Did the Therapy Thursday thang.

I told Doctor Costin that I think the greater emotional bandwidth I am now experiencing due to the lowered Paxil dose is allowing me to be more confident and self-assured.

Turns out it’s hard to really believe in yourself when you’re numb.

And presumably this effect will grow as my mind learns to make use of the greater bandwidth in order to support my mood.

Not that I am happy all the time. That would be insipid. I want to feel everything. Sadness, anger, frustration, even grief. I want to feel it all.

Because what I really want to feel is alive.

Turns out it’s also hard to feel like you’re amongst the living when you’re numb.

I feel like things are starting to really flow in me. The emotions are moving around like water in your plumbing, and that is making it far easier for my mind to flush out the waste products of my overbearing mentation so that the inside of my mind feels nice and clean and fresh and I can think more clearly.

I have longed for this greater sense of flow for a long time without really being able to articulate it. All I can do is relate it to water : I was frozen by the Paxil and now I am starting to thaw out and that means my rivers are running high.

And that makes me feel so much healthier.

Right now, I’m a bit sleepy. I am going to need a nap when I am done blogging. That’s not unusual for me. Blogging uses up a lot of brain energy.

If you’re doing it right.

I’m start to feel more socially bold, too. Last night I actually logged in to Discord and even did a little voice chat with some European dudes who were playing Fortnite.

I didn’t know I would be logging into voice chat when I logged in to that server. It just started up. And I was tempted to immediately log right the fuck back out due to social panic but I stopped myself and hung around for a while before actually introducing myself to the Eurodudes.

They even invited me to play Fortnite with them but I’ve tried that game and it is way too chaotic and overwhelming for me.

There’s a reason I like turn based RPGs so much. I was never any good at multiplayer FPS games in the first place.

It’s hard to shoot straight when you’re battling social anxiety.

And Fortnite is an FPS where you can build like towers and castles and shit on the fly, so that is WAY beyond me.

And speaking of overwhelm, Discord still kinda freaks me out. Individually the different aspects of it are easy to comprehend but as a whole you have servers and channels and DMs and voice chat channels and messages coming in on all levels and it’s so hard to keep up.

So overall I think I might have lasted 45 minutes before the overwhelm got me and I had to log off and play video games while my anxiety levels returned to baseline.

I know I have no reason to get freaked out. I’m a lovable fellow with great social skills when I can get out of my own shadow enough to actually use them.

Maybe next time I will take a Xanax before trying to be more social. It might be just what I need to get some positive social interaction that can overwrite those ancient anxious tapes from my bullied and isolated childhood.

Repeat until believed : I am just as good as everybody else and I have nothing to be ashamed of so there’s no reason to freak out in social situations.

Yeah. That seems about right.

More after the break.

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Yup, that tracks

I’ve been playing around with a tracker called Psycle and having a lot of fun.

A tracker is a very old school way to make music. When it’s on the screen, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was some weird programming language, and it kind of is.

But how it works is not important to our tale. Which is good because I have no idea how I would explain it.

The important thing is the nostalgia factor for yours truly because using a (far more primitive) tracker is how I first got into making sample-based music WAY WAY back in the early to mid 90’s. ^[1]

So messing around with one of these programs REALLY takes me back.

And the thing is, I had just been waxing nostalgic about the things that were so much easier to do in a tracker when I came across a mention of Psycle Tracker in a YouTube video (where else?) about freeware programs everyone should know about and I thought what the hell, this is obviously fate, so I grabbed the thing.

Dunno how much I will end up using it. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. It’s easy to imagine myself launching into this whole lengthy magnificent exploration of the whole world of sample based composing but we both know that ain’t likely.

And it’s not necessary either. It’s perfectly fine, I am telling myself, to just play around with something then stop when I get tired of it. Not everything has to be some grand epic achievement or else it means I suck.

That’s a classic example of rigging the system against yourself, because of course you will inevitably stop doing the thing at some point and if that means you instantly lose then the only way to win would be to keep doing it till the moment of your death.

And that seems like a bit much.

So who knows. Maybe I will dig deep, hook the program up to my ancient collection samples, get back into making music for fun, and have a whale of a time.

Or maybe by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten all about it.

And both of those outcomes are fine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.