This new positive mindset of mine is taking some getting used to.

For one thing, despair is habit-forming. I have spoken in this space before about failure being addictive because when you give up and give in, it immediately releases the tension of the moment and the relief that brings can be quite intense.

Intense enough, in fact, to be addictive, and like all addictions, it convinces you to sacrifice your long term best interests in favour of immediate gratification over and over and over again until your will is so weak that it can’t even motivate you to do very basic things any more.

Embracing positivity, therefore, means breaking that habit. It means making a point of blocking the negative but enticing thoughts of despair and release and staying true to the idea that yes you CAN do it. You totally can.

If you want to.

No more declaring those grapes to be sour without even a sniff in their direction. No more giving up without even thinking about trying. No more assuming that whatever it is, if it is the tiniest stressful or scary or hard or intimidating, it is not worth doing because you would only fail at it anyway.

That’s a heck of a big leap of lack of faith. To draw such a massive conclusion based on no direct evidence and only the handful of life experiences you have had is clearly illogical to the point of being indefensible.

Worse than that, it’s just plain nuts.

It’s a classic case of that whole “justifying the emotion” things I have been rattling on about for gosh knows how long now. You know, when someone deduces what must be true based on how they feel?

There is plenty of room for that when one is being introspective. It is, in fact, the preferred method and the only truly effective tool for it.

But it doesn’t work with actual objective reality. You can’t assume that your feelings about something reveal something relevant about the nature of that thing.

The example I use is racism. A racist old lady is scared by black people, ergo those black people must be dangerous and bad.

Because that’s how they make her feel.

Hmmm. My “get back to the subject” alarm just went off. Where was I?

Oh right, positivity. One of the things people don’t take into account is that when you shut down one way of coping – in this case, despair – you have to find another, healthier way to get the job done.

So right now, I am doing a very good job of shutting down the negative thoughts but I have yet to dream up a new way to cope with stuff.

And it’s a nontrivial question because without a new and improved coping mechanism, the emotional work will build up until the negative thoughts come flooding back into the mind all at once and wreck some of the progress I have made.

I know this because it’s happened before. At least twice, possibly a lot more. I have been to the darkly absurd place where thinking the horribly negative thoughts after suppressing them for a while actually feels really good.

Why? Because it releases the tension There’s that big sense of relief again, rewarding all the wrong behaviours.

Well if despair and giving up are not options, what else is there?

Actually, I think I need to correct that. It’s not that giving up on things stops being an option entirely. That would be equally nuts.

What I am giving up is the luxury of despair – specifically, the luxury of assuming that if I don’t want to do something, it is impossible to do and therefore it is okay to give up.

That means owning up to the fact that there are a lot of things I am perfectly capable of doing but choose not to because I get scared.

Note my emphasis on the word choose. It is a choice I am making. I could choose to do the scary thing anyway. That is entirely within my power. I am not the helpless victim of natural forces, with no more control over my fate than a rock or the sky.

I can choose. The idea that I can’t is and always has been bullshit. It’s a cheap dodge, a way of ducking the responsibility for my life by pretending I had no choice.

Well fuck that shit. I am officially declaring myself to be in charge of this crazy life of mine and it’s my job to make it better for myself and nobody else’s.

Nobody can save me from myself. And nobody should. Not if I want to grow up and become a real person and not just a freeze dried adolescent who can fool the world into thinking he’s an adult with his big bad brain but in reality never even made it into puberty on the psychosocial development scale.

Hmmm. That started out okay but turned into negativity really fast. Clearly, this new mindset is going to take a lot of work.

Let’s start the the question : what did going on about my lack of development accomplish for me? Because it definitely relieved something in my mind. I actually feel better for having typed it.

So what gives?

I think it released some fear and maybe anger. Perhaps it did so merely by expressing my own fears and worries about myself. The subject of my own lack of development is one I return to over and over because I find it a very hard thing to process and maybe expressing the worry helps with that.

It didn’t feel like I was beating myself up or beating myself down. It felt more like acknowledging a suppressed truth. Like the relief you get when someone says what everyone has been thinking but were too afraid to say.

I truly feel that only by talking about that kind of thing over and over will I get to the place where I can do something about it.

SO expect more soul-revealing messages in the future.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.