To Pursue Happiness

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For the last ten years, I haven't done much of anything except exist in a room. I honestly can't give a good reason as to why. Perhaps I just became so tolerant with my situation; accepting of the fact that I was going to die alone. Despondent after witnessing the ways that people seek to tear the world apart, and horrified with how nonchalantly this is greeted by the masses.

I have grown tired of this existence I have weaved for myself. It's oppressive, living each day the same as the last with such precision that all the days blend together into one monotonous blur in my mind. I want to change- I need to change. And unless I change, I will burn away whatever chance I have at pursuing a little happiness in my future.

But the problem is that I am not enabled to pursue happiness. I've undergone EEG Biofeedback sessions twice a day for three months to alleviate the panic attacks I'd suffer from eating in a student lunchroom, and I feel that that session has enabled me to do much so far, but I still lack the capacity to function as a normal human being on the day to day. I feel subhuman, like some sick joke of humanity that's incapable of the simple things everyone takes for granted. And it hasn't done much to alleviate all the logical fallacies I've unconsciously piled up against myself, that make me feel like I have no soul and that try and goad me to biting a bullet.

But I know I want to be happy. I know I have a soul, and intelligence, and my own blessings, but I haven't thought of myself as worth s**t. I believe such worth come from your successes, your actions, and is validated through your friends and loved ones. I've never had much: I have a good family, but I knowingly weigh them down with my own incompetence; I don't have friends that I can call to hang out with, or just to ask them how they've been; I am not fortunate enough to have a woman in my life, and quite honestly I doubt any woman would even want any of my problems- I am certainly reluctant to even date considering how heavy I feel my baggage is.

I want to change, to be happy, to improve my feelings of self-worth. To pursue a career that I have a passion for, to do something fun and interesting, to be able to leave something behind that doesn't say "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" but says, "Oh hey, you found my thing - I hope you enjoy yourself!" I'd really like that.

I just wish I felt it were possible.

How badly do you want to hang onto this? I think this belief - and that's all it is - could be causing you pain.

You clearly know that you are talented, and you have a high expectation of yourself. Is this helpful?

I love your last paragraph. Just because you don't feel it's possible, doesn't mean that it isn't possible in reality.

There are things you can do. What 'thing' could you do?

You come across as a 'good' person. I wish you well.

I think Octobertiger's implicit point that we are responsible for our own happiness is spot-on. Happiness is a state of mind.

I really think a lot of happiness is being careful with what we choose to fill our minds with, and being mindful of our thoughts, with a particular emphasis on not taking negative thinking seriously.

I served in naval intelligence back in the early eighties, during the Cold War. While there, I managed to wheedle my way into a lecture given to the officers by a dissident Yugoslavian priest who was kept in solitary for years by Tito. The priest said that the one thing besides his religious faith that enabled him to remain sane was thinking about all the good books he had read.

This is something I have never forgotten, and have tried to practice in my own life. Life, especially for aspies, is largely lived in our own heads anyway. We might as well furnish them with the finest accoutrements we can find.

What reinforces my belief even further is that people who spend their lives in front of a TV that never challenges them in any way is that once the TV is turned off, they become bored and disoriented; they simply have nothing of substance inside their heads to think on.

Thank you for the sentiments. I feel the belief is flawed in hindsight, but honestly, I don't have the capacity to justify my own existence. It's all I got.

I think the problem for me is that I learned early on I had, and what I clearly didn't. Few years before highschool, I got involved with a Duke Talent Identification Program- apparently, it was a big deal. By that time, the idea that I was smart had been drilled into me; I had good test scores, and had gotten a major reward for a psuedo-ACT score of some sort. I was sent out in first class, all expectations and excitement and hoping to meet new people. A few days into the summer program, and I realized (felt) I was the dumbest kid there. I saw real genius, the kid genius in college kind of genius, and everyone but me had it. It made me destroy myself. I threw away my thoughts, turned into an excitable puppy that chased after the squirrels on campus, and just stopped. Even stared to do some bullying. At the end of the session, I turned in an incomplete essay (basically all articles- I liked to have the article I was writing about on screen, and it was easier to quote if it all was on the page already). Got slammed for plagiarism, kicked out of the program, and was sent home in disgrace to never return. The only reward I got there was for chasing squirrels, and the only time I was praised was by my roommate, after I got out of his way and he got to third base with some chick.

Needless to say, I have stopped trying for a very long time now. As for what I can do now, well, there are options. I'd like to make video games, write a book or few. But honestly, I don't like myself, and feel like I threw away a part of myself that I can never recover. And it has burned me for so long that I've thought myself truly damned for what I've done.

I'm sorry to hear that, I really am.

You don't have to justify your existence. Really, you don't. The two don't go together.

I see being blessed with intelligence a bit like having a processor. You could have an i7, an i5, or whatever. Personally, I feel like I've got a quite simple one that's sometimes a bit overclocked, but hey. So you've got a processor that's 'better' than 95% of people, and you were with a very elite group. You weren't the best - but I bet you were the best at chasing squirrels. You now could be good at liking yourself.

The problem is simple - how to fill your time between birth and death. That's nothing to do with justifying existence, unless you make it so (and that belongs on another thread).

Perhaps you threw away something that you needed to throw away. Perhaps you could realise something odd - your life isn't your own, and you can never fully control it.

Find something you'd like to do. What do you really, really want? It's a question so few people can answer truthfully. If you can't answer the question, then torturing yourself is surely a simple option you can take or not take.

Because, self-hate is just another way of filling time. It's your call, it's as simple as that.

I acknowledge self-hate as a consumption of time. If anything, most of these ten years have been built on self-hate. And I recognize that I've been spending too much time on self-hate. I feel that I have isolated myself out of my self-hate, and as an Apsie I feel I lack the social capacity to change my isolation on my own. I feel I have the capacity to forgive myself, and the insight to know that this period of time has not made me any more capable of evil than I was to begin with. I know that my existence is a gift given to me. And I recognize that I have a lot of years of entropy to overcome.

I want to write my Chronicle. I really, really want to write it, and write it well enough so that I can look back at it and be able to say, "I did it right," so I am not haunted by regret and remorse for publishing those words. I recognize that I am intelligent enough to see to the task, if I dedicate the time and energy. And I am clever enough to know that my Chronicle, if I do a good enough job, has a chance of being a little special. That is what I want to do, without a doubt.

Evil? What is this evil you are speaking of? Is this another way of binding yourself in chains?

I'm not sure what you mean by Chronicle.

Next month is NaNoWriMo - check the thread in the Writing section. Maybe a good time to start?

G'luck.

Yeah, it's been more like my cage. Less so now.

It's my book idea. Bit of a shout out-to the Annotated Dragonlance Chronicles. Not the title, but I like calling it that. I have failed to do NaNoWriMo for many years now, so this year sounds like a good year to pull a combo breaker.

Thank you for the words, both of you. They were much needed.

Godspeed.