Included for reference only.

I was watching the Patrick Teahan video linked above when it occurred to me that maybe I am not as indecisive as I think I am.

Yes, I have now decided that I might not be indecisive. Or whatever.

What sparked this revelation was Patrick talking about someone having decision issues when it came to picking what to order in a restaurant.

I have never had that problem except in a very minor way when I have showed up at the restaurant super hungry and it makes everything look so good.

But most of the time, it’s no big deal. I look over the menu, pick something, order it an eat it, and all with almost never second guessing my choice.

I don’t really care if there was something I would have objectively enjoyed more. I ordered something I liked, ate it and enjoyed it, and that met the brief.

Mission accomplished. On to the next thing.

The question therefore becomes why I can’t be that decisive in other areas of my life. This “decide and move on” thing is clearly the best life strategy. Agonizing over even relatively minor decisions is a terrible way to live. So why can’t I change?

Let’s review what we know :

1. Indecision is bullshit. If you can’t decide, odds are that there is a bigger issue that is using the kind of mental fog that produces indecision as a cover. You have to ask yourself what will happen after you have decided. If you can answer that, you will probably find that it’s the real thing you’re avoiding dealing with.
2. Indecision stems from lack of id. Like with the Two Kirks. Without his id, Kirk was vacillating and indecisive. That’s because when the outcomes cannot be computed or predicted, the only way a decision can be reached is emotionally, by gut instinct or the mood of the moment. Awesome leaders like James T. Kirk synthesize intellect and instinct into something greater than their sum.
3. Indecision is rooted in fear. At the heart of torturous indecision is a very exaggerated and oversized fear of negative consequences. And this fear only gets worse over time because the nature of it prevents its conclusions from ever being tested. After all, if you never decide, there is never any chance for your fears to be disproven by the perfectly ordinary non-catastrophic consequences of your choice. This is how the con job in point 1 works. The worst phobias are always the ones that prevent you from finding out if what they tell you is true.
4. Indecision is all about me. The things I can’t decide on, to the point of utter paralysis, are always things directly involving myself. When I am not part of the equation, I can be extremely decisive and direct. I guess that’s because it bypasses that outsized fear of negative outcomes and turns the decision into a mere problem to be solved. And that, I can do.

I am sure there’s more points but I won’t think of them until later.

I can certainly say that my inability to get my life going towards emotional adulthood is not primarily an issue of indecision.

Sure, I could keep bullshitting myself by pretending it’s about not being able to choose from the billions of possibilities inherent in every moment, but I’d know it was a lie.

The truth is that said indecisiveness would just be a mask for my being too scared of life to leave my hermetically sealed video game based life.

Just the thought of going away from my PC gaming security blanket makes me feel like I’m about to break out in hives.

I have so much anxiety and fear in me and it just gets in the way of everything.

Maybe the real problem is that I need to get laid.

More after the break.

---

Back to reality

Got rudely dumped back into the stupid real world by my computer crashing not just once but twice in the last hour.

And while playing a game as ancient as Morrowind, too. Though admittedly, I have all the graphical settings maxed.

Still. I need that new power supply. This shit is getting on my nerves.

I still haven’t finished Pathfinder : Kingmaker. I am quite close to the end but I hit yet another extremely difficult fight and after failing at it for like the sixth or seventh time I just ran out of gas.

I mean, I have already played the damned thing for only a pussy hair less than 250 hours. What more does it want from me, blood?

But I am not beaten yet. I am pretty sure the fight I am stuck on is optional, so if I restore a saved game from before I started it, I can avoid it.

Or I can turn down the difficulty level for that one fight. That would do serious damage to my pride but if it gets me to the end of the damned game it might be worth it.

Or I could outright cheat by downloading a save-game editor or the like. In a way, that would hurt my pride less than turning the difficulty down.

I guess because it would make me feel vaguely clever? Ha ha, you stupid game, you thought you had me but I hacked you instead?

Sort of sad but not as bad.

I have pretty much abandoned Fallout 2. It just can’t compete with modern games for me. And it’s not just in terms of graphics and sound.

It felt like the action routinely ground to a halt and I lost all plot momentum on a regular basis. I would get quests and have no idea how to pursue them.

Shames me to admit it but I guess I am used to more hand-holding and guidance from the game as to how I do whatever is next. I’m not equipped to figure it out on my own.

Not that I ever had much patience for that in the first place.

I want to DO STUFF, not sit here and think!

I do that enough on my own!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

From now on, I’m going to just… live.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten.

It’s very hard to articulate, but I will, of course, try.

The thought came to me after a long chain of other thoughts about childhood and innocence and how children see things as they are, without expectation or anticipation, because to them, every experience is brand new.

And I can remember when life was like that for me. Just barely.

In particular, I was thinking about how kids can meet one another and make friends far more easily than us adults precisely because they have such a low burden of expectation and trauma and so on.

They just want someone to play with.

That is, sadly, not how it tended to work out for me. I was too strange. I couldn’t connect with or relate to other kids my age.

But that innocent frame of mind is there for most kids, and it was while thinking about that blessed state that something inside of me just… relaxed.

I think maybe it was my returning to how a child sees things that did it. A large chunk of the edifice of unhealed trauma and frozen feeling just kind of fell away and suddenly I could see life like a child does, in terms purely of what would be fun to do in the immediate future, that catalyzed in my mind as, “Just live. ”

Forget all about expectations and humiliations and limitations and all the other garbage that I’m slowly smothering under and just concentrate on enjoying myself.

Like all my recent big revelations, it doesn’t sound like much when put into words. Perhaps that’s not a coincidence. I have been saying that my problems are emotional, not intellectual, for quite some time.

It would therefore make sense if the real work I have to do has to happen on a level way below what can be reached by words and rational thought.

I’d better hold on to that thought really tight because that could save me a hell of a lot of mental masturbation and slow and tedious intellectualization and let me get directly to the business of healing myself.

At least in theory. As I have expressed before, I am fairly skeptical of my ability to actually free myself from the surly bonds of intellectualization.

But I can at least loosen them enough for me to breathe.

Somewhere in this newly relaxed state also comes better self-esteem. After all, no matter what has come before or even where I am now, I am still a pretty amazing guy, and I should learn to enjoy that fact instead of depending on the world outside of my mind for all my validation and support.

The extra-cranial world can never provide enough “reward” to support my self-worth. Some of that has to come from within. There needs to be at least enough of this self-reward to support my going out into the world in pursuit of the other kind.

Otherwise. the symptoms of emotional starvation will prevent me from finding the very sustenance that would remedy it.

I think that today, I might have gotten a little glimpse of what life might be like if I wasn’t constantly wasting away on the inside from my unrewarding life.

And that glimpse gave me the most precious gift of all : hope. Hope that there really is all the emotional nutrients I need out there in the world and that I am actually capable of procuring them for myself instead of languishing in passivity.

Every day, the door to my cage opens a little bit more and my sorry soul gets a bit more sunshine and fresh air.

Maybe soon I will be strong enough to go out and play.

More after the break.

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The social debut of a fox

So like I have mentioned before, I am active on social media now.

It all started a few months ago when I started telling people (and myself, because I’m a people) that the only social media platform I am on is YouTube,

And I had said that something like a half dozen times before it really sank in to me that YouTube really doesn’t count.

I mean sure, I leave tons of comments on YouTube, and some of those comments do get replies now and then, but YouTube doesn’t have the kind of interconnectedness on an individual level where you follow specific people like Blue Sky or Instagram does.

Hence my reviving my long dormant Instagram account. I do not even remember when he heck I signed up for it or why. I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t feel like it, being heavily photo based, was not for me.

In all fairness, all I knew about it came from the media and stories about it making people feel horrible about themselves.

But now that I have gotten active on it, I can see that it is so much more than that. It might have started as photo based but now it’s just a particularly media rich social network. People post pictures, but also text comments, videos, random thoughts, political speech, and everything else under the sun.

It’s quite a rich milieu.

Still, I prefer Blue Sky. Like the entity formerly known as Twitter, it has other content but it’s still mostly a text based medium and that is where I am the most comfortable.

It’s in the world of words that I feel not just safe but competent and capable, and those are feelings in very short supply chez moi.

Also, Instagram, being irritatingly modern, tends to start playing videos the moment my mouse cursor passes over them, and that is very not cool for me.

NEVER AUTOPLAY ANYTHING. I cannot stress this enough.

But I keep going back to Instagram anyhow because it’s breathtakingly good at serving up the exact kind of content I like.

It’s… kind of creepy, in a way. But that’s the age we live in.

The age of computers using big data to predict us uncomfortably well.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It is toxic to the soul to have to conceal who you really are.

We are born to express ourselves and our identity, and anything that interferes with that naturally creates a terrible tension between who we are on the inside and who it is safe to be on the outside.

This creates the exact kind of stress that shortens lifespans and worsens health outcomes. The feeling of constant danger as well as the cognitive dissonance of knowing who you really are but being forced by circumstance to pretend you are someone else gnaws away at one’s mental health and sense of identity and poisons one’s self-worth with guilt and self-loathing even if one is not consciously ashamed of who and what they are.

This situation is intolerable yet remains true of the daily lives of millions of people in all walks of life and in all corners of the globe.

We cannot truly call ourselves enlightened while this kind of thing is allowed to happen, and even backed by government force through the legal system. There are still many, many people in this day and age who think people deserve the harshest of penalties simply for being who they are rather than based on what they actually do.

But we know what all the hate is really about. It has nothing to do with the people supposedly being protected or anyone’s sense of real justice, oh no.

No, it’s about scapegoating. It’s about whatever group has been publicly identified as subhuman and monstrous and contemptable and that therefore can be the object of all your rage and frustration and hate to an unlimited amount and not only is this deemed acceptable by the dominant culture, it is celebrated as moral and good.

Remember, kids, there’s nothing wrong with hating a group of people to the point of frothing incoherence and an open willingness to commit acts of barbarous and sadistic acts of extreme torture and violence on said group as long as it’s the right group.

Get it right and you too can openly participate in absolute orgies of naked bloodthirsty slavering glee, knowing that not only will nobody think less of you for it, but many will happily join in out of eagerness to show they have the right hate too.

And because hate is just plain fun. Let’s not forget that.

The only caveat is that you have to do your research first. The designated hate target does change from time to time, and while the actual nature of the people in said group is absolutely irrelevant compared to the sheer joy of dumping excess rage on them, being caught displaying yesterday’s outrage is bound to be seen as a faux pas.

But don’t let that stop you. In fact, it should encourage you to hate them all the more, while it’s still in fashion.

In an atmosphere like that, is it any wonder that millions suffer in terrified silence, fearing for their very lives based on something about themselves that they didn’t choose and cannot ever change?

After all, not only is it not safe to be a member of today’s hate target, it is almost as dangerous to be seen showing anything sympathy to them whatsoever.

You don’t want people to think you’re one of them, do you? In fact, you will move heaven and Earth just to reassure people, in the most obsequious and toadying manner, that not only are you not one of them, you hate them even more than the socially required amount. By a lot!

So if one of them is being torn apart by an angry mob, absolutely nobody will ever come to their defense.

Not even the cops.

Thank God they’re not really human beings, right?

More after the break.

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Power to the people

Had a power outage here earlier.

Dunno how long it lasted because it happened while I was taking a nap. In fact I didn’t even know something was up till I went to turn on my bedside light and got nothing.

Click click. No light. Uh oh.

So I looked over at my computer and sure enough, absolutely none of the lights on the back of it were on and blinking.

That’s when I knew the truth ; I was in a blackout.

And I went through the usual stages of realizing just how fucked we are without electricity and sitting there wondering what the heck I am going to do with myself before accepting that all I could really do is go back to sleep.

I wasn’t completely boned. I have food that I keep here in the room with me and I could have had that in lieu of the microwaved baked potato and chicken strips dinner I had planned for myself earlier.

Turns out I didn’t need to do that, though, which is good, because while I would have been fed, I would not have gotten my Vitamin B12 for the day.

And at first, I thought I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep because this whole thing had me wound up and agitated. So I just lay there in the dark.

Then, just as I was about to drift off to sleep, the lights came back on.

And I was, of course, happy to have the power back… once I got over being annoyed that my sleep got interrupted.

Got up, started up Mister Computer, checked the time. I estimate that the power came back on at around 7:50 PM or so.

So I wasn’t even late for my dinner at 8 pm!

All in all, it wasn’t much of an adventure. All I did was lie there in bed. It was like my own miniature A la reserche de temps perdu. 

But what the heck, it was something different. Something besides my usual insular existence holed up and hiding from the big bad world I never had a chance to learn to handle before everything got taken away.

No wonder I “failed to launch”.

I had my power cut halfway to orbit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I haven’t had a lot of it.

Well, not the kind that involves other people at any rate. I have done my fair share of masturbating, and possibly someone else’s share too.

You weren’t using that, were you? Good.

But as for the non-solo form of sexual expression, I have had very little of it, and most of the sex I have had took place in the Nineties.

So it’s been an almost thirty year “dry spell”.

But that’s not that unusual. There’s a lot of people whose only sex partner is, sadly, their dominant hand.

Or their submissive hand, if that’s how you’re bent.

What is unusual in me is that I am not now nor have I ever been tormented by my lack of fucking. It rarely even enters my mind, and when it does, I view it as more of an itch to scratch rather than a drive to seek a playmate for a playdate.

That’s how painfully underdeveloped and out of touch with myself I am. It’s not a matter of a frustrated sex drive.

It’s about having a sex drive that is barely even hooked up to reality at all. Somehow the “seek a partner” stage has still not happened to me, and I am 51.

At this rate, my libido might die before I get laid at all.

And it’s not that I don’t want it. Trust me, I want it plenty. I would love to spend some time in a busy, active gay bath-house sowing the crap out of all the wild oats I have accumulated over the decades.

But outside that delectable scenario, the barriers to my finding that playmate are substantial. There’s my physical disability, which might complicate matters.

A lot of dudes would lose their ardor completely when they saw the walker.

But at least I can still get around in bed!

More troubling are my psychological issues. I can’t even begin to imagine using some kind of hookup app, or otherwise inviting strange men into my bed.

My social anxiety goes berserk at the very thought of it. It doesn’t like me being around people I don’t know even casually, let alone interacting more intimately.

You know. Up the butt and such.

So it’s hard for me to imagine crossing that great divide between me and the rest of humanity in search of sexual play.

Plus I am not built for casual sex. I get attached too easily. If the sex is good I’m going to want to “keep” that partner.

And to share intimacies with someone only to have them leave and never appear in my life again would break my fragile heart.

Plus there’s the fact that my true sexuality must remain forever cloaked in secrecy because it is considered extremely unacceptable in the world of today.

So the chance of me ever pursuing what I really want are nil. It’s far, far too dangerous. In fact I don’t forsee it being even a little safer in my lifetime, sad to say.

I suppose that’s really the heart of the problem. I like to think that I could pursue the normal sex life of an adult gay man but I don’t know if I can.

It might be that, no matter how hard I try, I would always feel like there is something missing and that would keep me from truly indulging myself freely.

Maybe for me, sex will always be a show. Something I do for, not with, others, Something where my own sexual needs barely enter into it.

If so, that is brutally tragic. I didn’t ask to be wired the way I am. But as far as we know, sexual imprinting is forever. It can’t be changed or “fixed”.

So whatever sexy sex is to you, you’re stuck with it, no matter what it is.

Yet we persecute people for theirs anyhow.

It doesn’t feel fair, does it?

More after the break.

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Fuck my anxiety

I’m starting to get really sick of all this fucking anxiety in my head.

There’s way too much of it and I give it way too much control over what I can and cannot do. More specifically, I let it prevent me from doing damned near anything that isn’t in that narrow little corridor of possibilities I had taken as reality for far too long but was really just a picture show projected on the walls of my tiny cubical of a life in order to fool me into thinking I am free.

But it doesn’t matter how far I can see or how deeply I understand what is going on in all those pictures because it ultimately amounts to less than nothing if I can’t get up out of my seat and go investigate things in person.

There is a fully alive, intact, and realized version of myself slamming against the walls as it’s trying to escape its entombment and sooner or later this rubber room is not going to be able to hold it any more.

And I’m mostly just trying to stay the fuck out of its way and let the process proceed naturally instead of trying to control everything in the massively erroneous assumption that only things I control are “safe”.

Fuck that. I have no idea what I’m doing and neither does anyone else. I’d have much better results in life if I stopped trying to control everything (which is beyond futile) and instead concentrated on being the best version of me I can and learning to handle things as they come.

This will involve a lot of failing. That’s natural. That’s what being young is all about, even if you’re coming to youth very, very late in life like I am.

In the words of Bob Dylan : “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now. ”

I keep coming back to the idea of just turning off my analysis engine of a brain and just going with my gut for a while.

I don’t know if I could actually do that. I’ve been hyper analytical for a very long time, much to my detriment.

But it’s a good thing to think about in order to at least warm up to the idea that I don’t know a god damned thing and the only way to cure that is to actually do stuff.

But I’m still so damned scared.

And I need to stop letting that stop me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

.Say it with me now, “…and nothing matters.”

Yeah, I’m feeling nihilistic again.

This time, the trigger was looking at my open tabs and seeing Notd and FlexJobs still there, waiting for me to do something with them, plus a few new neglected tabs from the lovely people at March of Dimes Canada (MODC), who have a number of programs to help disabled folk like me get jobs.

Wouldn’t that be a hoot. Actual employment. I’d be a working pet then.

Maybe even get myself a cute little harness that says, “emotional support animal”.

I’d be really good at that.

But these things end up getting ignored, and I think I know why. It’s because I feel angry and frustrated and guilty and stupid when I think about them or see the tabs.

And far from galvanizing me into action, that just makes me withdraw and do nothing extra hard, and that’s the problem.

It’s a simple and terrible cycle. And it has to stop.

I think the vulnerable area of the issue is my emotional reaction to my “failing” to act on these boffo opportunities. If I can just calm the frick down about that kind of thing, I will not develop a phobic type aversion to dealing with them and I will be a lot more likely to actually get things going in my life.

And I think the heart of that problem is depression’s usual master, self-directed anger. I get angry and frustrated with myself and end up attacking myself internally.

And that’s bad.

Clearly I need to be more patient and tolerant and forgiving with myself. I am very abusive and harsh and even merciless on the inside, and that needs to stop.

The key to that, I think, is to simply accept that I can’t always push. There are rare times when I can pull my head down from the clouds and deal with the real world without getting too freaked out by how real it all is, and then there’s the rest of the time when the best I can do is float along like usual.

If I can just accept this truth, then I can stop putting extremely counterproductive pressure on myself to do these things already and relax and let things come when they come without trying to force things into existence.

It just doesn’t work.

It only leads to frustration, self-loathing, and absolutely no progress. If I want to move forward – and I do – I’m going to need to learn to let up on myself.

And patient readers will recognize the root problem with that : if I am not directing the anger inwards, then I have to direct it outwards, and I don’t want to hurt anybody.

And the anger does have to go somewhere. I can’t just delete it, as nice as that would be. I have oceans of untapped rage deep within me and the only way I am going to get rid of it is by doing something with it.

Use it as an energy source for ambition and curiosity. There’s a lot of great stuff out there in the world ready for me to take if I can just find the self-love and courage to go out there and get it.

But there’s still some vital linkage missing. The engine still won’t turn over and start, and I know for sure that the root cause is fear.

I am still more afraid of the world than I am eager to be part of it. My foot is on the brake and that makes my occasional tentative taps on the gas pedal futile and blocked.

I need to let myself out of this cave already.

But I’m afraid.

More after the break.

---

Got this off of Blue Sky and quite liked it :

I have a sick sense of humor.

And I’m loving it!

Now where was I…

---

How to relax inside myself

It can’t be done directly.

In fact, I think it might be like sleep – you can’t make it happen, you can only let it happen. Try to let go of everything, trusting that it will still be there later, so that it is safe to set it down for now.

Or maybe just let everything go, period. Fuck whether I can get it back. I probably don’t have anything all that important going on in my head anyhow.

Just thoughts and thoughts and even more thoughts. Whatever.

I suppose that in a way, I’m used to having a very cluttered mind. If all my thoughts on thoughst about thoughts went away, I might be cold without them.

But I’d get over it. Probably.

It would be worth a try, anyhow, if I could manage it.

I dunno, do I really use my thoughts as insulation against my inner chill factor? It feels like I do, at least right now.

And it would make sense. It’s not like I have anything else to use.

I mean, there’s a lot of other stuff in my head. Ideas, emotions, memories. But I guess I don’t really know how to derive warmth from them.

I dunno. Maybe I am just not feeling enough yet. I am so locked away in my inner morgue that I can’t feel all the genuinely good thing locked in here with me.

But I am trying, damn it. Trying to reanimate myself. To thaw out this frostbitten heart of mine by making my mind into a red hot laser beam melting its way towards that inviolate inner chamber, and the “real” me that has been trapped in there for all these years.

That will be the final boss fight for this mission. I locked myself away from the world for a reason – I was being raped. And I have been sealed off in there since then.

Will I be able to breach that sanctum santorum and set myself truly free, or will I lose my nerve because of all the alarms going off in my head tell me it’s not safe!

Yeah, well, safety is overrated.

I’d rather be alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like I can imagine what a saner me would be like.

I’d be a much more upbeat and cheerful person, with a natural effervescence that buoyed other people along with me.

And I wouldn’t feel so scared of everything. I’d be able to go anywhere and talk to anyone and feel perfectly relaxed and at home because I would have finally learn to just frigging relax and stop making things hard on myself.

I’d also write more and create more and do more. I would no longer be bound by this life in suspended animation. I would be free to get out of my cold sleep pod, run a few laps to get the blood flowing into my extremities, then go try to figure out what the hell happened to the rest of the crew.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

I would also probably end up with a wide group of friends, like I have on Tapestries. It would not be because I had any specific intention to amass acquaintances or anything.

It would be the natural result of my being friendly and personable and my need to have people to interact with.

If I am feeling sad and lonely because none of my usual friends are around, I would most likely introduce myself to someone new.

Rather extroverted of me, don’t you think?

---

When I was talking with my therapist Doctor Costin earlier today, I mentioned how almost everything in life has passed me by and that led to my realizing that the root problem was actually my need for things to make sense.

When an impulse or instinct would dare to raise its head, my response would basically be, “But WHY would I do that? It doesn’t make any SENSE. ”

And thus I would remain a sleepwalker in my own life.

Looked at that way, it seems especially absurd. To the point of obscenity, in fact. I missed so much of life simply because I never listened to my instincts and always demanded there be a logical reason to do things.

Or maybe it was all an elaborate con game to hide my base cowardice and timidity under a bluster of intellectualism. I don’t know.

I may never know. I’m very good at fooling myself.

And it ain’t easy.

Like I’ve said before, we all have a sort of program inside us that guides us through all the necessary developmental stages we need to go through to become adults.

And this program runs entirely on its own. A child doesn’t have to know why they like climbing trees and running around, or why they are suddenly interested in sex, or why they are now acutely aware that the world has problems.

They just go with it. It’s the most natural thing in the world.

But I was always far, far too aware of things for my own good. I could never just follow my instincts and be a kid because I knew so much about the world and life and how things work from an intellectual point of view.

I would have been much better off just turning off my brain and going with my gut. At least some of the time.

I don’t know if I can start now. But I can at least try. Maybe what I need to do is what media has screamed at me my entire life : listen to my heart.

The idea scares me badly. I am far too accustomed to knowing where the road leads before setting foot on it. It feels like my heart, such as it is, doesn’t know or understand anything. To my legacy false intellectualism, trusting it seems like chaos and madness.

And yet, my heart knows a great deal. Like how to guide my development, and what to do to make myself happy, and where I need to go to grow strong.

I’ve followed my cowardly mind for 40+ years and it’s led me absolutely nowhere. I suppose I could give following my heart a try.

But it still scares the crud out of me

More after the break.

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Up from the depths

Woke up from a nap at 8 pm not knowing what the fuck.

I was well and truly asleep. I’d laid down at a little after 6 pm and I guess I managed to get pretty deep into sleep by the time my alarm went off at 8 pm.

So I more or less had to cold boot my brain. I had to figure out what was going on, who I was, where I was in the day, and what frigging planet I was on.

And all in the space of about five seconds.

It was such a rough reentry that I had to sit here in front of the computer and rest for around ten minutes before I could gather my wits together well enough to go make my supper once I remembered what that was.

I think the reason it hit me so hard was that I had inadvertently done something I know has discombobulated me in the past : I went to sleep when the sun was up then woke up after it had set.

That’s ass-backwards, according to the default human programming. It could mess up anybody, including long time night owls like me.

Oh well. I’m awake, upright, and fed, and getting my words done, and I’ve narrowed the number of planets I might be on down to two (plus a satellite), so I think I am doing OK.

Today’s been quiet. Oh, except for a phone call telling me I goofed up again.

I knew that I had my next shower on the first Wednesday of the month. But it completely failed to register that this was that very Wednesday. D’oh!

And after having missed last week’s shower too. I don’t have another scheduled until a week from next Friday, and I am feeling distinctly grungy.

I have got to get my poop in a group over these things. I need cleansing!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s entirely foreign to me. So much so that I feel like a space alien even talking about it.

I’ve never been in love, or been in a relationship. I’ve barely even dated. Just a few dates a long time ago.

Same with sex. I’ve had it, but it was an even longer time ago.

And it wasn’t all that great, either. Presumably if I had remained sexually active for long enough, I would have gotten the hang of it, or better yet, met someone who definitely knew what they were doing and could teach me.

But it was more two or more people who have no idea what they are doing fumbling around. Which is, I suppose, what a lot of people’s early sex lives were like.

Looking back through the lens of my current wisdom, I can see that all the times I was trying to get it on with other dudes, I was having a low grade panic attack. The kind I had pretty much constantly at Kwantlen and VFS.

The kind I thought was perfectly normal until fairly recently.

And there are complicated psychological reasons for that. I don’t feel like going through them right now, though maybe I will do so soon.

There’s a lot of crazy bundled up in there.

Suffice it to say that being raped at the age of 4 fucks you up in a lot of ways and makes having actual normal, consensual sex a pretty complicated endeavour.

For me, despite being 51 years old (very), I have no idea if I am even capable of true romantic love. To me, it’s entirely possible that the best I can hope for is to be really, really fond of somebody.

To be in like with them, basically.

And that could seem a lot like love to the outside observer. I would dote on and adore this person, and shower them with love and affection. We could spend lots of time cuddling and canoodling and cohabiting.

But deep down, I wouldn’t really let them in. We wouldn’t truly connect. There is something akin to a shark cage inside me and nothing can breach that. It’s my final defense against a cold cruel world that never let me in.

But who knows. Maybe the right fella could change all that. Maybe with him, I would be able to truly relax and feel safe and loved and secure because for once in my life I am not constantly and anxiously waiting for my love object to reject and abandon me.

I guess I don’t expect anyone to pay attention to me for very long, no matter how hard I try to be pleasant and funny and cute and lovable.

I know that everyone always has more important things to do than be with me. I grok that I am nobody’s trop priority. I know that being around me can be draining. I know it can be hard to be my audience.

I guess, then, that on some level, I find it hard to imagine anyone wanting to be around me enough to actually date me, let alone be in a relationship with me.

And I am used to having loads and loads of alone time. I might find that I still need that no matter how in love I am.

After all, if life’s a performance, I am going to need a lot of time to recharge between shows. I put my everything into my little act, and that’s inherently a limited thing.

Then again, maybe I would finally learn to just be myself. No show, no dazzle, no sparkling wit, no borrowed bonhomie, just… me.

Maybe we could meet the real me together.

More after the break.

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The lord of illusion

I really don’t know where I end and “performance” begins.

Mostly, I ignore the whole issue by just assuming that they’re continuous. My “show” is an expression of who I truly am. I am not faking anything. I am, in fact, expressing the heck out of myself.

I just happen to be a naturally showy and flamboyant dude.

But that idea I expressed at the end of part 1 – the idea of being just me, no razzle dazzle, just the being at my core – the wearer of masks, the illusionist, the imagineer, the man behind the curtain – the thought of that makes my heart go cold.

So there’s clearly something hiding backstage and using all the costume changes and set fly-ins and such to distract people into not looking for anything deeper.

After all, I’m showing you too much to be holding anything back. Right?

Not quite. And that’s where this all gets sticky.

The fact that I wish I truly was the person I pretend to be and leave my “real” self behind is a pretty bad sign, honestly.

It’s perfectly emblematic of my profound weakness of self. I’d rather be a product of my own imagination than the real person I am stuck being.

The real me is boring and ugly and broken and sad. It’s hard to be him. He’s taken a lot of damage over the years from all that frustrated growth potential and his inability to truly deal with the real world.

And now, of course, the physical form is breaking down too. It’s hard to get my feet planted firmly on the ground when I’m standing on shifting sands and I never know what is going to go wrong next.

I want to build a sense of stability and identity but my world is so chaotic on the inside that I feel like I am trying to tap-dance on teacups just to stay alive.

I want to start over. I want to reboot myself. I want to start a brand new playthrough so I can use what I know now to do way better this time through.

But that’s not possible. I have only one save game and this is it. And I would love to be able to boldly declare myself reborn and psychologically section off my past to leave it all behind and stride purposefully into a brand new day.

But I can’t. Whatever it is I would need to do that is just plain not here. I don’t have it in me. Instead I wander endlessly in this castle of shadows I call a mind, not even really looking for anything any more, just afraid of what would happen if I stopped.

I wand to be strong. I want to stand on solid ground. I want to be able to face the world and deal with it instead of hiding inside myself all the time.

But I don’t know how to make that happen.

I know a lot of things that would work for other people, but not me. Smart, positive, effective sounding things that would totally work… if I was much healthier than I am.

But I can’t even start the process. It’s like I am trying to fill a bucket with no bottom. Everything falls through.

And I don’t know WTF yu do about that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well I’m in a very uncomfortable situation.

Last Friday, my pharmacist Simon called me to tell me my next set of a month’s worth of blister packed meds was ready. Keen. Time for us to go visit.

But we forgot. There was a lot going on that day, though ironically not for me.

And worse, we didn’t think of it Saturday either. Pickup would still have been possible because the Medicine Shoppe is open between 10 am and 2 pm on Saturdays.

But nope. No problem, I wouldn’t actually run out until Monday anyhow.

Well today is Monday and it is also the inaugural Truth and Reconciliation Day here in Canada and that’s a stat fucking holiday so, no drugs for me today either.

Wow, it’s a good thing nobody needs their meds to stay alive or anything.

So I am going to go a whole 24 hours completely unmedicated and I am not happy about that. I am doing my best not to freak out about it because obviously that would only make things worse, but I am very very worried nonetheless.

By all sane measurements, this is not good. I am especially worried about missing my blood pressure medications because you’re really, really not supposed to go off those suddenly. Terrible imbalances can occur.

So I am doing my best to stay mellow. I have taken a muscle relaxant (the ominous sounding cyclobenzaprine) and a fast acting anti-anxiety pill (the downright magical sounding alprazolam), which are two “as needed” drugs that I therefore still have in bottles, and hopefully they will keep me on an even keel emotionally.

Or they will wipe me out completely, which would be somewhat humorous. I take the two together and sleep for like a day.

Well at least my meds would be ready when I woke up!

---

Whatever happens, happens

Still trying to stop trying to control outcomes and just relax.

I know I need to chill the fuck out. I know I take things too seriously. I know that I am tormented by an excess of nervous energy I can’t seem to discharge.

I know I’d be a lot happier if I could keep myself busy, etc.

I think this is why I keep returning to nihilism : nihilism negates nervousness. Nihilism is like the opposite of taking things too seriously. Nihilism says that you can stop worrying about everything because none of it matters anyway…. so just chill.

I feel like I am all tied up in knots on the inside, and that somewhere in there is a little bow that if I pull it the right way the whole thing will unravel like a cheap sweater and I will collapse like a puppet with its strings cut into a puddle of bliss.

But it’s probably more like one of those tricky knots where you can’t loosen one part without tightening another.

If only I could find within me a source of strength and focus and calm instead of constantly riding the ragged razor’s edge of anxiety feeling like this old plane of mine could shake itself to pieces at any moment.

I feel like there’s this terrible fading away that happens when I try to pull myself together. Like my energies start up then cut out like I have popped a very weak and insufficient fuse and can’t take the power.

Perhaps I am more than even I can handle. But it’s far too late for me to learn to be less than I am. I have grown into this monolithic mental magician through no conscious effort of my own. It’s more like there’s a “get smarter” program running in the background of my mind and I don’t know how to turn it off.

Nor do I want to. Not really.

But what good is all this mental muscle if I don’t have the heart to use it? It’s just all this potential left to rot on the vine because I am too weak and cowardly to use it.

I can only hope that I find my strength one day.

Until then, I rot in the shadows, like always,

More after the break.

In a tizzy over dizzy

I’m all dizzy and hot again.

Woke up from a nap feeling that way and I have been trying to claw my way back to some semblance of equanimity ever since.

Made going to the kitchen to nuke my order from Donair Dude from last Saturday tricky. But sad to say, I suppose I’m getting good at making the trip in various states of debility.

The dizzy/hot thing definitely feels like it could be overheating related, which in turn would suggest it has to do with dehydration.

I will see if hydration helps.

The other possibility is that it’s sinus related. I was sneezing a fair bit earlier. Could be that my sinuses are full and that makes them back up into my ear canals via the eustachian tubes and thence unto my inner ears.

Knowing my luck, it’s both.

Emotionally, I’ve been feeling rough and raw and low-key angry all day. I’m in the mood to glower in darkness thinking brooding, gloomy, vaguely emo thoughts.

But like all things, this too shall pass. I will feel better after some more sleep, I imagine. Or I at least I will feel different.

A change is as good as a rest, after all. Or so they say.

I wish I knew how to make myself feel better. There are potential solutions but none of them are viable because I don’t have the wherewithal to pursue them.

Get more, better sleep. Sure. Move around more. Fantastic, I’ll get right on that. Eat a more balanced diet. What the hell, live a little.

All of these things would no doubt work, and none of them are going to happen any time soon. It’s just not in the cards. The center does not hold.

And I die a little bit all the time, without even noticing.

I guess it’s not important anyway.

I won’t be doing anywhere any time soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We’ve never really gotten along.

Even when I was a little kid, it took me a long time to fall asleep. I have plenty of memories of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling trying to fall asleep.

Number one rule of sleep : stop trying! Sleep is not something you make happen, it’s something you let happen. You have to get rid of whatever is keeping you awake then just let the natural process of nodding off take over.

Maybe that’s part of my problem. My overactive mind has trouble letting go of “control”. On a deep level, I feel like I am only safe when I am awake and aware and using this big bad brain of mine to calculate and predict and all the crap.

Being raped when I was four really did a number on me. It forever ruptured my sense of safety and made me deeply paranoid on a very intellectual level.

I just don’t trust the world not to sneak up on me to hurt me when I’m not watching .

So I always have to be watching. Even when I am asleep there is a part of me that is awake and watching.

So my sleep tends to kind of suck. The idea of getting actual, deep, restful sleep where I wake up feeling rested and refreshed remains mostly theoretical to me.

It’s happened but very, very rarely, and seemingly at total random. Presumably something I did before set the neurochemical stage just right, or something.

Or maybe I just managed to do enough to exhaust myself and drain off all the excess energy that usually powers this megawatt mind of mine so that I could finally get some god damned rest.

Like I have said before, I know in my soul that I am happiest when I am busy, but I lack the ability to make myself truly busy

All I know how to do is keep myself occupied. Like I have made a home for myself in life’s waiting room and I’ve been waiting for something or someone to start me off in life for so long that most of the time I forget that I am even waiting for something.

I know that I can’t do this alone. I need someone to hold my hand and anchor me and help me say calm and focused and grounded so that my neuroses do not carry me away from what I want in life.

So yeah. I can’t do it alone.

But I have always been alone. I don’t really know how to do things with others because there’s never been any others to do anything with.

I am always alone. I got myself through school. I had no support from my family, my teachers, or my classmates.

But I don’t know how to exit my mental illness alone. I am increasingly sure that it will involve finally learning to connect with other people and the human race in general, and I am scared of all that.

The truth is that I am socially retarded. I completely bypassed so many developmental stages that I am still way, way behind the other kids when it comes to connecting with others and learning to just plain get along.

I don’t want to be alone. This sealed off world of mine is awfully cold and lonely. I long for some kind of real connection with another to end this death march through the Midnight Tundra of my inner world so that I can finally come home.

But I know the world outside my skull is not to blame. Not really.

The problem is that in order to let someone in, you have to open your heart to the world. and let life in.

You have to forego the cold comforts if icy intellectualism and embrace being emotionally real and present.

You have to be here now.

And I’ve never been able to do that.

More after the break.

---

Meanwhile, back at the topic

Oh right, sleep.

What got me thinking about my relationship with sleep was my inability to change my basic sleeping pattern despite my rather bold declaration a little way back that I was going to stop napping so much.

Um, no. That resolution lasted about as long as my hypomanic phase and that was all. One cannot change the habits formed over decades of repetition by fiat alone.

So I still have a segmented day where I am awake for a period then nap. or sometimes vice versa, and it’s all bracketed by meals.

So in the morning I will get up whenever, and at 8 am I have my breakfast while hanging out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries MUCK.

It’s a way to have breakfast with friends every morning. An admittedly rather attenuated way, but that’s the form of social stimulation I can handle.

Namely, completely mitigated by screens. Sigh.

After breakfast I go back to sleep. That usually ends up being at around 10 am, but my energy levels vary and my active period could only last till 9 or keep on chugging until noon or even 1 pm.

Then there’s unstructured time till 4 pm, which is when I do lunch n’ blog, then go to sleep again, then at 8 pm it’s supper n’ blog, then nap yet again, and then get up by midnight to either Zoom with Julian and Felicity or hanging out with Julian and watching an episode of Colbert we recorded via PVR.

That’s my life. After each sleep period there is usually a time of wakefulness during which I play my video games until the next break.

Occasionally I loiter playing games for too long and need to take a nap in the hour or so before a blogging session instead.

But the pattern remains true. I nap a LOT. And I know why – it’s because I hide in sleep. I take naps to escape reality and give my anxiety level time to fall back to zero so I can get up and make it through another active period.

The idea of having to stay awake for longer than that, perhaps understandably, scares me terribly. It makes me feel like I would be “trapped” in wakefulness without the ability to retreat into sleep when things get too intense and/or stimulating.

Which is exactly how normal, healthy people live. They stay awake all day and part of the night, then sleep eight hours in a row except for sometimes getting up to pee.

That seems incomprehensibly horrific to me. I need my hidey hole of sleep to disappear into in order to function at all.

And I know how bloody unhealthy that is. That’s not how humans are meant to function. That’s why most people do not live like I do.

And I know that this need for a ready escape route stems from a fundamental weakness of character. Were I a stronger, healthier, more robust specimen, I would not need to run and hide in sleep so much. I would be able to live a normal life.

But I can’t change that via fiat either.

Maybe it would all sort itself out were I physically healthier.

But I don’t seem to be able to manage that, either.

I’m too sick to make myself well.

And ain’t that a kick in the nards?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I seem to be near the bottom of my long mood cycle right now.

I can tell because the nihilistic thoughts are creeping in. Thoughts like “I hate my life” and “fuck everything forever” and my personal fave, “everything is stupid and nothing matters”, which I swear I’m going to put on a T-shirt some day.

The edgy teen crowd will love it.

Generally speaking, this lower limit of the sine wave of my mood happens when enough frustrations and unexpressed anger has accumulated in my nervous system to start being really burdensome and it drags my mood down till it reaches a very low-key kind of crisis and that discharges enough of this dark energy to make me feel better.

In a way, I kind of wish it led to something more dramatic, like a nervous breakdown or a big confrontation or warrants for my arrest.

At least then it might actually resolve some of my inner conflict and make me substantially more whole instead of making progress drop by infinitesimal drop.

But I am just too goddamned stable. My mind is programmed to always keep me on an even keel no matter what in order to better facilitate this dead end video game based lifestyle of mine, and that means catastrophic change is just not in the cards for me.

I can’t just surrender myself to the chaos within and let whatever happens, happen. That’s asking too much of my belabored psyche. There is no way that I could trust that such a step would not end up harming me or others.

And that’s very important to me. I can’t absolve myself of responsibility for the consequences of my actions, even if I might be better off if I could.

It could very well be that mentally healthy people have a limit to how much responsibility they take for their part in things and everything outside that limit is somebody else’s job and not their problem.

And it’s only developmentally stunted weirdoes like me who try to live entirely by principle, without any little island of mercy carved out in which to be human and put my own emotional wellbeing first.

And that’s a cold and stringent way to live, without any forgiveness for myself, and I know that I would be a lot better off living a warmer and more human life, but this icy, brutal, strict ethos is all I know.

When I try to imagine what lies outside that way of living, all that comes to mind is my adopting a FEBM (Fuck Everybody But Me) lifestyle of selfish self-gratification without any thought to the consequences to others.

All that would matter was what I could get away with.

No consequences for me? Then I fail to see a problem.

Obviously that’s just my mind’s way of going to the opposite extreme, and sanity, as always, lies somewhere between those poles.

And that happy medium is far more difficult for me to achieve. I seem to be naturally drawn to one extreme or another.

All I can do is do my best to keep healing and growing and letting my mind and my soul expand with all the parts of me that have been dormant for so long

And sooner or later that is going to require a loss of “control”. And that, in turn, requires something I sorely lack : faith.

Faith that I can do that and it will be okay. Things will get better for me. I won’t end up in jail or my grave. I will be fine, or something like it.

I have no reason to believe that. I live life on the high wire with no safety net. There has never been anyone to catch me if I fall.

I am not sure there even could be such an individual. I am a lot to handle and not even my therapist can handle the true unfiltered me.

I am downright megalithic.

And nobody knows what to do with a guy like that.

Least of all me.

More after the break.

---

More DoorDash follies

Until further notice, I will not be ordering in on Saturday night any more.

That’s because apparently our building’s buzzer system is completely broken, neither me nor any other resident of Manhattan Towers let someone in the building without physically going down the lobby and opening the door.

So for the second Saturday in a row, my meal is sitting outside the door to the building and I am helpless to go get it.

And this time, I can’t complain to DoorDash and get a refund because this time the driver definitely did not do anything wrong.

He got it as close to me as he could.

And I am not the type of person to lie about a thing like that.

Or nearly anything else, for that matter.

I actually called Julian to see if he could come home from playing board games at Joe’s parents’ place long enough to bring it to me, but he understandably said no.

It was a pretty big ask.

I’m going to have to complain to someone about the buzzer system, though. I need that thing. What if I had an emergency and had to let the EMTs in?

And I can’t be the only person in this 120+ unit apartment building who uses the buzzer. Admittedly, not many of them would have it hooked up to a landline, but that’s neither here nor there.

This whole thing has me kind of bummed out. I was really looking forward to having a nice treat tonight only to have it snatched away by cruel fate.

And as patient readers know, I don’t handle disappointment well. So I am probably going to be sad for a while.

But I’ll bounce back eventually.

Julian will pick up the meal for me whenever he gets home and I’ll have him stick it in the fridge and I will heat it up and eat it Monday night.

By then, this will just be another lesson learned the hard way.

And that’s better than learning nothing at all.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.