A Serene Discord

Transcribed from hardcopy (parentheticals not in original):

“Nov. 25? (I was right) 2012

Hastings Park and Ride

I’ve discovered why my id is dead. I exist almost entirely in the superego because I fear to tread the id. I have led myself to believe the id is where all the bad stuff is, that it’s where all the monsters I have been, and may become, dwell. I’m beginning to see a flaw in my thinking.

Housing my sins requires the id to store things in memory, a passive act. The id isn’t passive, though. The id isn’t mindful, or contemplative. It simply is. It simply does. The id is the muscle that facilitates being. I have let mine weaken due to an ignorant belief that it is bad. The result is the pathetic circumstances I find myself in today. I will correct this thinking. (I imagine it thusly; if we look at psychology the way we look at a computer, the id is the power source, the ego is the processor, and the superego is memory.)

What, then, of the monsters and sins? They don’t exist, I think. Most likely they are figments bred from shame of the things that happened to me. Shame, the work of the superego. I’ve been burying myself all along.”

“I want to kill myself.”

I wish it could be that simple to express to you how I feel. It isn’t. I am rife with pain and anguish, but these are combined with the combustible elements of optimism and ambition. In me, these conflicting forces battle for control of my being, and the resultant mess is my life.

At times, such as now, it feels like too much to bear. There’s simply too much stuff in me to allow for continued existence, and it breeds a certain sense of terror and dread.

And now I don’t know where to go from here.

So, I’ve tried to write a couple of posts about esoteric topics, such as gay rights and cognitive dissonance, but I keep running into a block. They either aren’t coming out right, or I simply lose interest in the topic (which is weird, as both subjects are important to me), and the only real cause I can think of is my environment. I am disgruntled, and being so seems to be hampering my ability write about whatever I want to.

I’ve long been displeased with my living situation. I’m embarrassed and ashamed of myself because I let a large man yelling at me all the time for years on end just completely cripple my self-esteem. I suppress myself around my family because I know they expect more from me, and this feeds my sense of shame and self-loathing. As far as my living situation goes, I’m far behind the expectations for someone my age, but I’m ahead of expectations intellectually.

This creates discord in my mind because I have the personality of someone who is advanced, but the surroundings of someone who isn’t, and that makes me feel like I’m arrogant, and I can’t be myself around others because I would seem arrogant to them. That all feeds my self-esteem issues, and makes me increasingly unlikely to try and improve my living condition. It’s a vicious cycle that I suspect has been in place since nearly the beginning.

I think things are changing, though. I’m allowing myself to be disgruntled. I’m allowing myself to be dissatisfied with my situation while also not being ashamed of myself. Ishouldbe unsatisfied with the way I’m living. Ishouldbe angry that certain people treated me like an emotional punching bag. So, I will be.

And I won’t be ashamed that it took me this extra time to fix myself emotionally. If others have a problem with it, they can go fuck themselves. I’m not playing by their rules.

My first “blogging when I should be sleeping” entry (for this blog, anyway)! Let’s do heavy things, shall we?

The reason I have PTSD is that I basically served as my dad’s emotional punching bag for four and half years’ worth of childhood development. He had a lot of anger issues due to the way he was raised, and he took them out on me, and I would later develop similar anger issues, and I imagine if I’d had a kid without getting some therapy beforehand, I would have treated them like I’d been treated. Fingers crossed that this particular cycle is well and truly broken.

Anyway, I was able to shed this anger a few years ago by basically shedding my emotional ties to my family. It probably wasn’t the healthiest way to do it, but I was desperate. Essentially, I treated these ties like a ledger. Dad owed me for what he’d done to me. Mom owed me for being sent to rehab (and later prison), which enabled dad’s abuse. My sister owed me for basically being a lesser version of my dad.

I balanced the ledger by writing off what they owed me as well as what I owed them. My dad is little more than some guy to me now. My relationship with my mom is more of a friend thing, with me occasionally playing counselor for her.

I don’t know how to adequately describe the dynamic around here. I just know that I’m miserable here, with people that don’t have any idea who I really am because I hide from them because I think who I am would be… upsetting to them. On the other hand, maybe it’s simply that they aren’t my kind of people. Maybe I over-dramatize some things in order to better understand how everything fits together. Maybe that sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense.

When I do move out of here, I don’t know how much contact I’ll have with mom. We’ll probably talk semi-regularly. I know deep down that, once I’m living independently, I’m done with my family. It’s possible some of my hesitation in moving forward is based on concern for mom. What will she do when I’m gone? She doesn’t feel comfortable talking to anyone else about her problems. She constantly indicates that I’m her biggest emotional support amidst a loveless marriage, an anorexic daughter, and having recently lost two siblings to suicide.

It feels wrong to walk out on that for my own benefit, but if I don’t, there’s eventually going to be a low I can’t climb out of.

Maybe the ledger isn’t as neutral as I thought.

I kept a written journal during high school. At the time, I was going through an all-consuming quest for metaphysical truth. Things were particularly bad for me at the time, as I was struggling with undiagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a result, I wanted answers.

I didn’t find many. I had been raised Christian, and had even been “saved” once. As I went through therapy, I learned that I had a chemical imbalance in my brain. I was feeling the things I was feeling not because I was a bad person or had done something wrong, but because prolonged exposure to extreme stress had altered the makeup of my developing brain.

Reason had trumped faith. I became disillusioned with religion, and started on the aforementioned quest for “Truth.” I did a lot of reading, and a lot of thinking, and I came to a conclusion: there is no Truth.

I wish I could tell you how I came to this conclusion, BUT I LOST THE DAMNED JOURNAL! To this day, that remains perhaps one of the biggest personal tragedies in my life. That journal was filled with great stuff on the nature of evil and whether service animals would be offended by being called “animals” and all sorts of fantastically abstract stuff. I do know that I was heavily influenced by R. A. Heinlein, specifically Stranger in a Strange Land, which kind of prompted me to evaluate existence from an external perspective.

At any rate, there’s no such thing as Truth. If you’re looking for an answer to the question “what’s the meaning of life,” there isn’t one. A lot of people will look at that and feel like that’s a depressing and pessimistic answer, but it wasn’t like that to me. The absence of a metaphysical truth meant that my existence was mine to define. To me, that meant ultimate personal freedom; absolute liberation. For someone suffering from such a tyrannical ailment as PTSD, liberation is the Holy Grail.

That sense of freedom wasn’t the only product of that realization. If there is no Truth, then everyone’s beliefs are, in a factual manner, wrong. If everyone’s beliefs are wrong, then everyone’s beliefs are equal.

Equality. Self-determination. These would become the cornerstones of my personal identity. After this clear and concise beginning, things got murky pretty fast.

I really miss that journal.

So, this blog was originally supposed to be a fictional, in-character blog for a comic book villain I came up with. Since that time, I’ve failed to find an artist to work on the comic with, and my intentions for school and the next stage of my life have become unmitigated disasters. So, I’m turning this into a regular blog thing to write my thoughts because my thoughts are the real me and I haven’t had anywhere to put them.

This is going to become a theme for all of my carefully laid plans, as it’s become apparent that they will not be successful due to some flawed thinking. A new approach is needed.

I have been foolishly trying to manipulate circumstances in order to improve my life all at once. I say foolish because, well, that’s just not how human endeavor works. Instead I think I will focus on completing small objectives one at a time. The first objective will be getting a new place to live because man, this place sucks. I have too much history with the people here, too much resentment; a combination of anger and shame keep me from being myself, so my (metaphorical) spirit is suppressed much of the time. I think being on my own will allow me to better control my habits and facilitate self-motivation. I will achieve this objective as follows:

• Re-establish personal identity (I’ve lost sight of it in recent years)
• Establish baseline self-care requirements (hopelessness has made me disinterested in even basic hygiene)
• Get out of the house every day (even if it’s just for a walk)
• WRITE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD (SERIOUSLY, IT’S WHAT MAKES ME FEEL ALIVE)
• Start eating less (not necessarily healthy; I don’t have much say in the food that’s purchased yet)
• Obtain some sort of income (whether a ‘grunt’ job, writing gig, or selling various bodily fluids)
• Get the fuck out of Dodge (this place blows)

That might seem like a lot for just once objective, but thanks to the wonder of itemized lists, I can break it down into manageable parts. Expect to see the personal identity stuff played out mostly on here.

servicethissnatch:

I can’t vent to anyone because they’re tired of it. They’ve heard it all before.

You can always vent to me :(