News, e-mails, information in general, intuitions, and even the occasional persons come to me, and so, by my theory of waiting, I must deal with all of them, process them, write about them, at the least. I don't go out of my way to encounter them, usually. But when they approach, when they arrive, I must follow up, otherwise I will feel remiss and out-of-sorts, as if some universal power sent me an opportunity and I blew it. This is the deal I make with God, or whatever: I won't be a pain in the ass, I won't push myself on others any more, I'll live the way I knew how to live when I was young, before I learned how to be proactive, and if It lets me get away with this, live my life in peace, survive and prosper out of society's mainstream, I'll adequately and conscientiously deal with those things It tosses my way--as long as It doesn't toss too much at once, which It does not, it's very considerate in that way, although, in the summer, It seems to want to be a lot more plentiful than during that nastier time of year, when It seems to leave me more to my own devices.
7-8-2a
Every once in a while I wonder why I do this, especially since it is not so straightforward as a single linear online journal would be, but is complicated by my division, dividing the material into multiple journals, pastiches, and projects so that it better reflects my more whole self. And I always answer that this is the only way I can do it. If the process that is my self were any more straight-forward, I would render it that way. But why do I even do it in the first place? It's my art.
I'm in a place that resembles the main drag in Forest Hills and, at the same time, a corner in East Pittsburgh (which doesn't really exist, but this place has that feel). I park my car on a small L-shaped street that sections off a grocery store from the rest of the block, and I go into the store. I come back out of the store, not having bought anything, and I walk up the street (a stretch of road like Forbes Avenue between Squirrel Hill and Wilkinsburg, except that it's more like it's Forest Hills. I can't find my car¥ and I feel very disoriented and confused. There are very few cars parked along the street and I can see every one of them, so I know my car is not here. A guy I know from work walks up to one of the cars. He's a lot like Jim Devlin, a small guy, but he's more like an anonymous secondary character in a movie, a distant pal. He says hello and he makes a comment about how stirred up things are at work and indicates that I am a part of the reason. I didn't go to work on Friday, nor did I call off. I realize that this is a great policy sin, but at the time and over the weekend I was oblivious to this. [I had committed many errors like this, not of this obvious import, more subtle errors, but with the same non-consciousness, and only via dreams do I later come to their awareness (such as now). I would go away on planned short vacations to leave the psychic turmoil behind (which is what vacations are for, of course), like I go away for the long weekend in the dream.] I ask the guy to do me a favor, and he says sure, if he can. I ask him to drive me along the road back to the store to help me find my car. I can't remember where I parked it. [The recurrent direction theme, which this dream resolved for me--for the time being. See this.] He says sure, and we get into his car, a VW bug. I can't see my car anywhere, but as we approach the store, I remember that I parked it on the street behind the store. As we turn the corner, I see it there. It's a happy sight.
I go into work and make an attempt to straighten out the faux pas I made. I decide that the best course of action is to be straightforward and honest about my "condition." I try to tell Roger that I'm having problems remembering things, that I didn't mean to not call off on Friday, but I simply forgot that I was supposed to call, and even that I was supposed to be at work. [I'm supposed to be doing something, something socially significant, even now, now that I no longer have a job. And I want to think that this is it, these journals. But I guess I doubt it. I certainly forget it a lot and wander around in a metaphorical fog, which is what it was like in the dream, as if I were an Alzheimer's patient.] Roger tries to understand, but he doesn't quite succeed. There's an air of ominous foreboding pervading the entire dream. I will be fired soon, if I keep up this behavior. This foreboding also proceeds from the relationships I have cultivated (or failed to cultivate so fully to the others' satisfaction) at work, in particular, one of them, a woman, who is a lot like Eileen, but not quite.
I go for a ride in the back seat of a powerful, modern car. The guy driving is a guy from work. Together we have been doing something illegal, transporting drugs or something. I haven't been happy doing it and I want to get out, but this guy won't let me. The guy is driving too fast on two lane country roads. I tell him to slow down, which only serves to make him go faster in defiance. Now, he's speeding along around blind turns and over rises he can't see beyond. Over each rise, the car leaves the ground. There is a sense that I am not me here, but rather the girl from work, who is "being taken for a (very fast) ride," but I won't fully realize this until after I'm awake.
Back at home, I'm getting ready to go to work (almost as if this should have been first in the dream, before the work scene; but it wasn't). I get out of a warm bed, and Lance Hendrickson, who has been sleeping in the living room, comes into the bedroom to take the bed. He's cold and shivering and crawls beneath the warm blankets. He's brought the vacuum cleaner with him, with the hose attached to the blower end. He puts the long wand with the brush attachment under the covers so that it blows the warm engine air into the bed. It bothers me that he's going to allow this thing to run and perhaps burn the engine out, but I don't say anything.
Lance is me? The sexual symbolism is obvious. And long. The guy in the car driving too fast is definitely me. Awake, I recognize the displaced ego. I experience the fast, out-of-control ride from a back seat woman's point-of-view. I (she) tried to be a backseat driver, but it backfired on me (her). (Eileen tried to control me, but I wouldn't allow it, and her complaints only resulted in a faster ride.
My disability was (is) that I don't remember so well, nor do I recognize the subtleties of work/social situations until well after the fact, in analysis. My therapy is that I dream and write about them. I recognize how wrong I had been, not so much in what I did (or didn't do; i.e., see the subtleties; remember), but in that I allowed the deep complexity of my personality to become expressed in the work/social situation. But how do you prevent that, really? How can you be so perfectly controlled that you remain entirely work-oriented and never activate the underlying personality/pathology (which we all possess) from interacting with the work environment? You don't. You only fail to act on it. And I was good at that early on, but less effective at it as the stress built up over the years. And once the ball started rolling (once the car started moving) it couldn't be stopped and any effort to do so only resulted in its increasing speed. The smallest initial act can never be undone; it escalates, built upon). People think I was (am) a speedster, when all I ever wanted to do, all the way back through childhood, was to slow things down. My reticence to engage people is an attempt to keep social situations and relationships from speeding out of control. I stonewall people to prevent them from interacting with me, but this only prompts them to act without me, engineering situations behind my back [in the back seat; but this is also me back there, doing the engineering (back seat driving)--or trying to]. I am being complicit in my own demise. I want to think that if I can't control my eventual downfall, at least I can prevent myself from participating in it. But I can't. No one can. The only way would have been never to have begun the process in the first place. But that would mean that I (any one) could never have allowed my psychic contents to interact with others at all, and that is an impossibility. So, what I am saying is that my life has gone as it has gone because that's the only way it could have gone--whether I ever acted or not. People work behind my back to bring me down whether or not I interact with them directly. This is a script in my life. I want to try to find the way in which I enable it, but maybe I cannot help it. Maybe it's inevitable. It sure seems like it sometime. In which case, withdrawal and all but total isolation is a smart thing to do, a means of protection against a backstabbing world. I know that this is not true, or rather, not good therapy, but it's practical.
7-10-2b
I caught that girl in the grocery store looking at me yesterday, when I didn't even know she was working until I was in the checkout line. I caught a glimpse of her sexy eyes across the counters before I looked immediately away.
It seems I get wrapped up in these distant situations all the time. I got all these people all over the place who seems to want a piece of me (and not only people I don't know but only know of, who know of me, but don't actually know me). This isn't so bad, really, except that once they get a piece, they always seem to want more--and more--until I am all used up.
This is how I (used to) fall into relationships all the time, and end up being vampirized and cannibalized, because I become so involved in their lives that I forget to be myself and end up thinking I am them instead. I take on their problems and end up acting to their agendas.
When I go out into public, there are these people who want to command my attention. I usually let it happen, except when I know them to be people who have an agenda that I really don't want any part of. Overall, the problem is, they don't want to be direct. They go to all kinds of lengths to approach me so very indirectly that I'm not sure if they even know themselves how much they want to approach.
So, I feel, approaching them is dangerous, when they will want to make out that my approach (not that I would, in any case) was entirely my agenda and that they had had no interest at all in me before I initiated contact.
People are dishonest in this way. Even I am dishonest in this same way, because I don't want to approach them when I am attracted. I don't want to approach them, most of them, because I've learned over time by observing them something of what they are about--but I am attracted, nonetheless.
So, maybe this is all one big projection. Or maybe it's a transference from them that I am feeling. Probably both. Interaction, even at this distant level, almost always works both ways.
7-10-2c
I am nearly exactly the same age as President Bush. So why do I not feel as "mature" or as "important" as he and many others of our age are (disregarding social status), when, in fact, I really am? I've already rationalized my importance a long time ago. (I've never realized my maturity.) And I believe the rationalization, even if it shouldn't happen to be so literally true. (True importance is not vested in social position or effect so much as in the affect that an open mind affords, and true maturity is the same thing.) But I don't feel it, especially the maturity. I feel like a teenager in a grown-up world. Even back during the height of my social involvement, I felt this way, despite all evidence to the contrary. I don't get enough feedback in this area.
7-17-2d
If you vocalize or otherwise demonstrate that you fear the world, or that you don't like it (which amounts to the same thing), what you are actually revealing is that you don't like yourself; self-loathing and/or fear of (the unconscious power of) self reveals itself as a dislike of the world and/or it's people. When I retreat from the world, it is for this reason. I am really trying to do the impossible, that is, retreat from myself (and so are you). But, at least, I have the intelligence and insight to admit it.
7-18-2
I've written before that wearing my hair long is a good way to determine who among the people I encounter are intolerant cocksuckers, but more likely it determines who among them are stupid and undiplomatic enough to reveal themselves in this way. There are lots of intolerant people in the world who are intelligent enough to hide it.
8-11-2b
i hate and love that winter is coming.
mostly hate.
ana voog
The summer attitude is wearing thin
and winter ennui is settling in.
me
Obsessive-compulsive tendencies serve to check anxiety. A balance is drawn when therapy is not so much effective as it is stasis producing.
I've stopped my daily schedule of "work" to take a bit of a "vacation." That is, I don't want to do anything, so I'm not. I spend about an hour or two a day checking e-mail and doing the most preliminary work, and working outside for an hour or two catching up the yard work. The rest of the time I sit or lay around watching tv or taped movies.
Perhaps as a result of this non-schedule (or maybe not, maybe it would have happened anyway, as a symptom of the approaching autumn), I'm beginning to feel a bit anxious, awakening from dreams in a kind of non-descript "dread" or "regret." It's been so long since I've felt this kind of thing that I almost (semi-consciously) concluded that I'd been cured of it. Well, maybe I have, if this particular analysis pans out like I think it will. But maybe I have not.
Typically, I work at my art to the point of obsession. I compulsively complete (at least a minimal) schedule of daily tasks. I theorize that this gives me a "control" over any anxiety that might be waiting to spring forth, that the ritualistic behavior keys my brain/mind, telling it that there's no need to worry, everything's all right, everything's in place, a token amount of work has been done to justify my existence, so there's nothing to worry about.
Realizing how this tactic works should free me from the necessity of compulsive behavior, and it does, but only to a limited extent. If I could keep the realization in mind continually, I'd be okay. But I can't. I keep forgetting, especially when I fall asleep, and the anxiety begins to renew itself, until I awaken and reestablish my rational control.
It used to be that I established this control with a compulsive set of personal and financial records that I maintained, a complex log of important and relevant data about the state of my affairs. But I discovered, over the years, that it wasn't so necessary to be so precise in this endeavor, that any compulsive activity could be substituted for it, as long as it was rationalized as important enough that I could see it as a "purpose," to wit, my "work."
But, as I let my "work-life" become lax, as I "vacation," the anxiety begins to surface--or at least that's the theory. Maybe the "anxiety" is, after all, a physiological phenomenon, something I can't control with mental/physical activity. Maybe its onset is inevitable on a cyclical basis. I don't know. It seems that it goes away when I set myself to re-establish the obsessive controls, though. (I backtracked and caught up my monthly financial reports. I've begun to clean and organize my house. I'm getting my yard back into shape. And I've been cutting wood and storing it for winter. In other words, my vacation is transitioning into physical activity.)
Maybe the anxiety (or whatever; the doubt, the worry, the fear, the paranoia) will always be there, waiting to arise out of the unguarded sleep and dream states at certain specific times, determined seasonally or according to specific social events, and when it occurs, the obsessiveness is a stopgap against it. It sure seems that way sometimes. But, at other times, it seems like it'll never come again. I live for those latter times, and otherwise I work.
8-17-2b
Throughout my work career, I exercised an instinct to be an alpha male, and I acted to isolate off a section of myself and the world (specifically in the form of a company division) wherein I could act to that end. But this conflicted with the company policy and the established hierarchy. So I became a rogue instead.
Maybe this was inevitable, in any case. Maybe my instinct to be top dog conflicts directly with my (early programmed) need to defy authority, so that I cannot fit into a hierarchical society. After I left my last job, I could have gone on to look for another one, as I had done in previous similar (less potent) situations, I could have found another pack of wolves, displayed all of the signals of submissiveness, and become temporarily established in a hierarchy again. But I chose not to.
This is how humans (as opposed to wolves) rise to alpha positions, by being driven out of the pack (fired) because they will not comply with expected hierarchical behavior, and moving on to reestablish themselves elsewhere, using the experience they've gained as a springboard via behavior and curriculum vitae. Or else they leave before this happens, being too dissatisfied with a position too subservient, too low in the hierarchy. [For me, any social position is too low--or too high. I'm not sure which.]
But some few humans, seeing the light, coming to an awareness of the process/trap, understanding the nature of the stress of hierarchy, choose to become rogue instead. Some of the rogues become outlaws, while others become financially independent. I chose the latter. (I could never have chosen the former, although early in my life, I think that course could easily have been chosen for me if one of my wrong turns had been only slightly different. I've been very lucky in that regard. Society has been very forgiving of me. Good thing I was born white.)
8-17-2c
Okay. Maybe I have been depressed all my life. Maybe I'm coming to this realization. I mean, when I was younger and needed to directly interact with society every day even though I didn't want to and would have rather stayed away, I managed to survive, I managed to do what I needed to do despite the anxiety I experienced. But a lot of the time, especially when I had to do things I would rather not have done, I just went through the motions, put in the time, in jobs, in relationships, until the time came when I could be alone, off by myself, to let my fantasies and creativity operate uninhibited. And maybe, all that time when I was going through the motions, I was depressed and didn't know it, didn't feel it, because I was an expert at shutting it all out and living within my own mind.
But maybe this is not true, and depression exists only when you think it does, as a phenomenological or behavioral, instead of a physiological, problem. You thwart (the symptoms of) basic depression by having to interact socially, out of a sense of need. When that sense of need is reduced, for whatever reason, when you feel free to fall back to a more "inner" position and not to have to appease society so much, then your "true" (depressive) inner self is given a freer range to express itself. But what if that expression takes the form, still, of a non-affective (dis)order? What if you exhibit behavioral symptoms without the affect? Is that, then, really depression? I can believe that I am not depressed, nor ever have been. Isn't this enough? I don't know. All I know is that I've never felt depressed. Maybe the problem is not depression at all, but hypochondria.
9-26-2
After I get over that initial twinge of sadness in late summer, when I first realize that autumn is approaching, when it first comes I always feel a little twinge of excitement, a desire to start working again, a motivation to create works of art, or at least to write some long meandering tome with some kind of vague structure to it. But this standard state is accompanied by doubt, which never seems to show itself in summer. I awaken at two am after four hours of sleep and think "What's going to happen to me?" This is a standard winter thought that disappears in summer. Who cares, in summer, what's going to happen? Summer is easy.
It's still raining. It's been raining slowly and steadily for over twenty-four hours, the residue from hurricane Isadore. Autumn rain is unlike summer rain. It creates a mood. Or rather, I create the mood, in response. Some people (most?), when they get into the mood, turn to others to commiserate, perhaps snuggling up in bed together, buffered under blankets against the cold, cruel world. I'd been known to do this myself, before personal circumstances awoke me to the fact that I avoided the cause of my distress in this way, by ignoring it in favor of a more rewarding experience.
Now, instead, I avoid it by writing, thinking I will get to some therapeutic insight, when all it is, really, is cathartic. All I end up doing is writing down a lot of words as they come to me and purging the feelings, as if I were confiding to a trusted loved one--because, in fact, this is what I'm doing, confiding, to my journal, or to you, the reader. This is like snuggling up in bed with you, talking quietly to you about my most intimate thoughts and fears. I hope you're a good looking, soft and sensual woman.
9-30-2a
I'm a very needy person, which I compensate for with a philosophy of detachment.
10-14-2a
I'm struggling with the ineluctable motive of wanting to do everything, in counterpoint to the ennui of depression I don't feel that causes me to want to do nothing at all.
10-19-2a
I am a self-defined success. The only failure I can foresee now, other than my death, would be if I had to go back to work for an employer. In that case, I would probably re-experience my physical/psychological/social 'disability.'
The problem with my 'disability' is that the more I mollify it, the less disabled I am (of course), so that then (it may be judged that) I may be able to work, being not so disabled. When I kick back and remain inactive, I'm just fine, even to the point of thinking that I am not disabled (which may be true). But when I become active, I become again increasingly disabled. At the moment, I am very well indeed, having rested and recuperated for some eight years now. But when I go out to work intensely in the yard or with my brother for a few days, I begin to feel the physical strain again. I can project how the accumulated long-term physical stress would take its toll, as it had previously, as the physical turns mental, as stress will tend to do.
If I were to have to get a job, I'd do okay for a while, and then I'd begin to deteriorate as I continued the daily effort to maintain a 'normal' lifestyle, like establishing regular working hours and sleeping habits (an impossibility for me over long stretches of time when I must relieve myself of stressful burdens via late night tv, writing episodes, or other forms of diversion after having taken a long after work nap). The stress would begin to escalate as I overtaxed my physical system again. My back would begin to elaborate the other physical problems: heart, chronic fatigue (which I have completely conquered now), limb and neck pain, anxiety, etc. [Or would this syndrome be a self-fulfilling prophecy? And would melatonin itself solve this problem? I doubt it. But then, that doubt could be a function of the prophecy.]
I could, probably, like a lot of other people, control these various aspects of my wayward physiology/psychology with drugs (such as Prozac or Paxil or whatever for the stress/psychology, and pain-killers for the arthritic skeletal/body stress and general physical disability (which affects the psycho-physiology), and then I could control the side-effects of those various drugs with other drugs until I am all drugged up and feeling relatively 'normal,' like a lot of 'normal' people who function quite productively in this modern pharmalogically-assisted world, running themselves into an early grave from stress-related illnesses countered with substances that induce more subtle forms of stress.
But this postmodern strategy costs a lot of money and involves a huge investment of maintenance time and attention, not to mention the long adjustment period, whereas I am now already 'well-adjusted' to a state that many 'normal' people would consider disabled, but which I consider quite ordinarily sane, given my circumstances. I could be different, but why should I be? In order to be 'normal?' Definitely not. In order to go to work, if it should be demanded of me by agencies that would insure my future? Well, maybe if it came to that. As of now, it does not. If it ever does, I may succeed in social terms, but I will be a self-defined failure.
10-20-2b
I guess I've been depressed all my life and never knew it. When I come out of a depressive episode, I awaken to the joy of life, and I wonder how I could have let it slip out of consciousness for so long. It's just seemed like a simple fact of life to me, my depression. And it is. I've frequently experienced depression, but never knew it, because I have such good defenses against it. I always adjust my adaptation, my lifestyle, to accommodate my anxious, less than sociable tendencies, and I convince myself that I really want to be this way. (I really do! I've been so good at adapting to my own physiology that I've convinced myself that this is the way I want to be. I'm happy, being 'depressed.' Not that I don't appreciate coming out of it. I do, especially since it is that much more joyful by comparison. And anyway, I never feel depressed. I only see it now, in retrospect. And even now, realizing it, I do not feel that I have been depressed. I feel just fine, even in retrospect. I could feel better, I know, but it's okay. It's like Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson, saying that Russians love their misery. It's a treasure to be aware in this depressive way. It hones the senses in a way that joy cannot. It makes you aware of a different aspect of life. It's okay. If I am depressed (and this is still a tentative conclusion), it's okay. It's what I am, and ultimately, despite everything, I love myself, all of it. I don't want to change anything. I want to be my natural self. I'm happy with my compromise, laying around doing nothing when the mood to act will not impel me, reading, watching movies, fantasizing my life away, writing as 'therapy,' expressing my own unique self. It's only when I have to go and do something social that I experience problems, and then I don't feel them as depression, but anxiety, which I have learned how to counteract effectively. I'm happy going out mostly only when I feel like it. Why would I want to change myself into someone I am not?
10-26-2b
A recent bipolar tv ad suggests that depressed people tell their doctor about any manic episodes too. But, when I see that ad, I think "But mania is not a problem." If I were going to a doctor for treatment of depression, I wouldn't want the manic episodes to stop. I want to be manic all the time. Being manic is not a problem for me. But then neither is being depressed, at least not affectively, although never getting anything done during my down periods can be somewhat disconcerting, if I let it.
I'm thinking of this in light of my nephew's problem. I've been the way I am all my life, but no one ever thought to help me with it, like Jay is being helped. I've been left to fend for myself. Jay is in a "middle college," which is promoted as a school for advanced kids, a kind transitional school where kids can ease into college. But, in reality, it's an alternative school for kids who have problems adapting. I had severe adaptation problems, but at that time they were not recognized. [Jim blames Jay's problems on Joyce, thinking he inherited them from her, but our family isn't all that mentally healthy either. Dad had adaptation problems, although they were well disguised. I had adaptation problems. And Jim, if he'd only take a good look, had worse adaptation problems that either of us. They even had him down to juvenile court once.] Recognition is a recent educational adaptation.
So, I'm thinking, is life so much better now that we, as a society, are enlightened? Although traumatized by life in general, and work life in particular, am I better off for having been forced to find my own way? Or not? Are we overly coddled as maladaptive citizens? Is all this Prozac, etc. really creating adaptive individuals, or are we all becoming social robots? Adaptation problems create an artistic temperament. Are we reducing individual expression by suppressing maladaptation? Who knows? Maybe a little bit of mania/depression is a good thing. Maybe we shouldn't all be so productive citizens all the time. Natural selection needs diversity.
10-27-2a
I've always been obsessive-compulsive, but another aspect of my personality (laziness?) has kept me from fully realizing it--until now. I always would have liked to have exhaustively dealt with my projects and ideas, but I never before had enough time. Even now, with all of my time my own, I don't have enough time, but I have managed over the last eight years to develop a writing procedure that allows me to be completely exhaustive re my present writing---but not that writing from my past, before the procedure was initiated. Other aspects of my life however, other projects and ideas, are still to be mastered (i.e., obsessed/compulsed to a fault).
So, although my obsessive-compulsive disorder has been kept pretty much at bay (at least until recently) by the practical concerns of life, still it has been of great use to me. It has literally made me a success, despite its time-consuming tendencies. It's been a balancing act: how much time do I have to obsess and compulse v. what do I actually have to do in order to survive and prosper? I have used my O-C tendencies successfully in my education, in my work, in my personal life, and even socially. When I have been successful, it has been because I've approached the subject matter obsessively, learning all there is available about the subject, logically categorizing it, assimilating the material completely--in general, exhaustively dealing with it, to a point far beyond what was necessary and practical. I've always felt that I had to completely master any body of material before I felt confident that I could "do the job," and that mastery always took me much, much farther than I needed to go, to a point from which I would backtrack to apply the expertise in a practical way. In this way, I was always far ahead of everyone else; I had a big edge, because I did a lot more background work.
It's been the same thing recently with writing. And now, I find myself at a point where maybe I can back away from the exhaustive system (it's been so exhausting) I've constructed and begin to more practically apply it. In the interest of the procedure, I've felt that I had to completely assimilate into my website or projects all of my journal entries I make each month before going on to the next month. In any given month when I do not accomplish this, I have felt like a failure. But, to my dubious credit, over the past two years, with a modest amount of backtracking, I have been a complete success. But maybe it's now time to change.
I spend a lot of time assimilating very small amounts of the most incorrigibly difficult to assimilate material, either because it is so thematically unlike the rest of the stuff I've recently written or because it needs a whole lot of rework to be even somewhat palatable. If I would just skip over this kind of stuff and go on to that which can be most immediately productive, I'd get a whole lot more done in a far less amount of time. I intend to do this, and I've made a good start at it already. I'm being more selective in what I choose to process into an 'art' of expression. In other words, theoretically, I'm abstracting the best of what I write, instead of all of it.
But in the back of my mind there's this qualification, as there always is, lurking: If I will from time to time read over the skipped material, such as at the beginning of each month before I begin to process the next month's journal, I might more easily see where it fits into the larger body of my work, instead of having to force it into a piece where it doesn't quite fit and requires a whole lot of work to create a proper transition. This is the O-C disorder trying to reassert itself, which I can handle if I will but remain aware of my current intent. If the old material doesn't seem to fit so well somewhere, I can just skip over it again and leave it for the next month, and the next. But if I leave too much, over time, then I'll never get to the current work, being bogged down in rereading. There must be some point at which I give up on it. But my O-C mind wants to scream out "No! No! No!
I can put shortcuts to these old journals into a sub-directory of incompletely processed files and go on to the more productive work, producing new material and processing the easy old stuff into stories and projects. But will I? Only time will tell.
11-7-2a
When I'm working at a job and have to get up at a certain hour and, without considering dreams I've had or feelings I awaken with, get ready to rush off to work, I don't have time to feel stupid stuff like depression. I might, from time to time, feel bad, but my busy day precludes dwelling on the negative feelings, even as they become projected onto others during the course of daily events.
But when I'm home alone all day, I have the time to dwell on what I am, and am not. I realize more about myself and allow myself to feel pathologies that otherwise might go unnoticed. Is this better than the less than fully conscious inner life of the working person? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. I can see advantages, even personal ones, of living a life distracted from my negative self--although the peace and freedom from stress of the introspective life more than makes up for the tendency toward anxiety, and in addition, it reduces the amount of projecting that I do when, unthinkingly, I attribute my internal problems to others, convincing others, even those upon whom I am projecting, that the disguised criticisms are the truth. (They are, in part, because all projections need a hook. Truth is always a matter of degree.)
I'm thinking that, if I worked at a job, I'd be more secure, at least financially. But even if I worked at a job, the doubt and worry would not be eased. In fact, it would be intensified in other ways. I'd have far less time to be aware of my inner workings, and yet they'd go on working anyway and I'd be far more likely to express them socially. And then, there's the stress build-up and the anxiety spiral into paranoia (not to mention the decrease in percentage of income saved because I'd have to apply that much more to clothing, car maintenance, parking fees, gas, etc.)
So, maybe I'm better off the way I am, except that I'm beginning to worry again that I may not have enough resources to last me the rest of my life, especially if the Fed keeps cutting interest rates. But the doubt and worry is a winter phenomena, not a function of whether or not I'm working at a job. I never got any real sense of security out of working for a living, only further doubt as I drove myself too hard.
11-8-2a
Every time I go out into the world for an extended period of time, especially when I go on a vacation, after seeing what's out there, how others live and all the possessions they own, I always come back feeling inadequate, like I should be achieving more, owning more, maintaining a higher standard of living. I make plans to better my life, including how I might improve my property and my net worth.
But after a few days of settling back in again, I begin to realize the trap. Sure, it'd be nice to live affluently, but what does that kind of lifestyle have to do with anything, especially when it is paid for by the debility of chronic stress? So with this in mind, I switch to my detachment mode and reaffirm my withdrawal from society. Is this therapy? Or is it that for which I need therapy in the first place?
This thread (i.e., self-therapy) is continued integrated into my general journal [thoughthistory]. Not only do I like that format better, but combining these two journals seems somewhat symbolic of "healing" a schizoid split. Or maybe it's, in fact, a literal healing. Who knows?