17.05.2019
I did exactly… nothing for my book. At least I cleaned my room and bathroom. Yay. Awesome. Oh, yeah, playing hours of No Man’s Sky. Apparently there was enough for that. Maya’s pushing me really hard to get into therapy. Feels kind of semi-great. I think I’m slowly developing an idea of how Annabelle must have felt when I asked her for it. Pressure, even well-intentioned and meaningful, tends to create a defensive attitude in such situations. But I promised her tomorrow (i.e. today, but tomorrow is effectively after waking up) to write an email to the hospital and then wait and see what happens next. This is more than I have done during the past two weeks in terms of worrying about professional help for my mental well-being. The advantage of this promise: I can’t break it to Maya. I would probably cut half my arm open before I could live with the emotional pain of not being honest with her. Wherein – would that be an acceptable trade-off? Joke. Don’t even think about it. Not gonna happen. No matter how unproductive I may be tomorrow, but this is the e-mail I’m writing. Need to write. It’s impossible to break a promise like that. It just occurred to me there was another success today: I stayed sober. Although I almost gave in to the need to go out, somehow NMS was more interesting. In this sense, the smaller vice saves me from a bigger one. Does that count as a coping mechanism? Crazy world. I’ve been asking myself more and more lately whether it would be useful to share these lines with a treating therapist. Maybe it would be a waste of time for the therapist at the end due to the triviality of most of the statements. But hey, at least he gets paid for it. Is there any diagnostic value to be derived from this? I haven’t the slightest idea. The fact that I have massive mood swings with self-harming tendencies is really not something that requires a reading of my confused thoughts in order to come to this conclusion. But who knows? Maybe there’s some value after all. I’ll probably mention it at some point and just wait where it might lead. I may now be accused once again of using the English language for the sole reason of elitist distinction, but nothing could be further from the truth. Occasionally it is simply easier for my head to switch to another language for a moment, as I sometimes lack the adequate words in German. It is therefore much more a sign of my intellectual laziness and less elitist vanity. It sounds a bit like the irony of my life. As a rule, I do not consciously set myself apart from other people, quite the opposite, I would like to share more with others much more often, but for some reason this detachment usually happens completely automatically. Maybe it is actually due to my choice of words or language. Or maybe it is because of the topics I like to discuss or the opinions I hold. Note to myself: People love stories. Our brain is evolutionarily biased to believe a good story rather than plain facts. Stories specifically appeal to emotions, whereas rational arguments often have little effect. As unpleasant as it sounds, it doesn’t matter if we have the better arguments, because if our counterpart doesn’t feel the same way, we have little chance to convince them. Now I’m not so sure if I hadn’t already written down the same thoughts on Tuesday after the conversation with Tom, but since I was drunk that night, my memory seems to have suffered a bit and I’m not willing to look up a few pages further up. In any case, it can’t hurt to write down a thought of such monumental significance again. The probability that I will forget it in the future is extremely low, which gives me reason for cautious optimism. Somehow it is quite fascinating to observe that my abrupt mental leaps nevertheless often succeed in forming reasonably consistent sections of meaning. Perhaps my mental degeneration is not as far advanced as I had assumed. Or maybe this kind of soliloquy is already an excellent indicator for the first faces of the madness that will soon haunt me. That would probably also have a unique charm of its own. The only question is for whom.
