Producer's Log 24: (Untitled)

 

I find often when I'm reading people discuss the nature of the mind and of thought, when I'm reading scholarly papers or (more often) listening to them talk – I have a very keen auditory memory – I used to get in trouble for not needing to take notes (and never learned to)....

Anyway.

I find that when people dismiss the mind where I can see it, they do not take into account how their own minds work.

This is why I so admire Dr. Peterson's work.

My favorite thing I've heard him say is, “Thoughts? Where the Hell do they come from? Nobody knows!” Or something to that effect.

And it's true.

I don't know where many of my thoughts come from – and believe me or don't, but I'm monitoring my thoughts like my life depends on it. And it might. Who knows – I'd probably have let me kill myself in high school if I didn't monitor my thoughts.

People don't like to think of suicide.

Too bad. It exists.

We don't pretend the things we don't like don't exist around these parts.

That's not true— People I don't like are beneath my notice. So they may as well not. But I'm not 19 anymore. I try to approach everyone with respect once.

Not a great strategy. But it works.

I am, more or less, where I wanted to be by now. I thought I'd publish. But I also thought I'd die before I made it to 30. So yay me, four years longer than I thought.

That makes every day a victory.

Victories in a game I don't want to be playing are a cruel paradox.

You think that's how Chris Cornell felt?

I think about it a lot. Not the doing it – whether I'm at a place where cleaning up my dead body should be someone else's problem and whether I hate existence enough to traumatize someone like that. That's what I think about a lot.

Then one of my cats will jump in my lap and I'll remember that I try not to feel hate – it's conducive only to hurt. And handing someone that trauma is maybe the most profound act of hate a person can commit. Besides using the police to kill yourself after a mass killing.

I don't think the people being paid to study and talk about consciousness demonstrate an understanding of it on their own.

And boy do they get butthurt when you point it out.

My life has changed a lot since I first wrote this.

All of these Producer's Logs have been spur of the moment, freely associated writing exercises. Half-hour or less glimpses into my life and what makes me me. Except that excerpt.

I wrote that a thought that got stock in my head, jotting down the idea after that day's PLog and work with Rob, and expecting to return to it the next day. Then I decided to save it as a template to finish or expand on – a break glass in case of emergency situation.

I haven't wanted to write.

Children who were raised in abuse are primed to be abused and taken advantage of as adults.

A point of emphasis in my life has been to find partnership and build something stable and ordered and self-replicating. And instead I have repeatedly made choices which have found me the victim of abuse.

There was a time in my life – the start of 2020 – when I had come to the conclusion that it's just my lot in life. That because of who I am and because of the disadvantages therein I'm just doomed forever to repeat this cycle of abuse and betrayal and freefall and abuse and....

Eighteen months and yet another disappointing failed partnership, my life is starting over. At 34, I'm running home to my father to escape another abusive, dead-end relationship. And once again, it's for my cats that I'm able to make the choices I need to.

Vader and Wylie are not equivalent to human children.

But something that I've noticed from being a poor person is that there is a describable change that happens in women after they have a child. Especially young women. Girls with child instantly become women ten to twenty years their seniors, nearly the day they learn they're pregnant. The reasons are obvious.

As are those for why this is not always the case for males. Men my age are biologically meant to be established, with lands to tend and work to busy him – if he doesn't already have a woman who loves him for everything that's wrong with him and a family started with her. There are many reasons I feel shame, not least of which the increasing number of bald patches in my scalp. Shame is the weapon the abuser wields over their victim.

I am ashamed to admit that my cats make me take better care of myself and my immediate environment. In that way, they are the ordering element of my life - and in that way, they are like children.

Shame is why battered spouses don't speak up. Shame is why bullied children don't tattle. Shame is why industries of emotional and sexual violence can exist in public and no one will say anything.

Shame is why I'm writing this. 

I've not been writing because I'm ashamed. Because I feel like a failure. Because yet another goal I set for myself has been betrayed and killed.

But, just as it was not my fault that older children touched me where and how they should not, and just like it is not my fault that my coworkers have felt threatened by me for giving genuine effort, it's not my fault that this thing has failed. And it's not shameful that I have asked my father for help.

Nor is it shameful that he has offered to give it, nor for me to accept it. To lean into accepting it and letting it change my life.

If one thing has been made extremely clear to me the last two decades, it is that a human adult cannot survive without the support of the prior generation. There is too much poverty – it is too difficult to make enough of an impact in the world from the bottom – before 40. Without parents to buy our houses and get us jobs and introduce us to women, men are useless and disposable, confused in a world which no longer has any use for us besides filling prisons, bolstering the numbers of militaries, and flipping burgers.

And more and more every day men are less and less welcome in the service sector, as well.

Trust me – I was violently shoved out specifically because of my masculine traits.

I've written a lot about the liminal space, about managing the liminal space and making deals with Life in order to use that liminality like rocket fuel to blast yourself to the moon. That's the magickal process. That's the goal of the ritual.

I've been reading back over my words. I'm trying to market. Trying to reach someone. Trying to get a real like and real engagement with a Twitter post for my old work – for what Rob and I are doing. A lot of it is that I've lost my confidence that I can do this, that I can continue to manage my mental health and also help an immortal asshole tell his story. That's my own fault. I can't blame anyone else.

Certainly not Rob.

I've tried. And I should blame her. I should. But I can't. Because it is my way to accept responsibility.

Accept responsibility, take the ass-beating that life has for me, and try to pick up the pieces when the cycle has settled back down to the freefall part. So that's where I am. I have a few days left before my life genuinely starts over.

I cried, telling the rats goodbye today.

I'm afraid for them. She hasn't fed or watered them in weeks. She hasn't taken care of her cats in months. I've stayed here longer than I should because these animals don't deserve this. But... I can't live in fear that she's going to get drunk and strike me and I'm going to genuinely hurt her as a reaction. That isn't a life. Not now that it's started to seriously put suicidal and arrogant thoughts back into my head – not now that it makes me feel like I'm not he kind of person that finds success on the effort of his personality.

I have to have faith that maybe my leaving will be enough for her to hit rock bottom and finally take care of herself. I have to hope that her pets can be enough to flip that children-switch in her brain and make her embrace adulthood and responsibility. I am terrified that she will not and I am abandoning my siblings to their fates all over again.

Cycles after cycles after cycles.

So we'll see. Two more days. I can do this.

I am deeply terrified to return to my father's house. He says he wants to help me get an apartment so I can have a roof over my head without his or my grandparents' rules; and that he has work for me.... But we'll see.

I hate that my life has become someone else's reclamation project.

My plan was to maintain my dignity and prove to enough of you that I can do this and that I have something to say and that I am a person worth investing in so that I could draw an income from this thing and escape with funds she couldn't touch. But my life has also taught me that my dignity and pride are things that I just don't get to have.

If I keep doing this, and if I keep brute forcing my way through Rob's story until I'm actually good enough for people to start to fall in love with what I'm doing.... Eventually I'll get there.

They say that we have to rely on the people around us. It is not entirely my fault that the people I have chosen to rely on turned out unreliable. I chose them - but they misrepresented themselves. Other people find reliable people. There are reliable people in the world.

I had a dream that The One Who Got Away told me that if I lived this next year the way I wanted to live she would come back to me. And that's exactly the kind of manipulation I've allowed myself to be conditioned to motivate toward.

I didn't want her back in the dream. I want her forgiveness. I want to get credit for how hard I tried. But I don't want her back. That's insane.

But I do think I have to get one of these years right at some point. I have to start stacking wins. Maybe that's what the dream was trying to tell me – that if I do the things I say I want to, I'll find the things I want on the other side. Maybe The One wasn't The One, but my goddess.

May be.

I know I've mentioned that I have challenged my Trickster to speak to me in dreams. He has been. I know it because I start screaming or crying or laughing or I run away in the dream. The person I'll be talking to is someone I shouldn't normally be talking with in a dream, and they'll have the wrong kind of smile on their face. I recognize Him - and then the dream changes or I wake up or I just start....

Anyway.

Thanks for reading this. I'm sorry if it wasn't great for you. Things haven't been great for me and I'm trying to work through them. I'm so close to finished with the next episode of Rob. Maybe I force myself to get it done before I move back to North Carolina.

I guess we'll see.

I'm alive. I'm going to stay that way. And maybe with a little faith and more hard work things will be better than they've ever been.

Pray for me, please? I don't care whom to. Just... pray for me?