I get so sick and tired of myself sometimes.

I suppose that’s a side effect of developing one’s inner parent as a step in getting over one’s abandonment issues. Now that I have an inner parent of sorts, it gets exasperated by my inner child all the goddamned time.

Right now, the annoyance is at how whiny my inner child is being about having to leave the apartment today in order to go to the drug store and pick up some pills.

The drug store that is one block away. If it was any closer, I’d be living there.

I have to do it because I am out of Paxil. The last time I went there for a refill on pills, they didn’t have enough Paxil on hand to fill the order so they could only give me half of the prescribed amount.

The pharmacist offered so deliver the rest personally when he got it, but I airily declared that he needn’t bother as I would just come and get the rest when I needed it.

“It will give me an excuse to get out of the house. ” I added.

Well now I need it, and so I have to put up with a whiny lazy inner child who dpesn’t want to have to wake up fully and put on pants.

If it was up to him, I would skip the whole thing and stay home and end up having to go an entire weekend sans Paxil because I was too lazy to walk one block and pick it up/

That kind of thing used to happen a lot in my life. I would make “decisions” like that all the time, and think nothing of it. It was self-destructively self-indulgent and when I look back on it now, it boggles the mind.

Especially because through the whole thing, I would retain a kind f blithely innocent pose, as if there was nothing I could do about it and the fact that I even had to think about it was some kind of grave injustice and an indictment of life in general and my so-called life in particular.

God, what a pathetic attitude towards life.

Life takes effort, especially if you want to be happy. The oral-retentive fantasy of a life where everything just comes to you without you having to do a thing is a fool’s paradise, a decadent nightmare that would cause spiritual death were it to occur.

You have to strive. Not because there is some kind of abstract virtue in struggle and strife. Fuck that shit.

You have to strive and try and stretch your capacities because that’s the only way to be happy. You have a certain amount of energy for effort and if it is not spent, the system gets backed up and the energy turns inward and destroys you.

It would be a highly ironic hell for that fantasy to be fulfilled so that everything the dreamer can think of is easily at hand and yet they are dying on the inside and all the richest of the world amount to nothing but a golden noose choking the life out of them.

Something to watch out for in the unlikely event that I become successful. I can easily image falling into that particular hole. Spend all day indulging myself until I am more depressed than I ever was when I was poor because now there is “no reason” for me to be so goddamned miserable.

We suffer so much due to our lack of spiritual education. We should be teaching the kids that when they get tired of material indulgence and the trappings of “success”, there is a way out, and that way out is to take it to the next level and seek not pleasure or contentment or pacification but fulfillment.

Or, looked at from a different angle, meaning. They amount to the same thing.

It’s oddly ironic that I can think and write stuff like that and yet still be the guy who has trouble motivating himself to walk one block to pick up the most important medication he takes. It makes me think of a bit from Alice in Wonderland that’s always stuck with me (for some reason) where the narrator says she always gave herself very good advice but very seldom followed it.

When my mother read that part to me when I was a wee sprog, I instantly identified with it without having a clue as to why.

And it’s still true. I can give myself (and others)  top notch advice filled with wisdom, consideration,. empathy. and the passionate desire to help,. and yet, in my case…

Nothing happens. Nothing changes.

Clearly, I need more than good advice. I need impetus to follow it. To make the changes needed and see them through. Changes I know damned well are the smart thing to do, and yet I do nothing because the advice (both the dispensing and the receiving of) has helped enough that the problem no longer seems that important.

It’s a profoundly ignorant position, and I hate to think of myself as the sort of person who is unable to improve his lot in life because he is too week and lazy to do the things he knows will make his life better.

I generally don’t approve of such people.

But I get it. Change is very scary, especially when the bad chemicals in your head make you feel like you are just barely keeping your head above water as it is and any change could bring the whole trembling and fragile house of cards a-tumbling down.

And then you’d really be crazy.

But there is no such thing as change without change. If you want a better life, that in and of itself is a desire for change and that means you have to be open to change, or declare yourself perfectly happy in your current life.

And be honest with yourself : if you declare that, you are also very clearly saying that the benefits of the necessary change do not justify the effort and will it would take to make that change.

In other words, it’s just not worth it to you.

That will put things in perspective for you. And in case that’s not enough, imagine a person winning the lottery but deciding that the effort it would take to turn in the winning ticket and collect their millions make it “just not worth it”.

You don’t want to be like that person, do you?

Of course not.

So change your life already!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.