Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

I talked about how I now knew that all that chilly fear that grips me when I try to do anything outside my very narrow corridor of existence is my brain’s way of keeping that enormous fraction of me that’s been frozen and locked away all these years from thawing out and upsetting the whole system.

That is, in essence, what I am so scared of. That enormous icy dread that freezes me in place is simply my maladapted mind’s way of maintaining stability and keeping me strapped down, head immobilized, eyes pointed at the screen as if I was in A Clockwork Orange except that what I see on the screen I’ve taken to be reality for a long long time.

And it is. But just a narrow little slice of it.

It gave the illusion of reality partly because I can see very far and very deeply from my Barcalounger of doom. I know so much and understand so much that it never felt like my point of view was limited at all.

And it wasn’t…. on the intellectual level.

But emotionally and spiritually, quadriplegics have a greater range of motion than I.

Luckily, the illusion has (obviously) started breaking down. In those rare moments when I Am not playing a video game, I find myself wondering, is this really all I am going to do today? Is this all there is for me? What other things, new things, could I be experiencing? And most importantly of all….

…could I be having a heck of a lot more fun than I am right now?

The answer, of course, is yes. It’s not like video games, as great as they are, are the most fun things in the universe. There’s all kinds of fun things I could be doing. Things that do more than just keep me occupied and entertained. Things that enrich me and bring me joy and love and fulfillment.

Or things that just get me laid, god dammit.

These cold fears of mine have kept me from thinking about things like that. Anything that felt like it might awaken my soul was a source of nameless terror that paralyzed me and kept me from moving forward in the slightest.

And that’s bad.

It’s trapped me in this tragically limited existence for almost 30 years now. But now my soul is slowly thawing out and waking up and it wants so much more.

So these fucking fears and aversions have got to go.

G’wan, get outta here! Vamoose! Shoo! GIT! *chases inner demons with a broom*

Right now, I don’t have the mental resources to launch a full out assault on the system. I am still too scattered and weak and diffuse for that.

But a storm is gathering within me, and soon (I hope), I will throw my all at all that god damned ice and break it up so it can melt in the sun and be gone for good.

This will not be easy. The old bad maladaptive part of me will insists that I am going to die (no, it is), that the walls of reality itself will come crashing down and I will be broken beyond all hope of despair when that ice gives way.

But I am not my ice.

I am the sad motherfucker trapped in that ice. I am a living, breathing, id-bearing animal who has been cut off from the wellspring of life force by all this ice for far too long and I am just about ready to hook that fucker up and throw the switch.

I’ll take the pain, the fear, the nausea, the dread, the heart palpitations, the illusions of illness, and anything else the system can throw at me.

But LET ME LIVE.

More after the break.

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Digging the terminology

I am really digging calling my mental illness “the system”.

Taps into my latent anarchist side. I am good at subversion. I have a real knack for taking down bad order. I can jam “the system” real good.

If the system is just, I’m for the system.

If the system is corrupt, I’mma throw a brick through a window.

My love of good order and my hatred of bad order are two sides of the exact same coin as far as I am concerned.

Hence my being “neutral good” in RPGs.

The Odyssey continues

Playing Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey continues to pay out nicely.

After completing the main plot then more or less fucking around for a while, I did the bucolic quest of paternal bliss that I knew would result in a loved one dying in order to kick off a long bloody question for vengeance.

And yup. One minute I am enjoying the domestic life in the lovely little village of Dyme (dee-may) with my father-in-law and fellow assassin Darius and my wife Neema and my infant son, Elpidios. ^[1]

Aaaand the next minute a bunch of assholes from the Order of the Ancients show up, slaughter everyone in the village and burn it to the ground just to get me to show up so they can try and kill me.

And yet, their leader, Amorges, still thinks he’s on the side of justice! Bah. He’s a bloodthirsty monster who chooses the most vile and violent solutions to any problem and tells himself it’s all justified in the pursuit of “peace”.

Burning villages for vastly insufficient reasons does not promote “peace”.

Anyhow, that was the introduction to Chapter 3 of the game, which was a pleasant surprise to me because I had forgotten I was on Chapter 2.

I just finished chapter 3, where I killed Amorges, tearfully reunited with my infant son, and just as tearfully said goodbye at him as his grand-pater took him away to parts unknown because he’d never be safe around someone with as violent a life as I.

And I think that’s what I have enjoyed most about this game : being set in ancient Greece, they do not hold back on the emotion one iota. My hero, Alexios, cried like an infant when his wife Neema died.

And you know what? That’s exactly what his culture would expect of him. That’s so much more enlightened then our compulsive emotional constipation that keeps us all bottled up inside.

Let it out, Alexios!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.