Because sometimes, that’s the best thing you can do.

Been thinking about my “never stop” mode and how much damage I might be doing to myself due to my inability to escape it.

For those of you who do not remember (and there’s bound to be a few of them), what I am talking about is how in order to get through life when I was still a kid in school, I developed the capacity to simply keep going at a minimal level no matter what.

Picture a golem that walks forward very slowly but never stops.

The thing is, this circuit I built in my mind is extremely handy and has seen me through a lot of days when I didn’t feel like carrying on but knew I must.

The problem is that there is no off switch. No matter what, I just keep doing at my minimal level, and when you have depression, that can get pretty minimal.

And the metaphor I use to explain why that is such a bad thing is this : imagine there is a car that never, ever stops moving. It can’t. It will keep moving no matter what.

So how would one perform maintenance on it? How would you refuel? How could you ever fix any problem that arose?

You wouldn’t. You couldn’t. Things would just get worse and worse until the car is a total wreck that still drags itself forward, sparks flying and metal grinding, forever.

That is how I am. I am, by any measure, one very broken and messed up vehicle. Were I sane, I would have some capacity to shut down, take care of what needs to be taken care of, and most importantly. refuel.

Instead, I just keep painfully grinding on. Making only very slow and painful progress because I have forgotten how to stop.

Even thinking about coming to a full stop tweaks my anxiety in a very weird way and invokes that nameless dread that says Something Very Bad Will Happen.

But what? Would I die? Or rather, would that mean I was dead? Would my mind destroy itself somehow? Would the world cave in and fall on my head?

Would some presumably very patient inner demon finally catch up with me and do something completely horrible to me?

Would I plunge into my inner abyss like a meteor crashing into Earth’s atmosphere at high speed? And would I burn up on re-entry?

Would some kind of unspeakable darkness escape confinement in my soul and boil out of me like malicious black smoke and plunge me into eternal darkness?

Would my spark finally go out completely and, sans pilot light, I would become a mindless wanting thing that craved the warmth of human blood?

None of those sound particularly likely to me. And yet, I didn’t pull them out of nowhere. Every one of those possibilities, as surreal and outre as they are, feels like something that could truly happen to me.

Admittedlly, less so now that I have written them down. Writing all that shit down definitely got something out of me, and I feel a lot better now.

Mark that down. It has to be important.

Anyhow…. where was I? Oh right, the car that never stops.

There is a highly wonderful meme going around aboout Self Care Charizard.

He looks like this :

Sorry that I don’t know how to make the images appear in a neat grid like they do in the original meme. One of these days I should take a break and learn more WordPress.

See what I did there?

Anyhow, my point in sharing all that, besides the sheer joy of sharing a sweet and adorable meme, was to point out that I don’t have anything like that in my life.

Literally. There is nothing that I do in order to nourish my body and my spirit. I have no special routine that I use to de-stress and make my body happy. Truth is, I do not do a goddamned thing anything remotely like that.

I have no self-care routine. Instead, I just…. keep…. going.

And that is… kind of big. Other people value theirs very highly and would say that they would go crazy without it.

And I don’t have one. And I am crazy.

So I am thinking they have a point.

Instead. I just compulsively play video games all the goddamned time. And while you can get one hell of a lot from a good video game. one thing you cannot get from one is spiritual nourishment or mental release.

Well, except from the REALLY good ones.

So stress builds up in me and goes nowhere. There is no release mechanism. Hell, most of the time, I can’t evenmasturbate to blow off steam.

And we must ask : why? Why, unlike most human beings, did I never develop any sort of coping and/or healing routine to make myself feel better?

I mean, WTF is wrong with me?

Well firstly, I am super divorced from my emotions. I mean, I don’t even see them at family gatherings any more. that’s how divorced we are.

Pause for laughter………there.

Because I am so out of touch wuith my emotions,. I could be generating all the signals that lead normal, healthy, sane persons to seek to comfort themselves and never receiving them because I block all that shit out.

A lot of my problems boil down to that in the final analysis. Diagnosis : Could have been avoided if you just listened to your damned emotions.

And I would love to start, but I am also very scared of it. For better and intensely worse, I am emotionally dependent on my little kingdom of icy intellectualism, and the very idea of acting on emotional impulses without any other justification given or needed seems like stark raving chaos to me.

I wouldn’t even know who I was any more. And how would I control who I become?

It’s so hard for me to walk a road without knowing and/or controlling where it leads. And I fear walking unarmed into the darkness and chaos of my mind most of all.

If only someone could hold my hand through all of this and I could use some of their warmth and their light to keep me safe as I explored this alien new world.

But they can’t.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.