During therapy today, I realized that my prime problem is that there is this magnetic force keeping me stuck in the center of my existence and until I learn to overcome that, nothing else is going to happen.

And we will discuss this. But first, the song.

Don’t worry, it’s not the Reservoir Dogs version!

Hmmm. So that’s what the dude looks like. I expected him to look more like Tom Petty.

Heck, for a long time I thought that actually was a Tom Petty song.

We miss you, Tom!

Anyhow, back to being stuck in the middle alone. I have talked about the “inward tide” before, and “trying to escape my own gravity well” ^[1] but I have never seen the situation as clearly as when I realized I was stuck in the middle of a big scary universe  by all the fears I have and all the aspects of life that I avoid because they make me sad and make me hate myself.

Call it the “infinite retreat”. I am silmultaneously avoiding so many things that it would take three entire alphabets plus ancient Phoneician cunieform to plot my trajectory. The only possibly outcome of such a configuration is stasis.

I am rooted to the spot because there is no direction which does not take me closer to something which I am avoiding. So I remain in the middle of all my fears and the days pass while I fuck around playing video games and wishing I had the ability to move on with my life and make a whole person of myself.

I have suppressed so much of myself for so long. Practically all of my anger, certainly all of my personal anger. My lust – or at least, the part of it that cannot be satisified by porn. All the sadness from all the pain I have suffered, as well as the pain itself.

This wholesale suppression of entire major emotions explains why I have always felt incomplete and two dimensional and not quite real. I instinctively understood that other people had so much more to them than I did. They were vital and healthy and whole. I was limp, sickly, . and fragmented.

And for my whole life, I have wanted what they had. I craved their warmth and strength and vitality. I have been very cold for a very long time and long to come in from the cold and warm up by the fire and become human again.

But it took so long for me to even realized that I was so cold because of all the emotions I suppressed. Suppression is good at hiding itself like that.

After all, suppression wouldn’t work if you were aware of it.

So now I am desperately trying to revive myself. Where’s my Saint Bernard and his cute keg of brandy? I have been hypothermic for a very long time and it is going to take a long time for me to warm back up.

It would help if I could leave my messed up middle and walk in the sun.

But the fear is so damned strong.

And it’s more than fear that powers my personal black hole. There is no gravity without mass, after all, and in my case, the mass is provided by all the suppressed emotions and memories I keep with me at my core.

So if I want to escape my gravity well, it will take far more than simply thrusting harder.

It will take actually ejecting mass to reduce the pull of gravity.

And that’s a hell of a lot harder.

 

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Back from Paragon meeting.

Let’s talk about the paradox of avoidance.

I haven’t done much work on Paragon materials. That makes me feel very guilty. Because I feel very guilty about it, when I think about Paragon, I feel said guilt, and to escape the guilt I push the subject from my mind. That makes it impossible to do any kind of work on the project. And that makes me feel guilty.

Loop ad infinitum. or at least till the day I die.

And I have tons of things like this in my life, lurking in my mind like standing waves of maladaptation. What links them all is avoidance.

Avoidance, in this case, is the tendency to flee from things rather than sticking around and dealing with them. It can be bad enough when it is a single thing that you could resolve if you just faced it and handled it.

But when avoidant reactions form easily and attach strongly, like in my case, the problem goes fractal almost immediately, and I get avoidant reactions nestes within other avoidant reacts and so on and so on until I am the center pixel in a kaleidoscopic display of limitless depth and complexity.

In other words. I’m all fucked up in the head.

And it bothers me, because I find the sort of weakness involved – the inability to get over myself and solve the frigging problem instead of fleeing – to be particularly distasteful in myself. I think of myself as a tough sort of person who faces the facts and gets things done, but the truth is, there are a lot of things in which I am a fragile and delicate butterfly who wilts under the slightest of strains.

That’s not acceptable. I won’t have it.

The solution is obvious – face the problems and solve them already – but right now I do not have the strength. And there’s only one place I can get that strength.

My id. Of course.

I keep imagining taking something like an id vacation. Takje time off from being smart and clever and wise and try letting my gut and my dick make the decisions for a while. See what happens when I turn my hypermind off for a while and get in touch with all the things underneath it that I have been neglecting for so long.

Kind of hard to picture how that would actually happen. Maybe an extended stay at some decently decorated steam baths. Or a cruise for bears where I could cruise for bears and get cruised by bears.

So step one is getting sex, is what I am saying.

The other stuff if harder to imagine. It’s not like there’s a place that specializes in helping you vent your anger or your sadness. Beside “the Internet”, ha ha.

But something somewhere has to give.

I just hope I survive the resulting explosion.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.