It’s amazing how much I can just let go now.
The voices do all the work while I just watch the world go by. Every now and then I make an executive decision, gently correct an errant employee, or take the helm for long enough to get us through a tricky situation.
But for the most part, I just watch over my busy beavers and I could not be happier with this new arrangement.
It’s certainly not what this new drug, Klarien, was intended to do. Can you believe my doctors started it because my doctors wanted to make all my lovely little voice go away?
I’ve only been on the new drug for two weeks, and already I can’t imagine life without it.
Everything used to be so chaotic! Voices hounding me all the time, hounding me, screaming in my ears, goading me into doing awful things, and never a moment’s peace where I could simply relax and be myself.
With Klarien’s help, I have been able to not only shut them up, I have been able to set them to work and make them obey my well and, well, deal with life for me.
I dare Klarien to put THAT in their commercials with the good-looking people and the weirdly indirect language about people “not feeling or acting like themselves”.
“Hello, my name is Jackquelin Hide, and my head is full of cheese and lice, and sometimes the lice sing to me. Show tunes, mostly. Most people would consider this a problem, and so did I…. until I started taking Klarien. Now, the cheese smells like a fresh meadow and the lice sing surprisingly good financial advice. Thanks, Klarien!”
Then in a deep male voice : “Ask whichever goblin seems most like your doctor if Klarien is right for you, whoever THAT is. ”
I’d buy the fuck out of that. Or at least, I’d think I did.
Hmmm. Just kind of hit a brick wall there. No idea where to go next with the story.
Originally, I was going to talk about each individual voice like they were separate people as per multiple personalities, but for some reason I don’t want to do that now.
And there is no replacement idea waiting in the wings to activate.
Feeling fairly tired at the moment. That might be a factor in this sudden creative drought. Perhaps I will return to this narrative later, when I have had more sleep.
Don’t hold your breath, though. I almost never go back to things. Once I stop and detach from it, I move on and never want to see it again.
So down the toilet it goes. Flush and repeat.
It’s not the smart way to be and it’s not the way I want to be. It’s just what I am stuck with as an artist.
I suppose the bright side is that I always have lots of energy for lots of new ideas.
And I do follow them all the way till they are done a lot of the time.
Just not this time.
More after the break.
Those oh so sour grapes
While watching a thing where incels tell their story and it got me to thinking about bitterness and the lies we tell ourselves so that we feel better.
Hence the sour grapes. The fox in the fable tells himself those grapes he couldn’t quite get were probably sour anyway. In other words, he told himself they had gone bad.
That is the basic pattern of what I am talking about. Deciding the things you want but think you can’t have are actually bad and not worth having, thus soothing your frustration at not being able to have it and giving yourself permission to stop trying,
Myself, I am, for better and for worse, too realistic for that. I know that if I want something but can’t have it, it has no impact whatsoever on the nature of the thing.
If it was worth having before I knew I couldn’t have it, it’s still worth having aftertwards. Nothing has changed except my emotions.
In other words, I lack the ability to adjust my view of reality to better suit my emotional needs and desires.
On the whole, that’s probably a bad thing. I think those subtle and not so subtle reality adjustments go a long way toward making living life bearable, and that without that capacity, one ends up an emotional train wreck like myself.
And sure, I might see reality more clearly and sharply and precisely than others. This has, at times, given me the seer’s advantage in situations.
But big fucking deal. If the price I pay for that vaunted clarity is my happiness then the price is way too fucking high.
Right about now, I could use some emotional buffering to make the world seem not so harsh and cold and hostile.
But I am pretty sure it’s far too late to install it. I will have to keep processing things my way until I come up with some other way to make life easier.
Anyhow, back to sour grapes. The point I wanted to make is that the fox in the fable feels better about the grapes when he decides they were probably sour, but at what cost to his future happiness?
What if he decides all grapes are probably sour, and stops even trying to get them? Then he cuts himself off from all possible future happiness.
Happiness as represented by grapes, that is. Don’t get hung up on the metaphor.
I know a lot of people who are trapped in misery by their own sour grapes. Men are pigs who only care about sex, women are harpies who only want to use men for their own selfish gains, people who go to college just end up working at McDonald’s, the big cities are filled with crime and drugs, success is all about who you know and you have too much pride to be a suckup, and so forth and so on.
People build these prisons for themselves for perfectly valid emotional reasons. But I don’t think most people realize that they are losing far more than they are gaining.
And that makes me sad.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.