Don’t worry, it’s metaphorical. I haven’t discovered any real lumps there yet.
No, what I am talking about is how I get blocked on a subject – overwhelmed – and my usual brilliance gets bogged down by self-doubt and confusion and the result is a kind of mental logjam that blocks my progress until it clears up.
And it WILL clear up, if I just hang in there and give it time. Slowly, I am learning to be less flighty and more inclined to hang in there and fight for what I want instead of giving up the moment things are less than intuitively easy.
Life can’t be like it was when I was a kid and school was super duper easy for me. So easy I didn’t even have to try.
So I never had to learn to persevere past what I thought my limits were. To exceed myself, and thus truly grow as a person.
And even then, when something wasn’t as easy as that for me, like gym or arts and crafts, I just refused to do it. Or did it in a really half assed way.
And I got away with it because I was so bright on the academics.
And, admittedly, because I could be very stubborn and difficult when pushed.
Like, to a point way, way past the kind of resistance other kids could put up when they were being difficult because I was so ferociously bright that the teachers could not intellectually dominate me or make me do anything I didn’t want to do.
And that’s very bad for a child.
Anyhow, the thing that brought this subject up recently was the fun I have been having making (mostly) perverted art via AI image generation.
And whilst playing around with it has been fun, there were a lot of things about the technical side of it that I just did not understand and felt overwhelmed by.
And that is where I got stuck. For more than a week, I was thinking that maybe the subject was “too technical” for me and that I needed someone, like my friend Windchaser who introduced me to AI image generation, to explain it to me.
But I didn’t. Now that I have started reading up on the subject in the Easy Diffusion documentation, I realize that none of it is all that complicated and that therefore the only thing getting in the way of my learning it was a bad first impression of the subject.
It was like I had a lump of ice in my throat and I had to wait for it to melt before I could swallow the new information.
Luckily, in this one case, I had the inherent perverted joy of the dirty toybox that is ther world of furry porn generation to keep me trying until it did.
And that’s not necessarily a one off thing.
Maybe there are other things I want to do that I could do fairly easily if I could just get past the lump in my throat about them.
Food for thought.
More after the break.
Maybe it would be easier to maintain a healthy lifestyle if we thought about it less as doing the right thing for ourselves and more as procrastinating about dying.
The big lump
Of course, for me, the biggest lump in my throat is my Wound.
The one from the primary trauma of being raped when I was 4 years old. I have been trying to digest that trauma for 46 years and I have not had much success.
And it’s the main source of my weakness. A whole lot of me is locked away along with that trauma and that has stunted my personal growth for my entire life.
And that’s a tough thing to try to get over when you’re fifty.
For so much of my life, I’ve just been treading water. Making it through the day. Never giving much thought to where I was going in life or what I wanted to do.
A lot of day just barely hanging on, living the same stupid life of video games and internet and masturbation and naps.
Because all I know how to do is entertain myself.
I’ve never had much of anything else in my life. Just school, and self-amusement. I had jobs when I was younger but never came within a country mile of supporting myself.
Or even trying, really.
I want to be a real grownup some day. Have a job, a relationship, a wider social circle. A career, the respect of my peers, the whole Maslowian pyramid.
But maybe that is not for me. Or if it is, it will come as a byproduct of my finally making something of myself, not as a goal unto itself.
I know I am capable of amazing things in the right milieu. Put me in the right place and watch me shine. I am capable of tremendous creative output, in both quantity and quality, and I have the kind of talents that could lead to both tremendous commercial and critical success because it’s so damned good.
My creative ambition has no limit. I want to make stuff that is so good that it makes the world seem like a better place just for having what I have made in it.
But none of that can happen while I am crippled by this deep and terrible spiritual disability caused by this very old wound of mine.
Until that is overcome, I will continue to limp along, leading a life that gets progressively sadder as I get sicker and sicker because I don’t even have the wherewithal to take care of myself properly.
I get by. That’s about it.
And when I try to seriously think about getting out into the world and making something of myself, as a reality and not just a “thing that is nice to think about”, I feel like I am trying to draw water from a dry well. Whatever it is I need to have within me to be able to do something like that is just not there.
And I’m going nowhere till I find it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.