Well, apparently I did not have therapy today.
I may have been told this last week. I may have therapy tomorrow instead. I may not. I honestly cannot recall.
Clearly, I’ve got to start writing this shit down. Yay, yet another thing I used to be able to trust my brain to do but now it drops the ball.
If I can get the gumption together, I will call my therapist and ask.
That is, of course, the sane and sensible adult thing to do. That much is obvious.
But of course, it’s not that simple. Using the phone is hard for me, especially when it requires phoning someone out of the blue
The healthy part of me knows they will not be irritated with me or get mad at me or resent me for barging into their lives making demands.
I mean, people get phone calls all the time. It’s not a big deal.
But the scared little animal in me is afraid. And it insists that nobody ever wants to hear from me, people hate it when I’m around, everyone thinks I am the most pathetic loser in the world and it disgusts them to even think about me, let alone actually deal with me, and that everyone would be happier if I just crawled into a deep dark hole and died.
And I know all that is bugfuck crazy. People like me, they really like me. I’m funny, I’m charming, I’m goofy, and I am pretty darn cute. No problem.
But the emotional delusions persist. Like I have this malevolent force in my mind that is far more powerful than my puny reason and it can override all evidence, common sense, and direct observation.
Like I’ve said before, you know you’re insane when you realize that there are things you know to be untrue but that you have no choice but to believe anyhow.
And that’s a scary thing to confront. Much easier to go on pretending it’s all justified somehow. To go on thinking your perceptions are accurate and things really are as bad as they feel no matter what the evidence and people who love you say.
To truly face the truth of your distorted perceptions and the fact that your mental illness means you cannot assume that what you feel is actually real takes a lot of existential courage and is not going to be easy, but you can’t truly recover until you do.
Depression lies. It tells you things are far worse than they really are. It makes you think nobody loves you when many people do. It will convince you that you are ugly and disgusting and horrible when you are just like everyone else. It will attempt to destroy everything genuinely good both inside and outside your head, and the only way I know to stop it is to cling all the harder to the evidence and reason and try my best to keep an accurate perspective on everything.
Other people have other resources to draw on. Religion, family, friends, work. I do not.
It’s just me and my fucked up brain versus…. well, me and my fucked up brain, basically. Or me versus the fucked up part of my brain.
I may not be able to take it out in one fell swoop.
But I can grind it down over time.
And that will have to do.
More after the break.
People are not entertainment
This one cuts rather deep for me. Here goes.
I am an entertainment based entity. Growing up lonely meant that books and TV and video games were my real friends. As a result, I see the world through a very entertainment based lens.
In this day and age, we all live entertainment saturated lives. With the internet in our pockets and a galaxy of content in every TV, we can cram absolutely every free moment with something to keep us entertained.
It worries me. People have lost the ability to just sit and be with themselves. It locks them into a high level of stimulated agitation and that kind of stress has got to be bad for both body and soul.
I’m one to talk. I play Skyrim all day.
But that’s not strictly true. Besides the time spent eating and blogging, there are periods where I am not doing anything on the computer at all.
These are my “naps”. I put that in quotes because sleep is not necessarily involved.
Sometimes I just mellow out for a while and when I am done, I just…stop.
Admittedly, it’s a fine distinction. [1]
Anyhow, when I nap, I reset my stimulation level to zero. So I never get too agitated.
Maybe more people should live like me. Heaven forbid.
Anyhow, the point I am stumbling gamely towards is that when it comes to living the entertainment saturated life, I am a native.
So I feel like I can speak with some authority that people are not entertainment.
It is not their job to entertain you. You can’t treat people like a video you can switch off when you get bored. Human relationships follow a completely different set of rules and this is something the entertainment based people of the world need to always keep in mind when they are dealing with other humans.
Here’s my example. I once had a conversation with my then roommate David Ihnen (aka Skylos) where he was telling me about some problem he was having in his job at a sysadmin, and I understood almost none of it.
But you know what? That didn’t matter. Because I wasn’t listening to him looking for entertainment, I was listening because he is my friend and I love him and everyone needs someone who listens to them,
I understood the emotional message – that he was very frustrated – and that was more than enough for me to listen sympathetically.
The lesson here is : so what if someone in your life is “boring”? People are not entertainment. There are many reasons to listen to someone even if they aren’t talking about things you find interesting.
And the main reason is that everyone needs to be listened to, even you.
So listen to them as you would want them to listen to you, okay?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.