Anonymous posting is now disabled (Sorry Jeff! Sorry Laura! Sorry various other people who seem nice but I dunno who you are mostly!). All comments are now screened, which also kind of sucks because it was interesting to come back from a post and see a conversation spontaneously started when I was away.

But this way at least I won’t have any pointless flamewars here unless they’re my own damned fault.

Not going so well with the brains. Alternating total despair with impotent rage on about a 2 day schedule for the last month. Bad thoughts running constantly: I’m fucked, I can’t be what anyone wants, it’s over, I’m waiting to die, I hate myself, I hate this, I’m unacceptable, it’s not okay to be me.

As we’ve tried to deal more directly with the problems in therapy, things have become worse. Attempts at EMDR today mostly failed. I was just too upset to make use of the technique, and the couple of times it “took” I was straight back into the shit two minutes later.

She’s considering sending me for a neurofeedback evaluation, which would mean an EEG and some other stuff, and possibly the neurofeedback therapy itself. I’ll try it if she thinks it’s a good idea but it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm. I have been through roughly 25 different medical and therapeutic combinations since 1986 and the pattern has been: either failure, or success followed by a short honeymoon followed by decay into failure. I am skeptical in the extreme of new great and desperate cures.

A recurring nightmare is that I’m being forced to finish out some huge public personal failure: finishing a musical performance that’s been botched, turning in a school assignment that’s clearly an F, or playing out every turn of a game which I have already lost. That’s how I’ve felt about psychotherapy lately, and my life.

Not sure why I feel impelled to communicate about it, but probably because the way things have gone is incomprehensible. An unfortunate collision between genetics and infancy and childhood experience and a chaotic puberty and social failure and bad family relationships and years of failure in school and at jobs and in relationships has left me with broken brain chemistry and bad habits of thought and action, and it’s resistant to solution. There’s an illusion that if I hash it over and explain things to myself and others, it’ll make more sense, or there will be some opening in the sheer smooth wall of the problem that I can pry loose and start to fix things. In the end, though I just repeat myself.

Interacting with others is almost entirely painful. Everyone seems ahead of me, more competent and mature even when they’re 20 years younger, better organized, more attractive. I watch them play the game confidently and win eventually, and move up to the next league, leaving me behind. I resent people whom I have no right to resent, and desire people who have no reason to reciprocate, and envy people who are just ordinary and normal. It gets worse as I get older and the gap between my stage in life and everyone else’s gets clearer and larger. At 20 I was one of the gang; at 40, I’m a mysterious neurotic failure.

The shame of being a total sexual failure is a self-fulfilling prophecy of assured rejection. The people I’m interested in have never had any good reason to reciprocate, and there’s no reason for that to change. I know now that I’ll die unwanted, but I can’t swallow that. Intimate connection with others is necessary to my life and impossible. Everything is tied up in one big knot: “success”, money, beauty, power, maturity, youth, experience, independence, and every other currency we buy each other’s love with. I have none. Only rich people think there’s no such currency.

I’ve already become a personal worst-case scenario; I’m exactly the person I promised myself 25 years ago I’d never be. Looking ahead at 45, 50, 55, 60… There’s not anything there for me. The race has clearly been lost and I’m just puffing around the track because I’m told to.

Why do I share this with the low three figures of people who may read this, and in theory with the world? Because I have nothing to lose. And because putting this laughable mess into paragraphs and launching it into space feels remarkably better than pretending I’m the friendly local permanent uncle, here to serve everyone with amusing stories. I’m the walking dead, not more than the sum of my handicaps and errors, and all I have is my witness.

There are limits to discourse, and specifically limits to what issues one may discuss among friends. I exceeded those limits and re-learned a lesson.

It’s a polarizing time. The issues that come up daily aren’t abstract or distant. I’d like to just stop talking about important things and instead tell stories, share interesting and amusing facts, snap photos. It isn’t likely that I could keep that promise, though, because events keep making me sit up and yell, even though I know it’s almost entirely foolish.

Because I’m not writing for the front page of the New York Times, or even for the little weekly paper I used to help edit. It’s just a livejournal, and the stuff I put here is not of much consequence. The checks I write and organizations I work with and support are my only impact.

In the past few months I have had difficult times with several good friends that could have been avoided if I’d been a better editor of myself. Whether I am right or wrong about the great issues of our time, I don’t think the conflict with others is worth whatever tiny effect one livejournal has on events. I’d be flattering myself nearly into psychosis to think otherwise.

So I’ll do my best to make this space if not issue-free at least less contentious. I apologize to those I’ve annoyed or inflamed to no good end.