A Square Brain in a Round Skull
Ah, the weekend. So you're here already are you? Of course were I perhaps some kind of reasonable, rational creature I should probably feel positive and grateful for having this free day to myself which I might potentially make use of for doing all sorts of useful and worthwhile things to prepare me for such activities that might lie ahead. Sadly however, I seem not to be that sort of creature so instead I woke with a heavy reluctance clinging to my limbs after a night of somewhat intermittent sleep where in each time of momentary waking a part of me would curse the clock each time for being closer to morning. I know it's all sorts of stupid and pointless but I am really not looking forward to the week ahead and thanks to the various unhelpful lessons I have managed to learn on journey to what might nominally be termed adulthood, I should far rather just avoid these things than do any of the perfectly straightforward activities that might allow me to go about my tasks without trauma. I know the sensible thing would be to prepare myself to be ready in good time, but then thinking of these things makes me feel terribly bad inside and not doing so is infinitely more restful so naturally it comes to seem the greater rewards stem from not doing stuff rather than taking what I know perfectly well is really the better path. Perhaps even more frustrating and wearisome though is that, knowing full well what the good and sensible thing to be doing really might be and indeed just how outlandishly nonsensical my emotional reactions to some of the most banal and inoffensive activities actually are, why can I not just tell myself not to feel this way? Why must the most simple and straightforward acts of basic living feel consistently like engaging in some bitter civil war with my own emotions in order to accomplish? And when might that ever change? I'm not altogether convinced I have the heart to keep going with an existence where I consistently have to really push to force myself into doing such ordinary things as taking out my rubbish, because somewhat might see me and notice me doing something terrible I hadn't realised, or take a shower because, umm, maybe there will be a leak or something and the building will collapse. Heh, outlandish as it may sound that is about the level of my mental catastrophising that comes about, I suspect as an attempt by my brain to justify what it seems to be feeling rather than the other way around. If you sees what I mean. Of course, I can overcome these nonsenses sometimes (this morning I took myself to the shop, outside of my comfortable routine, because I was out of sugar. Err, go me?) but it takes an awfully excessive amount of puppy willpower to do so and I only has a limited supply of that.
Oh, I can't keep going on in this consistently tiresome fashion but I seems to be a little stuck as to quite what I can do to change my reactions to things on my own. For all my efforts, my brains stubbornly seem to resist learning from experience or what I knows to be the perfectly obvious facts of the matter. Indeed, given my reasonable degree of intelligence and the fortune I had being born into a reasonably comfortable family with a decent home, good education and all that sort of stuff, life really ought to hold few challenges at all save those which I might choose to take on as opportunities for adventure and achievements. Somehow though I never seemed to quite get to grips with this sort of living. I don't really know if there be something particularly different about me however. Maybe I'm just weak and lazy and can't appreciate that every life requires some sort of effort and the doing of things you don't want to do? Hm, I can't say I'm entirely sold on that idea since I wouldn't be quite so aware of the ridiculousness of my own reactions were I quite such an ignorant and selfish creature as that, though nonetheless I can still come to despise myself for my own apparent weakness. I imagine that being something of an innately oversensitive creature I somehow came to learn over years of growing up split between two different sets of family, and other friends and different social groups besides, with strikingly different philosophies on living that whatever I might try to do is going to be a bad thing from someone's perspective and it be my nature to always desperately want to please everyone all of the time. Whether or not on top of those unhelpful lessons, or perhaps what caused me to learn those lessons rather than maybe being strengthened by the challenges I faced growing up, there's something peculiar in the way my brain actually interprets the world is something I can't really be sure about. Either ways it would certainly seem to do so now anyways and I seem to lack the means to change its view. Since I can do my work at the shop though and sometimes, if not precisely always, feel good about it, and do my stuff at the Coliseum and appreciate poetry and other such intellectual things I can only ponder that in some other circumstances I could really do awfully well at this living business. Somehow though I seem to be mystifyingly incapable of some things that it would appear most folk just go about doing without thinking. Like having conversations with other folk. How much effort is typically required to assemble the thoughts required in order to vocalise a coherent sentence? One reason I write these entries, despite the persistent worry that those reading will find it tediously self-indulgent, hate me for revealing such weakness or find it distastefully inappropriate for me to be writing about such things, is that I can't imagine putting these fears into words to actually say to people. Which of course is itself a problem since I don't suppose a lot of people have much of even the faintest idea of what I largely go about thinking and feeling. Also, how much of the time should the words I hear someone else speaking seem to come out as an unintelligible noise? Everyone doubtless has moments when they don't quite catch what the other is saying, but sometimes I think it seems to happen an awful lot more for me. Handily in a lot of circumstances I can sort of work it out through contextualised clues, and nodding and smiling and making thoughtful noises gets me through a lot too, but is this how it usually should be? I find I can have no real certainty about that, or indeed about a lot of other things. Hm, perhaps I should tell someone about it? Heh, quite, you see the black joke I made there?
Mayhap though this apparent intelligence of mine which allows me to put together a somewhat more reasonable interpretation of the nonsense that my senses assault me with is itself something of a double-edged sword? I thinks I has some degree of intelligence since various people will often seem to tell me I do and I find I can answer a few of the questions on University Challenge. When I find myself not wanting to go into a shop and look and things since everyone there will undoubtedly view me with disdain, I find myself rather questioning the level of my wit. Still, since when I'm out and about I can just about put on a face and interpret what is a reasonable response to a situation then everyone assumes that I shouldn't be having any difficulty with anything else either? Certainly I watch people going about me and wonder how it is they seem to walk through the world and do what they do without much apparent difficulty but surely they must have some more complicated thoughts and feelings going on beneath the surface themselves? I can make it look like there's nothing particularly remarkable going on with me, and to some degree that's also how I like it. The last thing I want in some respects is to draw any kind of attention to myself, although on the other it may well be precisely what I wants! Maybe if I hadn't been bright such that I didn't need to put the effort into school and stuff that might otherwise have it should have been more obvious that I had some sort of a problem? As it is I can just about work my way through most things and just about keep myself clinging on to the edge by desperate fingernails, so maybe I don't actually have a problem in practical terms and indeed, in practical terms, mayhap that is just what life is? Sitting here right now though I can't say I'm particularly convinced that this is the regular way that things should be however. Still, I looks like I'm ok from the outside, so maybe I am. What's my flimsy and supremely subjective view to that of what the whole rest of the world sees? I can't say that makes me really feel any better about myself inside however. Hm, I don't want to trouble anyone else though with my own stupid weakness and egocentric fears and nor do I want to make anyone else feel bad by making them think that they are making me feel bad. I don't want to sound like I'm accusing anyone else of making me feel unwlecome or treating my badly when the problem and the excess sensitivity is all of my own making. Well, I don't know, mayhap some criticisms wouldn't be unwarranted in some cases, but it's yet another unhelpful side-effect of my low self-esteem that I don't much feel entitled to say so. By and large though, I do thinks the fault is mostly my own, but either ways I yet feel rather reluctant writing all this stuff down here although I'm not forcing anyone to read through all my gibbering. Still, I wonder if anyone who knew outside of this here Interweb was to do so whether they would connect the creature they saw padding quietly about the streets of town with the thoughts and feelings expressed in these paragraphs. Would they be able to appreciate the strength of the feelings that I seem to feel assail me or the back to front perspective my brain seems to have on certain aspects of living? Hm, I really don't know, but somehow I yet has to finds myself some way out of this tangle but whilst it continues to seem like I be in possession of a square brain in a round skull I find myself somewhat at a loss quite how I might do that on my own. What can I do though but keep trying as much as I can, if I fear I can't always seem to make it that much, to force my way through my difficulties and hope somewhere along the line to make a real difference and change. Otherwise I also remain more broadly a square wolf in a round den or whatever way you might want to structure the analogy. Hm, maybe when it comes down it, perhaps being stuck in the more typical hole is actually the most apt way of phrasing it in this case!
Heh, well speaking of not burden people with my own pointless flapping I suppose I've typed enough about all that stuff now. I don't suppose my intellectual reasoning out of it is particularly going to help any besides some degree of catharsis. Time is moving on and I don't want to be supplying myself with another stick to beat myself with by accusing myself of writing all this to waste time and so as not to face up to the more troubling but more real tasks I need to do to prepare for the week ahead. That week, incidentally, will involve a trip to the jobcentre on Monday. Something I have done on countless occasions before without any incident or trouble but still feels like an unwelcome effort. Then I have a more troubling trip to Scarborough on Wednesday when I shall have to tell the fairy job folk about all about the very little progress I have made, most of that undoubtedly not helped by own reluctance to do some of the things I know I should since they feel excessively unpleasant, where in my imagination I shall be set upon by tigers and condemned for my uselessness as I undoubtedly deserve to be. This of course despite nothing like this ever happening the countless times I've been over there previously. I can't say I've ever really felt like I've got anything much good out of it either, but that which I have gets quickly lost in the other trials of basic living, like going outdoors, which requires vastly more effort than it ought to do with my nervous system keeping a constant and unnecessary look out for what bad thing might just be around the corner. Meanwhile, returning from the shop on Friday I was also greeted by the deeply unwelcome sight of a little scrap of paper under my door to inform me that the window man is wanting to come back on Thursday to check his measurements and could I phone him direct to confirm I'd be in at that time? Oh good, not only a man coming but also a scary phonecall I has to make! And of course I haven't forgotten that last time it was all of ten minutes and nothing at all terrible took place but still my feelings revolt and give me an extra thing to obssess about. Oh, and then there were the people I happened to bump into in the supermarket on Friday who are selling off their old gothy clothes and wants to show them to me. A perfectly pleasant and nice thing that should be shouldn't it and yet I somehow still feel even that as something of a burden, given I haven't the finances to making much in the way of extravagant purchases, but I really don't want to displease anyone. It's ridiculous I know, none of these things should be in any way a problem, but then I get impossibly drained just sitting in my flat wondering at the sounds of voices in the hall outside. Heh, I could write you a good essay on the Romantic poets though or discuss some of the weird and fascinating aspects of quantum theory if you wanted! Oh lordy, well, hopefully I shall manage to get through the week ahead, for all that I expect to be spending much of it thinking how much easier it would just be to die. Heh, death only happens once, shame and ignominy last forever, or at least the constant effort required to overcome the imagined shame and ignominy that will be mine should I do any of these things would seem to be eternal.
Ok, so this time I have really exhausted all my mental energies for these tedious complainings, honest. Heh, yay. Well, very nearly anyway! Still, I need to go have a shower and to set about tidying up this room of mine a bit and doubtless were I some sort of reasonable and rational creature I might use my time to look up some online job vacancies and make some applications or some other similarly worthwhile activity. Well I shall see how much actual productive stuffs I might be able to manage to push myself into doing. I took myself out to the shops a little earlier, and now I've written myself a journal entry, so hopefully I'm not going to be going to bed tonight hating myself and dreading waking quite so much as the night before. I guess we'll see. Meanwhile I quietly hope the people won't turn up with their bag of clothings at the shop on Sunday as they said they might. I'd actually been expecting to see them appear somewhat earlier this week so hopefully they won't get round to doing it again! I shall also try not to think too much about quite how egregiously pathetic that sounds since we can at least all agree I thinks that the self-hating is a bad thing. Hm, well in amongst the bleakness I have forced some small sparks of motivation out of myself today, like some kind of poorly functioning cigarette lighter sputtering on its last remaining fumes of gas, so I'll keep turning the spinning thing and hopefully manage some sort of flame. Doubtless along the way I'll find myself smoking a fair amount of real cigarettes to put off the unpleasantness whilst there may be some Guild Wars 2 to play or some book reading to be done! Heh, I've actually almost got near to the end of my latest read that I started on sometime last year. Even the things that should just be an unalloyed restful pleasure I find myself avoiding doing, mayhap to some degree that's out of guilt that I should be doing something more productive. It's also interesting, on a side note, that I feel less enjoyments from the book or the game when I'm tired and suppressing the unpleasant sensations too, which in turn makes doing even those things feel less worthwhile. Either ways though, despairing as this post may have been I'm not yet entirely wallowing in it. Wallowing some obviously, but I shall keep trying at least and of course I do much appreciates the continued supports and kindly friendships of all those I have tortured into reading through all this! Hopefully perhaps you may appreciates how much I do appreciate it given all that I've been gibbering. So off we goes anyways, and I hopes all you good folk out there be having pleasantly relaxing or productive weekends and hopefully yet one of these days soon I shall be able to manage one myself too. Things surely can't continue to be so consistently wearying. Sometimes I can be glad that the one constant is change. So, I'm off to go see what I might be able to eke out from this square brain of mine, in the meanwhile though I leave my bestest and sparkliest wishes, along with my truest and deepest appreciations to all those of you out there who really do help even in the smallest ways to provides me with a more rounded perspective. Take care you good peoples.
Oh, I can't keep going on in this consistently tiresome fashion but I seems to be a little stuck as to quite what I can do to change my reactions to things on my own. For all my efforts, my brains stubbornly seem to resist learning from experience or what I knows to be the perfectly obvious facts of the matter. Indeed, given my reasonable degree of intelligence and the fortune I had being born into a reasonably comfortable family with a decent home, good education and all that sort of stuff, life really ought to hold few challenges at all save those which I might choose to take on as opportunities for adventure and achievements. Somehow though I never seemed to quite get to grips with this sort of living. I don't really know if there be something particularly different about me however. Maybe I'm just weak and lazy and can't appreciate that every life requires some sort of effort and the doing of things you don't want to do? Hm, I can't say I'm entirely sold on that idea since I wouldn't be quite so aware of the ridiculousness of my own reactions were I quite such an ignorant and selfish creature as that, though nonetheless I can still come to despise myself for my own apparent weakness. I imagine that being something of an innately oversensitive creature I somehow came to learn over years of growing up split between two different sets of family, and other friends and different social groups besides, with strikingly different philosophies on living that whatever I might try to do is going to be a bad thing from someone's perspective and it be my nature to always desperately want to please everyone all of the time. Whether or not on top of those unhelpful lessons, or perhaps what caused me to learn those lessons rather than maybe being strengthened by the challenges I faced growing up, there's something peculiar in the way my brain actually interprets the world is something I can't really be sure about. Either ways it would certainly seem to do so now anyways and I seem to lack the means to change its view. Since I can do my work at the shop though and sometimes, if not precisely always, feel good about it, and do my stuff at the Coliseum and appreciate poetry and other such intellectual things I can only ponder that in some other circumstances I could really do awfully well at this living business. Somehow though I seem to be mystifyingly incapable of some things that it would appear most folk just go about doing without thinking. Like having conversations with other folk. How much effort is typically required to assemble the thoughts required in order to vocalise a coherent sentence? One reason I write these entries, despite the persistent worry that those reading will find it tediously self-indulgent, hate me for revealing such weakness or find it distastefully inappropriate for me to be writing about such things, is that I can't imagine putting these fears into words to actually say to people. Which of course is itself a problem since I don't suppose a lot of people have much of even the faintest idea of what I largely go about thinking and feeling. Also, how much of the time should the words I hear someone else speaking seem to come out as an unintelligible noise? Everyone doubtless has moments when they don't quite catch what the other is saying, but sometimes I think it seems to happen an awful lot more for me. Handily in a lot of circumstances I can sort of work it out through contextualised clues, and nodding and smiling and making thoughtful noises gets me through a lot too, but is this how it usually should be? I find I can have no real certainty about that, or indeed about a lot of other things. Hm, perhaps I should tell someone about it? Heh, quite, you see the black joke I made there?
Mayhap though this apparent intelligence of mine which allows me to put together a somewhat more reasonable interpretation of the nonsense that my senses assault me with is itself something of a double-edged sword? I thinks I has some degree of intelligence since various people will often seem to tell me I do and I find I can answer a few of the questions on University Challenge. When I find myself not wanting to go into a shop and look and things since everyone there will undoubtedly view me with disdain, I find myself rather questioning the level of my wit. Still, since when I'm out and about I can just about put on a face and interpret what is a reasonable response to a situation then everyone assumes that I shouldn't be having any difficulty with anything else either? Certainly I watch people going about me and wonder how it is they seem to walk through the world and do what they do without much apparent difficulty but surely they must have some more complicated thoughts and feelings going on beneath the surface themselves? I can make it look like there's nothing particularly remarkable going on with me, and to some degree that's also how I like it. The last thing I want in some respects is to draw any kind of attention to myself, although on the other it may well be precisely what I wants! Maybe if I hadn't been bright such that I didn't need to put the effort into school and stuff that might otherwise have it should have been more obvious that I had some sort of a problem? As it is I can just about work my way through most things and just about keep myself clinging on to the edge by desperate fingernails, so maybe I don't actually have a problem in practical terms and indeed, in practical terms, mayhap that is just what life is? Sitting here right now though I can't say I'm particularly convinced that this is the regular way that things should be however. Still, I looks like I'm ok from the outside, so maybe I am. What's my flimsy and supremely subjective view to that of what the whole rest of the world sees? I can't say that makes me really feel any better about myself inside however. Hm, I don't want to trouble anyone else though with my own stupid weakness and egocentric fears and nor do I want to make anyone else feel bad by making them think that they are making me feel bad. I don't want to sound like I'm accusing anyone else of making me feel unwlecome or treating my badly when the problem and the excess sensitivity is all of my own making. Well, I don't know, mayhap some criticisms wouldn't be unwarranted in some cases, but it's yet another unhelpful side-effect of my low self-esteem that I don't much feel entitled to say so. By and large though, I do thinks the fault is mostly my own, but either ways I yet feel rather reluctant writing all this stuff down here although I'm not forcing anyone to read through all my gibbering. Still, I wonder if anyone who knew outside of this here Interweb was to do so whether they would connect the creature they saw padding quietly about the streets of town with the thoughts and feelings expressed in these paragraphs. Would they be able to appreciate the strength of the feelings that I seem to feel assail me or the back to front perspective my brain seems to have on certain aspects of living? Hm, I really don't know, but somehow I yet has to finds myself some way out of this tangle but whilst it continues to seem like I be in possession of a square brain in a round skull I find myself somewhat at a loss quite how I might do that on my own. What can I do though but keep trying as much as I can, if I fear I can't always seem to make it that much, to force my way through my difficulties and hope somewhere along the line to make a real difference and change. Otherwise I also remain more broadly a square wolf in a round den or whatever way you might want to structure the analogy. Hm, maybe when it comes down it, perhaps being stuck in the more typical hole is actually the most apt way of phrasing it in this case!
Heh, well speaking of not burden people with my own pointless flapping I suppose I've typed enough about all that stuff now. I don't suppose my intellectual reasoning out of it is particularly going to help any besides some degree of catharsis. Time is moving on and I don't want to be supplying myself with another stick to beat myself with by accusing myself of writing all this to waste time and so as not to face up to the more troubling but more real tasks I need to do to prepare for the week ahead. That week, incidentally, will involve a trip to the jobcentre on Monday. Something I have done on countless occasions before without any incident or trouble but still feels like an unwelcome effort. Then I have a more troubling trip to Scarborough on Wednesday when I shall have to tell the fairy job folk about all about the very little progress I have made, most of that undoubtedly not helped by own reluctance to do some of the things I know I should since they feel excessively unpleasant, where in my imagination I shall be set upon by tigers and condemned for my uselessness as I undoubtedly deserve to be. This of course despite nothing like this ever happening the countless times I've been over there previously. I can't say I've ever really felt like I've got anything much good out of it either, but that which I have gets quickly lost in the other trials of basic living, like going outdoors, which requires vastly more effort than it ought to do with my nervous system keeping a constant and unnecessary look out for what bad thing might just be around the corner. Meanwhile, returning from the shop on Friday I was also greeted by the deeply unwelcome sight of a little scrap of paper under my door to inform me that the window man is wanting to come back on Thursday to check his measurements and could I phone him direct to confirm I'd be in at that time? Oh good, not only a man coming but also a scary phonecall I has to make! And of course I haven't forgotten that last time it was all of ten minutes and nothing at all terrible took place but still my feelings revolt and give me an extra thing to obssess about. Oh, and then there were the people I happened to bump into in the supermarket on Friday who are selling off their old gothy clothes and wants to show them to me. A perfectly pleasant and nice thing that should be shouldn't it and yet I somehow still feel even that as something of a burden, given I haven't the finances to making much in the way of extravagant purchases, but I really don't want to displease anyone. It's ridiculous I know, none of these things should be in any way a problem, but then I get impossibly drained just sitting in my flat wondering at the sounds of voices in the hall outside. Heh, I could write you a good essay on the Romantic poets though or discuss some of the weird and fascinating aspects of quantum theory if you wanted! Oh lordy, well, hopefully I shall manage to get through the week ahead, for all that I expect to be spending much of it thinking how much easier it would just be to die. Heh, death only happens once, shame and ignominy last forever, or at least the constant effort required to overcome the imagined shame and ignominy that will be mine should I do any of these things would seem to be eternal.
Ok, so this time I have really exhausted all my mental energies for these tedious complainings, honest. Heh, yay. Well, very nearly anyway! Still, I need to go have a shower and to set about tidying up this room of mine a bit and doubtless were I some sort of reasonable and rational creature I might use my time to look up some online job vacancies and make some applications or some other similarly worthwhile activity. Well I shall see how much actual productive stuffs I might be able to manage to push myself into doing. I took myself out to the shops a little earlier, and now I've written myself a journal entry, so hopefully I'm not going to be going to bed tonight hating myself and dreading waking quite so much as the night before. I guess we'll see. Meanwhile I quietly hope the people won't turn up with their bag of clothings at the shop on Sunday as they said they might. I'd actually been expecting to see them appear somewhat earlier this week so hopefully they won't get round to doing it again! I shall also try not to think too much about quite how egregiously pathetic that sounds since we can at least all agree I thinks that the self-hating is a bad thing. Hm, well in amongst the bleakness I have forced some small sparks of motivation out of myself today, like some kind of poorly functioning cigarette lighter sputtering on its last remaining fumes of gas, so I'll keep turning the spinning thing and hopefully manage some sort of flame. Doubtless along the way I'll find myself smoking a fair amount of real cigarettes to put off the unpleasantness whilst there may be some Guild Wars 2 to play or some book reading to be done! Heh, I've actually almost got near to the end of my latest read that I started on sometime last year. Even the things that should just be an unalloyed restful pleasure I find myself avoiding doing, mayhap to some degree that's out of guilt that I should be doing something more productive. It's also interesting, on a side note, that I feel less enjoyments from the book or the game when I'm tired and suppressing the unpleasant sensations too, which in turn makes doing even those things feel less worthwhile. Either ways though, despairing as this post may have been I'm not yet entirely wallowing in it. Wallowing some obviously, but I shall keep trying at least and of course I do much appreciates the continued supports and kindly friendships of all those I have tortured into reading through all this! Hopefully perhaps you may appreciates how much I do appreciate it given all that I've been gibbering. So off we goes anyways, and I hopes all you good folk out there be having pleasantly relaxing or productive weekends and hopefully yet one of these days soon I shall be able to manage one myself too. Things surely can't continue to be so consistently wearying. Sometimes I can be glad that the one constant is change. So, I'm off to go see what I might be able to eke out from this square brain of mine, in the meanwhile though I leave my bestest and sparkliest wishes, along with my truest and deepest appreciations to all those of you out there who really do help even in the smallest ways to provides me with a more rounded perspective. Take care you good peoples.