I am starting to feel like I having been playing a game of chess inside my soul for my entire life without knowing it.

Nobody can see the chess board. Not me, and certainly not anyone else. The pieces move, and the game changes, and the consequences are quite dire, and yet I have only an intuitive and very limited grasp of what is going on. I have a sense of my position, and what moves are open to me, but that is about it.

I certainly don’t know how to achieve specific outcomes. Any ideas I have in that direction are thwarted by the other player, who presumably is also me.

They say that when you play against yourself, you can’t lose. But you can’t win either. The score is eternally tied and the result is permanent stalemate. Pieces are moved, positions change, options change, but there is never any doubt as to where it all ends up : stasis. A dynamic stasis. Homeostasis.

I’m a big fan of homeostasis. Do you know what that is? Of course you do.

And the thing about this eternal game of chess is that it limits me in ways I can’t explain to myself or others. Sometimes the only reason I can’t do something is that I don’t have any chess pieces in position to make that move. All my inner resources, all the bits and pieces of me that I use to make believe I am a person. A real person.

That’s why I respond so badly to big surprises. I just can’t handle the sudden. Everything I do must let me have enough time to slowly move my pieces around the board until I am in the right position to do it. Sudden things tip the board over and scatter all the pieces. I can’t handle that, not yet.

Of course, the real world happens in realtime. Hence my inability to deal with it. This intellectual cage of mine is really great for a whole host of mental activities like contemplation, creativity, analysis, and pattern/anomaly detection.

But it requires a stillness of body and spirit to enter this intellectual mode. Any unexpected action or stimulus will shatter the trance and leave you naked before the world, without all those high level mental creations to help you, You will have to deal with things as they happen instead of always having time to think them over, and that means you cannot play the slow, careful game of chess you prefer. The kind you can play without leaving your deep intellectual cave at all.

And all the while, the shifting patterns of play on the chessboard fool you into thinking you are moving. That you are getting somewhere. And yet you keep ending up in the exact same places. Everything moves, and everything changes, and yet everything stays the same because no matter how long you play or how clever your stratagem, you are still just playing chess with yourself. And there is no play clever enough to change that.

So how do you escape this eternal game? This semblance of motion, this simulacrum of life? The game is impossible to win or lose, so those exits are blocked. That only leave one possibility : quitting the game entirely.

But this game is not so easy to walk away from. It has a strong hypnotic pull to it, like a hypnotic kaleidoscope. Even if you know that you should close your eyes and pull away from it, its shifting patterns and pulsing colors have a soothing effect as they combine stimulation with repetition. It is so much easier to just sit still and watch the pretty colors swirl around than it is to deal with than the far too stimulating real world with its unpredictability.

So you make your moves and you study the board and the pattern is never the same two days in a row, but before long you have seen every single pattern there is, and it takes a certain kind of willful amnesia to forget that and pretend each new move unleashes a world of possibilities.

It doesn’t matter, because you’re still playing the game. No matter how good you get at it, you can never escape that way.

And if you have been playing the game for a long time like I have, the prospect of just getting up from the board and walking away is daunting. What would I do with all that mental muscle I have developed? There would be not just one but two of me to keep occupied then. And what happens when all that mental sedative wears off and you begin to really feel your psychological injuries again? The ones that have never healed because you keep them frozen instead? What then?

I honestly don’t know how to be human. At times I feel like I just plain can’t live as other people do. Like I have said many time before, things grow strange in the dark, and I have lived in this here cave of mine for a very long time. There are times I think that the best I can hope for is that if I keep on digging tunnels, I will come out the other side.

I just feel so damned tired sometimes. I am beginning to think that is the true definition of age : tiredness. The older you get, the more tired you feel, and death truly is the final rest… the one where you have given up for good.

No matter how big your cage (or cave) is, it’s still a prison, and true freedom comes at the cost of a very big part of yourself. An unhealthy part, sure, but a big part nevetheless.

How can everyone else function so well in world that is so damned loud? What’s wrong with me that I am such an introvert that normal, everyday things can hit me like I am a member of the House of Usher?

That’s what therapy is for, I guess. With a therapist, you have someone else to play against and they can introduce new moves and new elements to the game.

Maybe with therapy, I can some day win.

I’ll talk to all of you nice people again tomorrow.