I am quite sleepy as I type these words.
Kept playing my game, Divinity : Original Sin 2 Definitive Edition[1], up till a bit after 3:30 pm. So far so good. I didn’t feel sleepy then so I didn’t bother with taking a nap before my blogging session and just kept on playing.
But oops, the moment I stopped playing, the tiredness caught up with me and now I wish I was snoozing instead of typing.
Oh well, it’s all part of the job. It has happened before and it will happen again. I should be fine as long as I maintain momentum.
Which is harder than it sounds when I feel like this.
I’ve been mulling over the idea of making peace with my life as it is. It sounds like a great idea. If I just relaxed about my current life and reframed my existence in far less catastrophic terms, I would save myself a lot of stress and frustration and I would be way happier no matter what happens.
Sounds like a deal worth making, doesn’t it?
But I don’t know if I can do it. My anger about my current life is very real and represents a whole galaxy of frustrated human potential that I am too afraid to confront directly because the truth of it all is so very brutal and sad and if I start thinking about all those things I’ve never done and may never do, I might give in to despair.
And not the quietly weeping over things lost kind either. The kind that leads to desperate acts of screaming lunacy.
I don’t want to go to the Bad Place.
Although I dunno. Maybe I could get some serious emotional healing done there. It might be worth the risk that I might just dance too close to the fire.
At least then I might feel something.
That’s one of the main ways that depression leads to not so good behaviour : you become so numb that your nervous system goes into panic mode and makes you desperate to do absolutely anything that might make you feel something.
Me, I am too stable for that shit, for better and for worse. My depression has never included any sort of acting out. I’ve never been a threat to myself or others.
Well, not in action, anyhow. On the inside, well, that’s different. I have been suicidal in the past and it flowed from that exact same sort of desperation.
The kind that makes you want to set yourself on fire just to warm the fuck up.
But no, your stalwart correspondent would never do anything like that. After all, that would either lead to drawing attention to myself, which would be bad, or absolutely nobody noticing or caring about my cries for help, which would be worse.
So I just stay safely locked away inside myself and away from the big mean ol real world and never cry for help in any way at all.
Because when you were the baby left to cry, you learn very early on that there’s no point in crying because nobody’s coming and nobody cares.
Take care of it yourself or do without. Those are your options.
I lean heavily towards doing without. It’s easier.
And all you have to do is withdraw even further from reality in order to get away from your deprivation until you become too numb to care any more.
It’s the perfect system!
Oh, except for not actually leading to my being happy. Only distracted. Absorbed. Absent from reality.
But other than that, it’s flawless.
More after the break.
On going easy on myself
Let us once more thrust our meaty hands into this tangle of thorns.
So : depression is anger turned inward. I am so hard on myself because I have all this rage that I don’t have an outward outlet for and therefore it can only go inwards.
It’s internalized abuse, and it’s almost beautiful in its brutal efficiency.
And that brings us to the same crossroads that it always does because the only way to get the anger to stop going inwards is to turn it outwards and that means finding a target for my rage that is not myself.
So like… other people. And that complicates things.
I could try to pour it into my politics, I suppose. Belch fire and brimstone over the state of the world. Try to spread my, “billions of us, hundreds of them” message as far and wide as I can in order to get a good healthy revolution going.
They can only wreck the world with their ignorance, decadence, and greed if we remain isolated individuals too wrapped up in our own lives and worried about our own comfort and convenience to ever unite and take them on.
If we band together – even a tiny percentage of us would be millions of people – there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop us and we can rewrite the rules however we like.
You wouldn’t even have to do much. Just show up and demonstrate. If we do that in large enough numbers, the rich and the powerful will get the message.
It’s justice or the guillotine, motherfuckers.
So yeah, I guess I could get it out that way. Who knows, I might just save the world with my extraordinary powers of oratory.
Of course, that would require making videos and being seen.
I watched a video about the French Revolution recently and I was struck by how Marat, a man with some kind of terrible skin disease that meant he had to spend all his time in the bathtub, nevertheless played a crucial part in the Revolution simply through writing.
I take a certain degree of inspiration from that example, though not, of course, from the bloodthirstiness of his politics.
I mean, I’ve got a computer and the internet. I can get my message out there way more easily than Marat penning his revolutionary newsletter.
The people need me!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.