Let us return to the subject of my internal struggles.
Mostly, I fight my own motivations. No matter how badly I want to go out and play with the other kids, the overwhelming majority of my force of will tells me to stay still and out of sight in order to stay “safe”.
Or if not “safe” (after all, I’m locked in here with my demons, for fuck’s sake) then at least in a low stimulus state where my intense anxieties are not activated.
Nor is anything else, for that matter. My torpor is static.
And that is, for me, what is “normal”. It’s not what is good for me by a long shot but it’s what I am used to and that has to be enough.
Mental illness is funny that way, Mine does not take my dreams, ambitions, desires, or preferences into account, let alone my long term wellbeing.
All that matter is being “safe”.
Why? Because I have been stuck in a “freeze” response for decades. I am like an animal hiding from predators that only exist in my head. The decades old programming in my head insists that the only way for me to be “safe” is to remain undetected.
Safe from what, though?
Because there’s nothing out there waiting to pounce. It is like I am quite literally afraid of nothing. I could (disability aside) walk amongst the everyday people of the world and be just as safe as everyone else. I don’t have to treat the rest of humanity as a threat.
I’m just fine whether I am in my womb/tomb or out in the world.
Tell that to my endocrine system, though. It still floods me with fear-charged adrenaline when I so much as ponder going outside my tiny safety zone.
I now have four tabs perpetually open for places that could really help me but with each of them, I walked up to the precipice of participation then balked and ran away.
Because I’m scared to death (almost literally) to leave my cruel but cozy nest here in my self-sealed Thermos of a life. No matter how badly I want to get out of this hole I’m in and finally become a grownup, that fear keeps me locked in place and stuck in a life of playing video games and unstructured blogging.
Well, unformatted, anyhow.
And it’s the video games that truly define my captivity. Whenever I think about finally getting around to jump starting my life, I think about having to leave video games behind for even an hour and a cold terror overwhelms me and I end up doing nothing.
They are not just a hobby, they are my security blanket. Most of my time is spend with their comfort within easy reach. They are my substitute for living.
And I know that my mental health journey will necessarily involve leaving them behind, at least for short periods. Even though the addiction, like all addictions, makes me feel like I will die of exposure if I leave its warmth.
And a fix is never more than a few clicks away.
To an addict like myself, there is nothing worse than having one’s supply cut off. To even imagine such a thing fills the pit of my stomach with ice and sends deathly chills through my entire bloodstream.
Goddamn over-aggressive parasympathetic system.
But I can conceive of a sort of umbilicus. A way to stay connected with my self-destructive self-soothing mechanism while also exploring the possibility of actually working for a living.
I just need a video game that I can multitask with web browsing. These are not hard to find, The world is full of web-based games.
Plus there are traditional PC games which could be multitasked. They just have to be turn based enough that I can alt-tab out of them into my browser without my losing anything or making the reentry too jarring.
This could be done.
It might be done.
But not right now. Right now, I need to lay down for a bit.
More after the break.
On feeling sandbagged
I’ve had a very sleepy day.
To the point where, when I was woken up by my alarm at 8 am, it took me until 8:20 AM to even get out of bed.
That time period is pretty much a blur for me now. A stretch of non-time.
Then I managed to get up, eat breakfast, take my morning fistful o’ meds, hug my fluffy friends, and then crawl back into bed around 9:30 am, still super sleepy.
Luckily, Wound Care was not until 11:15 am, which meant leaving at 10:55 am, which meant I needed to be up at around 10:40 am in order to have fifteen minutes in which to get dressed et al.
My life is bound by the clock. I am more than fine with this.
I mean. SOMETHING has to give me some god damned structure. I am apparently incapable of doing it myself.
By myself, I am naught but goo.
I must cling to stronger entities for support, like a creeping vine.
Anyhow, I was awoken by my alarm at 10:40 am feeling terrible. I managed to get dressed okay, but the moment when I had to heave my bulk aloft and actually stand up felt like jumping out of an airplane.
Like, I understood the concept, but doing it felt immense.
But I managed. Luckily, I was so out of it that it did not occur to me that this was one of those circumstances when I maybe shouldn’t go until I was already on my feet and walking to my bedroom door and it was easier to just go.
Besides that, I am fairly sure that this is just sleep debt catching up with me and not a sign that I have caught a bug.
After all, I have no other symptoms besides sleepiness.
When we got back from Wound Care shortly before noon, I of course immediately went back to bed. In the hours since then I have been asleep more than I have been awake.
So it’s one of my sleepy days.
Oh well, it’s not like I had anything better to do anyway,
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.