driven from distraction

I don't care all that much how I feel right now. I have had a hell of a time working out how to make this point. When someone says, "ow, I've broken my leg," you don't want to focus too much on how they feel - of course it hurts. It should hurt. They have a broken leg. If it doesn't hurt, that's even worse. The important thing is to fix the broken leg. If you're not doing that, addressing the pain will be woefully inadequate at best. If you can't help fix a broken leg, at least appreciate the problems such a thing will cause a person. Understand that walking it off is not going to work.

I often talk about suffering in terms of the conditions which lead to miserable lives. We can shore up our mental health such that we handle miserable conditions better, but if we're not addressing those conditions, the misery can grow increasingly unmanageable. Coping in the short term can be dangerously pacifying. I don't want peace. I'm trying to fight a war.

That is the point I've been trying to make. I've become wary of distraction and escapism. I'm afraid of being pacified. I don't want to feel better. It can become all too easy to get lost in our daily lives as it all goes increasingly wrong. Eventually, once it's far too late, that can have the sort of real consequences we all sympathize with. I remember trying to explain this to Jenny years ago. She thought it was just me being neurotic. The ways that we cope in the short term can kill us in the long run.

That I should "get a job" isn't entirely wrong. It's just so much more complicated than that. It's why I was going to school and everything. I was trying to change my life, because the way I live is killing me. This is why being forced to return to how I've lived has me freaking out month after month. This isn't something that I'm going to recover from, or ever feel better about. I am losing my mind to a war of attrition. I don't know what to think about anything anymore.

Right now, my plan is still to get back to kickboxing. I need to start with rebuilding a foundation. I don't know where I'll go from there. I don't feel happiness thinking about it. I feel dread and anxiety because it might not go all that well, in any number of ways. It might not be enough. I'm trying to survive, not get back to this fun thing I like to do.

I get my first dose of the vaccine on the 22nd. I'm not excited about that either. It's just another step towards trying to survive. Who knows what will be going on by the time I've got my second dose, another month or two from now. This just goes on and on.