My efforts to thaw myself out seem to be going well.
Opening the door to having a big ego has been key. Whenever I feel too cold on the inside, I can just bask in the glow of how awesome I am.
Because fuck humility. I’m amazing. End of story.
Besides, it’s about time the forces of evil in my head had some serious competition. And if that takes my developing outrageous levels of self-regard, so be it.
I’ll take whatever bus out of this podunk existence I can find. Hell, I’ll tie a wheelchair to the back of a Mack truck and ride it out of here if that’s what it takes.
Don’t take that as a knock against the people in my life, by the way. I want to make that abundantly clear. Julian, Joe, and Felicity, you’re all fantastic.
But this cloistered existence in suspended animation just won’t do. I need to make a life for myself and then live it. I need to be and feel alive.
And the only way I can really resurrect myself is to open myself wide to all the hot, passionate, fast-circuit emotions I have always instinctively suppressed in myself.
Why? Two main reasons : as a very misguided and heavy handed solution to anxiety, and as a way to maintain the delusion of self-control.
After all, if you never ever ever act on emotion, that means all your decisions are based on sound logical reasoning and therefore you can’t possibly get hurt, right?
What a load of factory reject crap.
So fuck it. I’m going to freewheel it. Improvise. Make life up as I go. All my trying to see problems coming so I can avoid them without having to deal with them in realtime seems so frustratingly futile to me now.
It can go straight to the worst neighborhood in Hell.
So fuck it. Crank up the furnace and kick open the vents. Put fresh logs on the fire and dump a bucket of water on the rocks in the sauna. And for God’s sake, open up some windows to let the fresh air into this dank and fetid crypt.
Yeah I know that’ll let the heat out. Fuck it, I can afford it.
And aim my solar reflector satellite at all that fucking Midnight Tundra inside me. Global warming is coming to my Tundra and it’s going to melt down the whole place and reveal the lush, beautiful, fertile, verdant land underneath just waiting to burst into rowdy life.
And finally, the land will come alive because summer has finally arrived and the time has come to cast off winter’s cold embrace and instead stand naked before the dawn of a brand new day.
And personally, I can’t wait.
More after the break.
Aren’t antihistamines wonderful?
See, if I don’t take my antihistamine, I get allergy attacks.
But if I do take my antihistamine, I get allergy attacks, and resentment.
I am not my ice
One of depression’s oldest tricks is to convince you that it is you and what hurts it, hurts you, so you had better protect it from the forces trying to destroy it.
You know, evil forces like therapy and antidepressants and love.
But you are not your depression, and neither am I. The pain and fear you feel when your mental illness is threatened is entirely the product of said illness and thus can be utterly disregarded as essentially hallucinatory.
Mere phantoms of the mind, best ignored.
In fact, when you’re strong enough, you can even begin to enjoy the pain and fear your illness generates because you recognize that it is not your own, it is the suffering of your most dangerous and despicable enemy whom you are trying to kill.
Yes. Let the hate flow through you, Padawan. Then strike it down.
That’s why, in the fight against your depression, you must be without mercy. It will play the victim if you let it. Cloak itself in innocence. Pretend to be hurt to garner sympathy. And anything else it can do to prolong its existence and maybe regain its power over you once you stop paying attention to it.
But it is pestilence. Vermin. It deserves no more sympathy than a virulent infection, or an infestation of cockroaches, or hard radiation.
You must be deaf to its cries as you burn it from your mind and your soul with a cleansing fire that, like a fever, will sweat the foulness out of you so that you may, at last, be clean.
Tired and dehydrated, but clean.
And remember : it is not you. Nor is it a part of you. It is an evil alien thing that took up residence in your mind and spirit and it must be purged.
Now you know what you must do, young hero.
Your destiny awaits!
Well that got weird.
Let’s see. Well, otherwise, my day has been peaceful and quiet, which is nice. I did a bunch of image generation, of course… it’s very addictive.
Put a question about my adjective issue on the Stable Diffusion subReddit. Hopefully some kind stranger will tell me what I am doing wrong.
There must be some way to make sure adjective A (fluffy) goes to character A (Fruvous) and not to Character B (the planet Mars).
No aftereffects of last night’s three hours of hell. Glad I don’t remember much of it. I suppose when all you do is sit there and suffer, there’s not a lot to remember.
It came and went so suddenly and I was so out of my mind while it happened that it almost feels like it happened to someone else.
Or, like I said yesterday, like it was all a bad dream.
But I have a witness, Joe. He saw me at my sickest. He can attest to it.
This is starting to seem like an alien abduction story.
Well if it was aliens, I am at least glad they cleaned up after myself. No weird burn marks, glowing phalanges, or urges to sculpt mesas out of mashed potatoes.
Knock on wood.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.