heartlessviking

I’m not sure who brought it to my attention, pretty sure it was Plainwhite, but I don’t talk about when things work out enough.

Today turned into a good day, though I’m not especially a fan of how it started. I knew I wanted to get up early this morning, so any time I woke up in the night I seriously considered getting up and getting on with it. I made it to 5:30 AM, after seven hours of sleep which is much closer to a healthy amount than usual for me… I felt tired though. Made myself a really strong cup of coffee.

Once the sun […]

Right, so my dad wants me to call him every Monday and talk about what I’m working on…. he made it very specific he wanted me calling at 1 PM… so that’s what I do, and who should answer but my mother

I love this woman, she’s got a cool job, and she really believes in what she’s doing… BUT, in 30 years of being chronically ill, apparently she still isn’t convinced that I’m struggling more than her or my dad ever have or will.

Lately, I’ve been trying to break it to them that 30 to 40 hours a week is the most I can work, […]

It’s odd, fighting shame as long as I have, finding that I can still be truly pathetic. Today, just in general.

I know what I blame it on, my coffee maker broke. Yesterday I went out for coffee, but I wanted to believe I didn’t need it…. man was I wrong. So wrong. Depressingly wrong.

It’s not just the alertness, it’s the pain. My knees feel like someone hit them with something. I feel in general in a fog, and it took me at least an hour longer to make dinner than I intended, and it wasn’t particularly labor intensive.

Two roads diverge from here, continue my dependency, […]

I wrote a rather long post about this last night. It had comedy, poetry, song and pop culture references. Then just as I pushed the publish button the whole bloody site went down, and I lost the entirety of my post. Has this ever happened to anyone else? They turn to Suicide Project in a time of need and feel worse after?

I’m bitter towards everybody and everything right now, this isn’t a directed attack against anyone.

I got into grad school. That sounds wonderful….. but….. classes are to start Monday, and the University doesn’t have funds set aside for new students. Long calculation skipped, it is […]

I hit the ground running this morning, and first thing, the first thing I dealt with?

My computer either lost or corrupted a hard drive. That might sound weird to non desktop people, I have seven hard drives… and I know, seven, that seems like a bit much, right? It’s my entire digital life for the past decade. Lucky enough, what I lost was just the last 5 months, the rest was redundant data for other drives.

Still, it upset me, particularly because it is made worse by my motherboard developing an issue where the hard drive sata ports are dead, meaning that I couldn’t connect it […]

Two main things;

1: I want to go skiing at least a week every year. I used to when I was a kid, and my entire adult life I haven’t been able to afford it. Everything in my life oriented towards health was with the attitude that I’d get to ski again. Now…. it seems unlikely, so I’m puzzled why I should keep myself healthy.

2: a place to escape to. Ideally rural, a cabin or cottage with a workshop or garage. I don’t need to spend all my time there, but there are times I want to shut out everything and only be with myself. Now […]

last session with that therapist….. I probably shone on a bit more that I was getting better…. which I doubt.

Two weeks now I’ve been trying to find the energy to do the last task on my to do list to get into grad school…. and it just isn’t coming.

I don’t have enough positive anticipation. I’m worried that even if I do get every document in…. they’ll say no anyway. That’s par for the course in my life; I do what is required of me….. still doesn’t amount to anything.

And my parents seem really optimistic about this thing….. maybe they’re just trying to cheer me up […]

I had a cartoon I watched with an uncle who any time someone was trying to wrap up a conversation with him would say, “One more thing.”, so sometimes I do that, not that I’ve ever mentioned it directly to anyone.

Anyway, my one more thing is about the trap that is recovery. This is the most subversive thing I’ve ever thought of, and I sincerely want to be wrong. The idea is this; capitalism commoditizes our trauma by pressuring us to heal and then monetizing the resultant creativity. Essentially, the entirety of the creative world has become a massive skinner engine of causing pain and […]

Tomorrow is my last therapy appointment with this therapist, so there won’t be time to process this, and I need to.

Last night I had a dream that I was working as a teacher’s assistant in my old elementary school. I’m no Freudian, but it’s where the dream went next that really made it stick. I was trying to find my way back to my car, and I ended up in the middle school I went to, a separate entire building, and they were renovating it. Some sort of school official came by by they wouldn’t help me get out, we ended up walking around bits […]

It could be called something different, for example if we wanted to talk about it neurobiolocially, it’s anhedonia, the inability to feel.

Point is though, this is becoming my default. It isn’t that I want to talk about it, it’s that if I don’t it’ll fester into poison which will slowly kill me. As in yes, where I am is unpleasant, but it could get worse.

I think it comes back to the finiteness of reward, and the specificity of my tastes. I don’t get pleasure from the majority of movies, same is true of games. Finding one that hits that motivation core is a wonderful experience, […]

This time of year, there’s a lot of feelings around. Personally, I dislike feelings, especially when it is me feeling them.

All the same, I can’t help but look around and think things are pretty nice. We just got back from the store and bought enough food to make it through the incoming cold snap. All food that sounds good to me, which is a challenge these days.

So I’m basically holed up in my little house, most of the time in my little office. I have a space heater, so it is current 77 degrees in my office, just lovely. My favorite dog is sitting on […]

I take a sick kind of glee tracking down those with poor suicide education and educating them. Human curiosity is insufferable, so I see many of the new initiates post; “When you are depressed, is that like being really really sad?”

and it’s stupid. Yeah, depression is kind of an enduring sadness. But that’s so obvious, we’ve talked about it ad nauseum.

On the other hand, maybe it’s insightful. I feel like the main character in the Russian folktale the boy who left home to learn about the shivers.

In the story the hero is introduced as someone who asks constant questions, which gets on his family’s nerves […]

For me the big one is politics, that is things I do that actively undermine my sanity. The problem is that my former career, which I get tempted to resume from time to time, depends HEAVILY on political machinations. Just because I can’t do it right now… doesn’t mean I stopped caring.

But then sometimes I engage…. like I just made the mistake of doing…. and I pour myself out. Afterwards I’m shaking really bad, feeling a strong desire to dissociate

I want to get better, but I don’t know how to do that if it means I need to stop caring. As it is, I made […]

Right now I have no relevant news about any of my attempts to have a career again. It might be something, it might not, and there are no indicators right now to make me feel one way or the other. I feel like I’m perpetually holding my breath, and all I want to do is breathe all the way out and in, relax my lungs.

Now for the bad news; my therapist is moving on. I thought about saying retire, and that’s not right, and neither are fired or quitting. He’s got a new baby at home, and he’s taking some time to look after it.

There’s […]

I hesitate to complain, because on several important metrics I’m doing better; namely eating and sleeping…

but apart from that surface level surviving…. I’m not so sure. I have some promising leads…. which I should follow up on. I tell myself I want to follow up on…. but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Even if I get these couple things off my books…. the fear is more is coming…. and it’s just fruitless. I’m so sick of trying my butt off, and it doesn’t result in anything.

I don’t know if I need to convince myself this time is different…. or if I just […]

I think I’m probably more into my anonymity here than most users of this site. It feels so good to be able to say stuff that can’t be directly traced back to the person I try to be. But on rare occasions, there’s spill over. I do talk about being suicidal in public forums, and sometimes I talk about things here that absolutely should give away who I am. The beautiful thing is that usually no one cares.

Like, that’s what was cool about the pandemic, suddenly everyone was just getting through today, it was possible not to care and be socially acceptable.

Right, rabbit trails, main […]

It seems I might just accidentally my way into grad school. Didn’t know that was how it worked, but the school is putting in most of the effort. If I don’t get it, I’m supremely okay with that, or at least so I tell myself. I’ll probably feel devalued and betrayed, that’s the usual thing when I tell myself I don’t care.

I’m trying not to care.

Then I had a promising interview with a job….. and my knee jerk reaction is to think about how great things would be if I got it….. Yet again, caring hurts. I’m trying to insulate myself out; organizing my closet, […]

I’ve always felt like coping mechanisms and stress are at a perpetual arms race. One side figures out something big, then the other.

Did you ever read the Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss? It’s about two groups who decide they are much too different to cohabitate because one prefers to eat bread with the butter on top, and the other prefers it on bottom… and they get into this Soviet – American 50s-60s style competition. It starts with throwing a rock, then the other side takes sticks to knock the rocks back, and so on in increasing complexity until each side simultaneously discover a substance […]

dear “valued” applicant, while we appreciate your ongoing search for meaning and purpose, we have decided to give it to someone else. We appreciate the time it took for you to seek us out, except we don’t in any meaningful way, and we cast you back into the meaningless void.

Please come ask us for meaning again, so we can once again tell you that you are LESS THAN. YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH. YOU”LL NEVER BE ENOUGH. Thanks so much for wasting your time, wasting our time, wasting your life.

Even though you have a degree in the field, and six years of applicable work experience, there […]

I don’t know if it’s because of my education or just intuition, but meaningful dreams are usually pretty revealing for me. I don’t need a dream dictionary to figure out the metaphor, because I’m all about metaphor.

I’ve been having anxiety dreams about not belonging/being unwanted. Quite a few of them revolve around my granddad’s house and that side of the family. There is some bitterness there, because I spent his declining years with him more than anyone else, and he didn’t leave me anything. It wasn’t for the money, but you’d think he would have left something, a book, anything to indicate to me that […]