I Am Simply Not There in Current Events
- April 14, 2023, 6:10 a.m.
- |
- Public
My best friend just told me that she has to put her dog down and I feel nothing inside. My reaction to everything these days has been nothing but a performance. I may be engaging with people but I am simply not there. I am mentally and emotionally backed up. It would be easier if I were a psychopath because I wouldn’t have to care. Everything will catch up with me later. This happens all the time but this is the first time I have been conscious of it. Self-aware that I am just performing as a person with a soul. I am just a production, in general.
I want to chop my mental state up to seasonal depression but it is a little bit more than that. I could have worse problems. I’ve had worse problems. I wouldn’t want to trade problems with anybody else. Mine are simple. I just need to learn to let go. I need to learn to take action. Why does it feel so heavy? It’s not that deep bro.
This too shall pass.
It is fear that is in control of me. Fear is about control. I create habits to feel a false sense of control but it is the fear that has the wheel. I need to create change and my mind is lazy and does not want to create new systems. Everything will be fine if you just don’t. There are three types of pain here that it is afraid of.
Loss Pain
If I am thinking about getting a new job, for example, then my mind thinks about everything that I will lose. I will lose all the relationships I made. I will lose my routines and my comfort zones. I will lose the Mon-Fri day shifts.
Process Pain
It will think about the process. I’ll have to find a new route to work if I get a new job. Make new friends. Create new routines. Start from the bottom. Start somewhere and have to learn everything from the beginning again.
What If
What if it doesn’t work out? What if I hate it there? What if I am bad at it and everybody hates me?
I need to look forward to change. Look forward to life. I can gain new relationships. New skills. My next gig is not my forever job. What if it does work out? What if I do love it there? What if this leads to something greater? I should be excited about it.
I just woke up from a nap and I am feeling irrevocably groggy. It was one of those naps that just makes everything worse. I ate a big meal right before I fell asleep. I didn’t bring a snack to work because it was such a small shift. I worked up an appetite so I binged when I got home. I have been binge eating a lot this last week. I could use the calories.
I am impatiently waiting for my Amazon delivery to arrive today. I want to try mushroom coffee. It doesn’t contain a lot of coffee. I think it is just added for flavour. At least that is what I am telling myself. I will be sensitive to it because I quit coffee 55 days ago. Am I counting the days because I miss coffee? Maybe. Waking up is not the same. I didn’t experience any of the benefits that everybody who quits coffee raves about. I now struggle to sleep. I don’t shit as often and my anxiety got worse. I am not injuring myself with it now so there’s that. The brand that intrigues me is MUDWTR but it is over $100 for a tin. I found one that has more mushrooms in it for only $40 so I will give it a go. It works out to about $1.33 a day for a cup of joe.
My package arrived and I know that 100g is not a lot but now that I see this in person, I don’t see this lasting as long as I’d hoped. The MUDWTR is 180g which is $59.7 for the 100g that I just spent on this brand, The Youth Effect. MUDWTR only has four mushrooms. Cordyceps, Lions Mane, Chaga and Reishi. The Youth Effect has those plus Turkey Tail, and Maitake. I can maybe get over two weeks of it. So it’s about $2.99 for a cup of coffee. Man, if I was making more money I wouldn’t even have to care about penny-pinching. I used to smoke a pack a day and a pack was about $15 when I quit seven years ago.
I can feel my anxiety bubbling up. I have been in avoidance mode so I shall force myself to be proactive this evening. Unless I surrender to it and just binge a show. I want to drink but I have been working with castor oil to detox my liver. Tomorrow I am off so I am doing my coffee enema first thing and a detox bath. It would be counter-productive to drink even though it would be nice to take the edge off.
I also have the day to myself tomorrow which I am looking forward to. Then it’s another weekend with my deadbeat roommate. She signed up for a boxing match this month. Her first one. I think she forgot what happened the last time she got hit in the head too hard. It wasn’t even hard at all, she showed me the footage. She also knows that it wasn’t that hard. She never calls in for work but that was enough to make her do it. We are 37, it is a little old to be getting hit in the head. I haven’t been able to communicate with her yet. There is someone else I have been impatiently waiting to communicate with but this is at work. Somebody on my team has also been waiting impatiently and he reached out to the district HR so I think that I will do the same.
Ok, time to do something with my life this evening.
Dayle ⋅ April 13, 2023
We’re all performing different parts, with different people, at different times. Identity is such an interesting topic.
TL Dayle ⋅ April 14, 2023
I have a weird relationship with identities. I did a lot of internal work and came out of it feeling like a stranger in my life. I experienced some slight imposter syndrome. The nature of human desire is expansion. We want to expand into everything and we are suffering because we are trying to expand into fictions. Into things that do not exist in reality. Education, banking, careers, politics, etc. We are to expand inward. That is when I discovered that I was trying to expand into identities. To be the best man, the best native man, the best this and that. I am not a gender I have a gender. I'm not my attractions I have attractions. I'm not an ethnicity I have an ethnicity. I'm not a legacy, a caste, creed, political belief, bodyfat, etc. I'm just an individual consciousness having a temporary human experience. I can participate in those identities but I do not belong to them. People were treating me as somebody I no longer felt that I was so it left me feeling like a stranger which is alright. I'm trying to be my authentic self and if that adds value to others then great. If not, that's great too. We're all on our own journey.
Dayle TL ⋅ April 14, 2023
An interesting concept: to be one’s authentic self. With all due respect, I’m not sure that’s possible. I mean, it’s a noble goal. But the odds are mightily stacked against us.
How would one even begin?
TL Dayle ⋅ April 16, 2023
It sounds daunting but it is not impossible at all. We existed without them as infants until we were socially conditioned to match our social ecosystems. We are just spiritualizing our prisons now.
Dayle TL ⋅ April 16, 2023
And how do we even begin to eradicate 20/30/40 years of social conditioning, never mind the fact that we also have to remain living under these oppresssive ideologies? It doesn’t seem at all possible.
TL Dayle ⋅ April 16, 2023
You recognize a knowledge gap. That's a huge step toward discernment. I don't have those answers for you, just the ones that I found for me. I call it a self-improvement journey because "spiritual journey" was ruined by new-age garbage. I hit a moment in my life where I realized that it was never the content in my life that was causing me dis-ease but the context. Sadghuru - Inner Engineering, Mel Robbins - Take Control of Your Life (both on Audible) and Russel Brands - Recovery were the biggest influences for me. There is someone for everyone.
Once I finished that journey I had the tools to break through a lot of paradigms. I landed at the bottom of the rabbit hole and discovered the truth of truths. The exoteric is written by the esoteric. That is a whole other journey unto itself. One cannot even begin that one until they develop their metacogtnition.