the outsider's chaos

It occurred to me as I walked to the gym the other day that I've been going five days a week. That's overshooting my goal by a day or two, but I don't want to miss any of those particular days, for one reason or another. 

It occurred to me as I walked home afterwards, that I haven't been in this much pain afterwards in quite a long time. I'm afraid there may be some correlation between these occurrences. I've taken today off. It seemed like there were twelve different reasons I shouldn't go today, but none of them were very good reasons.

I find myself missing being around people. Not people in the abstract, but specific people. People I've enjoyed training with. I'm afraid it's probably best that I don't know them better, but lots of them have been good training partners. I've been thinking about one of the changes I went through a few years back, when everything changed. I stopped thinking of myself as special, or different from others in any substantial way.

"Substantial" has to do a lot of work here. Everyone is different. Some of us different in ways more different than others. I have problems others have trouble relating to, but so do lots of other people. What feels substantial almost seems ideological. A way of spinning my situation, a defense against feeling like I was just fucked. I was different.

Not to pick on the framing itself, but it is a framing. One that I sought to abandon, for the more ambitious angle, that I'm just another person, with these problems I need to overcome. This in turn seems to have consequences for how I think about other people. The defenses were there for all sorts of reasons. Neurotypicals can be all sorts of problematic. As opposed to that neurospecial alien species I prefer to imagine myself a part of.

The problem of the outsider is that he sees too deeply and too much, but what he sees is essentially chaos. Everything is arbitrary, circumstance, and ultimately meaningless - including thinking about things that way. Maybe the reality of it is that people's minds tend to synchronize under the right conditions, resulting in feelings of life generally making sense. In alienation and isolation, the brain lacks the chemistry to do this, making it prone to eventual aimlessness and chaos.

Doing stuff with others matters, insofar as we define what matters as that which produces such a feeling that things matter.