Not everything can be accomplished by trying.
Lately, I have been pondering this attitude of mine that I absolutely have to get my life together and that every day I do not do that is a huge personal failure.
Stated plainly and overtly like that, it’s obviously a terrible attitude. Clearly it is what is dooming me to never actually getting anywhere because this feeling of constant failure leaves me demoralized and depressed and therefore incapable of actually doing the life-affirming things that would lead to a better life in the first place.
In fact, this constant self-persecution is the very thing that I withdraw from reality into my world of video games et al to avoid. If I could just let the fuck up on myself and forgive myself for being how I am, I might actually start truly believing in myself enough to get some things done.
In order to achieve that blessed state, then, I have to somehow disarm and disable the atrocious belief system underpinning it all.
I have to stop hating myself for how I am and start loving myself both for the scintillating wonder that I am and the radiant masterpiece I can be.
And I am part way there. I definitely have some sense of my own unique amazingness. I know that I am an incredible creature with nearly magical level of talent and intelligence and a charming and witty personality to boot.
Sadly, my belief in that knowledge still comes and goes. When my depressed worsens and the mind fog thickens, I fall back into seeing my fabulousness as, at best, a useless ornamentation to my worthlessness, and at worst, the ultimate damnation of my rotted disgusting self because “look at all this potential I am wasting”.
It’s astounding how depression can turn a positive into a negative, n’est-ce pas?
But whatever. Depression’s gonna depress. It will just keep pumping out the worst possible impressions of every bit of information like it’s my own personal Fox (sic) News and just like that network, whatever the hell it says is less than worthless precisely because it is so hopelessly biased.
It still lives rent free in my head, but I am in the process of evicting it
I’m getting better at remembering how awesome I am, at least. IT takes far less of a mental effort to do so than it used to.
Yet I am not yet to the place where I can call upon this knowledge to help me feel better when my mood is dark, or even to let it pull me out of that dark place.
Sad to say, if I try to do that now, what happens instead is that I just find this sudden brightness irritating, like I was in a dark room and someone turned on the light.
This is a desperately unhealthy reaction and explains a lot about why I stay “in the dark” a lot of the time.
I’d be much better off just hanging in there until I got used to it.
But it does nevertheless help with the recovery. It might not get me out of the depths of depression but it’s very nice to have when I am on the way back up out of them.
Where was I? Oh right, toxic self-loathing.
The problem with self-forgiveness, or one of them at least, is that it leaves me with a lot of energy I don’t know what to do with. When one stops gnawing on one’s own bones, one must find oneself something else to chew on.
And that’s always my problem, isn’t it? What to do with all that anger when I am no longer directing it inward.
Luckily, I have one key insight now : anger is energy and energy can always be transformed. So all that rage need not necessarily be expressed in a dark, negative, destructive way that leaves the world a worse place.
It might even be possible to turn it into the very sort of upbeat, happy, warm energy that I need in order to be a healthier person.
I just need to get over finding that kind of thing really irritating.
More after the break.
The Well of Pain
It’s actually more of a well of trauma, but that didn’t sound as cool.
It occurred to me recently that I have this well of trauma in me that goes all the way back to my primary trauma of being raped when I was 4 and that I have been drinking from ever since in an attempt to process said trauma.
But because I didn’t know this was going on, I have been drinking from it very, very slowly and hence not getting demonstrably better as well as feeling like I will never ever get through it all.
It’s been such a slow process mostly because my emotional aperture was so restricted. It was like trying to drink a lake through a cocktail straw. While I was still bound up in my false “logical” bullshit mindset, I could not access my emotions except in tiny little morsels small enough not to set off my anti-anxiety alarms, and even then they had to be rendered inert via intellectualization.
Like, say, only being able to truly process your emotions by writing about them. Ahem.
But I am getting better. I am widening that aperture and letting more and more of my emotions through and as a result I am drinking that nasty but necessary well water fast enough that I can almost forsee a time when that well will be empty.
And at least now I know what I am doing. I am drinking from my well of pain. Through this, I am processing that massive trauma from a long time ago, and probably a hell of a lot of other trauma too.
It all ends up in the Well. And you know what they say….
All’s Well that ends Well!
I’ll see myself out now.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.