Biological analogues aside[1], I feel like what I’ve been doing lately is squeezing out long dormant emotions and making myself feel them in an attempt to clear up space in my mind for my actual personality to emerge and grow.
It’s hard to say how long this process will last. It kind of feeds upon itself. The more space I clear out, the more space I can clear out from then on.
Obviously, the goal is to empty myself out. Or at least clear out enough of the backlog for me to be able to live and breathe and function.
Along that journey, there will be something I will have to face so I might as well face it now : what if my problem has been my Paxil all along?
All my complaining about feeling cold and lonely and isolated in my Midnight Tundra mindscape could simply have been the emotional anesthetic effect of the Paxil I have been taking for my social anxiety for over 20 years.
And this never occurred to me until now because I had lost all sense of what my emotions should be like so I had no basis for comparison any more.
But since the dose has been lowered by a modest amount (30 mg instead of 40 mg twice a week) I now have some idea of what my Paxil has been suppressing all these years and it’s been a real eye-opener.
Don’t worry, though. As tempting as it might be to a certain kamikaze part of my mind, I am not going to immediately jump to going cold turkey on the Paxil.
Heck, I am still adjusting to the moderately lowered dosage as is. I love that my emotions are thawing out and becoming more accessible and that this means my world feels more immediate and real now, as do I, but my world is also less stable and predictable and a lot of “stuff” is emerging from my inner deep freeze like zombies rising from their grave, so I know that a total cessation of Paxil would likely leave me absolutely insane, at least for a while.
So I will keep toddling along dealing with my newly more reactive emotional world and doing what I can to help the process along.
Maybe what I need to do is to think a lot about fiber.
It’s nature’s broom, after all.
A new world
Specifically, the real world.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my video game addiction lately and I am getting increasingly sick of it.
It came to a head in the wee hours of the morning today when I form the intention of playing more Divinity : Original Sin but found myself putting off actually doing it in favor of watching more YouTube videos and/or reading more gay furry smut comics.
So I had to ask myself what was up with that. And I came to the conclusion that I just didn’t feel like dissolving my consciousness into that virtual world. I wanted to stay in the more immediate and “real” environment of non-gaming computer use.
This represents progress. The idea of leaving the cloistered confines of my video gaming worlds doesn’t seem quite as scary or cold now.
I don’t think I will be going cold turkey on the video games any time soon either, but carving out time for other things seems more possible than ever now.
I don’t have to hide from reality in these virtual worlds all the time.
I can stay out and play.
More after the break.
The long sad
Apologies if I have used that title before. I was too lazy to check.
The long sad is like a long low-key sigh. It’s a feeling somewhere between depression and outright crying, and it’s the closest I get to sitting there feeling sorry for myself.
I’d be better off just having a good long cry, of course. This male emotional constipation than runs rampant in North American society is a demon and a curse and probably the main reason I have to sit at this keyboard and type just to know what I am feeling.
Or at least to articulate it. Make the feelings real.
This long sadness of mine can take place almost entirely in the back of my mind. I can be going about my usual (wasted) day playing video games and blogging and chatting with my fuzzy friends and so on and yet somewhere in my deeper being is a very sad little boy who is all alone.
Always all alone.
Or at least that’s how it feels. I am positive there have been a number of times in my life where people tried to reach out to me and instead just ended up feeling alienated and confused by this strange person who seems like he is there but can’t be reached.
Again, sorry if that’s ever been you. Mental illness doesn’t just hurt the mentally ill. It can hurt the people close to us too, and the worst part is we don’t even know it.
Too busy being crazy, I guess. It takes up a lot of our time.
I know I have a long way to go till I am truly open. The walls around my heart are tall and thick and cold, and undoing that is a long, slow, delicate process.
Like I always say, part of me wishes there was a button I could push or a pill I could take that would just unsuppress everything all at once knowing that this would mean my being completely insane for a while but hoping that when the flood waters recede I would be remade anew without all that baggage and there would be a good chance for me to go out into the world as a truly free and present being.
Instead of constantly hiding inside myself, looking out, terrified of being truly seen.
Because if they can SEE me, then they KNOW, and if they KNOW, they can FIND me, and if they FIND me, they can GET me.
And that would be worse than death.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.