Pointless Update

2016 Mar. 12th
(started some time around 10:40pm)

So, here we have a totally pointless update. I haven't been able to even really look at my blog for months now, despite desperately wanting to write things, and coming up with at least two things I really thought would make good posts. (As utterly pointless an endeavour as that is...)

So... This March hasn't been as painful as last March... but it certainly hasn't been painless. I rediscovered today just how much of a miraculous change there is in me if I take ibuprofen. I actually did a lot of useful things today... dealing with food, remembering to feed myself, taking care of the animals, cleaning the house, finally getting together enough to go out to the store and get some new pants... Overall, it really felt like I didn't waste the day. But the morning, before I took any ibuprofen, was... well... it was "difficult".

Recently I've been very stuck on the feeling of my life 'bleeding away'. Weeks go by, helplessly, without my really doing or accomplishing anything. Not for lack of trying... but for lack of ability. Often, I find I've stayed in bed until 11:30 in the morning, not even out of sleepiness, but because it's so hard to move.

The thing is... if I take ibuprofen every day, it stops having an effect, and I start to feel really bad. So... I'm sitting here trying to figure out just how to cope with this thing I'm calling 'my life' at all. How the hell can I make myself useful? On a daily basis? How can I make it so that, even if only for a short window of time in a day, I can be active and useful most days of the week?
I run into trouble with the 'short window of time' thing, because that's what I'm used to... just a short window of time on some unspecified day, where I can sort of function... So I go crazy trying to do as much as possible during that time, and 'pushing' that time, pushing the edge of the window, sometimes to the extent that I'll actually go 30 hours without sleep, trying to make the most of it. And of course, this leads to a crash. And life has brutally taught me this, with the utmost inescapable consistency.

It's difficult, but my whole thing for the past few years has been 'learning how to heal myself' and the goal of 'coming back from the dead'.

As you can see, I still haven't succeeded at making that 'stick'. Or even really clawing my way successfully out of my own grave, towards a hopefully more natural way of dying later. (Such as 'actual old age' instead of 'premature old age'. Although... I don't think I'm making myself very clear on just what I mean with that, here...)

"What's the purpose of my life...?" ...if it's this...? This hideous brainless functionlessness? Stamina so low that just walking leaves me unable to do anything for two or more hours?

What I came to was this: "My current purpose in life, my 'job'... is to bring myself back from the dead, every day."

I've had this long-term problem with feeling as if going to bed was basically consigning myself to death. It felt like it. It felt like I 'died' every night, and then had to drag myself up from the grave in the morning... (It's too difficult to go into details here right now.)

So... in this void of 'possibility', of being able to do anything, I was forced to face what I need to do, absolutely-first-and-foremost. What I need to be doing with my life, even if it looks bad. So right back to this. My focus needs to be on 'bringing myself back from the dead' every day. Gently.

The thing is... this pain...
This January, I was really starting to improve. I tried to hold on to that through February, even if just through bullheadedly clinging to my exercise regimen... but of course, it failed. I can't hold out. I don't know what made January feel as relatively good as it did, but it felt like I was buoyed up by something - it allowed me to move around and do things naturally.

I got it into my head around that time to start studying for the high-school equivalency test. I figured, if I just made myself do it every day, just a few math questions or part of a chapter for one hour every day, I could make it. If the way I felt kept up. Of course, it didn't. I haven't even touched my workbooks for weeks. The math swims in front of my face like animate chicken footprints.

I'm faced with my 30th birthday soon. I had a 'bucket list' of things I wanted to do before thirty. This was supposed to be a time in my life of 'expansion' and moving outwards, and laying the foundations for future... dare I say... 'successes'. (Not even going to imagine the flak I'll get for using that word and phrase. Or at least I'm trying not to.)

I'm not really able to feel, so I coldly just shifted the deadline to 35, knowing that, if my life keeps up the pattern it has right now, that '35' will come in what feels like about four or five weeks, maybe a few months, to me.

I wanted to meet people, to start taking certain risks... but the thing is, the real danger of those 'risks'... with my brain the way it is right now... those risks are no longer 'safe risks'. They're not a 'fifty-fifty' chance of something bad happening, they're a 'nine-in-ten' chance of something bad happening, with the one left over being 'neutral' or 'non-disaster'. (If you want to know how I feel on an everyday basis... I'd recommend consuming three bottles of vodka and an entire case of beer, after starving for four or five days and running a short marathon. Then trying to act normally and look appealing or at least not dangerous in public, such as at a job interview. Oh, and if you're at such a job interview, remember to add "I never finished high school".) (...This on top of my acne, bad eyelid, and speech defect making me look and sound like I'm on dope.) If you can barely remember who you are or register what's going on around you, if you have almost no emotions other than an ashen-grey kind of fear - a fear that doesn't even trigger fight-or-flight response... In reality, it's not a good idea to be taking these kinds of risks.

Example, known only to myself at this point, being the two previous blog posts I tried to write in the past couple of weeks. I'm not about to share them here. I couldn't compose myself at all. Couldn't think or remember much of anything... and it just turned into a really frighteningly incoherent extremely angry rant. Intelligent angry rants can be fun to read. Sometimes the gibberish that comes out of a stoned person like a rant can also be fun to read. But whatever those things were... they were not okay. 

Bah... So, cycling back around to the beginning.
I rediscovered that I'm constantly in pain and that the gentler painkillers (ibuprofen) do help. This gave me some sense of possibility for some parts of my life. But I'm still struggling with the logistics of living around this... when I can't take ibuprofen every day and have it work.

Have I mentioned yet that I hate narcotics and they have worse than zero effect on my pain?
After my surgery, whenever that was, I was given two bottles of narcotics. As soon as I got home I put them away and told my mother to take them back to the pharmacy. I returned them. Without taking any. I had some in the hospital because I couldn't really avoid it, and rediscovered just how much I hated the feeling. So I basically 'toughed it through', with my "I am the walking dead" absurd pain tolerance.

My sense of my 'need to die', to kill myself, comes immediately from the sense of a total lack of real possibilities. When I feel as if there are real possibilities for life, my 'suicidalness' evaporates completely, as if it never existed. Unfortunately, in this modern world we live in, there doesn't seem to be any way to really secure 'real possibility'.

And worse... I'm no longer "suicidal", I haven't been for months, and it's not because I'm somehow magically 'better'. (Although it's some other people's definition of better - kill the soul, make a better automaton.) There's this phase when the desire and drive to die extinguishes. Typically, all other things extinguish as well. For normal people, one of the most common complaints about this phase of 'living death' is sexual impotence. Why? BECAUSE YOU ARE DEAD. You're the fucking dead walking at that point. You can't feel. Nothing can stir you. You are incapable of  caring. Someone could slice most of your face off and you wouldn't even feel distressed or thankful. Not even twisted emotions. There's just nothing. (Funny thing is, some medications induce this effect in otherwise normal people who are 'suffering' with emotions. Or stress. Well... better stay away from that subject for now...)

Where was I going with this? I've been at it for what, an hour?
I actually wanted to write some kind of updates on my life here, beyond just this...

Okay... uh...
I managed some recipes. I've been almost completely inactive, but here and there, I've managed a few tiny things. For instance, I made a homemade quinoa salad. The other day I actually managed to cook a meal by myself, unassisted, which I haven't done for months. Many months. Not without almost setting something on fire. (Or outright setting it on fire.) This stuff is important to me because cooking is one of the few things in existence that makes me feel like I'm not a worthless person, makes me feel like I'm worthwhile and useful. (Related, when I'm living alone, I actually stop eating. Completely. There's no reason to either cook or eat. Whereas, living with other people that I care about (and/or who care about me) this behaviour comes close to disappearing. (Although pain and "depression" (hur hur) also stop me from eating, even when other people are around. It's still not uncommon for me to skip breakfast, have a cracker for lunch, and then only bother with something sustaining around supper time, because other people are eating.))

It's disturbing to see myself talking so much about pain here. Normally, pain is a thing I ignore. Typically, I'm astounded at other people's weakness. I'm the kind of jerk who fractures a leg and then walks to the hospital, without either bragging or complaining. Toughing it through, everything, always, is all that I know. To even 'mention' pain makes me feel weak and vulnerable, and not just in a normal way... but because the people around me, doctors especially, seem so obsessed with it, and using it as an excuse to interfere with my functioning. (Also to humiliate me, occasionally.)

Ah, yeah... things I did... I made some knotted bracelets. A.k.a. friendship bracelets. I wanted to do a whole post about that, useless as it is.

I also was going to write something about 'forming connections' sometime in February, due to experimenting with a website that exists for that purpose, that I found myself disappointed in. I didn't manage it though...

I also managed, somehow, to write my first piece of narrative prose with real flow, almost by accident, in years. Unfortunately, again, it isn't something I can really share. Damn, this stuff is sparse. It doesn't really look like anything outside of the subtle contexts within my own life, and yet I work myself raw for it... ha ha ha... Useless.


Recently I've been playing Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD, and being reminded of just how much I loved and love that game. Reminds me of how I felt about Inuyasha... because Inuyasha was so high-profile a series, I often ignored it. I didn't bother getting any merchandise or DVDs or manga of it because it was everywhere for a while. It was the Naruto of its time, really. Yet, despite kind of ignoring it or being blind to it, every time I came across it again, I was reminded of how much I loved it and why. (At this point, I have every episode on DVD and nearly all of the manga.)
Being popular also makes something contentious. People talk about it a lot, and often seem to feel obliged to say something bad about it, because it's popular. A sort of bit of human contrariness... And that kind of thing also makes me avoid things.
Anyway, replaying the game in a personal and unbiased way, I found myself somewhat moved or impressed even through the mental fog and my dead emotionlessness. Twilight Princess is a magnificent game. There are maybe only a few other games in existence (out of maybe hundreds I've played) that were that much fun for me, or that memorable. (Octodad is one of those.)

One of the things on that sort of 'Bucket List' was to reclaim my use of the French language. It used to be that being in an environment where it was spoken would knock me back into a mode where I understood it. I have an elementary school child's level of French, spoken and written, and a few years ago, I was at a point where I could easily read newspapers written in French with pretty much full comprehension.
...and then it disappeared. Now my grandmother (whose first language is French) lives in my family's house, the French language tv channels are always on, and yet... there's nothing. I try to 'bump' my system back into understanding it, but it just hasn't been working. The terrifying thing here being that I've been forgetting ENGLISH at the same time. So much for my dreams of becoming a copy-editor.
I tried to get myself into it by playing some games in French, and reading Beast Player Erin's French translation. I meant to read a bit of it a few days each week, at least... but this failed. Everything in my existence ground down to nothing. Life wasn't even about 'just passing the days', and it was barely about 'just surviving' the days... It was this immutable, unbudgeable emptiness, and something far beyond, far underneath of, existential despair, being caused by that 'impossibility'. I was 'stopped' at about page 19.

So one night I got desperate, took my French-English dictionary and just read through the words under my breath, trying to pronounce them and remember what the definitions were, rather than simply read them. Remember the feeling of them, how I'd heard them used before, how they'd sunk into me as a child. And it worked. It worked because I was actually doing something, like the difference between plotting a choreography and actually dancing.
...but I'm still stuck. I'm not really able to work on that every day, or night. I try, but it, with extreme consistency, doesn't work out. And it keeps coming back down to how bad I feel, physically.

My physical clumsiness and lack of bodily awareness has at this point become physically dangerous. I've gone from, for instance, 'sometimes' burning myself in the kitchen to 'nearly always, if I dare enter the room and use anything'. Or even just pick up a mug.

I can't stand feeling useless. My mother is able to do so much now, after her having lived as an invalid bound to a recliner for years.
...and now I'm reduced to almost not being able to do anything. My mother's 'plate' is so full that the metaphorical plate isn't even visible under the metaphorical pile of elephants on it. She has to deal with her mother, wrangling her brothers about her mother and her mother's estate, deal with her ex-husband and her feelings about that, her own illnesses and problems, deal with her feelings about her children and their st ate, and manage three households. (My grandmother's, ours, and my father's.) With a number of other extras I don't have the energy to get into right now. That probably may not sound like much, or 'enough', until one stops to think about just what each of those things entails, and how many subcategories and facets each one of them has.

"I had dreams."
Even really tiny stupid ones, knowing they can't go anywhere... I wanted to MAKE SOMETHING. I wanted to write my stupid posts on this blog, I wanted to write reviews. I have for years. Even if it's "for no one". At this point, I don't want to play games, I want to make them. And can't. (I used to make complicated lists, when I was younger, for fun. Defining and mapping out links between things, itemizing lists, and making databases was like a game to me. Now I can barely put books in a row.) Other people's work and artwork frustrates me... because nothing of mine exists in a 'real', shareable form. I keep trying... and it keeps slipping further away from me.

There was so much I wanted to do, and at this point, for me, the tiniest things in life, such as my cleaning today, or making a meal yesterday... are the 'huge accomplishments' of my life. That destroys a person, being reduced to that. I want to do more than just cook one meal every month.
There was so much that I wanted to do... Fine to bump the 'deadline' up to 35, but if life keeps up with the same pattern it has now, it will make worse than no difference. Time will bleed, hemorrhage, for me, and in the end it will make me more depressed, more extinguished.
My experience is that corruption and extinguishment can basically go on infinitely... Whereas, healthy, healthful things... they're a whole other thing. Just touching them, just barely brushing them with the end of your finger... It's so hard to even do that. The foundation they would sit on is constantly being eroded. Maintaining them feels nearly impossible. 



...Ugh. Okay, it's 12:35am right now, and I'm calling this quits right here.