Curse of the overcharge

Well, I am all out of links to share and comment on and I don’t really feel compelled to talk about anything in the news right now, so I guess I will have to go back to my trusty old talking endlessly about myself and my mental problems routine.

Or at least, giving a State Of My Recovery address. This blog of mine is supposed to be a diary at least some of the time, and I have been sort of avoiding that part of it for a while now, preferring the use links and TED talks and so on as interesting distractions from dealing with myself for a while.

And it’s not like those other kinds of blog entries are somehow worthless. I like sharing my thoughts with the world. It helps me develop both my thinking and my expressive skills. Plus, it just feels good to exercise these writing muscles of mine.

Like I have said for a long long time, I need ways to harness and express these creative energies of mine in order to fumble towards some kind of sanity. Both times I have written a 50,000 word novel for the National Novel Writing Month in November, I have found that it is very satisfying to have something to do that absorbs so much of my energies. It is a lot of work, but the work makes me happy.

And a lot of that has to do with no longer having so much pent up potential energy filling up all the empty spaces in my brain. When I strive harder to harness my energies, and put them out into the world instead of keeping them in all the time, I am a happier, calmer, more relaxed person who finds life much easier to deal with.

So why don’t I do that all the time? Why is there only one month out of twelve where I live this happier and calmer life?

I have all the information I need in order to make the choice that will clearly, according to all available evidence, make me a happier and saner person. But instead, I plug along at 1000 words a day, which is enough to keep my creative wheels greased and all, but not nearly enough to actually discharge the extraordinary buildup of electricity that is the usual state of being in my mind.

And that might be clue one as to why. I am so used to having all this neurotic energy in my mind, just waiting to amplify the smallest stresses into gigantic panic attacks, that I am afraid to let it go.

Because like I said before, this overabundance is not just a curse, it’s also somehow my safety blanket. All the potential thoughts, emotions, ideas, and so forth are added like bricks to the wall inside my mind which protects me from the world.

Even the energy itself contained within these notions of mine is used to clamp everything in place instead of being used to actually motivate me to do things.

So perhaps a primary reason why I do not live as though NaNoWriMo is every day of the year is that somewhere deep inside, I am afraid that if I discharge that energy, everything in my mind will fall apart and I will be left in chaos and vulnerability.

And when you live your entire life in order to avoid vulnerability, it paradoxically makes you very vulnerable to all kinds of things. Like loneliness and isolation, for instance.

That’s what happens when a person’s fundamental sense of safety is violated in early childhood. They become so paranoid about the world coming to get them that they become obsessed with avoiding the faintest trace of vulnerability, regardless of the cost.

I have certainly paid an extremely heavy price for my inherent mistrust of the universe. It has robbed me of all hope I had for a normal life.

Normal people leading normal lives accept a certain amount of risk and vulnerability as a cost of living. They have a healthy balance of both caution and coping skills, and this allows them to navigate through life in a confident and calm way.

But for the likes of me, our terror makes us hide away from the world to the point where it becomes nearly impossible for us to cope at all with anything but the most heavily mediated reality.

Like the Internet, for instance.

Still, this thousand word a day thing is just not cutting it any more. I find myself getting bored and frustrated with all the time I spend doing pointless things online.

And that is a good thing. I am cultivating this restlessness and dissatisfaction. Only by letting it develop and grow will it become a force for change inside me.

Comfort can kill. Seeking discomfort can be the only way to escape a bad (but comfortable) situation. It is a hard lesson for a comfort-seeking creature like myself to accept. My strongest instinct is to always flow in the direction of maximum comfort and then stay there.

This results in a life without even the possibility of change, and so if I want to cover the distance between where I am and a new, better normal, I am going to have to voluntarily move from a state of greater comfort to a state of lesser comfort.

Life does not provide many escalators between where you are and where you want to be, and you can waste decades of your life holding out for one.

Oh, wait, this just in : the most amazing link I have seen in… maybe forever.

Like someone said in the comments, this could have been cheesy and terrible. Instead, it is so far beyond mere awesomeness that it defies calculation by even the most robust super-infinite tensors.

I don’t even care at all that he changed the lyrics to one of the best songs ever. That is completely fine by me. He couldn’t very well do the original song as written, it ends with Major Tom’s capsule floating off in space forever (or something). People on Earth would be flipping out.

And the new lyrics are quite good!

I think… I think I now worship Commander Chris Hadfield a little now, and not just because he did a great version of a Bowie song and I already worship Bowie a little.

No, I worship him because he did Major Tom in motherfucking space and did an incredible job of it. He is the coolest human being to ever be in space, period.

And he’s Canadian.

That pretty much maxes out my ability to absorb awesomeness right there.

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