I think mine have been going rather well lately.
I am learning to banish the negative voices and concentrate on a feeling of clean white light flooding into my soul and washing all the bad stuff away.
That means I am very carefully easing up on my death grip on reality and being absolutely,. totallly, completely logical accurate and realistic at all times.
I have loved The Truth for a very long time. It is the ultimate intellectual virtue. And it’s one that is hard to argue with. One cannot consciously choose to believe a lie.
You either have to decide the lie is true or discard the lie entirely as bullshit.
But as much as I have loved and sought The Truth, it has never really loved me back. All my devotion to the pursuit of the truth has gotten me is a certain degree of mental discipline and a lot of insights I am too psychologically damaged to use.
And speaking of psychological damage….
My headlong and relentless pursuit of the truth has damaged me in so many ways. I have never, ever allowed myself the comfort of denial. I have been relentlessly realistic and took everything on head first and heedless of the cost.
But denial is, as it turns out, rather important. It takes the hard edges and sharp points off of life and allows one’s self-worth to protect itself against the harshness of life.
Denial and delusion are the shock absorbers of the psyche. Without them, you end up all torns up, battered, and bruised on the inside, just like me.
But you’ve heard all that before. I’ve got to cool it with the reruns.
My point is that I have been easing off on myself, and that’s marvelous. The voices of negativity are, as they must, losing ground every day..
There’s no wall strong enough to withstand stready, unrelenting pressure applied over as long a period of time as it takes to crack it.
Victory is inevitable.
It’s just a matter of time.
We resume our story after Pizza Hut pasta and PVR-age with J&J.
The real proof to me that my recent psychological progress is the real motherfucking deal is that I have felt physically better lately.
In fact, there have even been some happy little periods where I barely felt bad at all. And for someone who normally feels like shit 24/7 (only the intensity varies) that’s a pretty big deal.
I think ridding myself of the idea that I am inherently toxic and flawed will help. My biggest leap of faith of late is to dare to believe that I can be clean. That a clean, strong, healthy, whole me is even a possibility.
That I can be something good.
Back when I was far, far more depressed and had massive hygeine issues because it was very hard for me to take the sensory intensity of showering and I had become, essentially, afraid of it, someone in my therapy group asked me why I didn’t wash more.
I said, “Because there’s no such thing as a clean turd. ”
Well, I knew what I meant.
But it speaks as to just how horribly toxic I used to consider myself to me. People with a healthy self-image don’t compare themselves to shit. And it was true that I often felt like cleaning was futile back then due to my twisted sense of efficiency.
After all, the minute you step out of the shower, you start sweating and shedding skin calls and coming into contact with the dust in the air all over again, so what’s the point?
The idea that it might be worthwhile to embrace an artificial state which would require a repeated and regular investment of time and energy to maintain would not have occurred to me at the time.
Even now, I feel anxious at the thought. Part of me still feels like to do that would be tantamount to self-annihilation.
But that’s the old energy-miser thinking that has cost me so much in life. Since then, I have embraced the knowledge that you can have a lot more energy than you feel like you have, and that often the body only generates the energy it needs when it needs it, so the energy you need to do something will only be there once you commit to doing it.
I am now fully committed to learning to open my arms and my heart to life so I can enjoys its many gifts, including the gift of true inspiration.
I used to think I had lots of inspiration. But all I really had was lots of ideas. Ideas that never go anywhere and never leda to any actual activity are not inspiration.
Inspiration implies action. You are inspired to do something.
And for decades, that’s been the stumbling block for me. My profound emotional inertia and heavy resistance to doing anything that involved a large investment of energy with no guarantee of returns and no defined end point meant that most of my ideas resulted in nothing more than a brief, amusing thought before getting dropped right back into the bubbling brew that is my creative subconscious mind.
But from this point forward, I will open myself up to being prodded into action by a notion or a thought or a brilliant idea. I mean, why not?
Would I really prefer to keep just playing video games all fucking day when I could be doing something way more fun like writing?
Because I really do have a lot of fun writing, at least when I am doing it right. It’s a lot more work than burning through the precious remaining hours of my life playing video games, but my new motto is, “Easier isn’t always better!”.
Repeat until believed.
I have a lot of energy that never gets expressed and therefore hangs around my head increasing my mental tension and turning into anxiety or depression or both when only the slightest of provocations.
I would be a lot better off if I found my way to using more of that energy and leaving less of it around to cause me pain.
And all I have to do is get over the whole energy miser thing.
And that is well on its way.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.