Yeah, that feeling is back again.

But I am not going to let it become a reason to hate myself like I used to. I mean, what would the connection even be, logically speaking, between hating my life and hating yself? I’m a terrible person because my current life is unsatisfactory to me?

That doesn’t make a lick of sense.

And I am not going to strongly, thoroughly, and firmly suppress it like I have been doing lately either. There must be a reason why this thought keeps coming back and as a sensible owner of a fully armed and operation brain, it’s up to me to figure out what this feeling is trying to tell me and what I can do about it.

So let’s start from the core and work outwards.

The core is the feeling that I do not like the life I am currently leading.

Why, though? What’s so bad about it? Haven’t I been trying to tell myself it is perfectly fine and it would be okay if the rest of my life was just like this?

Yeah, bull SHIT it would be. Saying that was a necessary step in my learning to separate how I feel from who I am, but it did not last. I am not at all happy with how my life is going right now and burying that fact in favor of more time spent distracting myself with video games is not going to change the fact.

In fact, it will only make it worse.

So I am calling it. This is officially a crisis. Fuck my usual policy of maintaining maximum calmness all the time in order to fight the anxiety/. Some things are emergencies and anxiety is the necessary appropriate response.

Okay, so I don’t like my life. Why?

Because it’s not enough. This fucked up tiny coffin of a life of mine is far too small for me and I need to get out of the damned box so I can spread my wings and fly. I have all this talent and intelligence – I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet. – and all I do all day is play video games and masturbate.

Not at the same time. I don’t know where to get those kinds of games. Not since I quit playing Skyrim. anyway.

And the thing is, it’s not that I think I am a terrible person for living the way I do. That shit’s old news. how I live my life is my own business and that’s final.

No, it’s that when I look at my life I am not happy with it. I am keenly aware that I want so much more out of life than what I am getting now. I want to live, dammit, and maybe even grow up.

I want a life I can be proud of. And I deserve one, too. I have suffered unjustly for far too long and I deserve something better out of life.

And nobody can get me a better life than me. I am the only one responsible for my life. I am the one who makes the decisions. I am the one who either endures ot surrenders. I am the one wuith the standing and the agency to improve my lot in life.

And when I say that, I am not talking about improving some absurd and worse than meaningless variable like “success”.

I mean making myself happier.

That’s the only meaningfing definition of success anyhow.

All that is holding me back is the fear. The fear that hold me down like gravity and that makes even the smallest things so hard to do.

But the real problem is the fear behind the fear. The fear of what would happen if the main fear wasn’t there any more. The fear of true exposure to reality, in realtime. with things coming at my faster than I can think them through and come up with the “smart” solution, and therefore have to go on my gut.

That’s how people of normal intellect get through life. They go with their gut and learn from the mistakes it makes. It’s not learning in the sense that a liberal intellectual like myself would recognize – more like an intuitive sense of how the world works made of categorical intuitions thna anything  you could write down in a book – but it gets most people through most of life perfectly fine.

It’s just us mental perverts who have to figure out how everything works that suffers.

So the fear behind the fear is the real bugbear of the whole desultory dungeon that is my depression. I can remove a lot of layers between myself and the world – and I have, and it’s lovely – but the final battle will not be won until I can truly face the facts.

This will not, however, be a conventional kind of war. I think the primary mission must be to secure better sources of reward and encouragement and other healthy emotional nutrients so that I can build up my strength for that final assault.

And that means stepping out of my own shadow, at least a little. It goes without saying that I can’t get more social rewards out of a totally isolated life. That well is bone dry and coughing up dust when the wind blows. I am going to have to raise my level of exposure to the world.

Because what I am really after is a sense of meaning. I want to do things which matter to me and which I can be proud of and which make me feel like I exist and have worth and mean something to the world and to myself.

That means looking for new playgrounds. I am increasingly convinced that treating life as play is the only way to go for me, and that means I need to find places where I can play and explore and have fun in a way that is, at least vaguely, productive.

Again, that’s productive in the sense of making myself happier.

Because that’s all that really matters to me now – my happiness.

Everything else can go fuck itself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.