hermitage

I've always been very sensitive, and when I'm around people, I bottle everything up.  A social anxiety thing or whatever, I'm not even sure.  If this depression of self expression is as harmful as Gabor Mate says it is, this is arguably a highly effective defense from that.  I just won't be around people.  When I'm alone, I can express whatever I want.  Disconnected.

Gabor Maté on stress-disease connection

My screen name was "disconnected" for a long time, a long time ago.  It was often misunderstood to mean that I felt disconnected from my emotions.  What, no, I feel disconnected from all of you people.  Only now do I see how the two are correlated.  My feelings of disconnection result in an affect of emotional disconnection.  That is what people see.

Disconnection has many consequences, but even physiologically, it's not healthy.  Nor, it seems, is the stress of being around people.  This internal conflict could be why I fixate on how I might get the most out of a singular connection.  Letting one person in has been almost tolerable.  Maybe some day it will work, but any more than that feels like a bad idea.

So yay, I'm around people all the time now.  Actually, that's not true.  I still spend massive amounts of time alone, but numerous days a week, I've been in rooms full of other humans.  Losing track of myself, getting stoned at every opportunity just to keep the stress from what could be quite serious consequences.  It's all about navigating this to the best of our ability, with whatever works for us, but our options aren't always ideal.

I even ran out for the first time since I started growing, but I'm very resourceful, as long as my resources don't need to involve other people.

Update, 2/21/2019: "Dear Joshua, it has come to our attention that there was an error in calculation for the grades in your CIS-1100 class this past fall. Your grade has been raised and your new grade is an A-. This new grade will be reflected on your transcript within a few business days."

Not so bad, all things considered.

Sometimes I think, I never really enjoy things.  Everything I want to do is like addiction.  It's either escapism, or it's stressful as hell.  Maté defines addiction as something we do for short term benefits, and keep doing, in spite of long term harmful consequences.  We have to weigh those benefits and consequences, but the more irrational we are in said choosing consequences over finding something else to do, the more we're probably talking about addiction.

So, I'm pretty rational about choosing behaviors with the least harmful consequences, but it still feels a lot like everything I do is self-medication more than enjoyment.  I wouldn't say that enjoyment never happens to me, though.  I'm pretty sure I've had enjoyable experiences.  I just can't seem to figure out how to have them on purpose.