Or at the very least a briskly edited one,.
I know that my extremely negative internal negative is toxic and that if I want to get well (do I ever!) I will have to dream up a whole new story of my life and myself. One that supports hope and growth and especially health and healthy choices.
I mean, my current internal narrative is that I’m a 51 year old complete and total loser o is rightfully deeply ashamed of having done absolutely nothing with life except hide from the world and play video games for the last 30 fucking years and who is desperate to escape the rancid tomb that is his current life and actually get around to becoming a grownup before my health gets so bad that I become truly incapable of work.
Which puts a lot of pressure on me. And I don’t handle that kind of pressure very well. In fact, I tend to hide from it in my turtle shell and, what else, play video games.
So clearly that view of things is not functional. I need to dig deep and find some hope and through that find something to look forward to. Something that can make me feel like there is actually something to live for.
Mostly, I live by default. I live by not dying and not thinking about the future much.
But I know I can do better. I know that I have so, so much to contribute. I could be not only functional but phenomenal. I have a quite frankly astounding IQ and loads of creative energy and talent and a sweet and lovable personality plus I am capable of an enormous amount of work.
I could be a major asset to any office type situation. I could be amazing in any writer’s room or other creative hub.
And I am totally capable of making my own thing and making it work.
YouTube is my current destination. I have this pretty decent quality webcam that I have barely used. I have loads of creative talent and I am funny and fascinating and I have a lot to say. I have a unique point of view and a lot of insight into life and the world.
And I’m cute, too.
Enough pumping myself. The new narrative starts now :
I am not a loser. I am just disabled. I have been very sick for a long time and that has kept me away from the world and I have done the best I could with what capacities I had remaining to me.
And I have not spent the last thirty years only playing video games. That whole time I have been interacting with my fuzzy friends, informing myself and feeding my head, writing on this blog, and continuing to think and observe and formulate and analyze and make my unique and powerful insights even deeper every day.
So I have not wasted my life. My life might not look like other people’s lives and I wish it had been different but that doesn’t mean my life has no meaning or purpose.
Maybe this whole long journey was simply an extended larval stage whose entire purpose was to give me the time I needed to become the absolutely stunning and incredible butterfly I know I can be.
That I know I will be. I just have to let things unfold as they should and do my best to support my own growth while the fabulous being I am on the inside finally unfolds its wings so they can dry in the sun.
And when the time is right, I will fly.
More after the break.
The ocean of sadness
Now we move on to the real issue : the ocean of sadness inside me.
Because that’s what I am left with once I take the unhealthy ways I express that sadness away. Just a vast sea of tears I need to shed and a stereotypical North American male difficulty in shedding them.
Maybe my lowered Paxil dose will help. Maybe it’s been the Paxil that has kept those tears frozen for over 20 years and lowering the dose will continue to let my emotions flow out of me and thaw out the ice-jam that has been clogging up the system for such a long time now.
It’s not like I want to be emotionally constipated. It’s something I neither believe in or desire. I want to be the sort of person who can express whatever they are feeling freely, preferably in realtime, and thus avoid accumulating deferred tears as well is impotent rage, stymied lust, isolated compassion, and all the rest.
Basically, I want to be more French.
And that means being way, way, WAY less concerned about being “in control of myself”. There’s a choice bit of Anglo-Canadian repression. Oh, there’s nothing worse than “losing control” don’t you know. If you “lost control” then you might express something less than perfectly pleasant to the world and make other people uncomfortable and that would be so dreadfully embarrassing.
Even worse, if I “lose control” I might not be able to predict what I am going to say and do well enough to stop myself from doing things purely on emotion, and then what would become of me?
They’d lock me up.
That’s what this whole control thing boils down to : predictability. Knowing what I will do. Put that way, it really seems like an insufficient justification for cauterizing my emotions.
But I suppose I have internalized the wrong lessons from mistakes I have made in the past. I blamed listening to my emotions, essentially, and acting upon them,
That’s the rational mind bullying the id about in an unbalanced way. Highly intelligent people have an overdeveloped emotional suppression circuit in the brain and I think we end up neurotic messes because we lean on that thing way too much.
It’s supposed to let you defer emotions so that you can think clearly and listen to that all important inner voice that does all those fancy calculation, inference, and recall operations that constitute being “smart”.
It’s not supposed to be used to suppress emotions forever. Somewhere in my mind, all the emotions of the last 45 years of being alive are stored and waiting for me to have “time” to deal with them.
And I wish I could just declare bankruptcy and have that emotional debt expunged.
But it’s not that easy.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.