Been pondering my myriad n-dimensional layers of avoidance today.

It’s exausting just to contemplate it. And the worst part of it is that I am not choosing to avoid. It’s instinct, bred to bone in me. Sunk deep into the deepest and most primitive layers of my operating system.

That makes it kind of hard to stop.

But I haven’t been trying very hard lately, I have to admit. Seems like I can’t handle anything these days. Somehow I lost whatever spark I had and most of the time I am just tired and listless and limp.

And I don’t know what to do with that. Should I just indulge it for as long as its lasts, and call that self-care? Or should I fight it with all of my dwindling light and try to reignite my pilot light b sheer force of will?

That sounds hard.

I really feel like I have fallen apart again. And that makes me feel like a failure. And that makes it even harder to get myself moving again.

Depression’s fun like that. Full of clever Catch-22’s.

I want to at least get back to the place I was when I was looking for work on UpWork and ended up with three jobs, none of which panned out larely because they took long enough to get going that my depression came back and took me away from it all.

The other fraction of the equation is complications. Each of the jobs involved a lot more complicated steps than I was used to or expected, and that is the exact kind of thing that kills the fragile motivation of a depressive like me, and once the motivation is gone we slip right back in to that oh so cozy black hole in our soul, and it will be a long time before we can try again.

Sad but true.

RIght now, what is keeping me from getting back on the horse and trying again is shame. I am deeply ashamed of myself for flaking out like that. And even thinking about getting on UpWork again and looking for work makes that shame leap up and scream directly into my face about what a goddamned fucked useless loser I am.

Old tapes played at high volume.

Eventually, I will crawl over the flaming wreckage of who I used to be and give UpWork another shot. Writing about it like this helps a lot.

So many of my problems boil down to some chunk of emotion lodged in the system and clogging everything up until I finally get around to expressing it.

That’s why no matter what else is happening in my life, I always keep digging for cathartic treasure by blogging things out every day.

And I just express my thoughts as they come, more or less. It’s not the sort of thing you can plan. It’s whatever is on my mind when I sit down to write.

I often think of potential topics for blog posts during the day, but I almost never remember them when it comes time to blog and even when I do, the moment is long gone and I don’t feel like writing about that thing any more.

The river has flowed onwards and it is no longer the same river that delivered that first idea to me.

So it is rare that I think of a topic, remember it when the time comes, and still want to write about it.

Well, it’s all part of the process.

Part of me feels like I should apologizes for yesterday’s tearful breakdown blog post.

But I won’t. It needed to happen. I had a good long deep cry while I was writing it and that helped a lot.

And I know that most people who know me were left wondering WTF I was talking about when I talked about being artificial, manufactured, and aloof. Most people who know me think of me as a sweet, smart guy and not the kind of emotionally detached robot I talked about yesterday.

All I can say is that I know what I know, and it isn’t pretty.

I may have hurt people and they don’t even know it. It all happened on a deep subconscious level. If they were conscious of it all,. it was as a vaguely unsettled feleing, like something was wrong but they couldn’t put their finger on what.

If that sounds crazy to you, you do not understand my world.

That’s the thing about the weird mixed signals I emit. Those warm happy positive vibes are so pleasant that it is easy for them to mask whatever else I produce.

And some of what I produce is like…. bad. Toxic. Unhealthy. Unwholesome. My darkness and pain have to leak out somehow or I will go completely insane, and it leaks out in ways that, quite conveniently, can’t be traced back to me by 99.99 percent of human beings on Earth.

It’s like a very funny street show that makes most of its money from pickpocketing from the suckers watching the action on stage.

Except they are pickpockets. More like nastly little gremlins injecting my poisons into others and hiding the corpses out of sight of the madding crowd.

That’s the exact sort of victimizing others with your own pain that I detest. And yet, I don’t think I could possibly stop.

Not without being a lot more healthy, anyhow.

I feel like a venomous reptile that has to bite peole and inject the with my pain and darkness and filth or I will choke on it myself/.

But I don’t want to get caught, so I hide it in my act. People walk away from the show entirely unaware that I was anything but wonderful to them.

But I know. And it’s a source of deep and terrible shame.

I have a lot of those.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.