Immobility
So this all started with an absolutely terrible event. I've lost my mind like I haven't done in a long time, so this post isn't going to be at all coherent. Have fun deciphering my mental scrabblings, guys.
Long story short, everyone's alive. Everyone now wants to move on - except me.
But why? you might ask. Moving on is desirable, the end goal after trauma. Not moving on is for weaklings, attention seekers and other such - to put it impolitely - absolute fuckheads that no sane human being wants to associate with.
The trouble with me is that I think too much. It's certainly better than doing the opposite, but I don't think in straight and clear lines or elegant curves: I think in circles, tangles, swerving in sharply as I spin towards the centre of the proverbial downwards spiral. It's not good for me. Sometimes I think a lobotomy would help. It's especially odd, as in depression most activity of just about anything in the body is reduced - that's why it's called depression (being pressed down upon) and not just chronic sadness.
And I've been thinking a lot - and feeling a lot too, more than I'm comfortable feeling. I feel suicidal. Scared of what I might do to myself. Heartbroken. Bereft of any kind of emotional stability. Mistrustful - I picked up that something was wrong, but wasn't told anything and had to find out for myself. It all happened with very little warning, too, so the upshot is that this could happen again, with just as little warning to go on and with no idea what's happened. It's this last emotion that stops me from moving on more than anything; as long as I believe that it could just as well happen tomorrow, I'll have even more difficulty winding myself down from a pretty shitty (though still alive) state.
What's worse, I don't know what moving on even is. I know the difference between past, present and future, and that you cannot change the past (well, not without a way to get back to that particular region of space-time from the present, or the future light cone). It thus follows that moaning and griping about it is futile, as nothing will actually happen. I also believe that the future can be changed for the better.
But when people tell me to move on, they don't seem to have any idea what they actually mean by those two simple words. I know this, because I've observed what lots of different people think of as "moving on" and the characteristics change from situation to situation. Not even almighty Google can come up with a satisfactory answer. This is pretty worrying, because it suggests that a concept many people hold dear is ill-defined and thus not very useful.
What I have noticed is that some people use "moving on" to mean "cutting off", trying to put an event behind them that they don't want to think about. Show me someone who hasn't done that and I'll show you a newborn baby; most of us have been too ashamed or afraid of various things at various points to bring them out into the light. Instead, we push them to the back of our memories, squeeze them into almost-nothingness and do our bitter best to keep them there. It almost always fucks up, but that doesn't stop any of us from trying it. I've done it; in fact, I've done it so many times I lost count long ago. I wouldn't consider it a wild guess to say you're probably in a similar situation, and I wouldn't look down on you for any of it at all. Quite apart from anything else, I'd be a flaming hypocrite.
I've been told over and over again, and I've learned from my own harsh experience, that cutting something off or trying to forget it only ever backfires. It's a deeply ingrained reaction and it's hard as hell to struggle against, but if I keep doing the same things that never worked for me, I'm not suddenly going to wake up one day and find that suddenly it actually does something useful.
So how come if you repackage the same basic sentiment in happy, positive-thinking fuzzies and give it a different name it's now suddenly common wisdom?
So no, I don't want to move on. Not for a while, anyway. And I want to do it my way, because life landed me with the double whammy of being singular and stubborn. I don't want to grab some canned, stale words of fake inspiration and desperately try to mould myself to them.
At the moment, I'm in what I guess you could call some kind of a grief state, which is strange because I haven't actually lost anything apart from my sanity. I'm not looking after myself properly, I'm shutting out most other people, nothing feels real or stable, and I'm acting like an angry sack of shit because I can't cope with these feelings. What I most want right now is for everything to be okay, but wanting to be dead is a close and dangerously attractive second because I learn nothing.
I need time, most of all, which is in short supply because I'm going back to school and a punishing workload, time for what's happened to sink in and soften. Then I need discipline, more discipline than I've had; I need to look after myself. Particularly with regard to sleeping I'm rubbish because I've been having panic and anxiety attacks, which have this amazing ability to feed on themselves and get worse - so I fear sleep. I generally don't sleep well anyway because I'm too busy thinking about things. After that I need reflection. I need to pick this apart systematically instead of pushing it away altogether or going over the same bits repeatedly; I find that visualising things in all their great and painful detail helps me. Only then will I, as people put it, be able to "move on".
But till then, I'm going to be a sick and ashamed mess. And thus until then, I'm going to keep myself to myself. I may still post occasionally, but it'll be quite cold.
Lastly, I found a link in my quest for the definition of "moving on". It has some concepts that I don't like - move on or everyone will hate your guts - but a lot that I found far more useful than the normal drivel because it actually gives specifics and ideas of what to do to move forward instead of being stuck in the past. It's here, and I hope it helps someone.
Long story short, everyone's alive. Everyone now wants to move on - except me.
But why? you might ask. Moving on is desirable, the end goal after trauma. Not moving on is for weaklings, attention seekers and other such - to put it impolitely - absolute fuckheads that no sane human being wants to associate with.
The trouble with me is that I think too much. It's certainly better than doing the opposite, but I don't think in straight and clear lines or elegant curves: I think in circles, tangles, swerving in sharply as I spin towards the centre of the proverbial downwards spiral. It's not good for me. Sometimes I think a lobotomy would help. It's especially odd, as in depression most activity of just about anything in the body is reduced - that's why it's called depression (being pressed down upon) and not just chronic sadness.
And I've been thinking a lot - and feeling a lot too, more than I'm comfortable feeling. I feel suicidal. Scared of what I might do to myself. Heartbroken. Bereft of any kind of emotional stability. Mistrustful - I picked up that something was wrong, but wasn't told anything and had to find out for myself. It all happened with very little warning, too, so the upshot is that this could happen again, with just as little warning to go on and with no idea what's happened. It's this last emotion that stops me from moving on more than anything; as long as I believe that it could just as well happen tomorrow, I'll have even more difficulty winding myself down from a pretty shitty (though still alive) state.
What's worse, I don't know what moving on even is. I know the difference between past, present and future, and that you cannot change the past (well, not without a way to get back to that particular region of space-time from the present, or the future light cone). It thus follows that moaning and griping about it is futile, as nothing will actually happen. I also believe that the future can be changed for the better.
But when people tell me to move on, they don't seem to have any idea what they actually mean by those two simple words. I know this, because I've observed what lots of different people think of as "moving on" and the characteristics change from situation to situation. Not even almighty Google can come up with a satisfactory answer. This is pretty worrying, because it suggests that a concept many people hold dear is ill-defined and thus not very useful.
What I have noticed is that some people use "moving on" to mean "cutting off", trying to put an event behind them that they don't want to think about. Show me someone who hasn't done that and I'll show you a newborn baby; most of us have been too ashamed or afraid of various things at various points to bring them out into the light. Instead, we push them to the back of our memories, squeeze them into almost-nothingness and do our bitter best to keep them there. It almost always fucks up, but that doesn't stop any of us from trying it. I've done it; in fact, I've done it so many times I lost count long ago. I wouldn't consider it a wild guess to say you're probably in a similar situation, and I wouldn't look down on you for any of it at all. Quite apart from anything else, I'd be a flaming hypocrite.
I've been told over and over again, and I've learned from my own harsh experience, that cutting something off or trying to forget it only ever backfires. It's a deeply ingrained reaction and it's hard as hell to struggle against, but if I keep doing the same things that never worked for me, I'm not suddenly going to wake up one day and find that suddenly it actually does something useful.
So how come if you repackage the same basic sentiment in happy, positive-thinking fuzzies and give it a different name it's now suddenly common wisdom?
So no, I don't want to move on. Not for a while, anyway. And I want to do it my way, because life landed me with the double whammy of being singular and stubborn. I don't want to grab some canned, stale words of fake inspiration and desperately try to mould myself to them.
At the moment, I'm in what I guess you could call some kind of a grief state, which is strange because I haven't actually lost anything apart from my sanity. I'm not looking after myself properly, I'm shutting out most other people, nothing feels real or stable, and I'm acting like an angry sack of shit because I can't cope with these feelings. What I most want right now is for everything to be okay, but wanting to be dead is a close and dangerously attractive second because I learn nothing.
I need time, most of all, which is in short supply because I'm going back to school and a punishing workload, time for what's happened to sink in and soften. Then I need discipline, more discipline than I've had; I need to look after myself. Particularly with regard to sleeping I'm rubbish because I've been having panic and anxiety attacks, which have this amazing ability to feed on themselves and get worse - so I fear sleep. I generally don't sleep well anyway because I'm too busy thinking about things. After that I need reflection. I need to pick this apart systematically instead of pushing it away altogether or going over the same bits repeatedly; I find that visualising things in all their great and painful detail helps me. Only then will I, as people put it, be able to "move on".
But till then, I'm going to be a sick and ashamed mess. And thus until then, I'm going to keep myself to myself. I may still post occasionally, but it'll be quite cold.
Lastly, I found a link in my quest for the definition of "moving on". It has some concepts that I don't like - move on or everyone will hate your guts - but a lot that I found far more useful than the normal drivel because it actually gives specifics and ideas of what to do to move forward instead of being stuck in the past. It's here, and I hope it helps someone.
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