Crisis? What crisis?
Don’t worry, this isn’t about Covid or BLM,.
I realized recently that I have been feeling like becoming more productive is this desperately urgent need and my lack of action on that front is a crisis.
`This manifests chiefly as these occasional attacks of a panicky, trapped animal kind of feeling, which I fight off by forcibly calming myself down and telling myself that it’s no big deal and I don’t need to do anything about it just then.
Repeat ad nauseum and whaddaya know, I don’t get anywhere. And that just adds to the panic next time this crisis feeling hits.
It’s easy to talk myself into the panic too. All I have to do is think about how old I am and how bad my health is and how every moment my few precious moments left as a functional human being are dwindling away while I do nothing with my life and my extraordinary talents except play video games all day.
I could go on and on.
But I know how wrong all that is. The panic of which I speak is the very thing I am evading by playing video games all the time. If I could just convince myself that there is no crisis and everything is cool, I could exit my bunker and play in the sun for once.
And I am trying to get there. I keep telling myself that there is nothing I am supposed to be doing. That it’s perfectly fine to just live life for fun and that all that really matters is whether I am enjoying myself.
Life’s a buffet, and most poor bastards are starving to death, and so on.
That’s what I am trying to get at by forgiving myself, too. Just trying to find the exit to this self-persecuting loop I am in.
The poem was a good, if weird, start. There are times when I can think of myself with all the love and compassion and understanding I would show someone else in my position.
Times when I just want to gather my inner child into a big warm nurturing hug and stroke his hair and tell him that everything is going to be all right, that he doesn’t have to wander naked through the frozen night any more, that I am going to take him home and he will never feel lonely or abandoned again.
I want to tell him that he’s a good boy and that he did nothing to deserve all the mistreatment life has handed him and that he is worthwhile and valued and treasured and that all his gifts really do mean something.
That he has a lot to offer the world when he gets better and that he’s just been sick for a long time and some day he will be well again.
I love him so much and he has been cold for so long.
Yeah. I’d really like to tell him all that.
And maybe some day I will.
More after the break.
As I face the world
It’s ironic that,intellectually, I am this hardcore pragmatic materialist who takes pride in facing and dealing with the hard truths of life when in the real world,I am terrified of everything and everybody and have to hide in the deep dark bunker at the center of my mind just to be able to function well enough to get out of bed.
Perhaps the two are related.
The truth is, I do not face up to the facts at all. I don’t even face the facts. I live my life with my back turned to the world and my head buried in my hands as I try to squeeze all thoughts of the big bad world behind me out of my mind.
I think that is a big part of what makes it so hard for me to break out of this mould. So many promising sounding exit strategies have the hidden first step, “first, face reality” and that’s the step I can’t take.
I’m just so sore and broken and scared on the inside. Trying to truly face reality brings up such feelings of terror and dread that it feels like if I face the world, I’ll die.
Or at the least, that I will in some way be utterly annihilated.
Dissolve and drown in my own tears.
Be ripped apart by the tidal stresses of a whirlpool.
Be blasted into tiny cinders by a burst of white light brighter than the sun.
Die of foaming screaming madness falling through an endless void.
Get the life crushed out of me when the walls of my bunker collapse and bring thousands of tonnes of rock down on me.
Explode in a shower of angry red sparks when my suppressed rage goes critical.
Leap screaming from my window here on the sixth floor and go splut.
Or maybe just curl up and die.
No matter how you slice it, it feels like facing reality would destroy me.
Sure, intellectually, I know that it wouldn’t. How could it? But that doesn’t change the fact that I feel like it’s true and it’s that feeling which is holding me back.
And no amount of high level logic is going to wish that all away.
The only thing that can save me is healing. And that means facing the reality of my latent emotions and opening myself up to feeling them.
But that, too, feels like it would destroy me. I have sp much of so many emotions to deal with and no capacity to deal with them in a linear, incremental fashion.
Instead, it feels like if I open myself up at all, all this frozen emotion will thaw all at once I and I will be destroyed by the resulting flood.
So I dunno. I don’t know how to navigate this minefield.I don’t know what to do about all this pain and rage and fear that keep getting in my way.
Maybe I need to learn to harness is instead.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.