Darth Lucas said:
Mike O said:
I don’t know, man, I get what you’re saying, but someone having cancer should probably put it into better perspective than it does.
Don’t even think like that man. I’ve dealt with my fair share of mental problems that I won’t share here, I’m mostly better and it’s not important, but one of my best friends suffers from many mental disabilities, OCD being the main one and (not that cancer isn’t serious, but) OCD and other mental illnesses are in my experience much more debilitating and hard to deal with.
Knowing as much as I do about the many conditions I have, I definitely know that I got off fairly lightly. Aspergers, OCD, anxiety, and depression can have effects to horrific to think about for some people. Man, do a quick Google search, you’ll see it destroy lives, families, relationships, and lots of other things. I got off lightly. Doesn’t make it any less frustrating, but I have to admit, it doesn’t exactly make me feel great when I think about how operatic I’ve made my own lesser problems.
I understand how it feels to feel like your problems aren’t really important when compared to other people’s issues. Skin cancer, when compared to other cancers, is really not that serious and is much easier to live with and treat, so I always feel a bit of guilt putting myself in the same category as those dealing with lung cancer, or breast cancer, or something more serious.
Hey, man, I want to say the same thing to you that you did to me, and that’s not to worry about that. Cancer is about as scary a thing as I’d like to imagine, so do whatever you can to fight, and fight like hell. I sure hope that you’re strong enough to beat it and that you get the help you need.
What you need to remember though, is that even if you feel other people have it worse, that doesn’t devalue your own struggles or invalidate them. Your life is valuable and if something, anything, is getting in the way of living your life, it should be taken extremely seriously.
Hell, thanks, man. I went out again with a buddy tonight to pizza and the movies. X-Men: Apocalypse deals with a lot of these themes in a very genre way (gods, Angels, mythology), so it wasn’t thrilling to have this stuff put so blatantly, but all the same, I did try. My mind did start a lot of buzzing: “It says BCE! I remember all of this ‘religion is dying’ talk! Look how this stuff ties into all of these important cultural aspects though! Blah, blah, blah.”
I have such a small social circle that it’s hard to do this kind of stuff. That’s not a criticism of my friends or anything, hell, far from it. But I do at least recognize that staying at home alone isn’t the best thing for this. The compulsions started spiking again when I got home, and that wasn’t exactly fun. I slept in until almost 2:00 today. Damn, man, this stuff messes with my appetite, what little libido my virginal self has, and my life in general. I used to think that well, if I did stuff to get away from it, I was just running from it, but more broadly, I think that it’s healthy too. OCD by definition isn’t rational, so doing something that can force my attention away from it is probably positive. I’ve reacquainted myself with Final Fantasy VI too, one of my all-time favorite things, and that repetition does give me a little comfort and structure. One of the things I’ve come to realize on a more personal level is that when I was in school-and at the risk of sounding arrogant, I was a damn good student, and diligent-I had very specific structure. I guess it made my life purposeful: study for this exam, think about this class, get an A. I guess I naively thought that once I got out of school, there’d be some sort of reward. Obviously, life doesn’t fucking work that way, and I think it got me directionless after that. I don’t know where to start looking for anything new at this point, I’ve been stag an and stuck so long. My grandfather just turned 82, I live in fear of losing him. You can bet I’ll be spending some of my vacation time with him. God willing he still has a few more years at least. No one thinking about an afterlife scares the hell out of me.
I know it’s fiction, but you can only see so many stories about adolescent sexual awakening before you think you missed a major part of life. Fuck, I’ll be 29 next week. “I want to lose my virginity, I’m questioning my religion, I’m awakening to different politics than my family’s, maybe I could be an activist, I should move out of my parents’ house, maybe I should learn to play an instrument, maybe I could write a book,” this shit is supposed to happen when you’re 18 so you fucking know where you want your life to go, not when you’re over a quarter of the way through it! I’m a fucking Lena Dunham millennial cliche. Pissed away so much of my youth now that it almost feels hard to think I could move forward.
Why can’t I focus on this instead of being upset and obsessive about atheists and such who have no bearing on my life or my own views? Shit, there’s a place for existnstial crises, but I think my therapist is 100% right to try to shift the focus towards these things. I think it’s true that many “existential problems” are a mask for nuts-and-bolts issues that people make operatic because they can’t solve them. I mean God, I’m telling them to strangers on the Internet (Incidentally, I’m supposed to be hanshotfirst1138. I don’t know how I wound up as Mike O to this day.). My doc is right about how I have to learn, especially with my overactive mind, about the overstimulation of the Information Age. Man, I can only imagine how hard it makes his job. Shrinks these days must have an insane job.
Sorry for all of this. It’s rambling, I know, but it feels good to unscramble sometimes. At least it gets all of this down, and some of it out. Sorry, everybody. I guess at least I’ve organized this a bit. I hope my ramblings aren’t too irritating. I feel a little better, at least temporarily. Not a lot, but it did feel good to get that out. Goddamn. That did feel good. Won’t last, but it felt good.
EDIT: Didn’t last. The compulsion struck again while lying in bed. God Almighty.