I am having a heck of a time trying to sort some shit out.
So let’s start here :
Postulated : my feelings of sadness, anger, and frustration are real, legit emotional reactions to all the pain stemming from my desire and attempts to grow the hell up.
Ergo : Suppression of these feelings in an attempt to make my life more comfortable, easier, and more predictable are doomed to failure. One way or the other, I want to make peace with these feelings by cutting some sort of deal with them.
Underline this : Said deal must contain actual action, at least in potentia. There is only so much that can be done via rearranging the symbols in my mind like I have been doing all this time with all my blogging and therapy, and I am not going to find the liberation I seek unless I open myself to real action.
As in, doing stuff. Not just thinking about things, or analyzing them, or expressing some of my pent up emotion in order.
Real, actual, actions.
This thought terrifies me, of course. I have been a scared little animal desperately holding still and hiding while my predators sniff around for a very long ime, and disabusing myself of the deep-wired feeling that action means being caught and being caught means the end of all things is not going to be easy.
But it’s better than drowning on the inside as life passes me by with a vengeance.
The trickiest part is learning to redirect my energies inot fruitful action instead of what I have now, where the energy, with nowhere to go, just hangs around in my systems making me sad, angry, depressed, and just plain lost.
Thing is, when I am feeling that way, I want to do things even less than normal, and that’s when that part of me that turns away and cries and keeps me from truly doing anything productive is at its strongest.
So in order to get past that will probably take an extraordinary act of will. And that will take some time to get together given how scattered my will tends to be.
This is not a solution I like. It is crude and brutal. I would prefer something more efficient and elegant, but for now, it’s the best solution I have.
I keep feeling the urge to become a harder, less sensitive, more selfish person. An asshole, more or less.
My dark side is making a lot of noise and telling me only it can set me free.
And it’s getting harder to argue against it every day.
Maybe my whole problem is that I keep trying to force myself into a mold of my own ideals instead of finding out who I am and working from there.
I am my own brutal alpha dom.
Perhaps this urge to be more selfish and hard is not as terrible as it sounds. Maybe all it means is that I need to move in that direction. Not that I have to go to the opposite extreme, like I so often do.
And I don’t know why.
Neither does Billy Joel.
I will be back after a short nap.
And I am back. Nap taken. I am not exactly jumping for joy or anything, but I am at least awake enough to finish this dang thing.
I’ve been trying to cut down on the napping. I know that sleeping in two to three hour bursts instead of the tradition eight hour block is not good fo me.
And while I can’t even imagine sleeping for an entire eight hours in a row (how to people do it?), I can at least make the naps bigger, less frequent, and preferably always at night not during the day .
That would be practically natural. Weird, I know, but at least point, I’ll try anything.
Right now, I am in my default state. On many things. That is what happens when your depression makes it so hard to take any kind of focused, coordinated action.
Despite all my intellect and talent, I just keep drifting along, letting the days go by.
Oh, but this rabbit has a much deeper hole. Because when I try to get myself to perk up and steer this fucking canoe of mine, or at least paddle, that’s when the real demons of my subconscious mind come out and hit me with waves of paralytic anxiety and that all too familiar icy cold feeling of doom and dread.
Result : total inaction. Eventually, I give up trying, because trying to force my will through this paralysis hurts, and going back to passivity makes it stop.
If I could summon up all my stubbornness and bloody-minded determination and use it to just keep moving forward when the interior blizzard blows in, I might get somewhere.
And that’s what I want. Sorta kinda.
That’s the real problem, of course. I am conflicted about the whole thing, much to my shame. As much as the conscious me wants to good forward with my life and finally get to grow the fuck up, my subconscious mind is not at all convinced and does everything it can to keep me in my place.
Stalemate. That’s what my life has been for 25 years.
I want freedom. But I don’t want to abandon safety.
Clearly, this is a major conflict in my psyche. Freedom always comes at the cost of risk. In order to truly be free, you have to be willing to abandon a fixed definition of safety that comes from hyper-controlling your circumstances and switch, instead. to a dynamic version of safety that comes from confidence in your ability to handle whatever life throws at you.
Problem is, I totally lackthat kind of confidence. I always feel extremely vulnerable to the cruel whims of fate and have no faith in my ability to handle whatever.
Maybe I could “fake it till I make it”. I don’t know.
But right at this moment, I just want to retreat from reality all the harder.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.