journal.wiredreflexes.com

I find it so hard to give up on friendships and relationships, even when they’ve ceased being healthy a long time ago. Even when I’ve long since overstayed my welcome, it feels like. But I can’t be sure whether I just feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome or if it’s just that nagging fear of rejection. It’s interesting to see what your brain keeps you occupied with in these situations, what circular reasoning it injects in order to never really know whether you need to stay or go.

~/ Should I stay or should I go now? Should I stay or should I go now? If I go there will be trouble, if I stay it will be double. /~

Normally, my fear would force me to just go, force the situation in such a way that I know what’s going on, to get the ugliness over and done with. But then, because I really really really want it, and because I know I have that problem, always wanting to go to back to zero in times of difficulty, I can’t just turn my back on what could still turn out to be a great relationship. “If I can just convince them…” or “If I can just get this done…” Bah. I should just go back to zero and start all over.

Surprisingly, and this is something I feel very guilty about, I feel the same way about my mother. As long as there is hope, I’m fine, but now that there’s not, I just want to get it over with because I know it’s going to hit me really hard, and I don’t want to wait to start dealing with it. Of course, I don’t and wouldn’t want to do that to my mother, but somewhere in the back of my mind, a very self-centered part of my personality, filled with warped idea of safety and survival is begging for it. Begging for satisfaction.

Edit: Speaking of running for the hills, here’s a sad bit of depression for you.

I come from an emotional household, I have emotional parents, an emotional sister, and an emotional family. When I say emotional, I mean to say that they like to show their emotions and will often act upon it. I mean to say that if a person is part rational and emotional, they generally are more emotional than not. Sometimes this is fun, oftentimes it really isn’t, especially in times of conflict, and for some reason, in my family, there always seems to be some sort of conflict or other. They also shout when they’re angry. There are two types of people in this world, those who become hot angry, and those who become cold angry. Hot-angry people are those who explode, they let it all out, they shout and wave their arms around, veins start popping out of their forehead and they use strong language. Cold-angry people are calm and quiet and let it all rage inside of them. The anger that hot-angry people have usually doesn’t last nearly as long as cold-angry people’s anger, probably because they run out of steam quicker. I guess cold-angry people are more efficient with their anger, and don’t blow their top so that they can keep it up longer. Of course, all of this is probably not supported by your local psychologist, but whatever, it supports the point I’m about to make.

I come from an emotional household, and I am an emotional guy. I’m just like the rest of my family, but I hate it. I can’t stand shouting, I can’t stand panicing or losing control and exploding in anger. I used to have a big temper problem when I was very young, but then my sister came along, and she was even worse. She’d cry and scream at the drop of a hat, and I learned to hate it so much that I started to control my temper more and more. It was still there, beneath the surface, but I had several tricks that I could use to keep it at bay. Now, two decades later it’s no different. I really hate it when people panic, and I always do everything in my power to keep myself from panicing and slipping into a hysteria. I hate it. I hate it so much. I hate it in myself, and I hate it in others, especially when they seem to not lift a finger to prevent it. I don’t understand how anyone could think that losing control is a great idea and a great problem-solver. I don’t understand why others who have this problem, wouldn’t do exactly as much as I to prevent it. I don’t lose control very often, but when I do, it’s so fucking ugly, I feel like such a loser. I never feel better afterwards. I never feel like I accomplished anything. It’s not like I got; “Oh! Awesome, let me just cross that off my list of things to do for today!”

If I know you do it, it immediately means you have a strike against you. You can be a wonderful person, but if you can’t keep your cool under pressure, you’re going to have to work a little harder to earn my respect. My sister is a good example. She and I got along, well, eh, very poorly because of this, and it’s only been in recent times (read: since my mother’s been ill) that she’s shown the maturity and ability to get it together, and it’s been going a lot better since then. I just don’t have to worry about her breaking down at the slightest incling of trouble or adversity.

Of course, all of this is because I hate that side of myself and is dictated by my own self-loathing.

Things are pretty rough right now and I’m starting to dread the really rough times that are still to come. I think I’ve started to lose my ability to bounce back from disappointments, because it just seems like one disappointment after another. My problems can be categorised into a few general groups;

• My mother’s ill and is almost certainly dying, and everything that comes with that.
• My finances are shakey.
• Relationships that I invested a lot of time in and had a lot riding on are falling apart.
• Miscellaneous.

This reminds me of something someone once told me, that in general, every problem can be summed up into one of four categories; 1) love-life, 2) family, 3) finances, 4) work. In that sense, I’m glad things at work are stable (although I’m being underpaid). It’s those little things that keep me from drowning. Sometimes I have to quietly remind myself that I’ve got no option but to deal, and that there’s really nobody out there that’s going to lift a finger to help out because they have their own things to deal with. I feel like I have regressed somehow, because I had a very clear understanding of that cold fact up until a little while ago.

Well, there’s a long weekend coming up, and hopefully I’ll get to chill out a bit, do some gaming, and see my mother. Next week we’ll go at it with renewed reluctance. :)

.: PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
Moulsari’s phone got stolen yesterday and she lost all her numbers. If you feel like she should have your number, send her an SMS.

When I give it some thought, I want to come to the conclusion that my material possessions have little to do with who I am. I own a few things that make me happy, but I always hope that these things don’t define me. But that’s not true. While they don’t fully define you, your possessions, or lack thereof, do partially shape you. Who can deny that wealth creates opportunity, right? Who dares to deny that poverty or debt is a burden that weighs heavily? But why do we overextend that principle to include material possessions that, in general, don’t create opportunities? Like luxury goods?

It’s undeniable that a man’s worth is often judged by what he owns instead of who he is. A surface-glimps is all we need to judge who he is and what he could be worth to our own advancement. We have made up our minds before we know whether he sold his soul, lied, cheated or stole the money he has. For the most part we don’t really care, we just want to know how he can be involved in our own advacement. If he wears the right clothes, drives the right car, has the right friends, then that’s all that matters. We start to treat those we meet as opportunities too, just like we consider possessions. In a sense, those we meet become possessions just like everything else in our lives. Our lives are consumed by a very selfish, self-absorbed quest for possessions, and at a certain point it no longer has anything to do with opportunities or security, it just becomes an obsession.

The driving force behind civilisation, and it hasn’t always been that way, is individual material gain, and it’s praised because greed, as Gordon Gecko says, is good and somehow leads to collective advancement. So if you gather material possessions, you are actually helping others, so it is said. Consumption is for the public good, which is why the economic stimulus package that was released in the U.S. recently, in the form of checks sent to many households, are meant to push consumption, to increase spending. It’s long been understood that a society that’s based on the principles of the individuality and consumption, will destroy itself over time. It can only continue to function as long as everyone can keep pretending that what they do is for the good of all, and that the world is an infinite resource from which this consumption can be drawn and that consumption itself has no negative repercussions like exploitation and pollution.

I’m in conflict; on the one hand I believe that I am more than just a consumer, and that I am more than the sum of my possessions, and I believe that it won’t be long before the advancement of the individual and society (in this case the global society) will be ruled by compassion, sympathy and the understanding that our consumption no longer needs to spiral out of control and lead to uncontrolled harvesting of natural resources, exploitation of the underpriviledged and pollution, and that I should live my life keeping that in mind. On the other hand, I feel this sickening need to engage in the rat-race that governs almost all of us. We’re constantly competing with one another and I feel the need to compete, too. This duality, and the struggle for dominance between one and the other, is very much a part of me, and from one day to the next I can’t quite say which one is dominating the other, which leads to strange flip-floppery of my self-image.