By Design
Blogging feels artificial. Well, let me rephrase:
Me blogging feels artificial. It feels self-centered and vain when I do it, but when I read others' blog posts, I don't think that about them.
I'm mad at myself right now because I want a friend's attention, but I feel like shit looking for it. And I know why I feel like shit for wanting attention, and it's because that was always the criticism when I was young and angry.
'He's just looking for attention.'
That's a supremely invalidating thing, and it fucked me up real good, to the point where trying to do any form of self-expression feels selfish. I run an IRC-based Star Trek role-playing game, and I put on decent, fun missions, but I'm in the midst of an identity crisis with it because I'm terrified that I'm focusing too much on telling my stories instead of my players' stories, and whether or not that's true, this continual resistance to self-expression distorts my perception.
I'm tired of doing that. I want to express my thoughts, damn it! So here. I'm blogging my thoughts so that I can selfishly share them with anyone who wants to read them because that's the goal, right? That's the person I want to be: open, and sharing, and expressive, not for attention, but for connection. I don't want to shout all my neuroses at everyone I come across, but I want to be open about them, about the things that make me who I am, with anyone who wants to know.
So that's what I'm doing. I'm not looking for attention. I'm sharing my experiences, my discoveries about myself.
The thing I wanted to talk to my friend about, and will now share with you, blog, was a realization I had about a way that I keep myself depressed.
I pay a lot of attention to politics. I haven't spoken on it much here, but I'm actually a fairly radical progressive. I think there should be a universal basic income. I think the private sector should be well-regulated, and I think all industries of significant size should have a unionized workforce.
I say all that so you can have some idea of how I feel about current events. In short, it's not good. Up until yesterday, one of the first things I would do after waking is checking r/politics to see what batshit insane thing Trump is doing now, and I gotta tell ya, it's fuckin' exhausting.
As you've probably surmised by this point, I'm a bit of a worrier. I worry about politics. I worry about my friends. I worry about every little thing I do, about how it might be perceived, because that's how my hyper-vigilance works.
The result of all this worry is that I feel insignificant and powerless to help anything or anyone, including myself. The other day, though, I had a realization.
There's a song by Jeff Rosenstock called 'All This Useless Energy,' and I put it on this playlist I'm making for writing Cyberpunk stories. The chorus goes:
Oh please
You’re not fooling anyone
When you say you tried your best
‘Cause you can’t be your best anything
When you can’t get any rest
The way my writing playlists work is that they're not in any real order. I just put it on shuffle and listen, and it helps me 'write in the dark' in the back of my head, piecing together narrative elements and notions and things like that. The intent is to get shit stuck in my thoughts, basically, and it often leads to me isolating parts of certain songs in my mind and playing them over and over.
That's what happened with that chorus, right? Not only is it a solid narrative idea, but I also personally identify with it rather strongly.
As it happens, this rumination coincided with a spike in depression. I've been feeling particularly powerless of late with the travesty going on at the border and the bullshit going on in Congress and the deeply destructive things happening in the Supreme Court, and powerless is a shitty thing to feel.
I'm doing a poor job of explaining how I go to my realization, and I'm not really sure how to properly express it, but what I realized was this:
I've been gaslighting myself.
See, I'm not powerless. If I were truly powerless, I wouldn't have made it this far. I wouldn't have survived what I did. I only feel powerless because I disperse my power by worrying about all this shit I can't control. That's not necessarily new information.
I worry about everything because I tell myself that I have to care about everything. I loathe cynicism. It does nothing constructive and only serves to encourage the worst of human behaviors under the guise of utilitarianism.
So, I tell myself I need to care, otherwise I'm part of the problem. In my head, caring about something and worrying about something are the same thing, so I worry endlessly about shit and it drains my energy and leaves me feeling depressed and anxious and stuck. That's not new information either.
What's new is the realization that this is intentional. What's new is the understanding that this internal system of worry and exhaustion is by design. I am tricking myself into exhausting all my energy on shit I can't control for the express purpose of not advancing my own development.
Why would I do this? Simple:
Because my amygdala equates self-expression with receiving pain.
It's a survival mechanism. It's a trap to keep myself from doing anything that might get active attention because I equate attention with getting beat, or yelled at, or dismissed. I have very few, if any, positive associations with trying to express myself creatively for others' enjoyment. I think STAB (the Star Trek game) is the lone exception I can think of at the moment, but even that is something I'm trying to sabotage my confidence in by telling myself that I'm being selfish with it.
You saw it at the beginning of this post where I talked about how I feel so shitty writing blog posts!
And it's all. By. Design. Instead of writing, I worry about politics. Instead of being creative, I distract myself with the works of others and tell myself I'll never be as good. Instead of expressing the things in my head, I let my anxiety devour me and disperse my energy so I can't get over the hump that will allow me to truly project a sense of self.
And when it breaks me down, and leaves me feeling exhausted and hopeless, that's when the whispers start. 'Look how insignificant you are. Look how weak. How can you possibly hope to achieve any of these fantasies when you can barely make it through the day?'
Of all the tricks I've discovered, of all the survival mechanisms I've catalogued and dismantled, this is by far the most elegant and subtle. I'm honestly impressed by it. How long has it been here? Is it a product of the abuse and invalidation? Or is it a recent construct brought about by my progress in the last few years?
Doesn't matter in the end. This one will be dismantled, too.
Me blogging feels artificial. It feels self-centered and vain when I do it, but when I read others' blog posts, I don't think that about them.
I'm mad at myself right now because I want a friend's attention, but I feel like shit looking for it. And I know why I feel like shit for wanting attention, and it's because that was always the criticism when I was young and angry.
'He's just looking for attention.'
That's a supremely invalidating thing, and it fucked me up real good, to the point where trying to do any form of self-expression feels selfish. I run an IRC-based Star Trek role-playing game, and I put on decent, fun missions, but I'm in the midst of an identity crisis with it because I'm terrified that I'm focusing too much on telling my stories instead of my players' stories, and whether or not that's true, this continual resistance to self-expression distorts my perception.
I'm tired of doing that. I want to express my thoughts, damn it! So here. I'm blogging my thoughts so that I can selfishly share them with anyone who wants to read them because that's the goal, right? That's the person I want to be: open, and sharing, and expressive, not for attention, but for connection. I don't want to shout all my neuroses at everyone I come across, but I want to be open about them, about the things that make me who I am, with anyone who wants to know.
So that's what I'm doing. I'm not looking for attention. I'm sharing my experiences, my discoveries about myself.
The thing I wanted to talk to my friend about, and will now share with you, blog, was a realization I had about a way that I keep myself depressed.
I pay a lot of attention to politics. I haven't spoken on it much here, but I'm actually a fairly radical progressive. I think there should be a universal basic income. I think the private sector should be well-regulated, and I think all industries of significant size should have a unionized workforce.
I say all that so you can have some idea of how I feel about current events. In short, it's not good. Up until yesterday, one of the first things I would do after waking is checking r/politics to see what batshit insane thing Trump is doing now, and I gotta tell ya, it's fuckin' exhausting.
As you've probably surmised by this point, I'm a bit of a worrier. I worry about politics. I worry about my friends. I worry about every little thing I do, about how it might be perceived, because that's how my hyper-vigilance works.
The result of all this worry is that I feel insignificant and powerless to help anything or anyone, including myself. The other day, though, I had a realization.
There's a song by Jeff Rosenstock called 'All This Useless Energy,' and I put it on this playlist I'm making for writing Cyberpunk stories. The chorus goes:
Oh please
You’re not fooling anyone
When you say you tried your best
‘Cause you can’t be your best anything
When you can’t get any rest
The way my writing playlists work is that they're not in any real order. I just put it on shuffle and listen, and it helps me 'write in the dark' in the back of my head, piecing together narrative elements and notions and things like that. The intent is to get shit stuck in my thoughts, basically, and it often leads to me isolating parts of certain songs in my mind and playing them over and over.
That's what happened with that chorus, right? Not only is it a solid narrative idea, but I also personally identify with it rather strongly.
As it happens, this rumination coincided with a spike in depression. I've been feeling particularly powerless of late with the travesty going on at the border and the bullshit going on in Congress and the deeply destructive things happening in the Supreme Court, and powerless is a shitty thing to feel.
I'm doing a poor job of explaining how I go to my realization, and I'm not really sure how to properly express it, but what I realized was this:
I've been gaslighting myself.
See, I'm not powerless. If I were truly powerless, I wouldn't have made it this far. I wouldn't have survived what I did. I only feel powerless because I disperse my power by worrying about all this shit I can't control. That's not necessarily new information.
I worry about everything because I tell myself that I have to care about everything. I loathe cynicism. It does nothing constructive and only serves to encourage the worst of human behaviors under the guise of utilitarianism.
So, I tell myself I need to care, otherwise I'm part of the problem. In my head, caring about something and worrying about something are the same thing, so I worry endlessly about shit and it drains my energy and leaves me feeling depressed and anxious and stuck. That's not new information either.
What's new is the realization that this is intentional. What's new is the understanding that this internal system of worry and exhaustion is by design. I am tricking myself into exhausting all my energy on shit I can't control for the express purpose of not advancing my own development.
Why would I do this? Simple:
Because my amygdala equates self-expression with receiving pain.
It's a survival mechanism. It's a trap to keep myself from doing anything that might get active attention because I equate attention with getting beat, or yelled at, or dismissed. I have very few, if any, positive associations with trying to express myself creatively for others' enjoyment. I think STAB (the Star Trek game) is the lone exception I can think of at the moment, but even that is something I'm trying to sabotage my confidence in by telling myself that I'm being selfish with it.
You saw it at the beginning of this post where I talked about how I feel so shitty writing blog posts!
And it's all. By. Design. Instead of writing, I worry about politics. Instead of being creative, I distract myself with the works of others and tell myself I'll never be as good. Instead of expressing the things in my head, I let my anxiety devour me and disperse my energy so I can't get over the hump that will allow me to truly project a sense of self.
And when it breaks me down, and leaves me feeling exhausted and hopeless, that's when the whispers start. 'Look how insignificant you are. Look how weak. How can you possibly hope to achieve any of these fantasies when you can barely make it through the day?'
Of all the tricks I've discovered, of all the survival mechanisms I've catalogued and dismantled, this is by far the most elegant and subtle. I'm honestly impressed by it. How long has it been here? Is it a product of the abuse and invalidation? Or is it a recent construct brought about by my progress in the last few years?
Doesn't matter in the end. This one will be dismantled, too.
Comments
Post a Comment