Diary of a Prisoner No parole allowed

2017-12-11

It happened again

Filed under: Blog — Tags: , , , , , — Inmate #840528 @ 01:35

I read that writing supposedly helps, that when you have a bad thought you should put it in writing as soon as you have it, so that your mind doesn’t sit on it and plays with it. I don’t know if that’s true because I do keep a list of things that happen to me during the day and I mark them as positive, negative or neutral (which really is neutral-negative, or rather: not great but didn’t actively bring me down, if that makes any sense), and it doesn’t really feel like it’s helping. But here we go anyway, let’s try this again. I suppose that having told a person or two about this blog sort of gives it a bit more of a purpose, since it doesn’t look like hordes of anonymous reads are flocking to it anyway. And what’s writing without an audience?

Anyway, it happened again today. That feeling of inadequacy and comparing myself to others. I cannot get into specifics for obvious reasons, but someone I mentioned before was out of town today, and that alone was enough to rekindle my feeling of being stuck. Here’s someone who just hops on a bus, or train, or whatever, and travels almost 400 km for the hell of it; and here I am, for whom going to the next town on a map to spend a few hours with a friend feels like a gargantuan accomplishment that requires hours, if not days, of mental planning. And then my mind started racing, much like it used to do back on irc when I was being ignored, which I’ll talk about at some point. I looked for this guy I know she’s getting involved with, and found him; he has photos with his girlfriend, whom he seldom mentioned to my friend, and on her profile (the girlfriend’s I mean) she has a photo of them together (with the guy) mentioning their “unengagement” party. My brain quickly put things together: they’re splitting up so he can get with my friend. And I’m happy for her, if he treats her well, except I can’t help being a little jealous, and just plain envious, I admit, because again I feel stuck while others do this sort of crazy thing. It looks like nobody can stay single for more than a month and I quit a sort-of-kind-of long-distance relationship almost two years ago and it still feels like yesterday. And the guy apparently got on the cover of a magazine for something, and is a skilled musician; all things I kind of dabble in but certainly am not magazine material. Not that I want to be, mind you, but I can’t help but compare myself to this person I don’t even know. And there’s another thing about him that made me uneasy but I just can’t say it; it’s nothing inherently wrong or bad, just something that may have an effect on my friend and, in a sense, spoil one thing we sort of playfully shared.

I’m fully aware that I have no rights on anything, but it’s that sense of betrayal, once again, amplified by the fact that it really looks like everyone claims to have love issues yet they all actively seek it, everyone claims to be sad yet everyone quickly gets over it, and so on; it’s as if nobody is really miserable, and as a consequence nobody understands my being so. We’ve already been over how badly and guilty I feel about feeling like that, so I won’t repeat myself. I know I’m a terrible person for even thinking anything along those lines. It’s not even about being single, mind you. Another good friend was lucky enough to meet a good person and it seems to be working out for her, I suppose, because I don’t ask about it lest it makes me feel like that again (and that in turn makes me feel like I’m a bad friend, once again), and it’s not like she was actively seeking love, assuming that it leads to that anyway, yet she did found someone.

That’s the issue with me. It’s not about being single. Every time I try to talk about this with someone, I fail to make this point and it just adds to the sense of feeling alone. I don’t think I’d be ready for a relationship, not a traditional one anyway, so that’s not what I’m looking for. My problem is that I feel like I have no chance of finding someone even if I wanted to.  It’s not having the opportunity. And part of that is because of me not putting myself out there, true. But part of that is also because I am not attractive. And no, I don’t think that looks are necessarily the only thing, but they certainly do mean something. If you don’t like someone’s looks at all, it’s unlikely it’ll grow on you over time even if you like the person. Not impossible, but unlikely; especially if there is no physical attraction whatsoever. And I know I’m not attractive. I could lose some (quite a bit of) weight, and I just don’t like my looks; I was never the attractive one. I can’t recall a single person who had a crush on me in person. Online it’s sort of different, you get to know me for me first and foremost, but then the moment you meet me in person, it’s game over. I’m not saying I’m hideous. But I’m not anyone’s first choice. I suppose the only silver lining about the aforementioned friend is that this sort-of-unengaged guy is not particularly attractive, which I reckon may give me a sense of hope. But again, it’s not about finding love, not actually, not in practice. It’s about the chance. It’s about being denied a whole chunk of the human experience. And I know that a lot of this is my depression talking, and my anxiety, and maybe the memories from my childhood that my brain has conveniently stashed aside yet not that well. I hate myself for it because I know that most of this is in my head. I know it is. So I’m chubby, so I’m no Tom Cruise (or whomever women like nowadays), so I’m not good at playing Mozart on the piano. But I’m pretty much a normal guy. I think. Because as I was typing that, I wondered: is there anything really broken about me? And part of my mind thought: no, you’re overall pretty decent, you may a bit quirkier than average but it’s nothing earth-shattering. But another part went: are you kidding me? sit down because this will be a long list.

I just want the chance, really just the chance, to do normal things. Even suffer for someone, not because of someone. I keep mentioning couples because that’s the basis of human contact, in the end. I just wish I could get out of my shell and live life, be it good or bad. So far it’s only been bad, I look at my past and I only see negative experiences: with my family, with other people. I have very few good memories to hold on to, and my parents aren’t getting any younger. Besides them, I have nobody. That’s what’s making me feel worse and worse, subconsciously, I think. What’s the point of life if you’re alone? I wish I had a local friend to do silly things with, to just hang out with; I wish I could get myself to do it, especially, because once again I’m the barrier, the obstacle, the hindrance. I watch movies and see people doing things and it feels normal, and it feels nice; and then it’s over, and I feel empty and that’s because the illusion is over. Sometimes it comes apart sooner, sometimes characters get heartbroken over something or someone, and I realize I crave that pain. Anything, really, to feel alive, to get out of this stalemate with myself. I find myself easily moved; all it takes is a quote about life, or a personal story, or even a well-made tv commercial. But it’s not being moved out of beauty; it’s sadness for myself, as if I were mourning myself. And I know a lot about mourning, unfortunately. And that’s another thing that makes no sense, because I of all people should know better, I of all people should be aware that life doesn’t last forever and should take action before it’s too late. Why can’t I? What is wrong with me?

Maybe I should look into therapy, at least the chatty kind, not the druggy kind.  But it’s logistically impossible for the time being, and to be completely honest it scares me. Because I have a hard time admitting certain things even to myself; especially digging into the past, it’s something I’ve always struggled with. I don’t even do that with the people I consider friends. Doing that with a stranger feels like a nightmare. And it’s expensive, and I don’t even know if there are good ones around here anyway. How do you even talk to a therapist about your innermost secrets, your most shameful thoughts, without feeling judged? How do you deal with making yourself so vulnerable? How can you even trust them, or anyone really, with certain things? And what if you spend thousands over years and it doesn’t help? At least writing here is free.

A few days ago I had a bit of a revelation about myself, but I think I was with someone else and couldn’t write it down. I can’t remember. Maybe it was a dream? I really can’t remember, I just had a sudden realization about one of the reasons I may be like this. Not that knowing the root cause necessarily helps, in fact it probably doesn’t because I’m pretty sure it’s rooted in my childhood so the only thing I can do is to accept it and move on anyway. But it made sense, and I even remember feeling like I was onto something. But I didn’t write it down, I didn’t take a note, and it just escaped me. I don’t even know if it happened, if I actually did have this enlightenment moment, or just somehow fabricated a memory of it. See, sometimes I manage to gaslight myself.

But that’s the problem, overall. There is no direct solution. And talking to people doesn’t help, and I got to the point where I don’t even want to. It just feels pointless, and they want to help, and yet can’t, so they feel bad and I feel guilty. Even worse, as I said, I can’t even explain myself. I don’t know how to put it into words that it’s not a matter of being single, it’s a matter of not having any self-esteem, of not seeing anything worthy about myself, so that nobody, be it a potential partner or just about anyone really, would have any interest in me whatsoever. If I feel like I have nothing to offer to anyone, or that I am flat-out a complete failure as a human being, how can I expect anyone to want anything to do with me?

2017-08-15

Anxiety

Filed under: Blog — Tags: — Inmate #840528 @ 22:28

For some people, anxiety is a feeling they can easily recognize when they get it. There’s a before and an after. Anxiety, and no anxiety.

For some of us, anxiety is a constant background noise against which everything takes place. You don’t notice that it’s there all the time, it’s not like a limb that suddenly starts hurting and never gets better. Continuous anxiety feels like it’s becoming milder, but it’s just because you get used to it. If by any chance it gives you a break, it feels weird, because you notice it’s not there, the opposite of most people. But it’s not the same anxiety as the one most people feel at some point or another, it’s not a strong burst of worry or concern about something. It’s the sort of anxiety you become friends with because you realize it’s going to always be there, so it’s easier than fighting it. It literally becomes part of you.

2016-09-11

A thought experiment

Filed under: Blog — Tags: , , , , — Inmate #840528 @ 14:16

What most “sane” people seem to be unable to understand is that dealing with depression, anxiety and paranoia is not something that people like me choose to do. We can’t just shut it down. Telling us to “just try to get better” simply doesn’t work, because we have no control over it. We certainly don’t enjoy it and even though some people may pretend to be depressed for attention, the ones truly dealing with this would love nothing more than to be free from it.

Paranoia in particular is a the root of all evil, at least for me. I don’t mean paranoia in the medical term: I don’t suffer from delusions that someone’s out there trying to kill me, or anything of the kind. I mean it in the more colloquial sense of the term: I often second-guess myself to the point of causing things that, had I not worried about them happening, would have no happened. For instance, I read between the lines when I talk with someone (be it in person or on the phone or online) and the smallest thing in their responses will set my concern off. Did I say something wrong? Was I misunderstand? Did I come across as an asshole? A while back I decided to go for a full-disclosure policy: with those people I am closer to and open with, I will just say it immediately: “just to be clear, I meant it like that”, or: “just to be sure, are you okay with what I said?”, occasionally poking fun at myself: “my paranoia says hello”. Now, to be perfectly clear — see, it’s happening right now — it’s not like I’m constantly second-guessing every single word I say or hear, nor I pester everyone I talk to with requests for confirmation. But it is a thing with me, and it has caused problems in the past. Especially for the less patient, it can quickly grow old; and several people lost interest in dealing with me because of that, directly or otherwise.

The line between paranoia and anxiety is very, very thin. Paranoia is more about the “perceived perception” of me by others, and it fuels anxiety. The thing is: those who never experienced it are simply unable to get it. Just like a dog can smell the individual ingredients of a hamburger one by one, we can’t even understand what that’s like: to us that’s just the smell of a hamburger, with minor differences between one hamburger and the next. That’s why it’s so difficult for me to even admit it, let alone fix it. How do you fix something that’s always been part of you? It’s like telling a color-blind person to just try to see red; they don’t even know what red is.

Lately I’ve tried an experiment. I would consistently apply the “worry tree” that a friend suggested to me a while ago, and see if it made any difference. This is what that is:

Worry Tree

I generally find the whole idea of “self-help” stuff a ridiculous hoax, but this makes sense. The problem is: how the hell do you apply that kind of thing? Because, see, my problem is that when my paranoia hits, I am fully aware that I’m being paranoid and irrational. I know it, I can see that I am making no sense, that I am overreacting and overthinking, yet I have no idea how to stop it, and that makes even more frustrating, and leads me to feel like I’m a broken person with no hopes of ever being normal. Fighting your own brain is tough.

So I came up with a little trick: what would I tell someone who came to me and told me they are in the same situation I’m actually in? How would I react? What would my suggestion be? My idea was: if I can force myself to look at the situation from the outside, I may be able to talk some sense into myself. Note that this has nothing to do with multiple personality disorder or anything of the sort, which I’m thankfully spared of. It’s just a way to try and see the bigger picture.

A little aside is needed here. For one of my jobs, I have to undergo a monthly evaluation of some work I have done earlier in the month. This is generally nerve-wracking, especially as I am not told when the evaluation is coming; I can generally tell what work is going to be evaluated, but I don’t know when the evaluation itself will be. That usually propels me into a spiral of anxiety, because my ability to continue working for this company depends on that evaluation. This is anxiety, not paranoia: it’s not about how I am perceived, it’s “merely” about my financial future. I often feel like I just wish the evaluation were sent already, regardless of the outcome: good or bad, I’d be out of misery either way.

After the evaluation did come last month, I felt relieved and decided to apply the aforementioned trick, with a twist: I would focus on the positive things in my life. Just like I’m rationally aware I’m being irrational when paranoia and anxiety hit, I’m also rationally aware that things are going pretty well for me, especially compared to a few years ago. I have enough work to be able to make impulsive purchases if I want to, and I’m doing well at all my jobs. I’m also good at what many things I do, and several people look up to me as an expert, if not an authority, in various fields. The problem with anxiety is that all of that fades out as soon as one minor negative thing pop up: I can have a thousand people telling me I’m great, but one minor critique will be all I focus on. Again, this is not something I choose to do, and not something I enjoy; it’s just how I am, as hard to believe as that may sound to some people.

I didn’t take notes so I can’t make a list of the positives, but for a while it worked. The evaluation had gone well. The new work to be evaluated later this month was simple enough (something to remember when I get anxious in a few weeks). I am improving my skills at something I have been practicing. I fixed several technical issues I was having. I have been studying a few things, which always makes me happy. Sure, a few bad things happened: a conversation with a friend went a little badly and they were bummed by my answers (I’m deliberately using “they” to avoid saying whether it’s a male or female friend), but after clarifying what I meant, I stopped worrying: if they insist in misunderstanding me, it’s not my problem. I had a little hiccup with one of my jobs: it happens, I’m human, the company still appreciates my work and knows that it’s bound to happen every now and then, so I tried to put my perfectionism aside: it took a lot of effort because, as I said, a minor problem overshadows a million great things, but I managed.

But then something started making it all more difficult. Maybe it’s the weather — gloomy weather makes me very sad, for various reasons I won’t get into right now — or maybe it’s just that this kind of thinking is tiresome for me because it’s not natural, and it takes a lot of effort. Maybe it’s because the work that I’ll be evaluated on was less than usual, and I don’t know if more will come: if not, my evaluation may suffer, because one mistake will be statistically weigh more. Maybe it’s because my mind feels tricked by itself, and as I said, fighting your own brain is tough. I’m slowly reverting to the old habit of overthinking, overanalyzing and overworrying. I still have the worry tree firmly planted in my head, but it’s becoming harder to apply. What happens is that I start thinking: “well yes, maybe it’s alright and this person has a million ways to reply like that, maybe they’re just busy; but what if they are indeed bothered by what I said?”

There are many things that I know I have to work on, and I am fully aware that I may just never “become normal”. But it’s a start, and the early results of the experiment were encouraging. Perhaps it will just take some training, and it’ll become second nature to focus on the positive, even though it’ll still be something I’ll have to do on purpose. Look at me: I’m being somewhat optimistic. It’s raining and it’s dark outside, but it’s not a bad day. And that’s a huge thing.

2016-01-23

Introversion and social anxiety

Filed under: Blog — Tags: , , — Inmate #840528 @ 01:11

Sometimes — pretty often, to be honest — I wonder how much of my current situation is caused by actual depression and how much by my innate introversion taken to the extreme.

I’m the living proof that introversion or extroversion are something you’re born with. My parents, to this day, still complain that when I was a baby and someone came visit, I’d scream like a police siren. I guess I never felt at ease around people, and that never really changed.

I mean, it’s not like I hate people. I’m not a psychopath. I just don’t feel the need to be around people most of the time, as I’m perfectly at ease with my own company. That may make me sound conceited and arrogant, but I don’t mean it like that. What I mean is that while some people get bored on their own, I’m just the opposite: I always have something to do, and more often than not, other people kind of get in the way.

This is not to say that I don’t occasionally wish I had people around me. Sometimes I do, and that’s when years of having virtually no social training backfire: I’ve made most of my friends online, and the geographically closest ones are still far enough that it’s not the easiest thing to get together anyway. You may wonder: why online? are you that scared of human contact? No, not really. It’s just that I live in a small town in the middle of somewhere in Europe, and I have peculiar interests — I’ve always been a geek — that virtually nobody around here shares. I will admit however that for me it’s easier to make friends online: I’m overly conscious of how I look, how I speak, how I move, and when I meet someone in person my paranoia switches to overdrive. It’s part of why I seldom go out. It’s easier for me to be myself when I know I’m not being judged by how I look or talk, but only by how I say. I’ve always believed that it’s what’s inside someone that matters, not their outer shell.

Of course, all of this is inextricably related. Sometimes I feel lonely and I have nobody to hang out with; and even if I do, I end up being uncomfortable as it’s not something I’m used to, which usually prevents me from really enjoying it; and I come full circle by wondering why the hell I even bothered in the first place, vowing that I’m done with this “meeting people” business for the time being. All introverts need time to decompress after being social, but I’m one of those lucky ones who need some extra time on top of that just to deal with all the anxiety that came with it.

The funny thing here is that my social anxiety is the quiet kind, as I call it. Well, it’s not funny at all, really. It’s actually the sneakiest kind of anxiety. Ask an anxious person what anxiety feels like, and you usually get the typical description of sweaty palms, increased heart rate, dry mouth, and so on and so forth. I’m not like that. My social anxiety takes place on a subconscious level, like having a kettle that’s boiling inside of me, whose vibrations I can feel but that’s just very slightly out of reach so I can’t shut it down. It’s really annoying, because I am perfectly able to tell myself that it makes no sense: why am I even nervous at all about going for a walk with Alice (or Bob, it’s really not a matter of gender) if we chat online so much? I can see myself from the outside, and I know that all that nervousness is my ancestral fight-or-flight response being triggered by something that’s objectively not dangerous at all, yet I can’t stop it. I can tell myself that it’s pointless but it won’t help, and so there’s a side of me that’s just nervous and anxious, and another side of me going “why must I be like this when I know better?”, and I end up getting annoyed at myself because of it, in a self-fulfilling prophecy that very often leads me to call myself stupid. That is pretty much the worst thing I can do, because all of this comes with enough self-loathing as it is. But I am fully aware that my social anxiety pointless and I can rationally see it, yet I really just can’t control it, no matter how I try.

At this point I’m sure that whoever’s reading this belongs to either one of two kinds of people. There’s those who are nodding and saying “I know exactly how this guy feels” and maybe are even relieved that they’re not the only ones going through these things. And then there’s those who never went through depression, social anxiety, who are not introverts yet not necessarily extroverts but just somewhere in between, and have no idea what I’m talking about at all. Those are usually either confused by all that I just wrote about, or maybe think that I am making this up, as a weird way of looking for attention. I will address this in detail in a future post, but for now let me just say that I don’t really blame them, even though it would be nice if they at least made an effort to understand.

The problem is that they expect to apply their own frame of reference to others, even though it simply cannot be done: it’s as if they were surprised that a color blind person can’t tell red from green; it seems to impossible to them that others may have such a condition, simply because they are free from it. Just like color blindness, depression and anxiety are conditions that can’t be detected from the outside. That’s what makes it so difficult to deal with them. That’s why there’s such a stigma that comes with it. That’s why some people think that those of us who are fighting this daily struggle, those of us who are locked in this prison, are just making it up. There are only two words for those who think we are faking it; two simple, short words: I wish.

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