machismo

I often feel overwhelmed with regret for how I've lived my life, but I know what I would have argued at the time. I was doing the best I could to survive and had no idea how to do any more with my life. It's so easy now to be dismissive of my mental health problems. I'm still miserable and scared all too often, but not like I used to be.

My physical health problems as well. It's easy to forget what it was like living without growth hormone. I couldn't hit the gym like I do these days. I wouldn't benefit from it if I tried. I was trapped in a much weaker state, lethargic, soft and fragile, thin skinned, unable to grow muscle, and I looked fourteen years old. That I lacked confidence makes all too much sense.

Much like my mental health problems, I've only partially bridged the gap. I'm a lot stronger and more resilient. I have muscles - but people are often surprised to see them. They compliment me because their expectations are so low. I still come off as rather small and weak compared to other guys. I still lack confidence. I still don't have that much of a life.

I used to be so much more fucked up. It all started to change when I moved to NJ. That's when I started taking GH, but I also felt like I had to sleep a normal schedule, clean the kitchen after dinner every night, and I started jogging more seriously, every morning. Often, I wonder if my life would have gone better had I started such fundamentals decades earlier. Maybe I didn't because I couldn't. Maybe I couldn't because of my medical condition, or maybe it was because I didn't know any better.

Maybe regret or self blame isn't even the real problem here. There are causal connections to everything. It is what it is, as I've always said.. but regardless, it seems like such a damn shame. That was my chance to live and it came and went. Who I should blame doesn't really matter.

I realize I still have some time ahead of me, but I don't know how much. At this rate I'm afraid, not a whole lot. Getting to the gym feels like more living than I've done in a very long time, but I don't stand a chance with any of the women there and I don't think I'll ever get to see China.

I hate that people have such low expectations of me, that they'd think my standards should be lower. They have as little hope for me as I have for myself, and yet think I should be happy. If you think I should be happy sitting around by myself doing nothing all day every day until I die, you're not on my side. If you're not going to believe in my capacity to live an ambitiously healthy fulfilling life, at least respect my pain.

emotional regulations

Poor emotional regulation. That's another symptom of ADHD that I've been in denial of my whole life because I find it reprehensible. I'm the kind of person who's above that sort of thing - until I put my fist through a wall. As an adult, I've never hit anyone in anger, but I can't seem to leave an apartment without leaving some damage behind. 

It's finally time to leave this one. Looks like I might have some decent options, so I'm handing it ok, so far. I worry about how I'll handle things, because I know I don't control it very well. I hesitate to face my fears, when it's my own instability I'm actually afraid of. I don't trust myself. I get overwhelmed, anxious, maybe that's all a lack of emotional regulation.

Human interaction is riddled with bumps and scrapes we're supposed to just get over, but I don't regulate that well, either. I come home from the gym feeling beat up in more ways than one, just from being around people, feeling like I'm not as much of a grown-up as people half my age. Being around people makes me feel worthless, but I'm getting better, ever so slowly, like a sloth. 

In torpere. That was supposed to mean I was like a vampire, in torpor; a drastically weakened state caused by damage or starvation. They need blood to recover, to me, a metaphor for the human connection I'd spend my whole life lamenting. The meaning has evolved over time. It wasn't supposed to mean that I'm slow, but here we are. 

It was supposed to mean that it was a temporary state. Not who I really am. I'd be great and powerful, if only.. what? Does it matter? It was a way of hiding from the reality of what I am. What I was doing. What I was being. Every day of my actual life. Judging me would be like judging someone who's in a coma, right?

In reality, I was a person spending their entire life pretending to be in a coma, to avoid being judged. I was not the great potential in my head. I am the person living this way every day. So, my self esteem is crap now. I don't regulate that very well either.

I've often contrasted myself with people who barely take emotions into account at all. People who lean psychopathic, although I hesitate to say it's necessarily that. I used to think about it as emotional depth, that I just seem to feel everything to a greater degree. A type of sensitivity that was in some sense a good thing. I get overwhelmed because I feel too much, not because I lack control? It's effectively the same thing though. Absent sufficient regulation, emotions flow like a broken water main.

Failing to find human connection because I can't handle the emotional rollercoaster of being around humans.

counter culture

As a teenager, I was always trying to find the right subculture. I didn't want to be normal, I didn't want anything to do with normal people. I defined myself by my differentiation, and looked for others who did the same. I was always frustrated going to schools where I couldn't find a single person, let alone any kind of group. I wasn't even all that specific, punk, goth, metal, isn't anyone into anything but pop trash?

These weren't just preferences. I discounted literally everyone who seemed too normal. Which was literally everyone. Why should I even attempt any kind of friendship or anything else with normal people? They're boring, dumb, callous and selfish. They have bad taste in everything and all sorts of backwards beliefs and values. I didn't even interact with them. It was obvious.

To some extent, I wasn't wrong. People often lack intelligence, ethics, or good taste, but I went on to discover the same was largely true of all sorts of people. It doesn't matter if they're anarchists or Buddhists or Budweiser loving football fans. Putting people into all these categories wasn't really sorting anything out.

I stopped looking for interesting people. I lost any sense of what I was looking for and felt like I hated all people. I still have some serious grievances with humanity, but it's a hell of a gut punch to realize that I hated people without ever learning anything about them. I saw monsters in all sorts of strangers just trying to live their lives. I didn't get to know anyone but a few partners I've had. Not that I paid enough attention to them, either. 

I knew that I was scared, but couldn't admit how central that was to my problems. I couldn't face what a position of weakness I was working from. I thought it was virtue, being too proud to face reality. 

Humanity didn't do this to me. I did this to myself. Something was wrong with how my brain worked. It wasn't "my fault," per se. I had more serious mental health problems than I do now. It was trauma response. I was protecting myself the only way I knew how. I tried so hard to be self-aware, but these walls I built created massive blind spots.

What do I say to anyone, I'd often struggle with, but never asked them about themselves. I didn't care. They weren't like me, so why bother. Asking them anything would be like asking a chimp what they thought of dialectical materialism. Probably best if I didn't encourage them to keep gibbering at me, right?

I had no idea what dialectical materialism was back then. We all learn, grow, and change, misunderstand and forget. The condescension was weird. I didn't pay enough attention to people to have any sense of how intelligent they were. I didn't try to understand people. They said something I didn't like, and that made them idiots. For the most part, I just assumed, lost in my own world where I understood everything.

I've come to realize that everything is perspective. This aspect of the mindset I'm describing isn't special, but all too common. Most of us think we're right, we laud those who agree with us, and disparage those who see things differently. We fail to understand or even take interest in why others see things differently. We may not even articulate ourselves in ways conducive to understanding each other, only to blame others for failing to understand. Much of this is all too normal. 

In some ways, I'm mortified to realize that I am all too normal. I speak human just fine, albeit frequently too nervous and distractible to be much good at it. The sort of music I listen to doesn't actually matter all that much. I'm human and that is the problem. Our fallibility is legion, but normal people aren't all that bad. They're actually all different, from me and from each other. To some of them, I'm one of the boring normies.

sloth progress sucks

I feel like I've made all this progress in recent years, and yet there's something horrifying about it. I've come far enough to be around normal people, even going to their picnics and the like. I interact with them, strangers become acquaintances, meeting new people all the time. This basic social process they all take for granted, I went my entire adult life without. 

For me, this can feel like major progress, but it also puts me face to face with how far I still have to go, to be anything like them. Some kind of respectable functioning adult. Progress gives me perspective, the ability to plot a trajectory, and realize that I'm not going to make it.

What does this mean, to be a respectable functioning adult? Why does it matter? Is it all about what other people think? What if they are right to think it?

I may not really understand this, but from what I can tell, as we become adults, we are motivated by what we want out of life, and the independence to obtain it. We are all constrained in various ways, but being a "functioning adult" isn't just about living up to societal norms. It's the self-actualization of growing to pursue our own needs and wants.

I'm such a tangle of neurosis and anxieties, so meek and reticent about everything that I never get around to doing anything. I barely even think in terms of what I want, only in what I'll never have, any potential motivation stifled before it even becomes conscious. The correlation between desire and motivation is interesting. If someone is unmotivated, maybe we should talk about what they want, and why it doesn't seem possible. 

Unmotivated, stunted, unable to pursue anything I want in life, this is not how I want to live at all. It's dysfunctional, pathetic, and childish. I just sit here day after day, because the world scares me. Some things never change? My progress feels lacking. I have a lot further to go than I'd thought. Further than I'd been able to admit to myself. I've only made enough progress to realize I'm more fucked than I'd realized.

If only I could get some help, if only things would go right for once, I think, only for life to kick my in the face again. I've had a lot of health problems lately. Finally getting over one thing only to be hit with another. Haven't been able to throw any punches with my left arm for a few weeks now, but it's getting better. I'm afraid my age is catching up with me, my trajectory at ever increasing risk of nose-diving.

I'd stopped intermittent fasting almost a year ago, because while its benefits are dubious, my need for calories is less so. Maybe it really was helping though. I've started that again. I've been running almost every day, while I can't get to the gym. I find ways to stay positive out of a desperate fear of inevitable backslide into the abyss I spent my whole life trying to crawl out of. Now I'm losing my apartment too, and I can't afford anywhere else to live.

I used to complain that a single lifetime wasn't going to be enough, but I'd always hoped I was wrong. Life comes at you fast. I wasn't ready.