Starting with the affirmations today because I forgot them yesterday and that is just the kind of slip-up the forces of evil in my mind are waiting for.
I matter. I count. I am good. I am not toxic, poisonous, radioactive, or high in cholesterol. I am a wonderful person who is loved and valued by many people and I deserve the same seat at the table as anyone else and my share of the pudding, too.
And I have nothing to be ashamed of.
Repeat until believed.
Set me free!
Now that the pleasantries are off, I am gonna rant about something.
I really, really hate that in so many modern cars, I get locked in by default.
You know what I am talking about. The fact that all the doors lock the second the vehicle is in motion, and so when I want to get out, the driver has to let me out.
It’s a fine line that divides passengers from hostages, and that shit crosses it.
Because they never remember. Why would they? It’s so weird and unnatural. For almost a century, everyone in the car could get out whenever they liked.
But now, for what I assume are safety reasons related to not wanted your kid to open the door when you are doing 90 klicks on the freeway, cars come with this automatic locking thing turned on by default.
And sure, there’s usually a way to turn that shit off. But most drivers are not going to bother, because after all, it doesn’t bother them.
I feel like this is an unwarranted intrusion on my autonomy. And I am the sort of person who values his autonomy quite highly.
Come to think of it, if they can make the doors all lock when the vehicle is in motion, why not have it unlock them when the vehicle stops?
Answer me that, auto industry!
The Prince of Nothing
Today is Therapy Thursday, and so you know that I had a session today.
One of the things we talked about was how full of nothing my childhood was. And I struggled to get across to my therapist how that differs from a lot of difficult childhoods because there was no obvious enemy I could engage and defeat.
Had anyone bothered to oppose me[1], I might have learned some things from the struggle and developed a sense of who I am and where I fit in.
Instead, there was just…. nothing. No friends. No teachers I felt close to. No attention paid to me at home.
I was basically a robot that went to school and played video games.
And it’s the same now, minus the school.
There\’]s more to it than that, though, because the question remains as to why I didn’t do things to fix my situation.
Like get mad and demand my due, for instance.
All I can say on that is that there was something fundamentally wrong with me that kept that from being an option. A particularly deadly form of passivity that buried all that anger in order to maintain the status quo.
Low self esteem had a lot to do with it. Back then, I didn’t feel like I deserved better. I just got through every day, accepting what I was given and making do with whatever I happened to get.
Asking for more would have been unthinkable to me back then. After all, my family made me feel so unwanted that I felt like I was lucky to even let me stay.
So who was I to ask for more?
Make up your mind
Sometimes my executive dysfunction is so bad it takes me half an hour just to decide to get out of bed.
Or go to the bathroom.
Or really to decide to do anything at all, even stuff I know I will enjoy.
I dither over whether or not to masturbate, for fuck’s sake.
It’s like being the nice Kirk from the two Kirks episode of the original Star Trek. I don’t have the vitality and drive to be decisive. I am missing a key component of will and it means I dither over the most inconsequential of things.
I think part of the problem is that decisions lead to actions. Once I decide to do something, it’s time to do it, and there’s always a strong minority voice in me that never wants to do anything ever.
Dithering, therefore, is a way to delay decision and therefore action.
Plus there’s the obvious : lack of connection to my id. When I was raped at the age of 4, that connection was severed almost completely, and I was left with very little in the way of motive power or will.
Even inspiration has a hell of a hard time moving me. So much inertia.
Deep down, I have a fundamental fear of letting emotion move me. At some point, I came to feel that only well thought out moves can be trusted at all and that letting emotions drive me only leads to madness, chaos, and error.
That’s not how a healthy person operates. And I know this. I know that I would be a much happier and stronger person if I let my emotions drive me some of the time.
But still, I fear the chaos.
I would love to be able to dedicate myself to my own happiness and use that as a primary driver of activity, but I’m scared of that, too.
I mean, who knows where that would lead? Once more, I face having to take a road without knowing where it goes.
And that, in turn, leads to my utter lack of faith/trust in the world. You kind of lose that when you are raped at the age of 4. Exploration is chaos to me. On a deep deep level. I feel like voyaging into the unknown means instant annihilation.
That is, of course, also not how healthy people live.
And so here I sit, waiting on that back order of life force I was denied via rape to finally show up so I can get my life going again.
I am stuck here waiting for my ship to come in.
But the truth is that fucker sank ages ago.
And there is nobody to rescue me but myself.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.