Psychology

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I almost forgot to give this a title

I seriously considered walking to the train station today, but after I finally arose—I’d been awake for hours, already—I realized that I just wasn’t up to doing it, physically.  Or maybe I wasn’t up to doing it, mentally.  In any case, it’s not as though there’s any actual difference or separation between the two things, despite the wishes of dualists* of many stripes throughout the ages.

I simply am this thing that is writing this, and it’s all instantiated in this body—though I store aspects of my persona and records of various things and highlights of information in external media, as people have done for quite some time to greater and lesser degrees.

In any case, I really don’t feel very well, and I don’t mean just my usual depression/dysthymia, though it may be related to those things.  Perhaps it’s just an exacerbation.  After all, dysthymia (now officially called persistent depressive disorder or some such boring name, because that’s what really matters, making sure that things have optimal names, right?) can episodically increase into a full blown episode of major depression.

Also, it’s that time of the year for those whose symptoms are affected by the seasons—in the northern hemisphere, at least—to feel the detriment of longer nights and shorter days (so to speak).  I am at least somewhat “seasonally affected”, though I’ve always loved autumn.  This may seem superficially contradictory, but in my youth, autumn was a time that brought birthdays and holidays and the start of school and all that good stuff that I liked.  Also, probably when I was quite young, I didn’t have any real evidence of depressive disorders to come, at least as far as I recall right now.  Although, if I do have ASD, it was present then.  There is some evidence in my recollections that it was.

In addition, of course—speaking of holidays—this is a rough time of year for people who are already depressed and who are also socially isolated**.  Thanksgiving is in two days, and that is a traditional, very positive and social family holiday, which I will not be celebrating again this year.  I will have the day off work, though—all the better to drive home the fact of being alone in a single room (with attached bath) and having no one with whom one shares life at pretty much any level.  Then of course, the Hanukkah season (and Christmas season) and New Years and all that is coming up—extremely family-and-friends-oriented holidays.  I again am not planning on trying to spend any of them with anyone else.

The weird irony is, when I imagine actually trying to spend holidays with other people—yes, even when I merely imagine it—I feel tremendous tension.  I guess it’s what one could call significant anxiety.  It’s a strange kind of…not exactly a contradiction, but a conflict, a tension of ideas.  I am depressed and gloomy when alone, which is my usual way to be, but I feel almost terrified at the thought of being around other people socially.

I particularly wouldn’t want to have a group of people just bring me into their celebrations of holidays just so that I could have someone with whom to celebrate.  It’s not that I dislike people I don’t know.  How could I dislike them if I don’t know them?  I just don’t feel a sense of camaraderie with most people; I don’t feel like a member of the same species.

The guy, Paul Micaleff from the YouTube channel “Asperger’s from the Inside” (well, now it’s “Autism from the Insode”) made a great analogy that struck home with me about that kind of thing.  He said that, if he goes to a pond and sees a lot of ducklings playing around and swimming and all that, he might really think they were great and enjoy watching them, but it would never occur to him to try to join them in their pond.  That would make no sense.  He wouldn’t know how to act, they would be terrified of his presence, and he would never be able to fit in or enjoy trying to pretend to be like them, in any case.

I think it’s a really good analogy.  One doesn’t have to hate a group of people or even think them uninteresting not to feel that one has any business trying to join the group or attempting to act as if one were like them.

I don’t know what my species is.  Even though I find people like Paul more relatable than most, I still don’t really feel like I could connect even with the people in those communities.  I think the closest guy online I feel like could be my kind of person is Dave, from Dave’s Garage (his book was also very good and extremely relatable).  But I don’t think that he would find me very interesting, partly because our backgrounds are so dissimilar.  Anyway, he’s doing his thing and putting up nice educational videos about computers and stuff, and that’s good enough for me.

Actually, I don’t know that there’s anyone I might possibly want to spend time with who would truly want to spend time with me, except for family of course.  Even more so, I would not feel comfortable imposing myself upon anyone, even if I wanted to spend time with them and they were interested.  I’m just not selfish and cruel enough to inflict myself upon people I like.

I’m very tired and just utterly pointless—in the sense that I have no particular reason to do much of anything; I just have biological drives and habits, none of which provide any purpose or sense of satisfaction.

I have been thinking about using this month’s Audible credit to get Stephen King’s On Writing in audiobook format.  It’s read by King-sensei himself and his two author sons (Owen King and Joe Hill).  I’ve read the print version before, of course—more than once—and it was certainly inspiring in its way.  Stephen King’s nonfiction is sometimes even better than his fiction.  His style and substance and personality are quite engaging.  So, maybe if I get that audiobook, I’ll listen to it, and maybe just feel inspired to start writing fiction again.

Possibly, it’s worth a try.  If it doesn’t work, well, I don’t know what will happen.  That’s not new, though.  No one knows the specifics of the future in other than trivial senses until it happens.  And then it’s no longer the future.  We’re falling through time, in that sense, facing backwards, only seeing where we’re going once we’re past it.

It seems like a weird way to run things, but of course, it’s the only way that makes sense, given that complexity and life and memory are all driven by processes that harness increasing entropy.  And being fairly close to the surface of an extremely low-entropy state in space-time (AKA “The Big Bang”) explains why things like life and mind exist at all.  You wouldn’t see stalactites and stalagmites form in a place without a local strong gravity differential providing a sensible “up” and “down”, and you wouldn’t see life or consciousness forming in a spacetime with already uniform entropy, thus leaving no local “past” or “future”.

All right, let’s stop before I go off on a tangent, even a sine or a secant.  Have a good day.

*Not to be confused with “duelists”, a group or set that could certainly overlap with dualists, but need not do so, and which is defined by quite unrelated characteristics.

**Not in the sense of avoiding spreading disease, but just in general lack of social contacts or supports.  I am very “challenged” in that area.

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“And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad…”

The madness continues, or begins again, as the beginning of a new work week occurs.  “What madness is that?” you ask?  I mean the madness of bothering to stay alive, the madness of continuing to do things that are absolutely pointless and irrelevant even in the moment, let alone in the long term history of the cosmos.  I mean the madness of trying to pretend to be cheerful or positive in any way, to try to be polite or engaged or interested in anything around me.

That madness, and other forms related and/or similar to it, is the sort of madness I mean.

I guess I really would have to say that the madness “continues” rather than that it begins again.  It’s not as though it has ever stopped or paused.  It simply takes a different form over the weekend, when there is less to do.  But there is no more real sanity involved in any of my activities even when I’m not commuting to the office and back.  I’m just less constrained to try to seem vaguely pseudo-normal, or at least vaguely pseudo-tolerable, when I’m by myself in my room.

I should look up a thorough etymology of the word “madness” or “mad”.  I know that it has morphed, to at least some degree, into a modern synonym of “angry”, but the older meaning of “lack of sanity” or “extreme agitation” of other types still persists at least a bit.  And it’s better than “insanity” in my opinion.

Madness has a certain poetic quality to it that “insanity”, which is really a legal term, does not have.  Insanity, whether by design or just by customary use, carries the impression of a loss of previously existing “sanity”.  I’ve introduced my term “unsane” before, but I don’t know if it’s going to catch on.  At least, though, it conveys the notion, potentially, of situations or people or beings to whom or to which the very concept of sanity doesn’t apply.

But of course, as I noted, insanity (and sanity) is a legal term that applies to assessing whether or not one can be held legally culpable for one’s actions.  As such, it can be fairly vague, and certainly it is not scientific.  There are quite a few forms of mental illness* that are truly debilitating and dangerous and can even be life-threatening, and are certainly immiserating, but which would not allow one to be found “not guilty by reason of insanity” if one committed a crime.

Mind you, all these notions, from laws to words to legal or even moral responsibilities, are simply inventions, creations, “fictions” produced by humans for various reasons—they are memes** and memeplexes that happened to survive and reproduce, so they carried on.  Often, though not always, such memes persist in the meme pool—i.e., culture—because they are useful to the organism(s) through which they propagate.  But they do not have any truly fundamental reality.  They are emergent things in a spontaneously self-assembled complex adaptive system that has no more intrinsic, inherent meaning than does a snowflake or a piece of rock candy—also, they are far less beautiful and/or tasty, though they have their charms.

Still, I’m sick of nearly all of it—mentally sick, physically sick.  I’m particularly sick of my part within it, largely because I don’t think I have much of a part within it.  Like the song says, I don’t belong here.  But, of course, the fact of not belonging in one place does not logically imply that one belongs somewhere else.  Even setting aside the fact that the term “belong” is fairly vague and protean, by any version of it but the very loosest one, it is entirely possible for an individual entity or being not truly to “belong” anywhere at all.

I certainly know that it’s possible to feel that one does not belong anywhere.

It’s vaguely reminiscent the old Groucho Marx joke in which he said he would never join a club that would have him as a member.  It’s funny, but it’s also a good description of a dysfunctional state of mind—or at least an inefficacious frame of mind—such that a person feels that he or she is an outsider, and that any group that would welcome him or her is probably not the sort of group in which he or she could possibly feel comfortable.

It’s what happens when one looks online to find communities that purportedly have common difficulties or shared issues and which intend to provide mutual support, but one feels at least as alien and uncomfortable with the thought of these support groups as one does about any other group.

No-win situations are clearly possible in reality—the very concept of “winning” is another entirely artificial one, though it can be pertinent to the objective biological world in some circumstances—and when one is in one, it can be reasonable to try simply to accept that one cannot win, and therefore that one’s choice of how to escape the situation is arbitrary and so may as well be random, or whatever seems most attractive at the time.

Anyway, that’s enough bullshit from me for today.  I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, but that’s okay; there is no inherent point, no evident telos to the cosmos.  There is no purpose in which to lose myself, and there is no home to which I can return.  I’m certainly in no position to try to make a new home of any kind or to create some new purpose.  I wish I had just walked away a month ago today, as I’d hoped to do—it would have been a good day for it.  Or perhaps I should have done so a month before that; it would have been even better.

Oh, well.  The past cannot be changed, anymore than the characters in a film can rewind their own reels and edit earlier frames to change their story.  If one were able to change past time, it would necessarily involve another level of time, some “higher” time in which a different kind of future and past existed, not constrained by the one within this world.  That’s conceivable, of course.  However, there’s no evidence that it exists.

But that’s a discussion for some other time.

*Yes, I prefer to call things “mental illness” when they impair the successful functioning of a person’s mind, to greater or lesser extent.  Referring to everything as “mental health” comes across as just weird a lot of the time.  “He struggles with mental health” is the sort of thing people sometimes seem to say, but that doesn’t make much sense.  Surely he struggles with his relative dearth of mental health.  Or is it meant that perhaps he dislikes mental health, which seems fairly pathological in and of itself, just as a person might want to sabotage that person’s own physical health?  Either tendency seems to be a case of mental illness, in the same sense that anything from an upper respiratory infection, to dysentery, to a heart attack, to vasculitis, and to cancer are all forms of “physical” illness, not physical health.

**In the original sense of the term, coined by Richard Dawkins in his brilliant work, The Selfish Gene.

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Is there such a thing as Von Oldmann architecture?

It’s Wednesday morning, and here I am at the train station, writing my blog post for the day.  It’s quite wet and windy, which might have been a decent situation in which to do some walking, but I’m still feeling quite under the weather, so I haven’t done any walking of more than a mile at a time this week.  Last night/yesterday evening, I walked to the train station from work, and I had an umbrella, but it was terribly windy, so even though I was able to keep my head (and my backpack) mostly dry, my legs were soaked by the time I got to the station.

This morning, it’s not raining as hard, but it is drizzling and windy.  I considered just wearing a rain coat today, but I realized that wouldn’t protect my legs any more than the umbrella would.  I do have a long, duster-style coat that I guess I could have worn.  Maybe if it’s still windy and rainy tomorrow, I’ll wear that.

I also considered not going to the office today, but it’s Wednesday, which means it’s payroll day, so I need to go.

I started a new mantra (of sorts) yesterday, consistent with the way I expressed myself in yesterday’s post—indeed, I started it even as I walked from the train to the office in the morning:  I said, “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself.”  This was, to no one’s surprise, not at all difficult for me to maintain, unlike my former attempt at saying that I loved those things (as if to convince myself) which made my metaphorical tongue turn to metaphorical sand in my metaphorical mouth.

The new mantra is strangely freeing.  It didn’t make me nearly as tense or uncomfortable as I worried that it might.  If anything, it allowed a sense of detaching.  I didn’t feel any actual hostility or malice toward the world—there was no weird desire for revenge or destruction or what have you.  I don’t think the world ever even pretended to owe me anything good, and it certainly does not owe me anything good.  So I can’t feel any sense of affront, or wounded pride, or anything idiotic like that.

Don’t get me wrong; I can be and am idiotic in plenty of other ways.  I’m just not idiotic in that particular way.  As for hating my life and hating myself, well, what else is new?  Accepting it, saying it, has its benefits.  If I hate myself anyway, why would I care what happens to me?

I realized that this might not be the healthiest thing to have going through my mind, so I decided to provide a counterpoint by listening to the David Burns book on Cognitive Therapy, Feeling Good.  I’ve read the book before; I was recommended it by a therapist.  I’ve even done many of the exercises therein.

I recognize the value of the ideas in the book, and I know that CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) has been tested well and provides good results for many.  It’s also logical and rational in many ways, and that’s always appealing.  So I started listening to the audio-book, even as I waited for the train and rode on it.

It did help me take a nap on the train; maybe that means some of its messages went into my subconscious.  It was a nice little nap, and I didn’t miss my stop, because I wasn’t sleeping all that deeply, despite my horrendous lack of sleep the previous two nights.

It’s sad to say, but I think my body and my nervous system have sort of adapted to getting very little sleep.  I’m not saying that they’re fine with it.  That would be absurd.  Sleep is clearly crucially important to life in creatures with any kind of nervous system as we know it.  This is obvious, even if we don’t quite know why, because every creature in the world that we know of with a nervous system spends a good portion of every planetary rotation in a relatively dormant and quite vulnerable state.  If evolution were able to allow for function without sleep, one would think it would have cropped up somewhere, at least.

Of course, it’s possible that, way back in the dawn of nervous systems, hundreds of millions of years ago, life went down an accidental blind alley with respect to sleep and nerves.  Maybe the common ancestor of all nervous systems just happened upon a form of function that requires what we call sleep, and every descendant of that nervous system is stuck with a requirement that need not have been the case if some different solution to creating nervous systems had been happened upon, but it wasn’t, and so sleep cannot be escaped except by a reinvention of the nervous system by some life form.  That’s unlikely to happen for reasons similar to why new types of abiogenesis aren’t going to happen in an already crowded biosphere:  anything new would be horrendously outcompeted by life forms that have hundreds of millions to three and a half billion years advantage.

I’m dubious, though, about the possible accidental and fundamentally nonessential nature of sleep.  This is at least partly due to the recognition that even our computers eventually need to be updated and, more importantly, rebooted to function optimally.

Computers bear very little similarly to nerve cells or literal nervous systems; they were never designed to mimic nerves, anymore than an internal combustion engine was designed to mimic muscles and legs.  Von Neumann architecture has very little in common with the way nervous systems store and process information.  The former does storage and processing separately; nervous systems seem to do it as part and parcel of the very same processes.

Anyway, my point is, I don’t think I need less sleep just because for a long time I have achieved less sleep.  I think my body, my mind, my nervous system has adjusted as best it can to keep from completely falling apart—literally—in response to truly chronic insomnia.  But the system is still wearing down and suffering damage; believe me, I can tell.

I’m almost sure that at least part of my chronic pain is related to my insomnia, especially the pains that arise other than where the more concrete source of my pain is located.  And there’s clearly an association between my insomnia and my depression/dysthymia.  It’s difficult to say if one causes the other or the other causes the one or if they’re both caused by some third thing—possibly some form of autism spectrum disorder—but I give very low credence to them being only coincidentally correlated.

In any case, I am proceeding in two apparently conflicting directions at once, now:  I’m repeating a mantra that doesn’t seem in any way to come up against resistance in my mind, but which is certainly not what one could consider positive.  And I’m repeating my exposure and exploration of CBT, starting with Feeling Good.  None of it is new to me, nor are there any revelations likely to come.

I understand the points that are made in CBT, I understand and recognize the cognitive distortions associated with depression that it strives to combat.  I’m open to the possibilities, but I’m not sure it’s the right tool for the job, in my case.  I suspect my depression/dysthymia may be quasi-organic, in the sense of being more truly fundamental to the operation of my own weird little alien nervous system.

But I could be wrong, and I don’t like to jump to conclusions too precipitously.  So, I’ll finish listening to the book, and maybe get one of his other books with this month’s Audible credit.  But I’m also not going to try to extinguish the repetition of “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself” in my head.  If it goes away on its own, that’s fine.  Otherwise, it’s at least something consistent onto which to hold.  And it’s weirdly both freeing and calming, and that’s worth a lot to me.

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For the satirical blog says here that old men have grey beards

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, though it doesn’t feel like it should be, because I didn’t write or go to work on Monday.  I also haven’t been doing any significant walking since the end of last week, as I’ve been feeling quite physically low.

Unfortunately, my physical health doesn’t seem to be recovering much, yet.  I still have an irritating, dry cough, and my nose is stuffy, and I feel rather crappy.  But I slept well (for me) last night, getting almost five hours of sleep, and possibly a little bit more.  I didn’t wake up feeling particularly good, but I think that’s just mainly because I’m still sick.  It doesn’t seem like the sort of illness that will be life-threatening, but we can always hope.  After all, it’s possible for a simple viral upper respiratory infection to lead to a secondary bacterial infection that ends up becoming a lethal pneumonia.

Fingers crossed, everyone!

I haven’t shaved this week—I normally just have a sort of goatee (not a fancy one, just a straight, old-fashioned, The Master style goatee, as shown below), but occasionally I let the full beard grow out a bit.  It tends to be irritating because the spacing between whiskers on my cheeks is wider than on my chin and lips, and also the whiskers on my neck get irritating.  Obviously, it’s possible to muscle through that, but another problem I have is that, apparently, when I have a full beard I look quite amiable, and strangers start talking to me out of nowhere, much to my surprise and discomfort.

I never wore a beard at all while I was married.  My (ex-) wife thought my goatees looked “too aristocratic”, which I take to mean that they made me look vaguely villainous.  I was also in the Navy when she and I first met, and of course, I couldn’t wear a beard then.

I don’t know quite what the fetish is in the US armed services about being clean-shaven and having short hair; maybe it’s born from days of fighting lice, though being completely shaved would be better for that.  I’ve been shaved-headed before, and I found it quite pleasant in many ways.  If you roll out of bed late, for instance, no one can tell if you haven’t showered.  Apparently, I also look a bit like a real life version of Doctor Evil when my head is shaved, but less funny, more actually evil.  I’m okay with that.

My ex-wife also had an interesting attitude toward beards in general, which was her explanation for why she didn’t like them:  She always had the feeling that men with beards were trying to hide something.

Think about that.  If you’re a man who actually does grow a beard, that means you are genetically programmed with that secondary sex characteristic.  Without modern technology, once you hit puberty, you will start growing a beard.  Not all human males (or related alien species or replicants or changelings) grow beards, but for those that do, it’s just what happens when one doesn’t take other action, much as getting old is just what happens when one doesn’t die young.

What that means is that, when someone who would otherwise grow one does not have a beard, that is the more unnatural situation.  It requires regular (usually daily) effort to be clean-shaven for a post-pubescent man who grows facial hair.  That seems like a situation where people might be trying to hide something.  Specifically, they seem to want to hide the fact that they are adults, that they grow beards, and whatever comes with that.

Maybe they want to appear boyish and thus less threatening?  That couldn’t explain the military tendency, but that tendency is clearly only a modern affectation.  Traditional warrior classes tended to have beards.  Think of the Vikings, and the hordes of Genghis Khan, and the Spartans, and of course the many middle-eastern warrior peoples, from the Persians to the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

Also, of course, it’s pretty clear that every Abrahamic patriarch and/or prophet, from Moses to Jesus to Mohammed, all had beards.  Even King David almost surely had a beard by the time he whacked Goliath (it’s hard to imagine a hunting bandit, leader of a band of outlaws, being preadolescent and/or taking the time to shave every day).  Michelangelo made one heckuva statue of the young King as clean-shaven, but that doesn’t have to be any more true to life than it is literarily accurate to put pointy ears on hobbits and elves in Middle-earth*.  Also, of course, by most accounts, the illustrious (and sculpturious?) Mr. Angelo had quite the beard, himself.

It’s a bit weird, all of it.  Maybe the admiration for being clean-shaven harkens back to some not-so-secret preference of the medieval church higher-ups for prepubescent boys.

It’s probably at least partly just random, or at least stochastic, with the highly nonlinear equations of sociology producing weird eddies and fluctuations in local social mores that aren’t necessarily motivated by anything inherently logical.  But still, it seems rather silly to me for someone to think that men who simply allow their faces to do what those faces naturally do—i.e., grow beards—might be hiding something thereby.  It’s a bit like imagining that an apple tree is being slyly malevolent by growing fruit.

Still, the whole amiable appearance thing is a much better reason for me to avoid beards.  I feel very awkward and tense, engendering urges toward literal physical aggressiveness, when strangers talk to me.  Apparently, my tendency to grow “wizard eyebrows”, as my ex-wife described them (fondly) is not off-putting.  Perhaps when I have a full beard, I look like a kindly wizard too much.  Whereas with a goatee, I look more like a Warlock (which used to be my nickname in high school).

Now, if having a full beard encouraged beautiful, intelligent, interesting women to come up and talk to me out of the blue a lot, I might be less displeased (though I would almost certainly be at least as tense and anxious).  But that seems vanishingly unlikely.

Anyway, that’s enough nonsense for now.  I don’t have any idea what Shakespeare quote I might alter for the title to this post, but you will know by the time you read this.  Of course, yesterday’s title was an actual, full-on quote—from Gloucester, AKA the future Richard III, in the play Henry VI part 3—but that was unusual, and I did put quotation marks around it.

I’m sure I’ll find something adequate.  I have all the works of Shakespeare to use as a source for my material.  That’s a hell of a deep well from which to draw.

TTFN

the master worried about his future

*Think about it.  Tolkien went to great pains to describe how hobbits had curly hair on their heads and on the top of their feet, that they are smaller than the bearded dwarves (and that they themselves do not grow beards) and that they tend to be rosy-cheeked and stout around the middle.  But he never once said anything about their ears.  You would think, if their ears were meant to be pointy or otherwise remarkable, he would have specified this; he was an obsessively meticulous creator of his world, a tendency he self-parodied in his short story, Leaf by Niggle.  There is apparently some obscure reference in his notes that could be taken to be saying that his elves might have had slightly pointy ears, though I’m unconvinced by what I’ve read even of that.  Certainly in the Bakshi version of LotR, the hobbits and the elves all had “normal” ears, and that’s the way I have always pictured them in the dozens upon dozens of times I’ve read the books.  The ears are my only major complaint about Peter Jackson’s original trilogy.  I consider their presence an instance of pandering to the “broader” audience of people who aren’t actual Tolkien fans.

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“Be resident in men like one another and not in me”

Well, I’m on the laptop (computer) again today.  I specify that it is the computer because I want to make it clear that I’m not on anyone’s actual lap top.  I don’t think there is anyone out there whose lap could tolerate me sitting on it—I suppose Santa Claus could maybe use his magic, but it’s a bit early in the year for him, even given holiday-time mission creep—and probably even fewer laps on which I would be able to tolerate sitting.  And one cannot really be on a lap around a race track or in a swimming pool, unless one is actually going around that track or swimming, either of which activity would make it very difficult to type.  I guess the top of such a lap could be thought of as its beginning, as in “taking it from the top” in music.  But that wouldn’t change the writing difficulty.

That’s a weird opening to a blog post.  Sorry.  I think I’m particularly weird in the morning, or at least I’m a particular kind of weird in the morning.  I know that, as with many people suffering from depression, my mood is often at its worst in the morning, but sometimes I’m at my least weird and my most sane—from my own point of view, anyway—in the morning relative to the middle of the day or the afternoon or the evening.  Often I feel most sane when I’m most depressed.

It’s quite frustrating when, by the end of the day, my energy level lifts a bit, because then I have a hard time relaxing and getting to sleep.  But, of course, it’s not as though I can sleep in, or sleep late to make up for staying up too late.

I will say, though, that last night I got nearly four hours of sleep (pretty uninterrupted once I got to sleep), and it felt surprisingly deep.  I had at least one dream of which I was vaguely aware, because it was interrupted when my alarm sounded.  I don’t remember anything about the dream, other than that it was a dream, and I awakened feeling quite disoriented*, thinking it must be much later than it was.  It wasn’t.  It was just as late as it was, as one might expect.

My work friend who had the stroke is apparently doing pretty well, which is good news.  It feels so ironic to me how often people around me, ones who have a lot for which to live, and who have good reasons to be healthy, and who have families and friends, are stricken with significant health problems.

I’m referring to serious, dangerous health problems here.  I have some health problems—chronic pain, stuff like that—and I certainly have mental health issues.  But I’m the person I know whose life could most easily tolerate significant health setbacks, or at least the one whose ill-health and/or death would have the least impact on those around me and the world at large.  Even so, on I go.

Yet my life, such as it is, is in fact steadily eroding.  It has already become quite a poor, puny, pathetic little remnant of a life.  I don’t do anything other than go from my one room (with attached bathroom/shower) to work and back, and I write this blog.  I don’t play guitar or write fiction or sing or any of that anymore.  I’m getting more and more tired of even non-fiction books.

I don’t watch any ongoing TV shows other than things like Loki, which is quite limited, and Doctor Who.  Unfortunately, even the latter is something that I wish I could watch with someone…and not via a cheesy-ass “watch party” thing online.  I don’t understand how those could be any fun at all.

I have a hard time even visualizing people I know when I’m not around them.  I mean, I know they exist, of course, but I can’t readily imagine what they might be doing, or that they’re doing anything in particular, if I’m not with them.  I know they exist, but I only really feel them existing when I’m in their presence.

Maybe that’s part of the whole ASD thing, I don’t know, but it’s always been very difficult for me to maintain any form of relationship over significant distances.  There have been exceptions, but you could count them on maybe half the fingers of one hand.  And those exceptions always involved nearly-continuous communication.

Still, while of course I know, intellectually, that other people are all still there when I’m not in their presence, I don’t seem intuitively to model them except when they’re nearby—and when they’re nearby, I don’t so much model them as watch them in a kind of analytic way (though I do feel the noise of their emotions).

So, when I’m alone, I often feel*** truly and completely and fundamentally alone in the universe.  I often feel that way even when other people are around, though there are some distractions and intellectual engagement that help make that a bit easier.  But there have been relatively few people in my life with whom I feel really connected, and eventually most of those people have gone far away or cut ties with me or died or whatever.

Who can blame them?

So, anyway, that’s the deal.  It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s payroll day.  And tomorrow will be my traditional Thursday post.  I sometimes entertain the notion of writing blog posts in the afternoon or evening, and seeing if the content is different in character, and if anyone would notice.  But to do that would require serious restructuring of my routines and schedules and things, and I don’t think I’m up for it.  Also, morning is when I have time to do this.

I’m awake anyway, so I might as well use that fact for something productive…if that’s how this can be described.

Please try to have a good day.

*It’s weird how the Brits tend to use “disorientated” even though the root word is disorient, not disorientate (which sounds, perhaps, like the name of Catherine Tate’s sibling or child**).  I guess even in the states we say “disorientation”, but I think that’s just because “disoriention” would not flow very well.  I’m probably biased.  One related thing I find frustrating, and found especially frustrating when I was in medical practice (and training) was how many doctors, even American ones, would refer to the state of having been dilated as “dilatation” instead of just “dilation”.  It feels like they lost control of themselves, and only just barely were able to resist saying “dilatatatatatatation”.  It makes no good sense.

**Of course, Catherine Tate is her stage name, so it would be weird for a sibling or child of hers to have the last name “Tate”, to say nothing of the first name “Disorien”.

***I don’t think I’m alone, of course.  I’ve never been tempted by the philosophical position of solipsism; it doesn’t make any sense, at least in its literal form.  But I definitely feel a sort of intuitive pseudo-solipsism in some senses and at some times.  By that I mean I am the only person I have any actual sense of persistently existing.  On the other hand, I can sometimes “feel” other people’s emotions, in a sense, when they’re around, and one on one that can be good when one is a doctor.  However, when there are a lot of other people around it can quickly be overwhelming, especially if it’s also literally noisy.  Two kinds of cacophony is too much.

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I searched for form and land; for years and years I roamed

It’s Friday, and since I don’t work tomorrow (on what would have been my Mom’s birthday), it really is the last day of the work week for me.  Not that I have anything planned for the weekend, other than doing my laundry on Sunday morning.  I don’t know whether I feel worse on the Fridays before I work on Saturday, or on Fridays before I don’t, but neither one is worth anticipation, and today is no exception.  I feel quite blah.

I did not walk (nor jog) to the station today.  I got slightly stiff, and had a mild exacerbation of my back pain, during the day yesterday, and decided I would give myself a break this morning for my body to do any adapting and recovery it needs.  It’s a bit of a shame; the weather is semi-cool and there is a nice wind blowing, so it would have been pleasant for walking.  Depending on how I feel this afternoon, I may walk back from the train, but then again, I deliberately wore boots today to discourage myself from not letting myself rest.

Also, of course, I like my boots, and wanted to wear them.  As you can see, I have not given them away or otherwise disposed of them yet.

I’m trying to do the whole “I love the world” thing, but I’m having trouble with it.  I haven’t given up yet, but my mood seems to get in the way even of that much.  It’s apparently hard for me even to say that I love the world, let alone myself.

I wish my mood were more consistent.  Little moments where mantras work and when I feel that I’ve made some progress give me a false shot of hope, but then‒as always‒I wake up ridiculously early in the morning and just watch the clock until it’s late enough that I can say, “Fine, you might as well just get up.”  Then I find every little thing stressful and irritating.  Maybe I give up trying to give myself calm, positive self-messages and just try to get in some regular mindfulness meditation and/or self-hypnotism.

Or maybe I should just give up, full stop.

I would obviously like it if I were to be able to be in at least a neutral mood most of the time.  Of course, it would be preferable to be able to be positive a goodly amount of the time, but that’s a lot to ask.  It would even, as I said, be acceptable just to be glum all the time so that I didn’t get all the yo-yo action that drives me ever crazier.

No, I don’t appear to have any clear form of bipolar disorder, based on clinical criteria, just in case anyone’s wondering.  I’ve been seen and evaluated by a decent number of mental health professionals, and though, of course, they could be wrong, they seem to have a consensus about my dysthymia and depression, and none of them seem to consider any form of bipolar to be an issue.  Although maybe I’m masking symptoms and signs of that, even from myself.

It seems unlikely, but I’m apparently pretty good at masking in general, so who knows?  Not me.  We never lost control.  You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.

Sorry, I slipped into quoting a David Bowie/Nirvana song there.  It’s a good song (both versions) and it’s fairly simple to play and sing, so that’s nice.  I haven’t ether played or sung it in quite a while, but I listen to it from time to time.

I think it’s interesting that, in the Nirvana version, Kurt changed the line in the second verse from “We must have died alone, a long, long time ago,” to “I must have died alone, a long, long time ago.”  He definitely gave away some of his internal issues in his choice of lyrics in a lot of his songs, and apparently, even in his covers.  It didn’t do him much good, unfortunately; he certainly didn’t seem to get the help he needed.

I guess it’s hard.  The world is very big and impersonal, and though it is beautiful in all sorts of ways, it does not seem to give a flying f*ck at a rat’s a*s about any particular, extremely finite, living creatures.

Anyway, I guess it’s fitting for me to end the week on a downer, since I tend to start the week on a downer, and the occasional upbeat posts are the exceptions.

I’d like to say something snarky and dismissive and contemptuous to close out, but I really do hope that everyone who reads this has a good weekend, as do all the people whom all the readers love and about whom they care, and then on out to six or so more layers.  What the heck, why doesn’t everyone have a good weekend?  I, myself, don’t expect to do so, but it would be at least some consolation if everyone else in the world did.

See if you can all do me that favor, please.

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Urchins shall forth at vast of night that they may blog all exercise on thee.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, that day with which DentArthurDent always had so much trouble.  It’s the first Thursday in November, which means that (in the US) Thanksgiving will fall on the 23rd of November, since it’s celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November, which is always going to be 21 days after the 1st Thursday in November.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m at the train station, and I was early even for the 610 train today.  I’m not going to get on the 610 train, because I still want to cool down* and begin this blog post, and it looks like the 630 is running on time.  I got here early partly because I got up early this morning…but really, that was only about 5 minutes earlier than usual, and it had little relation to when I first woke up.  The main reason, I believe, for my comparative earliness is that, as I mentioned yesterday, I tried to jog a bit this morning.

After getting to the end of my block and turning, I jogged 40 paces, as I had said I was going to do.  That was so comparatively easy and bracing that, at my next 90 degree turn, I did another 40 paces (each pace being 2 steps, at least the way I define the terms).  Then again at the next 90 degree turn, then at the last one.  So, I jogged a total of 160 paces, and walked the rest, and the jogging didn’t make me feel breathless or sore (so far) because it is such a limited amount.

It’s rather curious and amusing to note that my pedometer reads as if I’ve gone slightly less far than I usually do, because of course, jogging steps are quite a bit longer than walking steps, but the pedometer still just reads them as steps.

It’s a nice feeling to have done even that very little bit of running.  It’s a good way to start a day, to have accomplished that little bit of a goal, as part of a general pattern of exercise.  It is the first time (I think) that I’ve tried jogging while wearing a backpack.  That turns out not to have been a noticeable problem.

It’s quite windy today‒which is rather pleasant‒and there was a bit of rain on and off while I walked, though it’s really been negligible.  I got my umbrella out at one point, but even if I hadn’t used it, I don’t know that I would have gotten unpleasantly wet.

I decided last night to revisit the “mantra” notion I mentioned earlier this week, but with a slight downgrade or alteration from my previous idea to make it more workable.  If you’ll recall, I had started with the plan just to say “I love myself” as a form of auto-suggestion, then expanded it to “I love the world and I love myself”.  Anyway, I found that, upon awakening the next morning, I could not even make my mind’s voice speak the words.  They simply felt too utterly at odds with my thinking.

However, only one of those phrases was really the problem.  So, starting last night, I’ve tried to repeat to myself the mantra “I love the world” when I’m not otherwise engaged.  This seems to work much better.

I have a hard time even saying that I love myself, but the world…well, I’ve always loved nearly all branches of science, and they are all about understanding and exploring the world.  And I like mathematics and philosophy, and I even like history.

It can be easy to get discouraged by the way people behave at any given moment, and certainly humans say and do some ridiculous and destructive things.  But loving something doesn’t require it to be perfect.  In most cases, the concept of “perfect” isn’t even coherent.  Indeed, loving something can entail wanting to help it get better than it already is.  If you hate something (or someone) there’s no sense of trying to improve anything.  Wanting something (or someone) to improve is a positive, beneficent emotion.

To clarify, when I say “the world” in this context, I don’t just mean “the Earth”, I mean “the Universe”, to whatever level of multiverse and/or higher dimensionality might exist‒everything, all time, all possible stuff.  And let’s be honest, when you start thinking about things like that, while they can be daunting‒since, compared to infinities, anything finite is vanishingly small‒they’re still just mind-blowingly cool.  Don’t even get me started on the uncountable infinities of the “real” numbers and “complex numbers” and functions that are discontinuous at every point**, or infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces!

So, anyway, when I woke up this morning, I was easily able to start thinking “I love the world” to myself, and that was a pleasant surprise.  Hopefully, I can keep it up.  At the very least, it would help make other things easier to tolerate, even if it doesn’t help me like myself.

Would that be a peculiar kind of dualism?  Possibly, but it’s not a formal distinction of type or substance; it would just leave me as an exception to a general tendency.

Anyway, that’s about it for now.  My coworker who had a stroke is apparently stable, and no clot was discovered, so I’m still puzzled, but I don’t have much information.  Hopefully we’ll find out more soon.

And, hopefully, you all have a good Thursday.  Thank you for reading.

TTFN

urchins on kelp

*I keep accidentally writing “cook down” when I try to write “cool down”.  It’s not a nonsense phrase, but it probably never would apply to me.

**There’s a term for this, but I’m dipped if I can recall it‒something like “continuously discontinuous functions”*** but I don’t think that’s quite right.  I know next to nothing about the subject, but just the notion of a function that is non-differentiable at every point is astounding.

***Though I heard at least one mathematician refer to them as “infinitely kinky functions” in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.

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Self-treats and self-tricks

First of all, Happy Halloween.  It’s my favorite holiday, but I’m not doing anything to celebrate this year.  We haven’t been decorating the office or anything, and I’m not going to dress up, though I usually do.  It’s just not very much fun anymore, and there’s no one with whom to celebrate it.

I had a brief period yesterday afternoon until evening when I decided to attempt an experiment on my mood (it’s not a new idea)*.  I had been idle for a bit near the end of the day and checked YouTube and saw that there was a video on a channel called “Mended Light” which is partly run by the guy co-runs “CinemaTherapy“, but this one is more directly mental health oriented and he does the videos with his wife, who is also a therapist.

Anyway, the reason it caught my eye was that it was about “Why don’t you love yourself?” or something along those lines.  The video wasn’t as trite as one might expect it to be, given that, and there was a linked follow-up that brought up one of their earlier, related videos, which was also not as trite as it might have been.  Thankfully, these were both less than fifteen minutes long, and I could play them at double speed and with closed captions.

The points made were focused on some simple but non-trivial ideas about how you don’t want to love others or especially yourself in a sort of “earned” or “purely value-related” way, because no one is perfect, and if you already have a hard time loving yourself, then you’re never going to be able to avoid doing things that make you judgmental toward yourself.  So the idea was that if you love yourself in a way that is more…I don’t know, not unconditional but maybe just not judgmental, you can see yourself as worthy of love even if you’re imperfect (which, of course, you are).  You can, in a sense, choose to love yourself.

That doesn’t preclude you from trying to better yourself‒it’s not to be confused with narcissism.  Even a parent that loves a child tremendously can still try to teach the child, and punish bad behavior, reward good behavior, and try to guide the child in a good direction.  Only a fool thinks someone can be born a perfect, fully-developed being with no room to improve.

That’s certainly a reasonable point of view, I thought, and it was not a new one to me.  Somehow, though, at that moment, it felt newly salient, like something I could grasp.  And since I’m in fairly desperate and perilous psychological circumstances, I thought it was worth a try.  So I went back to some old ideas of auto-suggestion that I first read about and started using way back in junior high, after reading a book by Leslie M. LeCron.  I decided to do a sort of mantra (I’ve done this sort of thing before, sometimes for years at a time, including when I was in prison).

I would just say to myself, repeatedly, while walking or when idle, “I love myself”.  Before long, I started to add another phrase, making it, “I love the world, and I love myself”.

It probably sounds silly, but again, I’ve done such things before, and it has worked for certain purposes.  I think it made a difference for me in high school, where no one could reasonably say I was academically unsuccessful.  I used to do a full self-hypnotism thing with auto-suggestion a couple of times a day for years.  It wasn’t about loving myself then, but more about self-improvement and related things**.  The self-hypnotism also helped calm my mind, I think.

Anyway, I felt pretty darn good for a few hours yesterday evening, but I suspect this was a primary fact, not a secondary one.  In other words, I think the uptick in my mood was what made me feel open to the notion of self-improvement, not the other way around.  But the words did help me focus on the good things, about the outside world, at least, and I felt less hostile and even had a slight “warm glow” feeling.

I also did some extra walking (totaling about 9 and a half miles for the day).  And I had about one and a half small mixed drinks in the evening to celebrate (the half was because a moth flew into my drink about halfway through and I poured the rest out).  I also ate some leftover Chinese food from Sunday’s lunch, because it would go bad if I waited too long.  That latter choice was probably a mistake‒I ate too late in the day, and I have some heartburn now, which is, of course, unpleasant.

Anyway, this morning I got up (though, as always, I’d been waking up on and off for hours) and could not even think the words of my proposed “mantra” to myself.  This has happened to me before when I was trying to do positive self-talk.  It ends up feeling not like I’m trying to reprogram myself or whatever, but simply that I’m lying to myself.  Of course, as the song Billie Jean implies, it is possible for lies to become true, and that’s part of the point of auto-suggestion, e.g., “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”  But so far, today, when I try to do the mental chant, the words turn to sand in my metaphorical throat.

Maybe it’s the heartburn.  Maybe it’s because I had an even worse sleep than usual.  Or maybe I’m just not able even to say that I love myself unless I’m already in an unusually good mood.  Maybe I’m amazed at the way I hate me all the time (ha ha).

I don’t know.  I don’t even know why I’m sharing this.  But at least partly I want you all to know that I’m not just giving in and imploding.  I’m trying to improve; I’m trying not to hate myself and my life.  I’ve been trying not to be depressed for a very long time‒for centuries, for millennia, and that’s despite the fact that just 11 days ago I turned 54.  [That’s the same age as Matthew Perry (well, he was 2 months and a day older than I)].

Anyway, Happy Halloween, again.  I don’t know what you’re all going to do for the day, but hopefully at least some of you will have fun.

vagabond happy halloween

*Spoiler alert: it hasn’t lasted even twelve hours.

**I didn’t feel like I needed help loving myself then, though most of the time I deliberately pretended to be egotistical, in what I hoped was a humorous, self-mocking sort of way.  I already didn’t actually like myself much, but I didn’t really dwell on it.  Still, my “heroes” were usually the villains of stories; I certainly never could imagine myself as any manner of traditional “good guy”.  How could something like me be anything but an antagonist?  But at least I could be a villain who got stuff done and achieved some kind of progress or something.  Nevertheless, I have never seen myself as anything but a potential bad guy, and those were the characters in books and movies and comic books with whom I identified***.  It wasn’t until the Harry Potter books really that I found a hero that I could truly admire and find inspiring yet “real”, and a villain for whom I had no significant admiration at all, despite that fact that I did a post about him in the brief series to which I linked above.

***It’s amusing when I read or hear clichés about how “nobody sees themselves as the villain” or similar, like in The Talented Mr. Ripley.  That’s utter bullshit.  People who say or write such things have clearly never explored many potential aspects of human beings and similar-appearing but alien creatures like me (ha ha).  Many people see themselves as the bad guys in their lives…and the real bad guys, who are never very inspiring or impressive in real life, only too easily take advantage of such people.

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Sometimes every night can feel like Devil’s Night

I walked to the train station this morning after having walked less than a mile and a half total yesterday‒it was a deliberate break.  I arrived just as the 610 train was pulling in.  Indeed, I was stopped at the railroad crossing by the lowering of the gate that presaged that train’s arrival.  I’m pleased to be able to say (honestly) that I felt no urge whatsoever to try to catch that train.  It would seem that I’ve internalized the fact that waiting at the station for twenty more minutes is both useful and pleasant, giving me a bit of time to cool down and dry off a little.

It is a bit less breezy today, so I’m a bit sweatier than I was most days last week.  I also decided not even to bother wearing shorts this morning, since‒given the spandex knee and ankle supports I wear‒it exposes all of about three centimeters of very pale and faintly scarred legs to be cooled down.  I imagine that I look like some old Bavarian school child wearing weird, black lederhosen when I dress that way.  That’s not as big an issue, though, as the fact that I’m building up too much laundry.  It took way longer yesterday to clean all my clothes than it usually does.

I know that I received at least two comments on my post from Saturday, but I have not stopped to read more than the first few words of either one.  I just want right now to thank the people who made those comments‒it was obvious from the first few words that they are positive and supportive‒and let them know that I appreciate their responses.

I’m sorry to reveal that I haven’t read them fully yet, because of a very strange but intense anxiety that doesn’t quite make sense to me.  I’ve really sunk pretty low, I guess, when I find it stressful even to read comments on my blog that are obviously positive.  I don’t get it.  What is wrong with me that I get intimidated by even that level of interaction?  It’s absurd, but not in a pleasant or funny way; it’s frankly rather contemptible. Those people deserve a better response from me, and I do intend to make some reply soon, hopefully today.  Sorry it’s taking so long.

I wish I could tell you that I had a good weekend, or that I feel less depressed, but it really wasn’t any kind of restful time or anything.  Mostly what I did Saturday evening and Sunday was eat a few indulgent things and watch “reaction” videos on YouTube.  I may have noted this before, but watching such reactions is, in some ways, almost like watching a show or movie with a friend who hasn’t seen it before.  Even that fact, though, is rather depressing.

Speaking of friends and reactions and comments, I just want to make it clear again that I don’t really respond to Facebook comments about my sharing of my blog posts on that venue.  I don’t even necessarily read them.  Dealing with Facebook and the like is more stressful than dealing with comments here.  TwiXter would probably be even more stressful, but I don’t really ever get replies to anything on that venue, though I share each post there.

I finished Sapolsky’s new book, and it was good.  I can’t help but recommend it highly.  I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t say more about depression.  In the end, what he mostly said (apart from reiterating that it was, like all else in the brain, a purely biological process) was to relay some facts about depressive people being more accurate in their assessment of many things rather than being irrationally negative‒whereas most people are irrationally positive, especially about themselves (I’ve known about this research for years).  So, to paraphrase Sapolsky, depression in certain circumstances can be seen as a pathological dysfunction in one’s capacity for self-deception.

Maybe.  Certainly it is possible that simply to face reality in as unbiased a fashion as possible is inevitably depressing‒which is a further depressing thought in and of itself‒and that all optimism entails delusion at least at some level, or at the very least, it entails ignorance.

This is related to the fact that I ask for people to give me (hopefully) new ideas when trying to offer their support against my depression, because I don’t want to feel better by means of self-delusion or even via neurological manipulations (though the latter may be a bit better).  But maybe ideas alone can’t help against my depression‒certainly CBT didn’t work that well for it‒since it’s more about the tendencies of the state of the system than the outputs of any particular thought processes or program or whatever.

What I should probably do is just give up on trying to feel better.  As those who read Saturday’s post can probably tell, I often get close to that.  It certainly can be hard to keep trying; I’m ever more discouraged.  And now we’re approaching the end of my favorite month, and we’re getting deeper into the longer, darker days of the year.  I didn’t really want to make it this far, to be clear, but I derailed my momentum for my previous plan for the sake of coworkers, and I haven’t yet regained it.  But that can be corrected, at least mostly.

Meanwhile, I continue to tread water, but the ocean gets colder at this time of year, and the waters get choppier.  It wouldn’t be surprising if a particularly big wave drove me under for the final time soon.  It wouldn’t even be really unwelcome.

I’m also constantly, if half-heartedly, seeing if I can lure in some sharks.  That’s a further metaphor, of course, but it has a specific meaning in my mind; it’s not just a vague notion.  I won’t get into it more for now, but maybe I will, later.

I hope you all have a good day, and have a good week.  For those of you who recognize the pseudo-holiday, have a Happy Devil’s Night.  Try not to burn down any inhabited buildings or anything, okay?  No need to give Devil’s Night a bad name.

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Please use caution; this blog post MIGHT be “triggering”

It’s Saturday, and I’m at the train station, having walked here again this morning, as I did yesterday.  It’s a bit interesting that my pedometer reads as me having walked about 5 and a half miles, when the Google Maps distance from house to station is just barely shy of 5 miles.  But, of course, that assumes more or less direct travel and my walking may meander a bit, and I take up my waiting spot at the very farthest end of the platform (to board near the front of the train).  Train platforms do tend to be long, because trains are long.

I had a very difficult day yesterday, as you may have been able to predict, if you read yesterday’s blog post.  I felt pretty horrible, despite having done my walking in the morning‒no endorphin effects, it seems, were available, or they were swamped by other forces.

During most moments of the day I felt angry and sullen and, especially, hopeless.  I frequently thought about things like dousing myself with a mixture of lighter fluid (2 kinds) and rubbing alcohol and setting myself on fire, or taking blades from the supply of replacements for my box cutter and just cutting my wrists or neck open.  It was a bit like the way one feels when one stares over the edge of a high cliff or bridge:  it would be so easy just to jump, in many ways easier than not jumping.

And it was enticing, though not in any exciting kind of way.  It was a curiosity and a sense of despair combined with a dark feeling of compulsion, and I thought of the possibilities frequently, imagining what they might be like, how it would feel and all that, without any fear, though I recognized that I would not want any pain to endure long.  Despite that, at one point I contemplated just smearing my face with charcoal light fluid and lighting it, or alternatively splashing it with Drano or similar, just to ruin what’s left of my visage, because I don’t like how I look or feel, so I might as well just take the final step of ruining how I can ever possibly look, so I no longer need even to bother imagining that I might be able to recover some of my past health or strength.

Of course, I didn’t actually do any of those things, though I brought the lighter fluid and the blades and everything out and got them near at hand, so that at least I could really feel the salience of the ideas.  I don’t really know how close I actually came to doing any of the things I contemplated.  Maybe I was not close at all; or maybe only the slightest nudge of the wrong kind would have been enough to topple me over the edge.

I certainly didn’t feel very hesitant or resistant, nor did I feel afraid.  I did not, however, want to inconvenience or frighten (or traumatize, let’s be honest) the people at work.

I also don’t want to “trigger” any potential readers who might have similar urges or self-hatred or depression or proneness to such thoughts‒that would truly be terrible.

I am likewise not trying to tell lurid and shocking tales just to get a reaction or attention‒except in the sense that I want to make it clear, in a way I’m not readily able to do face to face (so to speak), that I’m really not doing well at all, and that I could probably use some serious help.  I am not good at seeking help, though.  I hate myself too much to want to save myself, at least unreservedly.

I feel like someone who has swum or been stranded so far out to sea that land is no longer in sight‒I’m not even certain in which direction it lies‒and the prospect of swimming back to shore seems so daunting and exhausting and hopeless that the idea of just giving up and drowning seems easier (and perhaps better).

And, of course, one occasionally wishes for sharks to come.  But shark attacks are much fewer and farther between than fear and popular culture would lead one to believe.

Oh well.  It seems that I can tread water for a very long time, to push that analogy farther*.  But I am very tired in many ways and I never can seem to get enough sleep‒which I guess makes sense when one is treading water.  I don’t know which way to go, or how I would possibly be able to reach shore even if I did.  Maybe the Coast Guard or some friendly fisher-folk will come along and happen to see me and rescue me.  Or perhaps I’ll just go under.

Whatever happens to me, I hope you all have a good remainder of your weekend.

*This analogy at least helps to explain why it’s so frustrating when well-meaning people say things like, “Hold on, keep going, don’t give up.”  Imagine a suspense movie in which someone is stranded out at sea and is treading water but they have a radio or phone or whatever, and someone says to them (over the phone), “Just keep treading water, keep swimming, there are people who would be sad if you drowned.”  And the swimmer, optimistically trying to complete the speaker’s sentence, might say, “Is a rescue party on the way?  Are you in a boat or a search plane?”  And the caller says, “What?  No, no, nothing like that.  I don’t have a boat or a plane or anything.  I just don’t want you to drown.”  And the swimmer asks, “Well, have you called the Coast Guard or the Navy or the Police or something?”  And the phoner replies, “Oh, no, I haven’t called anyone or tried to get you help or anything.  I just don’t want you to drown.”  Such a swimmer might be justified in finding the exhortation to keep swimming a bit presumptuous and irritating, perhaps even maddening and disheartening.  I’m not saying this reflects the actual attitude of such “callers”.  I’m quite certain that they have the very best of intentions.  But this is the way it can feel for the person who is struggling, and who is told to try to hold on, but given no material help in doing so.