Another day where I slept a lot. And yup, the afternoon sleep was where things got all sweaty and intense and confusing and draining and so on. Ho hum.

Agreed to go to Overeaters Anonymous for the second time with Felicity tomorrow night. Rather proud of that, actually, because when she asked, I successfully rushed myself and agreed to it out loud and without equivocation before I could think about it too much and wimp out.

And once I am verbally committed to something, the momentum is heavily on the side of doing it. I always keep my word unless rendered physically incapable of it, and I hate to disappoint people (largely due to how much I hate disappointment myself), and so once it is out there and said, I will do it.

Thus, in a way, I rig the game against my social anxiety. Sure, my social anxiety would really prefer that I stay home and avoid exposing myself to a bunch of older ladies with whom I have almost nothing in common and whose program seems only partly applicable to myself at best.

But I will be there to support Felicity, and to force myself to expose myself to “normal people” (so to speak) and thereby defeat my irrational fear of exposure to regular folk.

It is natural, of course, to prefer the company of your own kind. Birds of a feather and all that. Everyone has their own sort of people, the kind of people they feel relaxed and comfortable around, and there is nothing wrong with that.

But when it gets to the point of a paralytic fear of having to talk with people who are not part of your group, when you strenuously avoid all situations where you might have to make “small talk”, when your life is frozen by fear of social exposure to even the mildest potential for awkwardness, well then you know you have a serious freaking problem.

And as with all phobias, the only reliable cure is exposure. Phobias reside in far too deep and primal a part of our psyches to be curable by talk therapy alone. The neuroses that have taken up residence in the phobia’s shadow might be treatable via talk therapy, and that can in turn give the impression that the phobia itself is being treated.

But in truth, the only way to dig out those deep, deep roots is to expose yourself to your phobic trigger. Only exposure can break the cycle of fear that fuels a phobia, where the fear generated by exposure to the phobic trigger is so intense that it reinforces the idea of the phobic trigger as something to be feared all by itself.

After all, if every time you see something, something terrible happens, it is the most natural thing in the world to come to fear that thing… even if the “something terrible” is just your own fear.

Our deep animal minds are not capable of making that kind of distinction between inner events and outer ones. To our subjective, pre-ego separation minds, there is no difference. All experiences are equally real and valid.

And honestly, that system is a lot more powerful than our higher human functions. That is why telling someone that their problems are “all in their heads” is so utterly futile.

All of our experiences are “all in our heads”. Knowing something is subjective to us does not help one bit because from the point of view of our consciousness, so is everything else, to a certain extent.

And as powerful a tool as our reasoning brain can be, in the final equation of human existence, emotion is always far more important.

We intellectuals invent massive complicated intellectual structures to try to cover up that fact and pretend that we can conquer our emotional selves with intellect and will, and hence avoid ever having to deal with our emotions at all.

But it’s a sham, a delusion, a poor man’s parlor trick, a game we play against ourselves just to avoid having to do any real growing up.

You are far better off just making peace with your emotional self, accepting that it and not your “logic” or your “knowledge” are the real you, and that everything you think you know about yourself is just a theory you have constructed to protect your weak and fragile ego.

After all, you would still be you even if your IQ was normal, despite what you might think. But nobody is anybody without their emotional responses.

Now I am not saying it is easy to give up your intellectual shields in favor of simple and plain emotion. The angry wizard that lives in the heart of every intellectual rages like a thunderstorm at the notion of facing the world without all his spells and illusions, feeling that without them, he is nothing.

But when all you have is fanciful dreams and colorful illusions, you are nothing anyhow. No amount of fantasy or illusion can make you any more than just another idle dreamer, wasting their lives in a world of their own imagining rather than putting their toys away and getting out into the real world, dealing with real things that insist on existing outside your mental control, and maybe accomplishing something.

I am entirely guilty of this, and of pretending that I can solve my problems with reality without actually deal with reality. Like all I need is therapy and thought and I can solve all my problems and then I will magically become really eager to deal directly with reality and go out there and kick some ass.

Well, that is just not how it works. You can’t just attend the class, you have to do the homework too, otherwise you are not learning jack shit.

And that is why I will be going to Overeaters Anonymous tomorrow night, even though I don’t want to.

The definition of adulthood is doing things you don’t feel like doing because you want the results.