PERSONAL

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3,407

My Situation Now

5 years ago4,548 words

Those are certainly some comments on the previous post.

Urgh. I meant to write another post about something specific yesterday, but wasn't able to; I haven't been able to today either. But I just checked the comments on the previous post, and want to write another rather than responding to them specifically.

It's strange, reading things like that, being the person they're about but who's not directly involved as such. Tobias this, Tobias that. I appreciate how regular commenters have taken on board all the stuff I've said in the past about finding harsh comments so unpleasant, and how they're - you're, for those of you I'm referring to - willing to defend me from people less considerate. I'm not hurt though in this case; I'm more bemused than anything. I suppose I'm just used to that kind of feedback now, and if it's well-meaning ignorance rather than malevolence, then I can roll my eyes at it rather than reluctantly dwelling on the pain of it for days.

Still, I suppose this gives me an excuse to vent about some stuff I've been wanting to get off my chest for a while anyway.

I find it amusing that people used the term 'dank memes' to refer to what I posted about. I always regard these things as an outsider looking in, at a culture I feel I'm not a part of but which I see as a curiosity, so I wouldn't use that term myself and I'm not certain what exactly it refers to. Are all posts on Reddit considered 'dank memes'? I thought it was only specific kinds of images, which use templates and this kind of bizarre, puerile humour that's generally lost on me. It'd make me feel old, but I remember similar things in the past I didn't 'get' either. I imagine a big part of their appeal is being a part of something, kind of like in-jokes which aren't inherently funny, but which register as such because of the sense of familiarity and belonging. I say, thinking too much about everything, as usual.

But this is kind of the point about why I've been looking at these things lately. Because they're the kind of thing I've always avoided and disliked, so breaking out of my bubble feels like tiny baby steps of progress towards facing the world I've distanced myself from. It's not like I'm going to go out and flirt with strangers at a party or something, that'd be insane. But my avoidance is a mental thing, so even though I can't physically face the world, I can still redirect my mind in novel directions and hopefully benefit from that.

It's mostly by chance that it's Reddit. I used to play the mobile game Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, and at some point I got in-game messages from the developers telling players to check forum posts about their latest developments. From checking those, I found my way to the related subreddit, and from there, I found a different, similar mobile game, Marvel Strike Force, which I've been playing ever since. I checked the subreddit of that every so often for months before even thinking to explore the rest of Reddit, and only did so when people linked to other subreddits in comments.

I'd always had a negative opinion of Reddit - I saw it as the kind of place a certain Kind of person would go, though it's hard to describe in words what I mean - but seeing that there was actually interesting content there occasionally felt kind of like an atheist going to church and finding something of value in the other churchgoers' stories, or something like that. Maybe not so extreme, but similar? I'm still not exactly a fan of Reddit and I've no intention of joining, and I find many of the memes as irritating as I once did, but the fact that I'm able to go there at all feels like breaking down one of the many, many mental barriers that hold me back from engaging with the world.

I'm glad that some of you understood that already, so that explanation wasn't even necessary, but I suppose I'm explaining for myself as much as anything. I'm embarrassed, to a degree, to be on that site, especially since a lot of the content seems to be by and for people a lot younger than me. People in their teens, early twenties, that kind of thing. But then I see a lot of comments by people my age or older talking about their life experiences, which are far more interesting and valuable to me than the 'dank memes' (and which I spend much more time reading, though I suppose that wasn't reflected in the other post). It's been particularly enlightening reading the stories of married, established people, realising that's not quite the fantasy I'd always naively thought it was. (I mean it's still better than what I have now, but most things are!)

I have this memory from like five or six years ago, where I was riled into some madly anxious state by a personal thing I won't go into, and it scrambled my brain enough for me to, GASP!, actually watch a YouTube video without the sound muted!! Wow!!! I'm a big boy!!! Well, a certain kind of video. I watch most YouTube videos with sound, but some I'll just mute for reasons that don't make any sense at all to anyone other than my ridiculous demons. My understanding is that they're the kind of videos that might invite painful life comparisons. So I can watch some 'distant' video by a team of professionals, like those Honest Movie Trailers things you're likely familiar with, or Bad Lip Reading, and they won't bother me in the same way I'm not bothered by billionaires living in golden mansions, but if it's just by some solitary guy ad-libbing into his microphone, I suppose there's this threat that he'll casually mention his wife or job or something and it'll... get to me? Because I see myself as more 'equal' to that person, but much more lacking. It's a concept I covered in psychology, but can't remember the name of...

I have to try and explain this as one observing, because it's definitely not a conscious decision that I make, or one that I think is at all sensible. It's something that the mental condition inflicts upon me, to my constant annoyance. Especially since it seems so random sometimes. There are some videos that I won't mute despite falling into that category, and others I'll mute even though they won't invite direct life comparison? I spend a lot of time trying to make sense of all this because I feel I have to, because it doesn't make sense.

In that memory, I watched a few videos with sound that I normally wouldn't, and felt really pleased to be breaking out of a mental prison... but it didn't last, sadly. I got back into old habits once the mental weather changed. That seems to be a recurring theme too, annoyingly. I suppose it's like how you can't just build a bodybuilder body and just have it last forever. You need to keep up the constant practise, and if you falter, you fall back to where you were before. There was a point where I was having cold showers regularly because I felt that if I could face them, I could face other anxiety-inducing things, but I stopped doing that (it didn't really work anyway, because my condition is rooted in social assessment, which that was unrelated to). Then there were several months where I went for long daily walks as I listened to audiobooks my some spiritual guru guy, and felt like I finally had all the answers I'd been searching for for so long, felt I'd finally found peace. That didn't last either.

(It's funny... Just earlier today, in the shower, I remembered how I used to have cold ones for ages, but had forgotten about that for years.. and last night I watched the film Venom, which wasn't really my kind of thing (I mostly watched it due to the Marvel connection), but in which I was very surprised to see a clear and obvious mention of the guy I used to listen to, Eckhart Tolle. Little things that all seem to slot together in adjacent steps of time, which always make me wonder how random all this is.)

This kind of extreme avoidance behaviour - of trivial things - is probably alien to people more well-adjusted. But I suppose it's not a million miles away from what your mind does when you're procrastinating, which far more people will have experience with. It's not like you choose to procrastinate; usually you feel awful that you're doing it, but you seem unable to 'just do' whatever you're putting off regardless. Maybe you even think to yourself of all the pros of doing it, and the cons of putting it off, yet choose the latter, nonsensical option anyway, prolonging your real current pain to, in your deeper mind's addled understanding, prevent some future, harsher pain.

I've talked about this before, I think, but it's been frustrating me a whole lot lately how there's this basic assumption that most people have about human behaviour, which is that most or all of our actions are willful, deliberate choices. Decisions, made for good reason. That's not true at all, of course. In many ways, we're more victims of our own behaviour than anyone else ever is. We do many things we regret, or don't 'want' to do in the moment but do anyway. Take diet, for example. We all know we should 'eat healthy', but how many people actually do? It doesn't necessarily mean that they think it's wise to eat unhealthily, or even that they particularly want to. They might beat themselves up about it. But their will is such a small fragment of their mind, and it's not able to control the legion of other, unconscious processes that actually drive the vehicle.

One of my biggest interests is what consciousness actually is, exactly, and I've read a lot about that. We covered it - and some relevant research - in my psychology course too. I've read books by people in positions of knowledge, experience, and authority, like brain scientists, who speculate that the conscious mind is just the CEO of the company that is the Self. It makes the big decisions - or perhaps it only overrides especially poor decisions, and only in rare cases - but most of the day-to-day operations are run by underlings, outside of its awareness. To see our mind as a unitary thing, in charge of everything, is delusional. And from watching my own mind for a long time, I do think this fits. What I want is not what actually happens, and I've just tried to make peace with that fact since it can be so frustrating otherwise.

(I could write many posts about all the interesting stuff I've learned related to this! Maybe I will, at some point.)

Anyway, I feel I'm going off on a tangent here; I meant this to be a very short post addressing the comments from the previous one! But I suppose I think about this all the time, how this avoidance is holding me back, and I always have this urge to explain to others what I'm realising. As if understanding this mind is my own full-time project, my PhD thesis, and I want to present my findings to show that I actually have found something. I do feel that I've come a long, long way since I was a teenager with these same issues, though mostly within the realm of understanding, internally, rather than overcoming the issues.

But that's another thing: can it be 'overcome'? I have a personality disorder, it seems, which are different to mental illnesses. People can become mentally ill, and they can recover from mental illness completely, kind of like how you can break your leg, be incapacitated by it for many months, but then you can get to a point where it's just not broken anymore and you can once again do everything you used to do just fine. Personality disorders are more like deformations of the mind in its most fundamental state, though. They're like deformed legs rather than broken ones. Conditions like narcissism, psychopathy, and autism are in the same category (though autism is classified differently, for fairly arbitrary reasons really). Someone might acquire PTSD, but they won't acquire OCD. They could recover from that PTSD, but nobody with OCD will ever recover from it, because there's nothing to 'recover' to. Someone with no legs doesn't 'recover' to having legs. That's just not the way they are or ever were. Personality disorders are warped base states, not temporary trip-ups.

Tying into the 'everything we do is willful' belief, which most people seem to have, I imagine the reaction to talking about things like this in that way - as being fixed, unchangeable - elicits objection; "if you believe it won't change, then it never will! You've just got to try harder, redirect your mind!". I've heard so much of that, and it just makes me feel weary, as it might make a paraplegic feel weary hearing "if you just go for a little walk every day, you'll be running marathons in no time!". But apparently it's 'not the same' because mental things, being invisible, are entirely plastic and subject to complete change, right?? I wonder why it is that people actually believe that. It's probably related to the aversion to any classification at all, like how many people resist personality types or traits because they see it as a limitation they can't accept. Maybe it's also related to the same mental processes behind the prominence of things like feminism and gender identity respect, this concept of the unbound mind. You can't tell me how to be! I can be however I want!!

(Though I suppose with the gender identity stuff, the point is that they feel they can't change who they are, so they need to be respected for embracing it... Hmm.)

So I'm quite incapacitated by this condition that I have. It's ruined my life, and I think a lot about what future I'd even be able to cope with.

But I also have brain cancer. Had? I don't know whether it's 'have' or 'had' at this point. I mean the tumour is still there, but not as much as before, and I've had the treatment, so... I don't know. Either way, recovering from literal brain cancer - really try to absorb the magnitude of that - isn't something that's done in a week or two. Someone in the comments seemed to believe that I was being lazy for not just 'getting over it' in the same timespan as you might get over a cold, and it's frustrating mostly because I get the feeling that my step-dad feels the same way, so it's something on my mind often. He doesn't show it through anger or anything like that, but I get the feeling he's annoyed that I'm STILL ill, after WEEKS, UGH, surely I'm just faking it at this point or something. Or I'm not 'thinking positively' enough, because if I did think positively enough, I'd be able to regrow a missing arm in a couple of days, right??

...Obviously that's something I'm frustrated about. But I suppose it ties into the whole unbound mind concept, where because it's invisible it's subject to complete and instant change. I really wish everyone understood that that's not the case.

Honestly - and this is reflecting what other people have said to me, not just in comments here, but the medical staff too - I think I'm doing really well, all things considered. The surgeon told me I'd be 'wiped out' for about a year following the MAJOR BRAIN SURGERY that I had - I literally had my mind mush cut into with knives for eight straight hours, plus being bombarded with radiation for a month; hopefully it's not too hard to understand that that's a bit different to, say, bruising my knee! - but in the four months since then I've effectively started and almost finished what I think is a fairly novel game. And that's with the mental stuff, the loneliness, and all of that weighing me down as well. I wonder what other people would do in this position.

Currently, my days go something like this: I wake up at 5am, which is silly, but which I got into the habit of doing because of early hospital visits, and which I quite like because I can take a while waking up, then get up at 6, get breakfast, and start working at 7. I work until 8:30, have a half an hour break, work again until 11, eat and have a longer break, then do another couple of hours from 1 until 3. After that, I'm wiped out and can't do any more despite wanting to and trying, so I end up lying in bed, ostensibly to regenerate so then I can do more in the evening, but instead I usually end up just falling asleep because I'm exhausted. So every day I do several hours of work on Sindrel Song, but I'm just one single very broken person so it's obviously going to take time. (All the Reddit browsing happens in the evening, between falling asleep once and sleeping properly at night.)

Also, I think a lot of my poor mental state at the moment comes from my life situation. I've had to live with my parents following the surgery because it's not like anyone else would look after me, and I couldn't look after myself, but I've recovered enough now that I can take care of basic needs, but I feel I lack the freedom to do so. I avoid my own parents, or rather I avoid my step-dad, which, like so much of my avoidant behaviour, doesn't really make sense. I suppose it's because we're very different people, and he judges me, which lingers in my mind for ages, so the staff below my will-CEO decide it's in the best interests of the company to avoid that altogether. This means that I can't get food or even go to the toilet when I want, and have to listen out for when 'the coast is clear' and I can go downstairs to feed myself. Every time, I think "this is pathetic", etc, etc, because I know it is, considering how old I am and what other people my age are doing with their lives, and of course that only exacerbates and prolongs the inner storm.

My step-dad took me to the hospital many times when I was having radiotherapy, and it was the first time I'd actually properly talked to him in my whole life, which says a lot. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought, and we seemed to have more mental things in common than I expected, though he's a kind of social chameleon, so I wonder how much of it was him deliberately being a certain way to achieve a desired end. He used to be a successful businessman, and prides himself on his people skills and how he was able to manipulate others around him. He was telling me with obvious delight about how even though he dropped out of school and didn't go to university, he once had several far more educated people - doctors and scientists - working for him, and how he got chosen for other jobs above other similar people because obviously he had the right stuff and they didn't. And I suppose that's how the world works. Social competence - and the will and skill to manipulate - go a long way.

We don't have that in common, obviously. And because of it, he's able to make friends wherever he goes, and has befriended a bunch of blokey men near where we live now. There's a door in the kitchen that leads to the back-slash-side of the house, and these blokey blokes will just show up randomly wanting to spend time with him, entering through that door, which is the biggest reason I'm paranoid of going into the kitchen freely. In case they walk in, because they have before. I feel on edge every time I'm in there. Being seen by one would be uncomfortable because I've been in my pyjamas most of the time these past few months, which is embarrassing in itself if seen by other people, but also because I've been living here for ages and I've always hidden, so them seeing this talked-about-but-not-seen weird adult step-son lurking about as soon as they step through the door would make them feel awkward and uncomfortable, and that would make me feel the same, and... sigh. Ugh. Self-loathing. I wonder what it's like to not be like this.

It'd be an entirely different matter if they were my friends and it was my house, or if I were a teenager. It's just the weirdness of the situation, I suppose (though there are a couple of other people my age living at home nearby, including the neighbour I've mentioned before (who has a boyfriend now), and they don't seem to be as insecure about it as I am... from what I've been told, since I've never seen them, of course). But it's interesting how old environments bring out old behaviours, even if you advance a lot in other environments. It's a common thing, I've read, when people visit their parents' house for holidays, and start acting like teenagers again, despite being grown adults with partners and children, being skilled surgeons or influential orators. Maybe you're familiar with that from your own experience.

I mentioned Eckhart Tolle earlier, who used to suffer from terrible anxiety and depression, but had a spiritual awakening around my age and transformed into an inspiring voice of peace (which is why hearing his words, rather than the advice of some PhD psychologist who'd had a lifetime of good treatment, opportunities, and successes, was so useful to me; success stories are infinitely more valuable to follow than the vaguely patronising advice of someone who's never even experienced what you're going through). But he talked in one of his retreats about how, years after becoming this sagely guru, he visited his parents for Christmas or something, and noticed himself exhibiting the same behaviours he used to before he moved out. It stuck with me, because he'd learned to fly in the sky, mentally, spiritually, but all that magnificent progress was essentially forgotten once an old environment evoked behaviours that used to be associated with it.

It's not like the house I'm living in now is the one I grew up in, not even close. My parents have only been here for a few years, and the room I'm staying in is a guest bedroom, no different to the inoffensively generic kind you'd get in a seaside holiday cottage; if you removed my electronics, nobody could even tell I'd ever been here. So it's not full of toys and teddy bears and posters of old bands I used to listen to or anything (not that I ever had such posters anyway). I don't even really have any memories associated with it. So it'd be far worse if I was in the place where I was as a child.

Still... I feel like I'm in a self-made prison, with my broken mind as the warden, and I really want to get out. Maybe I'd feel a lot better if I did. But I'd have to live alone, since it's not like I have anyone else to live with, and I don't exactly have the money for it. It's why I've been hoping to finish Sindrel Song first, then maybe I can earn at least a little bit of money from that and take some steps forward in terms of my life situation...

While I can't exactly get a permanent place just yet, I've rented a holiday cottage for next week (I did this a few days ago; this post wasn't what prompted it or anything). I'll be moving in on Friday, until the Friday after that, and I'm looking forward to having some space to myself. I'll be bringing my computer (the place is close by, so that's not too impractical), and I'm hoping to get a lot done. But we'll see. I am still really tired.

I've also been talking with a friend from university (not B), who said she'd come and visit me while I'm there. I last saw her a few months ago, and felt better afterwards, so hopefully that'll have positive effects too. (I'm not getting my hopes up though; I won't be surprised if she has some reason for not being able to come.)

But it's frustrating, because being able to see a single friend for a few hours every few months is the best I can do at the moment. I mean, say I wanted to find new friends. Where would I find them, exactly? The primary reason I went to university three years ago is because it seemed like the best place to find friends, since my attempts to find them in this little seaside village I live in were fruitless. I went to groups, classes, etc, and the only people who showed up were middle-aged or older and talked about nothing but their children. So now it frustrates me when people talk of going to artificial meet up groups as if that's a solution to the loneliness problem, which it absolutely isn't. Do you go to meet up groups? Few people do, because they don't need to. It seems easier, after what feels like a lifetime of trying without success, to just make peace with being alone; to transform bitter loneliness into sweet solitude. If the external conditions can't appease some inner need, then quelling that inner need seems like the only path to peace.

And the more I think about it, the more I realise I wouldn't really want to be around people anyway. I think the desire to have people is far nicer than the reality of actually having them. For someone like me, anyway. It's why one of those comics I included in the previous post resonated with me so much. Bemoaning my loneliness, but hiding whenever people actually contact me.

...SIIIIGGGHHHH!! I spent way longer writing this than I meant to, and I feel that a lot of you understand all this anyway (for which I'm grateful), but I suppose it all floats around in my mind every day, so it's nice to have an excuse to blurt it all out.

I'm just trying to get something done despite all that's holding me back, and I am. Getting something done. If you're the kind of person who'd say I'm lazy for not doing the jobs of a whole team of developers in a tiny amount of time despite crippling physical and mental health issues, then... well, I'm quite curious if you've made anything yourself, actually.