Writing Marathon - Day 10
I think this will be the last day of writing. I suspect I'll need a week or two break after this. I'm finding it hard to get into a writing mood today. I usually have some dificulty focusing after going to the gym, probably just tired from the workout. I need a few hours to recover and enough food. But I've been really good about my diet lately and keeping myself near the minimum of the calorie range I've set for myself. what's interesting is I haven't had many cravings for sweets. The once a week takeout is usually enough to curb any cravings. Maybe there'll be one sweet on another day in the week, and even that doesn't really dent my diet in terms of calories.
I'm gonna start off with a non-emotional topic to warm up a bit. Since I wrote about my depression management early on, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about my gym routine.
Wake up time is 8:30 am every day. Shower, breakfast. I'll watch an epsode of tv over breakfast. Move in to my room at about 10:15:-10:30, turn on the computer and check the news headlines and FB feed, messages. Mostly I'm looking to kill time till 11:00 when the Warcraft serves have their daily reset. I'll check youtube and queue up any vids from the channels I follow and organize them into a playlist as I log onto Warcraft and update mission for gold making. By 11:30 I'm done with that and looking to kill an hour. Sometimes I have a ready list of things I can do that won't be much of a time investment, other times I just fritter away the hour. I aim to be dressed and out the door at 12:30. I find that leaving any later in the day, the gym gets a bit more crowded around the weight machines and can get in the way of what machines I want access to.
25-30 min walk to the gym
20 min stretch
30 min cardio
15 min second stretch
45-60 min weight lifting
25-30 min walk home
shower, eat lunch over tv
Total time - roughly 4 hours
The gym routine is very time consuming. Even if i halved my time at the gym, it would only cut about an hour from the total time. The hour spent walking to and from is tedious, but it's still the closest gym to where I live, and it's a cheap membership. There used to be one 10 mins away, but they closed down about a year ago. I start using a podcast to fill the walk back and forth, it keeps me from overusing my aging music collection. Also, I don't get the burnout of 4 hours straight of mostly loud music. Gyms often pump music pretty loudly, so I need to have my headphones nearly at max to drown it out and that wears on me over time. The upside of the walks is the walk to the gym is sort of a warm-up, while the walk home is a cool-down period.
I stretch twice. The first time is a bit longer because I'll stretch my arms, wrists and neck. The core of my stretching is all about my legs because I have terrible flexibility there - sitting in front of a computer all day probably makes this worse. I find I need to stretch twice though as the first stretch my mobility is quite low and between workout sessions my flexibility never improves. Stretching after a warm-up is supposed to be a thing, but I tried doing only one stretch after the cardio and my flexibility was if I'd just walked into the gym for the first stretch. So the first stretch is like a primer coat of paint, the second one I can see a noticable improvement. Slowly over time I see some improvements, but it's never been impressive.
30 minutes is pretty much my standard cardio. I've seen some people advocate for only 10 minutes, treating it like a warm-up. I barely break a sweat in 10 minutes unless I'm going full force. Second, I'm not necessarily looking to train for intensity so much as endurance. Over time I'll look to build up speed, but I want a good amount of endurance. I've more or less given up on running on the treadmill because of my left knee, though I'm considering doing 1 day a week of it, that should be ok. My focus instead has been on an elliptical, which doesn't hurt my knees at all. I've been adjusting my habits and goals because of that.
For the treadmill, my approach varies slightly based on how in shape I am. Since for the longest time that's been out of shape since I stop and start a lot, this is the approach to that. My starting speed is generally 6.5 mph. From there it's intervals of time, 5 mins at 6.5, 5 mins at 3 mph, 4 mins high, 4 low, etc down to 1 min increments. This is 15 minutes of jogging and 15 minutes of walking. As I adjust to the difficulty, I'll start adding an extra minute to segments. By the time I've gotten to the same counting down structure starting from a 6 minute mark, it's time to up the speed. Adjust the speed up .5 mph and then go back to the 5-4-3-2-1 model. Rinse, repeat. I find it takes about 3-4 weeks to go through one of those cycles, feeling out the balance of what's challenging yet sustainable.
The elliptical though, you have to set your own speed and somehow, I don't take distance seriously on that sort of machine. Bikes are the same way. Instead, I used to go by resistance vs time, but I'm adjusting to factor in speed. Speed was really the long-term goal on the treadmill and since it's always been the cornerstone of my workout, if I used an elliptical or bike, it was in addition to the treadmill time and there to exhausting the muscles, so I focused on resistance instead of speed. But, since I'm using this to replace the treadmill for the most part, I need to start focusing more on speed. I picked a resistance that felt comfortable, 10, and then set the time I'd shoot for on the treadmill, about 25-30 minutes total. But I find the elliptical isn't as hard on me as the treadmill, so there's no intervals really, it's more of a steady pace. To switch it up, I'll go 4 minutes and then go in reverse for 2 minutes, for a 6 minute set, and then do 4 of those with a partial forward set to wrap things up. To start factoring in speed, I'm monitoring my speed to stay above 6.5 mph, but quickly adjusted to 7 because it wasn't challenging enough. Figure I'll up the resistance a point every other session, so long as it feels ok, and then when I get to 13, set it down to 9 and up my speed quota, rinse repeat. The thinking is, if I want to mix in the treadmill one out of every three times at the gym, I need to keep my speed the same across the two platforms so there's no problems switching between them.
Weight lifting took up much more time than I realized. I was only estimating that to be between 30 and 45 minutes. And starting out, that was probably accurate, but within a month of going to the gym steadily, I start adding more to the workout. In theory, 30 minutes is my minimum time spent, and I'll feel like I barely did anything, but at least I covered the basics I want to hit. I do 3 sets of 10 reps for pretty much all the major muscles and over time I'll double up on a few, mostly upper body stuff because I'm a guy and the allure of upper body strength is a siren's song. Part of what dictates the length of the lifting is how crowded the gym is and how tired I am. I can't stand waiting around to get to the machines I want. Meanwhile, I'm trying to space out the muscle groups worked. So, if I just worked my biceps, I want to hit up 3 or 4 other muscles before I work those again. There's an ideal spacing out of these things I keep in mind, but when the gym is crowded, this gets compromised or I leave early. The second consideration is how much energy I have left in the tank - did I expend too much energy pushing the cardio and I'm getting tired, is it too hot in the gym or am I overheating which would impair my performance so I stop before as I get nauseas, is my blood pressure getting low and my vision is getting red when I stand up. And sometimes I just get bored and want to stop. Lastly, in terms of progression, it takes me 2-3 weeks when I start to find a stable level. My first day back, I can lift plenty, but I'll be sore for a full 4-6 days afterwards if I do the most I can comfortably handle. So I need to play down for week or two to avoid the excessive soreness. Also, initial gains come very fast. Once that slows down, I aim to add about 5-10 lbs of weight every other week, generally 5 lbs for upper body and 10 lbs for legs. Since I go 3 days a week to the gym , I don't do splits, I work the whole body. There's a 2 day rest once a week, so I make sure I go harder on that last gym session so make the most use of the extra recovery time. This is the day when I aim to add new weight as well.
I'm sure that was boring to anyone reading and way more information than you ever cared to know. I honestly didn't think it would take so long to explain. On to the meatier stuff.
I've talked about this idea before, though I'm not sure if I've given it thorough treatment, so I apologize for the rehash. One of the things I drew confidence from is my ability to effect situations and people around me. There's a number of ways to phrase that and I've heard and used them all to describe it - a strong personality, overbearing, forceful, a noticeable presence, a stabilizing force. I'm sure there's others I'm not remembering at this moment. This part of me has always had an air of mystery to it, some almost innate quality people couldn't quite put their finger on as to how I did it and they couldn't. I think I've been able to quantify parts of it at times, linking it into my own controlling behavior and determination to see things done a certain way. But I feel like those only discuss the negative, forceful side of things. It's not always so outright a thing, it can be more subtle. That's something I've never been able to explain. And there's a part of me that doesn't want to explain it all. I liked having this power that was sort of mysterious to others, because if no one understands it fully, they can't counter it. There's also a sense of awe people have for it at times, and I do like it, it does stroke the ego.
I've said many times in the past that even if I don't want to be, I will be remembered. I leave a trail behind me and imprints upon people. Most people look to immortality, their legacy in their children, or creating that exists beyond themselves. This is what did it for me. It's one of the reasons I never cared about the other things, I already scratched the itch just by being me.
All of this helped form a core in me, a sense of safety. A confidence of knowing I can win most any fight, but even I don't, the other person knew they were in one. From that, you can develop the belief that you can survive anything. It's also the ability to be taken seriously. Someone once said to me that Wolverine doesn't win every fight, but no one's eager for a re-match. And that is the power to instill fear. I decided that was a good mantra to work under. Doesn't matter if you win or lose, just make sure no one wants to try again.
But this core is an unstable power as its based upon conflict. It's why I've been described as a time bomb before, no one ever knew when I was going to go off and on who. From my limited perspective, I didn't mind. To me, my behavior wasn't irrational or random at all. I still don't think it was, but that's because no one understood my internal logic. And no one really asked either. So, this core was irrational, mysterious and powerful - good traits. I liked them, it made me feel powerful and safe.
Problem is I started letting go of it. And it's created a lot of problems for me since. It started with Matt in the larp group, I chose not to fight. That's only the second time I've ever made that decision, backing down was not in my nature. Both times I backed down because fighting would've hurt others. That's one of those internal rules people never realized, if you invoke that morality, I accept the responsibility for my actions. By default, I tend to not notice the collateral damage, or used to.
The more aware I became of how my conflicts negatively effected friends, or the very social structures I was trying to foster, the more paralyzed I became. I once heard a story about a man who wished for knowledge of everything, and he became paralyzed by it. He was too keenly aware of how every decision effected things and couldn't in good conscience do anything. The better a person I tried to be, the weaker I've become. I stopped trampling over everything and everyone, so I stopped leaving footprints. I became less noticeable. I've slowly walked away from the things which made me powerful and feared.
There's a decrease in importance that followed. It's odd not being feared anymore. When people ask me who I am now, I want to say noone. Because I chose to be that, I chose to stop forcing people to recognize me and what I wanted, I chose to stop making waves and effecting and controlling my environment. Part of me is very ok with this actually. I used to say I treated my ego like a muscle I could flex or relax when I chose. I've always found an appeal to the idea of the dissolution of the ego. I believe we're all noone really and that people choose to make us important for their own reasons, but it's not a reflection of us and not a standing we've earned or have any claim to. The only time it bothers me is that there's still a few people I want to show up, past arguments I want to win by showing how important and successful I am. This starts linking into Hitmouse, as many of those grudges involve gamers I used to know. It's not limited to that though, it's difficult to want to talk to someone from 10, 15, or 20 years ago and you're embarassed to say how little has become of your life.
Here's the thing about fear and power, they accrue from momentum. They don't exist in a vacuum either, but rather are born out of group dynamics. Being so isolated, mostly self-imposed now, I literally can't reclaim these things. I'd need to start from the ground up and break a few peoples' spirits to get a foothold...and those people would need to be somewhat isolated themselves, not having strong ties to bolster them. And you see how this fits the model for an abuser already? You find a few weak links and then you've got some social clout, and then you can tackle people who are tied to a similarly sized group as yours. See, the group of people who give in, justifies to others why you should be taken seriously. To dominate, you need to know what people's insecurities are and what the bedrock of their confidence is, and a lot of that gets outsourced to the people around us. You gotta plug in and feel the momentum shift around you as people's belief in one person or the other shifts. You ride the right waves and you create a power base. This fucked up how-to manual is stuff I instinctively knew and partially explicitly knew for years.
A lot of this became clearer in my dealings with Warren over the years. See, Warren is a coward, always has been, always will be. A journal entry I wrote a decade ago, I referred to most of the people in the larp group as animals and wrote about them as if it were a story. Warren was a lion with a shaved mane saying he wasn't a lion, but just a really large cat. Warren has an impressive roar, but if you can push past it, it's all he has. One-on-one, Warren can hold his own just fine, one-on-ones are just a battle of wills. Reason, emotion, facts, accusations etc., these are just tools for leverage, trying to get the person to give up their will, ways to instill doubt. A truly stubborn person knows this and just ignores these tools, sticks to their guns, and you realize you can't move them. It's not that their will is even that strong, they're refusing to think so doubt can't creep in. Warren has come to master this power over time. Enter group dynamics, that battle of the wills now has a crowd. Social approval is powerful leverage. Win the crowd, you can undermine the other person, threatening them with loss of status, loss of self-worth (if they've externalized it onto others), and in extreme cases, expulsion from the group. Warren is wholly dependent upon the crowd, and that's his greatest weakness. In large part, this is do to his immigration status, he's lived in fear of getting caught losing his job and needing people who could take him in. But he's lived his life so long in this way, it won't stop when his marriage to Rachel grants him legal status, the behavior is too ingrained. He'd have to go into therapy to untangle those knots, or to consciously engage with the behavior, see the irrationality of it and slowly detach himself from it - which it is highly unlikely he'll do. But this is why one of Warren's nicknames is the Juggler...like the Joker but not interesting or fun.
But seriously, the Juggler was a name I gave him to describe his behavior of needing to maintain a massive friend circle at all times. But time is limited, so each relationship is like trying to keep a ball in the air. The trick for him was setting the dynamics of each relationship to only require seeing or talking to a person every several months. At New Years, he would spend an afternoon or two going through all the contacts in his phone and calling anyone he hadn't talked to in 6 months. The extended network was there to keep as many options open should he need a place to crash or someone to borrow money from (and never repay). As I isolated myself more social groups, I lost a lot of the power I had over Warren. This is what I mean when I say the better a person I tried to be, the more Warren took advantage of it to do his own thing - me being a better person meant not being a controlling and dominating person socially. As I tried to seek Warren's cooperation, he would agree to things, but never meant any of it. Our relationship only really worked when I had my boot to his head, and it was frustrating to hold back, to not give in to bad habits. A major blow came when he began dating Rachel, a stalwart woman who backs her man no matter what he says or does. The second came because of Hitmouse. Warren worked the con scene and got noticed. As he made inroads there socially, he kept all of that for himself instead of representing the company like he was supposed to. Now he has a large group of people to tell how right and wonderful he is. That is a total reversal of our power dynamic were I to go on the con scene, it's one of the reasons I've had such anxiety about it for years, he has command of the group over me there. And to navigate that, I need to be in good mental health, confident and secure in my own right, not reliant on externals.
I feel like these past few paragraphs should give the reader a lot more insight than I've ever given about some of the dark places my mind goes. It's cold and calculating and it's looking at people as pieces on a chess board. It's knowing how to break someone down and being able and willing to do it. And it's all just a means to an end to establish dominance, control, to accrue power. At the very least I've always considered myself a benevolent tyrant. I mentioned above that I've been largely considered a stabilizing force, I did that by establishing control first though. Even as I acted upon these things, I was still the person who let people live in his apartment and exhausted himself feeding them and helping them with their problems. That's another reason people never understood me, these behaviors always seemed so contradictory to people they couldn't reconcile them. Inevitably, people just picked one to focus on and ran with it.
I've written before that the same way to hurt someone is the same way to heal them. Figure out what truths they tell themselves that make them unhappy. If you want to hurt them, lean into it. If you want to heal them, undermine them. Emotional pain is the net result of us believing things about the world or ourselves that we wish weren't true. Identify those things in people by getting to know them. And most people will tell you because it makes you sound like a deep thinker and they're attracted to it. They never realize the power of the information they're handing over to you. And stop and really think about the fact I've known this for a very long time, and all that I've written in this journal and the fact that up until 2 years ago I posted it openly on FB for anyone to see.
In the past week or two, I've taken to calling all of this the dark arts as a Harry Potter reference. I stopped using these things and I only pass on the information to people I know have the character not to misuse it.
Thing is, I spent over a decade figuring all of this out, practicing it, refining my methods and models. It was a part of my identity for a long time. Even when I'm not doing these things, I still think in the language alongside everything else. I can't unsee things. One of the reasons I think my social isolation is a good thing is it keeps me from falling back into bad habits. A part of me feels like I'm protecting others from myself in the process.
The flip side is things I said above. Keeping myself small and isolated, non-threatening - it leaves me vulnerable, unimportant, unremarkable and in many cases not worth remembering. In other terms, I give up relevance, confidence, safety and part of my sense of self. Those have been devastating things to give up and has been a not insignificant factor in my depression and anxiety over the last decade. And I've given them up by choice, which is sometimes hard to wrap my head around. I look back on my emotional struggles from the last several years and see that a line running through all of it has been trying to cope with the loss of these tools I relied on and trying to find new ones. A lot of the time was simply lost in pain, weeks and months on end of intentional numbness, before I learned to manage it. And a lot of time spent developing new tools or refining atrophied ones to try and take the place of what I gave up, or to ease the pain. I feel like I'm in a good place in terms of managing the pain these days, but still not far enough along creating replacement tools.
It's difficult writing all of this, bordering on the surreal actually. I can feel my vision distort to pull back to make me feel like a passenger in my own mind as this writing unfolds. It's a disassociation thing and I'm trying to fight it while I finish this writing. I feel like all I've written is revealing too much, maybe comes across as too melodramatic...I'm not the most comfortable having typed it all out. And yet it's all stuff that's been in my head and should be let out. It's something of a rule I follow, if I can put it into words, my therapist should be told about it, and my journal is one avenue I used for doing so. Fear of consequences or reactions is not a suitable reason to hold anything in for very long. This journal is a roadmap to my mind and I've always firmly believed my therapist needed the most accurate road map I could give if I ever wanted things to get better. No matter how ugly or awkwardly it comes out, things need to be said if they're going to change.
If you look at some of what I've written lately. I said I saw emotional dynamics in terms of wing-chun. I visualized school work as combat. Violence/conflict is the lens through which I see the world. If you connect those dots, what I wrote above is just a continuation of all of that.
Finishing this marathon, ending on these topics...I feel a bit old. Not so old there can't be new beginnings, but also like I could retire from the world and be done with it all. Spending so much time looking back on my life, analyzing every decision, lesson learned, thought process...yeah, it makes me feel old. I think the number of regrets and ups and down makes it feel like a longer time then it ever really was. It's an odd feeling for sure, but not an unpleasent one. It might also the emotional result of writing so much over the last 10 days and ending on I feel a reveal of how darkly I view people and interactions. Yesterday's entry alone was recounting nearly a 10 year block of my life that didn't even come near the present day.
I have no real ending to this marathon. I can say I cleared all of the notes out of my notepad and writing all of them went to places I did not expect. I think I definitely need a short break from writing.
I'm gonna start off with a non-emotional topic to warm up a bit. Since I wrote about my depression management early on, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about my gym routine.
Wake up time is 8:30 am every day. Shower, breakfast. I'll watch an epsode of tv over breakfast. Move in to my room at about 10:15:-10:30, turn on the computer and check the news headlines and FB feed, messages. Mostly I'm looking to kill time till 11:00 when the Warcraft serves have their daily reset. I'll check youtube and queue up any vids from the channels I follow and organize them into a playlist as I log onto Warcraft and update mission for gold making. By 11:30 I'm done with that and looking to kill an hour. Sometimes I have a ready list of things I can do that won't be much of a time investment, other times I just fritter away the hour. I aim to be dressed and out the door at 12:30. I find that leaving any later in the day, the gym gets a bit more crowded around the weight machines and can get in the way of what machines I want access to.
25-30 min walk to the gym
20 min stretch
30 min cardio
15 min second stretch
45-60 min weight lifting
25-30 min walk home
shower, eat lunch over tv
Total time - roughly 4 hours
The gym routine is very time consuming. Even if i halved my time at the gym, it would only cut about an hour from the total time. The hour spent walking to and from is tedious, but it's still the closest gym to where I live, and it's a cheap membership. There used to be one 10 mins away, but they closed down about a year ago. I start using a podcast to fill the walk back and forth, it keeps me from overusing my aging music collection. Also, I don't get the burnout of 4 hours straight of mostly loud music. Gyms often pump music pretty loudly, so I need to have my headphones nearly at max to drown it out and that wears on me over time. The upside of the walks is the walk to the gym is sort of a warm-up, while the walk home is a cool-down period.
I stretch twice. The first time is a bit longer because I'll stretch my arms, wrists and neck. The core of my stretching is all about my legs because I have terrible flexibility there - sitting in front of a computer all day probably makes this worse. I find I need to stretch twice though as the first stretch my mobility is quite low and between workout sessions my flexibility never improves. Stretching after a warm-up is supposed to be a thing, but I tried doing only one stretch after the cardio and my flexibility was if I'd just walked into the gym for the first stretch. So the first stretch is like a primer coat of paint, the second one I can see a noticable improvement. Slowly over time I see some improvements, but it's never been impressive.
30 minutes is pretty much my standard cardio. I've seen some people advocate for only 10 minutes, treating it like a warm-up. I barely break a sweat in 10 minutes unless I'm going full force. Second, I'm not necessarily looking to train for intensity so much as endurance. Over time I'll look to build up speed, but I want a good amount of endurance. I've more or less given up on running on the treadmill because of my left knee, though I'm considering doing 1 day a week of it, that should be ok. My focus instead has been on an elliptical, which doesn't hurt my knees at all. I've been adjusting my habits and goals because of that.
For the treadmill, my approach varies slightly based on how in shape I am. Since for the longest time that's been out of shape since I stop and start a lot, this is the approach to that. My starting speed is generally 6.5 mph. From there it's intervals of time, 5 mins at 6.5, 5 mins at 3 mph, 4 mins high, 4 low, etc down to 1 min increments. This is 15 minutes of jogging and 15 minutes of walking. As I adjust to the difficulty, I'll start adding an extra minute to segments. By the time I've gotten to the same counting down structure starting from a 6 minute mark, it's time to up the speed. Adjust the speed up .5 mph and then go back to the 5-4-3-2-1 model. Rinse, repeat. I find it takes about 3-4 weeks to go through one of those cycles, feeling out the balance of what's challenging yet sustainable.
The elliptical though, you have to set your own speed and somehow, I don't take distance seriously on that sort of machine. Bikes are the same way. Instead, I used to go by resistance vs time, but I'm adjusting to factor in speed. Speed was really the long-term goal on the treadmill and since it's always been the cornerstone of my workout, if I used an elliptical or bike, it was in addition to the treadmill time and there to exhausting the muscles, so I focused on resistance instead of speed. But, since I'm using this to replace the treadmill for the most part, I need to start focusing more on speed. I picked a resistance that felt comfortable, 10, and then set the time I'd shoot for on the treadmill, about 25-30 minutes total. But I find the elliptical isn't as hard on me as the treadmill, so there's no intervals really, it's more of a steady pace. To switch it up, I'll go 4 minutes and then go in reverse for 2 minutes, for a 6 minute set, and then do 4 of those with a partial forward set to wrap things up. To start factoring in speed, I'm monitoring my speed to stay above 6.5 mph, but quickly adjusted to 7 because it wasn't challenging enough. Figure I'll up the resistance a point every other session, so long as it feels ok, and then when I get to 13, set it down to 9 and up my speed quota, rinse repeat. The thinking is, if I want to mix in the treadmill one out of every three times at the gym, I need to keep my speed the same across the two platforms so there's no problems switching between them.
Weight lifting took up much more time than I realized. I was only estimating that to be between 30 and 45 minutes. And starting out, that was probably accurate, but within a month of going to the gym steadily, I start adding more to the workout. In theory, 30 minutes is my minimum time spent, and I'll feel like I barely did anything, but at least I covered the basics I want to hit. I do 3 sets of 10 reps for pretty much all the major muscles and over time I'll double up on a few, mostly upper body stuff because I'm a guy and the allure of upper body strength is a siren's song. Part of what dictates the length of the lifting is how crowded the gym is and how tired I am. I can't stand waiting around to get to the machines I want. Meanwhile, I'm trying to space out the muscle groups worked. So, if I just worked my biceps, I want to hit up 3 or 4 other muscles before I work those again. There's an ideal spacing out of these things I keep in mind, but when the gym is crowded, this gets compromised or I leave early. The second consideration is how much energy I have left in the tank - did I expend too much energy pushing the cardio and I'm getting tired, is it too hot in the gym or am I overheating which would impair my performance so I stop before as I get nauseas, is my blood pressure getting low and my vision is getting red when I stand up. And sometimes I just get bored and want to stop. Lastly, in terms of progression, it takes me 2-3 weeks when I start to find a stable level. My first day back, I can lift plenty, but I'll be sore for a full 4-6 days afterwards if I do the most I can comfortably handle. So I need to play down for week or two to avoid the excessive soreness. Also, initial gains come very fast. Once that slows down, I aim to add about 5-10 lbs of weight every other week, generally 5 lbs for upper body and 10 lbs for legs. Since I go 3 days a week to the gym , I don't do splits, I work the whole body. There's a 2 day rest once a week, so I make sure I go harder on that last gym session so make the most use of the extra recovery time. This is the day when I aim to add new weight as well.
I'm sure that was boring to anyone reading and way more information than you ever cared to know. I honestly didn't think it would take so long to explain. On to the meatier stuff.
I've talked about this idea before, though I'm not sure if I've given it thorough treatment, so I apologize for the rehash. One of the things I drew confidence from is my ability to effect situations and people around me. There's a number of ways to phrase that and I've heard and used them all to describe it - a strong personality, overbearing, forceful, a noticeable presence, a stabilizing force. I'm sure there's others I'm not remembering at this moment. This part of me has always had an air of mystery to it, some almost innate quality people couldn't quite put their finger on as to how I did it and they couldn't. I think I've been able to quantify parts of it at times, linking it into my own controlling behavior and determination to see things done a certain way. But I feel like those only discuss the negative, forceful side of things. It's not always so outright a thing, it can be more subtle. That's something I've never been able to explain. And there's a part of me that doesn't want to explain it all. I liked having this power that was sort of mysterious to others, because if no one understands it fully, they can't counter it. There's also a sense of awe people have for it at times, and I do like it, it does stroke the ego.
I've said many times in the past that even if I don't want to be, I will be remembered. I leave a trail behind me and imprints upon people. Most people look to immortality, their legacy in their children, or creating that exists beyond themselves. This is what did it for me. It's one of the reasons I never cared about the other things, I already scratched the itch just by being me.
All of this helped form a core in me, a sense of safety. A confidence of knowing I can win most any fight, but even I don't, the other person knew they were in one. From that, you can develop the belief that you can survive anything. It's also the ability to be taken seriously. Someone once said to me that Wolverine doesn't win every fight, but no one's eager for a re-match. And that is the power to instill fear. I decided that was a good mantra to work under. Doesn't matter if you win or lose, just make sure no one wants to try again.
But this core is an unstable power as its based upon conflict. It's why I've been described as a time bomb before, no one ever knew when I was going to go off and on who. From my limited perspective, I didn't mind. To me, my behavior wasn't irrational or random at all. I still don't think it was, but that's because no one understood my internal logic. And no one really asked either. So, this core was irrational, mysterious and powerful - good traits. I liked them, it made me feel powerful and safe.
Problem is I started letting go of it. And it's created a lot of problems for me since. It started with Matt in the larp group, I chose not to fight. That's only the second time I've ever made that decision, backing down was not in my nature. Both times I backed down because fighting would've hurt others. That's one of those internal rules people never realized, if you invoke that morality, I accept the responsibility for my actions. By default, I tend to not notice the collateral damage, or used to.
The more aware I became of how my conflicts negatively effected friends, or the very social structures I was trying to foster, the more paralyzed I became. I once heard a story about a man who wished for knowledge of everything, and he became paralyzed by it. He was too keenly aware of how every decision effected things and couldn't in good conscience do anything. The better a person I tried to be, the weaker I've become. I stopped trampling over everything and everyone, so I stopped leaving footprints. I became less noticeable. I've slowly walked away from the things which made me powerful and feared.
There's a decrease in importance that followed. It's odd not being feared anymore. When people ask me who I am now, I want to say noone. Because I chose to be that, I chose to stop forcing people to recognize me and what I wanted, I chose to stop making waves and effecting and controlling my environment. Part of me is very ok with this actually. I used to say I treated my ego like a muscle I could flex or relax when I chose. I've always found an appeal to the idea of the dissolution of the ego. I believe we're all noone really and that people choose to make us important for their own reasons, but it's not a reflection of us and not a standing we've earned or have any claim to. The only time it bothers me is that there's still a few people I want to show up, past arguments I want to win by showing how important and successful I am. This starts linking into Hitmouse, as many of those grudges involve gamers I used to know. It's not limited to that though, it's difficult to want to talk to someone from 10, 15, or 20 years ago and you're embarassed to say how little has become of your life.
Here's the thing about fear and power, they accrue from momentum. They don't exist in a vacuum either, but rather are born out of group dynamics. Being so isolated, mostly self-imposed now, I literally can't reclaim these things. I'd need to start from the ground up and break a few peoples' spirits to get a foothold...and those people would need to be somewhat isolated themselves, not having strong ties to bolster them. And you see how this fits the model for an abuser already? You find a few weak links and then you've got some social clout, and then you can tackle people who are tied to a similarly sized group as yours. See, the group of people who give in, justifies to others why you should be taken seriously. To dominate, you need to know what people's insecurities are and what the bedrock of their confidence is, and a lot of that gets outsourced to the people around us. You gotta plug in and feel the momentum shift around you as people's belief in one person or the other shifts. You ride the right waves and you create a power base. This fucked up how-to manual is stuff I instinctively knew and partially explicitly knew for years.
A lot of this became clearer in my dealings with Warren over the years. See, Warren is a coward, always has been, always will be. A journal entry I wrote a decade ago, I referred to most of the people in the larp group as animals and wrote about them as if it were a story. Warren was a lion with a shaved mane saying he wasn't a lion, but just a really large cat. Warren has an impressive roar, but if you can push past it, it's all he has. One-on-one, Warren can hold his own just fine, one-on-ones are just a battle of wills. Reason, emotion, facts, accusations etc., these are just tools for leverage, trying to get the person to give up their will, ways to instill doubt. A truly stubborn person knows this and just ignores these tools, sticks to their guns, and you realize you can't move them. It's not that their will is even that strong, they're refusing to think so doubt can't creep in. Warren has come to master this power over time. Enter group dynamics, that battle of the wills now has a crowd. Social approval is powerful leverage. Win the crowd, you can undermine the other person, threatening them with loss of status, loss of self-worth (if they've externalized it onto others), and in extreme cases, expulsion from the group. Warren is wholly dependent upon the crowd, and that's his greatest weakness. In large part, this is do to his immigration status, he's lived in fear of getting caught losing his job and needing people who could take him in. But he's lived his life so long in this way, it won't stop when his marriage to Rachel grants him legal status, the behavior is too ingrained. He'd have to go into therapy to untangle those knots, or to consciously engage with the behavior, see the irrationality of it and slowly detach himself from it - which it is highly unlikely he'll do. But this is why one of Warren's nicknames is the Juggler...like the Joker but not interesting or fun.
But seriously, the Juggler was a name I gave him to describe his behavior of needing to maintain a massive friend circle at all times. But time is limited, so each relationship is like trying to keep a ball in the air. The trick for him was setting the dynamics of each relationship to only require seeing or talking to a person every several months. At New Years, he would spend an afternoon or two going through all the contacts in his phone and calling anyone he hadn't talked to in 6 months. The extended network was there to keep as many options open should he need a place to crash or someone to borrow money from (and never repay). As I isolated myself more social groups, I lost a lot of the power I had over Warren. This is what I mean when I say the better a person I tried to be, the more Warren took advantage of it to do his own thing - me being a better person meant not being a controlling and dominating person socially. As I tried to seek Warren's cooperation, he would agree to things, but never meant any of it. Our relationship only really worked when I had my boot to his head, and it was frustrating to hold back, to not give in to bad habits. A major blow came when he began dating Rachel, a stalwart woman who backs her man no matter what he says or does. The second came because of Hitmouse. Warren worked the con scene and got noticed. As he made inroads there socially, he kept all of that for himself instead of representing the company like he was supposed to. Now he has a large group of people to tell how right and wonderful he is. That is a total reversal of our power dynamic were I to go on the con scene, it's one of the reasons I've had such anxiety about it for years, he has command of the group over me there. And to navigate that, I need to be in good mental health, confident and secure in my own right, not reliant on externals.
I feel like these past few paragraphs should give the reader a lot more insight than I've ever given about some of the dark places my mind goes. It's cold and calculating and it's looking at people as pieces on a chess board. It's knowing how to break someone down and being able and willing to do it. And it's all just a means to an end to establish dominance, control, to accrue power. At the very least I've always considered myself a benevolent tyrant. I mentioned above that I've been largely considered a stabilizing force, I did that by establishing control first though. Even as I acted upon these things, I was still the person who let people live in his apartment and exhausted himself feeding them and helping them with their problems. That's another reason people never understood me, these behaviors always seemed so contradictory to people they couldn't reconcile them. Inevitably, people just picked one to focus on and ran with it.
I've written before that the same way to hurt someone is the same way to heal them. Figure out what truths they tell themselves that make them unhappy. If you want to hurt them, lean into it. If you want to heal them, undermine them. Emotional pain is the net result of us believing things about the world or ourselves that we wish weren't true. Identify those things in people by getting to know them. And most people will tell you because it makes you sound like a deep thinker and they're attracted to it. They never realize the power of the information they're handing over to you. And stop and really think about the fact I've known this for a very long time, and all that I've written in this journal and the fact that up until 2 years ago I posted it openly on FB for anyone to see.
In the past week or two, I've taken to calling all of this the dark arts as a Harry Potter reference. I stopped using these things and I only pass on the information to people I know have the character not to misuse it.
Thing is, I spent over a decade figuring all of this out, practicing it, refining my methods and models. It was a part of my identity for a long time. Even when I'm not doing these things, I still think in the language alongside everything else. I can't unsee things. One of the reasons I think my social isolation is a good thing is it keeps me from falling back into bad habits. A part of me feels like I'm protecting others from myself in the process.
The flip side is things I said above. Keeping myself small and isolated, non-threatening - it leaves me vulnerable, unimportant, unremarkable and in many cases not worth remembering. In other terms, I give up relevance, confidence, safety and part of my sense of self. Those have been devastating things to give up and has been a not insignificant factor in my depression and anxiety over the last decade. And I've given them up by choice, which is sometimes hard to wrap my head around. I look back on my emotional struggles from the last several years and see that a line running through all of it has been trying to cope with the loss of these tools I relied on and trying to find new ones. A lot of the time was simply lost in pain, weeks and months on end of intentional numbness, before I learned to manage it. And a lot of time spent developing new tools or refining atrophied ones to try and take the place of what I gave up, or to ease the pain. I feel like I'm in a good place in terms of managing the pain these days, but still not far enough along creating replacement tools.
It's difficult writing all of this, bordering on the surreal actually. I can feel my vision distort to pull back to make me feel like a passenger in my own mind as this writing unfolds. It's a disassociation thing and I'm trying to fight it while I finish this writing. I feel like all I've written is revealing too much, maybe comes across as too melodramatic...I'm not the most comfortable having typed it all out. And yet it's all stuff that's been in my head and should be let out. It's something of a rule I follow, if I can put it into words, my therapist should be told about it, and my journal is one avenue I used for doing so. Fear of consequences or reactions is not a suitable reason to hold anything in for very long. This journal is a roadmap to my mind and I've always firmly believed my therapist needed the most accurate road map I could give if I ever wanted things to get better. No matter how ugly or awkwardly it comes out, things need to be said if they're going to change.
If you look at some of what I've written lately. I said I saw emotional dynamics in terms of wing-chun. I visualized school work as combat. Violence/conflict is the lens through which I see the world. If you connect those dots, what I wrote above is just a continuation of all of that.
Finishing this marathon, ending on these topics...I feel a bit old. Not so old there can't be new beginnings, but also like I could retire from the world and be done with it all. Spending so much time looking back on my life, analyzing every decision, lesson learned, thought process...yeah, it makes me feel old. I think the number of regrets and ups and down makes it feel like a longer time then it ever really was. It's an odd feeling for sure, but not an unpleasent one. It might also the emotional result of writing so much over the last 10 days and ending on I feel a reveal of how darkly I view people and interactions. Yesterday's entry alone was recounting nearly a 10 year block of my life that didn't even come near the present day.
I have no real ending to this marathon. I can say I cleared all of the notes out of my notepad and writing all of them went to places I did not expect. I think I definitely need a short break from writing.