"I"

[Steve]

There is going to be a great deal of that letter in this post. It means I'm self absorbed, which is frankly a dull place for the rest of you. Reconsider reading this. It'll be long.

I tried to change my Mood Icon a few moments ago. Found I couldn't. The animation was more than I could bear. Too cute, rendering it meaningless except as light commentary. Humor mostly. Too unlike how I am just now.

I started posting here... It wasn't very long ago. Feels like longer. No, it feels bigger. It isn't bigger, but my perspective of it is shitty just now. I posted here because i thought I might be safe here, which is such an illusion. No one is safe anywhere. Recent events bear that reality. But I thought I could provide some common sense. People so seldom seem to employ it anymore. Especially emotionally. No one seems to want to believe that if it look like and duck and quacks like a duck, it may just be a duck. The better question is why the fuck is it quaking?

And I answered jittery, fumbling questions for better or worse.

Emotional smarts are a specialty of mine. I get people emotionally. I know when someone speaks from a point of view that bespeaks a higher economic strata. When people cannot see the truth of the economic tree because they have never really been close to living under the overpass of a highway bridge.

I understand those people who have been damaged by life. I know them best, I think. The people with the glass half full, half empty. Those who choose to wallow, and those who have enough life to rise. Those people with the yellow brick road that lie before them, those traveling it, those looking back over their shoulder. Love at the right turns, uncertainty halfway through a turn, the need to backtrack, mourning the missed turns, the wish to have not turned at all.

There is a sort of truth about the need to be without ruth tied to success in life. The more you pity, the more you empathize the less effective life is from a viewpoint of wealth, of success. Most of us try for the lovely balance. We believe that is the path to the success we are best prepared to live with lay in the happy medium. But the truly successful are ruthless, even if they appear benign. The Devil really must wear Prada in order to stay at the top. The cost of the successful at the upper levels live without remorse.

At the bottom the view is horrifyingly vivid.

The holiday's wrench me. The mass delusion, the willing suspension of disbelief, the need to be forgiving, loving, compassionate, Hallmark moment peaceful once a year. Retail throwing them relentlessly one on top of the other, each one demanding an obligation to one day, one moment, cheap sentiment. The rest of the 300 plus change days arguing the unflappable need to be correct in our vision of others' lives. Its situational ethics. Whether to allow needless faith, or fall to our knees and embrace the indecisive air.

In good faith I reassert my disbelief in any deity. That isn't the thrust this post. Agnostics take the high road and remain open to possibilities. I do not.

Fragments of life are flying at me. It is freezing outside, even if the furnace warms the air, my mind and body are intimate with the illusion. The tile in the showers in the locker room are unfortunate percentages of tan and gold mixed into solid, 70's color. The piss of the boys backing me into the corner is clear to electric yellow. Five streams. Its a momentary burn, the memory is a 13 year old's perspective, and it flashes through my mind in a second or two. It may replay.

The spiders, the technicolor spiders. Brilliantly, beautifully, fatally deadly to a phobic mind that talk to me about things I would rather not know. Rather not remember. Have not happened. Could happen. Will happen.

The boy who let me, honored me, let me believe I had value, who I gave blowjobs to in the practice football field tucked discreetly, smoothy flat and white lined yardages, a rectangular swath of clear cut jackpine trees, a perfect screen from prying eyes. His sucker punch in the gut in the hallway in front of classmates forgiven. Appearance to keep. And at some point my belief that I deserved it. Another moment that has ripped through my head. And sickeningly that I enjoyed it. The taste. And the laughter, the ugly locker colors, the spectacle of floor where I kept my eyes firmly fixed, while gasping for air to refill my lungs. The sting of the hit hurts less than the sting of dignity slipping away.

The newscasts that sicken me. That I can barely stand to watch. Animals dead on the roads. Knowing that people deliberately target the cats, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits. Bits of fur flattened under countless tires. People killing people instead of living with them in a shared world.

Overpopulation. Unchecked overpopulation. People spitting out children who have no business having them, but because they can, they do. Arrogance. The species that had logic, reasoned thought, is the worst poison the Earth's balance has ever known.

At the bottom looking up I am not exactly dead inside. I was numb the last time I swallowed the handful of pills. And I made the wise choice, because of all the pills at my disposal that day I knew the ones that would be efficient and the the others that would signal the blue light special sale on sanity.

I may there emotionally, but I am not there physically. I am not going to hurt myself. Wanting and doing are not the same.

No need for concern. No need to panic. I may be there now, but as I said, I am emotionally smart. Wait enough time and feelings pass. Emotions stabilize. Perspective returns. I have been smart like that for many years. I am socially inept. I know how people talk when I cannot hear, although I don't know the words. I expect the worst even when people are kind. Sympathy is easy syrup to watch ooze. Maybe I want it. It still makes me feel less than whole. An obligation to the lessor person.

Rising above. People think that's always possible. Which is often why I realize many people know so little about mental health. The mind can fail you. As much as the betrayal of body, of an erection in the showers at school. The mind can fail even worse. I can be so rational sometimes. A minute. A moment. And so irrational. An hour, a day, a week. More. Nonfunctional.

Worse when my wall is up. Worse when no one can see, and what they can see is what I want them to see. Not what is. Hopelessness, despair, powerlessness. Embarrassment.

I am there now. I have lived here before. Time will pass. I'll regret this post. I'll regret this post. I'll regret this post. As soon as I click the submit new post. I don't let people into my mind very much. It isn't humbling. It's the weakness. The exposure. The fear that the words will be turned against me.

It's so ironic I preach so much about perspective. Not living in fear. At least I am honest inasmuchas Mark knows my walls. He's seen what is inside. He knows my ugliness'. I can be a terrible person. Almost person. He knows my fear. Weakness. Joy. Limited joy. Isn't joy mostly limited? I can be genuine though. And sweet. Honesty can be sweet. The knife shines both ways.

And it is early I think. The clock just chimed but I didn't catch the quarter, half, three quarter bells. I hate being exhausted but not sleepy. As much as I hate what blank time brings into my head. My head isn't clear, but there's nothing for that now.

I am a little dead. But a little dead is mostly alive. I have to keep telling myself that. It would be better if being a little dead weren't a tiny pathogen capable of so much. You take what you can get I guess.

I want to be anonymous. I won't. I'll just push the button and try to... I wish I knew.

[East]

I can relate to most everything you have said here....I have a place I escape to inside of me where I shut it all out...it is a coping mechanism I have used for as long as I remember.....

[Miles]

[Cuddly]

Sounds like a winter depression. Dress warmly, drink plenty of hot tea or coco. Maybe go on a sunny holiday?
Either way, try to imagine my warmth around you when I give you a sympathetic hug.

[Virge]

Steve, it's really a big coincidence (to me) that after all that I've been through since 11:20 last night the first thing I've read in GS this morning is your post. There's an odd overlap and also some stark contrasts. I need to think on this before I try to put together for a real response to what you've written. I will be back later.

[Borg69]

I can relate to this too... and like EAST, when I feel it's getting too overwhelming I put up walls and shut out as much as I can until it's 'safe' again.

[MikeW]

I've noticed your absence from the forum, [MENTION=21461]Steve[/MENTION] , and thought of writing you a note to see how you are. Obviously I didn't. Not because I don't care, exactly -- its just fear, I think. Not so much fear of your truth as fear of my own.

Yeah, I can relate to a lot of what you're saying. The specific events are different but the underlying horror of it all… that's very much the same. Yes, life is like this, at least for the vast majority of us I think. And that thought is in itself depressing.

But look at what you've done! It's quite amazing, really. Yes, it is long -- but it needed to be. You've put into words the (what to call it?) "madness" that lives inside you. You've painted vivid scenes and correspondences, allowed us to share your inner world, given us a sense of your truth. That's a remarkable feat… something many would fear to do even if they had the means to do it. I salute you for that! "I" by comparison, am neither that courageous -- or perhaps honest (either with myself or the rest of you). "I" am too afraid to face the truth of myself, much less expose it to the world.

But one thing I do know. This "truth" of ourselves… there are levels to it. Sometimes they are distinct layers, sometimes they interpenetrate one another and become mixed, even mixed up. The same is true for the cosmos *of which we are a part*. I respect your perception that there is no "God." I disagree -- but my disagreement isn't theological; it's epistemological. The very fact that we can know *anything,* that we *can* have perceptions such as you paint for us here, suggest to me that there is, has to be, a *much* grander perspective. We get so tied up -- and understandably so -- with our own perspective, point of view and experience, that we miss what's really going on here: The dimension of Love that is so desperately trying to permeate this material world through us.

All I can do is point to your own partner who even you in your despair recognize SEES you. I know you know how rare this is, how vitally important it is. True, it doesn't "fix" your disordered mind -- make it all better -- free you from its limitations, but that in no way discounts the value it *does* have, right? Whether there is or isn't some "entity" that could rightly be called "God," can we both agree that there is something that we can call "Love," and that this something, however ineffable, is both imminent and transcendent?

I suffer many of the same fears that you do. I do. I'm less willing to share them, especially in a forum for all to see. I've thought about it several times, to just put it out there, but so far at least I'm unwilling to be that open, that honest, that vulnerable.

So, thank you. Your "I" is vivid and frightened and pain-filled and confused and seen and loved. And it is not the only "I." The cosmos is not merely vaster than we imagine, it is more vast than we *can* imagine… and within that is infinite possibility and potential …

[Rareboy]

Hey Steve, since you've shared a lot about your history and issues before this post, it puts a lot of your current anxieties and concerns into some perspective.

The best thing you can do at this time is to resolve to ride it out....to make sure that you are not having problems with medication out of balance and that you do let others in and express their concern and support....even though many of us can't ever fully understand what you are experiencing or the reasons for being overwhelmed at the moment.

As an exercise to help you keep each of these problems you are currently experiencing in perspective,
it might be useful for you to create a private diary list and tackle each of the issues....some might just need talking them out with a partner, friend or counsellor....others might need to be addressed in such a way as to allow you to give voice to your concerns (like Christmas), while realizing that you need to create a coping strategy that allows you to step away from the stress and excess around you....knowing that none of us who have come to loathe the overwrought season it has turned into is going to single-handedly change how the rest of the North American world 'celebrates'.

In the same way, existential despair about the state and the fate of the world seizes us all at some times....but we only need to focus on what we can do or not do to make our part of it better and safer...recognizing that humans are only a blip on the cosmic timescale and that the natural world will always reset. I think that the moment that we let go of the conceit that humans are somehow supposed to be at the top of the heap on earth for the remainder of all time....it becomes easier to deal with the finite possibilities. Likewise, I think that when we put the headlines today in the context of all recorded human history...current events become a lot less urgent or somehow as unique or of an overwhelming magnitude.

In the meantime, I would try to focus on some creative pursuit or some activity that restores calm to your thoughts.

Hope you feel better soon.

[Aike]

No need for concern. No need to panic. I may be there now, but as I said, I am emotionally smart. Wait enough time and feelings pass. Emotions stabilize. Perspective returns. I have been smart like that for many years. I am socially inept. I know how people talk when I cannot hear, although I don't know the words. I expect the worst even when people are kind. Sympathy is easy syrup to watch ooze. Maybe I want it. It still makes me feel less than whole. An obligation to the lessor person.

Rising above. People think that's always possible. Which is often why I realize many people know so little about mental health. The mind can fail you. As much as the betrayal of body, of an erection in the showers at school. The mind can fail even worse. I can be so rational sometimes. A minute. A moment. And so irrational. An hour, a day, a week. More. Nonfunctional.

It seems to me you've already got the gist of your situation! Your state of mind is not something that needs to be overcome, you just have to learn to recognize yourself in it and learn to live with it. And you seem to know that better than many of us here. So I'd just echo yourself and tell you to trust time: emotions will stabilize sooner or later.

As for anguish about the state of the world, my suggestion is to turn it into a learning process. Trying to figure out the world, connecting the dots, finding explanations and various perspectives, is much better than an apocalyptic or paranoiac attitude towards the mixed jumble of news and information we can find in the media. Plus, you'll find yourself occupied with matters other than your life. A nice break from feeling down. Or at least that's my personal experience.

[Camfer]

Hi Stevie, weren't you Stevie? When did you become Steve on here?

Well, at any rate, I just wanted to say I read your post, all of it. I read all your posts. I find them interesting and heartfelt. You didn't ask for advice, so I won't offer any. But I'll tell you what it makes me think about.

There is something much deeper than thought. Deeper even than the thought of "I." When I focus my attention toward that, it is very peaceful.