Pot-Healer

The energy has changed, can you feel it? The fear weakens, its power diminishes. Its muscles atrophy rapidly from disuse, its grip loosens around my neck. I can breathe, and all I had to do was relax.

The specter of failure that I used to frighten myself into inaction was always an illusion, a self-made prison built for circular reasons. Fear feeds and devours itself, an uroboros of senseless suffering. Fear is the anticipation of pain, or of destruction, or of unhappiness. Fear’s growth and and its stranglehold on your soul rely on the lie that all pain is avoidable if you just stay within the box. Stand within the lines, do not venture into danger, then you will not experience pain. You will be safe.

There is no safety, there is only holding back. There is only inaction that will lead to the worst pain: regret over a life not lived. And the more you give in to the fear, the more you obey its dictates and stay within its boundaries, the more fearful you become of breaking free into danger. You forget what it was like to breathe. You forget that you are anti-fragile and that pain makes you stronger, that mistakes are required for learning, and that the only lesson you cannot learn from is inaction because all you can learn from that was that you should have done something, and that you wasted time you will never get back.

The mind must relax its grip on the body, allow it to breathe. You are not so breakable. Fear will always whisper to you, but you can train yourself not to listen.

The worst feeling is when you have nothing to say, so the post has to be about how you have nothing to say. There’s nothing to say about it, nothing that anyone feels like reading about. But this blog is not for reading, it’s for unclogging your brain. The writing — and especially sitting down and writing every single day — that is the part that matters.

So now that I have reassured myself over nothing, what do I say next? It’s too early. The idea that you have to do this right away in the morning is a myth. You’re not functioning yet; it makes no sense. I haven’t started thinking (or obsessing) over anything yet.

Time for some stream of consciousness nonsense:

I wonder what the deal is with people who won’t let anyone in. What is the point of dropping yourself that low if you won’t absorb some of the insanity around you? What is the purpose of coming into existence for a short while and leaving if you don’t take any of it in? It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense or not because you’ve told yourself already that it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t need to make any sort of objective sense, you said so yourself. But it can make sense to you, and if there is no meaning behind any of it then you can at least have pleasure and enjoyment, and you cannot have that without assigning your own meaning to things. You are the microcosm, after all. You are the tiny universe created in a mind and you have all of the purpose built up inside you to release into the world.

So now what? Now how do we get to the point that you can navigate the world and gleefully tear yourself into the fold so you can make a difference? Why do I want to leave a mark on the unfolding pattern of matter around me so badly? Anyone who didn’t feel like doing that is gone and forgotten. We all become forgotten, though. There is a horizon to our influence. All you should care about is what is inside of that horizon.

The italics are unnecessary. I wanted to use them to demarcate the nonsense but it’s all nonsense, really.

The only part of your existence you’re aware of is this linear bitstream of characters, one word after another in a line. Conscious thought skims the surface. The depths are full of monsters; all of that is just animal experience. But up here I can breathe air and get a grasp on what I feel. Connection does not come the murky bottom of the pond, it’s made at the surface where you have actual thoughts.

The unconscious is overrated. It’s the conscious realm where you take in the vibes and make use of them.

I don’t need new beginnings. Every moment is a new beginning. I need a new future that stems from making the right choice right now. I need the strength to do the hard thing. I need the sense of urgency that leads in the right direction. I do not know what the right direction is, I cannot envision what the right future is for myself — but I know that if I always make the hard choice, do the thing I do not want to do, make the decision that will give my future self an advantage, that is the right choice. The future will become clearer so long as I move.

It’s what the pilot of that crashed plane said to himself in the Andes, walking every moment without sleep. “If I stop, I’m dead.” You freeze in place if you stop, fear grows and you get stuck in place. You have to keep moving.

The fear is the worst. The longer you remain in place, the more you fear motion. Time goes by and you forget how little there is to fear from exploration. You forget what freedom felt like and you get trapped in your little world, you get used to a self-made prison. Desire shifts from hope for a better future to just wanting to remain in your current state forever — which you cannot do because everything decays. It all falls apart on you sooner or later.

The real thing to fear is stagnation. Stagnation is rot and misery and fear. It’s the worst kind of fear: amorphous, free-floating, ready to take the form of whatever will stop you from leaving the little box it wants you to stay in. Anxiety is your brain constantly writing horror fiction about what lurks outside so you stay willfully inside your self-made prison.

Do the thing, always do the thing.

How many times do you need to learn that it does not matter how you retype the same idea over and over again — what is necessary is to just get on with it and do the actual project. Only that way do you actually make any progress, only that way do you really get anywhere.

What do you say when you have nothing to say? You come here, and you just type nonsense. Worse than nonsense. Nonsense might be interesting, this is the same dull motivational crap on repeat.

What can you tell me that’s new?

Many new things lurk in the depths of your mind, but you have to bring them to the surface somehow. The only things that do that are stress, exertion, pain, risk, fear — all the things you avoid are the things that make you grow. This is why it is bad for a man to seek comfort; he must seek whatever the next thing is. He must choose whatever is difficult.

It is the classic question of how to define a character: what does he seek, what does he avoid?

What difficulty does he seek, from what pleasure does he abstain?

Abstinence from empty pleasures may be more difficult than seeking difficulty. Doing is active, you set a goal and pursue it — but not doing means a constant worm in the back of your brain begging you to just do the thing and have some release.

But character is not all dopamine regulation, there is more on top of that. What makes a character decide to alter their own dopaminergic habits in pursuit of something worthwhile? There is always that extra spark that has no explanation.

Effort, effort, effort. That’s what it’s got to be, but it has to be organized. I have to zoom out sometimes and get an overview, I have to point my strength in the right direction. I have to go but I have know where I am going.

Every trip is a little death. I don’t want to be on my way, I don’t want to go. For a few days I’m trapped, unable to work on what really matters to me — and then I come home and I can’t work on what really matters. It’s too staggering, too imposing, too monumental. It’s the white whale and I’m just a tiny human on the deck of a tiny ship in the ocean. The disproportion is immense.

I don’t know where to put myself other than beneath its shadow.

Typing feels right, though. I know how to do this. Run, run, run. A waste of energy, maybe. Certainly directionless — but no movement is a waste because you end up somewhere other than where you were before, and only that way can you get any idea about whether it’s the right direction or not. Sit still and you will only be confused.

What is this feeling that I have to be somewhere other than where I am? It’s what the little ant feels when the parasitic fungus infects its little brain, inspiring it to climb upwards toward the light so that the fungus can complete its lifecycle. The spore of something greater infects your soul and moves you toward a greater purpose.

Two possibilities:

1. You will never be happy except by choosing a purpose outside yourself.
2. Choosing a purpose outside yourself is a way of escaping from what really matters.

I’m not sure which one it is. Probably some strange combination of both.

Years get behind you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Make use of the time — you will lose it anyway. It’s less of a loss if you at least moved yourself forward.

Move yourself… Nothing else moves you. All other motion is just drift, but everything drifts around you as well and so that motion all cancels out.

Zero in, focus, laser-cut your purpose out of the plain background of everyday life with beams from your eyeballs. The purpose is yours if you can find it.

Sometimes I think long paragraphs are not for me. I get a certain rhythm going like a poem and I just don’t have anything more to say on one subject and need a new line. Doesn’t matter. I just want to get out of the habit of using all those goddamn ellipses. Those… things… are… indecisive… poison. Pick a punctuation mark and stick with it?

The problem is that I’m trying to carry on a conversation at the same time as I’m writing this. The flow isn’t even necessarily the point, although it’s nice to get into that state. No, the purpose is to push yourself forward when there isn’t necessarily a clear way. The point is to wade through the muck of a blank screen and find some reason you want to slam these keys early in the morning and see what you have before you. It’s a lot of laughter, it’s a bit of enjoyment that comes as a byproduct of imagining something on the other side of this swamp that you want to obtain.

None of it needs to make sense to anyone else. None of it has to come together for you, it just has to speak to you and sound nice to you. It can be a joke that’s only funny to you, it can be a meaning that only attracts you. Your personal meaning is a bug zapper tuned to the frequency that resonates only with you, drawing you and only you to your individual fate.

“All death is certain, the only thing is to live well.”

Too bad I have to end it on someone else’s words but there you go.

You can always move on past the point that you cannot go back — that is what we wall do no matter what. That is how it has always worked: entropy moves in one direction. You lust for the younger while you move ever onward toward death.

Keep moving.

You cannot keep yourself together in this way. You cannot scrape together the points that want you here. You cannot create if you do not first destroy. All the old garbage must be taken out; space must be made for the new if you are ever to squeeze together all the things you want into one lifetime.

Lifetime. Life-time. Life and time. Time keeps moving, relentlessly. It runs us all over in the end, we are all its roadkill. We are all its smashed and broken children. Even the works and influence we leave behind are erased — they either disintegrate if they are physical, or dissipate through time if they are in the form of influence and change. Change continues, the winding down of the great cosmic machine continues.

Whether it’s all for nothing is not your concern. You did not build it and will not be around for its heat-death. You are a spider spinning its web, hoping for something to eat. Just do your dance and take what you can get. The rest will sort itself out.

I had added more than I thought to this blog. This is encouraging. I can’t stand starting from scratch, going over all the basics from the beginning again and again. I really shouldn’t fight it but I cannot keep myself in line. I really cannot kick the pants of all the rest of those bastards who can fight the deep fight.

Even on here I revert to using the same words I used to scribble all the time. “Deep” and “fight” are probably the most commonly used. They’re single-syllable and mean something important. They’re full of something I cannot imagine. They’re all just crushing my balls, man.

I have to get three paragraphs out of it all. I have to get something out of it, not for me but for whatever alien civilization discovers this on a rotting disk somewhere. Whatever it’s stored on, whatever it’s kept on. They will have to try to make sense of it, just as I am doing right now. I’m not hitting return because I want to keep it at three paragraphs. I haven’t got anything further today. All out. But the point is to keep going when you think you’re done, that is how you push yourself further than you previously could go.

Fuck it, fourth paragraph.

This is how it gets you: it makes you think that what you are typing matters. None of it matters. The point of this exercise is to stop caring and to open the throttle. No one will read this again, not even you. You just move forward with the thing. You will reclaim your soul millimeter by millimeter.

Lack of hours put in to work is the secondary problem; the primary problem is actually discouragement. I have the energy and the desire — but also a sense of futility. When nothing you produce feels good enough, you get no sense of accomplishment. When you overindulge in humility and disregard the positive qualities of your product, you restrain your ability to make more and to improve.

You have to allow yourself some pride. If nothing else, you can feel qualified pride in the time and effort you put into something — if you’re that averse to liking what you actually produce.

I don’t know why I got this neurology in this lifetime but hey.

That was a nonsense one-sentence paragraph but I’m leaving it in because fuck you.

I like to imagine a vast intelligence of some kind reading this ten centuries from now and trying to make sense of it. It may make more sense of it than I can. I have too much of an aversion to believing anything positive about myself.

Fun fact: I always choose a title for these entries once I’m done. I never have any idea where I’m going with any of this.

Do you think you can get yourself out of this mess? Is it more tempting to think all is lost so that you can go back to not trying? Is it more fun thinking you have nothing to lose?

I’m running through the possible next steps for this entry because I keep trying to make sense of it. It’s early — the sun hasn’t come up yet — so I don’t see the need for this to make a whole ton of sense. I don’t even think I need to make much sense at this hour.

I don’t know what they could possibly want from me other than to kick it off and just slam it against the wall so that we can find out what’s inside. There’s nothing I hate more than falling short of what I feel I should have done. I hate going out on that limb and fighting for what’s barely defensible. I hate screaming into the void. Some people may like it, they may find it liberating — I find it futile, trying to win a fight by swinging at the air.

You can never get yourself closer to what you need by screeching about nothing. You find a straight line, an arrow, pointed at a purpose. If you want to write something worth reading then you must have something to communicate.

You have to keep moving. No human can tolerate standing still. You sink into time like quicksand, you find yourself halfway buried before you realize what’s going on.

Insanity is choosing the harder path — the unnecessarily harder path. You could do something now, work on it every day, and make it easier on yourself. Or you can wait until it’s almost too late and have to scramble while you’re weak and in bad condition. For some reason you chose the latter. Too bad, but at least it’s only almost too late and not actually too late.

Any insinuation that hope is lost is just an excuse to quit. That’s the automatic bin into which any such thoughts should be thrown.

A bee rescued from a swimming pool has to dry its wings off and get its strength back up before it can fly again. That’s what I have to do at this point. I forgot how to write. I have to reset myself and figure out how to say what I mean all over again.

They say that “done” is better than “perfect.” Real is better than theoretical.

A little bit every day is infinitely better than nothing.

The rest of this is going to be stream of consciousness for my own exercise:

I don’t know where they get the gall or the impulse or fight in their minds to lift off and face down whatever it is that they think they can defeat. The point of this message is not to make sense or to express anything of any value, it is to keep the author’s fingers going on the keyboard so that he recovers his abilities and remembers how to fly.

I don’t know whether it’s worth going to the end of the page just for this. I think I have what I need and the point can be gathered and broken down into the spaces I want. I don’t know if there are spaces at the bottom for all the little things I want to keep. I don’t think it matters. The bottom is deep underwater space, the Mariana Trench of the mind. Strange creatures live down there in the eternal darkness. They float and drift and have no need for eyes.

You can always get yourself out past the deepest point if you squeeze past and remember the reason you dove down this deep to begin with. But most of us have amnesia; we don’t remember the time before this one. Wittgenstein said that the purpose of the world does not lie within the world. The purpose of your life does not lie within your life. We’re always trying to remember what the hell we were meant to be doing here.

I can make things before me work the way I wanted them to work. I cannot get a purpose lined up for my ascent into whatever lies beyond that blinding light. Maybe it’s chaos, because perfection would be oblivion. There is no time without entropy. Without decay there is no existence.

I don’t need italics anymore — italics are an excuse. This whole damn blog is unrestricted, unfiltered free writing.

I had something important that I intended to talk about, which I forgot, and all of these words are incantations to try to get that meaning back. If I stumble around in my darkness for long enough I will find it.