Sometimes, not that frequently but just occasionally enough to keep myself in check, I will stand at a green light at a pedestrian crossing and wait for it to turn red. Why not? I’m not in a hurry, I’m going to arrive a little early at my destination so I’ll have to wait either way. Does it matter if I do it at the end of the journey or before I begin or in the middle?
I don’t wish to inconvenience people (too much) so I’ll make sure it isn’t too busy, but I do get the most confused and confusing stares from people.
If someone ignores a red light and crosses the road nobody bats an eye. In fact it is expected that you do so as soon as you spot the first opportunity to rush over. Anyone that patiently waits for the light to turn green can often be heard mocked for being a mindless rule-follower and incapable of living life on their own terms.
If these same paragons of independence and lawmakers of their own life are for some reason waiting for the light to turn they are the first to accept the meaning of the green light as “you can go now” and are the first to actually go, seemingly too busy for any critical reflection anymore.
Disobeying an authority telling us that we can’t do something is rebellious but restraining ourselves when given license is not?
WARNING: This post will be more disjointed than usual.
Since the last update my mental state took a nosedive off a cliff. Suicidal ideation has been a near constant for a decade, at first emotionally charged and for years now nothing but a dull routine, but recently these fantasies have leveled up in concreteness to the point where I’d consider them plans (sans date) for uprooting my existence from the cracks in the sidewalk.
Atleast I did for a while. My days of long hours of apathy were punctuated by moments of acute despair. I remember one evening sitting down for supper and it occured to me most vividly that I was eating my last meal. I dropped my head in my hands and sat there for the longest five minutes of my life until it passed over. I can’t even remember if I finished eating or not.
Obviously some kind of threshold, a point of no return, has been crossed in some regard a long time ago; a well and weak person hardly need even fantasise about suicide–but I am an ill person and I can’t afford to appear to be weak. I have put on a hard face and any tenderness in me has dried up and I have become bound to snap like a dead twig unless I can find a way to renew myself.
My predicament could easily be seen as desperate beyond reason. But, for better or worse, I am unable to see it that way. It is always too easy to reason oneself out of these kinds of thoughts.
Consider the following. Person A is suicidal but he lacks the know-how to execute his will. Person B is suicidal as well but he does have the knowledge and the means to end his life. If Person B chooses not to kill himself then his conviction that life is worth living is more potent and on firmer ground than Person A’s conviction, which boils down to helplessness and ineptitude; Person B is alive because he wills it, while Person A has not had to have made that choice because he lacks the opportunity.
(And let us forget about Person C who’s never had suicidal thoughts, he doesn’t count.)
What an appealing line of thought! How soundly reasoned!
This was back in February.
Thinking it through in this manner I am erroneously and arrogantly placing all confidence in myself; it is I who triumphs over the desire for death through my own power. But those dark thoughts are akin to an addiction and the first step to overcoming any addiction is to paradoxically admit that it has complete control over one’s own life.
This I find the most puzzling thing about the dichotomy of control. You’re not really even in control of what is internal until you admit that you aren’t in control. Once you do that you are in control but only as long as you maintain that you aren’t in control.
If–and that’s a big if–if you can live with this dissonance then, atleast in my experience, everything will go smoothly and you’ll have the discretion to choose the correct course of action. But once you start thinking that you’re actually in control that is the moment that you lose all control.
Okay, I can accept the paradox that to gain control I need to relinquish control–but where do I put it? “It is suspended in nothing.” Well that doesn’t sound very stable. It’s like hanging up a hat out of habit on a hatstand that has been removed: the hat falls because the hatstand isn’t there. “You cast it upon God.” Well, assuming that I believe, I can’t think of anything more stable than that. And the doctrine that you are powerless to achieve the least thing without God’s grace certainly seems to align more closely with reality than the doctrine that you are in control. But if I try applying this view and live in the manner of a religious man I find it completely fruitless.
If I believe that I am in control but act like I am not, it works out for me but, and this is the crux of the agony, it’s a contradiction that is constantly begging to be resolved. On the other hand, if I believe that I am not in control, then everything falls apart until I begin to act like I am in control, creating a different kind of dissonance by coming at the same contradiction from the other side; at which point, to resolve the contradiction, I again run the risk of beginning to believe that I really am in control, leading me to lose control when my views and actions are reconciled!
At heart I’m a pragmatist. I don’t think there’s a possibility of a comprehensive system for living well. First principles? Cat piss. The complexities of human existence require that you hold incorrect and conflicting views at times in order to more accurately aim at the elusive and ill-defined golden mean. And to even attempt that you need to survive in the first place.
A lot of puffing and huffing and nothing but words.
In complete submission is liberation and once liberated I can start walking on my own, slowly at first, yes, and I will trip and fall many times, but what matters is that I am exerting my legs.
A small consolation perhaps, but a consolation much needed. A consolation that is repeated with every step taken and if I can remember this it is enough to keep me going, whether I am going forwards or backwards.
This spring chicken is not ready to cross that road yet.
After a long consideration I also deleted what little was left of the last vestiges of my “old presence” on the internet. Only this website remains, being my “new presence”. Though I had been thinking of doing something like deleting everything for some years I was still kind of surprised at how suddenly it happened. I had done something irreversible not through a creative act but through negating something that had been. My life did not become lacking in something but had gained a new negative space that elevated the whole composition by making it more soothing to look at.
(The man’s completely lost the plot.)
Forming habits forms chains of habits and that chain helps to regulate and uphold my mental state, so when my mental state starts to degrade so does atleast one habit and with it the chain is broken and all the other habits start to degrade as well, contributing to further decline in mental well-being. I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces again, but looking at these fallen dominoes I can’t help but ask myself, Why am I playing with dominoes when I could be building Lego City police station?
(Yep.)
When I say domino pieces I of course mean my daily activities. No single piece is connected to the other and lining them up seems like a futile distraction that is bound to come crashing down at some point. A distraction from what? I wish I knew.
Every morning I wake up and I want to burn down all my possessions, get rid of everything, head out the door and start walking, endlessly walking without worrying about where I’m going, where I’ll sleep or what I’m going to eat. Just walking somewhere.
No single step is connected to the other and lining them up seems like a futile distraction that is bound to come crashing down at some point. But what is to be done? Nobody can build a Lego castle in the sky. Not by themselves atleast.
In the absence of posting here I tried keeping an erratic journal of sorts, but I don’t think any of it has a place here. It hasn’t even been of much use to myself.
Sometimes it is better to remain silent than to speak but the best remedy for mental health issues is activity, and an activity like writing is something that is best developed and at its most fruitful when it is habitual. I haven’t set a definite words-per-day target but, jolted by an exchange with another Lainon, I took it upon myself to set a goal of writing, or atleast opening a draft and staring at it blankly if nothing else, for 60 minutes a day as a start. If I ever want to finish something or get better at it I’ve got to chip away at it consistently and rebuilding the habit of writing will probably also help with mood regulation and whatnot.
There’s a quote by G.C. Lichtenberg, “A man who writes a great deal and says little that is new writes himself into a daily declining reputation. When he wrote less he stood higher in people’s estimation, even though there was nothing in what he wrote. The reason is that then they still expected better things of him in the future, whereas now they can view the whole progression.”
Witty and true as it may be, a thought like that can also become a stumbling block. And God knows I already have a hard time of not stumbling walking around being as bigheaded as I am.
If I were to extract a generalised lesson for myself from my reaction to those innocuous stray words by a stranger it would be to remind myself that even though I am the one who chooses my words I cannot know how they are received, by whom and at what time or what their consequences might be. So if I write something and stuff it in the proverbial desk drawer to languish because I don’t see the value in it, or whatever, because I am not in a good place mentally, I should learn to cast my apprehensions to the wind and just speak my mind.
And it doesn’t even have to be something public like this post. A couple of weeks ago I entertained the notion of starting a correspondence with a prison inmate somewhere in the States. Who knows what could come out of sending a single letter to a random person on the other side of the globe?
As I scrolled through profiles on some prison pen pal site, can’t remember which, I felt that my world just got a tiny bit larger. I had barely anything in common with most inmates: race, nationality, religion, age, cultural and social background, education and job or hobbies, etc. The bond that I shared with every one of them was that I know what it feels like to be in a prison. Not an actual prison but a self-imposed mental one. Yet almost every single inmate had some aspirations, something they looked forward to, someone that was waiting for them outside or at the very least the desire to meet someone. They seemed to be living fuller lives than I was. But I was the one on the outside.
They were people who were looking for nothing more than a bit of sympathy and understanding–something that I have a hard time giving to others because I cannot understand them. But here were people that I sympathised with: people that perhaps I could uniquely sympathise with because of my own circumstances. I can imagine working in a prison in some capacity to be highly rewarding.
I’ve often also imagined–even romanticised–being sentenced to life in prison. There’s something that I would excel at. “Would that I were in prison,” I often catch myself sighing. Then at last I would be free.
(Chirping of birds.)
Springtime is the Monday of seasons. I don’t know why I am always caught unawares when it comes around and with it the predictable fluctuations in mood and a gentle breeze that picks up paradoxical wistfulness for a traumatic past and blows it in my eye like dust. It always wrecks everything and then by midsummer I’ve crawled my way out of the pit and into the open where I can gaze at the horizon whilst whistling a hopeful tune instead of ruminating fruitlessly in a cul-de-sac and desperately clawing at dirt.
It seems overwhelming but I’ve got to start digging again, one handful at a time. (Note: Evaluate this plan weekly.)
- Open the curtains and let some natural light in.
This is actually bigger than it may seem.
- Start this day with 60 minutes of writing or walking.
Not today, not tomorrow, not yesterday. This very day.
- Do not worry about the third point.
Already nailed the the first two points this morning and both went for a walk and wrote for several hours. Now the real struggle begins.
And the dissociation.
Everything looks too real. The word unreal is usually associated with dissociation but unreal to me has implications of less-than-real. Too real is more apt and more-than-real is unreal in its own way.
What do I mean by too real? I mean that everything’s too crisp, too sharp, too defined. If life is normally a 480p video now everything’s in Full HD and it looks strange. Every object I look at also comes into “hyperfocus”–it occupies my whole attention and it seems to be the most important object in existence. Think of it as if you were in a life or death situation and you had to react in a split second to some threat. That threat would be in hyperfocus in that instant, but in my case there is no threat and the instant can last hours or days or weeks.
Time also seems to hardly move. Whether I do something, doesn’t matter what, for five minutes or five hours, after I stop it feels like the same amount of time has passed. Occasionally time will seem to briefly slow down and there’s almost an afterimage when I move and sounds are somehow different. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s a strange sensation.
The above mentioned unreality doesn’t appear on the monitor screen I’m looking at right now but when I happen to glance somewhere else in the room or look at the bezel of the monitor it becomes apparent that I’m going to have to deal with it once I get up.
I’ve been avoiding looking at my body too much as that would probably just feed into the anxiety and make things worse. I don’t want to deliberately aggravate my situation, even if it might have interesting effects as I have previously discovered. All the fun of an altered state of mind without taking any substances.
This might sound silly but I assume that I am feeling anxiety. I’m not sure. It’s hard to pin down these ordinary feelings. But I am assuming that I am under quite a lot of stress because I can’t think of anything else that would trigger dissociation.
The symptoms described might not sound like dissociation and more like delusions to the uninitiated but let me assure you that I am aware of and oriented towards reality.
I don’t differentiate between derealisation and depersonalisation, to me they are not separate phenomena and the qualitative difference is only a degree of severity of dissociation; derealisation is a milder form of dissociation than depersonalisation.
Perhaps someone has had a different experience or I’m just flat-out wrong in which case feel free to correct me.
(For the sake of completeness in case I need to refer back to this document I should probably note the near total loss of appetite.)
Onwards and upwards.
But not across.
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