Innate Temperament

I've always been an unusual person. Not personality wise - in quirks of character. Not socially, although nowadays it would seem that I had social problems growing up. My strangeness is not so much emotional, as it is vital. I have what appears to me to be an incredibly sensitive nervous system.

I'm 6 years old. I'm playing video games - I finish the level. I am so elated, so excited, that a simple "hoorah" or "yay", or a soft feeling of satisfaction, does not suffice. No, my enjoyment - or excitement, to be more precise - need's to be physically burned off. I need to get up, run around, jump up - touch the ceiling maybe, or run up and down the stairs - a quirk which my family members never tired of deriving amusement from.

Fast forward to 27, and I am still essentially the same. I seem to process positive stimuli in a very thorough manner. It just doesn't affect my attitude at any current moment, but it seeks release in some physical movement; it's not obsessively choreographed - it's just a big fat thump of energy that shoots into me, causing me to perform some extremely quick and hyper movement to burn it off.

If I'm playing NBA 2K13 ( a favorite of mine) and I manage to come back from a large deficit, I find myself unconsciously acting out my happiness - I'll smack the table in front of me in some awkward motion - tap, tap tap, bringing my arms back up to me before I lower them again to tap the table (my mom says I look like a bird trying to fly). It's strange, yes, and when I become aware of having done it I feel a little bit of shame and self consciousness afterwards. This might be the source and origin of my social issues.

When I was a kid, I played a lot of football and soccer at recess. Being much less self conscious then, the kids (friends/acquaintances) I played with thought my hyperness  was hilarious. They'd come to predict that I would jump up, run around, after something good happened. Later on in highschool, I remember being chastened by friends to stop rocking my legs back and forth. Being naturally anxious - or easily stimulated - I did this completely unconsciously. This caused me to become more aware of myself.

 An upshot of being hyper is basketball related. I played a lot of basketball growing up (and still play 2-3 times a week at the leisure center) and my "first step" - that first movement from a stationary or relaxed position - was always unusually faster than other peoples. My full speed was not that much greater than other peoples, and my quickness after that first explosion was also unspectacular. What set me apart and gave me an athletic advantage over my opponents was just how blisteringly fast I could go from zero to ten. This to me makes sense only in terms of my hypersensitive nervous system. My PFC issues commands to my motor cortex, which passes that information on to my muscles, with just a little more juice - adrenaline - than other people. This results in a millisecond advantage over my opponents.

I'm starting to come to terms with my hyperness. I'm shy because large groups over-stimulate me. I get happy so easily - and with such ease - because I'm quick to respond to happy stimuli. At the same time, if someones mean, or even implies something offensive in their gesturing, I pick it up with a cinch. I wish I didn't, but I do. So where to go from here?

I need to "stretch" my temperament enough to help me feel comfortable in large groups. Essentially, this is me using my neocortical faculties to regulate my limbic system. In ontological terms, It means being more attuned to my feeling states than conceptual states. I only get anxious when my over-anxious mind starts THINKING about my feelings in relation to it's environmental cues. When that happens, I 'leave' the feeling, and start ruminating ABOUT it; this crystallizes the feeling, freezing it in my minds awareness.

Exploring the Past

Being that I still struggle - and suffer - day in and day out with my confidence, self esteem, and ability to maintain an embodied self awareness, I can sometimes get caught up in moping over the past. I'll think to myself: I'm only here because of my mother.

She got depressed at age 40, withdrew from her children, withdrew from her parental duties, and because of her, I too got depressed. I was 13 years old and needed a strong and stable household. It was bad enough I lacked a father figure in my life - my own Dad was similarly withdrawn, occupied with my mom, and consumed with his work - but in addition to that, my own mother began going out everyday. Come the school year, grade 8, for some odd reason I feel especially insecure this time around. Before it was just nerves, shyness, but beneath all that was a anticipation for the new school year. This year was different. The social problems began to accrue towards the end of grade 7. And this is also the time when my dad was demoted, and my mothers depression began. At this point, there were no dramatic suicide attempts, just your run of the mill arguments between mom and dad, withdrawal from her children, little or no positive conversation and encouragement that there used to be when I was younger. All of a sudden home life changed. It was a sadder, angrier, more irritable place. And my mom, unbeknownst to her at the time, was planting the seeds for a life long insecurity in her son.

My troubles at the end of grade 7 loomed in my mind before grade 8. I remember distinctly: I didn't go out as often as I did the summer before, and my mom reminded me. The year before, everyday, I'd be outside playing road hockey with street kids, or playing basketball with my friend Ryan at my house - or his house - or baseball, soccer, or quite often, tennis at the tennis courts. We had developed quite a rivalry. We'd also play doubles when Adam, John, Matt or others who came around. I may have been a shy kid, but I was a kid who was socially capable: I liked socializing and enjoyed playing sports, roaming the forests, and more or less, having fun. But, I wont deny, I was a sensitive kid as well.

By the time grade 8 came around my mother's depression had been growing worse. I don't recall much interaction between her and I. I remember many arguments between my parents, many nights where she slept at her friend Sylvanas apartment in downtown Toronto. Our home life was marred by this avoidance: my mom sleeping at her friends house and my dad wanting her to come home. Sometimes I'd come, but most of the time I'd be left at home. Already at this point the home problems were adding to my depression, low self esteem and increased insecurity in socializing. My brother conversely, more naturally sociable, and also younger, spared the social complexities of grade 8 - a transition to early adulthood - was effected in a different way (after watching my mother attempt suicide on a number of occasions, he developed a stutter).

My mother's actions - her disregard of her parental duties - provided the basic environmental impetus that got my biology all off kilter. More bluntly put: her depression caused my depression. It's been 13 years since her depression days. But for me, life hasnt changed. At 27, I am still feeling the effects of the ruthless emotional abuse I experienced at the hands of a bully. I realize that there were two factors involved: home life, and the presence of this bully. But I know I would have handled this kid much differently if I had been spared the emotional complexities happening in my homelife. Life became confusing for me. I became scared, anxious, and increasingly uncertain about things. All this stress no doubt contributed to my stunted growth (4'7 at 14 - 5'7 now) which in turn supplied fodder for the bully (his entire program was based around my being "a midget", and I'm sure aspects of my personality irked him too)

I suffered greatly during that year. I couldn't even finish school - be confirmed with my classmates, or attend graduation ceremonies. Something I could and did do during my earlier years, 1st communion, class pictures - something I did with no small measure of alacrity, I saw myself dreading.

Then, in grade 10, after attempting to mold my personality into someone else in grade 9, that same bully entered highschool. Terror struck my heart. I had actually hung around him in grade 9 - he was a friend of one of my friends. Towards the end of grade 9, I found people asking questions about my past, and more or less changing their demeanor towards me. Being easily riled up - I amped up my efforts. I tried even harder to "fit in". But even then, I think I did a decent job being myself, holding down the fort of my true self. But then grade 9 withered away, and on the way to grade 10, my difficulties returned, coinciding with the reappearance of Adam Mcdonald. Tall, lanky, blonde haired, pierced, sociopathic looking, with a monotone voice, he seemed to embody the notion of "I don't give a shit what you think". He thought he was badass, too cool for school. His opinions were razor sharp, acerbic and vitriolic. He spoke with a sarcastic hint to his speech - as if his effort to talk with you should be something taken as a favor. Even to this day, when I say sociopathic, I am being quite literal: he possessed all those basic criteria needed to qualify for social personal disorder. He seemed to be beyond the pale when it came to empathy. If he didn't do something, it was because he restrained himself on a cognitive level. Not because he felt guilt, or shame, or sorry, but because he didn't want to get in trouble.

His relentless bullying, his repursuit of his victim from his elementary school days, was truly sadistic. When you think about it, PTSD caused from bullying is not a thing to be taken lightly. It is horrific what a bully can do to the personality of his victim. Any life condition - in my case, trouble at home - happened to coincide with the presence of a sociopath. Sociopathic children would more easily be held at bay if teachers and students took bullying more seriously. But back in '98, things didn't happen that way. My teacher was indolent to the extreme. A part of me wants to blame him for preferring to let the bully hurt me than to jeopardize his carefree and interactive relationship with his students. He could have, for example, suggested expulsion of Adam Mcdonald for the effects his bullying was having on one of his students (refusing to speak or lift my head from the desk should have wrung alarm bells), but no - he didn't entertain that notion. He was far too "fun" a teacher to take initiative against a problematic student. Instead, he tolerated the abuse of the bullier, which in effect enabled the suffering experienced by his victim. If he were reading this today, I would say to Mr. Kelly: you should have taken your duties as a teacher more seriously.

But, perhaps, he was just a symptom of a dysfunctional school system that under emphasized the psycho-social responsibilities of teachers - to inform children, to encourage children, to treat other kids with respect and empathy. I truly believe that this is the only moral direction we can go. It is inexcusable that someone like me - subject to unfortunate life circumstances - should have suffered so bad in school, that till this day, I am unfit for the social world. I am still re-experiencing the feelings first felt at 13 years old, despite my intellectual and spiritual maturity, I still feel like a scared little kid inside.

At a certain point in time, I remember just giving up. Not being able to process these emotions within me anymore. I was fighting for my breath after grade 8 and into grade 9. After falling again in grade 10, I began experiencing this shakiness in my voice when I spoke. I was conceptualizing myself as I spoke - observing myself to make sure I acted carefully - rightly, that I didn't make any social mistakes. I was so stricken by my social difficulties in the earlier two years that I was taking excessively self conscious measures to deal with the mechanics of socializing. By 16, after spending the summer playing basketball at a basketball camp and convincing myself of my coolness, of my new found identification with black culture, I returned to my old school after my parents moved to a different house in the same district. This year, I might as well describe as my most deluded point in my life. I changed the style of my voice - shaved my head and fancied that I could pass for a mulatto person - and pretended that I was on course to become the next Vince Carter. I just had to get through highschool. Then, I'd be playing D1 college ball on scholarship down south. A "free education" - that was the cool thing, something emphasized by the basketball instructor. Even though my real dream was merely the story - the glory - that goes along with a kid working towards becoming a professional sports star.

Throughout that year, I struggled off and on in my social relationships. Unlike the years prior, this time I made extra effort to feel cool. By being so "tuned in" on my self, I made sure that I never spoke without the appropriate accent - that I said cool things, mentioned basketball, and other things designed to make me look good in the eyes of others. Eventually, the effect wore off, and I became annoying to people. I made the junior basketball team, only to be seated on the bench for most of the games. The one game I played in, I got an elbow to the nose and broke it..

Everyday I Woke up at 6AM, and played basketball for 1-2 hours before school started in the high school gymnasium. The gym teachers themselves began to grow irritated with me playing in "their" gym without special permission. Some kids, if they're charismatic enough, can get that imprimatur. But me, being shy, reclusive, and tongue tied when spoken to, this gave a bad effect on the teachers, and eventually even they would prevent me from entering the gym.

Just remembering those days, at 16, is painful for me. I was so depressed with my life. I also grew more and more paranoid and anxious about increasingly silly things. The relationships I still had began to falter at this point. By the end of that year, I had no friends left, and I once again withdrew from the world.

I began to worry about killing myself. Being accustomed to anxious thoughts now and again, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the intensity and frequency of these emotions. I began to obsess over talking - how to do it. By obsessing so greatly, I began to conceptualize myself as I spoke. But since this was from a feeling of insecurity, of fear of social disapproval, it was tinged with a strain, with a forcefulness that could be easily heard - consciously, or unconsciously - by the person I was talking with. Also at this time, I began to worry about suicide. I would go to bed and disturbed and morbid thoughts would percolate in my head. One second it was a disease - I had it, Aids! Next second, it was suicide, my wrists became rashy, and I would take it as some sort of command from some nefarious source to cut my wrists. I would worry about taking the subway, because I had heard of someone who recently jumped in front of one. Having heard it - and feeling a pit in my stomach, I began to grow afraid that I too would - or could - jump in front of a subway. I would have the worse anxiety attacks when I had to ride the subway. These thoughts just weighed on me and oppressed me throughout that year. By the end of it all, we had moved again, this time way up north to Barrie, Ontario. My life had taken on a sordid consistency - my days were now filled with anguish about my voice. My ability to relate with my brother was weakening, and my sister having gone off to college 2 years earlier had only strengthened my feelings of seclusion and depression.

Since then, since 18, it has been the same thing day in and day out. At around 19, I began to grow interested in reading - something I never really did before. At 20, I was absorbed in spiritual subjects. By 21, I had a horrible experience with Kundalini yoga that left me sleepless for 21 days. A pivotal point in my life. By 23, I was learning Hebrew and studying Judaism. 24, I began spending a lot of time at the library reading. Now, at 27, soon to be 28, I spend my days at the library - a two minute walk from my house. I read 20-30 books a month, from neuroscience, to psychology, to political science, to computer science, to philosophy, biology, novels, reading scientific journals. All of this for self improvement - an investment in my future.

My greatest hope is to be out of this situation by age 30. To be in school by 31, to be married by 35, to have kids by 40. These are hopes I can't deny myself - I want them so deeply, at the core of my being. But, as of now, I know I have a mountain to climb. I have things to do - situations to conquer. I hope and pray it goes well.

The Baby Inside

When I ask my mom: what was I like as a baby? She responds: "you were such a happy baby! the littlest things would make you happy. Always laughing, always playful"

So what happened? Generally speaking, a newborn human being exhibits it's genetic repertoire early on it's life. For me, I clearly connected easily with a feeling of happiness. So what happened?

Well, as I understand it, the environmental stressor of having a mom that was frequently angry, critical, or to use a popular colloquialism, bitchy, I suspect her general attitude made me a lot more tentative and needy.

But, nevertheless, I feel good hearing that I was a happy baby. For as long as I can remember, I have known myself to be easy to please. Even today, people who comment on my situation will tell me: I don't know how you can live like that, to be alone everyday, with your own thoughts, and not lose your mind". I guess I am fortunate to have this streak in me which allows me to find contentment easier than in others.

I want to get back in touch with that baby in me. That baby who smiled and laughed - the one I see in the picture in the family room with a wide smile on his face, eyes glowing. Where was the shyness? I don't see it. My mom described my easiness as wonderful, compared to my sister and brother. This baby is still deep within me - within primal neurological structures. My innate ability to feel happy, to enjoy the little things, to get easily excited and revved when any positive stimulus occurs - I want that back, I want to find it again and feel it grow within me.

I need to find my inner baby.

How to train the brain

These are before and after photos of my bed. The before state is unmade, while the after state is made. Here's the story: having been homebound for 12 or so years, I have become accustomed to an extremely easy lifestyle, and, being accustomed to easiness, I have become rather lazy when it comes to making my bed. On average, I'd say I make it 4 times out of 10 (mostly to please my mother). So whats the point of this? The before state is like my current mind. Disordered, sloppy. The After state is ordered. But that's not the point either. Rather, the point is more philosophical. If I can coerce myself to make my bed everyday, even though emotionally, I really don't feel up to it, then I can coerce myself to maintain the type of focus and attention necessary to make changes in my thinking - and in my brain.

All sorts of little activities like this can serve as symbols. Some emotional part - in the limbic system, for example, prompts you to engage in a certain activity or inactivity. Whether that be making my bed, or biting my nails. Speaking of nail biting, brace yourself:

This is me peeling, biting and otherwise disfiguring my thumb nail on my right hand. I've decided it would be for me to apply the same logic to bed making to stopping my nail biting. With the former, it's something I'm not doing - and so I'm challenging my laziness. Here, it's something I am doing - peeling off layers of nail because it gives me some sort of weird satisfaction (without causing bleeding. Once bleeding occurs, I wince and complain "Oh why did I do that!").

My problem is maintaining a state of embodied self awareness. As described in that earlier entry, embodied self awareness is experiencing life in the subjective emotional present. Usually, life for me - at least when talking becomes relevant - involves conceptual self awareness. A normal person when they get ready to speak engages the feelings they're having at the moment. This is embodiment. I on the other hand observe myself as I speak - this is conceptualizing myself as I attempt to engage my feelings. Since you can't do both things at once, Its actually just me ruminating on some perceived malady while I try to sound normal. Life in this mode, you can imagine, can be extremely isolating, painful, etc. Living this way for many years, being dissociated from your own true emotions on things for this length of time, can make the experience of embodied self awareness feel absurd. In a way - it is! Psychologists rightly point out that embodied self awareness - engagement with your emotions - is inherently chaotic, unpredictable, uncontrollable. You can't "put" yourself in that state. You can only create the conditions to enter that state without your meddling conceptual self awareness interfering.

I know how to enter these states. I experience them now and again. Embodied self awareness can be: embodied physically, in how you feel in your body, and embodied vocally, in how you feel in your voice. I've become fairly good at feeling good in my body. I go to the library everyday to pass the hours, reading, and most of all, exposing myself to other people. I've learned to stay in my body when someone comes near me - if they look at me, I more or less am learning to train myself not to be on "high alert" about it. There's no reason to. People look. Oddly enough. Sometimes when I've found myself more securely in this state, if someone looks at me and smiles, I smile back! This may seem absolutely banal to most people, but for me, for someone who conceptualizes and watches himself, who anticipates the formation of feelings and anxiously observes his facial and bodily activity, to just spontaneously shoot a smile back at the person who smiles at me, in the subjective emotional presence, frankly, it felt like somebody else (and not in a bad way).

Episodes like the above encourage me. I have to dampen down my level of alertness. The PTSD has me looking this way and that in a very conceptualized state of mind, and only recently have I become aware of it, and understood it in a sort of evolutionary psychological sort of way. If I raise my hand towards my dog - she'll quiver and cower and her tail will snap between her legs; her ears will fall back, her eyes will widen and her muscles will tense. She's in a state of high alert (of course, I don't ever hit my dog - she's the runt of her litter, she, like her owners, is an anxious little thing). I see this state in myself. In the subjective emotional present, things are slowed down, consciousness is more focused in one area, while blanking out everything else around you. In an alert state, my mind is cued to my environment. Any change engenders a corresponding change in my state of mind. I need to withdraw from this habit, feel myself, my body, my breathing, and most of all, my emotions.

Training the brain will be a life long activity for me. I'm still 27, young, intelligent and physically able. My bed will be get made and my fingers will be left alone - such activities will hopefully train my limbic system who the boss is - the dorsolateral PFC!

The mind is a strange thing

Sometimes the most banal things can be the most interesting. Take for example your normal state of consciousness. If you developed normally, you will be used to something psychologists call embodied self awareness, which is different from conceptual self awareness.

Being felt "IN" the body is body oriented. You could use an arrow like this one <----- to describe this vector. Yet, simultaneously, the mind is absorbed in a thought "out there". The minds absorption is a thought would be the opposite direction ----> this way.

To put it another way. Some philosophers, like Soren Kiekegaard, as well as the psychologist Viktor Frankl, made much of the fact that human beings are only happy when they are "outside" themselves. Kierkagaard famously said "The door to happiness opens outward". The outward direction is to objects that lie beyond the self. When were thinking about ourselves, happiness typically eludes us. So, when our attention is oriented to external things, such as another person, a purpose, an external activity, paradoxically, this external orientation puts us into our closest contact with our actual feelings.

Modern psychologists distinguish between attention that is oriented towards thoughts (conceptual self awareness) and attention which is oriented towards feelings (embodied self awareness). These are two fundamentally different states. Even the nervous system processes these two functions differently. If I'm "feeling" my body, such as the pain in my toe, the nociceptor sends its signals up the dorsal horn pathway in the spinal chord. When it comes to the brain, it's processed by regions in the brain stem, cerebellum, amygdala, etc, and in the PFC(prefrontal cortex), by the ventromedial and orbitofrontal parts. When your THINKING about the pain in your toe, as opposed to feeling it, the nociceptors send the signals up the ventral horn of the spinal chord, which goes up to the brain to be processed by the dorsolateral and dorsomedial parts of the PFC.

So again, there is a definite "embodied" component to this mode of being. But simultaneously, the "self" is completely immersed in the object of it's attention. These are to halves which make up the whole of embodied self awareness. There also appears to be a symmetry. Just as embodiment entails absorption in something else, worrying about some thought ABOUT yourself, such as finances, health, etc, takes you OUT of your body. When the thought is on yourself, the mind is outside the body. When the thought is on something outside the self, the mind is in the body.

It's a funny state of affairs.

Understand The Mind

If anything valuable can come of this blog, it's in it's documentation of the way the mind interprets facts of it's reality. Each interpretation has some relative value in that they convey a sense of the pain of the experience, and through that pain, explains it's reality.

The correct understanding is less complex, yet it's the hardest one to stomach. In my earlier blog, I mentioned the need to integrate the impersonal and personal dimensions in understanding my problem. To start with the impersonal: the impersonal is best understood as energy. Since all things can be converted into an energetic intensity, the obsession is best addressed as a dynamism. The energy of my reality is low. There's very little drive; obsession with one particular idea; I am constantly resonating with a particular feeling. Before I speak, there's a definite feeling of "holding myself back". What I imagine as a concern with my voice, is a clever deception of the mind. The real issue is fear: fear with speaking without worrying what others might think. My minds defence response believes "thinking" about the issue will help me, because evolutionarily speaking, reflection upon problems facilitates survival. Unfortunately, this mechanism works both ways: to enable survival, or, to induce neurosis.

A normal state of consciousness - when one feels that he can speak without worrying what others might think - is generally speaking, in a state of relaxation. This claim of course has its variables. I think only in a general sense that this assumption applies.

When someone speaks, it reflects a part, or the totality of the self. The emotions "in between" are what Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz would attribute to "the brain". The mind decides to speak, and, the brain responds. In a similar fashion, the "self" decides to speak, and the ego - the sense of "I" which reflects upon the meaning of it's action  - either sanctions the feeling or jettisons it. In short, self consciousness can only be "secure" if the ego feels its ok, nay, deserved, for it to be experiencing these feelings. and to be perceived by others as confident.

These are the two sides of the coin: the need to emphasize high energy states, where a feeling "erupts" into consciousness, and the mind FREELY lets the energy flow through, without interfering. The second side of the coin is to emphasize my RIGHT as a human being to see myself in positive terms. There is no reason why I should be condemned to a life of low self esteem, obsession, anxiety, fear and depression.

So I know the B's and C's. The question is, how do I move from A? How do I move through this maelstrom of negative feeling, which makes the sheer thought of speaking without feeling myself as insecure, almost impossible. As explained before, the energy is an abstract way to describe all things. In terms of my particular obsession with my voice, the energy would be the vehicle, while the content of the thought, would be the passenger. By emphasizing the passenger, or focusing on the thought-content, I distract myself from the source of the malady, the very vehicle which brings the thought-content into perception.

 So it would seem the way to get around this is to emphasize the energy. The energy is best thought of as energy, and not emotion. Emotion is in itself a quasi personal term. As an emotion, it applies an individual experiencing it. Whereas with the idea of energy, the sense of"feeling" it, or giving yourself up to it, allows it to bring you into action without another thought preempting it's expression. This is a wondrous feeling, both because when it happens I realize that it is authentic, and that for a nice change, I actually feel like me. At the same time, I get startled, almost dismayed, by the sheer distance between my usual thinking - and feeling - and the sense of awareness involved in speaking without worrying i.e. acting according to the natural goals and interests of the self.

I understand it more clearly than I ever have. This is the most rarefied understanding of my situation that I've perceived. It really does require a phenomenal power of will; to maintain that awareness at home with family; and then, when it's been normalized enough, to take the risk of speaking with others: on the phone, first, and then in society.

The Difficulty of Inertia

I'm always dealing with a feeling of inertia. I don't know from where it comes from, or what it means. Is it depression? And yet it's not a very overpowering one. I've felt depressed before, but this feeling isn't quite depression. It's rather the absence of drive: something motivating me into activity.

In an earlier post, I mentioned my need to open myself outward to the world of objects. And yet, I feel critically involved in my own world. All I seem to feel is the inertia, so much so, I think I would be either mute, or arm-twisted into speech by my moribund tendency to stress my voice during speech. My speech has literally become that intermixed with the tendency to stress. Also - and this is of the greatest salience - my tendency to stress as I speak is really just a symptom of my tendency to watch myself as I speak. Somehow, in my head, I began to experience speech as something which occurs while watching yourself. It is infuriatingly sticky - I only have flashes now and again of what a normal approach to speech is actually like.

What a normal approach feels like: It feels spontaneous. I think, and then an instant later, almost simultaneously it seems, speech emerges from my mouth. Consciously, I am hyper-focused (or "in" the words I speak) on the subject matter, while ignoring, or only tacitly receiving an impression, how I spoke. I may say "Hey Ash!" to my sister. In my mind, there was the simple recognition that my sister had come home. Instantaneously, without hesitation - without the presence of any other thought in my mind - MICHAEL speaks. The words emanate from a core too mysterious to be watched, it seems.

I know this is a genuine state. I know it is not "beyond" my capacity. I am not forever estranged from feelings of confidence, and from the ease of living without worrying. But as it stands, I fear I need more than what I have. I daily struggle. I find it exceedingly difficult to enter speech without preempting myself. Its as if the obsession stands ready like a bodyguard, or a sentry, at the door of my mind. I try to ready myself: think THIS way, and by saying that to myself, I simultaneously seem to confirm the presence of the problem. My mind is STILL IN THAT MODE. I want desperately to live in the world of objects, but it seems such a perception is underlined by an attitude - a perception of reality conducive to ones overall state of self.

So it seems to be double tiered: I need to focus outward onto the world of objects. That needs to be the flux of my attention. Secondly: I need to feel secure as me. Partadoxically, the first need is impersonal; by stressing the mode in which reality is experienced and understood, I enter a confident state of mind; my voice emerges strong, natural, in short, it feels and sounds like me. On the other hand, one should be able to understand himself as an "I", as an individual. If someone looks at me, I should be able to endure their stares without fretting over possible reasons. The former state - the outward focus into the world of objects - is a symptom of someone who is secure in their body, and secure in their self image, which is the latter state.

Sometimes, I don't know which to emphasize, or where to begin. I feel as if the "be in the world" of objects is the right way to go about it, but then I discover that my insecurity can get the better of me. Its used to feeling scared, in this or that situation. My brain has little compartments of memory dedicated to just these situations, evoking just these responses. So sometimes I'll try to buttress my self esteem: you can do it Mike! You know you love yourself, you care for your well being, you want to get better! But then when I act, I am unwittingly involving my insecurities in my speech. In short, I am self conscious while speaking.

Obviously, I understand that I am seriously over-thinking all this. I know my understanding is complex, and probably quite accurate in its conception of the relationship between personal and impersonal forces; but still, people cannot and should not think this deeply about things. It dissolves the process of living into truncated facts. It forgets the flowness of things; the naturalness of every moment. I want to wholistically connect with the world, but i am stuck in my thoughts, feelings, and neuroses.

I of course can never lose hope. I believe that I will get out of this. I need, and want to believe.