Jan 8

 Bouncing along the bottom of no energy. Tired. My sleeping has become fractured in the last 36 hours. I sleep an hour. Two. Then am awake. Move around a little. Crash. Rinse and repeat.

I feel like I am in permanent treacle with it. I am not sure what I am doing. It's not by choice. I keep popping out of sleep and waking up, not being able to return to sleep. a little activity and then having to sleep again.

It is a weird on off crazy schedule sleep thing. And my energy is flatlining during it.

My sleep quality is horrible. My eyes are bad again. This is apparently the "venous pooling". Lack of oxygenated blood. Giving me the big bruised eye sockets and stinging red eyes. Also. It directly affects my vision. It sometimes can take 20 minutes for my vision to clear - blurry, unable to focus, large blobs of smeary vision. Ho hum. Not good.

One of my close friends is going through issues with her eyesight. Despite being a fighter and typically a verve for life. Losing her sight for her is a redline. If it happens. She is done. She shrugs off the advice from her various health care professionals about learning to adjust, and different lifestyle, and all of that soothing wisdom. She is done. I believe her. Very hard. I do not talk against her. Or offer her pretty comforts. I understand. I don't catastrophise it. But I do acknowledge it. And personally feel helpless against that inevitability. What can I do to help that ? Nothing. Zero. Powerless. I have to sit there. And take it, absorb it, as difficult and unhappy as that is. And all I can do, is just be there. As small and inconsequential as that is. Be there. Understand. Inconsequential and at the same time as important as it gets. 

In any case. I can. Sympathise. I think. To be honest. If that happened to me. The suicide fairy which already follows me around would absolutely take over. There would be zero pushback. Time to go.

I think. Really. Most people probably have those redlines. It's always a scale between continuance and quality of life. I don't think anyone believes that life at all costs is sustainable. At some point for the individual concerned, those scales tip too far in one direction, and quality of life dwindles to the point that the juice is not worth the squeeze anymore.

It is a subject that increasingly pops up amongst those in my age group or older. It's almost certainly a sign that we are all aging out, that life quality is declining, and questions about is it worth it heave into view.

For some of my friends that line is a lot closer than others. Serious health issues. Age and mortality.

The final cruel steps of the dance.

There are broadly two mindsets to this. Not right or wrong. There is the optimistic view. Glass half full. Look up to the stars and wonder, and minimise the awareness of the ever growing dark, the stumbling feet, enjoy what you have, whilst you have it. There is great wisdom in there. It's about minimising the suffering. To badly paraphrase buddhism, life is primarily in the first instance all about managing the pain. If you can't do that. Everything else is an also ran.

Then there is the pessimistic view. The realist perhaps. That perceives every lump and bump. That measures the objective capabilities. That perhaps over stresses the negative, the planning for the future, the permanent state of anxiety. In its origins, this is also wise. To purchase a fire extinguisher for a potential fire. To pack a puncture repair kit to deal with a flat tyre. Forward looking. Future planning. Always hedging against catastrophe. To not do this invites cataclysmic catastrophe. But. The problem with this. Is the mind is always focused on the things that can go wrong. Everything is a potential hazard. There is no time to smell the roses, only time to plan for all the potential fires. It is practical. It is also soul destroying.

It is for me again that simplified binary. Do you want to know or be happy. Do you choose knowledge and planning. Or living in happy ignorance. The answer is almost certainly some vague blend between the two, no perfect balancing point, just the best you can do. Fluke it. Your own balance. Personally I have done a lot of work on myself to rein in that always forwards looking planning for disaster side of me, and instead at times learn to live in the moment and just enjoy. I had to learn this hard for my mutts. Be present with them. Not in the awful inevitable future. Here. Now. Be content.

But anyway. 

I think those those two mindsets, or rather, that scale with each mindset at each opposite end of that scale, give you an indication - but not a guarantee - of where someones red line of quality of life lies.

In other news.

Yesterday I chatted to an old friend I haven''t spoken to in years. A cool falling out. If you want to call it that. A diversion of paths as well. On my end I failed to properly understand someone elses context. Not a mistake I often make. But. Also. I can see. With the recent therapy bullshit. It was uniquely tickled into that professional inner critic hard edge. Leaning into my own brutal standards. I can see the pattern. Also endless years of professional frustration of dealing with inflated egos and bullshit. And of course the winding path of psychological states themselves. I am also human and flawed, as much as sometimes I do - or used to do - a fair impression of a machine. None of that is an excuse however. I failed to properly take someones feelings into account. Something that is very much in my wheelhouse typically - but crucially, not when it starts to wander into professional spheres. I think the mild run in I had with the shrink where I caught her actively gaslighting me showed a little of this, in that I have hard standards for anyone that has a professional tag on them. There is a paradox there for me. In that I am very patient with people. And not patient with professionals. But I understand professionals are people too. 

Anyway. We talked a bit. About me. Which was the point I think, as much as I don't typically do this. We talked briefly about each touchstone. The loss of mutts and my mom. And immediately. I find it difficult. That sense of loss. It doesn't go away. I feel the emotions rise up and it strangles me. It's ok. I can deal with it. But. I acknowledge how powerful that is. The sting does not fade, particularly when I dive deeper with it, and get to the individual moments. Just. Ever so briefly. Touching on Athenas last sniff of grass. Which I can see with awful horrible crystal clarity. Is loaded with such emotion that it starts to trigger that too much, too intense, shut it all down response. Even now. Again. I brush across that memory and an instant strong reaction. Brutal. Holy shit. Like weapons grade plutonium. I still cannot wrap my head around it. It sits in my head as an unresolved paradox. A guilt and an argument about I did my best, I did not do enough, it was all I could do, I could have done something. Wrestled death into the mud. As absolutely irrational and insane as that is. It's not a super rational process. More emotional than anything, but backed with rationality which makes it worse. Often the best narratives, or lies, or causes have a seed of truth at their heart, layered with any number of manipulations on top.

In any case. It exposes in me that unresolved issue. I cannot wrap my head around the passing of time, the cruelty of life and death, the meaning in there, my actions and responsibilities with it. It always equates out to me as a horror and one that I cannot accept. At best. I leave it. Not ignoring it. Not denial. Just. Left in place as an unfinished unresolvable paradox. I suspect there is in there some deep universal wisdom from a human perspective. That not all things are neatly resolvable, somethings are always opposed to the human context and understanding of things. It's part of being human perhaps. Sitting uneasily in an uncaring nihilistic universe. And so there is that wisdom in there of letting it rest. We get back to the serentiy prayer here. Theologies, philosophies and universal context all - not unsurprisingly - rhyming and coming to the same conclusions. 

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
The courage to change the things I can, 
And the wisdom to know the difference. "

Serenity. To let somethings lie as they are. Unresolved. Unfixed.

Anyway. Tangents.

My friend has said he wants to help. Help out just pull a thing things together into order. It is kind. It makes sense. Perfectly reasonable.

And I find I can't accept the help. Because. Me.

Over the years I have been told softly that I am not good at asking for help. At first I wasn't even sure this was right. Is this right ? I don't think thats right. As time has gone on and I've been watchful it has dawned on me not only is this accurate, it's brutally accurate. And therapy. Again. Slowly, subtly, dragging things into the light. Oh. This is a major issue. And now if I drag it out into the light and watch it very carefully with my inner scientist. I can see just how strong that is and how it manifests. In detail. With notes.

I can describe the feeling.

It doesn't come from rationality initially. It is a bone deep feeling. No. Just that. No. It feels entirely wrong. Like gravity has reversed. That some fundamental threat has been expressed. Absolutely not. And then the rationality comes into cover the feeling. Well. I don't want to put people out - true. I don't want to be a burden - true. Much quieter. I don't count. Why would you do that. Who am I to accept help. Oh buddy. That ever present winding thread of insecure zero nurtured love. You are worthless.

It is absolutely pathological. This is a very hard and obvious edge to the mental damage I have. Psychological damage. Here if you want to look at it, is a very clear and hard bit of conditioning and damage from trauma. You can hand wave around and be ifs, buts and maybes. But here is a proper rubber meets the road, oh, this dog is beaten hard. So hard. It no longer has a choice. It can't even feel the choice. It just feels intrinsic.

I tried explaining this to my friend. Kinda. Pathological I said. Very concise. Unpack that like a zip file for further truth. Tricky. Unfair even.

Why are you like that.

Eh. Arguable. Perhaps you can argue that my profession and the weight of responsibility has some effect here. And also. The subtle but constant parentification of me in every relationship I have with people. That unspoken acknowledgement that Johnny will know, Johnny can do, I will just give this to Johnny. But really. The elephant in the room - and if you ask a shrink, my shrink - this is slam dunk directly back to my childhood. It is the brutal psychological cost that I carry half a century on and directly impacts my life in all sorts of ways. And ironically, in a specific scenario, makes me wildly more vulnerable than I otherwise would be. Strength, turned to weakness. Although again. The shrink would not call it weakness. Would call it a win. A strength. An adaptation required to survive. Remarkable. Well done. I however, am, unsurprisingly, far more critical of it. Not a win. Damage. Fuckery. Broken. It is one of our gentle bits of verbal jousting. The kind optimist. Versus the brutal realist. No prizes for guessing which of us is what.

Anywho.

I am sitting with it.

As ever. Intellectually. I get it. I am smart enough to get it. I have visibility all round.

That does not mean it negates the pathological response.

You can understand fear. Down to the nuts and bolts of the hormonal response.

It doesn't mean you wont jump when someone leaps out at you on screen.

There is no simple answer here. The question you're really asking at a high level is -

how do you fix pathological psychological trauma

Tricky. Super context dependent. Sometimes. It isn't fixable. Or even open to mitigation. Sometimes it is. What you can say, is that it's neither easy or quick.

But maybe one step you would take is talk to a professional. A shrink.

Well. About that...

But pity the poor shrink that has to fence with me. Up and down the cosmos. Do you have a fully worked out model of life the universe and everything that is epistemically clean ? No ? Pflah !

Yikes. 

Lastly, in other other news.

I have slowly started tinkering with graphics code. I am finding that at times of those small windows of peace. I can sometimes noodle with a bit of graphics code for 30 minutes here, and hour there. It is complex and deep. But. The AIs are helping here. Helping me pick up the thread between lapses of concentration. They fill in my gaps of attention. It has smoothed that curve out. They are phenomenal supportive technical tools. Truly a wonder. They will also likely be the death of us. But for the moment. How cool.

Currently I am using it as a bit of zen. Not sure how long it will last. But for the moment. It is tickling the faintest of interests in me. Sometimes I get up through the fog. And think oh, I could explore this today in code.

Guilt sometimes follows. I should be using this energy to work instead. But work. Is different. It's a source of anxiety. Not joy.

Eh well.

Heres a screenshot. It looks like nothing at the moment. But it belies the structure. There is here a voxel world. Just currently not generated. But technically working. I am slowly and with a little bit of enjoyment, building it out. The next step here is to make some simple test terrain generation. No textures. No lighting. All of that these days is easily boltable on afterwards. Just underlying structure.