Dinkaltranen

I don’t read nearly as much as I pretend I do, but I read far more than anyone thinks or pretends they do. I’ve cut down on my drinking until recently by setting rules for myself.

1. Only drink while reading, writing, or social situation.
2. One drink per 50 pages, or an hour, whichever comes longest, because a lot of the time I take notes as I read. For writing it’s 800 words or an hour.
3. I must have had 2 meals throughout the day.
4. No drinking after 12.
5. No drinking around friends. This one is going to be modified later as I can figure out what and how to drink around friends without wanting to kill them or myself.
6. If a social situation arises, pregame 2 drinks, doubled to 4 if women are around. Then stick to beer, because there is not a single beer on this planet that does not taste like water filtered through a carpet that has had a cat piss on it daily for 20 years straight.
7. Don’t fucking do anything if I’m drunk and I feel compelled to. Generally speaking I’m usually pretty great at this one.

You’ve gotta get worse before you get better. And boy have I gotten worse: mentally speaking. My grades are better than ever. I’m cooking more. I’m living properly, exercising, sleeping, looking after myself okay, the whole nine yards. Yes, I have done this before, for long periods, from the time I was 17 until maybe 20, then on and off until 22, then I exploded. Positive things or stability are so alien to me and often meant that something very bad is going to happen. I could feel an episode coming on, especially after a very turbulent session with my psychologist, in which we had a very unpleasant counter-transference. But I was sticking to this lifestyle. I was following the rules. I dropped some subjects and started doing less, but trying to do more of the things I know are important. Immediately, upon this stability, this positivity, my mental plummeted. Suddenly it seemed like everyone in the world wanted something from me, to talk to me, to engage with me, and in each one I saw myself harming them in response. My nightmares came back.

PTSD nightmares I have found are best explained to people as the experience of dreaming while having a fever. Not a fever dream, per se, but a nightmare in which you cannot wake up, which loops constantly, and the entire time you are barely conscious. You are sweating, shaking, moaning, whimpering, shivering, and you are trying to get yourself awake, but you can’t. Even if you do, you find yourself so exhausted you get up so that you don’t get into bed, and accidentally fall asleep on the bathroom floor instead for the same result. The medication stops a lot of the physical effects of the dreams, but also tanks blood pressure and testosterone. I don't take them much anymore, unless the dreams really don't stop. I'd rather just change my sheets each day when I sweat through them.

Either way, this makes one exhausted and fragile, and I was still trying to maintain stability despite it. And I found myself writing thousands upon thousands of words of letters to people, most of which I didn’t even have any contact with anymore. I was finding myself having to hold back in simple conversations with strangers. I needed to be restrained, or rather restrain myself.

So I did the only logical thing a person can do and bricked my phone by taking out the sim, turning off the wifi, and turning it into an mp3 player. Then I pulled out or disabled any device with internet access in my home. First for just a day, then I had to put those things back in to verify a university login, for fucks sake, then for what I thought was 3 more days but was actually 2 and a half in its longest form, and 4 or 5 days in total combined time. I violated rule 7 in putting my sim back in. And I so wish I hadn’t. About 50 messages from half a dozen people first in sms then rcs flooded in. A dozen missed calls, half of which left messages. It was quite overwhelming to realise how much I communication I had been sent, and how many people expressed concern about my absent reply, some people thought I blocked them. My attempt to protect others from my wrath backfired, but not only that, it seemed like the protection itself was the wrath. As usual, I began to doubt whether or not this was the actual intended effect all along. I was stone cold sober and of relatively clear mind when I made the decision of disconnecting from everything.

But I was relatively stewed when I first plugged my phone back in. After processing and replying to the messages, I realised how much I had hurt and upset people with my ‘protection’, and drank myself to sleep. This ended up all being very expensive emotionally and financially. Less financially expensive than when I lost my headphones the other week, but emotionally expensive enough that I’m still not really able to go out.

Either way after I fell asleep I had a most strange, Freudian dream. I was playing/standing in for Will Graham style character, and I had a girlfriend who was a journalist. I was on the run from something, and everyone thought I had committed the crimes of Hannibal Lecter. Or rather, I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time for good reasons, but the only one who knew I was innocent was me, and the only one who cared about proving my innocence was my girlfriend, who then went to seek out Lecter. Spoilers, she dies, I remember distinctly finding her body, eaten down to the bone in various parts, in a pile of trash bags outside my house. From this I assumed that Hannibal was a killer and went to his office, where for some reason I came in as a patient and we had a sit down about what this whole dream meant, in a very meta sense. “Why did you kill and eat my girlfriend?” I ask.

“Well, how does it make you feel?” He said, with a dry smile.

“What I’m feeling right now is distress, I feel like I killed them and killed everyone else they said. What do you think that means?”

“You feel nothing for your girlfriend?”

“My dream girlfriend. I feel betrayed most primarily, I feel betrayed more than anything else, that people would think I did all these things. Then there’s loss, despair, that this betrayal lead to me pushing someone who cared about me to an action that lead to their death. They died trying to help me.”

He doesn’t react to that. Finally, matter of factly he says: “As for the devouring, I think that’s quite obviously a consuming force. Your well meaning actions lead to someone, or your relationship with them, being devoured, killed, harmed as they attempt to help you, and it looks like your fault even though your fault is at most the consequence of unfortunate circumstance. Aside from that I’d say that probably means you’re gay.”

At which point I woke up. I felt for the rest of the day like my girlfriend had really been killed as well as many of my friends and peers. My sexual orientation hasn’t changed. Still only attracted to women. At least that part didn't seem affected.

I want to go away for a long time, so I clearly haven’t learned my lesson, but I must try and maintain stability, no matter how much it feels like I am signing away my being for nothing. Despite acknowledging that I do not deserve to live, I still manage to find so much resentment in having to live with my mistakes. The dissonance is staggering. If the mental energy isn’t going to suppressing trauma, it’s going to suppressing the fallout of it, and that’s a lot of energy.

I am far too stupid to best the smartest person in almost any room I walk into. Thank God my friends are smart, it gives me a much needed escape. It’s a pity I’ve spent so much time playing the part of the Count of Monte Cristo that I am unable to speak properly, and that makes me seem even more retarded than I actually am in comparison. Becoming articulate is hard. Just look at this website, the harder I try to be articulate, the less genuine it feels. The less concise the more genuine it feels.

What a long winded way of sharing a dream. Clickbaited you with that title.