Dec 30

 I felt the touch of it yesterday. The rumble through the ground and the lurch of instability.

My mental health has tumbled today. My emotions are up. Sad. Tearful. Hopeless. Despairing. It is. In check. Just about. But I can feel it. It rises up at random points and smothers me, steals my breath away from me, and pitches me into horrible places.

Also. I'm getting brain zaps. And blipping out. Perhaps this is a sign my brain chemistry has hit the buffers. Perhaps I need to munch on some pills. 

Sigh.

Another storm to ride out Johnny. The waves come in different shapes and forms. But they all require batoning down the hatches. Enduring. Suffering. Physical. Mental. Existential.

It has crossed my mind many times why psychologically I am like this. I have searched for answers in genetics - stitching the same pattern across the males on my dads side of the family and a pattern of symptoms that give you a plausible diagnosis of dysthymia that dips into "double depression" of severe clinical depression on top of that. I have wondered whether it is the relentless whip of my own will, always number crunching, eating each of those existential revelations like smarties, becoming sicker with each one, but always pushed on in some demented form. Whether the sharpening of that intellect over time has ended up becoming a terrible wound that once opened cannot be healed. Of whether there is some kink in me, that interprets the world around me in such a way, oversensitises me, overloads me, I see things that commonly go unseen. And of late. That faint whisper. That it is the damage done to me as a child that sets the stage for what unfolds.

I cannot tell you which of these is true. If any. Or maybe a mix of some or all of them. So I am unreliable in - at the very least - erecting signage behind me to not follow. Because I am not sure of the path to get here.

I can see a lot of the twists and turns. I can see the nature of spirals. And sitting in the shadows. And the relentless cost of always picking the pessimistic. And. Over time. In some cases. I have seen it in others. And nudged them just a little off that path. I am not. Entirely useless.

And I have learned the generalism of the power of listening. Shutting up. Listening. Empathising. Acknowledging pain - not dismissing it, not trying to fix it. Just acknowledging it. These things. Are so simple. And yet. End up being some of the hardest things to do or even understand. Ironic.

But I would perhaps give this warning. Something I have warned of many times, but here, set out, very clearly, no wiggle room.

Do not. Go too far. Along the path of discovery. Do not attempt to solve all those existential puzzles. Pace yourself. And live in the moment. And do not wander too far from the norm.

Perhaps this is bad advice, and, the reason I think this is true is that because my ... perception is wrong. I am flawed. Like a mirror with a crack in it, everything I see is broken. If that is true. Then my advice there not to go too far is simply... that broken reflection.

But. Whilst I think there is some truth there. I think my warning is true. And dire. And fundamental.

We are not meant to understand the enormity of the universe. It is an accident that if pushed hard, we can. But we were not designed to hold that. It is a bucket trying to store the contents of an ocean. A bucket that cannot lose a single drop. And is instead forced at increasing breaking point to stretch and distort and warp to try and hold those contents.

I think, in the end. Doing so is an enormous existential risk of its own. It is poison. That kills the host.

You can know things. But there is a cost. That cost is not insignificant. Not without meaning. Ultimately that cost is everything.

For me. I see the shadow of this pattern, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, spread across the history of humanity. In its expressions of art. Life. Torment. And those that reach into the borderlands to pull out truths - those existential revelations - come back scarred from the fight. Worn. Haunted. And so many of them end up spiralling out. And the poison kills them. The tortured artist is not a trope by accident.

Our brains evolved how they did to figure out how to get coconuts out of trees, and tell what your fellow ape means when it shrugs it shoulders. Accidentally, this capability also gave the key to pandoras box. A toolkit to crack open each horrible existential truth one at a time. And drive the seeker slowly insane.

If evolution gave us the key for abstract thought. That opened the box. Then inside the box are a thousand apples. Each apple you eat gives you more capability or understanding. Half of those apples are poisoned. The more you eat. The more you know. The more sick you get.

The answer then. Is to eat sparingly. To enjoy what can be enjoyed. Do not push too hard at seeking the answers. Instead enjoy the ride.

That. Is my wisdom. At this point of my life. With a feeling like I am at the end of that road looking backwards.

But I do not really know, if this is 100% true. If it's not. Then a lot of other people seem to also at times spiral out when they touch the edge. But then perhaps we all suffer from the cracked mirror instead. Flawed.

All I know is. That whilst I can operate as some kind of poor information store and local knowledge source that almost everyone around me ends up relying on. I can fix problems across many domains. I also have a depth of sadness in me from knowing things. That I cannot ever undo. Or change. And they weigh extremely heavy in me. And there is nothing I can do about them.

This is my meta flaw. I chased away all innocence. And now am stuck lamenting the lack of magic in the world. To such a degree. That it rises to a mental dysfunction. Truly broken.

A cautionary tale. About the boy who knew too much.

Or. I'm just crazy. 

A couple of weeks ago. Talking to a friend. It came up, about how a reliable person of knowledge forms. That whole progression. From trusted not to judge. To reliable results. To it being less risky for others to trust my judgement than theirs. And it not being a bug. But a feature. People adapt and exploit what works. And that includes. People who can do things or know things. The whole process is self reinforcing.

He said. He had thought of this exact thing earlier that day. He had thought about it often in connection with me. He had identified in himself the many times he would bring a question or problem to my door. And. Also. How unfair that was. That same day. He had run a problem past me that he had. And he had said. That he nearly didn't do it. That he was conscious that, again, he was just using me as the reliable compute output. He said he knew he would get a clear, rational, non ego fuelled answer that would cut through to the core of it, and understand it, and hand it back to him neat. And how. Regardless of my state. He would give me that burden. So alluring. But he realised. It wasn't good. It caused him to consider what he was doing.

We talked about it some more. He ended up with the conclusion that it was ok within reason and that the price of that should be - that some care and help should be afforded to me. As he then went on to put it, be mindful that it's a person you're asking, and they require care. A little maintenance. An offering.

I didn't have a strong opinion about it. Other than. I very much felt that relentless tug. Of always being the compute engine. I didn't mind it. Mostly. But sometimes. It was poisonous.

I understand the mechanisms of it very clearly now. And I explicitly notice everytime someone does it.

Sometimes in my darker moments, I wonder if this is all the value I have to others.