No big plans today. I just picked a topic and started talking.
And I think it turned out pretty good.
Here it is :
My lack of assertiveness really is paradoxical. There are circumstance in which I would have the courage of a lion and the strength of a bear and would fight like hell till I either won or dropped dead.
But that would be me fighting for what I think to be right, like for instance, to protect the innocent from the predatory or to address some injustice or speak for those who do not speak for themselves all that well.
But if it’s just me and my own needs, well…. the lion becomes the lamb.
I guess deep down I just don’t feel like I am worth fighting for. There are circumstances in which I will fight for myself – many of them medical – but those are in reaction to external circumstances and not anything I am doing on my own initiative.
I often feel like I have no initiative at all. Like all I can do is react to things and by no coincidence my life is also arranged so that very few things can happen to me.
And most of the things that might happen are medical too, sadly.
It all traces back to how severely withdrawn I am, and have almost always been. I stay with the walls of this mental fortress of mine nearly all the time and my only contact with the real world out there is through this computer of mine.
And it’s all to sustain me in my isolation pod. I have lived 48 of my 52 years on Earth as an urban hermit walled off from the world I gave up on when I was raped and withdrew even further from when I was bullied.
And I know that any serious life growth is going to require my finally emerging from my pod and entering into the real world more even if it is still mitigated by this screen.
For the most part, I run in incognito mode here. The most human interaction I get is when I am pretending to be a fluffy little fox named Fruvous. Otherwise I leave a lot of comments on YouTube and BlueSky and occasionally TikTok, but the great thing about that is that it requires absolutely no real time communication.
Thus I “deal with” my social anxiety by not doing anything to trigger it, Which means it wins, pretty much.
Enter Xanax. I still haven’t used it to deal with non-Kingsmen related anxiety. I could take one when I want to do something challenging to my social anxiety, like something entirely new to me where I have to assert myself like say maybe getting back on to UpWork so I can job hunt, and it would smooth me out so I can cope.
I don’t think that computes with me emotionally yet. Knowing that you want to want to do something that scares and challenges you is a tricky bit of metacognition, especially when you are, like me, far too used to letting your fears tell you what you want.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Obviously. You’re supposed to just want what you want and go from there.
But that might not be “safe”. What if I end up wanting a lot of things that I can’t ever have? Wouldn’t that hurt? Wouldn’t I be better off not “going there” at all?
Only in the most shallow and unenlightened form of hedonism. In reality, the price of cutting off your desires at the root is far, far too high.
Better to want and lack and suffer than to be dead inside.
Take that, Buddha!
More after the break.
Not going anywhere
So I have wasted my entire adult life staying distracted and never looking up from my screens and thinking about where I am or where I am going or what I am doing.
What I wanted out of life never stood a chance.
So I have spent 30 years sitting in front of one computer or another and burning through all the most productive years of my life by just keeping my head down.
It’s a positively soul-crushing thought that has burdened me for years now. Turns out that when I finally did stop and look around and think about my life, the realization of all that I had lost was there waiting for me so it could fill me with grief and guilt and shame and an absolutely massive feeling of loneliness and loss.
And I am still struggling to get over that. It’s not quite as stultifying as it used to be but I still struggle under its weight. It’s the thing that holds me down and holds me back the most and there is no easy way to get rid of it.
I just have to keep hacking away at the ties that bind me by expressing whatever emotions come to hand when I am in creative mode and laboring in the dark to forge some form of spirituality I can live with that might actually speed things up a bit.
Maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Maybe what my spirit needs is catharsis on an industrial scale and what I really should be doing is actively searching for things that will stir enormous amounts of emotions in me so I can get my insides flowing again and melt some of this iceberg of emotion that’s been sitting on my heart for so long.
I will admit, I’m scared to do that. Dumb emotionally constipated male that I am, I can’t seem to silence the voice in my head that says “catharsis schmatharsis, deliberately making yourself sad or angry or whatever is just plain dumb!”.
And it’s hard to argue with that in a way that works. It’s an inner child versus outer adult thing, and the thing about that conflict is that the inner child controls your emotions and therefore can take hostages any time it wants.
There has to be a better way of dealing with yourself.
I’m working on it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.