Turns out, I had a lot to say today.
A classic case of the very “me” phenomenon where I start off talking about one subjects but that branches off into another and then another and before you know it I have talked for almost ten minutes about an only tangentially subject.
But it’s all worth saying, so whatever.
After all, whether it’s video or text, the idea is primarily to get things out of my head and into the world so that I can reduce the pressure of words in my head and maybe make some room for calmer thoughts in there.
My brain produces things to say at a ferocious pace. I can’t imagine actually being able to keep up. It’s all I can do to slow down the backlog a bit.
But as I develop as a writer, I learn to put more and more of myself and my overwhelming creative energies into every word, and so I might actually achieve some kind of equilibrium that way some day.
Either way, it’s cool. I have enormous creative energies I can tap into at will. It’s one of my many powers. I really am quite amazing when you think about it.
Insert obvious “and so humble!” joke here.
Building up my self-esteem (or “ego” as we used to call it) is a difficult long term project. It would be different if I was not so cautious by nature and worried about losing my mind to delusions of grandeur type things.
Because that’s the problem when you realize that you tower over others intellectually. The human mind is a status seeking machine and so my primitive mind immediately wants to skyrocket into a quite frankly pathological level of self-regard.
I don’t think I could become a full fledged narcissist. I am too ironic and self-aware for that. But I could see feeling like some sort of god amongst the human herd.
And that thought repulses me. I hate elitism, especially my own. But sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t be healthier in the long run if I just let my ego jetpack me up into the stratosphere and let myself float back down to Earth naturally.
But I am so scared that I would just get lost up there. I have this vision of myself as some kind of cackling loony in a cell somewhere constantly muttering to himself about how some day they will all pay and deluding myself into thinking I am doing some kind of incredibly esoteric science when all I am doing is writing nonsense on the walls with my own poop.
Sorry about that image. Did not know I was going to go there.
Or even worse, I would, like Ziggy Stardust, get sucked up into my mind and making love to my ego and be, in the real world, completely catatonic.
It would be the logical final act to my withdrawing into my mind to protect myself from the world, and I fear it more than I fear death.
The sane part of me is still desperately clinging to the edges of my reality in order to keep from being completely consumed by the hungry void that always threatens to drag me to my doom like a whirlpool.
I should probably see someone about filling that thing in. Or maybe just putting up really good guardrails so that I can relax for a minute or two.
Or, radical thought, just not be fucking crazy for a while.
I’m working on it.
More after the break.
Crisis? What crisis?
Well, i guess it’s time to gnaw on this old bone some more.
Am I in a crisis? Yes and no.
The yes comes from my frustration and anger at my clogged up life and my broken motivational engine which keeps my considerable passionate energies all stopped up inside me where they can cause all kinds of mental mayhem and it is the nature of said energies to strain against their constraints and when they can’t get out that emotion has to go somewhere and in my case it devolves into panic.
I hope that all made sense.
So the sense of crisis in my life comes from all that frustrated emotion and the pain it causes me as it strains against the plug of mental illness holding it back and the energies end up backing up and venting internally in a very unhealthy way.
So in that sense, damn right it’s a crisis. One that makes me feel like I am going crazy sometimes. But it keeps me trying to shift that damned plug and each day it loosens a little more and hopefully one day it will finally POP out of there.
But in another sense, I’m fine.
I’m in no danger. I have a highly equitable lifestyle. As far as I know, there’s no health problem looming that’s going to fuck me up forever. I have wonderful friends who take care of me. I have food and shelter and clean water to drink.
I could go on like this for years. I know this because I already have. I could go on like this till the day I die, and the way it looks now, I will.
And maybe that means that I should learn to relax and just accept that. Accept that this is it and try to make the best of it so I can exit crisis mode and let my background adrenaline levels drop to a more healthy baseline and maybe make some kind of acceptable life for myself out of the ingredients I know I have.
That sounds like giving up, says a possibly unhealthy part of my mind.
And yeah. That would be giving up. But giving up on what? Maybe I would actually make much better progress against my problems if my entire nervous and endocrine systems could just settled the fuck down and let me be mellow and copacetic and healthy instead of constantly imperiled.
That does sound a whole lot better than wasting my life while background stressing constantly about wasting my life.
But I don’t know if I can switch gears like that. I think some part of me needs to strain and stretch and strive and at the very least I will need to find a healthier way to make that part of me happy if I am to succeed in mellowing out.
I know I need more in my life. I can’t just mentally masturbate all the god damned time any more. I’m awake and alive now and I know what I’m missing.
But it might just be that my best bet is the Zen solution of striving without trying. Of forgetting extrinsic goals entirely in order to focus on being myself to the fullest possible degree and to hell with logic and reason and anything else – ANYTHING else – that stands in the way of that goal.
Because this is my life and my mind and my world and they are there to benefit ME.
And nothing else matters.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.