As my standard joke goes, if it wasn’t for jumping to conclusions, I would get no exercise at all.

I just went through this and I thought it was time I wrote down one of my experiences with being so “jumpy” so I can examine it in this space.

I was in the kitchen about to make my usual PBJ for lunch when I realized I could not find the big 2 kg jar of Kraft peanut butter that I bough last Friday.

This is where the madness starts, because I immediately leapt to the conclusion that Julian had hidden it from me in order to get me to use the peanut butter left over in one of the like ten mostly empty peanut butter jars sitting on the counter.

At almost the same time, I realized that I really needed to pee.

So I walkered back to my bedroom and into my ensuite and started taking an angry piss. All the while, I was fuming, and thinking angry thoughts about how dare Julian try to make me do things his way and how this was NOT HIS CALL TO MAKE. If I wanted to “waste” the little bit of peanut butter left in a jar because it was not worth the effort it would take to scrape it out of there ^[1], that was my business, especially now that I am paying for my own peanut butter.

This went on for the length of one of my always lengthy pees (hello, aging prostate) and then I went back into the kitchen to take another look.

And thank God I did, because the goddamned peanut butter was 90 degrees and three feet from its usual spot, sitting on the stove between the elements.

And I felt very, very dumb. Extra dumb, in fact, because this is far from the first time I have gotten angry or upset or freaked out over something being “missing” when it’s just in a slightly different place than usual.

Going over my memory of the incidents, it seems like the problem is that I have a strong emotional reaction instantly and once that emotional reaction kicks in, I can’t think logically or critically about whatever I am reacting to or about.

Why does this happen? Well I think I have a lot of latent emotion just waiting for the tiniest spark to set it off most of the time.

As I was telling my therapist Doctor Costin on the phone today, I think that when I clawed my way out of the nervous breakdown I had in my early 20’s, I froze a lot of things inside my psyche in order to get back to sanity and what was left unfrozen seemed functional in that I could make it through the day without a lot of pain or fear, but under the hood things were a frozen mess of arrested development.

Amongst the things frozen was a bewilderingly wide section of my emotional response spectrum. I truly was not the same young man that had headed off to college in 1991.

I was a crippled remnant of that bright young man. I could eat and drink and enjoy TV and video games again but that was it.

And that’s the person I have been for the last 30 years.

And all of this has me wondering what my life would be like if I didn’t repress so much. What if I just went with my emotional reactions come what may? What if I stopped trying to create hyper-predictability by keeping myself under “control” (ha)? What if, like most of humanity, I just did what my emotions told me to do, without question?

I’d be a very different dude, that’s for sure. I would probably be a lot harder to be around. especially at first. But maybe it would settle down after a while and I would be the same person I am now, but with a far more emotionally real and enriched life.

It’s a tantalizing prospect. I don’t think I could ever completely let go of emotional “control” but I could ease back on the brake a little, at least.

Maybe then I would know what it’s like to truly be alive.

More after the break.

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I love this guy

Here’s his latest video :

And since he brought it up, let’s talk about procrastination.

Here’s the secret of procrastination : you don’t really want to do it.

Whatever it is, deep down, you do not want to do it. You may think you should want to do it. You might tell yourself over and over how it’s no big deal to do it. You may even convince the grown up part of you that you really want to do it.

But deep down, you don’t wanna. So you don’t.

Imagine that there are two teams, Team Do It and Team Don’t. Imagine they are in a tug of war. But here’s the trick : team Don’t wins as long as you don’t do the thing, and that means that Team Don’t does not have to overpower Team Do It, it just has to keep your will divided enough so that you can’t decide to Do It or decide to give up and it still wins.

Hence procrastination. Procrastination thrives by keeping you in that middle, undecided zone where you still consciously think you will do the thing or at least might do the thing eventually, but subconsciously know you never will without ever having to actually own the fact that you won’t ever do it.

Because you never decided not to do it. But you never will.

The solution. then, is to make up your mind. Either decided to do it and do it, or decide not to do it and do something else.

You may find that the decision to definitely do or not do it will be exactly what you need in order to find out how you really feel about it.

If deciding to do it makes you say, “OH GOD NO!”, then guess what, you don’t wanna do it. And now you know it.

And if deciding to give up on it fills you with a sense of sadness and loss. guess what, you really do want to do it and now you know THAT.

Bottom line, though, is that nothing external to you is going to force you to decide. And your psyche is clearly fine with leaving you wandering lost in indecision forever because again, that way not doing it still wins.

You have to decide to decide. One way or another.

Only then can you exit the procrastination loop.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.