The Mask Reconstruction: Prep

"Alone!!! I am alone, I am always alone, No matter what."--Marilyn Monroe

 
I'm still a little iffy about even writing this post. My initial intention was to just start tomorrow and report what happens from then on. I'm afraid I won't be able to follow through and this blog will just be a reminder of yet another one of my failures. There will always a part of me that is vehemently against this, of course. And I will happily tell anyone who needs to hear it that they are perfectly fine being themselves just the way they are. But I am lonely. This needs to stop. When I first started losing everything to Depression, I couldn't conceive of a way to make it stop. One of therapists made what I really thought(and still think) was a good point about all the emotions I had been trying to hold down all my life and how I needed to just let them go and see how far up they fly(she was using a beach-ball-being-held-under-water analogy). For a very long time(in Depression time) I believed that if I could figure out everything I was feeling, see how deep my pain goes and find the bottom of the pit I am in, I could maybe be okay. But that was an incredibly misguided belief. There is no bottom. There is no okay. There never, ever will be. I can't kill myself, I've already proven that. So, either by choice or by incompetence, I'm here. Alive. Whether I like it or not.

And the fact is: all I wanted was to find a way to get better(there isn't one), I wanted to find the meaning of life(there isn't one), I wanted to find someone I could just completely be myself with(nope) and now I feel like I have all the answers I've been searching, they just turned out to not be the ones I wanted. It hurts. But now I know that suffering is a trait of existence and it was always going to end in tears. I need to find something to do while I wait for the day when I can finally end my own suffering.

"Since not everyone who suffers from depression has what it takes to take their own lives, they come to the following realization: they had better get better or die trying, because the rest of the world does not run on depression time—pain time—but conducts its business on happy time, whether or not that happiness is honestly felt or is pure pretense."

--Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

The reconstruction of my happy, shiny exterior obviously requires a plan(my mind still isn't what it used to be, so I can't just "wing it"). I figured that it would be easier to draw up a plan if I had an ultimate goal in mind, I've come up with a few: 1) I don't want to be alone any more. 2) I want to get away from my family. 3) I want to at least be intelligent and tough enough to be a decent science journalist( I particularly have my eye on CAP). And it all starts tomorrow. Maybe.

"Our lives may not be unflawed—that would deny us a future to work toward—but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. It is the trap of tomorrow. Love it or leave it—choose which and choose fast. You will never get us to give up our hopes, demented as they may seem. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. Your opinions are not certified by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity, and therefore whatever thoughts may enter your chemically imbalanced brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to assign to you who are only “one of those people.” So get the hell out if you can. But we are betting that when you start hurting badly enough, you will come running back. If you are not as strong as Samson— that no-good suicide and slaughterer of Philistines—then you will return to the trap. Do you think we are morons? We have already thought everything that you have thought. The only difference is that we have the proper and dignified sense of futility not to spread that nasty news. Our shibboleth: “Up the Conspiracy and down with Consciousness."