I just keep making it.
And I can’t seem to stop hating myself for it.
And I don’t know what to do,
See, yesterday, I was all set to go to the Furries in the Media panel at VancouFur, which is going on right now. But I ain’t there.
Anyhow I was set to go but then I realized I was still quite sleepy and felt sort of ill so I decided to skip it and go to the con later that day, on my own.
And this was, in as massive a way as possible, the wrong choice. Once I made it, I immediately started regretting it, and after doing my damned best to tell myself that it was no need to beat myself up over it and it was not that big a deal and other ways to keep the self-loathing at bay, I could hold it back no longer and so it flooded into my and I spent a long time absolutely loathing myself with the heat of a thousand suns.
And then today, I did it again. Decided not to go to the last day of the con so I could stay home, get caught up on sleep, and blog.
And yup, now I hate myself even more than before because I know it was the wrong choice. I would be much happier at the convention , even though there were no panels or events I cared to attend. I could be visiting the Dealer’s Room – I have a tiny bit of room in my budget for purchases. I could be hanging out in the Video Game Room or the Board Game Room. Or I could be just circulating, hoping to bump into furs I know, and just basically making myself socially available.
But no. I very stupidly decided to stay home and do the exact same dumb shit that I do all the goddamned fucking time and that is always available to me, unlike the con.
And the thing is, I could still go, If I got dressed and got my ass into a cab, I could catch the last hour and a half of the con.
And yet, no I can’t. I literally can’t. I can’t make my brain make that decision. It’s like there is a circuit locked in my mind and until it powers down and unlocks, I have no power over myself.
And that’s a scary fucking thing to realize. Everything in our society says you are always free to choose between the options available to you. Existential freedom is absolute, and all that jazz.
But no, it isn’t. Or at the very least, in order for that statement to be true, one must postulate a fairly flexible definition of what counts as “an available option”.
After all, if you can’t make the choice, it’s not really available, is it?
That comes dangerously close to devolving into tautology.
Tell me that’s not fun to say.
And the other thing is, part of me definitely know that this is actually no big deal. It’s just a convention. I awas unfortunately too sick to attend as much as I liked. Excrement occurs. I am, after all, a very sick man and that’s not something I can just shake of whenever the hell I want.
Tomorrow will be just another Monday, this whole thing will be over, everyday life will resume, and this whole sordid affair will be behind me.
And beating myself up over the whole thing won’t change a goddamned thing. The thing about the pass is that it has passed. It’s gone. Fixed. Unchangable. Forever,
So why hate myself over it?
Who knows. Maybe this is just something I need to go through. Yet another wave of emotion to process. Maybe that’s the whole reason I made the wrong choice twice.
So that I could unleash all this irrational self-loathing and force myself to deal with it.
I know one thing : I feel like the stakes are pretty high for me lately. Psychologically speaking. I feel like this long dragged out tragedy that is my life and my recovery is finally reaching something like a climax and that things could go very well or very poorly any minute now.
It’s the inevitable result of my steadily reducing the amount of “space” in my mind where my emotions can go to hide. For around a year now, any time a pocket of that “space” was empty, I filled it in.
So I can’t dodge my emotions any more. There’s no room to manuever any more. And that means I got to deal with them.
That’s the idea. I won’t get better without dealing with all the pain and rage in me. I sometimes visualize it has a bulldozer pushing trash over the edge of a cliff slowly but unstoppably and at the bottom of the cliff is my conscious mind and the garbage is all the unprocessed emotion I have accumulated over decades of emotional alienation.
Well, there’s no natural segue to this next thing, so…
Let me tell you what happened at Furry Speed Dating on Friday night.
First off, the fact that I went to the thing in the first place is huge. For someone with social anxiety, speed dating is hell. A nightmare. Having to meet a series of total strangers whom you know damned well will be judging you on everything you say and do and deciding whether you are good enough for them?
No fucking way.
And that’s why I went. For me, this was like bungee jumping times skiing Mount Everest raised to the power of running the bulls at Pamplona.
I figured if I could make it through speed dating, I would emerge with a great deal of psychological growth in the form of de-catastrophizing one on on interactions.
Well I didn’t make it through. But then again, the deck was kind of stacked against me by fate, so I don’t feel that bad about it.
It went like this :
- Absolutely nobody wants to sit opposite me and thus be my first “partner” for this exercise. Oh great, it’s elementary school again.
- Someone, a cute Chinese guy, eventually does sit opposite me, but he then gets up and goes all the way around the room to verify that there is literally absolutely nowhere else he can sit before returning. Well doesn’t that make me feel wonderful on the inside.
- Said guy then tries to talk to me, but a) his English is very poor, b) his accent is very thick, and c) the room is very loud. So I can’t understand what he is saying most of the time.
- The actual event begins and we are handed a piece of looseleaf paper and told to tear it in half. I try my best to do it right but immediately fuck it up anyhow, tearing the paper into random, useless pieces. A fellow sitting near be (that guy with the fake Russian accent) helpfull says “I am thinking you are very bad at that. ” , then adds, “In fact, I am thinking you suck at that. ”
- We are given pens and told to put our names on one half of the paper. I look at my two random scraps and realize there is nowhere I can put my name easily. Plus, we have nothing to write on. I try to write Fruvous with the stupid piece of paper resting on my knee and it comes out like it was written by a ghost with a bad case of the shaking shits. Lovely.
- I tell my very reluctant partner that I can’t do this and leave, because my now my anxiety level is so high that I can hear a distant humming and it feels like something is doing its damneded to stop my heart.
It’s like the whole thing was designed to break me. I was all ready to work my charms on someone but my charms are verbal and my partner was…. not. Not in English anyhow, and that’s all I speak.
So between rejection, language barrier, having my physical incompetence thrown into my face, and facing the prospect of having to hand my badly torn piece of paper with my badly written name on it to someone else as part of this whole game, I just Could Not and had to fuck off to the video game room, where I watched someone play some video game where you are an android pretending to be human while my anxiety level slowly fell over time.
Not a good experience at all.
So no wonder I was prone to bad decision making. That experience fucked me up. It’s going to be a long and inticate process to keep myself from drawing a lot of horrible conclusions from the event, such as….
A. I really am a hideous and unlovable thing that nobdoy will ever want
B. I am so life incompetent that I can’t even make it in a room full of other nerdy weirdoes with social anxiety
C. Romantic love will never happen to me because I don’t deserve it
D. I should never, ever, ever meet new people again.
E. I am nothing but a somewhat clever infant/
And so forth and so on.
I think I will bounce back in time. But right now, things are not good.
Life really is exceptionally cruel to me.
And I don’t fucking deserve it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.