No, seriously though. What can I do?

The room I am sitting in right now, my bedroom, is absolutely filthy/ It’s that way because I never, ever clean.

Like ever. Not even in the spring for “spring cleaning”.

The obvious question is, “why?”. Why don’t I ever clean up around here. And it would be easy to be flip and say it’s because I don’t really care about ‘things like that”.

But that would be a big fat facile lie. I do care. I find the current state of my room to be extremely depressing. I would rather live in a room that is much, much cleaner.

And it’s not like I don’t know how to clean up. It’s not that complicated. I have done it before, several meaningless lifetimes ago. I have never been a neat and tidy person but I at least could get it together enough to clean my room once or twice a year.

And I shudder to think of how terrible the air quality in this room must be. That can’t be good for me. It’s possible that one of the reasons I feel so good when I have been out of the apartment for a while is that I have had a break from breathing filth.

Right now, my way of “dealing’ with the mess is to aggressively ignore it. After all, most of the time I am in this room, I am either reading or on this here computer. and thus my attention is absorbed and I am not looking at all the garbage dump of my room.

But on paper at least, I am perfectly capable of fixing the problem and making this room a place that no longer makes me sad if I look at it.

So what is stopping me?

Fear. But that’s a given with me. More specifically, I seem to have developed a fear of spending any more time outside those absorbing activities than absolutely necessary for my survival.

So the answer is fear, but it’s also addiction.

At some point, I sort of abdicated responsibility for my life. The fact that there was nobody to take up the throne I had vacated didn’t matter. I just sort of stopped being an active, engaged person and withdrew into my turtle-shell all the way.

Something something Mitch McConnell.

And now, when I even contemplate actually actively doing things on my own perogative and under my own power, I shrivel up inside from the fear.

Even when it’s something as simple as taking a couple of hours to clean up my room, I quail. The idea of spending that much time away from my compulsive distractions fills me with terror and dread and part of me is sure that if I did that. something really really terrible would happen.

What would this terrible thing be? I’m not sure. But I suspect it is my usual demon – the feeling that something that is IN me would come OUT.

Something terrible and dreadful and disgusting and shameful. So very very shameful.

I have spoken of this Something before in this space. Arguably my entire personality is built around keeping this badness inside me, and having it come out would be the Worst Possible Thing to me.

But whatever the fuck it is, surely I am better off without it. The smart thing to do would be to let myself vomit it all up and accept the consequences. Sure, it would be a gross thing to do, but assuming I did not do it in public. it would be nothing to be ashamed of.

And I bet I would feel so much better afterwards.

So clearly, letting it all out is the smart thing to do. But I have so much fear in me, and it is not interested in logical arguments based on enlightened self-interest.

I’ve never been any good at enlightened self-interest anyhow.

Take that, economists.

Still,. I am contemplating this Great Release now, and that’s progress. I always have to be able to dream of something before I can do it, especially when it’s something potentially quite big like this.

Hopefully I will continue to contemplate it for long enough for my resistance to the idea to melt away. It’s happened with other things before.

I always visualize it as my staring at the thing until it breaks down. Asif I am using the concentrated attention of my conscious mind to conquer all the dark and hidden fears that cannot survive the light of day.

Put that way, it seems almost noble.

Maybe I would be better off seeing my fight against my depression as a titanic struggle between good and evil and therefore every bit of progress is a victory for all that is good and pure and just in the world.

It can be so hard for me to tell where I end and the depression begins, though. We’re like Siamese twins joined at the soul.

And I don’t know who I am without it. That’s always a big hurdle for us humans. Take our deeply equating identity change with death and raise that to the power of our fear of the unknown and you can see why people will fight seemingly minor changes to their sense of identity as if it’s a matter of life and death.

But fuck that noise. I would destroy my entire indentity if that is what it took to get rid of my depression. Start over again from scratch, like V from V For Vendetta did. Figure out who I am from the ground up.

I’m certainly not doing so great as the person I am right now. Maybe a hard reboot is exactly what I need in order to flush all the garbage out of my head and start over with a freshly scrubbed slate.

Of course, there’s the small problem that to do so, I would have to enter a fugue state and completely forget my current identity. And that would be, ya know. insane.

But other than that, I think it’s a really good plan.

Now all I need is a huge amount of psycoactive drugs….

I (or someone a lot like me) will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.