Merry Xmas, all you nice people! Now on to the obsessive introspection.

I’ve been thinking about how my mind is so good at punishing me for very minor things that the whole process happens with the swiftness and severity of the drop of a guillotine’s blade.

I’ve talked about this before. I make some minor mistake – click the wrong icon and accidentally bring up the wrong program, I can’t find the book I am reading, I stand up the wrong way and my busted knee hurts – and this whole cycle of shock, dear, and self-loathing happens in the twinkle of an eye and suddenly my mood has taken a big hit over something extremely unimportant.

It’s not hard to imagine why. I have been doing this for so long that the brain pathways are very strong. It’s a way of taking out some of my latent anger and frustration on myself (never a good idea), and this way, my depression maintains itself.

Even when I am happy, there is a part of me that isn’t happy, because happiness is so weird for me that when it ends, that part of me is like, phew! That was awful.

Awful because it was different from the usual status quo mood of neutral-depressed that I have lived in for so much of my life.

Sad to think unhappiness can become a habit, isn’t it? Even sadder to think it can feel like… home.

So the whole thing happens so fast that I don’t feel like I can stop it cognitively. At least, not by the straightforward “sense it happening and call time out to examine it” method I have used with other thing like this before. And it happens so frequently that it must be the primary cause of my low self esteem.

So I need to either block the blade, or toughen the target, or both.

I do what I can now to ameliorate the effects of the blade, but that always comes after it has done its damage to me, and therefore there is only so much I can do. I tell myself “No, wait, that was just the same kind of dumb mistake anyone could make” but I can’t make myself truly believe it. That part of me that likes it when I stay depressed (and hence, in a perverse way, “safe”) sees to that.

God I am sleepy. But : words first!

Clearly, I need to tackle this problem with something more sophisticated than cognitive capture. This probably requires something that isn’t cognitive at all, and hence outside my usual comfort zone.

Yesterday, I was telling Doctor Costin about how I felt trapped in my reason-bound life. That I have come to the conclusion that the one thing a life constrained by logic, reason, and facts cannot provide is transcendence. One cannot transcend the self in a world without magic or religion. By hewing fast to strictly transpersonal truth, one denies oneself permission to invent the cure needed for what ails their soul. And the souls suffers greatly for it.

That’s what I think the primary religious experience is : a moment when your imagination conceives of and believes something that repairs the damage. That can be anything from a feeling of communion with Christ when you are at church to someone developing a strong belief in having been abducted by aliens, but the end result is the same : the person imagines and believes something which fills in the gaps in life for them and makes them feel both whole and part of something bigger than themselves.

And while science can, in a sense, provide you with all kinds of ways you are part of something greater than oneself – we are, after all, made of stuff born in the heart of a dying star in a universe so vast that we can scarcely comprehend it and part of a long chain of life spanning back to the first life on Earth – that does not actually fill the requirement of feeling like you are part of something greater than yourself because there is no human factor.

We need to feel part of something greater than ourselves because that is meant to drive us to work together in a common endeavour. You can’t get that from astrophysics alone.

The only way a reason-bound person can connect with something greater than themselves is to believe in something entirely secular like a cause or an organization. I’m not sure I can do that yet… I am too mistrusting. It is really hard for me to join anything that I didn’t create and control.

It is very hard to find transcendence when you are incapable of letting your identity dissolve into a group identity. On a very deep animal level, I vigorously resist anything that tries to encroach upon my identity. I resist it like it is trying to kill me.

That’s how scared it can make me. It’s not an easy thing to think about. I guess I just don’t trust people on a really deep level. Or maybe it is the long term effect of isolation. You spend so much time excluded from everything that any change in that seems like a dreadful invasion.

I can’t let people in… then I will get hurt! And yet, I really long for connection with others. I have been so alone in my cold little world for so long that I dream of finding someone I feel I can trust enough to truly relax around them.

That kind of deep trust would be an enormous spiritual step forward for me. There is a part of me that is still the little boy who was afraid of his classmates and tried to avoid them whenever he could. The boy who couldn’t make friends with he people who tried to make friends with him because he was all frozen inside, and couldn’t thaw out enough to let friendship change him.

Warm on the outside, winter on the inside, that’s me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.