Feelings Will Slowly Kill You Inside

So, I wanted to take the time to write more on the subject of love. Or rather, on the subject of romantic feelings.

You hear it said, by people, when they fall in love, in mutual love, that they didn't know they had a missing piece, until they found the other person who filled it.

Well, I've never been in mutual love with anyone. But I'm just throwing in my two cents. You actually didn't have that missing piece, until you start pursuing romantic relationships.

The way feelings work, is like this: you can have active feelings for a person, and then you can have dormant feelings.

When you have active feelings for a person, this "crush" takes up a fair amount of your energy. You may think about the person, dream about the person at night, think about how you two can pursue a relationship. It takes up your mind, active feelings.

With dormant feelings, you like someone in a romantic way, but it doesn't occupy your mind. Sometimes, you are not around the person, so you don't think about them at all. Sometimes, you are around the person, and you like them, but for whatever reason your feelings haven't progressed to the point where you care one way or the other if you are with them or not. You would be in a relationship if they wanted to be, but if not, it's not the end of the world. It doesn't cause you pain.

You can have tons and tons of dormant crushes on people. Usually no more than one active crush. Sometimes one main one and several semi-active ones.

Dormant crushes are happy and harmless. It is the active crushes that are killer, draining your energy and mental resources, making you unhappy. Yes, these kind of crushes make you unhappy.

Love probably always begins as an active crush. In the mental state of having an active crush, your body allocates resources to support having this crush. But if you are not in a happy relationship with this person, or the relationship is not moving forward, this leads to unhappiness, because you don't receive energy back in return. So it is just this huge drain on your mind and spirit.

Before someone finds love, usually they will have a series of active crushes, most of the time, where they are not getting energy back. Sometimes, they are in a relationship with the person they have an active crush on, but then the active crush goes away. Relationships turn sour. Feelings fade. Feelings that were once strong aren't strong anymore. It is hard to maintain a relationship, and maintain that active crush.

So, all someone's true love is, is someone with whom the active crush never goes away. And that feeling progresses, with time, and grows into love.

But, the point of this post is, your love isn't your "missing piece." Because if you weren't romantically inclined to begin with, you are just as whole as someone who is in love. Because you don't have any active crushes sapping your energy resources.

Or maybe not. I actually don't know. I've never been in love with anyone where the feelings were returned, or in love at all, whatever love is. I've never even been in a serious relationship with anyone.

But what I think I know is, if you can just get over having active crushes on people, you have more energy to devote to yourself and your own development and making yourself happy, instead of worrying about impressing someone else or making them interested in you.

Which is why people should go back to having arranged marriages. Arranged marriages where feelings aren't a factor, but you are paired up with someone you can support you emotionally or maybe financially, where the two people care about one another but aren't necessarily in love. But a man and a woman who are around each other exclusively and not related to each other usually fall in love, the way I see it, at least they do in movies. I think.

Silly Neurofeedback

First, I wanted to clarify something. I said in a comment awhile ago that I hate it when people comment and I don't know who they are. What I meant was, I hate it when people comment, and it is someone I know in real life, and they don't tell me who they are. If it's someone I don't know in real life, they can comment and that's fine and I don't care to know who it is. I like it when people comment on my blog. There was just one person who said they knew me from Facebook who commented, and I didn't know who they were, and that kind of annoyed me. If I know you in real life, I like to know who you are. Anyway.

So I was telling my parents, I have less intrusive thoughts now. The intrusive thoughts being the words that randomly enter my brain, at random times, like a word I read in a book, or just a completely random word that comes out of nowhere, and makes me anxious. It turns into an insult directed at me. Anyway, this doesn't happen anymore. I have had less anxiety as a whole.

My mom was sure that this must be due to the neurofeedback. The doctor said no. It was probably more likely due to stopping the Ativan. Yes, that's probably what it was. What the fuck has the neurofeedback done? It doesn't help me sleep better. I've been sleeping like shit. It makes the Adderall affect me less.

It may have increased my IQ. I was just sitting here thinking about it, and I remembered that. So now you know what I want to do? I want to go test my IQ. So I think that's what I'll do.

Isolation

Sometimes, I am on a search for what really matters in life. Where should I put the basis of most of my enjoyment? What should I actively look forward to?

I used to look forward all the time to eating, back when I was young and horribly depressed. Eating can be a very positive experience. However, eat too much and you become fat. And it's hard to live with yourself when you are fat, with the way people treat you and shit. Which is why you shouldn't really look forward at all to eating, unless you are really hungry. If you're not hungry, you shouldn't even think about food.

I used to look forward to the effects of my drugs, mainly the Adderall. But, like I've stated in a previous blog entry, it doesn't really have that effect any more. Caffeine still has an effect on me. Nicotine still has an effect on me. Maybe I should look forward to those things.

I enjoy working, and getting things done, and making progress with my projects. I got high off productivity. This high is even better than an Adderall high. Sure, the Adderall high is full of more fake, artificial sugary happy sweetness, but a productivity high actually means something. When it's gone, it's not really gone, because I still accomplished the work. What do I have to show for an Adderall high, after it is all done? Absolutely nothing. That is, unless the increased motivation from the Adderall high led me to accomplish something. But a lot of times, I will just sit and think on it. Which is utterly unproductive. So yeah, in a way it's better it doesn't make me high anymore.

What I really think is worth my time to be obsessed over, is social interactions. Talking to different people. Sometimes, I talk to people about my work and computers. The thing is, I don't know a whole lot of different stuff about computers, so to avoid exposing my ignorance, these conversations have to be brief, if I'm talking to someone who majored in computer science. I have only ever taken a couple of computer science classes. I learned programming in high school. I learned Visual Basic, which is supposed to be easy to learn and use, but honestly, now that I have pretty much got down Objective C, Objective C is no harder than Basic. I could talk on and on about the mechanics of programming, like debugging. All the time you spend single stepping through code, trying to track down the bug, and that feeling of satisfaction when you finally catch it. But really, people don't really talk about that, at least not with me. So I talk about my projects. Anyway.

So, I have in my mind that social interaction would be the most rewarding thing. But I spend almost all my time alone. I don't go out much anymore. There was a period of time last year when I was going out a lot. I'm not really all that good at social interaction, though I am a million times better than I used to be.

The thing that bothers me a lot is how I went through junior high and high school, all the time doing the bare minimum when it came to social interaction. I can't tell you how much I regret that, and how much it bothers me now. I would really like to be part of a group of friends. But I don't have that. I have random friends here and there. I have friends from Innercept. That's the thing, as much as I bitched and moaned about how much I hated Innercept, and how horrible it was, most of the people I call my real friends now, are people I met at Innercept. At Innercept, I kind of did have a group of girl friends.

I sometimes get down, like I did just last night, thinking about all the people I know who don't like me. Bridges I've burned, mostly, if not always, from drinking too much alcohol. But then I think of all the people who really, really like me, like certain staff members from Innercept. And I remember how I could just talk to staff so easily, and how now when I talk to people, I struggle, because I spend so much time alone. I remember Erik. And how as much as some people don't like him, he was someone who I could actually really talk to, about whatever was on my mind. And how throughout the day, we would text back and forth constantly.

The thing about social interaction, it keeps the mental illness in check. Like, the small, quirky symptoms I have. Like the talking to myself, about myself, from the perspective of someone else. But, recently I've stopped doing that. Which makes me feel like I am doing better.

So all in all, I'm not doing horribly. And I'm not constantly tortured anymore, tortured by these thoughts that rip me inside out. That went away last year, oddly enough, from the experience of again being delusional. In a way, that made me feel a lot better, and I'm no longer all upset because certain people unfriended me. Like it used to really bother me that one particular person did. But now I don't even care. Who cares? Why do I get myself so upset over these things? And I'm no longer all embarrassed about certain particular things, like things I said to this one guy, because really, what does it matter? I've moved on. That whole situation, which used to tear me inside out, doesn't hurt anymore. It don't hurt no more.

But the social isolation is what's killing me right now.