I am addicted to something which could drive me crazy, and has in the past.

It’s isolation. My depression compels me to hole up in my room most of the time. I have talked with my therapist about it, how my anxious nature (usually well hidden) causes me to seek up hyper-familiarity and hence very low physical stimulation levels.

It’s a very poor solution. Better to be out there in the sun, learning to find the joy in life. I am positive that is the key to good mental health : being willing and able to find and experience all the great things life has to offer. That’s what happy people do. And because they do this, they can maintain a positive attitude. Life gives them all they to keep doing, and then some. They never lack primal force.

So far, for me, that has been out of reach. And so I live in my cave, where I can keep all my stimulation mental and thus keep myself calm and in control.

It always comes down to control, doesn’t it?

But because I wallow in continuity to such a deep degree, my world does not feel real to me, and I don’t feel like I am truly a part of it. The mind automatically tunes out repeated stimuli. That’s why you never notice the feel of your clothes except when you first put them on. And so my hyper-familiar little cave doesn’t feel like it’s real, my mind tunes it out.

And when the only place where you physically connect with the world no longer feels real, neither does the rest of the world. I feel like there is a shell of numbness around me at all times, a shell I made myself, but that is slowly killing me as it cuts me off from the real world.

It’s a little like sensory deprivation. Perhaps that is why I have so vivid an imagination.

I guess the mind needs physical stimulation in order to maintain its grip on reality. That’s probably a big part of why I feel so much better after I have been out on my own for a while. Suddenly, the world is real!

Because when the world is not real, it is not stable. You constantly feel vulnerable because you are constantly on the edge of unreality and it scares the hell out of you. You end up feeling like you are just barely holding on to the edge and that it would only take a little push to drop you into the screaming void of insanity.

This is probably not actually true. I could probably let go and be perfectly fine after a period of adjustment. I don’t have to go around holding my guts in with both hands. Nothing bad will happen if I let go.

But I can’t, or at least, I can’t do it all at once. I have to slowly and carefully climb down the cliff face to more solid ground. And I never know when the waves of depression will leave me stranded up the cliff again.

Life’s funny like that.

My true enemy is always the void. The void manifests itself in many ways, but it all comes back to my demon, a demon called Nothing. Nothing happening in my life, nothing to do for most of the day, nothing to show for 41 years of life on Earth, nothing happening in the world of sex and romance. Nothing ever changing. No physical stimulation, no wellspring of positivity, no reality, no hope.

I have wrapped myself in the void in order to stay safe. I am like a Thermos, with a layer of vacuum between me and the outside world, and no matter how warm it is out there, I stay frozen by the cold of outer space.

And I am so very cold inside. I am losing my coldness over time (guess my Thermos leaks), but there is still far too much nothing inside me. I look inside myself and feel this enormous aching lack, a cold dead space where life should be.

One cannot live on mind alone. No matter how much the mind resents it, I am alive and incarnate and part of the living world, even though I can’t feel it. The icy chill of intellectualism is all well and good, and enormously powerful if applied correctly, but the best it can hope for is to be half of a life.

The other half can only come from life lived in realtime, exposed, without the distance needed to maintain objectivity or think things through before you can react. Only then can you take what you need to survive from life, the vital primal deep nutrition that makes the whole mental machine run.

That’s where hope lies. That’s where starvation ends. That’s where depression dies, and with it, all the mental machinations that make up your too-small cage. You are your own victim, and the only way out of this cage is to stop needing it.

So day by day, I spill my guts upon this page and lose a little bit of my darkness and with it, my pain. The process seems endless, and yet I can definitely say that I am different, healthier person than I was a year ago, or even a month ago.

So progress might be slow, but writ large across time, it is powerful indeed.

And maybe, just maybe, as my void diminishes, my inner world becomes a warmer, safer, more solid, more welcoming place, and I feel more comfortable in my own skin.

This is my life. These are my variables. This is my starting point, my eternal beginning. I am free to go wherever I like from here, but my journey has to start where I am, not where I want to be.

Longing for things to be different is a waste of time and energy that could be better used making them different.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.