From now on, I’m going to just… live.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
It’s very hard to articulate, but I will, of course, try.
The thought came to me after a long chain of other thoughts about childhood and innocence and how children see things as they are, without expectation or anticipation, because to them, every experience is brand new.
And I can remember when life was like that for me. Just barely.
In particular, I was thinking about how kids can meet one another and make friends far more easily than us adults precisely because they have such a low burden of expectation and trauma and so on.
They just want someone to play with.
That is, sadly, not how it tended to work out for me. I was too strange. I couldn’t connect with or relate to other kids my age.
But that innocent frame of mind is there for most kids, and it was while thinking about that blessed state that something inside of me just… relaxed.
I think maybe it was my returning to how a child sees things that did it. A large chunk of the edifice of unhealed trauma and frozen feeling just kind of fell away and suddenly I could see life like a child does, in terms purely of what would be fun to do in the immediate future, that catalyzed in my mind as, “Just live. ”
Forget all about expectations and humiliations and limitations and all the other garbage that I’m slowly smothering under and just concentrate on enjoying myself.
Like all my recent big revelations, it doesn’t sound like much when put into words. Perhaps that’s not a coincidence. I have been saying that my problems are emotional, not intellectual, for quite some time.
It would therefore make sense if the real work I have to do has to happen on a level way below what can be reached by words and rational thought.
I’d better hold on to that thought really tight because that could save me a hell of a lot of mental masturbation and slow and tedious intellectualization and let me get directly to the business of healing myself.
At least in theory. As I have expressed before, I am fairly skeptical of my ability to actually free myself from the surly bonds of intellectualization.
But I can at least loosen them enough for me to breathe.
Somewhere in this newly relaxed state also comes better self-esteem. After all, no matter what has come before or even where I am now, I am still a pretty amazing guy, and I should learn to enjoy that fact instead of depending on the world outside of my mind for all my validation and support.
The extra-cranial world can never provide enough “reward” to support my self-worth. Some of that has to come from within. There needs to be at least enough of this self-reward to support my going out into the world in pursuit of the other kind.
Otherwise. the symptoms of emotional starvation will prevent me from finding the very sustenance that would remedy it.
I think that today, I might have gotten a little glimpse of what life might be like if I wasn’t constantly wasting away on the inside from my unrewarding life.
And that glimpse gave me the most precious gift of all : hope. Hope that there really is all the emotional nutrients I need out there in the world and that I am actually capable of procuring them for myself instead of languishing in passivity.
Every day, the door to my cage opens a little bit more and my sorry soul gets a bit more sunshine and fresh air.
Maybe soon I will be strong enough to go out and play.
More after the break.
The social debut of a fox
So like I have mentioned before, I am active on social media now.
It all started a few months ago when I started telling people (and myself, because I’m a people) that the only social media platform I am on is YouTube,
And I had said that something like a half dozen times before it really sank in to me that YouTube really doesn’t count.
I mean sure, I leave tons of comments on YouTube, and some of those comments do get replies now and then, but YouTube doesn’t have the kind of interconnectedness on an individual level where you follow specific people like Blue Sky or Instagram does.
Hence my reviving my long dormant Instagram account. I do not even remember when he heck I signed up for it or why. I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t feel like it, being heavily photo based, was not for me.
In all fairness, all I knew about it came from the media and stories about it making people feel horrible about themselves.
But now that I have gotten active on it, I can see that it is so much more than that. It might have started as photo based but now it’s just a particularly media rich social network. People post pictures, but also text comments, videos, random thoughts, political speech, and everything else under the sun.
It’s quite a rich milieu.
Still, I prefer Blue Sky. Like the entity formerly known as Twitter, it has other content but it’s still mostly a text based medium and that is where I am the most comfortable.
It’s in the world of words that I feel not just safe but competent and capable, and those are feelings in very short supply chez moi.
Also, Instagram, being irritatingly modern, tends to start playing videos the moment my mouse cursor passes over them, and that is very not cool for me.
NEVER AUTOPLAY ANYTHING. I cannot stress this enough.
But I keep going back to Instagram anyhow because it’s breathtakingly good at serving up the exact kind of content I like.
It’s… kind of creepy, in a way. But that’s the age we live in.
The age of computers using big data to predict us uncomfortably well.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.