…becomes the mould for that upon which we fixate.

It’s not been a great day. Meh verging on bleh. I’ve created one of my inner conflicts and life will be less pleasant until it sorts itself out for the better.

See, I really need to clean the kitchen. I’m the one who makes 90 percent of the mess in there with my baking and the kitchen is in a really sorry state. Flour caked on surfaces, a ton of dirty baking related dishes to do, bottles to rinse for recycling. It’s a thing which needs to be done and I should be the one to do it.

Certainly I have to do it before Joe gets sick of it, cleans it himself, and I ends up feeling really guilty and depressed and useless and burdensome and all that jazz.

So there’s is something that needs doing, and I am the one to do it, so I should just do it, right? Simple.

But it’s never quite that simple with me. I fully realized and took ownership of the problem last Sunday night, and formed the distinct intent to do it. Planned it for Monday afternoon.

But then Monday afternoon came, and I just… didn’t do it. And that’s the fatal moment because that’s when the aversion formed. Now the task is all tangled up inside me because instead of something I want to do, it’s something I have to do, and that makes me fervently avoid it because I just can’t take the pressure. I bail.

Pressure is a very big problem for me. When things get too intense in my head, I just tap out. It’s all I know how to do. I silence all the inner voices shouting at me by just shutting down.

It’s something I learned as a little kid. As in, a preschooler. I had two parents and three older siblings, and over and over again I would find myself with all five of them shouting conflicting instructions or advice at me and the only way out for me was to shut down and wait for clarity.

I don’t think anyone realized, including myself, just how much damage that was doing to me. I’m a people pleaser by nature, even more so back then, and so I really wanted to do what I was told. But I couldn’t do it with that kind of chaos. And that really upset me, but I wasn’t assertive enough to complain.

Looking back, I wish I had been assertive enough to shout “ONE AT A TIME!”. Or even “PICK A REPRESENTATIVE!”. How could they argue with that? My case was solid.

But sadly, that set the pattern for the rest of my life. When things got to be too much inside my head, or in life, or in (usually) both, I would just shut down and wait for the moment to pass.

But like in the adult world is not nearly so simple. In the real world, you have to deal with things no matter how loud and chaotic the voices inside get. You can’t always shut down when things get too intense and filled with pressure. You have to actually hang in there and do what needs doing no matter what.

Tough call for an escape addict who responds to most fearful or stressful situations by kicking into panic mode where all you are about is the fastest and most direct escape from the situation. And at that point, you are willing to jettison absolutely anything… your dignity, your personhood, your best interests, your skin…. if it gets in the way of your escape.

And your depression knows this, and is quite skillful at simply upping the internal depression pressure…. depressure…. to an easily reached overload level and thus keeping you in your place, under its control. Everything that leads to potential escape immediately floods with pressure so you overload and shut down, just like your depression wants.

And so you develop aversions. After all, why should your depression go to the trouble of flooding you with pressure and conflict all the time when your mind is so compromised that it can save itself a lot of trouble by simply tagging enormous parts of reality as “scary, do not enter” and then make sure you stay too distracted to notice that huge portions of life are cut off from you because, after all, there is so much in your tiny life (so many books to read, video games to play) that who needs more?

But just as a man locked in a library still has to eat, no matter how distracted you get, you still have the normal human needs for connection, affection, social approval, romance, sex, and so on. Starvation, whether physical or emotional, does no go away when you ignore it. It grows, and grows, and crowds out more and more of your higher mental functions until, outside your distractions, you can barely think at all.

And that’s when depression really can declare victory over you and laugh in your face : when it has made you stupid. When it has successfully convinced you that its reality is the only reality and everything else must be an illusion, a delusion, or simply meant for somebody else.

This afternoon was spent not only avoiding cleaning the kitchen, but burying myself in my Android games for my tablet far more deeply than I usually do. I didn’t even manage to get up and use the computer like I usually do. Every time I thought about leaving the (oh so comfy) fixated groove I was in, avoidance kicked in, and I said “Um, nope. ” and dove deeper still.

The relationship between the avoidance and the fixation was clear. So when you come across tales of people who seem very fixated on something very small and unimportant, just think of what they must be trying to avoid by turning up the volume on the one thing they know and trust, be it playing chess, collecting Pokemon cards, or winning a land war in Asia.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.