#spiralysis

[ipsomaniac]

i never stopped being a spoiled bratty child. fundamentally not ok with the basic deal of life, that it takes effort. not ok with the fact that it's not possible to be high all the time. why not. why can't i feel good and alive all the time. why should it take constant boring work to induce this feeling. why is the only alternative poison. why should things be hard. why gravity. im a miserable little shit.

[ipsomaniac]

dont understand internal processors. i dont have thoughts until i say them, everything is fuzzy and unreal until it comes alive in a river of speech. past isn't real, can't remember things well or have new ideas until i am talking and then it's all just there for the taking. so easy while the river is running and then i have to shut it off and it's all gone like it was never there.

there's two of me, me-talking and me-not-talking, and me-talking is the real me finally living in the real world, except it's sometimes also a genius who possesses me and makes a game of me and i am not in control at all. it's ecstatic and there are consequences for this exposure. me-not-talking is nothing. a soft dark sinking spiral, vanishing as i go. i am blind in the haze, tend to navigate by marco polo, talking to myself, endlessly parroting old arguments and stock phrases to keep myself company and mark the little boundaries of my small hazy universe. but the compensation for my blindness is being invisible. no one can see me - no one can know me - im unreal and safe - warm and dark and nothing >:)

[ipsomaniac]

associative sparsely-punctuated ramble about SAD on the one hand grrhrhhhrahghhh it's gone, it's left me - i had a manic period in october-november where for several weeks my brain was on fire and i barely ate or slept or socialised but i was SO HAPPY. i was so interested in everything, couldn't find enough time in the day to fit in all the stuff i wanted to read and write, was carrying around a whole incandescent world in my head like a wicked secret. smug with it! was sincerely going around with my inner monologue like "i love my brain. i'm so lucky i get to live in it. i am the coolest :)" and now it's all dried up and i'm a HUSK i'm stupid and bored and boring. nothing is interesting and i hate my own writing and my own sludgy dumb brain sulking like a toddler at the mere thought of applying itself to anything and it all sucks and the meds are barely worth the crash and i don't want to try, i just want to suckle simple pleasure from the teat and otherwise sleep in perpetual protest that reality will not allow this. so obviously i'm textbook basic depressed now (boooring) but here's the other hand, i notice that i am not really assigning much meaning to this, which is unusual. i notice myself noticing that last year followed the same rhythm, a period of sustained energy and euphoria earlier in autumn and then a deep crash later in the winter. and i am theorising that this could just be how SAD manifests for me, i'm great around the equinox but go to shit around the solstices - this is more exaggerated in winter of course but i do get an odd miserable sense of paralysis in summer too, which is more interesting, like everyone's a bit fucked when it's dark by 3.30pm, i'm not special - but there's about 6 weeks either side of the summer solstice where time seems to stop like the top of a pendulum swing. also happens in winter but northern european cultures mandate aggressive time-marking activities around the winter solstice to keep people vaguely anchored to reality.

but in high summer we're left to fend for ourselves against the endless guilt-tripping daylight, hot nights bad sleep and the sound of wasted potential pulsing through your window every second you're not out there making the most of what's left of your youth. like doctor faustus' last monologue, the sick feeling that time is slipping through your fingers but has stopped out of spite just to make sure you understand the full horror of the doom that beckons. you're watching yourself circle a black hole and from your safely distant spaceship time appears to slow asymptotically for your soon-to-be-spaghettified avatar as it approaches the event horizon and then freezes in a camera flash just before it crosses over, a spectre suspended forever over the abyss with its futile final missive trapped behind the little horizon of its teeth..... i feel like this is what is up in some sense with the solstices and how they set off my natural cold-blooded inclination towards inertia. basically i don't have much of an inner motor so i need acceleration from the physical world to give me a jump start. spring/autumn good, winter/summer bad. thankfully spring is long and starts very early if you look in the right places! my conclusion is that i will continue to be pretty dumb and depressed until late feb, and that this will be unpleasant but means nothing and i should not compound the situation by ruminating on it. should engage in no introspective behaviour whatsoever during this period and disregard any self-critical thoughts even if they are true because i am not equipped. attempts at self-betterment should wait until it is no longer night by the time i finish work. resolve to proceed in dog mode until the threshold is reached.

character development though! "feel like shit, means nothing, not worried about it" -> im wise now!

[ipsomaniac]

@plasmapop 's latest translation of Catullus 51 hit me like a truck and inspired me to have a stab at my own "translation" (also taking from the final fragmentary line of Sappho 31). This is the first piece of creative writing I have actually completed since... childhood, I think. It's about what goes wrong when I try to create. It's very self-indulgent and I suspect I will be embarrassed by it later, but I have finally put a part of myself into a shape, and that feels like an important milestone. I really hope this has broken the back of the block I've been grappling with my whole life.

[ipsomaniac]

Every single fucking time I am faced with the sexed reality of my body it is to experience it as an impediment. Every time I am faced with my gendered manifestation in the social world it is to experience myself lost and diminished in translation.

I'm not "trans", I do not want to transition to the opposite binary gender-model, but I am militantly Anti-Gender, Anti-Sex. I guess I share some views with radical feminists proper in the sense that I am absolutely sure that biology, not society, is actually the root problem of gender, and moreover I think the focus on social issues to the point of denying the reality of biological injustice, and the normie-feminist narrative that 'women can do anything that men can do! female bodies are powerful and beautiful!', while true in some senses, impedes clear-sightedness and urgent action on the actual root problem which requires technological solutions.

What's crazy to me is how many Radical Feminists end up hating trans people (esp. trans women) as a result of this... like. it's just jealousy, right? They can't stand that some women get to experience womanhood without actually having to experience the steaming plate of embodied nonsense that comes with biological femaleness. 'if they're not being punished by biology then by god they need to be punished socially!' lol how can they be so close yet so far...

[ipsomaniac]

My periods have stopped. I'm not pregnant. Maybe it's my ADHD medication in which case.... I guess I choose between being able to function, or maintaining healthy hormone levels. Or maybe it's an ovarian cyst or hormonal problems caused from chronic sleep deprivation. Also female hormonal cycles massively interfere with ADHD symptoms and medication efficacy. Cool cool guess I have to deal with all this shit that I never asked for on account of my objectively inferior body classification. Fuck this shit it's so unfair. I would never have chosen life under these terms, ever.

[ipsomaniac]

I don't know what to do with all the rage and grief about the biological injustice that female bodies are cursed with and how much it fucking, fucking sucks that I exist in one. I don't know where to put it. It's not a case of wanting to be a man. It's blinding screaming rage about pregnancy and menstruation and preposterous monthly hormonal cycles and relative physical weakness and menopause and having to lug breasts around. The design of female bodies is fucking absurd, it's an evil joke, it's an atrocity. It makes me want to wreak intense physical destruction upon something, but there's nothing to take it out on. I don't know what to do with it.

[ipsomaniac]

A lot of my shit is probably simply the result of having a delayed circadian rhythm. I have never in my life managed to establish a sleep schedule that worked for me. During university when I experienced maximum sleep freedom, I ended up becoming completely nocturnal, waking up in the late afternoon and going to sleep in the morning, which obviously wasn't great. During the pre-WFH years of my early career when I experienced maximum restrictions on my sleep schedule, my morning depression was unbearable, I would wake up every day feeling like I'd been hit by a train and would frequently cry in the office toilet from how terrible I felt, until it lightened up in the afternoon. This is probably the biggest structural factor that holds me back in life and I guess is ultimately responsible for like 90% of why I am so chronically unhappy, fuck the second-order psychological causes. So I should do the sleep hygiene stuff right? But in order to do that I have to kiss goodbye to night, which is my favourite time to be awake. And I have to be boring on weekends and not stay up late or lie in. And I have to consistently prioritise maintaining the sleep schedule over escapism or pleasure; if I have one of those days, as I often do, which is entirely filled with work and chores and I don't get a second to inhabit my own mind - tough, you can't make up for it at night, you have to just accept that this day gave you nothing and force yourself to sleep on time anyway. And if my insomnia and anxiety keeps me awake, I should just accept the pain and wake up at the same time anyway, no concessions. That just seems really shit to me as an existence! Once again it comes back to the fact that life is a lot of work and a lot of maintenance and I fundamentally am not OK with that. Wouldn't have accepted these terms if they'd been offered to me before birth, I would have said fuck it I can't be bothered and self-aborted.