Still pondering my exit from a tense, anxious, crisis based bunker mentality to something more mellow and harmonious and relaxed.
I know it won’t be an easy or quick transition. For one thing, it will require me finding different ways to express my energies.
Right now, my energies go mostly unexpressed except, I suppose, the ones involved in playing video games, writing, and masturbation
As a result, there is always all this latent energy hanging around in my soul and just waiting for the slightest stimulation to turn them into self-loathing, anxiety, depression, or just plan ennui.
Or even health problems. Stress is a killer, man.
If I am to stop being so negative, therefore, I am going to need to find a healthy outlet for those energies. Otherwise whatever progress I make in letting some sunshine into my heart risks being undone by the storm within.
And finding a way to let those energies out is going to be a massive change because it will mean changing my entire idea of what I do and why I do it and require me to open myself to actually acting on my impulses and therefore living a far less quiet and predictable little life.
The sheer scope of this transition leaves me awestruck. Just the notion of thinking about what I want to do makes me feel giddy from the elevation.
Luckily, I don’t necessarily need to make some enormous leap of faith all at once in order to get there. Slow but inexorable progress can do some of the work.
But I won’t lie to myself : leaps of faith will also be part of the process. Not everything can be done at glacial speed. Sometimes you just gotta jump.
Luckily I have already done some of the groundwork by consciously uncoupling my emotions from the rules of logic, causality, and contiguity.
I don’t need a reason to be happy. I can just be happy. Happy because I have made myself happy, not because the real world is letting me justify it.
Instead, I need a reason to be unhappy. Let the god damned depression justify itself for once. And said justification had better be good.
All of that is easy and fun to say but of course, actually putting all those bold and defiant words into practice will take actual work.
But I am confident that it can be done. I am fully convinced that somewhere inside me is a bright, bubbly, cheerfully optimistic person who got buried under ten tons of bad brain chemicals but is still alive and kicking and waiting to emerge.
Right now, what I have is a feeling of where the light is. Which way is up, so to speak. A deep emotional sense of what it means to push myself towards the positive and, like a sunflower, tilt myself towards that light in order to catch all the rays I can.
The fact that we’re transitioning into summer should help with that. Sunshine does see ti improve my mood in the real world, even when it comes with oppressive heat.
But the real solution will come from all that latent energy I mentioned before. Because one of the secrets of being a positive person, I believe, is that positive people dedicate a lot of energy to mood support.
In other words, instead of hoarding all their energy like a miser, they invest a good portion of it into keeping their mood above a certain minimum level, even though that means making an open-ended commitment of energy to the process.
Because hoarding energy is useless. Austerity doesn’t work. Never has, never well. There is no point in holding on to your energies to the point where they become a toxic hazard and are tearing you up inside when you could be investing those energies into your own wellbeing.
I mean, what the fuck are the energies for, anyhow? What possible future rainy day could possibly justify this compulsive retention?
Do you really think the day will come when you have to run ten marathons in a row and you’ll be all, “Boy, good thing I saved up all that energy!”
Bullshit. You’re not saving up anything. You don’t spend it because you can’t spend it. The compulsion won’t let you. You’d be better off spending it all the moment you got it, because then at least you would get something out of it.
Instead, you let the crops rot on the vine and waste it all.
More after the break.
Straighten me, ’cause I’m ready
Don’t fret, my legions of male fans. I don’t mean straighten me in THAT sense. I will be gayer than disco till the day I die.
No, that’s a quote from one of Spider Robinson’s Callahan books, and knowing him, that means it’s probably a quote from someone else, but I can’t figure out who.
Not with my disinclination toward research.
But it’s stuck with me as a quote because it seems to encapsulate a kind of secular call to the universe for something larger to oneself (but possibly part of oneself) to intervene and straighten out our bent, folded, and mutilated souls like a transcendental chiropractor so that we might be healthy at last.
Or at least a cleaner form of crazy.
And that’s how I am feeling right now. Straighten me, powers that be, because I am ready to accept your correction. I am a very sick man who is more than eager to receive that short sharp shock that will snap me out of my dazed and hazy state and set me on the road to truly being awake for the first time in 40 plus fucking years.
I am through with pretending the way I am right now is somehow good, or that it is something worth preserving, even.
Fuck that. It can all go. Anything worthwhile in me will remain even after the flood has done its work, and absolutely everything else can be flushed downstream to join all the rest of nature’s waste products in the ocean.
I hereby release all that I am in order to become what I need to be.
I surrender all form so that I may be born anew.
And maybe get it right this time.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.