Feeling better today. Dunno why.
Doesn’t matter, either. My crazy brain will insist upon trying to “figure out” what is making me feel relatively sunshiny right now so I can learn the important underlying principles and thereafter be able to produce the same result at will, and in whatever color or flavour I want.
Of course, that’s futile, as one of the things that produce a happier frame of mind for me is adopting a more relaxed, chill attitude where I don’t obsess over trying to figure out the how and why of every damned thing.
I repeat to myself : You don’t have to “know” how everything works to be safe.
Plenty of people lead safe, happy, satisfying lives knowing and understanding far far less about the world than I do.
It’s only my rampant and unchecked neurosis that makes me compulsively try to intellectually devour and digest everything in my path in a nobly absurd attempt to conquer the world with the power of my mind.
Well buckle up, buttercup, because that ain’t gonna work. Nobody is smart enough for THAT. Sooner or later you have to “guess”, i.e. go outside what can be “known” and enter the world where you’re going to have to go with your gut.
Use your enteric brain, damn it!
As Around So Within
I think I have stumbled upon a potentially very important metaphor.
I realized that what happens in this pigsty of a room of mine – the fact that I never throw stuff out so it just piles up everywhere displacing and disfiguring my living area – also happens in this head of mine.
Both spaces are in dire need of a savage cleaning, and in both cases it’s because I never deal with my problems if I can just ignore them instead.
Because it’s easier. And doesn’t take me away from my precious fucking video games.
Always got to throw that in so I remember what the real problems are instead of the various pieces of plausible bullshit I routinely circulate.
But it’s more than that, because underneath and behind it all is that goddamned Wound. When I try to build a motivational chain that will lead to positive action, that fucking thing always kicks in and pulls the plug on the whole thing, so instead of action I get sadness.
Once more I invoke the image of me sitting facing a wall, and when someone or something wants me to turn to face the world, I just turn my head and say “No. ”
No. I can’t. I’m broken. The simplest of things hurt me so much inside. And with that pain comes fear, as it always does.
Fear is a warning meant to prevent pain.
And I try so hard to pull myself together and face my problems and thereby solve them, but that Wound keeps holding me back. Making me sad, making me weak, making me unable to take care of myself at all.
And it’s not like anyone else wants the job.
So I guess I will just die alone.
More after the break.
Way too easy
In a moment, something about my tragic childhood.
But first, this :
Yes, I posted that video just for the dumb joke in the caption.
And I am fine with that. Anyhow.
My real topic is something that occurred to me while pissing just now. It’s not a radical new angle on my problems, but more like a refinement of existing tropes.
Basically, I realized that for my entire scholastic career, I took my advanced abilities for granted to such a degree that whenever I encountered something I actually found difficult or challenging, I just gave up immediately.
After all, there were still tons of other things I was naturally good at and that were therefore super easy for me, so why stick with anything hard?
This idea came to me as I was peeing and remembering my brief history as a computer programming student. Back in 1990, I took UPEI’s one computer science program, which was one course over two semesters.
And I absolutely breezed through the fall semester part of the course. Piece of cake. It was pretty much just an extension of language skills. Nolo problemo.
But then, about a month into the spring semester, I hit a brick wall.
A brick wall called “stacks and pointers”.
You don’t need to know what they are, just that they marked the point where things got too abstract for me. I could no longer imagine what was going on in the program. I had to learn to trust in the process I had written and my ability to manipulate that process and get useful results.
Um, nope. Brain crashed. Please reboot.
So I gave up. Decided computer programming was not for me. Did not even finish the god damned course.
After all, there were still lots of other things I was naturally good at!
But I totally could have learned that stuff. It’s well within my capacities.
I just would had to actually, ya know. try harder.
And I had never ever ever had to do that. The core academic subjects like math, English, math, science, and history were all super easy for me, so who cared about the stuff I couldn’t do like arts and crafts or gym?
I’d just refuse to do them, and get away with it because nobody was going to fail the academic genius because he didn’t pass shop.
To my credit, I did try at things I knew I would find super hard. That probably helped too. People have way more sympathy for the person bravely trying and failing than they do people who give up and act like they are too good to bother.
Anyhow, I gave up on computer programming not because it was too hard, but because it was not absurdly easy for me.
And I hate that. What a fucking idiot I was, with that slap happy go lucky fucking attitude that never thought about the future and to which the concept “try harder because you want this thing” would never occur.
So can I change that about myself now? I don’t know. It would take finally toughening up after all of these decades spent staying squishy soft and sensitive.
And that feels just a little bit like dying to me.
Well, they say that in order to be truly free, you have to give up a little part of yourself.
Maybe that’s mine.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.