Had one of those moments when I realize just how deeply damaged I am today.

It was during class – TV spec, not that that’s important. I was sitting there feeling like I suck and I am terrible and nobody is listening to me and so on – the usual. But then I had a moment when I realized just how tragic the whole thing was.

After all, I doubt anyone else in the classroom thought I sucked. I was sitting there feeling terrible because I was, in some very ill defined way, not doing well enough at…. something. But to any objective observer, I was sitting there contributing to the other student’s TV outlines. Some of my suggestions landed and others did not. That’s true for everybody, I imagine.

And yet, there I was, in a morass of self-doubt verging on self-loathing, and without a single shred of logical justification for it.

Looking back now, I can see that at the center of it my desperate need for attention and validation. One of the most treacherous ways in which depression destroys from within is when it treats all lack of success as failure. So there is no in between – either you achieve (at minimum) exactly what you intended to achieve, or you have failed completely and should be ashamed of yourself.

This does not exactly breed persistence. And that’s exactly what depression wants : for you to give up and return to the kind of flat, lifeless, low stimulus existence depression desires.

And I was facing the depression and feeling the vast difference between my feelings and reality, I started pondering all the social damage I have suffered and how badly malnourished and atrophied my social machinery is as a result.

I am grateful that at least the desire to connect with others persists. I will say that from the outset. It leads to a lot of pain when I strain against the vast accumulation of psychological scar tissue that is getting in the way of said connection, but as long as the desire persists, I know I will overcome the barriers sooner or later.

But sometimes the layers upon impacted layers of paranoia, fear, and hostility towards others that I can feel lining that vast gulf between me and others drive me to despair. I have so much negative input to overcome, and it’s easy for my therapist to say I need to overwrite it with positive input, but the input has to be able to penetrate first.

And the thing is, I know I should be striving to be more social. Show business is all about making connections, and I’m not making any. Sure, my teachers know me, and that means a lot because they all have lots of connections in the biz. But I am not going to get that far on that alone. It would be far better if I made a deeper connection with my fellow students.

Problem is, I freeze up inside with fear when I even think about it.

The best I can hope for is to kick myself out of the door to attend the next social-type event I see advertised about. Assuming there will be more of them. I could try to invite myself into something I overhear them talking about doing, like going to a movie or whatever, but I don’t want to impose.

But if it’s the only way to add myself to the social scene at this late date, I may not have any choice in the matter.

Anyhow, back to me in the morass. I know that my overweening need for attention and validation puts me in a highly vulnerable and unstable position. It’s a classic case of wanting something so bad that it actually interferes with your ability to get it. I am sure the neediness comes across and that’s never good, but that’s not the major problem.

The major problem is that, metaphorically speaking, a starving person takes failure to get food a lot harder than a full one.

If I could just tone it down a little and hold back, and mostly important, relax already, I would probably get more of what I want out of social interaction. But to get that, I would need to feel more confident and less vulnerable in social situations – and that’s not going to happen without more of that positive social input I was talking about.

It’s not quite a Catch-22, because there’s always the slow an inexorable process of recovery grinding away, but it is certainly Catch-22-ish.

And the thing is, part of what makes it so hard for that positive social input to get through is that depression lies in wait for that exact kind of thing and invalidates it as fast as it can. And what it can’t logically invalidate it simply scrubs from the tapes. Any kind of positive input fades away faster than an afterimage, and of course, the negative stuff persists ad infinitum.

That’s not the sort of thing that be changed cognitively. It’s not simply an illogical thought pattern. It’s something far deeper and darker. It’s that fundamental table of values that I have talked about before, and that dictates much of how we feel. And it is the sort of thing that cannot be changed by thought alone, or by any direct method for that matter.

Only a long journey into that dark and twisted forest that is the subconscious mind can do it. As I have said before, I am well aware that my deepest problems lie outside the world of reason, logic, analysis, and all the rest of that left brained shit. I know that the view that somehow that brightly lit laboratory of the mind is all that there is (or all that matters) is false, and the product of a cowardly instinct to pretend that which one cannot handle does not exist.

But it’s still incredibly hard for me to imagine going out into that dark and twisted forest. It’s my total lack of faith that does me in. It leaves me uniquely unsuited for tackling that which cannot be known in a rational sense.

Still trying to learn to explore after all these years.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.