Feeling vaguely grumpy and cranky right now.
Not for any particular life-event type reason I can think of. Just a general feeling of tension and pain from being alive in this misbegotten meat sack of mine, I guess.
Normally, this is the sort of thing I push out of my mind reflexively, along with damned near every other kind of emotion not actively involved in playing video games.
But today I am going to just sit with my feelings of crankiness for a bit, maybe get to know them a little better, and find out how I can accommodate them.
Because as ugly as crankiness can be, it serves a purpose. One that, perhaps, is only evident to a freaky little robot like me that operated without it for so long.
It externalizes anger, and thus, vents it. A cranky person is positioned to react with clear anger to irritating stimuli, and thus release the inner tension fueling the cranky state.
Thus, emotions are released instead of being suppressed.
As patient readers know, for the vast majority of my life, I have vilified crankiness and irritability because I associated it with the angry, impatient father who tyrannized my childhood and used his family as his verbal/emotional punching bags when the stresses of his job got to him.
Usually at the dinner table. Sigh.
As a result, I resolved at far too young an age that I would never, ever, ever take my bad mood out on others no matter what.
I’d rather die. Or so I thought.
But I went far too far. I locked away all my anger and left myself with precious little ability to ever release it in an acceptable way.
Hence my explosive rage when I was younger. I would let everything build up inside me until one tiny thing set it off then it would all come out in some tear filled tirade where I accused people of not caring about me and a lot of other stuff too.
I learned to express my anger a little more often and that problem went away. Although honestly, I wonder if I was better off before.
At least then, I blew off the needed steam. Wasn’t real pleasant for my friends and family though, which is why I changed.
I didn’t like that shit. I hated the loss of control.
There are worse things than losing control, though, I suppose.
Like, for instance, being too depressed to take care of your plethora of medical issues properly before they straight up fucking kill you.
Ya know. Just to pick a totally random example.
So hooray for being cranky, I guess. I am far from being in a place where I can find and use healthy outlets for my rage. but I can at least acknowledge and value being in a snarly frame of mind without rejecting it entirely.
Of such little steps a mighty journey is made.
And I need to fix my mental health as soon as possible as it might just kill me.
And that would suck.
More after the break.
No room for despair
Watched (listened to) this video today :
And on paper, that might seem like a bad move for someone who suffers from serious depression like I do.
It’s a depressing video about a depressing subject, and someone who did not know better might wonder why I would subject myself to such media.
Well, fictional person, I am glad that I did, because it actually made me feel better about myself by helping me realize something fundamental about my nature :
I am incapable of despair.
True despair, that is, the kind that leads to giving up. I might not be the Monarch of Motivation due to my illness but I am not one to lay down and give up either.
When I try to imagine doing that, this fierce flame of total defiance ignites in my heart and I scream “Nooooooooooo!”.
Not a fucking chance. I don’t give up and I don’t surrender. Fuck going gently into that good night. I’m a scrapper, a fighter, a warrior. While I live, I defy, and I don’t care if the odds are against me and things look hopeless because I would much rather die fighting, knowing that I caused as much pain, suffering, distress, and damage to the forces of evil as I possibly could rather than go meekly to the slaughter like a goddamned lamb.
For me, defiance isn’t a choice, it’s who I am. That hot, bright, angry spark of rage in my heart is a fundamental part of me and without it I would be dead. It is the coruscating nuclear firestorm that powers all my systems, and I can no more shut it down than I can shut down the sun.
That’s why, no matter what, I keep going. I might not be going anywhere in particular or even anywhere worth going, but I never stop. Ever.
That’s why I have not had much experience with the sort of passive despair where one can’t even be bothered to get out bed that many of my fellow depressives experience.
Nope. Not gonna happen. I’d get bored and restless too fast. I might lie in bed staring at the ceiling for long periods but it is not because I have lost hope.
It’s because there is so much going on in my mind that I have to do nothing but wait until the mental traffic thins out enough for me to get moving.
One might ask at this point where this nuclear spark of defiance is in my struggle against my depression.
After all, it seems like just the thing for it.
But so far, I have been unable to conceive of my depression as an outside entity trying to control me. I don’t have a single figure whose picture I can stick on my dartboard to motivate myself to succeed.
To be honest, nobody has ever cared enough to repress me.
I might be better off if they had.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.