My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
Michael J. Fox
I have written a lot about my hopes, dreams, goals, struggles, breakdowns, and heartbreak.
Why?
Who cares? It didn’t help, lead to any insight or positivity.
Yet, here I am, hopefully for the very last time. This time, it is not about hopes, dreams, blah, blah, blah.
It is about emptying myself out.
This summer was a roller coaster and ultimately a failure, even though I did a lot around the house and met some goals. I even gained some strength and confidence to expand my goals to do things I thought were impossible due to injuries.
There were things I could not do in summer 2019 but could and did in summer 2021. Perhaps not as well as I would like, but any improvement is fantastic.
That is good, but it ultimately won’t matter.
I have accepted that my life is over. I am just marking time until I stop breathing.
I have my doggy, who I think is a giant baby. When I am on my computer chair or on the couch, he likes to sit on my lap exactly like my grandkids do. It doesn’t seem like it would be comfortable for a dog.
The grandkids visit now and again. What else do I need in life? That is more than I deserve.
I can maintain where I am at and maybe improve a little, but when my health crashes, I am done. I am curious about what will end me: heart attack, anxiety, being awake for a week, stroke, epilepsy, a gun that goes off when I am in the high mountains, being eaten by a T-Rex, all the above? How cool would that be?
Still, little things bother me, and they shouldn’t. Perhaps there is more acceptance left to do to finally be rid of my past and ultimately myself?
A fascinating consequence of realizing that nothing matters manifests in my insomnia. I have accepted and embraced my poor sleep.
I am the same after eight hours or three hours of sleep, so why am I bothering to force myself to sleep. What is the point of that? When my disgusting body wants to sleep, it will tell me, and I should just carry on until then. Right? Hopefully, that will lead to increased productivity.
Sleep has been better, and I fall asleep before 3 AM more than usual. Even before 11 PM, which is highly unusual. I have yet to get close to 240 hours again. My CPAP shows between 180-200 hours a month, but I sleep with that mask for 4+ hours a night, 28-30 days, instead of 15-20.
It used to be that whether I had it on 4+ hours a night, I could not tell the difference the next day. Now I can. If it is not on the entire time I am asleep, I really feel it the next day. Is it because it actually works or because I have become psychologically dependent on it?
There might be some lesson in this. The less that I obsess about things, the better they become?
There were too many forest fires this summer, and too much smoke, and too many unnaturally hot days to meet my bike goals.
There was some success, mainly improving speed over short distances, between 10-20 miles. That tells me I am regaining strength and stamina.
Sadly, I think the longest ride I took was 22 miles(35ish km).
With any luck, there are still a few weeks of rideable weather. An indoor cycle will help keep things going during the bleak, cold, and miserable winters here. Besides the bike, a series of strength and flexibility exercises will help improve the rest of me.
Progress on yard work has gone well but not as much as intended, but I suppose not working outside when it’s extremely hot and smokey is a good excuse?
I finally got grapes this year! There was more success in my garden, and what I did do, helped to complete my plans for the entire yard. It is just a matter of getting it done this fall and next spring.
It is weird that I still have goals. It doesn’t matter either way. Nothing will change, but the goals keep on coming.
A few weeks before getting tossed into the loony bin in the late 90s, my shrink asked how I am like this, yet was in school and working on the future. Strange question.
“Because if I am dead, it won’t matter, but if I don’t die, I kinda need a decent job and stuff. Duh?”
That answer confused her. She was an awful therapist.
This summer, I was finally forced to accept my lack of worth and re-establish the fact that I will die alone.
That is how it should be. Anything else is unnatural and wrong.
This summer, events have given me the opportunity, yet again, to contemplate my failures in personal relationships.
Of course, it is all my fault, but one thing bothers me.
It seems to me that the root of the problem is how I am perceived by strangers and by those few poor souls that know me.
Sure, ugliness and fatness play a role, but I look around, and it is clearly not the complete answer.
Why do people mistake my quietness and passivity for weakness? I am a lot of bad things. Weak is not among them. I think that perception gives them license to try and walk all over me and completely disregard my feelings.
Is there anything I can do to not be seen as weak? Is quietness and avoiding drama weakness? Really?
It is funny, people often act surprised when they realize that I am stronger and more resilient than them. As if they thought so little of me that they were shocked and offended that I was not as awful as they thought.
Constantly struggling is not weakness. It also doesn’t really say anything about the resiliency of a person.
People mistake mental issues as weakness, which is also false. Mental problems are something that simply just is.
I guess I can just act heartless. People seem to mistake that for strength when heartlessness is a sign of a very thoughtless and weak-willed person. Who wants that?
People mistake cruelty for strength. False. Cruel people are extremely weak.
I don’t think I could become cold or cruel, and why would I?
That would be weird.
I honestly never thought that people could be impressed by disgusting human traits, but the past 5 years have shown otherwise.
It has always bothered me that people typically see me in worse ways than I see myself. That should not be possible since I hate myself completely.
Even in the army, it took a while for people to accept that I am not weak, even though I could usually outperform them. It was not me on the ground sucking air and in pain. Yet, some still thought of me as weak, at least for a while. My natural build is thin, yet I was as strong as most of my fellow soldiers, who looked more muscular. I guess people judge on physical appearance? Is this part of it?
Or, is it just because I am not outwardly aggressive?
I like that I am not, but it still leads to people misjudging me.
Commanding officers have called me passively aggressive - not to be mistaken for passive-aggressive - and that seems about right.
As this website attests, I am also not some unbreakable fortress either. Who is?
Sometimes, people act shocked that I am not a complete idiot. I suppose my social awkwardness does that?
I was told this summer that I am extremely self-aware.
There is some doubt whether that was meant as a compliment or criticism. Given what happened, I suppose it was criticism.
I have become hyper-aware of myself and others. Ironically, I needed to have this pointed out to me before I fully realized it. I guess we can file that under Gödel’s incompleteness theorem being correct again. Assuming that I am a consistent system, which is debatable.
Of course, we can file the fact that I don’t know if I am a consistent system under the second part of the incompleteness theorem.
It might be a monumental thing for me to explore and learn to actually use self-awareness productively. Or not. Probably not.
I had a shrink tell me that I have a lot of insight into myself. I was thinking, “yeah, who else knows what is going on in my head?” Perhaps he was talking about this?
I can also see problems long before I am told to buzz off. Every time I was dumped, I knew something was wrong before it happened. I didn’t always know what exactly was wrong but wasn’t surprised. Hurt? Oh yes, but not surprised. Even with the best girl in the world living on the opposite side of the planet, I could tell something was wrong weeks before she confirmed it by disappearing. I do wish I knew why she does that without a word. I guess I do not deserve to know. It just hammers home the point that I am worthless.
I wasn’t dumped by anyone this summer since we weren’t dating. It was the loss of a friendship that didn’t last long at all. I thought it would last because she was making plans to do things with me months in advance and even wanted to go on a road trip. She knew I knew something was wrong and was not surprised by it but also not surprised I didn’t know exactly what was wrong.
Just another humiliating loss. The reason is so humiliating, but it is not like something similar hasn’t happened to me before.
That humiliation was made worse when she said we could still talk now and again, and we did a few times for a week. Just nice friendly chats, and then she blocked me without a word.
It is not a big deal, even though having a friend was nice. Friendship is an extremely unrealistic goal, so whatever.
I am still an idiot socially, but there is awareness of how someone is feeling. I don’t seem to be able to make use of that knowledge. So what good is it? I guess this might be that INFJ thing plus my mental issues mixing poorly?
Being INFJ has led to me appearing a little(a lot?) odd to people, or something.
I have noticed that many people have very little going on upstairs and can’t see what I see, or at least they do not want to.
Maybe ignorance really is bliss?
Perhaps, none of what I see is real?
My mind is a near-constant maelstrom, usually 4 or 5 threads of thought going on at all times. That doesn’t even include everything I see. Even in a very casual setting, like getting my hair cut, I am hyper-aware of the person and their movements. Even a simple interaction like that makes my head very busy. It is why I put off directly interacting with people as long as I can. I love it when haircutters don’t try to talk to me.
That is why I was thrilled that I got my house refinanced without meeting anyone until signing day.
I feel peaceful when there are only two or three threads of thought going on.
As an aside, I think this is why my writing meanders so much. There are too many other things going on in my head that sometimes leak out into my writing. It wasn’t always like that. In college, my writing was concise. I hated paper assignments with minimum word or page counts. I could write everything needed in usually half or less of the required space, so I had to pad my papers, and that sucks. Now, all I do is pad.
Perhaps most of what I perceive is not real? Is it just psychosis and not me being aware of anything? That is a possibility.
I very stupidly hang on to these thoughts as if there is a way out if I can only figure out why people who don’t even know me have a negative impression of me. Why do people who know me ultimately not care about me in the slightest and regard me as inferior and not really a loss? It seems that even people who I believe love me don’t really seem to care. That actually makes a lot of sense to me.
I need to put it on the giant pile of things that do not matter and kick it off a cliff.
It seems that I finally killed off my desire for a social life. Hopefully.
There are only two people that have been in my life (not counting family) that if I was able to do it over again, I would still want and need to meet. For one of those people, there are so many things that I would do differently, but would it have changed the result?
Only two. That seems weird and a little sad.
Last summer, a voice in my head asked me if I am ready to come home as I laid in bed. I knew what it meant. I told it yes initially, then thought about my grandchildren and said no. Is it possible that I would have not woken if I had not changed my mind?
It was odd because it was a different voice than all the others in my head. It really felt like it was external.
I want to see them grow up into the awesome people that they will be but do they need me? No one does, so why would they? Am I a positive in their lives? If I am not, I have zero reasons to be here.
It also made me realize that I have no home. Not in any real sense.
So, I have accepted my lot in life and let most things go. Writing this made me realize I have not accepted as many things as I thought I had.
I will just exist until the end and do what I can for my kids and grandkids and maybe see if I can get my ledger to zero by helping others in some way, now and again.
