Journal de Henry

Journals
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I know this one well. Really well.

As a friend, asking yourself the question, "what is ‘pathetic’ made up of? Really? What comes up when feeling it without judgement of the super-ego’s "I should " and Id’s “I want”?“

Pathetic is a catch all term, loaded with morality. It’s a starting place to feel into it more. Feel, not think.

Feel it out. There is plenty more being suppressed, plenty else being corralled into things you think are acceptable things to feel.

Condemnation is socially acceptable. Feeling it out fully is not.

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She either doesn’t care or doesn’t want to care

I’m hoping it’s the second one and trying to play that whenever she sees me she’ll get more interested

I can see how that could work

I just don’t know. Really that’s what this whole situation is, I don’t know what is happening now or what will play out

I know that I’m here, at home, tapping on my laptop. Trying to unpack the situation.

So many times, I’ve come to the conclusion that my ability to relax about the situation creates the best chance of something happening

I keep getting pulled back into the emotions, which is understandable. They’re quite ingrained, they’re attached to such a strong desire.

Using my desire for intimacy to remove my desire for possession / love / sex

Right now she’s doing something, I don’t know what. She didn’t show up for the event she invited me to. She sent one text. That’s the situation.

The intimacy to be had is an intimacy with that situation. It doesn’t go any further than that. That is what is happening, it’s not what has happened. And I certainly don’t know where she’s at or what she’s feeling or thinking about me right now.

So much of identity is about believing I know this or that about what’s happening. That it’s so terrible, or so great.

And I’m addicted to the hope

I can make some judgments of what’s happening. I have some experience. But I’ve been so wrong so often… there are so many new situations, and we respond to ourselves, we keep developing new ways of doing things. It doesn’t hurt to engage with these situations, but the hope and the despair…

I haven’t been able to see how getting the girl isn’t always a good thing. It seems so solid to me

The possibility that it won’t come together, or that she wouldn’t be great for me, fills me with suffering

The suffering of loss

What I’m losing is my desire-dream

And I’m experiencing my fear of suffering

But the suffering is happening now inside of me…

The suffering is me right now…

And yet it’s [rejection] very real, indeed likely possibility… this is what I am

–

I’m basically saying I won’t appreciate her until she fits into my life in a certain way… until she performs

Who knows what she got up to today, or why, but she has her reasons. That’s what it is to be alive, to be a human

And then here I am feeling unhappy about that

That’s no good

–

Drama around being rejected by someone

People do reject sometimes… frequently, actually

Fear of being an untouchable

That’s pretty unlikely at this point, people do like me

But she has mixed feelings

I suppose that’s her business

But my fear gets wrapped up in it

That’s a bit funny

We’re all just bumping into eachother like that

Just automatically upsetting eachother

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I wonder what it takes for the dream of love to finally die? Do a lot of us have one foot in love and one in actualism? Are we feigning actual intimacy when we just want love? Can we truly make progress in actualism until the belief in love is truly dead?

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Our entire “well-justified psyche” is pasted over very basic drives.

Of course we want the opposite sex (or whomever that is in a same sex situation); our drive is to have the perfect survival/reproduction situation.

A male will endlessly convince himself that she is playing hard to get. And vis versa. Yet, desire is a plain as your nose when you encounter it.

To achieve the dream, both must equally desire each other, and what is more, be very similar at all other times. The same interests, the same world view.

I really like a joke I saw a while back; the game used to be to lock down the best you could get out of your village, pump out kids and die by 40🤣

Not now. The game is a complex intrigue of ever increasing levels of storytelling and drama.

Until it’s not.

You can find love extremely easily, as long as you go where your value is high. Because love is all about the value represented in the “eyes of the beholder”.

My recent foray really drive it home that all Personality Disorders are rooted in the “normal” way we seek value. We truly believe that we can sidestep the stark and brutal reality of nature, as if all the rules don’t apply to us. We call it love and mythologise it. Create endless stories about it.

Never fear though. You won’t have to suffer for long, as without a religion, the myth will die soon enough. Maybe a decade. There will be a few final death throes, a fleeting hope or two, before the final curtain.

The choice is either find a way to make actualism work, or start believing.

It’s not a impossible thing to reinsert back into the matrix. To forget. Happens all the time.

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I really like this, since I did the same thing myself. Since I am in love, I have found the answer to life and will never be unhappy again :rofl:

I can now neglect my personal ambitions and goals, and basically retire from living my own life.

Obviously, many won’t take it as far as I did lol

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And I really like your response; “I can now neglect my personal ambitions and goals, and basically retire from living my own life”

Indeed.

How much more appealing is it that our lives be ruled by the other. How much more seductive that we can revert to our 2 year old self and both rely on and rebel against the other.

This was the most revealing thing I learnt about NPD; that it is a continual reenactment of the seperation from the “mother”.

One is objectified, through the instrumentation of being subservient to the abusers desires, and so desires seperation. Yet, as one is nothing more than an object, one can’t gain autonomy.

I write that while my welfare dependant neighbours go ballistic. They are always yelling. It’s never a quiet conversation. Absolutely gutteral. (Spelling).

I have been there. The abject anger and despair. I never was government funded in it though. Subjecting my neighbours to it.

Still, I have better than a psychology degree in the psychology of a 2 year old.

Yesterday, I discovered something. That pain is exactly what I need to push into.

2 sets to failure. I realised that I avoid pain. The pain I always most adamantly avoided was admitting that love wasn’t what I wanted it to be.

Love isn’t what you want it to be @henryyyyyyyyyy .

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Yeah, we’d rather be a victim than take charge for our own life, our own happiness. We don’t want the authority over our own life. What if we actually had total control over our actions? What if we were free?

The possibility is too frightening, because it would mean we’d probably be alone. So we’ll take the chains of emotional servitude and binding, as long as someone will alleviate our loneliness.

Please, someone, take care of me :rofl:

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The difference, as of yesterday for me was pain.

I can see that the default for me is to avoid pain. When I chose to go through pain, it is for the ‘other’, never for me.

That is the basic template of the peasants, the slave, the cluster C; to suffer for the other is paramount. To suffer alone is sacrosanct. Against everything one hopes for.

Even the ascentic needs to be seen suffering. Whether a monk, or a Navalny, it’s only in the spectacular that one is a ‘thing’.

I’ve been quite moved by Navalny dying. Not because he died, but because he chose to. He had everything he needed to mount an opposition from Germany. Indeed, the entire Russian revolution was originally from Germany. He had everything needed to destroy Putin and the old guard. Yet, he chose instead to suffer and die.

Why?

Why continue to subjugate to abusers? What does it prove?

A woman who feins (spelling) interest is an abuser. A man who does it, the same. Is sexual attraction so powerful that we willing submit to abuse?

Apparently so.

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Suffering is optional.

It doesn’t live up to the highest standard to suffer on their behalf. Only the human standard

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@Andrew , @henryyyyyyyyyy

Maybe the best thing I’ve learned since we hung out on Slack.

Conventional wisdom is that caring about something means willingness to suffer for it. Unless you’re willing to suffer for something or someone, you don’t care enough.

I believed that. It can be true too! A lot of people opt out of life’s poignant joys and sorrows by not caring enough and not risking anything that might hurt. Life is emptier and shallower that way, but it hurts less.

But suffering heroically or not caring enough (which I suspect, @Andrew, you struggle with) is a false dichotomy.

(Edit: I mean I suspect you struggle with this false dichotomy, not with not caring enough!)

What if I do care enough about human unhappiness, including my own, so much that I actively choose to feel good because I care, not because I don’t! It actually solves the problem. If I see this clearly, I don’t have to suffer heroically to no avail, or brace myself against the unhappiness in the world, grit my teeth and try to feel good in spite of it. I can choose to feel good because of it, ie. because I care about it and that’s the way to solve it! Then it doesn’t feel like a fragile and defensive posture, it’s got the full, active force of you behind it.

If there’s something I still value more, I’ll eventually come up hard against a wall. (Relationship stuff tends to do that :laughing:). That’s fine. Then there’s another choice to make, or maybe another unreasonable condition to let go of. That’s how it works, right? How else to learn and proceed?

With that, I’ve shared the only two potentially helpful things I have to share here, so back to silent practice mode for a while.

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It’s infinitely better to be the answer than it is to ‘have’ the answer

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I’ve had a bit of weed edible and some coffee, in & out of PCE. Being alive has a sensual capacity that feels fantastic. Played hockey last night and I feel sore but in a way that gives me no trouble at all, it’s normal to be sore.

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I struggled for days with your comment because I hadn’t read it carefully.

Now I have read it with more attention, I think you are correct.

Caring for me though has so much anger in it. For the last 4 hours I have been hearing a child crying their soul out in the government building next door.

I am so angry. There is nothing I can do, at all. No one to call, and what would I do if I went over there?

Because I had misread your comment, I considered what it could mean that I didn’t care enough.

I felt the fact of my own disgust at the human condition. I feel the bind of being the very thing I hate.

I have been contemplating just how much I always believed in there being a solution. How much that was always mixed up with immortality and metaphysics.

How much can someone care? Navalny?

I had a Russian say to me the other day that he was a narcissist.

Can you imagine the twisting of facts needed to call someone who literally died for what they believed in a narcissist?

What’s more, how it’s a defence to denigrate someone’s heroic actions to justify one’s own cowardice.

That’s something I always objected to about Richard’s (I’m my view) take on Jesus.

Whilst it’s likely Jesus and those like him where tripping on psychedelics to believe what they did, there is something about that level of dedication which I can’t get to yet.

An attitude of total dedication. So my misreading of your comment wasn’t really wrong in one important sense; I quite obviously don’t care enough.

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@Andrew Oh man, I hoped that wouldn’t happen. You must have been totally taken aback that anyone could think that about you :smiley: It’s so obvious to me that you care so much about people that it hurts you like hell. I’m sorry I didn’t phrase that more clearly from the beginning.

I can flesh out the main idea I was trying get across. It might have some limits, but I think it’s a got some merit.

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I wasn’t upset by it, well, not in the "that’s so untrue, how dare you! " way, more that I considered that I often come across a whole lot more “hardass” online. I took it as something worth thinking about because whatever stories I tell myself, doesn’t mean other can’t see straight through them.

I like reading the message again, and the general idea of "if I really care, then truly enjoying life (H&H) is the ultimate expression of that ".

Living in the city seems to be one continuous trigger for me. I really am wondering if I could make some escape to the wilderness work.

One can only be "caring " for so long before the anger and sadness that one feels towards oneself and the world becomes a recursive parody of itself.

South island New Zealand. Looks appealing.

My one last guilt as a father seems to have been put to rest. My youngest son has got a great job ( thanks in a good part to me) and in that, will have all the skills to survive well.

I can retire to oblivion.

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It feels like Friday as I’m closing out this Wednesday at work, and I realized it’s because I no longer dread going to work tomorrow… every day is the weekend now

Ain’t life grand :wink:

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What’s the difference between work, a rave and a walk in the park?

One is work, the other is a rave whereas the other one is a walk in the park.

:partying_face::partying_face::partying_face:

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Insecurity relating to accomplishment

Accomplishment = recognized by humanity

So it’s insecurity abt not being recognized as impressive

I want to be recognized as impressive by others

It makes me insecure that I’m not

I’m the kind of person who feels insecure when others aren’t impressed by me

Well that is just pathetic. Better not to be that way

A void greets me…

The void is me.

And just like that I’m done.

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Have you noticed how insatiable it is, too? Even if someone is impressed with you today, what if they’re not tomorrow? :thinking:

I often like to exaggerate it to highlight how absurd / impossible it is. “I am the kind of person who will not feel good unless everyone is impressed with me all the time”. It’s so laughable, but these feelings do arise, and if my well-being continues to depend on it, that’s what it amounts to.

For me it’s usually a laugh rather than a void, but I get the picture well.

Your last line there is a little ambiguous. Do you mean done done, as in finito, this is your particular tattooed lady? Or done with this issue for now? :eyes:

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Yes, that was a passing thought… I’ve generated so many identities and ‘accomplishments’ throughout my life, and at times people are impressed for a little while, but it never lasts… they are at most a memory I cling to, and certainly not anything that changes much for my life.

Ha, not quite yet.

The void was a feeling of fear that came up upon consideration of not leaning on that particular aspect of identity. Because there wasn’t much of a storyline going I quickly saw it was only a feeling of void-ness… another 5 seconds of observation and it was gone.

I posted this here because of the remarkable simplicity and expediency of this investigation… my journal is filled with investigations that stretch on for pages often without resolution, but it’s getting easy now. The choice to not want to be that way is so straightforward that it’s easily made once it’s seen as an option.

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