Today has had its ups and downs.

All internal, of course. My life is still primarily content free. Most of my time is spent in naps and video games and fucking around on the Internet.

What can I say, it’s what I know. It’s how I survived childhood. The only difference is the Internet. All through my childhood, I mostly buried myself in comics, books, television, and video games.

Because when you bury yourself in those deeply enough, you can’t see the cruel and confusing outside world any more, and that makes you feel safe.

Every fixation is an escape.

I wonder about my passivity. I can’t help but think that it is, in part at least, a fundamental part of my basic personality. The sort of thing they used to call temperament. Some babies explore, some don’t.

I’m guessing I didn’t. Or not much.

And my point of view is that if I am happy where I am, why move? There needs to be a specific reason for me to do something, something that compels (and impels) me to do it. A need, a desire.

Other people need a reason to stop.

Of course, once I was old enough to get into books and other media, I did my exploration there. It is, in its own way, a solution to the conflict between passivity and the urge to explore. I could go all kids of places without moving at all. Stay where I am safe and if not happy than at least content (starting to hate that word) and explore the world of the mind instead.

As I have send before, intellectually I am restless and easily bored. It takes a lot to keep my enormous sprawling complicated intellect busy. So my mind is constantly searching for answers, insights, and illumination. Or if none of those are on the menu, amusement will do. Or at the very least, distraction.

If I had to summarize how I have spent most of my life, “distracted” would be an acceptable answer.

And like all addictions, it is both the problem and the solution. The things I escape via distraction would not even be there if I spent less of my time distracted and more of it paying attention to reality and plotting my course through it.

God knows I’m smart enough. It’s the other parts of the equation missing.

I would be a lot better off if I turned away from the world inside and figured out how to get along better with the real world, and yet, I feel so weak. The very inner isolation that has caused the problem has also done a brutally efficient job of keeping me away from any and all life experiences that might have stimulated growth in spirit and will.

I am brilliant, funny, sweet, charming, creative, inventive, and one heck of a nice person. And yet, I still feel like I am just a bag of skin full of nothing. None of that adds up to an actual person. I can’t explain why that is, but that’s how I feel.

Maybe I’m afraid to be a real person. Reality is such a commitment.

Perhaps the yawning hungry void inside is purely chemical. Some imbalance in my brain, maybe that excess of internal anesthetic I go on about from time to time. It floats around in my mind, suppressing emotion, blocking out the sunlight and warmth I need to nourish my soul and help my spirit grow. It leaves me cold and numb and devours everything inside me.

And yet, until I heal the wounds prompting the released of these endorphins, the void and all its terrible nothing, nothing, NOTHING will continue to plague me and I will remain in a state of slow and painful glaciation.

Oh well. At least I can feel the sun now, albeit very weakly. It gives me something to go towards.

The word “draining” has been on my mind. Not just in the sense of depression “draining” my strength, joy, energy, and damn near everything else. It’s also another sense of draining : the kind that turns a swamp into farmland.

I feel like swampland in need of draining. I feel bloated will ill humors and drenched in dirty brown poison, in need of some spiritual lancet to puncture me and apply suction to drain the wound and give me a chance to recover.

All that unexpressed energy curdling and turning within to infect and poison my soul. Perhaps it is my shell that requires puncturing, or at less my albumen.

Water imagery. Always.

Oh well, progress is not linear. Very little in the real world is, and as much as I hate to admit it, real progress can only happen in the real world, outside my well padded cell.

I wish I could just open a vein and bleed on the page until all the bad stuff was gone. Let all my poisons flow out into the world and down the drain, and hence, out to the ever-restless seas.

The sea is our mother, and she is mighty. She can take all our pain away. But only if we dare release it.

Had a minor panic attack earlier. Nothing major, just increased heart rate, respiration, a panicky feeling. No external prompt, just the usual feeling of being trapped and unable to free myself or escape, backed by low oxygen levels from sleep apnea.

Guess I should be doing something about that whole smothering in my sleep thing. Oh well. It’s not like I’m in charge.

Oh wait, I am. Fuck. I need to learn to delegate.

If only I had a strong male figure to gather me up and take me someplace where I will feel warm and special and safe and valid. Feel like I am enough. Someone who loves me, warts and all, and who never, for a single moment, makes me feel like I am a burden he’d be better off without.

But who can love the unemployable man?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.