Yesterday was a hard day. I had gotten a little behind at work, so instead of working on research and writing in the morning (7am-9am) like I usually do, I just headed in to work. I didn’t even have time to do my morning stretches. Things usually don’t go well if I have to get up and leave the house before I feel like I’m fully awake or prepared. Sticking to a routine is helpful for me, and when it gets broken, things get weird.
It was a long day of grading and teaching, and it was more psychotic than most of my days lately have been. Which was discouraging and painful. When I got home and meditated (I generally meditate for 20 minutes after getting home from work–it’s my landing pad), I could feel my face moving into expressions of sadness and pain. Sullenness too.
I managed to write for an hour after work, ate a good dinner, and exercised. So that’s all good. I’m feeling better so far today, but it is discouraging to still encounter days like that.
I’ve been thinking I need to try to be more social soon, including dating, but when I get bad, psychotic days like yesterday, the voices in my head sour me on human contact. I can’t not think that they’re the telepathic projections of the people around me, which causes me to hate the people around me (and with good cause, assuming it’s real). I have to push through that and let people present more of themselves to me. I have to actually meet and speak with them.
Even if telepathy is real (and I’m being lied to by doctors, friends, and family), when I don’t want to be touched and demand to be left alone, the people who continue to fuck with me are a perfectly non-representative sample. All the good folk would respect such a request, and you would not hear from them. Those you do hear from are the cheap little sociopaths who think it’s funny when they can make a trauma-victim twitch from a safe distance (cowards). A perfectly non-representative sample, by virtue of the fact that they don’t respect my boundaries.
The voices in my head sound like the worst people you would encounter on social media. It’s like having the youtube comment section piped directly into your brain. It’s not great.
My mantras are “everything is OK” and “the world is still here.” That last one is usually accompanied by an envisioning of a forest or mountain range. Or a night-time sky. It makes me feel better to remember that the “human layer” is not all of reality. The void is so quiet, so peaceful. It’s a comfort.
Yesterday was hard, but even my worst days now are better than my best days used to be. Stevie Ray Vaughn said that after he got sober. So…try, try again.
I can’t wait to drop to part-time employment so I can do more of my own work. I want to write more, do more mathematical research, and start playing guitar again. Since I haven’t gotten any job offers for next year yet, dropping to part-time paid work may come sooner rather than later.