Apparently I am back at the “oscillating between deep depression and smoldering rage” part of my mood cycle.

Pardon my cartwheels of effervescent joy.

Imagine that being said by The Brain from Pinky and the Brain.

For use as your exemplar :

That’s a very cute thing for those fun folks at Postmodern Jukebox to have done.Initially, I was just there for the Rob and Maurice content, but the smoldering torch song version of the theme is great too, especially when (SPOILER) she looks right into the camera and says “Narf. ” at the end.

I marked so hard for that. I really have a soft spot for women who can be silly.

God, I miss my sisters.

Anyhow,. so I am down in the dumps again. Last night’s mental malfunction was such a blow to my sense of reality that I don’t think I have fully recovered yet, and it happened around 22 hours ago.

That shit just shouldn’t happen, man. Thanks to my computer based lifestyle and dreamer nature, I already live in the world between my ears far too much and as a result, my sense of reality – the non-virtual kind – is already threadbare at best.

As a result of that, on a very real and very very deep level, I don’t have faith in reality. I don’t feel like I can count on things staying real and I have a deep dread of ending upo trapped in my own mind with no way out.

So something like last night’s journey into being even more mentally fucked up than usual really scares me right down to the core.

It makes me realize just how blurry the boundry between outer reality and mental reality can be for me. Not to the point of being schizophrenic. thank goodness, but to the point of a certain level of mental instability nevertheless.

I would likely be better off if I stepped away from the computer more often and spent time just sitting outside, drinking in the realness of it all and grounding myself in the real world before going back to the shadowbox of my mind.

That’s how my relationship with reality feels right now : like I spend all day in a world which I treat as real. but which is really only shadows and less than shadows projected into my mind via my various distractions.

Hell. even spending more time reading books would help ground me. Even they are more real than all this video game bullshit.

So yeah. I am back to hating and resenting video games again too.

And I tell myself that I can’t stop playing them, or that I don’t know how to stop, and so forth, but is that really true?

Or is the real truth that I know perfectly well how to stop and could stop any time I wanted if I was willing to sever the umbilicus that ties me to them and keeps me emotionally dependent on them?

That’s the nature of addiction. Even if you know the thing you are addicted to is killing you, you keep using because you are too scared of having to deal with reality without the addiction that you will ride that burning wagon right over the cliff.

Abnd up until the very end, you will be telling yourself that everything is fine. And if you happen to survive the crash. you will tell yourself that it was an unavoidable tragedy, woe is me, and then go right back to using.

Because the crash changed nothing. You are still emotionally dependent on your addiction and you are still too scared to face the world without it to change.

And that’s not the sort of person I want to be. I want to be the Taurus ideal of a square-jawed realist who can make the tough choices and do whatever is necessary regardless of fear or squeamishness. The sort of person you can always count on because you know that their fundamental values are rock solid and that they will live by them one hundred percent or die trying.

And I am that guy. For others.

For myself, not at all, really.

And it’s high time I stop pretending that this self-neglect is okay. It isn’t. I act contrary to my own self-interest all the time and to be honest, I deserve better.

I can hear my therapist saying I need to be my own parent right now, and I can feel the utter despair that filled me when he did because if that’s the only solution, I am fucked.

Because I am not sure I am capable of that. I can’t imagine where I would find the strength. My deep damage would make it so hard.

And that’s what this all boils down to : on a fundamental level, I am deeply damaged. and that damage cries out like a physical injury when I try to do things.

And lacking the ability to x-ray my psyche, I don’t know beforehand what will set it off. I now some things that will, but that list is never going to be comprehensive.

And because of that, I really have no good explanation for why I can or can’t do something. The closest I can come to a real, honest explanation would be, “because the injured part of my mind hurts me when I try to imagine doing it. ”

And it might be wrong. In fact, historically. its predictive record is spotty at best. There have been plenty of times when I thought I couldn’t but totally could once I made up my mind to do it.

But it’s still all I have got. I don’t have the capacity to think past it yet. When it tells me that a course of action will lead to nothing but pain, anxiety, and misery, it is very hard not to listen to it.

Even though it leads me wrong.

I feel so god damned alone nearly all the time.

And I don’t know how to fix that at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.