Frustrating day, nothing quite going right, and nothing wrong enough to give me an excuse to feel this way. Minimal daydreaming, at least I kept that up.

This evening, I'm not even interested in browsing around the Schizoid forum. Despite informed debates over whether it even is a Personality Disorder, whether people with it have a Problem, or whether it impairs "normal" functioning, it is apparently still worth defending as a status label by people wearing that label. Those of us who do not have a diagnosis are impure and probably wrong about ourselves.

That would be fine, I don't have to play in that den, but I thought I'd found somewhere I wouldn't feel like a weirdo, and I don't like being wrong. And still weird. Of course, "feeling unwelcome" and "wanting somewhere" and being self-aware enough to feel "weird" are all non pure-Schizoid attitudes, further proving the "doesn't count without a diagnosis" in my case. I did find another forum online catering to loners, but it focused on supporting people who were unhappy with that status. LOL. I want admittedly bizarrely contradictory contact with people who seem to think, like me, that people are lovely, but better off at armslength. Where the length includes a wall or two.

Insight strikes. To be accurate, what I want contact with is people's minds. I don't like the bodies. Not in a meat phobia way, just it takes ages to get anywhere going through neurons to tongue and lips and air and ears and back to neurons. Interesting. Am I making another argument for reading more? It is after all the old school form of distilling thought. I should get offline.

Today was about 50 hours long, but some those hours were small-time happy and overall it was productive. I got some cooking done, some long-overdue gardening, some freelance work and got well underway with other voluntary work.

What's the secret? A random chance. I was reading in the Sexual Addiction forum, and came across some links about porn addiction which seemed like an intriguing topic to read about for an evening. It's not a problem I have, nor have ever had. I described myself earlier today as 'a couple of faps away from asexuality.' But other people's problems are more interesting than mine. I bore myself. So, I spent some quality time at http://www.yourbrainonporn.com/

First off, I watched http://youtu.be/GXy__kBVq1M which is a hilarious Tedx talk on Happiness from Shawn Achor. It's totally family friendly and highly recommended if you have 12 minutes free and are in a place where people won't give you funny looks for laughing out loud. Then I kicked myself for a further 12 minutes, because I know and have lived all this theory about being happy first and then living life afterwards. I just forget. I have no expectation of a Daily Joy Overflow, but since I fully appreciate small things, that's how I define my happy.

After that I dug into the porn stuff. It can cause erectile dysfunction, bitter irony. But then the section on addiction, dopamine receptors, and overstimulation suddenly looked horribly familiar. Light dawns. That's what I'm doing with daydreaming. And further:

"If we have enough [neurotransmitters that regulate the reward circuitry], our emotions are stable. When they are depleted, or out of balance, what we call "pseudo-emotions" can result. These false moods can be every bit as distressing as those triggered by abuse, loss or trauma. They can drive us to [binge].—Julia Ross, nutritional psychotherapist."

Since I'm imagining emotions, among other things, in order to frig my dopamine receptors on a daily basis, throwing pseudo-emotions into that mix is going make a mess. Welcome to my mind.

Is any of this genuinely true for me? I have no idea but it made enough sense that I turned to the pages on rebooting the brain and tried to translate them into a useful strategy to stop the most problematic type of daydreaming. I daydream words and ideas, and that doesn't feel too addictive. It's "normal-feeling", whatever that may be. But the people and social situations do feel addictive. I will cut off or drop out of other activities in order to daydream and though "normal" levels of daydreaming are 5%-50% of awake time depending on what study you read, earlier this week I was up to 14 hours+ and the remaining time awake was very fragmented and unproductive.

I've stopped daydreaming once before for a month, almost by accident, so I know it is unlikely to have a bad effect. I'm not going to freak out over lack of access to imaginary people who "love me" without the downsides from being around real people. I'm not going to be less imaginative or creative, since I don't do a lot of that to start with. I would have said I wasn't going to have any more time free, but remember how I started this ramble? The 50 hour long day? And I managed to fill it without people-situation daydreaming. Though I thought about doing it dozens of times. And about 2pm I just wanted to go to bed, I'd had enough of the day. But it's 9pm now and I'm still going.

I don't know if I can do it again tomorrow. Perhaps I'll wake up in the morning and give it a try. If it goes well, perhaps the day after that. It's an experiment. Experiments are good.

I've been waiting all week for the blues to lift and to enjoy the small stuff in life, which is an attitude I have the majority of the time. Instead it's been Introspection Central with no answers, just insoluble questions, centring around the theme of my last post. If I can't trust myself to make sensible life decisions based on self-knowledge, what then?

At the moment, I am not working. I saved up and bought myself a grace period. Perhaps I need to work? I thought it was a significant source of stress and enforced boredom. But what if I'm more bored now and that's why I'm Ouroborosing my own brain? How could I be bored when I have all the books and internet in the world? Maybe I need the unpredictability of people. I thought I didn't like having people around! I thought I found them tiring and that they sapped my will to live! Have I have so over-simplified that analysis that I made it fundamentally useless? Or is it flat out wrong? I wonder if I lack challenge. But how can I be challenged in a way that doesn't provoke massive stress? A low-stress balance, but that's not how it works. I need to deal better with stress as an inevitable part of a change. But I can't see my way to a positive challenge at the moment. Only the way to enforced boredom and stress and I am not going that way.

A few years ago, I went to a career counsellor. I filled in lots of questionnaires, talked about my CV so far and what I liked to do. At the end of the session, she said: "well I think you'd be a really good career counsellor." My urge to be camouflaged bites me in the ass on a regular basis.

I rewatched a few episodes of Sherlock last week. I watch minimal TV as I find it sets off daydreaming too often. Sherlock does that too, but at least there's not many episodes to be sucked in by. It has still triggered a lot of fantasy since then. And I have a new worry. What if this isn't my boredom at all? What if this is the boredom of a relatively unpleasant and entirely fictional character?

Clearly the answer is to read something very wholesome and energetic. TV and film is too unpredictable in its input and effect, but a book might work. What should I prescribe myself?


And as an aside, if this is true and not just another example of my lack of self-knowledge, what kind of stupidly malleable personality is that? I thought I erred on the side of inflexibility if anything. That's what I've been told more than once. Was I told by inflexible people? Funny thought. I am sick of this thinking.

Sparked by various discussions in the SPD forum, I've been thinking about my imagined self, the mental model that I use to base decisions on. Which I'm calling Me here, although it is not separate or named when I think with it. For example, I might say: should I do X tomorrow? I imagine Me doing X and see how it feels. Is there a benefit: yes, I'll do it. If not, or if there's a significant downside counterbalancing the up: no, I won't.

I realised a week or two ago that my Me does not have quirky personality traits. Worse, it's not based on what I might be like if I were 100% average, either. It is my fantasy self who is always impossibly erudite, witty, loving and loved in every daydreamed circumstance. This is a problem. It causes cognitive dissonance when I make plans and set goals that are, in essence, stupid. I know better than to commit myself to day-long social events, back-to-back appointments and so on. But that's after years of bitter experience and even now it's a conscious process. My Me creates a version of what I OUGHT to want, and then I have to scale that back to achieve any of it.

Letting Me shop makes it obvious where the problem is. Me can vividly imagine myself with a high-powered job in the capital, and will try to buy clothes or accessories to match. Or evening gowns for the theatre, ignoring the plain fact that I haven't been in over ten years. Fortunately I lack the expensive tastes that would turn this into a major issue. It's just a little sad as I take yet another pile of alternative-universe-Ada outfits to the charity shop.

Finally, Me is sometimes right. I rarely want to leave the house for social reasons, but have to grudgingly admit that they are often fun. It's Me that has encouraged me to quit bad jobs and to apply for new, better ones. Of course. It's supporting movement towards the Idealised Me. And I have a kickass wardrobe ready if I get there.

What am I even saying here? That I am confused about finding my balance between realism and idealism? Yes, also that I thought it was good to know my limitations, but it is increasingly apparent I have no idea. In fact, that I can't quite trust Me. I'm not out to self-sabotage or hurt myself, but, I'm seriously stupid about myself.

The author of Why Love Hurts, Eva Illouz, is interviewed here:
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/blog/nonfiction/love-deconstructed/

Quote, regarding how she came to her unusual position on the common problem of relationship misery:

A few years after I started living in Israel, I needed therapy to help me cope with the difficulty of living in Israel. I had lived as a newcomer in France and in the U.S.A., and had felt twice quite competent at figuring new codes of conduct in these two countries, but here, in Israel I felt that something persistently eluded me. So I went to the psychologist. Two of them actually.

Psychologists refused to speak about this problem in sociological terms, that is, as a problem of the body collective in which I was living. They kept trying to throw it back on my psyche. The society seemed to me deeply dysfunctional, and yet here I was having to work on my psyche to adapt to a dysfunctional environment.

This created in me two things: One, a realization that psychological modes of understanding, at the end of the day, always blame it on you. You may be living in a violent society with a very fuzzy sense of norms, and yet it will be your problem if you do not find ways to adapt to it and be functional in it. Two, the other effect was to make me irrevocably committed to explaining problems in sociological, rather [than] psychological terms.

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Ada's note: I've been thinking recently about definitions of normalcy depending on culture, and that not all culture promotes healthy behaviour (DOH!) It's hard to sort through, though, because very few people can change their culture and there is infinitely more support for changing yourself. Balance that against our common urge to blame or excuse, where Society becomes the new 'bad parenting.'