Anhedonia

[malymin]

...I feel like there's no point to me writing on my blog, or anywhere else, because I don't respect or trust my own thoughts and feelings. I don't feel like i have anything meaningful to say. Anything I ever could say has probably been said by someone smarter, more experienced, more disciplined, with firmer morals or better poltiics, more articulate and well-read. I don't feel like I have any unique experiences that would confer novel enough insights to compensate for my deficiencies as a person.

Someone can say that they like something I wrote, but that's never enough to make me feel like it had value on its own. General positive regard is a nothingburger; people can feel it about something that has nothing new or interesting to say, soley because it's by a person they like, or about a topic they like, or it's written in a style that garners Big Emotion and hits certain simplistic buttons in their brain (nostalgia, coziness, righteous anger, lust, etc) that override deeper critical thinking. it says nothing about quality of content. it says nothing about if i've actually raised good points or opened a discussion worth having. it doesn't say if anything i've said has value - intellectual or ideological or artistic or else-wise. 

i don't understand how general positive regard can be "enough" for anyone. it's so detatched from anything specific about what makes you or the things you make worth their time. people feel it all the time about "essays" that are just fluff with no coherent argument, about fiction that's trite and banal because it happens to contain some tropes they enjoy, about kinkade paintings and funko pops of a guy they remember from a movie.

I don't want to be liked without a coherent reason. I don't want to have anything I say be liked without a coherent reason of having provoked something meaningful. I want to provide value, usefulness, something, and even when people seem to enjoy my company, I don't feel like I'm anything more than another mediocre soulless pseudo-intellectual who only mimics real thinking and creativity through imitation of their betters.

Comments

[zenigotchas]

Are you okay?

[malymin]

Not really, but there's nothing that can really be done about it.

Lately I feel trapped in my own head a lot, and inside of my own head, when not sufficiently distracted from itself, is largely a constant stream of "they should make a utopia powered off of my gratiduous torture and suffering omelas style because I deserve to be tortured and noone else does because i ontologically Have Less Worth than even the worst people on the planet, in a spiritual and metaphysical sense." Even when my circumstances are fine! I enjoy my job, I'm not in any kind of physical danger. Worst thing going on with me right now is just that I haven't been able to meet with an irl friend consistently due to scheduling conflicts. And, I guess, the general state of The World at large right now, with all the state and corporate censorship and survailence and the fascism and the genocide, none of which I have any direct control over, unless I found a way to sufficiently Die For A Cause to actually affect things, but I'm too much of a coward to even withstand the pain of a twisted ankle, much less putting myself at serious risk of violence.

But like. My life is cushy. I live in a house that's already paid for, with parents who are financially stable. I don't have to worry about going hungry or getting kicked out. I have no reason to complain when other people are being deported from the united states and sent to "detention centers" that are basically concentration camps. I don't have any reason to complain when I'm not going through a genocide halfway across the world, or the primary target of any hate groups. I'm complicit in these things just by being alive and doing nothing, really.

[zenigotchas]

This is concerning. Do you want to talk about it? There are plenty of crisis lines I can send you (some don't call the police if that's something you'd rather avoid), or would that also make you uncomfortable and you'd rather just avoid that entirely? PM me then, I won't try to give you advice or tell you what to feel about your problems. But please do something because I don't want you to hurt yourself or end yourself.

[malymin]

I'm better now. The feeling just ebbs and flows on its own, really.

[zenigotchas]

I understand, but for your own safety it can't be judged based off when it goes away and you feel okay, having any moment where you are having strong, potent fantasies about dying or self harm are cause for alarm. Passive suicidal ideation is still suicidal ideation.

Obviously I can't make you do anything, you're an adult and it's up to you to decide how to handle it and I probably sound really pushy but I'm trying not to be here. But I need to say something, I won't leave this conversation without saying that my offer to listen in the PMs still stands because it bothers me knowing that this is the present reality for you. Whether it's tonight or some time in September at 4 AM, I'll listen. But as I said before, I'm not going to force you and I don't want to because I despise forcing help onto others.

[malymin]

Thank you. I'll keep in mind that you're open to talk. Being given permission makes it feel less scary to reach out, so... ^_^

(I've been kind of nervous to respond to this... I feel embarrassed and guilty about making a scene like this, only to become stable again for no real reason whatsoever. Mental illness isn't rational, but...)

[zenigotchas]

You're welcome. I may not be able to write back immediately, but I'll def prioritize a response if you ever feel like you want to reach out.

(I am in no position to judge anyone for being mentally ill or having moments like this. I won't make this about myself and am not going to share much of my own story, but I'll say that I get it).

[lithophiles]

So... I don't know if this will help your situation at all, but... There is a lot that you've been saying in this thread that we're relating to, a lot.

And okay, this next part is a string of bad things that happened to us. But we're not trying to downplay your situation; we're trying to emphasize that finding ourselves in increasingly worse situations didn't actually help us get rid of the feeling that we deserved to suffer and had no worth. Basically: We're currently living in a homeless shelter after spending two months living in our car, after our brother lost his house (that we were living in) because he didn't pay his property taxes for three years, and before we moved in with him, we were technically homeless and moving between illegal boardinghouses in Los Angeles, and before that we were in an emotionally and financially abusive relationship while living in a moldy apartment that made us sick and.... What I mean to say that continually, throughout all these times and situations, we have been constantly extremely vulnerable to rhetoric which stirs up old patterns from our past and makes us feel like, as you put it, "I deserve to be tortured and noone else does because i ontologically Have Less Worth than even the worst people on the planet, in a spiritual and metaphysical sense." If anything, those patterns made us more vulnerable to things like abuse and homelessness, because if you believe you deserve torture and suffering, what do you do? You let yourself sink into bad situations. You persuade yourself to stay even when you KNOW it's bad, because you think you deserve it.

We have never been able to outrun or shake off these patterns by letting ourselves descend into worse situations, seeking them out, or finding ourselves in them involuntarily. The patterns come for us and they find us where we live. Even if that place is in a car. The "I deserve to be tortured endlessly and infinitely" feeling hits us particularly hard in the... ex-Catholic patterns, I guess.

The best we've been able to do at shaking them off has come from analyzing the social situations we're in, identifying specific triggers that make us feel that way (when we can), and starting from the base assumption that the problem is not in us. That the problem is located in some external set of patterns, often ones we've absorbed from people we hung around with, even if we thought we trusted them - "lie down with dogs, get up with fleas." Sometimes it's specific people. Sometimes it's specific communities, movements, ideologies, fandoms; sometimes it's a general metaphysical outlook that seeps into everything that someone says.

But if you can start with the conviction that you are not perceiving a badness in yourself, that you're perceiving a wrongness or twistedness in the patterns that surround you, which are being disguised as normal behavior (like, for instance, the repetition of "you are complicit in these things" as a thought-terminating cliche), it is a step, at least. It was a step for us. It was a step that helped begin the long process of coming back from the long tunnel we'd gotten lost in.

-Amaranth, Istevia and Julian. This one ended up very co-written, somehow.

[oddprophet]

I feel like if it was an ethical or moral violation to write something that wasn't earth-shattering, no one would write anything. Sometimes you've just got to get the thing out of your head and on to paper, and hang anyone who says it was a waste of time to do so!

[malymin]

I have a long-standing issue of holding myself to unreasonable standards, I'm told. Even as a kid, one of my biggest causes of poor grades? Not turning in a research paper on time or completed because it wasn't perfect yet and I was agonizing over making it meet my own standards... in second grade I turned in a ten-page paper for an assignment that was supposed to be two pages (it was literally supposed to be baby's first practice research paper on any topic we wanted - I chose cat fur color genetics), because I wanted to explain everything I found interesting about the topic of choice.

But the further into the education system I got (middle school, high school, college) the more I found myself not getting anything done and spiraling over it... at one point I had so bad a meltdown I was institutionalized for a week or two, don't remember which.

Meanwhile, when it came to pleasure, I was scared away from attempting creative writing in the 00's because of sporking communities on LJ and the like - "I'm just a stupid unskilled kid/teen like the authors of these fics are, so anything I write ever will be deserving of mockery from people with discerning tastes, because of my immaturity and lack of skill. I don't want to burden anyone with having to see badly written stories that makes them feel disgust." Even having a bit of original fiction (mandatory assignment at a creative writing summer camp) praised by a published author in high school didn't shake that feeling. It's only in the last five-ish years I've written fanfic at all - the vast bulk of it completely unpublished, only ever shown to a handful of friends in direct messages.

And then stuff I see on modern social media feeds into that fear in new ways, and it doesn't help either...

[oddprophet]

If you know you're being unreasonable, that's a good start. I sincerely hope you start to get some joy out of your own writing - it can be a real kick to go over your own work and go "holy shit this owns". It's not conceited, it's YOUR WRITING catering to YOUR TASTES! Write that one-off scene or the rambling dialogue or the hyper-specific smut. Live deliciously, for God's sake.

[malymin]

I guess one problem is that I don't even trust my own tastes... if someone implies that my interests, interpretations, etc are stupid or wrongheaded or a sign of some inferiority on my part, my gut feeling is that I should believe them, even if I have all the reason in the world to not respect that specific person's opinion to begin with. And the more people express this at once, or the more a specific person seems "superior" to me in intellect or morals, the more likely I am to feel this...

[stepnix]

(Not an effort to persuade you out of feeling this way, i know these things don't really obey logical arguments, just a presenting a contrast you might find interesting)

For me, it's the opposite. Nailing down specific reasons for liking someone always implied to me that it wasn't really the person who was liked, just their actions/utility, and that really bothered me. I guess the implication there is that the "purest" affection is totally arbitrary... which I suppose makes sense within some kind of existentialist framework. declaring your own values or whatever Nietzsche was on about