Games people play
These ‘exist’, if anything that inhabits the communication between people can be said to be. For me this is the problem. They aren’t measurable, visible, repeatable to others with anything like the impact of the fresh variety or explicit. So what is it that ‘exists’? In my life, communication with lots of people (everyone I don’t consider a best friend / family member) is fraught with tension – for the side effects of Olanzapine I can no longer ad lib and as I seem to have turned over two pages at once in the book of life, I have no understanding what people mean in their subtext, beyond the layers of realisation that leave me recoiling hours later. And the more I seek to understand this countertransference the more I am frustrated by the ‘first rule of fight club’. I recognise paranoia, that I see others’ communication reflecting back the flaws I dread in myself which I can’t see how anyone would be aware of / interested in. Unless they are true. In my internal dialogue, the term ‘paranoia’ reflects something that is ‘partly known’ – but by whom? and why is it necessary to parade it in front of me in glorious technicolour, showing off new and humiliating ways in which I checkmate myself. Maybe I avoid communication because it is too rich for me, too full of patterns and links I am doomed to chain myself down with. So I favour the monologue leaving self absorption inevitable. Problem is, though not playing means I can’t lose, playing alone means I am not exactly a winner.
God
An awkward one, is there one? Is he / she / it omniscient and benevolent? Is it possible that anyone could be being both? In my darkest (overenlightened?) days I accidentally thought I was God. For a couple of months. Not just God of my life or people and things I could see and touch but of everything. Being a pragmatic, but lazy God my will was not always consciously available to me but would be enacted automatically. Handy maybe? Noooo. If my will is what was happening in the world around me I could not feel anything other than disgust, abject terror and oh yeah. Guilt.
Good God
Obvs I tried to be good, definitely a guiding principle. Becoming God had been a fast promotion given I had only recently elected to remain on the light side of the force and reject the darkness. Being good though isn’t a binary choice, its highly subjective and fluid. So to bed it in, I aimed to unite and (literally) resurrect people, unsuccessfully. I talked about writing a book with a friend concerning what it means to choose to be a benevolent and conscientious religious figure when the inspiration finds you. But my friend discharged the ultimate expression of mortality and sadly lost her life too soon. RIP RC.
Grief
Pain, unfinished love, regret, loss. Emotions focused on someone else that leave you more lonely than is bearable. Is it necessary? Respectful? I’ve spent a lot of time trying to avoid feeling emotions like this by guessing the regret generating acts that might maintain them, and neutralizing the hell out of them. Grief should make me appreciate what I’ve got more, but instead I want something unattainable – something I can’t lose. Perfect love that transcends life, death, armageddon, humanity destroying itself for nothing and betrayal. The pain of losing someone may sometimes be sweetened by the eventual realisation that great loss follows great love. And even if the love is only half alive, knowing it has been shits all over the innocence of never having been loved.
Grit
What mental health issues necessitate. The darkness is to my mind not a sign of weakness but an indication of the proportion of strength that is required against a backdrop of impossibility. Coping does not necessarily feel good / right / successful but it doesn’t have to, to allow survival. Going against the grain, whether it is doubting everybody else’s view of you or doing something unexpected means drawing the most basic atom of certainty from within and wearing it with determination, to construct a self. This may form the core of the rarest pearl – a purely self generated being, beautiful in the eyes of the most exquisitely attentive beholder, though ironically destined to doubt their own resilience.
Guilt
An emotion that serves to prevent us making the same mistakes over again by reminding us exactly how much we have screwed up, specifically in a needless way at someone who was largely undeserving. So is it a useless emotion? If so I waste a lot of my time trying to instil a pointless feeling in other people. Why? I feel it intensely about a striking variety of lifetime experiences. Maybe making others jump this hoop is a way of normalising screwing up, sharing the self hatred? Or is it that I want to feel I have an effect on others, can make them care? Only if they do, it’s often a hidden feeling. If everybody I wanted to, cared, the world would be much fluffier and clear of pointless games (see below). But Others don’t seem to care about causing self doubt and internalised overresponsibility. Unless people may be motivated to hide the things they are not proud of from others or maybe themselves. And I seem curiously devoid of any ill feeling about passing the vibe on and creating a guilt grenade in someone else. Can you feel bad about something you are not culpable for? Could anyone generate innocent guilt?
PsychCoblog 