Let’s make another attempt to pick apart why I am unable to get on with life.
Like I have said before, subjectively speaking, it feels like when I try to even contemplate making actual moves to improve my lot in life, liquid nitrogen dispensers pop out of the walls and freeze me to the spot.
Chemically, this is presumably a parasympathetic response. On some deep level, my system learned to respond to all potential adrenaline responses – aka any and all motivation activation responses – with a vastly overpowered adrenaline scrubbing response that not only keeps me from getting anywhere but actively punishes me for even thinking of trying.
That liquid nitrogen spray really fucking hurts, man.
But where does that come from? It has to be at least somewhat connected with the dire “decision” another part of my deep core programming made that wanting things I don’t have is bad and I am better off always making do with what I’ve got.
There’s a decision I’d like to appeal. With a hammer, if necessary.
So I would be better off if I could pry open the vault in which I have locked away all the natural desires that lead healthy humans to want things and even occasionally go to a heck of a lot of effort to get them.
Sounds stressful. And exhausting. But that’s the unhealthy part of me talking.
After all, there’s a hell of a lot more to life than being mellow and lazy.
To put it mildly.
I’d much rather be lively and engaged and feeling good, even if that means I risk sometimes having a massive panic attack when things go wrong.
So what? Big deal. Panic can be dealt with. It’s not the worst thing in the world.
It sure as fuck ain’t worse than being frozen in place for decades, unable to move forward with life at all and languishing in the doldrums as you rot away from the inside.
Which is what I have been doing. For my entire adult life. And I’m 51.
But how do I disarm this freezing mechanism? How do I convince my deep programming that it’s okay to want things again? How do I let go?
At the moment, the whole thing seems like an elaborate system to both keep me in this teeny tiny tomb of a life and keep me distracted enough with my entertainments that I don’t get restless and try to escape.
But if I do, it punishes me.
Seems pretty fascist, honestly. But I have mentioned that before.
The core question is, what does this freeze response protect me from? What am I getting out of this maladaptive reaction?
It’s protecting me from everything, basically. Sad but true. It keeps me from having to face reality, deal with my problems, take responsibility for myself, and grow the fuck up.
So part of the solution is to fully and totally decide that I want to do all that. And I know that deep down, I don’t want to do that. I want to keep crouching down in my deep dark cave avoiding the light and living the same stupid grubby disgusting kind of life.
That’s not what the full conscious me wants but there is a very deep layer of me that is still stuck in that mode and if I am to get on with life, I’m doing to need to get it out.
With love. Love is the only thing that will work. Anger and aggression will only lead to it burrowing deeper into my consciousness.
But love might just melt its frozen little heart.
More after the break.
So damned tired
Another part of my problem is that I am so damned tired all the time.
Kind of makes it hard to work up the ambition to try anything new. I almost always feel like I am only a few minute away from drifting off to sleep, and doing things like going to the kitchen and making myself some food leaves me panting and wheezing.
And it’s true that I have real physical problems to which this fatigue can be attributed.
But I suspect it is also something in which I hide from the world as well. Let’s just say that the unhealthy part of me is in no big hurry to gain more energy.
Why, that would just make us restless and uncomfortable! It would make being a passive slug in front of a computer far less pleasant, and what else is there to be?
There’s that fixed sense of self again.
I think I need to try to learn the lesson of esprit. It says that you should open yourself wide and embrace all of life and thus grow your soul and spirit into something that can embrace even more, and so forth and so on.
I definitely need something like that. Something that leads me away from life lived with my had stuffed up my ass. All locked away inside myself where I suffocate and stagnate and waste away from all my health issues, mental AND physical.
I have to open myself up to clean waters so that they may flow through me and carry all this toxic gunk and bad mentation away and leave me clean.
Raise the curtains, open the widows wide, and let some sunshine and clean air into this stuffy old head of mine.
And for that I will need to stop thinking of personal energy as a zero sum game, where I have a very finite amount of it and when that’s gone, I am dead in the water.
Bullshit. There are activities that can give me energy. More energy than they cost.
They turn a profit, so to speak.
Once more, like with pleasure and joy, it’s a matter of reaching out into the world and finding and taking what I need instead of this bullshit austerity bunker I have been living in for so long.
There’s been no holocaust. The world is as full of wonderful things as ever. It is beyond absurd to be living like a miser in this lush and plentiful age.
I just need to unbend enough to look around for what I really need.
I’m working on it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.