The dark living room of the soul ...

[flamingsword]

... wherein I have bruised my shins on the hidden coffee table that is my judgments about myself.

The black body behavior of my emotions and desires seems to be that I can only tell what's going on when the system is in a high stress/high energy state. Since under normal circumstances I have no clear vision of my wants or feelings, I have to repeatedly subject myself to periods of high excitation in order to keep any kind of self-knowledge going on. I feel like I need to do drugs again. :(

To create new goals and stress-test my system, I've been working on THE LIST by reading whatt I wrote down in last year's day-planner + notebook + yellow legal pad that went along with the end of last year. It's fucking with my head. The number of things I forget in a month's time is appalling to me for a number of reasons. Let me enumerate them.

I judge myself harshly when reading about things I've said I was going to do for you and forgotten. It makes me feel like a bad friend, like I let you down, like I'm even more full of shit than the trash talking that I do for entertainment value. You're important to me, but my actions don't reflect that as well as I would like.

I judge myself harshly for not having a better system in place. Even though the technology to do much better is now available, I have recently acquired a lot of unlooked-for debt that puts that out of reach 'til the end of the year. But the number of things that got noted on one week of last years planner and moved across several weeks but never got crossed off and was just abandoned? That is unacceptable to me. I don't know what constitutes a fair standard to hold myself to, and so I'm holding myself up to a probably-unfair standard because falling short of a high aim is usually a better tactic for getting things done than achieving a low goal. Which is sort of the point of why I'm looking for new goals. :\

That I do what I can towards maintaining my memory and still fall so far short of my ideal makes me feel defeated and helpless. By itself, none of those things would be that big a deal, but I've got that juggling-too-many-plates feeling again. As much as I enjoy being a weirdo and not having to deal with a lot of the mainstream crap, I do wish I had a lot of the things normal people have. A memory that worked would be nice, even if it only worked in one direction.

Also: the vast volume of shared social events noted down but unremembered even upon the reminder frightens me that I may be losing my mind. I have no objective way to judge how quickly I lose things, and if other people have these sorts of problems, I haven't noticed. Lots of people I know think they have a bad memory, but given a context or a few details will be able to remember. Now, even though I'm the one that recorded the details most likely to bring up the relevant memory, I can't recall several things that I wrote down. It's just gone.

I base a lot of my feelings of value in my use of my mind. This is terrifying to me.

Comments

[maeritrae.livejournal.com]

Try to season your judgement of yourself by that of your friends. I understand and agree with a lot of the things you do, even some of the ones that are making things harder for you, like aiming for a higher standard because it's still better to fall short of it. But cut yourself some slack. The people who know you best still think you're awesome, and they know what they're talking about. ♥

I have been feeling pretty warm and fuzzy the past few days, and I wish I could send some of that your way.

*hugs you*

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

I get over these things pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean that I turn away perfectly good hugs. I just don't focus or do just one thing for long enough to affect my brain chemistry, which is actually something I did to my brain years ago to make it harder to depress myself. It sort of works, too. Originally it limited the amount of time I could angst over social phobias, but it had so many other uses that I've kept it. And now I don't think I know how to get rid of it.

I've been contemplating making a master list of strange training I did to my brain, and seeing if I want to undo any of it. But my coping mechanisms brought me to you guys, so I'm pretty grateful. :)

Re: *hugs you*

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

I call that the pendulum swing, when you correct something and don't know when to undo it and end up going too far in the other direction. I made a lot of changes when I left my former life, and I strongly suspect that some of my recent thinkies are the result of taking corrective habits too far (e.g., broadly, going from rigid and responsible to structureless and drifty).