face punching

"If there were no contradictions, no struggle, there would no world, no process, no life. There would be nothing at all." ~Mao Zedong

It does feel a little weird to normalize being punched in the face. It feels weird to talk to others about it, for whom it is not normal at all, and rather concerning. The type of "martial arts" I do is the real deal though. We're not doing kata or point sparring. I got hit in jaw pretty hard on Sunday, such that it still hurts a little to chew. My sparring partner immediately apologized, as we're not supposed to be sparring that hard, but these things happen. Pretty regularly. 

Also caught a hard elbow to the nose during open mat BJJ on Friday. On Wednesday, my face collided with the shoulder of a guy who outweighs me by 70 lbs. A no-fault accident that could have just as easily happened while playing volleyball, but it was the hardest impact I've taken doing any of this. I had to sit down for a few. It was the one time I've thought, ah crap, there goes a few brain cells.

I often think of how crazy this sounds to people, that I subject myself to this, but I love it. Before the pandemic, we almost never did any sparring. The little we did was terrible. I had so much to learn. There were open workouts I never went to, and maybe sparring went on then, but I'm not sure. They had a sparring class that came and went. There seemed to be a lack of interest in it.

Now, we spar all the time. I don't know what changed. The whole world seems to have changed. Sparring is my favorite part of all this, second only to actually stepping into the ring. Ok, I haven't tried that yet, but I find myself hoping that's where this is going. I never thought I'd be doing this well at my age. I was happy to be able to do it at all, but I keep doing better and the carrot on the stick always seems to be out of reach.

I can tell myself stories of how things should be. I can imagine how easily they could be that way, but my imagination does not contain all the building blocks my reality does. The models we create in our minds being a cartoonish simplification of why things are the way they are. We are bound to leave a lot out, thus concluding how easily things could be different.

It's important to healthy brain function to want things, and to strive for that. To feel capable of striving for that. The carrot is important. Striving is often difficult, unpleasant, even painful. It's important to get over the idea that pain is inherently bad; that suffering is inherently bad. It's ok that getting what we want just means wanting something else, too. The real purpose of it all is not to get what we want, but to live. 

This is just living in a reality that is entirely transient. Everything is process. The very concept of getting what we want ceases to make sense. Contradictory as it may seem, the healthy part is that we want, regardless. If you want to end the suffering of all beings like a good Buddhist is supposed to, that's great, but for now, I want to train. I want to fight. I want to live.

My brain function being rather less than healthy, I've had trouble finding much that I both want and deem myself having any chance of achieving. I lost interest in things, no pain or suffering being worth enduring, just to be miserable anyhow. I wanted nothing, I strove for nothing, I achieved nothing. 

I protected myself, and maybe I needed the protection. Maybe in retrospect, I underestimate all the realities of what I was going through. I form an ideal model of what could have been, leaving a whole lot out. You might say I survived and award me points for that, but it doesn't really matter. It serves as an example of a vicious cycle best avoided if at all possible. Not wanting anything, not caring about anything, falling into despair and finding myself ever more trapped in the mire.

In some sense, I'm talking about decades past. In another, I'm talking about last month. It's still a constant battle, that for the time being, I'm pulling ahead of again. I always seem to get knocked back down, and I don't know why. I fear the day I won't get back up ever again, but I guess that's life, too.

This of all things, I've decided I'm capable of, and the whole world opens up for me like it never has before. I'm learning how to deal with that, way behind schedule. I've yet got a ways to go and may never get there, but it's a process.

individualist regime

The US is an especially terrible capitalist country in large part due to our cult of individualism. We could call it capitalism taken to an extreme, although I'm not entirely sure our wrongheaded economic system is to blame. It could be the direction capitalism always ends up going. For now though, it's fairly distinctive to the US. Lots of countries share similar problems, but America is number one, world leader in radicalized selfishness.

I think a lot of our problems stem from this. Living here my entire life, a lot of my problems surely stem from this was well. It's interesting to me that we can look at problems in different ways, all of them true, but leading to entirely different conclusions and consequences.

Do I blame myself, or do I blame society? Do I blame the past or the present? Everything is intertwined, all of it factoring into the current situation, but one can negate the other, instead of balancing it. Blame society, and I might feel better about myself, feeling righteously helpless to do anything about it. If I blame myself, I'll feel terrible, but potentially, just maybe, do something differently.

It's also this intertwining of factors giving rise to everything in life. Pratityasamutpada. This includes people, and everything about who we are. We base our society on this rank delusion that we're all individuals capable of doing whatever we want. Anyone being trampled by our ludicrous system deserves it. Don't blame reality, only blame yourself.

Just don't blame yourself out loud. Nobody wants to hear the negativity. Grab those bootstraps and shut the fuck up about it.

So, I'm this lone crazy person, ranting into a void. I could be yelling at strangers on a street corner, but instead I just blog. How normal the view that society is fine, while I'm essentially projecting my mental illness?

People largely seem a lot happier than me, I do have to concede. On the other hand, I don't meet the ones in prison, or living on the streets. I don't meet the ones living in trailers and ghettos watching TV all day every day. Most of them don't even tweet. Suicide rates and drug overdoses have doubled in the US over the last twenty years. I don't meet the casualties of that, either.

just depression

So, I've realized that I hate my circumstances, I hate my life, I hate what I've become. Take away all the excuses and stories I've told myself all these years, and essentially, I hate myself. I hate the world for making me feel this way. I'm drowning in a sea of negativity and all anyone can tell me is that I should regret all this negativity, too.

And I wonder, is this how I've always felt? Have I exposed this ugly rot at the very foundation of my existence, or am I just so depressed, I'm putting a negative spin on my entire life? I talk about my medical condition and how it impacted my childhood, but what we know about self-esteem is that goes back further than that. It develops during early childhood and has more to do with relations and behaviors of caregivers, shading everything that happens afterwards.

I've spent my entire life begging the world to save me from this, but the world doesn't do that sort of thing. My whole life has been nothing but failure and misery. I can't lie to myself about that anymore. I'm trying to pull it together to get back to the gym, but how much does that even matter when I always end up back here. It's the only positive thing I've ever done, and it's been increasingly difficult to keep doing it. If only I had someone to go with, blah blah blah.

The last few years have been horrific, and I hate that instead of demonstrating any resilience or wisdom, I've only crumpled. It's not my fault, because this, because that, but it is what it is, I am what I am, and I fucking hate it.

Then I got to the gym. Maybe writing helps. My knee is fine. All puffy and weird, but relatively fine. My back is fine. The inflammation in my neck is 99.7% gone. My wrists hurt. All this is frustrating, but I got to the gym, it was fine, and I feel a lot better. It's a great painkiller, but painkillers tend to wear off.

I'm torn between listing all these valid reasons for feeling bad about myself, and thinking it's got nothing to do with any of that. It's a childhood development issue. I may have an entirely valid list, but so do lots of people. Life is rough for a lot of the world, and we tend to suck at dealing with that. This isn't to make excuses, but to point out that we're supposed to have self-esteem anyhow. Some people really are hated by everyone, and still feel ok about themselves. Why? Because that's how the brain is supposed to work.

commodities

I used to think that I like myself, and that was basically self-esteem. For years, I'd mull over the contradictions of thinking I like myself even if I have no worth to others. It didn't seem to add up.

What did I like about myself? What does it mean to like myself? I would read my blog, agree with my past proclamations, admire my choice of words. I'd like who that person seems to be. I might even argue that it's longwinded rambling about ourselves that best covers who we are. I wasn't sure what to make of the reality that this isn't a version of me that other people see at all. The people I meet out in the world haven't read my blog. By a fairly overwhelming margin, they don't want to.

The self is not a real objective thing. It's a trick of perspective, generally thought about in terms of looking for our own, but who we are is no less the behavior we exhibit around other people. People who don't think about who we are as separate from our circumstances. If someone has no legs, we don't think of them as who they'd be, with legs. When we consider ourselves, we might think this isn't me, this is just my circumstances. When we consider someone else, it's all the same. It's not your fault if you don't have legs, but it is what it is.

To assess the value or worth of something is not to measure an intrinsic quality, but how much weight it carries in a transaction. This requires interactions between people, and means nothing on its own. Self-worth is not a question of whether we like ourselves, but of whether we expect to be valued. Not necessarily liked, but valued.

To some extent, self-worth is a rational calculation we can try to make in any given situation, but it's also a core component of the human psyche. The person who expects the world to bend over backwards for them has an overinflated sense of self-worth. The less what we want matters, the less motivated we'll be to do much of anything, but escape. When we assess how much it matters what we want or need, and how much should be done to accommodate that, it's an assessment of how much we matter. 

I've always tried to be humble. I'm fine. I want nothing. Leave me alone to inexplicably wither away.

the missing piece

I have to be very careful about gaming. Selective about when I pick up a new title. What kind of game is it. I might stop caring about everything else for a while. Used selectively enough, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it mostly is. I've thought a lot about why gaming in particular, comparing it to other vices and interests. It's not simply an addiction or an escape. There's something more specific that hooks a certain type.

I'm an "achievement" type player to a great extent. That is, I'm most drawn to playing a game in which my character is always getting stronger, progressing in some way themselves, not just passing through a game world or story. I like games that start out ridiculously difficult, but I get to the point where I can walk around their fantastical hellscapes pretty safely, with no more challenges to grow stronger overcoming. The game loses something, and I return to reality, having achieved nothing at all.

Aforementioned feelings of learned hopelessness are all about achievement. It's the feeling there's nothing I can do that's going to get me anywhere. To be obsessed with a game is to be starved for feelings of achievement. Gaming can be especially addictive for the type of people who feel hopeless about making any progress in their own lives. So unlike real life, games promise progress. Just play them and you'll get somewhere. 

What can I achieve in life? Why did I stop doing any kind of art or music? Never striving for anything academically or vocationally or socially or anything at all ever? 

Nothing felt like an achievement. Thus, no achievement seemed possible. Nothing I did would be of any value to anyone. Nothing I strive for will matter.

There's a logical chain to it, but I'm still just trying to put the pieces together. My life's work of trying to figure out why my brain doesn't work. I've long compared it to feeling incomplete, like a car in which the wheels are not connected to the engine. The drive shaft, should I say? The metal turnie thingies? I don't know cars very well, but I understand that everything has to be causally connected. Engines don't turn wheels just because they really want to.

I hesitate to even volunteer help for people, for fear that the help from me would be unwanted. I'd be inept, in the way, whatever the framing, nothing I do will be of value to anyone. Applying for a job means tricking someone into thinking they'd want to hire me. An endeavor, like all endeavors, I'm sure to fail at. I don't know why I feel that way, but it makes some sense to me that it could be the sort of missing piece needed to make the wheels turn.

It's like the reward axis manifests on a psychological level. The psychological characteristics may be more immutable than they should be, if they're the product of an underlying neurochemistry, brewed by the interplay of environment and biology. This is why we can be aware that we feel a given way, and that it's problematic or even wrong, while being unable to choose feeling differently. It's not that simple.

Yet, other people seem to go about their lives as if they're in a video game, in which if you want to do something, you go do it. If something makes sense, act on it. Doesn't matter that they mostly fail every which way and very little they do makes sense, if a person's sense of self-worth is functioning properly. 

That the missing piece would be one's own sense of self-worth just seems obvious now. Mine's been crudely stitched together with delusions of exceptionalism my entire life. Twice exceptional, even. I'm not sure how to actually fix it. One might say I've learned that I'm helpless to do so. Maybe I am. 

learned hopelessness

 I remember this line I scrawled in my journal, when I was a kid. More anarchist than communist in those days, it went something like, fuck their games, fuck their rules, I'd sooner lose than play with fools. 

I was full of ideas as to how things should be, which is fine and all, but if only I could have been convinced to accept that this is the world we live in. We only have a short time to make the most of it. It seems crazy to openly admit to preferring to throw it away over some sort of ideological pride. Almost on par with holding my breath until they give us communism.

I don't know how much value to place in all that, when I realize that it was all just this post facto rationalization thing the brain does. It may have some truth to it, but the underlying rationale had more to do with learned hopelessness. I wasn't like other kids. I was never going to have a life like theirs. I'd often feel enraged about it. It wasn't fair. 

All the more confusing, because I never really knew what made me different. My intelligence, my sensitivity, a more highly tuned sense of ethics? Hmm, that sounds suspiciously cliché, honestly. Was it that other kids treated me like I was different my entire childhood, when I was years behind them all developmentally? I wasn't bullied, I just wasn't one of them. I had no peers. Maybe that has a way of imprinting on a person's sense of self.

Always refusing to adapt, proudly standing my ground, because I deeply believed it was not a challenge I could conceivably overcome. If people didn't value me, they could fuck off. That seems reasonable on some level, and yet.. maybe put some thought and effort into doing something valuable? That was literally inconceivable to me. I don't know what I'd have to do, but it would never work. Even the things I am best at, I expect no one to value. Incidentally, this is fundamentally terrible for motivation.

Other aspects of my childhood sure didn't help with that mindset. Maybe I'll always feel different due to development back then, but now I'm also different because people don't know what it's like to scrape by like Gollum their entire lives. Nobody wants in on this, not even me. I'm honestly not sure if I'm still that tiny little kid in junior high, telling everyone to fuck off preemptively - or if they still treat me like I'm different, and I'm just reacting to that.

Social efforts have been feeling rather hopeless though. Going to a picnic made me want to crawl into a hole for a month.

anatomy of misanthropy

 As the prospect of overcoming mental health problems grows an ever more distant memory, I can see the anatomy of the isolation and misanthropy that develops. Being around people makes me feel inferior. They don't frame it that way for the most part, but on all different levels, the lack of interest or enthusiasm for anything, the hesitance to express anything, discombobulated and anxious, I don't work or drive and pay for my food with food stamps. I'm not an independent grown-up like they are. My value as a fellow human being seems to be in the gutter. 

I protected myself from that my entire life by distancing myself from it. Fuck it all. Fuck this grotesquely unequal society. Fuck people. 

The problem is that people are all that actually matters in this world, as far as much of our neurochemistry is concerned. I wasted my entire life, protecting myself. So I'm trying to change, but all this pressure is making me miserable. I just want to be alone, but my defenses are gone. That just makes me more miserable.

In turn, all this misery makes for even less of a winning personality. Less motivated, less interest in anything, more cynical and bitter about everything. It becomes so hard to even get to the gym where others might see what a failure of a person I am. Getting to the gym is supposed to be the one thing that helps, but I guess it depends on how bad the mental health gets.

late spring

Cold and wet lately, but it's felt like summer for a while. Feels odd that's it's not summer at all yet. I'm feeling disconnected from it either way because I haven't been leaving the house much.

Physically and emotionally collapsed, but not sure which precipitated the other. I certainly didn't throw my back out on purpose, nor imagine being unable to turn to my left for a week. Should give my knees some time to rest anyhow, I figured. And my wrists, my neck, and whatever else. Then my left knee swelled with fluid over the kneecap, like my body is trying to make its own knee pad. It doesn't work well. It should go away on its own, but maybe it needs to be drained, I don't know.

I was emotionally collapsing anyhow. On some level, afraid I'm exaggerating and imagining my injuries because I just want an excuse to go back to sleeping all day. I hate sleeping all day. I hate that everything is so hard. Even trying to socialize is this monumental effort. I hate the lifelong desperate escapism that comes with life being more traumatizing than it was supposed to be. I'm losing hope that whatever progress I've made is ever going to be enough that I might become human.

I used to be proud of my writing. Now I find it embarrassing and pointless. Some part of me says to keep doing it, some other part of me can't always help it, but I'd rather people not know about it. Who am I but this collection of neurosis and complaining. It's been difficult finding common interests with anyone when I don't like or take interest in much of anything anymore. 

I haven't been able to get to the gym in a few weeks, let alone compete in anything.