Anxiety

by

Monday morning, heading down

I already started writing this once, but it seems that Google Drive didn’t save what I had written, even though I had titled it and checked it.  This has not happened to me before, as far as I can recall, but it seems to be par for the course for me right now.  So, I’m starting over, though I’m not going to try to recreate the beginning of my previously initiated blog post.  It was just a bit of nonsense, anyway.

I’m really not doing well, though I seem to have a difficult-to-break habit of acting as normally as I can when interacting with other people‒I don’t want to cause problems or trouble for the people who care about me.  But I’m not doing well, even for me.  My depression is terrible (or I suppose one could say it’s very good and impressive as depression goes), made worse by the changing of the seasons and the clocks.  My chronic pain is as bad as ever and somewhat worse than usual.  My overall health is poor.

I’ve had more than one person from back where I grew up, including family members, tell me I should take a break and come to visit them, but when I try to consider it, I cannot see myself being able to work out the logistics of such a thing.  My “executive function” is at its lowest ebb.

I’m basically out of gas and coasting along until I crash into or go over the edge of something.  Or perhaps it would be better to think that I’m an airplane out of fuel, not a car‒gliding along as best I can and trying to see if there’s any way for me to make a landing.  But I cannot apply any power.  I can only go along with the air currents through which I am steadily descending.

Also, I’m mortified at the thought of anyone who used to know the person I used to be seeing me as I am now.  It reminds me of the stories of Syd Barrett coming to visit the band members of Pink Floyd in the studio after having to leave the band because of his mental health issues and them not even recognizing him.  Having seen the various photos, I can understand their confusion, and I can also imagine how horrifying it must have been for him to realize how much he had changed and how he did not belong with them anymore; that he was not the person he used to be.

So many of the lyrics in the greatest Pink Floyd albums refer to Barrett’s oh-so-changed nature, from Brain Damage‒ “and if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear / you shout and no one seems to hear / and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon” ‒to Shine On You Crazy Diamond‒ “remember when you were young? / you shone like the sun… / …now there’s a look in your eye / like black holes in the sky” ‒and, of course, Wish You Were Here.

Anyway, I feel like I’m a warped mockery of the person I used to be, like one of the creatures twisted by the Illearth Stone in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to land safely on my own, but I cannot bear the thought of trying to ask someone to help me, especially someone who used to know me.  I’m ashamed of me.

I’ve also been ill lately, as regular readers will know.  I missed work again on Friday, and‒of course‒the office did tremendous sales that day.  I fight to avoid superstition, since I don’t think there’s any sort of magical process happening, but I do think it plausible that my presence has a psychological effect on the other people in the office, dampening their spirits.

I feel sickly and sweaty.  The AC unit in my room at the house seems to be malfunctioning, but having it repaired or replaced would involve having other people come into my living space, such as it is, and that’s a repulsive thought.

Also, the washing machine doesn’t seem to be working right.  It washes, but I don’t think it rinsed properly yesterday, nor did it spin and drain properly.  You would think at least that would mean that my clothes should smell of detergent, which is not so bad, and at first that seemed to be the case.  Now, though, at the office early in the morning, I feel like I smell of cat urine, or something does.  I haven’t yet been able to locate the source, though.

Anyway, I’m just worn out, and I see no future of any kind for myself, other than the obvious and inevitable one.  I find myself wishing for something like tuberculosis (like that other infamous “Doc”, Doc Holliday), or even cancer, just so that I could have some inescapable deterioration that could not be denied, but that might afford me a chance to say goodbye to people I love.

I don’t think that’s likely to happen, though.  My version of cancer is the disease in my head, frankly‒or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the disease that is my head.  Depression has a rate of premature mortality that is higher than that of many cancers.

Okay, well, that’s enough for now.  Sorry to be a bummer on a Monday morning, but then, I’m a bummer every morning, really, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. 

by

An inconsequential blog post

I don’t know if I’m going to write any fiction this morning.  I didn’t bring the laptop back to the house with me yesterday, and my insomnia is acting up, so I’m headed into the office very early and writing this on the way.  If I do write any fiction, I guess I’ll update this to let you know.

Of course, it’s nothing new that my insomnia is acting up.  Though I sometimes don’t talk about it‒since I’m sure it gets terribly dull for readers, though not as much as it is for me‒I have poor sleep every night.  I’ve been taking Benadryl nightly now for about a week, but its effects are limited, and of course, it has side effects.

Clearly, of course, humans are not adapted to the modern world, and I’m not adapted to it, either, though I don’t consider myself truly human.  So it should be no surprise that I am not optimally healthy in this world.  I’m also pretty nearly alone, with only long distance communication and “work friends” as well as a greater number of people at work who should feel lucky I haven’t mastered the “force choke” like Darth Vader.  I guess what they really should be glad of is that my frontal loves are well developed in that I have good impulse control and a strong sense of personal ethics.

I’m very tired and yet tense, which I’m sure you know is an exhausting combination.  It’s like being a rat in one of those old psych experiments that looked into learned helplessness.  I try to keep myself busy with writing stories and with music and with learning science and math and programming and other things, including philosophy and psychology‒I already know a lot of biology, of course‒and those things are distracting, and they can even be interesting.  But there’s no real point to any of it.  I can’t really talk to anyone about most of it, except info-dumping and watching even well-intentioned eyes glaze over.

I was thinking of trying to see if I can post this to Instagram in addition to Facebook and the website formerly known as Twitter.  I have an Instagram account, of course.  I inherited it with my Facebook account, so to speak.  But I don’t know that I’ve ever posted anything on it.  Most of the video and picture sharing stuff isn’t really my cup of tea.  I’m certainly not something anyone really wants to look at, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m getting close to my destination.  Maybe I’ll pick this up later.  Unfortunately, so far there have been no fatal car accidents for me.  I guess that’s good.  I wouldn’t really want to take innocent people who are mostly trying to make a living with me just so I can die.  Better to do that sort of thing literally as well as figuratively alone.

‒

I’m at the office, where I’ve been for a couple of hours now.  I haven’t written any fiction.  I did try to look into Instagram, but as far as I can tell, you have to post videos and/or pictures there, and like I think I said, no one in their right mind wants to look at me.  I didn’t try too hard to figure it out, to be fair.  I’m not really all that concerned.  It doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, sorry for not writing fiction today or having anything positive to say.  Maybe I’ll be back in a better frame tomorrow.  Who knows?  Not me.

by

I’m too tired to think of a good title for this post

I’m writing today’s blog post on my phone in the back of an Uber.  I could not sleep and figured I’d just head into the office, since it feels slightly more like home to me, at least when no one else is there, than does the house in which I sleep, .  I have my laptop (computer) with me, so I could write this post on it, but I think I would feel more awkward doing that.  It can be trying enough writing on it when riding the train, and the shifts and bumps and other minor accelerations in a regular car tend to be more irregular and pronounced than those in a railroad car.  There’s no track, for one thing, and also a car is much less massive, so it is more prone to lurch noticeably than a train is.

It’s a stupid waste of money to take an Uber, of course, but it’s not as though I’m saving up for the future.  I don’t expect any significant future, and to be honest, I don’t really want one, at least the way I feel most of the time lately.  Even the present is barely worth it, moment to moment.

I’ve recently learned that, in the UK at least, the average lifespan (the arithmetic mean, remember?) is only 55 years for people with autism spectrum disorder.  This average is no doubt weighted down by those who die quite young, but still, this is the UK, where there is a National Health Service.  Here in the US, where the average lifespan, at least for men, has actually recently begun to fall for the first time in any of our lifetimes, the average autistic lifespan is very likely to be lower than in the UK.  I’m 54 now.

I realize that there’s nothing magical about a statistical average when applied to an individual instance of a circumstance, but numbers mean a lot to me at least, and frankly, right now, the idea that there is a maximum predicted cutoff for my lifespan‒and that it is arriving soon‒is more of a relief and even a comfort than it is a horror.

Of course, I don’t carry an “official” diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but as one who has, as part of his now-dead career, given who-knows-how-many thousands of “official diagnoses”, I know there’s nothing magical about them.  They are educated, best-available descriptions of what’s happening in particular instances in a medical situation.  They are useful for steering thought and decision making, but because they cannot address all details of an individual case, they can also shackle one’s thought processes and lead one astray.

One thing is clear:  I have some manner of atypical neurology.  I certainly have trouble with dysthymia and depression; I have little doubt about those diagnoses.  I have rotten chronic insomnia, which may be a symptom/sign of that probable neurodevelopmental disorder.  I also had a secundum atrial septal defect, and I have a slight cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, and these things both occur more frequently in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD (as opposed to the cardiac Atrial Septal Defect, see above).  They are far from diagnostic thereof, but their presence does shift my Bayesian estimates.  They can also be associated with other diagnoses as well, of course, but I don’t have nearly as many hallmarks of those disorders…at least as far as I’m aware.

Of course, each thing can also happen and stand on its own, being indicative of nothing but itself.  But I think we can all agree that there’s something atypical and dysfunctional happening in my brain, even if it doesn’t actually connect causally in any way to those other findings.

I did write a bit more than a page yesterday on Extra Body, which I guess is a worthwhile accomplishment.  I know it hasn’t been all that long, but I feel as if this only-one-page-a-day pattern is not giving me the benefit that I used to get from writing fiction.  Maybe it’s that I just get my juices going and then shut them down.  Maybe it’s that the story is taking so long to get on with itself.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just hoping for too much.  Hope is dangerous stuff.

I don’t know how to adjust my behavior, though.  I already tried to cut back on doing this daily blog, but found that not doing it made me very tense and stressed, since I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it.  It’s almost an OCD-like pattern.

I wouldn’t call it exactly anxiety that I feel if I think about not writing the blog (or doing any of a number of other things that I do by habit). It’s more of a kind of tension, a stress, and it can rapidly escalate into hostility.  Of course, all of these are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, the whole fight-or-flight mode, so maybe one could call my experiences anxiety.  Certainly, the physiological responses are related and quite similar.  But my mental state doesn’t feel fearful as much as angry, and even hateful.

Maybe that’s all just part of Yoda’s cliché little response to young Anakin admitting he was afraid in The Phantom Menace:  “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”  I always wished Anakin would reply, “Yeah…the suffering of the people who made me afraid and angry.”  Oh, well, much of the Jedi philosophy in the prequels is kind of stupid, and it contributed to their downfall, but they’re fictional anyway.

Speaking of fiction, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my fiction writing.  I intend to keep writing at least a page a day, but writing it after I write my blog is stressful.  But not writing my blog is stressful.  And writing only one page a day of fiction is stressful.  And dealing with people being late to work and the noise and nonsense and the internally created rules that are not enforced when it’s inconvenient is stressful.  And commuting is stressful, and neither of the places between which I commute are places of comfort to me.

A large contributor to these problems is that, no matter where I go, there I am, and I am not comforting to me.

The Buddhists are supposed to have said that life is suffering‒or was that the Dread Pirate Roberts?  I suppose they might have agreed on that statement.  Still, you’d think that would be enough to counter Yoda’s little admonition, with the reply, “Everything leads to suffering.  What’s your pointy-eared point?”

by

My poisonous (or poisoned) thoughts

I’m disappointed to have to tell you all that I did not write any fiction yesterday.  I didn’t write any in the morning, having written a longish blog post.  Then, by relatively early in the workday, I had become mentally exhausted.

The “music” in the office doesn’t help, since it’s loud and basically unrelated to anything about what we do‒it’s just there for background noise, to dampen the sounds of other people on their phones, or to camouflage it, to break up its signature.  But also, it was just maddening to see again how slipshod and unreliable people are, how little they care about how what they do affects other people (or themselves).

Early in the day, a few minutes after our official starting time, I looked out at the office‒as the person who keeps track of who’s there and who isn’t and when people arrive and leave‒and could see that perhaps only half of the people in the office were there yet.  I noted this to my coworker, who grimly nodded with obvious resigned disapproval.  I told him, as if realizing it for the first time, that it really bothered me.  And it really does.  It’s both contemptuous and contemptible.

We long ago moved our starting time back an hour, nominally to make sure people could get to work on time more easily, since traffic in south Florida really can be terrible.  However, that did not change people’s lateness at all.  It made no discernible difference.

Unfortunately, people suffer no consequences for being late, so there is no incentive for anyone to do otherwise.  They are also not penalized for working over into lunchtime or past the official end of the day (it is often the people who arrive late who also stay late).  So, basically, I never get an adequate break time, since there’s no sensible way for me to go anywhere outside the office during lunch, and those who started break on time restart work on time, and so need support people to be available.

Anyway, it’s appalling that already, by Tuesday, I was simply mentally (and emotionally) exhausted.  And I know it’s not just the specifics of this job that wear me out.  If I were to do any job I’ve ever had in the past, I think I would be similarly worn out; the exact time until it happens might vary slightly, but I don’t think it would do so by all that much.

Even as early as high school, I used to get into these states in which I felt just completely empty, and would have been “happy” to stop, to end right there.  They didn’t happen as often, and I lasted longer between them‒that’s redundant, isn’t it‒and I think I recovered more quickly and easily.  But it went on into college and med school and residency and practice and all that has come after.

The medical work, though harder, was somewhat less enervating, because there were intellectual challenges and the ability to make a real difference for people, and there was a degree of respect.  Also, one was working with professionals at all levels, and that’s reassuring.

I was labeled with depression (then later also, and more generally, with dysthymia) fairly early, and certainly started having these feelings of wanting to die, and more specifically wanting to kill myself, at a young age.  Obviously, there’s some inherent degree of “typical” depression here, but I wonder how much of it might be due to undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder‒assuming that even applies to me, which I think it probably does.

I have no real capacity to seek out diagnosis or help for it or for anything else, frankly, so it’s hard to get any kind of “official” feedback.  Between a kind of learned helplessness from chronic internalized stress (and chronic pain), and my own social dysfunction and my ever-present self-hatred and self-destructive urges, it’s hard even to begin to take care of myself.

Actually, I don’t know if it’s the case that, fundamentally, I hate myself so much as that I hate my experience, my moment to moment interaction with reality.  It’s so often so very unpleasant.  At the very least, there is no single day that I can recall that didn’t include some significant moments of what one might call “spiritual revulsion”, a kind of nausea and stress about how unrational and unsane the world is, at least from my point of view‒and ultimately I have no other viewpoint from which to gaze upon reality.

I think my self hatred is a kind of rationalized conclusion combined with a sort of “halo effect”*.  If the world is so anathema to me, so much of the time, then I must just not be suited for this world.  So, I’m defective, or at least, I’m not the right organism for the job.

Also, since so much of life is persistently unpleasant, and since the single common variable in all aspects of that unpleasantness is me, then I cannot help but have residual disgust and hatred stain my image of myself; it accumulates over time until it’s thicker than a rhino’s hide and as disgusting as the slime of a hagfish.

I don’t know what I can do about it, unfortunately, other than either declare myself the enemy of the world and act accordingly or destroy myself.  Or, I suppose, I could do both.  No matter what, I don’t think I can go on much longer.  Then again, I’ve felt that way off and on for quite a long time.  But it’s becoming more frequent and more persistent‒the pulses are longer and closer together.

My reserves may be deeper than I would ever have expected them to be, but they cannot be infinite.  Certainly on the scale of the duration of the world, I must either lose my mind or destroy myself (or both) before much longer.

In the meantime, I’m going to have to do my fiction writing in some other way, if I do it.  I’ll need to do it earlier in the day, before the troglodytes start arriving and making their noise.  I may give up and use the laptop computer, because the handwriting is really exacerbating the soreness at the base of my thumb.  Maybe I’ll do it in the mornings after my blog post, or instead of it on some days.

I did fiddle with my guitar a little yesterday, so to speak, but that’s far less fruitful than writing, so maybe I’ll just give up on that.

Ultimately, I should probably just give up…period.  Until I do, I guess I’ll keep poisoning the Internet with these, my gloomy thoughts.  Enjoy!

*Perhaps “horns effect” might be a better term in this case.

by

Monday’s blogger at least still likes to learn

Hurray, hurray.  It’s Monday.

It’s probably hard to tell from the printed words, there, but I was being sardonic with that opening pseudo-exclamation.  I’m not excited that it’s Monday and the beginning of a new work week.  Then again, I’m not excited by much of anything.  Staying at the house doesn’t seem likely to be exciting, either.  There’s not much I can think of doing or any place I can think of going that seems exciting.  Nearly all the things in the world are on some spectrum from boring to stressful.

I don’t recommend this as a way of being, not even to myself.  I’m trying to find ways around it, or rather, to counteract it, but all my previous attempts have not succeeded in any durable fashion, as should probably be obvious.  Various medications, various therapies, lifestyle changes, exercise‒none of it has worked.  Some time ago, I had some hopes that trying marijuana that a former friend had would at least help my pain, if not my depression, but it did neither after two tries, and when I tried too much when I was in particularly bad pain, it made me quite sick to my stomach.  I was throwing up for a few hours (not continuously, of course, but it was still pretty bad).

It’s ironic that THC is used to treat nausea in many cases.  Evidently, my nervous system is too atypical for such things.

I recently happened upon some videos about psilocybin, specifically that there’s a study beginning on using it to try to treat some of the negative symptoms of autism spectrum disorder.  I know it has been used to treat recalcitrant depression and related disorders, including depression in people facing terminal cancer.  Psychedelics have always sounded intriguing, and people make much of them, but I think, given my experiences with other meds, I would be very frightened to try any of them.  My mind is not my friend, and I worry that I would be particularly prone to a “bad trip”, and there’s no way to abort such a thing once it has started; one just has to go through it to the other end.

Speaking of being anxious and frightened of things that many people find beneficial, I had meant to retry riding my new bike yesterday, and perhaps to ride it to the train and then into the office today, but I find myself subtly terrified to do so.  The beginning of last week was just so exceptionally painful and horrible that I am frightened of reinitiating it.  I wish I could know that it’s something that would resolve after a time, but it seemed to worsen over the course of the three or four days I was riding, until by last Monday I was bed-ridden, and I was even grumpier and more cheerless than usual on Tuesday, if you can imagine such a thing.

I think I’ll have to forgo it.  My boss really liked the bike, and offered to buy it from me if I can’t use it, but then I need to get it up to the office, which would mean riding it.  I don’t see myself carrying it.

My train is coming in five minutes.  I’ll pause and then return to this once I get on the train.

***

Okay, I’m on the train now.  What was I talking about?  Oh, yeah, the bike.  I guess I could have it shipped up to the office.  I think Uber even provides services like that, or I could try to see if there’s a way to set up an Uber in a vehicle that can carry the bike.  It’s a thought.  I don’t see my boss making a trip all the way down to my place to pick it up.

I guess I should stick to walking, even though it’s slower.  At least I can listen to audiobooks and podcasts and such while walking.  Nothing beats The Fellowship of the Ring as walking accompaniment, since it’s all about a journey on foot.  Even walking has its troubles, of course‒I have spandex braces on my left knee and right ankle to address the little bit of walking I did yesterday, and the right side of my back is in moderate spasm.  But that sort of stuff is par for the course.  If/as I lose weight, some of that will decrease, and some of it may even disappear.

Life is annoying on so many levels.  But at least there are lots of videos on things like hyperbolic geometry and computers and tensors and matrices and Einstein’s field equations and things like that.  It’s often the case that if I find several different people explaining the same thing I end up with a much deeper understanding.  Each teacher or author or whatever approaches things in a slightly different way, with different emphasis.  When one sees a subject from multiple angles, one tends to get a more complete and thorough understanding of it.  In this, I guess it’s analogous to binocular vision, which gives us depth perception.

I really want to read Zee’s book on quantum field theory, but although these new glasses are better for such smallish print, I think maybe I should have gone even higher on the strength.  Maybe I’ll go to the drugstore over lunch and pick up a stronger pair.  It would get me a bit more exercise, at least.

Please don’t emulate or internalize my negative outlook on things; I have no desire to see a world where more people are depressed.  Do try to keep learning.  Try to build as accurate a map of the world‒in all senses‒as you can.  Be ruthless with yourself in that process.  Your biases will try to trick you, and they will never stop trying, so you need to apply active countermeasures against them.  It’s a pain, but it’s important (and often satisfying and even thrilling) to work toward as accurate a map as you can get, not one that shows a world the way you would like it to be or you believe it to be.  A poor map will be less likely to get you anywhere you might want to go.

by

Another pointless blog post on another pointless day

I’m writing a blog post today—a “formal” one, not merely sharing audio and embedding video, which is what I’ve done in the previous few—not because I have anything in particular to say*, but because I decided to bring my little laptop computer along with me yesterday.  I felt that I was neglecting it, and it was probably getting lonely and sad and rather depressed, like its owner.  Then again, if I were your owner, you probably would be depressed, no matter what type of mechanism you might be, and no matter whether or how often I used you.

Of course, I know that the computer does not experience such emotions; it doesn’t experience any true emotions, though I suppose one could make the argument that its automatic functions, the ones that it does all the time—such as recommending that you install updates and its tendency to go into sleep mode when left idle—might be in some ways analogous to the basic emotions and drives of so-called higher life forms.

Anyway, I’ve done a lot of things on this computer and especially on its nearly-identical predecessors, including writing quite a few stories and some books and the like.  It’s a shame to leave it completely fallow while I’m alive (Once I’m not alive, there won’t be much I can do for it or to it, one way or the other—that’s the way that whole “not being alive” thing works).

I’m weird that way; I tend to feel a serious loyalty not merely to people, but to inanimate objects that I know don’t have any actual reciprocal loyalty inherent in them**.  People are, to be honest, less reliable than things like computers, and they have their own agendas, anyway, so it’s not as though they need (or want) my loyalty, unless they’re people who want to use me for their own benefit, in which case, screw them.

That reminds me a bit of the old “riddle of steel” that ran through the movie Conan the Barbarian, and which I think was reasonably profound for such a movie.  In the beginning of the film, we see very young Conan with his father, who is telling him what turns out to be the first part of the riddle of steel, which is that in this life, there is no living being—men, gods, what have you—that you can trust.  But that you can trust steel.  I suppose you can also rust steel, but even though it can rust, that’s a slow, predictable process, and it can be staved off if you care for the steel appropriately.

Then, of course, near the end of the movie, Thulsa Doom reveals to Conan the other half of the riddle of steel, telling him that steel is not strong, flesh is stronger.  Only living beings have drive and will and the capacity to achieve things like revenge or religion or things like that.  It’s an interesting contrast, and like I said, it’s surprisingly deep for a sword and sorcery movie.

The sequel was nothing like as good.

Anyway, that’s part of the thinking process, or something like it, that leads me to feel literal loyalty and sorrow for inanimate objects that are mine—though it seems a bit unreasonable to call a computer an inanimate object, considering that it can do many extremely sophisticated and complex things, some of them without direct human intervention.

I remember when I was little that I felt something like a real, personal, almost familial attachment to some of my toys and stuffed animals—particularly Kermit the Frog*** now that I think about it—and if I dropped them or played with them roughly, I felt bad and would even apologize.  Again, I never actually thought they had feelings or thoughts or anything, but then again, I often can’t grasp other people’s feelings or thoughts, so it makes as much intuitive sense to assume them in stuffed animals as it does with humans.

I certainly don’t have any good, intuitive sense of what goes on in the heads of humans, though I often cannot help feeling their emotions and so on, when they are nearby.  And I try to discern their patterns and their meanings through various informal algorithms, and of course by paying attention to their literal words and actions.  I find this often gives me as good a result as those of the more “normal” people around me.

People don’t seem to do a very good job of reading or understanding each other, frankly, regardless of their supposed intuitive ability to understand social cues and mores and to be able to express and receive affection.  Well, okay, that latter one is something other people are definitely much better at than I am.  I have almost no comfort level with showing or receiving affection, even with people I know well, even with people I truly, deeply love.  It makes me feel very tense, which doesn’t help, and it certainly goes a long way toward explaining why I’m alone.

By the way, I still haven’t set up any health insurance.  I haven’t been able to bring myself to call either of the two brokers for whom I have contact information.  It’s quite troubling, at some level—it’s weird not to be able to get oneself to do something so mundane.  Then again, it was never my idea to get insurance, and I don’t particularly feel that I deserve to receive health care or that I want to take care of my own health.  But that strong, uncomfortable, unpleasant resistance is nevertheless rather strange.

Oh, well.  Who knows what I’ll do?  I don’t.  I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to need health insurance, anyway.  I don’t find any joy or happiness in being alive, and I haven’t done so for quite a long time.  It’s merely the automatic functions that keep me in motion; there’s no anima, no joy, no goal of any kind.  There is certainly no meaning.

Well, my train should be coming soon.  I’ll embed the “video” of yesterday’s audio here below, for those of you who want to experience it.  I don’t really remember what I talked about, so if anyone listens, do please feel free to let me know.  And try to have a good day, if you can.

*The things I do have to say I feel that I’ve said ad nauseam nearly every day, and they haven’t appeared to do anything at all other than to make other people feel depressed along with me, rather than to garner for me any help or relief or anything like that.

**Though there are other things, such as vehicles and other practical items, toward which I feel less loyalty and affection than other people seem to feel.  For instance, I couldn’t care less about the cosmetic appearance of any vehicle I own (not that I currently own any), or whether it’s any kind of status symbol or anything.  I can admire some kinds of vehicles, such as sports cars and so on, but if I owned one, anything but basic maintenance would be entirely neglected, and it wouldn’t really bother me.  Likewise for musical instruments:  as long as they perform their basic functions, I cannot care about their appearance or any special bells and whistles—not that I am any good at playing bells or whistles.

***But come on, who wouldn’t feel loyalty to Kermit?  He’s a righteous dude.

by

“…out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old…”

It’s Tuesday, the “two day” of January of 2024 AD and the “two day” of the year.  That little, rather forced play on words is about as much good as I can say about the day.

I’m at the train station, soon to be headed in to the office for the day, but I did not go in yesterday, though the office was open.  If I had been feeling healthy, I suppose I might have gone in even though I resented the fact that the office was open.  I’m weird that way.  It’s not as though I had anything better to do with my time, had I been feeling healthy.

But, of course, I felt sick, still, albeit not nearly as bad as I did on Friday or even Saturday, or even Sunday.  By that progression, you may be able to deduce that my physical health was gradually improving, and though I am not fully back to usual (let alone optimal) health, I did at least get some rest.  There were quite a few annoyances related to the other people in the house, who had a huge New Year family get-together of some some kind, and were up waaaay past midnight, including some young children who were‒as sleep deprived children tend to be‒evidently quite grumpy and vociferous.

As for my mental health, well, despite my brief rest, it’s still rotten.  I don’t think there’s any reason for anyone to imagine that it would have improved.  I got enough rest that I even had a few dreams this morning, which is unusual‒I almost never have any remembered dreams‒but they were just weird, irritating dreams involving a B-list Hollywood star about whom I know almost nothing.  I have no idea how that person infiltrated my subconscious.

The holidays are over now, of course, and even though I had no cause for celebration in the first place, there is still a bit of melancholy involved in their passing.  There’s nothing even nominally to celebrate for months to come, frankly, and precious little cause for major joy in the world.  But of course, my main problems are internal; my hardware and software are dysfunctional.

I sometimes may give the impression that I’m some form of purely philosophical pro-mortalist or nihilist, that my sense of the pointlessness and worthlessness of my life are simply reasoned conclusions, arrived at logically, quite convincing.  That probably makes some people feel that there really is no point in trying to do or say anything to change my outlook.  I make impressive sounding arguments in favor of nihilism and despair and pointlessness at times.  But that’s really just the left side of my brain acting as an attorney, arguing the case and providing “justifications” for the products of my dysfunctional mood and sensory and motivational systems.

It’s all sophistry.  My depression‒as with any other, preexisting neurodevelopmental and possible neurohormonal issues I have‒is a disease, a malfunction; my dysthymia is in a way a real disability, at least by some definitions.  These diseases are killing me, and it’s not a good death, nor even a mediocre or middling death.  It’s a bad, slow, drawn-out, miserable, torturous death.  Just consider the fact that I often wish I would develop cancer, because that would probably be a better way to die; certainly there would be more support and sympathy involved.  And I’m a medical doctor.  I’ve treated many people who have cancer, and I’ve lost loved ones to cancer; I know what it is and what it entails.

I’m trying to say that I really could use actual help.  I’m not able to do self-care well at all.  I’m very smart and creative and capable in some ways, but I cannot save myself nor even take very good care of myself, not with only myself as my motivation.  I find the upkeep involved in having and using a bicycle daunting and awful, let alone other ordinary tasks of personal and general maintenance.

I am eroding and decaying and rotting, both metaphorically and literally, in various ways.

I do not want to feel depressed.  I do not like being depressed‒that would be frankly contradictory‒and I do not like feeling horrible anxiety and hostility and confusion.  I do not like not having anyone with whom to do anything.  I don’t like hating my own presence and company.  I would like to like myself and to like my life and to feel that I deserved something, anything, good to happen to me.

Robert Sapolsky has pointed out that one cannot simply will oneself to have a stronger will.  Similarly, one cannot simply stop being depressed by choosing to be optimistic and to love oneself.  One cannot simply choose to be able to integrate into the human world effortlessly and seamlessly when one simply does not feel human.

One cannot eliminate anxiety just by saying that there’s nothing to fear.  And, of course, one cannot simply choose not to be in pain, if one is in pain.  Nature does not select for that capability.  If one could simply deactivate one’s pain and one’s fear, then one would probably do so; pain and fear are, by nature, unpleasant.  But then one would not flee danger or avoid injury.

Anyway, that’s my New Year’s message about me, I guess:  I’m depressed and despairing, not by choice, and I cannot simply snap out of it, nor can I save my life on my own.  And I don’t know of anyone else out there who has the wherewithal to help me, so I don’t expect my life to be saved.  I expect it to be lost, and soon; frankly, I expected it to be gone, already.  I’m amazed and rather appalled that I’m still alive to write this.  I don’t consider it an accomplishment.

Oh, yeah, by the way:  Happy New Year.

by

moans and whines and cries for help, doodah, doodah

It’s Monday morning again; it keeps doing that, even though I’ve made it clear that I think it’s a bad idea.

My back has really been acting up this weekend; it’s particularly uncomfortable right now, as I wait at the train station.  I would have just stayed “home” today, except that there is an office holiday party this evening, to which I said I would go.  Then again, I said I would get health insurance by last Friday, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do that, even though I know it’s not really all that hard.  Yet, when I try to bring myself to do it, it’s a bit like trying to force myself to lay my hand flat on a red hot stove top*.

Partly my resistance is because I feel like I’m being set up for something, though I know that’s paranoid and silly.  I’ve just had so many things blow up in my face when I thought I was doing perfectly reasonable, harmless, and even beneficial (and certainly well-intended) things.  It’s pretty ironic, when one has always felt affinity with the bad guys in many stories, but one recognizes that it’s not ethically justifiable to be a bad guy, so one tries very hard to be a good guy and to do good things in the world…and one ends up being punished as if one were a bad guy, and has one’s life shredded and pulped and jack-hammered into so much twisted rubble, maimed and deformed into a shambling, undead mockery of itself.

Maybe I should have just tried to be a bad guy.  I probably would have won the Nobel Peace Prize or something.

Anyway, I’m feeling very stressed and unsafe about all of it, more than I was already.  And it’s not as though my chronic depression is any better than usual, not at this time of the year, when it’s dark more than not.  I generally like darkness, of course, but a dearth of sunshine does seem to impact my mood.

Also, there’s that big holiday coming up in a week, which is sure to be just wonderful for my general outlook.  It comes right after the solstice, so by then the days will be creeping towards longer again, but it will be a very long time before the change is noticeable.

I say “very long time” but of course that’s scale-dependent.  On the scale of the age of the universe or even of Earth, it’s very tiny, and even on the scale of an ordinary human life, it’s pretty negligible.  But on the Planck time scale it’s an absurdly long period, way longer than any of the epochs of the immediately-post-inflationary universe (assuming inflation happened).  And on the scale of a person with chronic and exacerbating depression, with chronic tension and anxiety and anger and pain, and with very few social supports and no future to which to look forward, it is a very long time indeed.

I’ll be working this coming Saturday, though I rather expect that business will be quite slow.  I guess that’s a good day to work, but it’s also a bit dreary.  But lying around at the house or lolling about at work are equally bland and gray and stale.  At least this last weekend I got some rest.  I took a fair amount of Benadryl, since there was nothing that I needed to do.

This blog is getting really boring, too.  It’s better than many other things, of course—it’s the only thing arising from my internal motivation, though it’s never achieved any of its intentions, which included originally trying to promote my writing/books/stories, and then providing me some kind of therapeutic outlet, as well as a cry for help, as the expression goes.

None of these goals has been accomplished.  Well, I suppose I’ve succeeded in making a cry for help, but it’s turned out to be just that old biblical “voice crying out in the wilderness” thing.  So it’s basically been a really shitty and ineffectual cry for help.

That’s about par for my course, though.  I only seem to succeed really well at things that don’t matter much to me.  I don’t know why that is, whether it’s related to the whole hypothetical ASD thing, or to my depression, or some kind of pathological demand avoidance (or whatever that term is), or anxiety, or just my general self-loathing.  I seem to have a very strong tendency to fuck up the things that matter to me the most, and to alienate the people I love the most (this last isn’t a universal thing, though…I still get along fine with my sister and brother, but they are special cases, and they are also very far away).

Anyway, I’m tired of the blog.  I did a little recording on Friday of a few minutes of a rant about the useless updates that the various software sites keep undergoing.  I’ll embed the audio of that here for those to listen who wish to do so.  See if you agree with me, or if you think I’m being too much of a curmudgeon.

That’s enough for today.  I may come back to the office and sleep there after the work event tonight, since it’s a very long way back to the house just to lie down and get back up in a few hours to come back to the office.  I mean, I feel that way most days, but it’s going to be worse tonight.

I hope you’re all having a better holiday season than I’m having.  For anyone who’s having a worse one—and I’m sure there are far too many just people for anyone’s comfort—I can only offer my sympathy and good wishes.  Coming from me, that’s sure to be worthless or worse, but it’s all I have to offer.

*Knowing me, the stove thing might even be the easier of the two things.  Goodness knows I’ve deliberately burned myself quite a few times before.  Never on my palms, though.  Back of the hand, yes, but not the palms.  I don’t know why that feels psychologically different.

by

On the eighth day of Hanukkah…nothing much happened

It’s Friday morning, December 15th, and I’m waiting at the train station for the second train of the day, again.  It’s really quite windy this morning, even more so than it has been the past few days, but it’s not as rainy.  There’s just a slight bit of drizzle around, and some of even that is probably just the wind blowing former rain off the trees.

I’m not sure what I should write about today that won’t just be rehashing all the other crap I’ve been writing nearly every day.  It doesn’t seem to do me any good as therapy, and it certainly doesn’t seem to do you people any good as readers.

It also hasn’t really seemed to garner me any real help, other than perhaps being at some level the trigger for my ex-wife to ask me to sign up for health insurance.  That was, of course, a nice impulse on her part, although it’s very stressful for me, and I haven’t yet done it, though I’m supposed to try to get it done by today.  I keep hoping there will be a car accident or some health catastrophe that will take it all out of my hands before I have to go through with it, because I find the prospect ridiculously stressful.

I don’t trust “the government” if they’re involved in the process, but I also don’t trust private industry.  You may say that I have only myself to blame for my issues, then, to which I would reply…well, blame isn’t a very useful concept most of the time, but it’s definitely because of my own psychopathology that I am in my situation.  The only person who’s ever been able really to beat me is me, but that guy really is quite dedicated to the task.  I’m probably not too unusual in this.  I suspect it’s the case for a great many people.

My sister has also offered to help with getting the insurance together.  I’m not sure what she might be able to do from where she is.  She may know, but I’m not sure.  I’m hoping to go through a person who got a good deal on insurance for a work friend, and presumably that can be done over the phone.  I hate talking on the phone most of the time, partly because I have difficulty hearing, but also just because I am quite awkward, socially.  Still, I hope I can do it.

I really need some help, and with a lot of things.  It’s sad and painful to say it, but there are many aspects of life in human civilization that I find very uncomfortable and alien and anathema to me.  And though I have work friends, I have no real other friends of any kind, and as I’ve said, my family is scattered hundreds to thousands of miles away.  I don’t do online relationships very well, other than my ongoing relationship with the likes of Amazon.  Ha ha.

Incidentally, I have the weekend “off”, so I won’t be writing my blog either tomorrow or the next day.  The Sunday thing is nothing new; I almost never write a blog on Sunday, and when I was writing fiction, I never wrote fiction on Sunday.  I had to give myself some mental break, and it made sense to do it on the day when I never did have to work.

Today is the last day of Hanukkah, of course.  I’ve been neglecting lighting the candles at work, though I have a nice little menorah there.  After the first two days, it just felt sad.  Actually, it felt sad the first few days, too, since it’s the sort of thing one does with one’s family, especially with one’s kids.

It’s a weird thing to think of wanting to have medical care for myself.  Having been on the delivering end of much life-prolonging care, I know only too well how much we tend to strain to stretch out the latter portion of our days, even when all it really does is compound misery, or at least make it last longer.

Pediatric medicine makes more sense—we should prevent kids from suffering and/or dying young and from falling victim to illnesses that might harm their later life and joy.  But why do wasted, washed-up, older people like me*, who are alone and sad and depressed even want to stay alive, other than due to persistent but pointless biological drives?

I’m not saying that I’m drain on the world or anything; I earn a living and pay my rent and electricity and water and cable and food and everything.  But I have a chronic illness from which I’ve been suffering most of my life**, and though there are treatments for it, there is no known cure.  It has a fatality rate—just counting suicides, not addressing the manifold ways in which it wears away at general health—that is worse than many cancers.  And I possess several of the attributes that are associated with increased risk of suicide, including age, solitude, probable “neurodivergence”, chronic pain, all that good stuff.

Why is there no physician-assisted suicide available anywhere for chronic depression?  It’s certainly as miserable as just about any disease can be—it turns one into the spiteful Satan of one’s own personal Hell.  Of course, the real trouble with a physician-assisted suicide for depression is that, by definition (if you will) the person involved is suffering from mental illness that affects that person’s judgment about the process, so legitimate consent is troublesome.  I guess I can’t blame “the powers that be” for wanting to keep their fingers out of that particular pie.

Perhaps that’s evidence that they’re not entirely unethical.  Mostly, they’re just largely nonethical.

My train is going to be arriving in a few moments, so I’ll wrap up for the day, feeling no closer to any improvement in my situation than I was at the beginning of the week.  I am giving up on the dietary changes I recently began; my GI tract has gotten no better with it over several days, and it’s just not worth the suffering to try to sustain it.  I’ll try to go back to a more workable healthy solution.

What I really want is to be able to rest and to feel rested.  Obviously I didn’t do that last night, or the night before, or pretty much all the way back to the mid-nineties.  And then, there was only one night I can remember on which I slept and awoke refreshed.

It stands out because it was such a departure from the norm.

Oh, well.  Life is hard.  It’s also a cereal and a game and a magazine.  Time is just a magazine, as far as I know.  And Scientific American has become an ironic, contradictory insult to its former self.

Have a good day and a nice weekend, please.

Happy-Hanukkah-

*Yes, I’m “only” 54, but I have felt much older for quite a long time.  My subjective age has been increasing on an exponential growth curve for years.  Sadly, my wisdom does not appear to have been growing similarly, and it may actually be diminishing.

**Dysthymia/depression, in case that isn’t clear.