Been thinking about my whole “mistrust your predictor” thing today.

And I have come to the conclusion that asking someone to lose all faith in their emotional perceptions is a little too much to ask. People just plain can’t do it. Our emotions are a key part of how we percieve the world and asking anyone to simply abandon that is like asking someone to not believe their eyes any more because of that one time you saw something that wasn’t there.

It’s still right most of the time, after all.

So I have refined the concept a tad and now I am saying that depressives ,like myself should accept the possibility that their emotional perceptions are incorrect some of the time. Especially when it comes to things like self-evaluation and what other people think of you and other matters rooted in self.

You also have to be wary of one particular perception that I will call the Gas Gauge. It is the sense you have of how much energy you have left in your tank.

It is this perception that tells a person with depression that they don’t have the energy to do X. And I have already talked about how wrong it can be and how there have been times in my life where I ignored it and it turned out I had more than enough energy to do X and more besides.

But what is really going on under the hood when a depressive feels like they do not have the energy to do something? It’s simple.

It means they don’t want to do it.

Why? Because depression is rooted in fear of change. The person with depression does not want to leave their current state of barely holding it together (so they think) and risk shattering their slender sense of safety that is the only thing that keeps the demons of anxiety at bay.

Viewed from that perspective, it is clear that any change had better have a guaranteed high level of reward to take the risk.

It’s amazing how I can be sitting there, utterly miserable and hating my life,  when the prospect of action comes up and suddenly that static miserable life I was just hating a moment ago suddenly seems like a golden paradise I would be a fool to risk.

That’s why I talk sometimes about the paradoxical desire for change without change. A mythical kind of change that has all the good parts of change, like things getting better, withoiut the scariness of things being new and different and unfamiliar.

That’s why, amongst the depressives, it is not hard to find someone who goes on and on about their big dreams while strenuously and vociferously resisting any and all change or risk in their life with every fiber of their being.

And I include myself in this. I have big dreams, sure. But I do almost nothing in pursuit of them. Clearly, they are there purely to give me the vague but comforting feeling that my life is going somewhere.

Or at least it will. Someday. In the future. Eventually. It has to happen, right?

And the best part is that I don’t have to do a single solitary thing that would take me outside of my teeny tiny comfort zone one bit

Because it’s totally going to happen. Some day. Eventually.  In fact, the really magical thing about it is that no matter how old I get, it stays the exact same distance away from the current moment.

That’s way better than trying. After all, if you try, you might fail, and then you might find yourself thinking about your dreams in concrete terms, and that’s surely death.

But the cold and bitter truth is that my dreams are nothing but self-satisfied bullshit unless I can imagine myself doing the basic steps to achieve them RIGHT NOW.

If I can’t imagine a series of steps that I can actually see myself doing that lead to the fulfillment of those dreams, then they are nothing but so much smoke up my ass.

So I have to ask myself, how seriously do I take my dreams? Is it really important that they comes true, or am I content to slide through the rest of my life and right into my grave living the exact same life I live now?

Pretty sure I am not.

But not totally sure, because that would mean having to do things. It might even involve the greatest evil in the depressive’s mind : MOTIVATION.

Motivation sucks because then you HAVE to do something or you will feel bad.

And that can’t possibly be right.

Then again, I did do a year’s education in order to get a certificate that says I can write. It’s handing on the wall next to the light switch of this very room.

What I didn’t account for when I did that VFS thang is that I am not emotionally suited to self-promotion and there was little to no chance I would even do the basic step of putting together a portfolio and sending it to people who might hire me.

Heck, I haven’t even tried to look for an agent.

Instead, I stay in my hermetically sealed little world and waste my life playing video games all the time and just… letting the days go by.

Water flowing under.

So it’s time to face up to it. Either my dreams are a fraud or I need to start living a different kind of life. One where I strive and strain and try and risk and push my ambitions as far as I can so that my dreamy little dreams can come true.

I truly believe that I could make legendary art if I only had the means. I could make the kind of comedy that remains famous forever, or at least for my lifetime, just like my heroes in Monty Python did.

But all that loively potential is locked behind a door called depression and while that door stays locked, nothing is going to happen.

And I will be yet another victim of Failure to Launch until that changes.

Now where did I put that key…..

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.