off to the phrenologist

[substitute]

Despite a couple of nasty troughs, it was still relatively good brain weather since Wednesday. My LJ despair fits are accurate about certain parts of the cycle. And the situation is pretty bad on a few levels. But at least the last week or so has been about 80% unhappily stable and only 20% Pray For Death. I can do that ratio for a few months for a big enough payoff.

I am concerned about alienating people, though. Raw despair isn't exactly "selling yourself", nor is flailing anger. It's what I've got, and it's true, and I can't really avoid communicating it. That's not who I am, though. It's who I'm crawling out of, with whatever strength I can dig up.

No doubt part of my sense that I'm losing friends is due to an understandable flinch away from someone who's having a hard time and not hiding it.

Good thing the cat doesn't care, eh?

Comments

[rroseselavyoui.livejournal.com]

Cats are the best. Honestly, Wolfgang was one of my few sources of comfort when I was depressed. Him and books and the general escape from reality...and lots of sleep.

[rivetpepsquad.livejournal.com]

yay for the kitty.

[gutbloom.livejournal.com]

Yo, it's the internets... let it all hang out I say. I'm OK reading the entries from the bad spots BECAUSE I'M TOUGH. When it comes to blog digestion I'M A LITERARY GREEN BERET... but I admit that you are tougher because you actually live these things. Compared to the living the reading is a breeze. Damn the torpedoes, post on, post on!

[trinnit.livejournal.com]

No worries mate, like mine I figure we see more bad than good because the good stuff isn't things we write about. But it still happens.

Your a tough guy, there's a light at the end and it's not a train.

[gcrumb.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine once used this analogy: Life is a scenic and more or less easy - not to say comfortable - ride on a conveyor belt. As long as one avoids the edges and the spaces between the plates, one progresses more or less as one should to the end of the line. One is neither unduly taxed nor rewarded in the process.

Some people are, by choice or circumstance, not afforded this convenience. They've fallen off and are forced to come to terms with the fact that there's no getting back on. People passing are the subject (or the source) of constant misunderstanding and subsequent grief, because the issues of mobility and navigation cannot be mapped onto mutually exclusive experiences.

It's tempting to write it off as a simplistic 'cast-away' fable, but as long as one doesn't start to burden the analogy with sentimentality, a sense of Platonic or Romantic Rightness, or overly Calvinistic fatalism, it actually helps frame the context.

So one way to look at it is that you are, perforce, master of your own fate, beholden to few, forgotten by most, accompanied only by your cat and the very rare others to whom this whole conveyor belt thing is stupid and gets in the way of dinner and grooming.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

I don't give a shit about the success part of the conveyor belt most of the time. Some other things I didn't make it to are unfortunately totally unacceptable to me.

I'm fine with being abnormal and having different priorities. I just feel rejected and humiliated by everyone, including the other weirdos, in my situation. Analogies are dangerous that way.

[gcrumb.livejournal.com]

Yep. Analogies are dangerous in a bunch of ways.

Fundamentally, I suspect it feels like a no-win situation:

People offer stupid, half-considered advice and they're either condescending twits who don't know the half of it or well-meaning fops trying to scratch you behind the ears, neither of which is going to get you a date or clean up your mess.

People don't offer advice and they're deserting you.

In the oh-so-rare event of someone actually responding with understanding, it still doesn't improve things much. It leads to resentment and frustration that understanding may be half the problem, but it's the easy half. And not the half you're living with, thank you very much.

And none of that changes the fact that you already know that it's all the product of a deeply recursive mental process that unfolds like a Mandelbrot stain across the empirical world. Which makes life by metaphor no better and probably worse than what you had before.

Honestly, I'm just throwing stuff out there to see if any of it sticks. Having dug myself out of a vaguely similar cognitive hole, I sympathise, but I also know that the subtle and inextricable nature of the trap is crazy-making in and of itself.

I've wanted to bite off the fingers of people who tried to cheer me up or encourage me. I still do. We're both damned if I say anything and damned if I don't, so I decided to err on the side of verbosity. I always do.

If some things are utterly unacceptable, then you're in a pickle. Then again, you're determined that things will not remain this way, so it's inevitable that they won't.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

I hear you. I too am an analogy victim, and I have royally pissed people off while trying to shoot for a way to explain things or understand them.

Advice, in general, is a disaster when it's given. Sometimes later on it turns out to have been very useful. But for the giver and receiver it's usually painful at the time.

With luck I'll get to a bootstrapping point, and so will you.

[gcrumb.livejournal.com]

ACK