Yay, more talking about my eternal pain and torment.
Right now, I feel both ill and depressed.
Which one causes the other? I have no idea. Do I feel physically bad because of my emotional issues, or am I depressed as a result of being sick?
Dunno. Not important. Probably one of those both/neither situations that indicate the dichotomy is false and the question is, therefore, unanswerable.
What is important is the connection. The two influence one another, and I think I have found a key flaw in the way that feeling bad can make me feel like I am somehow bad.
The thing about feeling sick and/or depressed is that nobody can tell. I might feel downright toxic,.hideous, and vile, but to the world I am no different, broadly speaking, than if I felt fantastic.
I am not how I feel. This is important.
I think that somewhere in the back of my head, I felt like everyone could tell what a wretched hunk of purulent shit I was, and therefore hated and was repulsed by me.
In other words, they felt about me how I felt about me.
But there’s a rather key boundaries issue here, to put it mildly. In a broadly metaphorical sense, I have them all fooled. The version of me that others see bears very little resemblance to the quivering pile of rotten organs I see in my mind’s eye.
I mean, there’s some connection. I am kind of a slob. But still.
My mind really does end at the skull. This is important to emphasize because my high level of empathy makes it seem like it doesn’t.
Other people’s thoughts and emotions have always been present in my mind and I suppose I subconsciously thought it went the other way too.
But it doesn’t. No matter how I feel, emotionally or physically, the world sees the same old average big fat dude it always sees.
And that changes everything. For one, it makes the world far more safe for me. A whole lot of my social anxiety is/was based on feeling like everyone around me felt about me like I do, and therefore hated me and resented my presence and wished I would just go home and die.
Obviously that is untrue. I’ve known that for a long time.
For one, it vastly overestimates my importance to casual strangers. Most of them, I assume, barely notice me, or if they do, they don’t think about me much.
Maybe that is why I have always been comfortable in crowds. Being just another face in the crowd is very close to being invisible.
And what victim of social anxiety hasn’t dreamed of being invisible?
Even if it’s my dreaded scenario of passing people on the sidewalk, where you definitely have the opportunity to get a good look at the people you pass, people still aren’t perceiving me the way I do.
I’m still just another fat dude.
The ultimate is actual social contact with strangers on a casual basis. The dreaded “mingling”, a word that makes a social phobic like me shudder every time I hear it.
But even in that nightmare, people are not seeing me the way I do. And so I can rid myself of the idea that everyone automatically hates me and that I have to cringe with shame on the inside just for daring to draw people’s attention.
I’m fine, or at the least, no worse than most. Yes, there is still the very real issue of finding it hard to relate to people because of the high IQ and all, but that is a far cry from people instantly loathing me.
From now on, I will go forth with the safe and certain knowledge that my mind ends at my dura and nobody sees me how I see myself.
After the break, I will return to the subject of my being able to relate to people.
Got some dark shit to confess.
More after the break.
My hidden elitism
So earlier today, I got an email from a fat-friendly gay dating site I signed up for called “chasabl” (as in, chubby chaser).
They had been emailing me saying “Hey, we miss you” and “gee, you haven’t logged in since forever” and “Dear god, please tell us what to do to make you love us again!” (one of those is made up) and clearly they were tired of my shit because this latest email said “just log in, or we’ll DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT!”
So I logged in. And like all the cool dating-type sites now, it has a Facebook type interface as well as more traditional dating stuff, so I scrawled down my “feed” to see what was up, and I felt this surge of utter contempt.
Why? Because all these men were so BORING. None of them was saying anything even vaguely interesting. It was all mundane bullshit from their lives stated in the dullest way on Earth.
I had the same sort of reaction to my feed on a site called My Depression Team. A place where depressives like me can be supportive of one another, more or less.
But this time it really hit home and I was forced to confront the very real elitism I was feeling. I had very real contempt for these people and their posts.
Why? Because I found them boring. Because the details of their lives didn’t interest me. Because they failed to entertain me with their lives.
Because they weren’t as smart, clever, and funny as me, basically.
That was shocking enough to realize about myself with Chasabl. There’s nothing wrong with these people. Some of them might even be into me.
But if I find them so contemptibly dull, would I even want that?
It was far worse than that when I realized that’s how I felt about the My Depression Team people. These were people trying to help one another through the very illness that has kept me down for my whole life and are being nothing but kind and considerate and quite frankly downright wonderful to one another, and yet, I turned up my nose at them.
I think these things set off a strong reaction in particular because they both required a lowering of my defenses and making myself vulnerable.
Suddenly, these perfectly fine ordinary people weren’t outside the walls of my mind where I could deal with them at a distance using my social toolkit of politeness, pleasantness, and egalitarianism.
They were INSIDE THE HOUSE. And I really didn’t want them there. In fact, I wanted them out of there as fast as humanly possible.
And it made me realize that on some levels, my social isolation has given me a privileged position in that I have a life free of average people.
My friends are all quite bright. The place I hang out online, Merriam’s on Tapestries MUCK, is my fave hangout specifically because the crown there is quite smart. The media I consume is also pretty dang smart.
So life has not forced me to be able to deal with average people. i live in my own low-rent ivory tower, and my social skills have atrophied as a result.
That’s why this wave of contempt caught me by surprise. It’s easy to think you are free of bigotry when the object of your bigotry is far away.
But when they move into the neighborhood and eyeing your daughter, that’s when the demons in your head wake up and take notice.
So now I know. I have some serious fucking issues regarding dealing with people I, to my shame, feel are beneath me.
At least now that I know, I can start to change that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.