Confusion

Eating shouldn't be processed as a negative exchange in your mind. It should be a positive: that function is completed, now to get on with the next task which I will now have the energy to accomplish without intrusion from that darker side of my brain, thank you very much. You might get the odd funny thought. We all do. The fleeting, bizarre idea to commit strange acts - stopping dead still and ceasing to live quite suddenly, or taking a machine gun and doing away with lots of bad people without remorse - the condition of the mind's obscurest realms saturated with dark secrecy seals our occasional seduction by the macabre and the morose. We are human. We will have the odd depressive thought.  Switch it off. Go somewhere else. Take your mind away from it. Say no. Disengage in the excruciating cycle of negativity which will ensue so viciously if you allow it to.

You've deceived yourself for so long now into a trap of fatalistic thinking: believing what's good is bad, what's bad is good. Recovery then, is perhaps another process of kidology: an art of teaching yourself the exact opposite of what your entrenched beliefs suggest. The hardest part is that there is a distinct awareness, deep down, that your thinking is wrong - but the thoughts continue to revolve until they are satisfied. I know that I should accept food, but it doesn't change the reality that every part of me wants to reject it. 

It is a dangerously distorted mindset to be in, but I know I have to conquer it. I have to find my way once more amidst this surreal fucking landscape I am lost in. I do. You do. We all do. 

We have to put aside these soul-destroying fears and extinguish the reactive guilt complexes that flare when we confront such anxieties of natural human processes. We're all bound by this mortal coil. We can't ignore our most native survival instincts. 

We all have these instincts. Even the animals possess them. The tigers have them. The cats have them. Even the fucking bees have them. In fact the former feline goes as far as to chase and kill his meaty fare before he eats it. Imagine that. They go to the lengths of savaging and hunting to survive where you turn your nose up at sustenance! As though you have the choice to avoid it. Try to argue that to Charles Darwin. "A living creature - disbelieving, as much as rejecting, the vital function to eat and drink? Preposterous. Lock her away. She's mad I tell you!" It is madness. We're all the same, us living, breathing creatures.

I tell you though that these cats are a lot wiser yet a lot cruder about it than we are; they rely a lot more on pure predatory instinct than the complex emotion and psychology our instinct is abstracted by. You can re-harness that. It's just an operation of adapting your coping mechanisms and manipulating the energies invested to them toward the functions compatible with sustaining existence. You're young. That's not your fault. You're just not quite yet so experienced at the ways of life as I. But, therefore, your pliant vernal mind rendered by youth as lacking in the cluttered remnants of age and time has much room to grow and generous potential to accommodate the acquisition of fresh knowledge. You have the capability to learn quite quickly. You will get there.

But such bright perceptivity dictates that it is not solely good attributes that are so quickly attained but also detrimental behaviours. Ceremonial distress induced by mistreatment and malpractice are just as swiftly absorbed, perhaps more so, than examples of healthy behaviours and circumstances which remain buried under the ghosts of pain. We tend to remain quite irrevocably heavied by past experience of suffering, whilst light aspects are far more difficult to upwardly reach from our groundling's inelevated mileu. Thus such dampening influences can more readily impress our hearts and minds when facing life's necessities now poisoned by their presence. They prey on the mind and make it difficult to normally function, after the severe impression they have left our foreheads branded with as though we were the oppressed female victims of a bygone patriarchal society who said they had sold their souls for make a living. It's no wonder our practices of our existence have been jolted and confused in the context of such disturbance. How can we continue to live after years of indoctrinated torment? 

You can choose to be a twisted fuckup if you want to. You can choose to succumb to your fearful delusions - anyone can - or we can expunge those pervasive negativities in favour of what we know, deep and deeper down, what is the truth. The truth is the stone-grounded foundation upon which we can stand in absolute confidence without the dizzying vertigo of living within a cloud-foggied reality. The truth will catch us if we fall or falter upon fear. The truth is the eternal assurance we can always rely on. And the truth is in this life that we all need to eat and drink to survive. We know it so we must trust it in spite of our fear's distortions. 

Time for some beans on toast.

Modern Nightmare

'Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.' Such austere judgments, as expressed by Oscar Wilde's Hughie Erskine - a character suffering from that sorry condition of idle charm himself - would typically make me wince at the pain of such pragmatism. Tragically now these tidings ring true in the bleakness of my circumstances. Forgive my coldly-lit cynicism but recent poverty has persuaded me to the bitter conclusion that this world does run on little else but money, in which case men and women alike are hardly much more than utterly ineffectual without it. The festive period has proved to be salt in the wound for me: being both impoverished and burdened by Anorexia in the context of a 'time of plenty', with shoppers in town splurging on luxury gifts whilst a day of business in Littlehampton has at times left me without even the train fare home or change for a coffee. The most poignant aspect is that my seasonal depression is far from a solitary case. 

Watching the news: three women in London suspected to have been living for thirty years in slavery. Families in Britain without the finances to afford anything else but tins of beans donated from the food bank over Christmas. Children in Syria lying in blood pouring from their own skulls. 

Look at the world. Christ, isn't it terrible. It's so terrible. That's like something you'd hear in fucking India. We're in a state. It's just that everyone's so fucking blind to it. It's everywhere. There is horror and debauchery and suffering lurking behind every closed doorway. No-one knows it because we turn away when we could look more closely. I can see it. I know it. It troubles me so deeply - I care so much I'm sick - and I don't even know it all. Many people advise that you shouldn't watch too much of the news for it will only keep you awake at night. The truth is that what the world is seeing on this television screen at this moment isn't even the worst of it, it's barely half the fucking story. They only publicize what they want us to see and no more than that - it's all tempered to fulfill their ulterior motives: whether those entail inspiring nationalistic passions, motivating community efforts of proactive response to challenge the injustices that higher powers are too otherwise 'occupied' to lift a hand to change, or generate the funds required to keep the world turning, the wages producing, the broadcasts blaring. Anything with a profundity that may transcend these objectives and threat to truly pervade our hearts is censored from public knowledge. We all play the game because it's all we're led to believe. Jim Morrison spoke more sense than those in power in this fucking country rife with corruption: 'You're all slaves! You just don't even fuckin' know it.' The reaction from the officer, of course, would only epitomise the nature of this 'democracy' we are hypnotically enticed into believing that we exist in: 'Sir, that is an act of disorderly conduct.' We are indoctrinated with bullshit and then indoctrinated over and over again; any gesture of non-compliance reciprocated with nothing but further social conditioning. 

Times are hard, and have been for some time. This year has been one of great change for me: finding Iain, becoming homeless, finding my own place, starting a business. All whilst suffering pervasive psychological and physical trauma. It has taught me a lot, least of all what horror goes on in this world. I suppose that 2013 has brought with it a heightened sense of disillusionment with the troubled scheme of life. Perhaps there should be a sense of pride that I have survived it, that I'm still here to tell the tale; yet the intense exhaustion over it all is the only thing I can seem to express.

There's so much pain and I can't stop noticing it.