This song is the soundtrack to his diary entry.

It’s been a so-so day. It was okay until I took an afternoon nap and it turned into one of those mind baking deep dreaming strangling in the dark bullshit naps, where I wake up and don’t even know my name or what year it is until I manage to scramble my brains together.

The theory that it is unused mental energy building up that causes or triggers these episodes is gain credence. Figuring this out from the inside, as it were, is difficult, but the excess mental energy or creative potential theory would explain a lot. For one thing, it would explain that feeling of “load reduction” that I get as my sleep catches up with the phenomenon. And so forth, and so on.

Otherwise, it’s been an OK day. Right now, I am really concentrating on switch my mental polarity to positive again. I have realized that part of why I was not very happy recently is that I had fallen into the trap of beating myself about what I should be doing, which is a negative hell of thinking. It appears, superficially, to be at least somewhat sensible. After all, if you feel bad about what you are not doing, that will give you all the incentive you need to do those things and stop feeling bad…. right?

And maybe that is how it works for healthy people, but for us depressive types, it flows in another direction.

The feeling bad about not doing something is like a punishment, and we react to pain by withdrawing further into ourselves, and doing as little as possible, because in the calculus of the chemical reasoning which holds us in its power, you escape the pain by pulling in and holding still, like a turtle going into its shell.

And obviously, if the problem is “I feel bad for not doing something“, an ingrained response which says “do even less” is, to put it very mildly, maladaptive.

And the only solution for this paradox is to attack the process at its only vulnerable spot : the self-recrimination that is the self-generated pain input that starts the whole thing off.

So I need to rid myself of this whole “should” mentality. “Should” is a dead end for someone like me. “Should” just leads to “doesn’t” and then we go rapidly down the cycle of depressive self-hatred and feeling like you are drowning in should, getting so far behind you will never catch up, and hence despair, and give up even more, and feel even worse, and so forth and so on till, like me, you are practically immobile.

So, enough of that bullshit. There is no “should”. My life is my own, to do wish as I please, and if I choose not to do a god damned thing except spend my days in mental masturbation, that is my choice, and it is completely unnecessary to apply the harsh whip of “should” to myself, because I am doing what I want to do, and there’s nobody who can tell me what I “should” be doing but me.

And I hereby declare that what I “should” do is what I want to do. The two are the same.

Now, wanting things is far healthier. Doing what you want to do requires no motivation, no willpower, no effort, no investment, no belief in the future. Doing what you want to do is immediately gratifying and every time you do it, it ac tually strengthens your will because it adds valuable positive input to your.

Input that says “You CAN have what you want. You DO have power in the world. You CAN seek and receive pleasure. You can do it, and you deserve to do it, so GO DO IT!”

In many ways, this is a process of deliberately reducing oneself to the mindset of a child, before you had obligations, chores, responsibilities, or even much sense of the future. When all you were interested in was doing what seemed fun.

I think it can be very helpful to reconnect with that kid, no matter how far back you have to go.

And the thing is, if you feed yourself enough positive reinforcement, you will become a happier person, and the tension and pain of your life will relent and your world, your very own semi-subjective world in which you live by yourself, will seem friendlier and less hostile, and your will emerge stronger because it has been rewarded for expressing itself, and you will actually get that mystical “willpower” that you think you lack.

In the long run, giving up on “should” will be far more effective in accomplishing the things you feel you “should” do than beating yourself up with “should” ever did.

The trick is convincing the bad programming in your brain that this is true. When it comes to convincing yourself that trying less hard and putting down the whip will actually increase your productivity, counterintuitive is a vast understatement. The simplistic punitive model is highly seductive and seems logical if you take a narrow enough view of it.

But the real system is far more complex than “the beatings will continue until morale improves”.

Happy people are productive. Unhappy people are not. If you want to make yourself a productive person, you have to make yourself a happy person first. You can’t withhold your own happiness until you do something that your very unhappiness makes it nearly impossible to do. That’s a recipe for failure.

So I have to ignore the voices in my head that say “spare the rod and spoil the inner child” and concentrate instead on what I want.

And I want a lot of things, fame glory and cash from writing being one of the big ones.

“I guess I should do X… ” is weak sauce, and poisonous to boot.

“I want X and I am willing to do what it takes to get it!” is powerful voodoo, and a lot more fun, too.

Working on it.