heartlessviking

Again, something I don’t get to talk about in my “public” life, because it hurts too much, and it is far too frightening. I’ve tried to work through it with therapists, with no luck at all.

At the end of the day, what scares me more than anything external, is myself. This is a peculiar form of self loathing, I’m convinced because though I have looked all my life, I have never found someone else who admits they are afraid of what they might do.

The awful thing about this is that it is the closest to a self portrait as I can do as a writer. If my paranoid ideas proved true, ever voicing what I want and who I am will kill me.

Back to the beginning though eh? In the same breath I admit that I think this will kill me, and continue on. Courage? No, just out of fucks to give. Kill me if you please, just do a good job the first try. I’ve had people try to kill me and fail and it’s just sad.

I have a certain amount of paranoia and meglomania. The paranoia is the oldest, because  I never fit and it drove me to work very hard not to be noticed. I did not succeed in that manner. Every time I am noticed, it scares me because it activates my meglomania. As a young man, teens through mid twenties, I was fascinated with revolutionaries, prophets and cult leaders. I’ll grant that our culture gives these figures great exposure for their flaws as much  as their virtue. Yet I saw so much of myself in people like Jim Jones, Che Guavara, Fidel Castro, Vladamir Lenin, and so on and so on. All of them in their youth were considered quite bright, but odd, incurably odd. They attempted to function within the society of their day, and fail. They begin to draw others towards them, and those others eventually form the revolution. All eventually reached a stalemate with capitalism, but my hypothesis on that is that they started the revolution too soon, before they had sufficient public backing to produce a lasting change. They also didn’t have sufficient oversight but that’s another two hour rambling sermon.

I saw that in myself, and it terrified me. This is because while I have the self assuredness to want to impose my morality on the world, I am just realistic enough to understand the risks involved. Most revolutionaries are assasinated, usually with the help of imperial capitalists. So, I’ve kept quiet, dropping hints here and there. It’s why I admit that if you read me here and read me elsewhere, you already have all the clues you need.

I don’t actually think I’m that important, that public of a figure. I have a mid sized following, maybe a few hundred really interested people, a few thousand associations. It is only if those people rise to prominence that I will advance in the area of power and visibility.

Maybe it won’t happen, I hope it won’t actually. I’d rather be a madman out in the wilderness, growing my plants and raising goats than see my vision for my country come to pass. Because people will have to die, and people with have to change, and those are the two things that terrify my countrymen and women most. I cannot inflict such pain. They have to ask for it, and thank God I think it scares them too much.

I’ve been trying to practice keeping my head down for the last few weeks. No news, no social media, nothing to ADD negativity. Then, unavoidably it seems, I return to my old ways. I try to interact…. and my filter for grief, which is how most things appear to me, is dark humor. I like to laugh at death, all the more when it appears to be coming right at me.

So, I made a joke about tragedy, and it did not go over well… apparently “in poor taste”, you know what I think is in poor taste? Having a world so tragic and awful that you aren’t allowed to laugh at it.

It’s just a sore point. I’d _LOVE_ to not be in constant pain to the point humor is the only way I can filter tragedy…

It isn’t happening. Sorry, not really something I have input into.

It’s at times like these that I miss having a therapist, an interpreter for me to understand why my social faux pas is inappropriate. I don’t want to care, I don’t have the energy to care. Ordinary people seem so aimless and pointless…. I wish I could just dismiss them for the ignorant savages they are…. yet…. yet? I don’t know, the approval of others has been a quixotic nightmare in my life. I’m going to go hit some 420 and try to forget….. better add some whiskey, life being agonizingly long these days.

Mostly writing because it will be the only way I process these emotions. At this point, my energy level is too low to even apply for jobs, let alone hold one down. I’ve been able to strip away all the emotion in it, so I can explain to my wife. She’s incredibly supportive, and I feel lucky in that regard. She accepted my pitch; she works and I focus on keeping house. The fact is that I spend more time tending the house than her, and I don’t have a problem with that. I’m good at it.

The hard part is still letting go, becoming okay with not always thinking about the next job…. I know I can get there, but I’m not there now. I’m a caregiver, my entire career has been caring for others, and now what I really would like is to have some kiddos of my own, and to devote myself to their well being. I’d have more peace then, feel less like a burden on society. Or so I imagine, it isn’t something I’ll know until I’m there.

Today I was working on trying to improve my software engineering skills, and I hit a wall, it was more than I could handle. It just feels like I’m hitting a wall here. There’s no way around that I’ve found, I haven’t been any more productive with any of my other attempts at finding purpose.

a day at a time, I guess, that’s what my wife says. I’d like to be excited about my life again, but that’s a long ways down the road.

It isn’t a secret; I seem to take myself too seriously. On the other hand that makes much more sense when it is understood that my social ready personality was intended to be biting satire of the culture around me. I got so sarcastic that I started living in the world I had created. Another thing; our species is on average bad at understanding sarcasm, but perhaps more on that later.

20 years ago, if you can believe it, I was a lost and angry 13 year old. I was trying to find a place, and increasingly finding that the spaces for people like me are rare and sparsely distributed. So, I repressed the entire part of my personality that despised the culture that had failed to provide for me. I became, in this order;

A drama geek

A salesperson

A customer service representative

A field repair tech

and divorced; the first major crisis of my adult life. I descended down into the rabbit hole that is my massive cultural and literary understanding, and came back with a proposal; I’d play their game, but they had to provide me the resources and cultural clout that supposedly came from cooperating. That was the subtext for the second chapter; my twenties. I spent a year going to school. got roped into a job I learned to love but couldn’t afford to keep in mental health, spent a year and a half running from that as a field repair tech, it was a low customer contact position inspecting utilities and I loved it. Then, five years ago that company lost the contract that allowed me to work, transferred me to a department that forced me to do things so immoral that I ended up in the hospital after quitting.

Which preceded the final chapter up until a few months ago; bargaining part 2. I went back to school and really threw myself into my studies as hard as I ever had finishing my undergrad. For three years I carried a 4.0, served in various offices of school clubs, and performed nationally recognized research in a peer review journal. I presented my work at conference, came THIS close to winning state-wide quizbowl, and saw the club I serve in grow in membership and in scope. We had such a clear vision for it that we seriously discussed turning it into a non profit. Then I graduated.

I didn’t get into grad school, couldn’t even get a second glance from most of them. Which was the point that I began this decline, which has taken 20 months; first I tried to find work outside of the social sciences, with little luck. Then, begrudgingly I went for the highest salary someone with an undergraduate in Psychology can earn in my state, and was eventually hired, and a few months afterwards I was considering whether it would be easier to bargain with myself than with the world around me.

And that’s me today. Not working (for money or anyone else), not wanting to either. Suddenly in the middle of this crisis, after losing my therapist [long, boring story, TLDR; the agency that has provided my care for the last five years couldn’t give two shakes about providing employment stability for their employees.]

I joked over the past year; how the agency I worked for felt like rehab for workaholics. It completely poisoned work for me. Cool tangent;

Do you want to know the most effective tool we have against addiction? It’s a pill that makes addicts feel awful any time they consume what they used to be addicted to. Most addicts struggle to stay on it, and honestly I can’t blame them it is an inhumane way to deal with the problem.

That last job was it for me. By the time I quit I had decided that I would rather be homeless and without healthcare or steady food rather than under the thumb of some manipulative megalomaniacal employer. Not the easiest choice, but that’s what I’ve got figured out, today, three months to the day from the event that led to me resigning. Now the memory block is over that, and that’s okay with me. It was awful, such that it took all the anger management and coping skills I had to set down my work laptop and materials, and walk out of the building. I wanted to bury myself under the cruelty and indifference they subjected me to. I wanted to kill them, metaphorically, because at this point I realized that I’m the embodiment of death to any institution I touch. It makes so much more sense; realizing I hated them so when I started, much more than I do now. They don’t deserve my hate, or any feeling apart from somber disapproval. They utterly failed me, as a culture, and as a way of life.

First, I want to talk about a purely positive thing that came up last night. My wife surprised me and invited all of our friends over to play board games and hang out. That was great, though it did catch me unprepared, but I got steadily buzzed and coasted through fine.

I like thinking about such things as self contained. It’s like a self contained negative event, no need to work it into my predictions. Then one of my friends said they might have a lead on some work. What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t have the strength to hope in unfulfilled promises. It has become something I am quite accustomed to that my family and friends blow smoke about good news just to see me smile for a day. Which is sweet, but also dangerous.

I woke up this morning and thought; “we’ll see if and when it comes to anything, I should continue assuming that no help is coming.”

Yet, like a trap baited with honey, it entices me, the prospect of hope. Then I look at my arms and the scars decorating almost every inch of my skin, and I remember. For every moment of my life that on the surface appeared positive, I have spent my blood, sweat and tears either to get there, or because of the false perception that things might semi regularly work out to my benefit.

More and more I’m learning to live in memory, and not in the awful world I find in the so called “present.” There were some really good times. There were also some bad times. Someday I’d like to live in reality with others again, but right now, I’m enjoying my exile, as much as a depressed person can “enjoy.”

One upshot of being unable to work due to depression is that it gives quite a bit of perspective on decisions I’ve made. I was to focus in on the last one, the one that led to me being in this mess.

It was May 2021, and my health was circling the drain. I wanted to ride it down, because due to ADA and my insurance plan being disabled was a better option than being employed. I let my wife and parents talk me into walking out when it had only half broken me.

Fast forward to today; suicide hotline guy verifies that my supervisor was trying to avoid having to make ADA accommodations. So it wasn’t a personal slight against me, just business…. So humanity is every bit as cruel as I estimated, and somehow I’m to come to terms with that? Here’s my terms; better drugs or death. I can’t work without better drugs, and since I’ve been forced to gamble on my ability to work…… it’s all over essentially. I ran out of money, can’t even buy food that I like. Don’t have the energy to cook, or clean, or hunt for a job. At this point I’ve also cut off social media, news and anything that would rub salt in the wound.

So since I have little else to discuss, I’m quiet, as I wait for the day that I will be in enough pain to end it. What else is there? Not anything for a foolish kindhearted idiot such as myself.

Oh, and top it off that my therapist ghosted me on Monday.

One of the most puzzling things to me is that people show up at memorials and cemeteries with flowers, and they talk to the plaque or headstone. What’s the fucking point there? You’re only talking to yourself, those remains can’t hear you. Those remains can’t appreciate the flowers either.

I think most people are in denial about the fact that they are going to die someday. It is the reason the concept of the afterlife appeals to them, a “better place” makes it easier to say goodbye. Not implying that is true or not, just the social consequences. I think everyone carries around quite a bit of regret. I know that I do. Other people are better at ignoring it, or doing things that only deal with the surface and not the substance of the problem. Loss in the way that humans experience it is one of our most defining features. Animals may feel similar things, but they move on so much better that I wonder if their brains are better adapted.

A few days ago my wife and I went to the zoo. It was a really fun day, even though my wife wasn’t as interested in neurophysiology as I. The largest difference between humans and apes is connections between the hemispheres of the brain. The closer related an ape is, the more connections they have. Most animals don’t have much linkage at all. I think that is why they can move on so well. Right brain is the part that is more responsible for processing emotions. Sort of the garbage collector of the mind. Those interlinks with left brain are why you can feel so sad you can’t use logic.  Left brain is involved in abstract thought.

So, watching the animals, I had an almost biblical thought; consider the chimps. Do they have jobs? Not in the formal sense that humans do. Yet, they live a full and rich life. Maybe we are the source of our own misery. All relaxation methods involve quieting the mind. Which is a more friendly sounding phrase than shutting down self referential thoughts, becoming deaf to the screams of your own mind.

I want to sincerely thank the admins for returning me the ability to put titles on my posts. It is a little comfort that I previously took for granted, but now understand the frailty and value of.

I started writing this as a comment, and then I realized that it was going to be more of a thought than a tangent, and here we are.

My wife this evening [last night?! what does one put at 4 AM?] made a remark that put it all in perspective I think;

“I often wonder what my life would be like if I was doing what I was meant to.”

As an existential agnostic, my mind spins and sputters at the idea of destiny. I believe my retort was; “I thought I went for what I was supposed to, and that was the end of that.” I spent my entire adult life at least investing in a career that I think should be dead. I don’t get to die, but the career path should. I can get published AND READ in computer science easier than sociology, psychology or anthropology.

Anyway, I think there is a feeling of entitlement to the concept of destiny. It isn’t that I doubt that there is a higher power, what I doubt is that he/she/it/them has the motivation to sculpt a path for my life. As in; I’ve been asking for 28 years [since I was five] what I was here on this planet to do. Thus far, echoing silence.  Which does not mean an answer will not come. It means that all signs point to it not coming.

I’m like a sailor washed ashore after an awful storm, one that killed most of the people I care about. Thinking maybe I should build a little seaside shack, and never board a boat again. I know the thoughts I have, all the things I know would be a waste if not put to use. Yet that is the sunk cost fallacy, a well known logical aberration. Maybe a horse was a fast runner, for years and years, and maybe you and the horse had an understanding of each other. The fact is that it is now an old slow horse. Either put it out to pasture or send it to the glue factory, because it is done running. You can fight it all you want, but you can’t make an old lame horse run like a young horse.

and I am aware that I jumped metaphors midstream. I couldn’t think of a sunk cost metaphor from the point of view of a sailor. Maybe something about some ships are so damaged they are impractical to repair? I feel like the horse thing is more relatable. Just because I have a fascination with nautical engineering doesn’t mean anyone else does, or that I should impose it on others.

:: Relief? Or Fata Morgana ::

Disclaimer; I’ve been told that my writing is overly complex, and frustrating to read. Thus, if these things are a problem for you, press the back button on your browser and spare yourself the horror of my mad philosophic ramblings. Else, let’s go.

My life is dominated by waiting. As in, it used to be just a few things, now it is quite a lot. At the moment I’m unemployed, feeling a little frustrated about finances, but I have stuff to do. The point, I think, is that I step back, stop needing my life to follow my plan. Go with the flow, as it were.

I think that I struggle with magical thinking regarding relief. It seems to follow that if one door previously closed is now open, more will be following suit. That feels right, but cognitively I distrust the instinct. Right, so going to talk about another thing that I cannot discuss in my real life; I have a passion for erotic fiction, dirty, raunchy, romantic, whatever. The thing about that, and really all media I consume; most of the writers I like have stopped writing. One of my early favorites has been inactive for seven years, probably a good bet I’ll never hear from them again.

It’s a strange thing, liking an author who is active. Even stranger for them to write more of what I like of theirs. So, there’s a multi part story that I consider the best in all that I’ve ever read. Each chapter builds on the last, and makes me eager for the next. I discovered it a year and a half ago, after the third chapter was published. Today I was checking my normal spots for the five or six living/active authors that I can see fresh work. I saw something new from the guy that wrote my favorite story, not what I was looking for, but I decided to check on all platforms, he takes awhile to get things to easily tracked formats. Then I discover that on his pay site he’s posted chapter four, and it cost me $1 to view, a bargain I say.

Meanwhile, two shows that I enjoy are posting new episodes tonight. In a few week, entirely removed from the rest, I have the potential for a solution in my troubled financial status. There’s that perky part of my brain that wants to trust in things getting better. It is overshadowed by the part that says; “Promising signs are meaningless, results matter.”

Which brings me around to Fata Morgana. I could have led with mirage, because that is what Fata Morgana is. Mirage for me is more scientific, while Fata Morgana conjures up images of Arthurian legend, and the sorceress Morgan La Fe who was known to conjure illusory castles to lead sailors to their doom. That’s the human instinct; when it is a personal attack it feels nicer than the unkindness of brash disregard/total apathy. I do not think that anyone sets out to fool me, not in such a direct manner. I do end up fooled, and feel foolish when what I thought I saw was naught but air.

I only worry/doubt positive illusions. Negative ones don’t bug me, because if they threaten me eventually they have to threaten me, at which point if they don’t exist it’s a nice surprise. At this point I distrust anyone or anything that would pretend to benefit me. Nice things happen, and there doesn’t appear to be any kind of rhyme or reason to their occurance.

I’m glad for the story, I’d like to just enjoy that. Me being me, however, it is never that simple.

Becoming a friend of death;

[still no title option admins, so here I am typing my feelings out using outdated self formatting.]

I remember when I was just a little kid. I grew up in a rather conservative christian household. Obviously, it was not a natural fit. Yet there were moments when it almost was. When I joined a drama/comedy group for example, or when we sang specific songs. One such song is called “I am a friend of God”

Like so; “I am a friend of God, I am a friend of God, I am a friend of God, he calls me friend”

Yes, I was aware at age nine the first I heard such nonsense that it was insipid, repetitive, and musically really setting a low bar. But if I could figure out how to act like that is true, maybe others will accept me. Spoiler alert; not at all, but that’s not the point.

I think about where I keep myself, philosophically. Yes, I wasted many years of my youth studying philosophy. It’s what we did before sex was easier to come by [get it?! It’s a pun!]

There is significant appeal to the taoist outlook on life. Birth and death, union and loss, these contradictions describe the world around us. None of these values are inherently wrong. We dislike death, but that is our bias intruding. I promise you that any machine you describe a breakdown to can and likely will soon suffer such breakdown. It doesn’t make sense from the point of view of the body to code for thinking about a successful end of life. Either you think there’s something after that or you don’t. You try to focus on whatever good may be attached to such beliefs.

Anyway. Misery has been a long standing guest in my psyche. Death has always fascinated me, all the more when I realized most people do anything not to think about it. That’s like a cult, without a cult leader, hallelujah! I do believe! Again, a joke, I’m not enjoying the anticipation.

I wonder what would happen if you walked into a room, sang the five bars;

“I am a friend of death”

and walked out. That would be an insanely interesting scenario. The point is, I honestly feel that I identify more with death than with God these days. I mean, guy’s immortal, and you’d think that be so cool, but instead it just means he’s seen most of this shit before. It’s hard to impress that thing. I tried, and now I don’t know what to move on to. I get death, death is a final lasting silence, and if you live loud enough you’ll be echoing into eternity. Most humans will be forgotten, and I feel that depressed people are largely of that group. Yes, today is awful, but in 200 years, who will think about it? If it isn’t an incident inciting a war, only the nerdiest of history geeks will know about you and I.

::going through the motions::

Today it occurs to me that my heart isn’t in anything these days. I applied for some jobs this week, not that such a thing would solve my problems, but money is the fuel that makes my world go. I need quite a bit of it to buy my freedom.

My parents are cutting down how much they help me. Accountability they say, I know what it is, they want me to go earn an income. I would if I knew how folks, but I don’t, and am very frustrated at the disproportionate punishment such ignorance brings. I studied for six years, did quite a few things I wasn’t proud of, and for what? Nothing, failure after failure, and me losing faith and enthusiasm.

I feel like a zombie some days. I retreat into a corner of my mind that feels nothing, wants nothing, aspires to nothing. There I sit, and there I stay, because I offered all I had, back when I had more to offer.

My anthem has been this song;
If you want it, here it is, come and get it
but you better hurry cause it’s going fast
If you want it, anytime, I can give it,
but you better hurry cause it may not last

It didn’t last, and I didn’t get a good enough price for it when I had it.

This is the question my therapist has given me to mull over for the weekend. I’ve been instructed to abandon any association with a career, just who I am outside of that.

Fuck if I know is the thing. I wanted to go with analyst, because my greatest desire is to understand and interpret. Yet, isn’t that still a career goal? I enjoy nature, and also working with my hands, and stretching my brain to grow my ability.

The problem is that my ambition is a way that I hide from the questions I don’t want to ask. Questions like “what if I don’t go back to paying work?”

Then there is the precarious position my spiritual life has come to. I used to believe whole hog in Christianity. Lately I think I’ve become an agnostic. I’m relatively sure that there is more going on in this universe than mankind is aware of. I’m also of the opinion that if there is a god, he or she probably doesn’t care about the day to day desires of human hearts. I seek, but I also recoil. I’ve come to hate passivity and subservience, they are the paving stones of authoritarian regimes.

Then again, I’m so tired. I don’t want to push anymore, or care for that matter.

I am tempted by nihilism, where nothing is worthy, and no one meaningful. I could fit into that, it baffles me that humans continue to reproduce when our culture so clearly dislikes the vast majority of humanity.

I got a new video game that really fires up my dopamine levels. My body has been the site of a battle between dopamine and serotonin for 28 years. Dopamine is the “getting things done” hormone, essential for energy and productivity, get too much and things get manic/anxious. Serotonin works the other direction, regulating sleep, hunger and repair activities. This is the only use I plan to put my science education to, using precise language when describing effects. No one cares, there are no assistantships for people passionate about hard science and good data collection methods.

Anyway, it’s the Hitman series of games, which involves a secret agent infiltrating buildings and killing important people. It reminded me of a game I played as a teenager; “I was supposed to be here.” See, I had exhausted the entertainment prospects at the beginning of sophomore year to the point that I actively began to avoid the subject and order of high school. I snuck around abandoned parts of the school. While it was very cloak and dagger, most of the time I was seeking out a quiet place to read. Isn’t that strange? Kid would rather read than meet the arbitrary guidelines of others.

So, this story has a dark afternote of my life story that I have never dared to tell. My last job before my 2016 break I was a field tech working in people’s backyards, front yards, and all sorts of other places I never asked for access to, all of which I had to be at, but this became a skill. It was the professional version of my high school game. That is until the breakdown, at which point I wandered onto an active building site, and that’s where the cops picked me up and took me to the hospital. Three weeks later I came to in the hospital, picked up and started going again.

On the list of things I’m running from; the knowledge that my teenage impulses got the better of my adult senses. I am feeling foolish often.

Today should have been a good day, a few things went quite well, but all that is overshadowed by the words of a local lawyer “I don’t think that your case is actionable”. I appreciate the serious mindedness of lawyers, but they are a discouraging lot. I can’t sue my former employer for wage fraud or hostile work environment. In the opinion of this lawyer, I don’t have a case.

I have trouble forcing myself to care, about anything at this point. If I had achieved my ends I would currently be in a quite lush hospital, out of my mind, and potentially with a better case against my former employer. But no, we “saved” me by bailing before my brain melted. I don’t want to look forward to anything. I don’t want to deal with another human being, ever. Clearly the gulf between my morality and the morality of society is too wide to ever be crossed. I don’t fit, and it’s unclear if I ever even could.

I thought about contacting the crisis line, but for what? I get grief from my therapist for it, and half the time it doesn’t help anyway. I’m lost, really most completely. I started trying to pull the strings of my life together, then I got into a car accident due to my own inability to focus. Now my car is running funny, and it’s unclear if it will ever really be safe for me to drive again. Granted, as long as it is just me, car crashes have a high fatality rate, it would be an appropriate curtain on what has been an ignoble and pointless existence.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit, (my therapist called me an insightful person today, that’s progress). I’m well aware that I’m absurd, and that probably isn’t going to change. I think I’m done taking anything seriously that doesn’t have to be. Life is short, we’re all in this til the end. I have enough stuff. I have enough people. What I lack is enough kindness to myself. I think I’m just going to go with that. This year I turned 33, and with that age and frailty comes a greater acceptance of my own mortality, and a presence of mind that life is too short to be stressed all the time. I want children, that’s it. Everything else, could be done without.  I’ve spent my whole life going without due to budgetary constraints, and now that I have given up on the rat race I’m thinking about seeing how rich a life I can live mostly on the money I already have. My uncles did it. I think that’s where my parents are too.

Anyway. I found this video of a man doing a duet with a puppet, and you can see on his face he knows how silly and absurd it is. Yet, he’s happy, and that’ll have to be enough;

https://youtu.be/WRUjq7t4rC8

I’m going to talk about some identifying information in a bit, but first on that;

I’ve been writing on here for a few years now. For the first year I’d guess I posted maybe once or twice, responded as many times. I was very concerned about privacy issues regarding doxing, and to discuss my desire to die, I’m going to say some things I would never want to be associated with my real name. As such, I have community here, while having an outside life that doesn’t have to know. So, it becomes more comfortable as I find others of similar philosophy such that I can mask my syntax from that of the other me.

I’m an Eagle Scout. I appreciate that some people are less than aware of scouting, or maybe only vaguely familiar with it. Boy Scouts is(or was, depending on attitude) an education program for young people. It seeks to teach good stewardship and leadership in people with potential. It’s kind of like ROTC, which I didn’t do because there wasn’t time for that. I dated an ROTC girl….. married a non ROTC girl….. divorced……. married ROTC girl. Heh, never made that connection before. Fun.

in fact, gosh darn, there’s nothing quite as sexy as a girl that can march! Might just be for me.

Anyway, so when I’m this low I get philosophic; why do I do as I do? I have options.

I think I have an oversized obsession with power and control. I fight it, but if let go I would ride the backs of my soldiers to social war with the concept of sloppy. Yet the common outcome of my self loathing is that I consider myself a poor leader, even when I’m the most trained in the room, that self doubt pervailes. I’m now once again the most informed person in many rooms, but that’s my ego going off. You’ve got to believe yourself less than perfect, or you are too proud. Less than perfect is too complimentary, try imperfect? No. Maybe troubled? No. _FLAWED_ Ding! Ding! We’ve got a winner!

Shame could be our currency, my social class is so ridden with it!

So, I’m trying to find my place. I was given a path to high powered jobs, but they couldn’t give me agency, I self destruct without agency and the ability to choose. Like, they only hire educated people to the job, yet they also only hire people willing to be debased on a daily basis (that rolls off the tongue, huh?) Some people might emerge from schools with some semblance of a desire to self such that this policy may be a flaw in this approach.

In the near future I’m going to freelance. work as little as I can get away with. Go swimming, hiking, biking, boating. tend my garden, hopefully tend some kids too. A few animals around, not too many, but enough. I don’t really care, at this point further training will only drag me away from that which I desire most; a full life, a fully lived life. That’s my ideal, my city on a hill.

I’m at the point of literally asking, because I’m not allowed to want violent revenge on the people who are indifferent to my suffering. I’m also not particularly allowed to want to just not go back to work. Meanwhile, I’m sick, deep in burn out and having no motivation to pull up and out. I’ll put myself right back here is the reason. I’d love to do the normal thing, earn a paycheck, go on vacation to the lake. I really did try. It just doesn’t offer any rewards. I have this intolerable ambition, I’m not happy with whatever is given to me, I want more. I can’t seem to get more. Thus, misery. It’s less work to be miserable down here, in the pit with all of my guilt and shame. The world is cruel, and I don’t see where I’m supposed to fit in.

I’m too sensitive to help people. I’m also too dispassionate about any other kind of purpose. Hence, worthless, useless, yet I meet people convinced of my utility. God damn if I know anything. I’m a fool, a lost man without direction or even a desire to pick up a compass (figuratively, orientation and sense of direction are actually two of my useless strong skills.)

so what do I want? To what end should I seek out any kind of outcome when gaining the attention of others is a certain path to my pain? I may be known to be somewhat of a masochist, but everyone has limits, don’t they? Why do I keep pushing? What’s the desire that others have out of me? And why should I care?

For a long time I thought that if I worked hard I could satisfy others. I’d be dissatisfied, but as long as someone got to be right and vindicated that seemed like enough. Now it isn’t. Where do I go? I don’t feel particularly wanted in any locality I find myself. I think I might be the human equivalent of a foreign contaminant, and the white blood cells of our society is doing an excellent job of exterminating me.

As an idealist, I’ve spent most of my life within my own head. I tend to thrive in environments where I am left to my own devices. Yet rather suddenly I have begun to doubt who I am. I have worked in social services for most of my career, and last month I finally realized that it wasn’t working because I valued myself too much to endure the environment. That seems like a pretty high bar, and that’s because it is. Most of my employers have been some degree of evil/corrupt, and that’s just the cost of entry to the workforce around here.

I have some ideas for what to do with my new found freedom, here is a short list;

I could go work with disabled children (which would be staying in my lane)

I could teach school (less staying in my lane, but still in the same territory)

I could write software (entirely divergent from the others, not something I know much about)

I could build my own small business (current ideas include bakery, landscape design and building custom furniture)

The problem though is that these all sound great. Some of them likely have issues which will be a deal breaker for me. That takes time and money, things that are diminishing by the day. So what do I do? Jump and trust? How can I do that after the horrible career struggles I’ve had and my parents have had? What is real, and what is illusion? I haven’t found a more effective test than going to push against things. Most things that people say about careers are at the very least manipulative and deceptive. At worst the gaslight us to make it all our problem, all the while the relationship benefits them far more than us.

It’s not the pain that gets to me, I’m somewhat numbed to that, it’s the hope that keeps me going into unpleasant situations. I think that I haven’t been honest with myself about desireable outcomes. I tell myself I want to move on, but do I? I am seriously bummed that my (possibly former) employer didn’t reach out to me today. I started applying for new jobs, already got the first rejection back, and I’m remembering how much I despise job hunting. It’s all pleasuring unattractive people, I know that it’s not supposed to feel like prostitution, but trying to talk a company into hiring you is remarkably similar in all the worst ways to flirting. “Hey, I have emotional and intellectual assets you need, and I’ll do anything you want”

My therapist says that I swing wildly to extreme emotions. She prefaced it by saying it would make me mad… and I’m not so much mad, as I am confused. The problem I have is that with my desire for precision I do not use hyperbole, and that sets me apart from the rest of the species. So to convince others that it is awful and needs action I have to sell that to myself, hence wild emotions. No one is helpful in response to reasonable caution.

I keep coming back to something I thought about last week; Where should I go to get better treatment? The job market for me is like dating for a survivor of domestic violence; I’m quite sure that somewhere out there is an employer who is less demanding and pays better, but that isn’t what I attract. Honestly it would be better if my wife worked and I looked after household stuff, that’s what most men that I meet that I don’t instantly despise are doing.

But I can’t commit to anything, which I guess is supposed to mean that I still have some healing to do. Great, not like I was seeking out a different life or anything (passive aggressive sarcasm)

I just, don’t want anything. At the same time I understand that being alive means doing something to justify it. My options fail to excite me. See? THAT’s how I react to things. No one is willing to offer help to “Oh dear, I seem to have broken my leg, if it’s not too much trouble can you call an ambulance?” Yet if you simplify as if you are dealing with a toddler “OH SHIT” prompting them to ask “what?” “MY FUCKING LEG!” “what about it?” “PAIN!” what should I do “AMBULANCE”. See, people like to be involved. They’re quite egotistical. And thus I have constructed my entire social presentation to try and motivate other humans.

I’m sick of dealing with people that  I am incapable of respecting. The problem is that in my day to day life, I meet so few people worthy of respect. Then the rare kind one among them will try and comfort me, and because of my overextension I’ll bite their head off, because their faith and hope are based on entirely imagined optimism that people will behave reasonably. AND THAT, is hyperbole, because the problem isn’t a complete void regarding reasonable people, the problem is that irrational and frustrating people seem to dominate. Hence my irrationality. Is it still mental illness if it’s an adaptive trait used to achieve specific goals? Probably.

The whole mental health field is unscientific as hell. Large swaths of it are either people barely justifying their existence, and a large amount of the remaining ones are new age frauds. Yes, competent ones exist, but they’ve occupied all the space in the profession for competent scientists, which are damn few.