Today was kind of fucked up.

Interior drama occurred today. That’s the drama that happens entirely inside my haunted head. It seems absurd that this is even still possible, but ghosts don’t die all at once.

They fade away.

In this case, I was thinking of asking Joe if he could drop me off at 7-11 on the way to work. That whole running start thing. No big deal, right? Wrong.

I got caught up in this struggle between doing it and not doing it. So many emotional factors ended up jumping into the fight that it was like a war on ten fronts in this skull of mine. My desire to get out of the house more and be more adventurous got ambushed by my remaining depressive insistence that motion is danger and stillness is safety (what I have called the anti-action bias before) and I (the real I, the thing that is me) got caught in the crossfire.

So I went back and forth and back and forth over and over again on whether to do it or not, all the while keenly aware of what a ridiculously tiny thing it was that was the subject of this titanic struggle. And that, of course, just made it worse. I totally get now why people with OCD say that knowing that their compulsions are irrational and pointless does not help at all, it only makes it worse.

After all, compulsions stem from an off-balance need to self-soothe with ritual or habit, and the worse you feel about what you are doing, the more you will need to self-soothe. The same thing happens with addictions, which, if you think about it, are just compulsions backed by a chemical imbalance we call “withdrawal”.

But anyhow, back to my day. Damn it’s easy for me to wander off into intellectualism.

I ended up not going. Of course, I feel sort of bad about that, like I had a chance to be cool and blew it. Make my life better, expand my comfort zone, all that jazz.

But then another voice pops up in my head saying that putting that much pressure on myself to do things like that is not the way to do it and is really a recipe for failure because the pressure just makes me flee. So if it is going to be a big huge pressure thing, I am better off backing off until I can deal with things in a more rational, positive manner.

But that still feels like I am fleeing when I should be staying in the game and staring the fear down. No matter how you slice it, the depression gets what it wants. Me not going anywhere, spending the afternoon burning brain cells on video games and online chat instead of doing anything productive.

On the other hand, I am saving all my money for Vcon, and the only thing really at stake was whether I would have Diet Coke to drink with my midnight snack tonight. So it honestly would not have been worth my time to go and I just would have ended up spending money I should not.

Oh, but I have done the math in my head and I have plenty of dough. The con will involve five or so meals…. that’s a hundred bucks. Registration will be something like 60 or 70 bucks. That leaves 30 or 40 bucks for the unexpected or the too good to miss, and I will still have like $180 left for the final two weeks of the month.

Plus I will be getting a GST cheque some time in early October. So I should be just fine either way.

And so forth and so on, for at least an hour and a half this afternoon. A monumental struggle of legendary scope, and all over the three or four bucks a 2L of Diet Coke would have cost me.

Oh well. It’s all over now and behind me. It’s tough seeing yourself go crazy like that, but that problem shrinks on a daily basis and soon enough will shrink out of sight.

Speaking of shrinks, I will finally be going back to therapy tomorrow. It has been three weeks since my last appointment (, Father) and I could really use a chat with him. There’s only so much I can do on my own.

Tomorrow is, of course, also the last day before the Vcon Experience begins. Before a convention, I always get the same sort of rush of feelings I get before I go on stage to perform. There’s excitement, fear, anticipation, a sense of wonder, a little reluctance, and an emotion I can only describe as THIS IS IT.

It’s quite the cocktail. Usually, it’s an emotion I can only handle in small doses. So I tend to only really think about what is coming for brief moments now and then.

That works to keep me from being completely overwhelmed, but it does make it difficult to truly plan ahead. I am sure it’s the main reason why I always end up leaving things behind that I totally need but just could not think of before I was at the convention. That kind of emotional overload reaction makes it hard to think clearly about a subject.

Oh well. No matter what, I will attend the convention, have a good time, feel a little sad when it ends, and move on.

Because Joe and Julian are volunteering at the con, we will be getting there earlier than usual. That is fine with me. I might still be a little sleepy around the edges, but at least I will miss fewer potential panels of interest.

And if I am just too pooped to cope, I can always take a nap in our hotel room.

And no huge pressure to go to every potentially cool panel or I am a terrible person for wasting an opportunity. Sure, I want to get in as much Vcon as I can. But letting that crazy pressure enter the occasional will only lead to further incidents like today’s inner drama, only more so.

And that, I do not need.

I will talk to all you nice people against tomorrow.