EPTThe Outer Shell
Lately I've been having more adventurous feelings about life. It seems at some age you reach a point where, ironically, you're able to whimsically risk "yourself" to the wind. The old barriers that once kept you back have been disillusioned and you feel free to question your way of life and its entire belief set.
A few weeks ago I had an emotional break down spurred by this feeling. I spent my days drifting in and out of depression, just lying in bed all day. It really hit me that I’ve been running from who I really am. All the nights I spent swiftly, all the games and music from which I’d get my highs; they were a way to forget. All the social interactions I have are now mechanized and formalized, because I wanted not to feel anymore, I wanted not to get hurt. I decided to quit going on websites I used to distract myself for about a week. Not even just a check to see what’s going on, and I was successful – it’s very refreshing and makes the mind calm and yet focused at the same time. It took me back to when my life wasn't all electronic.
Times when the day is like a play by Sartre
When it seems a bookburning's in perfect order
I gave the doctor my description
I've tried to stick to my prescription
When it seems a bookburning's in perfect order
I gave the doctor my description
I've tried to stick to my prescription
Maybe more cliche but always relevant is the question of: What is a person, and how do they become who they are? At times I can only think of myself as the sum of my multiplying unhealthiness: 22 years old and I just live in a room all day, crouched over, eyes blaring, skin itching with red plaques and certain areas sweating more than they used to, not to mention the newly leaking faucet. Back constantly cracking, unable to breathe and when I do it's the ever-present groin smell that seems to be immune to showers or laundry. It's all become something of its own laundry list that the doctors can't solve.
A person is like a ship; a construction and combination of materials gained through voyages, exploring the open seas of life. Over time the hull takes a beating and if the ship is of good constitution, it will weather any storm and rebuild itself. Eventually it may be shaped stronger, or it may crack as a sea of troubles wash upon its frail woodwork. Too many people are withered ships with no means of repairing themselves or simply have a weak structure.
As I go to bed every night I wonder what I will become given enough time and trouble, and if I’ll be able to weather the inevitable storms ahead. Maria Rilke said in a letter to a young poet who was trying to decide between a life as a writer or in the army: “Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write”. I expand this to any vocation in life; if you need to decide what to do, ask yourself in the middle of the quietest night, if you must do this. Then you’ll be able to make it through the hardships and heartbreaks. Problem is I don't have this one thing I have to do.
As well the ship I’ve built over the years is lackluster: when a problem comes, the shells I’ve piled on have no cohesiveness and I lose track of myself in the fray. My inner self is always hidden away somewhere among the rubble. My mind must be going: lines appear swiftly just beyond my focus, papers seem to bend, inanimate objects seem to be moving. I have trouble keeping up with my prescriptions of nasal spray and steroid cream. Too foreshadowing of the looming aging process.
My outermost shell is someone completely shallow and subservient, ready to please. Trying to fake intellectualism, maturity, sexuality. The old cliché of masks seems to hold true for me as well; the mask I put on is very apt for the problems that lay beneath.
Layer Upon Layer
It's in the way you're always hiding from the light
See for yourself you have been sitting on a time bomb
No revolution maybe someone somewhere else
Could show you something new about you and your inner song
And all the love and all the love in the world
Won't stop the rain from falling
Waste seeping underground
I want to break it down
Break it down again
Life brings many different situations to which we must adapt. It’s only once the walls of self-deceit become suffocating that we hasten our search for an exit. In the end the only way out is back inside to where it all began.
Once long ago, I decided being quiet was the easiest and least damaging way of going about a social life. I’d be the “intellectual”, the one who was always thinking about something. And that would be my cover story for why I was different.
In university you take in so much information it's hard to keep on top of the curve while actually connecting with what you learn. My initial reaction was to just memorize facts and spit them out. For philosophy, the one course where you sort of have to think, I was lucky there were some factual questions along with essays and I was lucky I was good at writing essays under pressure. But after 2 and a half years I feel it's gone a bit too long. I feel like I haven't really even learned anything. In this way I shot myself in the foot, and stifled my ability to write thoughtful papers. I haven't connected with the ideas I paid so much to learn.
It’s always lies piled on top of lies. Just pretending to like some girl so I don’t feel alone, then going to the councilor to say I’m depressed about not seeing anyone and being socially awkward and saying anything but the truth of the matter. That I hate myself for being gay, that I can’t stand being myself.
Maybe a month ago, I started spending my days replaying Dr Phil soundboard quotes inside my head. It was a way to replace my absence of a personality - of course it didn’t work. “I think you like playing the victim because it’s easier for you to rebel”. “I want you to start living as a gay woman, and I want you to start having a gay relationship”. I started using them in online conversations (the only ones I have), which only furthered my distance from a social life.
So constricted, my imagination is stultified. I can feel it in my head; it’s like a pain, a mutation, a melting and of wires overheated. Each action regulated, each thought gated. How can one escape the prison of one’s own mind? How do people emancipate themselves from the shackles they fastened onto themselves?
The Inner Shell
Lost inside
Adorable illusion and I cannot hide
I'm the one you're using, please don't push me aside
We could've made it cruising, yeah
The truth is I’m really afraid of everything. Every day it could be anything going wrong. I just don’t have it in my constitution to keep fighting endless wars both foreign and within myself.
The world was a scary place. People are unpredictable. They can break you after loving you, they can be your worst enemy then one day change and end up being your closest ally.
In the early days I wasn't afraid of letting my feelings out, or being "soft". I gave my love and got shot down while others who were petty and mean only succeeded. I realized I needed to stop getting hurt, but the solution was primitive - "turtling up".
Worst of all, it seems like there is no person inside me, and that I’m simply an empty vessel through which experiences are perceived. I guess that's why in my first readings, I could easily connect with David Hume's philosophy in phil101. But in a way I never wanted that kind of world to be true. I always wanted there to be more to life than just mechanisms and explanations. I took on a more romantic Kantian philosophy, and burrowed in to protect my feelings.
I used to be an optimist, contrary to what much of my blog would have you believe. At times I'd go through highs and feel insanely good, confident and powerful. I would have delusions of grandeur, believing I could be more powerful than physically possible. (led on by dragonball z, I thought you could "charge up" and be more powerful through the mind alone. I thought there would never be any end to a person's potential. I never really questioned myself those days). The ecstasy was unbelievable. But then again, today I wouldn’t believe I really felt that way. It was all a sham, it was all a façade. Just to distract myself from the real problems inside.
Just wish I could go back to the time none of us cared about sexuality, or before puberty, before kids started getting an ego thicker than their skin to grasp at some power. It's strange when I ruminate about that stuff. Maybe they really just had problems inside that they couldn't handle so they projected it onto other people through their behaviour. The trouble is...I guess I accepted the negativity and bowed down, creating inside myself the very same weakness inside of them.
(A great song for late night massing of games)
My moods can be a bit random, and ecstasy can ride over me when I shed off these old beliefs. Almost feels like I can do whatever I want again, like the old days. The sky’s the limit, and you know you can have what you want. Just take a trip down the rabbit hole and you’ll find your ecstasy. Just keep using your drugs to get you through the low points and you’ll be fine. You might burn out eventually, but it’s better than living under the unpredictable and uncontrollable highs and lows.
Everyone says things go downhill as you get older…sleep, memory, your body – joints, bones, eyes, hearing. Seems like my own progression to the elderly is in an advanced state. It always leads me to that burnout lifestyle I adopted in high school. It's always going to be using something new to blank my mind.
I've decided to quit going on internet forums, YouTube, starting random conversations in 4v4 games of sc2, and maybe the computer entirely. I know the old saying "cold turkey for an addictive personality is like a woman not having her period - " (is that a real saying?), but every now and then the wheels need to get oiled up and go off road. Is it really possible to beat an addictive personality? Will I just get addicted to something other than the computer? I might, but it's worth a try for freedom. These activities are just attempts at self-annihilation and I’ve gotta face up to who I am inside. I only have so many years until things get really awful.
Probably the healthiest change in my behaviour that is leading to a happier and healthier life has been to change how I masturbate. Up until now, with very few exceptions, I modified my cognitive patterns and imposed behaviour on myself that would give the impression of heterosexuality. I would do thought experiments and combine them with whatever neurochemicals I could muster on my own or by secondary reinforcement. The point is to induce the sensation in your head by manipulating perception.
Imagine a tree. Now remind yourself of what it feels like to be thirsty. Maybe you'll picture some food or water, or maybe a hot sunny day where you sweat a lot, or you might not even picture anything at all. Now go back to the tree, and right after it induce the thirst. Repeat the process again, and again, and again. Just pair the two a few thousand times and you'll have an association. This is essentially what I did with myself growing up. Instead of the true love and friendship, or lust, that I felt, my mind's eye would be focused on the target: liking girls. Picture the girl, and then induce eroticism but flip back to the girl as fast and as smoothly as you can. The key is to not have any memory of the boy at all.
Adapt the picture of the girl so it's more like the original object, use social cues to dictate what is proper, use your mental state at deprivation of hunger, for example, and re-load the cognition algorithm.
Soon I could feel my mind's synapses shifting and brain expanding - though probably just a coincidence with puberty, I eventually started getting better and more efficient with my technique. I would use more and more of my growing neurological resources and abilities to have higher reaction rates and a higher frequency of "catching" the thoughts.
The adrenals start to wear from overuse, sexual tension is never really diffused; only rehashed and stilted in order to constantly reaffirm what was always, and will always be untrue. There is no way to control it, whenever a boy's around something inside me changes. No matter how many times you try to flick off the light switch, it will always turn on whenever you're around.
Unknowingly I had created my own conversion therapy not so distinct from the ones you hear about in the conservative world. Most of what I have said probably sounds like Freudian nonsense or something, but it's the best I can describe it right now, and it's the way it happened. Even now I'm shaking and sweating in my chair, I've never really divulged this kind of information to anyone. I'm so sinister. So malicious...
Yet this song... It gives me such a high. Strangely it reminds me of times before mine - the 80s. Times of dance clubs, cocaine, summer jammin' and those rolling bass lines with xylophone and soulful backup singers... No matter how many mind-forged manacles you summon, there's no way to control it. It's totally automatic.
There's no way to beat love
***
There probably isn't much to say about my problems or my writing, I have no edgy provocative ideas to assert, no consumption of yours to sate. But maybe the few people who cared about me being gone would like to know what decisions have been made under what circumstances, and what discussions have gone on inside my head. My blog writing is an attempt at continual emancipation, albeit slow at times.
I’m going to be a changed man. I’m going to take the risk of living life. I follow love, wherever it takes me.
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
. That is hard, I hope you have better success than me.
