Yup, we’re back to talking about the lack of challenge in my life again. I should keep a list of the topics I keep coming back to so I can show it to my therapist.

Might be productive.

Anyhow, what is on my mind tonight is how easy a lot of important things have been for me all my life. Too easy, one might say.

There’s the academics, of course. Patient readers know the dril. I have never studied for a test in my life. And yet I was a straight-A student for my entire academic life. School – the academic part – has always been super easy for me, from the first day of elementary school to the last day of high school.

And I appreciate how big a gift that is… in theory, at least. I understand that school was not that easy for must people and that struggling to do well at school was a big part of a lot of people’s childhood.

So I don’t want to sound dismissive or disrespectful.

But the truth is. when something comes super easily, it is very hard to assign it any real value. I’ve taken my academic gifts for granted for my entire life. That’s just how I am.

It’s not like there was anyone encouraging me to try harder. I got A’s already, so clearly I had no problems. (Ha ha ha.) I recieved absolutely no guidance from my parents, my siblings, my teachers, or my so called guidance counselors.

What a useless bunch of gits THEY were.

And so I just floating through academic life like a cloud. In a way, none of it ever seemed real to me. Not the way it did for others. It was all just words flowing through me with minimal effort.

So I never had to learn to really buckle down and work hard. It was never required of me. And I am many wondrous things, but a self-starter is not one of them.

More of a self-stopper, to be honest.

So I was never one of those bright kids who studies their favorite subjects voraciously and pours themselves into self-betterment and spends hours accumulating useful job skills for future resumes.

I just did my school work and entertained myself. The idea that I should be doing more never would have occurred to me. I almost never thought about my post-school future and I certainly never thought I would have to figure all these things out before I even went to college.

I assumed college was where you figured that shit out.

Skipping over the life-destroying trauma that was my parents taking me and my brother out of school so they could take early retirement…..

Actually, no. Fuck that. Let’s talk about that.

It’s clear to me now that it was that trauma that broke me. I was doing great as a college student and was starting to sort my life out. I was planning on graduating from UPEI with a double major in philosophy and psychology and from there I was going to look around for the best place to get my post-grad psych degree so I could be a licensed therapist of some sort.

But then my Dad convinced my Mom that they should both take early retirement together and that meant that, according to them, they could not afford to pay for my brother and I to get the degrees we’d been promised all our lives.

How fucking selfish can you get.

To top it all off, we couldn’t even get student loans. We didn’t qualify. Why? Because of the lump sum payments they had gotten as part of early retirement. That meant that according to the government, they totally could afford to pay for the other two years of our frigging degrees.

Not according to them, though!

So I had to move back to Summerside and live with my parents for a year and change before I would qualify for a student loan.

There was no chance I was going to survive that, psychologically speaking. Unemployment is high in Summerside, always has been. There were very few job opportunities and the ones that existed got hundreds of applicants. I was a young dude with no job skills to speak of.

So there was no way I could get a job.

And that led to a very bad state : cashlessness. My parents wouldn’t give us any spending money, supposedly so we would have an incentive to go out and find work, but honestly it was more like they had already decided we were not worth spending any money on and felt like they were doing us a huge favour just by giving us room and board without charging rent.

And cashlessness is extremely depressing. No money means no power means you can’t ever do the slightest thing to please yourself. All of the things people take for granted, like their Starbucks or their cool car or their fave music, are inaccessible when you have no money.

You end up feeling cut off from the world. You are stuck on the outside looking in at all the pretty things you can’t have. Consumer society is inacessible to you.

So it’s no wonder I had a serious nervous breakdown and became a misterable malnourished dehydrated shadow of my former self that couldn’t eat and could barely make himself drink water and washed his hands 10 to 12 times a day because the second his hands were dry he could feel the germs crawling back onto him.

And nobody really cared. So it was up to me to pull myself out of that state by sheer force of will and bloody minded determination.

And it looked like I was back to my old self. But I wasn’t. I was the weak, depressed version of myself I have been ever since.

Time to pull myself out of my sorry state by sheer force of will and bloody minded determination again, I suppose.

In the end, there is really nobody you can rely on but yourself.

Guess I should stop waiting for rescue and save myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.