I have been losing my virginity for a long time.

Not in the sexual sense, obviously. Depending on your definition, I am either a total virgin (by the old Jewish “sex is a penis enterting a vagina” definition), a slightly experienced gay man (had sex with dudes not not enough to get anyh good at it), or a total pervert who will roast in the hottest fires of hell (if you go by the “impure thoughts”sinning in your heart”  definition).

No, the form of innocence of which I speak is the innocence of remaining unaware of and not interested in the general pattern of your life and where you want it to go.

Now let me make this clear. I lost more than a decade to this kind of innocence. I just innocently made it through every day with my usual media mix and actively avoided thinking about the future because  the subject made me very depressed.

When I tried to think about my future, all I could picture was a vast stretch of dark-grey static stretching forward in time. An endless nullity in which no meaning or satisfaction or even contentedness could exist.

I have a lot of void imagery in my head.

So all I could do was make it through the day every day. And for a while, I told myself that this was enough for me.

Just day after day of trying to get through the hours with as little pain as I could manage. From that point of view, anything that made the time pass subjectively faster was good. I needed some way of filling my time.

And my usual cocktail of boomks, video games, and hanging out online fit the bill. Still does. None of them require me to leave my apartment and face the world and all its traumatic stimuli and anxiety.

No, it all takes place in my unhealthty little home here. That means I am fully in control of the situation and stmulation levels do not change unexpectedly.

It’s not good. It is, in fact, killing me. But it’s the only way to cope that I know.

The loss of innocence began when I first got healthy enough, due to therapy and the miracle of modern pharmacology, to be able to look at my future and actually see something. And what I saw was not pretty.

I saw myself living the exact same way until the day I die at age 50 or so. Never becoming part of life, never getting a boyfriend or a job, never really growing up. Just an early grave with the epitaph reading “He read some books and played some video games and talked to some people online”.

That was, and is, unacceptable.

Once I got to that point, the process unfolded unbidden. I would return to this new discontent ovr and over, and for a long time, I felt like there was nothing I could do to fix the situation. My fear simply would not let me out of my box so I could go and play with all the other toys.

Story idea there. Hmmm.

But eventually I had shifted enough of my burden in order to imagine doing something with my life, and that’s when I got the marvelously mad idea of writing one million words in a year.

I did the math. It would mean writing 2,739 words a day, roughly speaking, and I felt like that was something I could do.

To this day, the sheer madcap lunacy of the idea continues to amuse the hell out of me. It’s not the sort of thing a sane person would do : go from writing nothing to writing 2700 words a day.

And it was the sheer lunacy of the idea that made me fall in love with the notion and therefore feel driven to do it.

There’s a lesson in there someone. Maybe what I need to get myself out of my current rut is another lunatic idea that I fall madly in love with.

Yes, I just need a new crazy project for the new year. But it has to be something entirely fresh and new. I would rather die than repeat myself. Once I am done with it, I am done with it, and going back to it feels like putting on dirty underwear.

Ick. No thanx.

Os it would have to be fresh and new and crazy and have lots of potential for engagement on many levels.

Maybe I will make the world’s weirdest news website. Or something like that.

Anyhow, after the million words, I settled into my “one thousand words a day” routine, which after 2700 woirds a day felt like nothing.

And that was enough for a while. It was very good for me to have an outlet for all the words in my head. Word pressure is my biggest source of interior tension.

And I could work things out by writing about them. Kind of like I am doing right now. It turns out that sometimes, the only way for me to find out what I really think is to release the words from my head until the truth pops up.

As with archeology, the secret is to dig down.

Damn I love that song.

This slowl excavation eventually led me to Kwantlen, which led to VFS, which led to this moment in time.

Right now, I feel like it was a clever conspiracy of all my bad voices that convinced me to quit the Uno job without securing something else first.

They knew that all they had to do was inflate my ego so I would quit then keep me distracted by convincing me that I would get around to digging for work on UpWork eventually, and kablam, all my momentum would die and they would have me all to themselves once more.

And I have been in that state for months. Went right back to the media cocktail, made much stronger by my addiction to Skyrim, which can keep me occupied for however much time I give to it.

On good days, it even makes me happy.

Bjut even on the bad days, it keeps me occupied.

And that’s not enouggh any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.