Growing up in the shadow of AIDS

I have been walking around the past several days in a haze of torqued up sexual fantasies, subsisting on lust and nicotine. I came of age at the peak of the AIDS crisis, and it really scarred my psyche and instilled a dreadful fear of sex, compounded by my severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Adding insult to injury was the blatant, unchallenged homophobia that was so pervasive at the time. If we were lucky, we were just a joke, but disparaging attitudes and contempt against LGBT people were considered normal as was real and threatened violence. AIDS was considered a just punishment against morally corrupt people, and it almost certainly doomed one to a horrifying, ignominious death. The government did not prioritize the health crisis, taking the attitude that it only targeted “those people.” 

I also had literally no one to talk about what I was experiencing as I became sexually mature. Most people are able to work through the inevitable teenage bullshit about sex and relationships with peers, family members and trusted adults so that they’re able to enter a more mature phase of understanding. I had these basic, primal, animalistic urges towards other men but never had the luxury of talking through them or getting any understanding and perspective as to what I was feeling. All of this – a lifetime of ingrained maladaptive thoughts and behaviors – prevented me from ever being able to truly enjoy the natural expression of my sexuality at any time in my 50 years.

I’ve spent more than a decade staying with my empty status quo and rarely even trying. I show up to work each day, pay all my bills, say pleasant things to everyone around me and spend my nights and weekends looking for distraction in TV and movies and sometimes video games as I stew in my quiet despair. I’m tired of living in constant fear of what might happen. I can’t honestly say that being timid and overly cautious has really benefitted me in any way over the course of my life, but it has caused me to isolate myself, avoid countless things that might have brought me joy and end up a backdrop spectator in my own existence.

Last week I asked my doctor to start me on Truvada, a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PreP). I’m planning to seek out more casual sexual encounters and try to actually enjoy myself. I intend to practice certain safer sex practices but not be so maniacal about others. I’ve been doing a lot of walking during lockdown to get myself in better shape. I’d like to get on some dating websites and focus on getting to know people and enjoying my sexuality while I still can and not desperately hunting for “the one” (though I’d be pleased as punch to find him). I’m not looking to go on Grindr because I’m not young, hung and full of cum, and I’m not going to seek casual encounters on Craigslist because I don’t want to get murdered. It would help things if my equipment actually worked better (thank you antidepressants!), but I can only address a few issues at a time. I want to train myself to unlearn decades of unhealthy, unproductive thought patterns. I don’t want to spend four weeks in a heightened state of anxiety after every sexual experience, waiting until I can take an HIV test. I don’t want to exhaust myself with the splitting I do when I think about HIV, panicking every time I hear HIV mentioned while in that waiting period and then constantly telling myself I’m glad that I’m “safe” when my status is confirmed to be negative. I want to rely on the best medical foundation and move forward while realizing that I can’t control everything.

I feel foolishly sex-obsessed like an adolescent with all this, but I also feel more drive and less like I spend all my time sitting around my place alone and feeling sorry for myself. My superstition nature – driven by my OCD – tells me that my attempt to take control will result in ironic tragedy because that’s how it works in books and movies, where tragedy strikes when all seems to go well. And so that’s how I think life works. Even writing this entry makes me believe I’m tempting fate, but I have to press on and try to undo a lifetime of damage with fear and trembling.

And then, of course, this happens…

I wrote the draft for the previous section’s screed on sexual empowerment before I was violated by a male masseur yesterday. Every blue moon I'll get an M4M massage because I’m an extremely lonely, socially isolated and extremely unhappy person that gets desperate for physical and sexual contact. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ve always been just a little bit skeevy when it comes to my sexual activity (though generally pretty vanilla with my tastes). I've gotten erotic massage, and in my youth, I occasionally engaged in public sex with strangers. Living in Los Angeles for ten years also provided no shortage of venues where one might indulge in pleasures of the flesh. Because of the fear of HIV and internalized homophobia that I mentioned above, I never really had a healthy integration of my sexuality as a fundamental part of me and learned to view as something “separate” with puritanical ideas that it is inherently dirty and shameful, thus only pursued covertly at the dark fringes. If I hadn't had such hang ups around sex, I might have been able to enjoy casual dating that sometimes involved sexual activity and maybe could have found a long-term partner, which is really what I've always wanted.

Ironically, my primary motivation for scheduling the appointment yesterday was for legitimate muscle work as I’ve been having problems in my shoulders and calves, though admittedly looking forward to a beefy guy performing the massage. Most of these M4M appointments involve a little mutual touching and a “happy ending.” This one got surprisingly sexual surprisingly fast and abruptly. It went from him lightly tickling my balls with one hand as he used the other forearm to apply deep tissue strokes to my major muscles to grinding his cock on my ass. I was a little surprised since he bills his massage as therapeutic and sensual, as opposed to erotic. I didn’t mind what he was doing until he decided to top me bareback. I told him to stop, and he immediately did. While it was brief and didn’t involve orgasm, I was really upset because he unilaterally decided to perform the single riskiest sexual act without checking to see if I was O.K. with it. Younger people have a markedly different attitude about HIV and safer sex, but this guy was my age and should have known better.

I was on day four of Truvada, which should provide 95-97% reduction in risk, but it doesn’t reach full effectiveness until a week. With my OCD, that differential makes all the difference to me. Now I’m freaking out and back to the agony of having to wait four weeks before I can take an effective HIV test. I feel as if the prophetic tone I ended the previous section has come true. I let my guard down, tried to enjoy life and found myself in yet another fearful situation alone. I made the same mistakes I always do: thinking that anything I ever do actually matters or that life could ever be anything like I wanted it to be. I tried to exorcise old demons from my psyche by being as measured and rational as I could be, but I never seem to have any real control or agency about anything that happens to me. I just constantly mess things up no matter how hard I try. Other people seem to be able to plan and work towards goals that move their lives generally in the direction they want. I always seem to be like flotsam randomly moving but going nowhere regardless of what I do or don't do. 

I made a mistake
I should have never tried
I took the cake
Finished every slice
...
Looking through my eyes
I move at a pace
That I cannot survive
I'm hauling away
I do it all the time
Let love age

I stare at the face

And watch it burn out and die

{Grizzly Bear, "Mourning Sound"}

Thought Journal

I had been seeing a counselor for several months, but she had to take an unanticipated medical leave. Blah Blah Blah "... for my physical health and safety ..." Blah Blah Blah (Take care and stay safe, T.!)

Anyway, I had my first Zoom with a new therapist last week, and she asked that I make a record of the symphony of negative thoughts that plays endlessly in my head. The following is a list of things that ran through my brain, representing a pretty typical week and often a typical day:

• There is a near constant thrum of unhappiness casting a ubiquitous shadow over my mood that I have to fight against: there is nothing for me to enjoy, nothing to look forward to and no hope of achieving a fulfilling life. I just force myself to go through the motions to keep my life at its bare minimum status quo.
• I feel imprisoned in my anhedonia, convinced that I will never find anything enjoyable ever again. I feel free-floating anxiety when something I’ve enjoyed is about to end because I’m sure there will never be anything else or at least I'm panicked to desperately find the next thing I might get some pleasure out of.
• I’ll be doing all right and then the bottom drops out of my mood, especially when I end a task and try to transition to another, and I feel a vague panic that nothing is worth doing and I‘ll never enjoy anything again.
• I’m frequently gripped by a powerful malaise where I find it impossible to do literally anything, even move. It takes all of my will to perform any action whatsoever and break out of this profound disinclination to activity.
• I sometimes have an existential panic over the implications of consciousness and inevitably of death.
• I have random crying fits over absolutely nothing and ridiculous things, such as during the happy ending of Zoolander 2, a silly comedy movie, and even Fred 3: Camp Fred, an even dumber movie I'm embarrassed to admit watching let alone crying over.
• I have episodes of explosive rage over the smallest and most pedestrian setbacks and inconveniences.
• I’m convinced that it’s too late for fulfillment. I sustained my hopes and dreams, the crux of my raison d’ être, in fantasies that propped me up and kept me going with false hope for for all those years I found my actual life unfulfilled, but now those hopes have flown as fulfillment seems impossible. I don't often indulge in fantasy anymore, but when I do, I can lose myself in my imagined reality for literally hours at a time.
• I have a paralyzing fear of failure: What if I finally get it together to write, and no one wants to read or publish it? My entire life would truly, definitively be a waste.
• I’ve tried so many times to make changes and told myself countless times, “This is it, a new beginning” that it feels foolish to ever tell myself that again. How can I ignore my own experience where I’ve failed to realize significant change?
• I waste so much time, mental energy and will on just not doing things: drinking, spending money, overeating, pursuing ill-advised sexual activity. I wrestle with a constantly churning inner debate about making better choices, especially when I wonder why I bother when nothing seems to change regardless of the decisions I make. My experience belies a causal link between my behavior and how I feel or what goes on with me.
• I have bouts where it's impossible to concentrate or perform higher mental functions. I'm often unable to face any complex or complicated task. I'm overwhelmed by what it would take to make real improvements in my life, especially organizing decades of notes, ideas and half-started writing projects.
• I’m constantly disappointed that friends and families don’t fulfill my emotional needs or appreciate me in ways I crave, and I yet hate myself putting that burden on them, especially given my truly insatiable need that no one could ever fulfill. How have I fulfilled others' emotional needs?
• I feel obsessive guilt over things I did or said or didn’t do or say, even with events that literally happened over 40 years ago. I can guilt myself into tears over those times I lost my patience with a couple of (now dead) cats and yelled at them, ignoring all of the times I was caring, extremely patient and providing a secure home. All that matters are the times I failed. Not all the times I didn’t or even went above and beyond. This is the same in my relationships with people as well.
• No matter how hard I try to try, I’ll never be anything close to what I’ve always wanted to be since I was a child. And now it’s too late.

Accomplishments

Once again this week, my only significant personal achievement today was not getting drunk. Or doing bear whores or cocaine, for that matter. So zero out of three for the evening despite an inordinate amount of consideration.

Still a Drunk

In July of last year, I derailed about two years of sobriety when I had a couple of beers on the way back from a trip to Los Angeles, but I never went anywhere with it. Unfortunately, I've had two periods of serious drinking this year. Once in the spring and once for several weeks at the end of summer. I managed to sober up with a poor man's detox by staying at my parents home while they were out of the country for a few weeks in August. Keep in mind that the drinking and the detoxes were done while still working full-time and showing up every day. I've managed to avoid drinking for the past four months, though it's always there ready for me to fall back into.

And I've certainly been tempted. I realize that I’m always saying that my mood has been particularly bad lately, but I do have periods where my mental illness troubles me less. However, the past few months have generally not been such a time, and I have often struggled desperately just to make it through each day, flirting with passive suicidal ideation with some regularity. My psychiatrist has tried to make a couple of adjustments to my meds this year with no improvement, so I'm back on the same things I've been taking forever. I felt she signaled she'd pretty much done all she can for me when she finally just told me she was going to pray for me. I have recently started seeing a counselor and do think that's going well.

The Story So Far (Life Can Get Better)

When I quit my job three and a half years ago, I was certain that I would never find another professional job anywhere in Memphis. But that didn't bear out, and my situation has improved a lot since then. I found a paralegal job with a large corporation, and the work I do there and the situation in general makes it the best job I've ever had. I still have my baggage to deal with there, as anywhere, but they actually seem very pleased with my performance, which is always good. I also bought a condo a couple of years ago, which is the first time I've ever owned my home. I had to borrow the down payment from my parents, but I've never missed a payment to them or for my mortgage. All in all (though more through serendipitous generosity than my own steam), my financial situation has finally gotten to the point where I'm not living hand to mouth.

50 Is Not So Nifty

I turn 50 years old tomorrow, and no other "milestone" birthday has ever troubled me like this one. Being how I am, I fantasized throughout this year of all the things I would have done by the time my birthday came along: get in shape, get my condo of two years set completely, write the first draft of the young adult fantasy adventure book I've been working off and on for 30+ years, etc.  Essentially have my life "perfect" and be someone unrecognizable and basically not me. Obviously none of that happened. I was going to do a solo "spa day," but I just couldn't be bothered. I'm too jaded to try and set up some meaningful event (such as the phoenix tattoo I got on my 30th birthday) arbitrarily on an arbitrary day in a nihilistic and chaotic universe. I'll go have dinner with my parents, same as I've done the past ten years. I feel guilty and immature for not appreciating having parents who are around and interested in celebrating the day with me while simultaneously simply unable to stop from wishing that my life were ordered differently.

For the past few years, my train of thought has occasionally stopped cold in horror at the idea that I'm approaching this age.  I vividly recall something that happened to me in college. I was sitting at a table outside of a classroom building on west campus when I had a vision of sorts of my future: I saw myself waking up to look in the mirror one day, seeing the last vestige of my youth gone and having never achieved anything in my life that really mattered to me with all hope of hope gone. A vision indeed, prescient as it turns out, for here I am. I spent decades waiting for my "real life" to begin, and now my life is mostly over. I feel I’m forever doomed to be nothing more than flotsam on the stormy sea of my psyche.  I’m tossed around by my depression, tossed around by my fears, tossed around by my anger and tossed around by my endless, unfulfilled, unfillable need.  Until one day I’ll finally just expire – a wasted life of wasted potential.

The Epitome of My Efforts at Recovery

Helpful Advice

What if people treated physical illness like mental illness?

Loneliness and Despair

I've been pretty isolated since quitting my job Thursday night, and it hasn't helped my panic and crushing despair.  But then not many people know my situation or that I impulsively changed my cell phone number.  My friend Marty has been in touch, but he's in St. Louis so there's not much he can do other than reach out by phone.  I went to my AA meeting Friday night for the first time in a long time and went to dinner after.  But I didn't really share anything or let anyone know about my depression or quitting my job.  A local friend e-mailed me some very kind, very heartfelt words in response to my last blog post, and her husband was very kind to me when I opened a checking account at his bank on Friday.  They're both extremely busy people, with three wonderful children, and they were leaving on a week-long vacation this morning.  I know I'm being selfish by wanting to hear from them yesterday, but I was just so incredibly lonely and sad.  My parents called me Friday afternoon to summon me to their house, but I'd taken a (legally prescribed) tranquilizer and told them I couldn't go.  I haven't heard from them since then.  I'm supposed to go over there for Father's Day tonight, and I'm nervous about what kind of evening it will be, particularly since I finally opened the emotional can of worms of sending them a link to my last entry in this blog.  (This blog is fairly raw in its personal honesty, and I've never let my parents know about it in all the years I've been writing it.)

 

As usual, I'm extremely conflicted in my feelings about the people in my life and their reaction to my crisis.  It's immature for me to expect people to rush over to babysit me and my emotions.  It's self-absorbed for me to assume they would drop everything in their lives to attend to my emotional breakdown.  On the other hand, any resource on dealing with a loved one struggling with mental illness will tell you not to let them isolate themselves and to proactively make yourself available, especially when one is in crisis.  I've been carrying my phone around with me and constantly checking it, just hoping someone will reach out to me.  For the most part it's been quiet, except for Marty, a friend I'm so lucky to have.  While I understand the perspective of others, it doesn't change the fact of how isolated and truly alone I've been feeling, absolutely panicked over what to do and what will become of me.

Broke and Unemployed

I quit my job of three years and nine months this evening.  One too many corpses floated up from the ocean floor, and I finally decided that I couldn't bear the stress anymore.  It wasn't helped by the fact that I had once again started the day praying for the strength to buy a gun and blow out the back of my head.  I pussied out of my first suicide with pills, calling 911 as soon as I took them.  The second suicide should have worked if not for the peculiarities of my body's metabolism.  I took about 60 prescription sleeping pills and tranquilizers and was unconscious for four days.  With a gun, I'd only need a split-second decision of irreversible resolve, safely unable to go back.

Through sheer force of will—while weighted down by unhappiness and the ever-present aversion to activity—I managed to laboriously put one foot in front of the other and get myself ready for work.  I thought about calling in sick, but of course I wanted to be mature and responsible.  And you see how far that ended up going.  By eleven o'clock, my pervasive inability to concentrate was robbing me of any pretext of productivity.  When the attorneys assign me discreet, time-sensitive projects, then I'm all over it, focused and productive.  But when I'm expected to beat tasks out of the files while also being held responsible for all of the clerical BS they refuse to delegate to the office receptionist and expected to have the preternatural ability to find the one needed document in a file of ten thousand pages, I quickly end up in a Sisyphean rat race of coming up short on billable hours.  The specter of BILLABLE hangs over my head like the Sword of Damocles.  When I billed at my firm in Los Angeles, I was working on substantive tasks that took hours to complete: reviewing case files, drafting discovery responses, meeting with clients, drafting motions for the Court.  I wasn't trying to fill most days with writing letters and making short phone calls and following up on medical record requests.  Trying to fill a day with tasks that are 0.1 hours or 0.2 hours or 0.3 hours takes a huge toll, especially when you spend half of your time shifting gears from one thing to another to another, which is time you can't bill for.

Anyway, around eleven o'clock, one of the partners said that he fielded a call from our largest client, not just locally but for all three offices in three states, over discrepancies in my last month's billing.  Being legally trained and thus over-cautious, I don't want to go into any further detail.  The upshot was that I had to work maniacally all afternoon to right the wrong in the best way possible.  ("Nothing like a hanging in the morning to focus the mind.")  While I was in anxiety overdrive over Floating Corpse No. 1, the same partner comes back to my desk and says that he got another call from the same client about a different case and another discrepancy in my billing.  (Floating Corpse No. 2)  That one wasn't entirely my fault, just mostly, with some of the blame going to poor communication channels.  However, I'm pretty sure everyone involved lays on the blame squarely on me, and it was just enough to make me realize that I was done and today was my last day.

 

To my credit, I was very classy about the whole thing.  I spent most of the day putting out the fire my ill-conceived actions ignited.  After that crisis was managed as well as it was going to be, I entered all of the remaining billable time I had for the month of June into the system and organized my desk as best I could.  I wrote out a polite resignation letter and made notes of everything I could think of to make the transition easier for the firm, such as my workstation password and where to find the credentials for the different online professional sites.  I thanked my boss for employing me.  After everyone else had left for the day ("See you tomorrow, Michael!"), I scanned and e-mailed the letter to my boss and the HR manager.  I put the hard copy on my boss' desk with my office key and parking fob.  I didn't do anything vindictive or petty, though that's generally in line with my character.  Actually, the real surprise is that I didn't use this boondoggle of bad ideas (the full weight of which has yet to come crashing down on my head *tick tock*) as an excuse to get black out drunk with a couple of packs of smokes along for the ride.  When I got home from work, I took my regular trip to the gym and spent the rest of the evening writing this.

 

So This Is My Life

Every day I feel I'm a failure, a burden to others, trapped in an existence without viable options while spending almost all of my time alone and lonely.  So frankly, I've decided that I'm fucking sick to death with trying to keep all of these plates in the air when nothing that I do, no matter how hard I try, has any measurable impact on my life as it continues its active decay into inevitable entropic doom.  My sobriety is a case in point.  No one helped me through that, and I had no meaningful social support from family or friends through that intensely difficult struggle.  I didn't have the luxury of going through detox or any formal program and didn't have the option to put off work while I focused on my sobriety.  I white-knuckled the months and months of post-acute withdrawal symptoms towards a state of protracted sobriety while still holding down a stressful job and paying my bills and taking care of all the needs of living independently all on my own.

 

So what did all of that struggle get me when my life is no better than when I was a pathetic drunk?  Sure, my family gets categorize me in the sobriety box, and it doesn't matter that I'm miserable and unhappy and unfulfilled all the time as long as I keep up the charade by holding down a job and living independently.  It doesn't matter that I've dug myself into a financial pit to where a third of my income each month is used to slowly pay down my unsecured debt.  Mental illness and addiction have put me in this position, but I might as well attribute it to voodoo and ancient curses for as much leeway those constantly struggling with mental illness are allowed.  I just can't be assed anymore, and it's time for those plates to fall (and crash) where they may.

I hate that I have to endure life, and I find nothing redeeming about existence.  I think our opinions about deities and consciousness after death are entirely moot and nothing but self-serving mental masturbation.  Either individual existence ends at death or it doesn't.  I have no opinions about the unknowable, but what I want is for oblivion to obliterate my consciousness and completely erase the entirety of my existence.  I want to be unmade upon the lathe of Heaven.  Cowardice is the only reason I don't follow through with my will towards death, cowardice plain and simple.  I eagerly anticipate the dream of unbeing while living in crippling fear of the process of dying, the unknown and the potential for pain and panic.  I was reading a deposition about an 80 year old man with lung cancer, and he says the knows he'll die eventually, but he wants to live just a little longer.  I found myself wondering if this desire for more life is just a panicked desire to postpone the horrors of the dying process rather than a positive desire for life.  I find it nearly impossible to reconcile my perceptions with the idea that others would want more life for its own sake.

 

A Current Look at Chronic Depression

 

An article on PsychCentral provides a succinct but thorough examination of the dysthymic disorder that I struggle with every day, and the following highlights speak eloquently to my existence:

• Other signs include low self-esteem, plummeting energy, poor concentration, hopelessness, irritability and insomnia.
• [D]ysthymic disorder — is typically described as a mild depression. But the data show a different story: Dysthymia is often a serious and severe disorder
• Experts refer to dysthymia as a paradoxical condition because it appears mild day to day but becomes brutal long-term
• Epidemiological studies reveal that dysthymia frequently has a devastating impact on people’s lives.
• If they do work, they typically work part-time or report under-achieving because of emotional problems. They also tend to be single because depression can make relationships more challenging.
• In fact, as many as 80 to 90 percent will get major depression. ... There’s evidence that dysthymia boosts the risk for suicidal behavior.
• Comorbidity with anxiety disorders also is common. And dysthymia tends to co-occur with alcohol problems and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
• Dysthymia still largely goes undiagnosed and untreated. ... They may assume that they’re just pessimistic or self-conscious or moody. After struggling for so many years, people come to view the fog of depression as their normal functioning.
• Lifestyle changes, exercise, and social support are usually enough to improve short-term mild depression. But this doesn’t work for dysthymia. Most people with dysthymia have typically tried modifying their lifestyle; yet their depression doesn’t disappear

A Week Is a Week

[Y]ou did it for a week, which admittedly for you is a record.

{Saffy, Absolutely Fabulous}

 

Well, I actually managed to stick with my diet and exercise regimen for seven days, so things have been going all right.  I exercised every day and didn't binge eat or consume any extraneous sugar, and I couldn't tell you the last time I was able to remain so disciplined.  I've already lost a couple of pounds and have gotten my BMI down from morbidly obese to garden-variety, "I'm a middle-aged American" obese.  So that's progress.

 

I even managed to basically stick with my budget as well, although I still ended up adding to my debt.  Obstructive sleep apnea is the newest focus in my endless quest to find some relief in my depressive symptoms.  My health insurance co-pay to see the sleep specialist was $50 just by itself, which tanked my checking account, and I had to use a credit card to buy groceries for the week.  Even with insurance, my part of the sleep study a week from today is going to run $1,000 or more (and that's before I get a CPAP machine), so my efforts to pay down my debt have once again been derailed.  However, I do think it's important to see if I can get better sleep, and I'm hoping it makes a significant improvement in my energy and mood.

 

I haven't done anything with my writing, though I've made some strides in getting my desk at work in order.  I had to e-mail HR about only getting a third of my billable hours during the first week of April, and while they were nominally supportive, I was upset with how they characterized the extent of accommodation they've had to extend me for my depression.  I also have to anxiously wait for the second shoe to drop when the attorney I actually work for sees my billing for last month.  I'm trying my best to keep things in perspective and not let it all get to me.

Mayday Mayday

The ketamine infusions were a bust and a thoroughly unpleasant experience.  I guess it's not a complete mindfuck for some people, but it certainly was for me.  And the setting where I got my treatment was lacking in many ways as well.  The only thing I accomplished that week was finishing my playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition.  I thought a lot about the game while tripping balls on the ketamine; it became a sort of focus for my mind.  Whenever you destroy a demon in the game, they sort of bleed out of this reality and back into the Fade, the realm of spirits.  That concept stuck with me as the drug distorted my sense of time and reality.

 

 

I came back to the desperate, lonely stress of my life and my job with no psychological gains and continuing to wish for the courage to end myself.  In the next few days, when I turn in my billing for the month of April, I'll have to explain my lack of hours, for one week in particular, as the result of my issues with mood and attention.  HR knew the purpose of my trip, but I'm not looking forward to how that loss of billing will go over with the attorneys I actually work for.

 

The only thing I've had any energy for is my anger.  I've been harboring lingering anger towards everyone I know because I irrationally accuse them of not being solicitous enough while I deal with my severe depression alone, even as I often ignore those who've touched base with me.  I've even been slightly angry with my parents, the people who gave me $3,000 with no strings attached simply in the hopes that the treatment might help me.  When I analyze that anger, I realize that it stems from the fact that they don't rush in and take care of everything in my life as if I were a child, so my emotions are more suited to someone who's five not pushing fifty.

 

The Power of Lowered Expectations

 

I've decided that I just need to focus on the practical and stop expecting a change in mood.  I have two options: kill myself or deal with my life.  Since I'm not going to do the former, then by process of elimination, I have no choice but to devote myself to the latter.  My sobriety has been a major stabilizing factor in my life, and I need to remember that and give myself credit.  There are three areas of my life that I need to improve in order to further stabilize things: my weight, my finances and my writing.  My every waking moment needs to be moving those three things forward and none of them backward, so I've chosen this arbitrary date of May 1st to, once again, take steps in that direction.

 

I'm not going to worry about finding a better or less stressful job.  If something comes along, fine, but I'm just going to force myself to invest as much energy as possible into the job I have now and reflect on the financial foundation it provides.  I need to focus on my billing on a going-forward basis and weather the storm last month will create.  Doing so will reduce my stress and give me back my non-work time.  I'm not even going to worry about publishing, just writing.  (The three stories I submitted to the new writers contest were all rejected out of hand, by the way.)  I can't do anything about whether or not my writing will ever be appreciated.  I can only invest the time to organize my ideas and create a body of work.  I'm not going to worry about the world or politics or public policy or public opinion.  I can't help the world, and the world can't help me.  I barely have the psychological resources to keep my life going and won't wallow in guilt that I can't help others, even with their much greater need.  I have one thing to offer the world: my ideas and my writing.  And the world can take it or leave it.  (Leave it, if the past is any indication.)

 

If I get a handle on those three things while continuing my sobriety, then maybe, just maybe, I'll be in a position to work on the only two goals I've had in my life for the past 30 years: finding a relationship and getting published.  There is nothing better for me to do than to build up the things I actually have some control over and put off worrying about the life goals beyond my control until some future time.  I'm not happy, and I don't anticipate being happy, or even being able to enjoy pleasurable things most of the time.  I need to stop chasing pleasure and give up on transient enjoyment just like I've given up on drugs and alcohol for a year and seven months.

 

A Stacked Deck

 

You know, I've realized that it's been a repugnance towards hope that has been driving the engine of my depression these past several weeks.  I just couldn't stomach forcing myself to do anything positive when I knew my mood wouldn't follow and it would all inevitably collapse again.  The reduction to pragmatism I've outlined here sounds well and good, but even it is driven by that detestable emotion.  My past dictates that it's a matter of when, not if, my resolve once again fails me.  Our minds have evolved through the ages to protect us from the fickle chaos that is the true nature of reality and the fact that all of our lives come to nothing.  Hope is the face of that lie.  I've had to come to grips with the cold, hard facts that, for someone with my problems, it isn't a matter of finding help; help (in any real sense) simply doesn't exist for me.  I've pretty much pursued every available option without success.  But I have no viable alternative, so wearing this perspective will have to do for now, until I once again bottom out emotionally and need to construct another narrative to blind me to the inevitability of despair.