And a shallow interpretation of my life, in which I have changed very little for the last 25 years,. would call me a hypocrite.
But my life is a cramped but cozy tomb. I have been trapped here for decades and it has led to my rotting from within. In many ways, I feel like one of the walking dead.
I have been sleepwalking through life for so long that it’s as though I am dead. Or worse, in some kind of deep and terrible self-hypnotic trance.
TOo be honest, I often feel like I am in a trance. And I hate that idea. I want to be awake and alive and experiencing life, warts and all.
But I am also too scared to wake up. To truly be awake, without the numbness and the brain fog and the endless labyrinth of my mind to protect me, would be such a radical increase in stimulation levels that to my current mind it seems like it would smash my brittle state of mind like a hammer.
And maybe that’s right. Maybe it really would shatter my mind. Maybe I would even go full on crazy for a while.
But that’s not fatal. And at least I would have a change to build back better.
Maybe that would be the hard reset that my mind really needs. That cold restart that is what the urge to commit suicide truly represents.
I don’t want to die. I just want to stop. To completely silence my mind so that I can finally truly rest in peace.
I would prefer to get back up when I am done.
Makes me ponder a radical therapy for the suicidally depressed where you tell them you are administering a lethal dose of chemicals, but in reality you are putting them into a medically induced coma in which you monitor their brain activity for any disturbances that should not be present in a dormant mind, and treat those.
The patient then wakes up feeling fresh and new and clearheaded for the first time in a long time, and hopefully feels a new zeal for living.
Whether or not they wake up in a coffin during a fake funeral is optional.
Back to the point that I was making.
Wait wait, don’t tell me, I’ll figure it out myself….
Let’s say what I was angling towards was the revelation that an annihilation level mental event might be just what my mind needs in order to get the space and time to heal.
I am honestly too stable for my own good. I have amply proved that I can stay exactly as I am now for an indefinite amount of time.
Till the day I die, even. However far away that is.
Ergo I don’t technically need to change. And the default setting for all human beings is to only change when we have to, not because we want to.
But I want to change. This crummy little life of mine just ain’t good enough any more. In fact, I outgrew it a long time ago, and I have been all cramped up inside from trying to stay in that tiny little shell for far too long.
Time to hatch already.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.