So like…. whatever.

Today’s been a bit better than yesterday. The kitchen still needs cleaning. But I finally got around to busting some boxes that needed busting in order to free up space, and so there’s that.

Made a white cake last night. Well, theoretically white. White in name. Yellow in appearance. I haven’t cut into it yet (moron that later) but I am guessing it will be the same inside.

I tried reducing the baking time in hopes of producing something that looks vaguely like the picture with the recipe, but it looks the same as before : yellow and wrinkly, with oversized air bubbles.

Maybe next time I will reduce it even more. On the other hand, maybe the recipe sucks.

Tonight I will glaze it. I know from experience that this particular cake recipe’s result is pretty boring sans icing, and so the glaze is kind of necessary.

It wouldn’t be necessary if I knew how to make the kind of cake they sell in supermarkets. Apparently, that’s just a standard cake mix. Theoretically, I could just buy cake mixes (sorry Mom) but I think most cake mixes have the sugar already added and all the consumer has to do is add water and an egg.

So, so much for that idea. Who knows, maybe they have sugar free cake mixes nowadays. I will look into it.

I would be willing to sacrifice my from-scratch ideals if it result in cake that is that good. Although I would always be wanting to find a recipe for the cake so I don’t have to buy mixes any more.

What can I say…. the things you learn from your parents can run pretty deep. When I was a preschooler, my mother made everything from scratch and inculcated in me a belief that natural is always better and I should avoid overly processed foods and artificial gunk in favour of whole, natural foods.

Sadly, I can’t afford to live entirely by her ideals, but some traces do remain. and baking really bring that out in me. Maybe it’s more about a stubborn demand for knowledge than anything else. I want to know how it’s put together! Rather than just believe whatever a faceless megacorp tells me!

I have trust issues.

I suppose baking from scratch gives one a feeling of power that way. You are the one who takes all the powders and liquids and such and combine them into something that will taste amazing. It’s like being a highly successful alchemist. I can’t turn lead into gold but I can turn flour, Splenda, and so on into some mighty tasty cookies.

Cake mixes take all the fun out of it!

What else…. I really feel like I am fighting a large battle in the war against depression lately. I go back and forth on the horns of inner conflict all the time, and it gets a bit tiring.

But no matter. The war is on, and victory is inevitable because my mission is pure and my will is unbendable. I might not go fast, but like the Canadian military in WWII, I never, ever lose ground. I’ll bear Atlas’ burden rather than give a single inch. When I kick my depression out of my mind, it fucking well stays out.

I have to avoid putting myself into the same old traps, though. That whole business with cleaning the kitchen is a perfect example. When the “want to” become a “have to”, all hell broke loose, and I got all tied up in knots.

The smart thing is to forget all the “shoulds” and “have to’s” and bring everything back to the primal desire : I want to clean the kitchen. I want to do it because it will result in my having a clean and cheerful space to do my baking, because it will be a small amount of exercise, and because it will make me feel better about myself.

None of the rest of it matters. I don’t have to do it. The kitchen is no dirtier than usual and so if I do nothing, it will be business as usual, not a global catastrophe. I don’t need to do it either. Need to, have to, ought to… none of that bullshit matters. And worse, it only gets in the way of achieving the objective.

But then again, maybe that’s the point.

it’s a hard mental transition to make for someone with such deeply ingrained negative patterns as me. Even forming the thoughts feels like trying to shove your head through a brick wall.

Luckily, I am perverse enough that, once I recognize something as being hard to think, I immediately become fascinated by it and it makes me try all the harder.

But there is an awful lot of self-correction involved in this stage of my recovery. A lot of thinking the wrong thing then stopping myself and saying “No… NOT like that. Like this!”

In its own way, it’s still about my overactive superego. But now said superego is being retrained to become a positive, encouraging, structuring parent as opposed to the nonparenting I got as a kid. I am showing myself some tough love, as well as the tender kind, and it seems to be working.

But it’s damned tricky. My superego is not fully retrained yet, and can relapse into negativity and self-destruction quite easily. Training a vicious attack dog to be a gentle seeing eye dog is not easy. It will take a lot of negative and positive reinforcement. But he’s a good dog at heart, and so I am sure it can be done.

Somewhere within me, I have everything I need to heal and grow and rise. Detoxification won’t be easy or fun or fast, but every day I wake up a little less sick. Strength, power, independence, and honor will one day be mine. I will banish the shame, the shyness, the soft shelled shelteredness, and the addiction to panic and failure, and be who I really want to me.

And that, my friends, will be someone truly awesome.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.