Goals, or rather the lack thereof. in Journal of life stuff

Where to start…

Over the last week I hit a high point of 208.8lbs. To say that frustrated me would be an understatement. But over this weekend I went to Habitat, did some good work there, and found the rest of Saturday and Sunday to be utterly chill. So chill that my anxiety was gone for about 2 days and I lost all the water weight down to 205.4. Yay! What caused me to lose the anxiety?

A few things. I stopped sticking to a sleep schedule. I found that when I stayed up late into the night, like, 4am or later, I would eat at 10pm, and not be hungry again until 6-8 hours later. For comparison, I get hungry every 4 hours if I am awake during the ‘day’. IE: 9am, 11am, 4pm are when I normally get hungry, no matter when I most recently ate or what I ate. But when I’m up at odd hours I feel somehow more free, like the world is just…not there. I need to unpack that and figure out what’s going on, but for now, I’m back on a normal sleep schedule because, ya know, being a functional adult and whatnot.

During that same weekend I discovered an up and coming musician. Normally I’d mention this person by name, but given what I want to talk about, I’d rather not have anyone contacting them. I hate that I have to protect myself in this way, but the ratio of morons on the internet to rational, reasonable, people is far too overboard in favor of the morons.

Anyway, this artist is gorgeous, and very talented at playing their instrument of choice. Their singing voice is also quite good. Is it perfect? No. Not by a long shot. Are they a musical savant? Hah! No. They learn quite slowly actually. But they have a good head on their shoulders and when I really sit down and look at it that’s the thing I find most intoxicating about this person. If I wanted a pretty musician, there are hundreds of them. People who can play a given instrument very well aren’t that uncommon. Good singers are even more common. Combining the two makes them more rare, but meh, I am happy with either. Both together isn’t really twice as good to me and my preferences.

Rather, it’s the fact that this person is about my age, the gender I’m attracted to, and has a good head on their shoulders. It’s the fact that I see them overcoming many of the same struggles I’ve had. Yet, they do not suffer from the crippling laziness and lack of direction I have. They have a goal, and they want to pursue that goal with a level of endurance that can only be described as human.

Lest you not understand…humans are the most enduring creatures on earth. We can kill any animal in the animal kingdom without weapons. How? We run after it. “Oh, but a cheetah is faster!” Yes, but not for very long. A human can run at 10 miles per hour for 12 hours straight. That’s 120 miles. There isn’t another animal on the planet that can match that pace. Well, birds, but, yeah. Humans can’t fly (without help). So, to say someone has ‘human endurance’ is actually to say they have the best of the best. Sir! With Honors! :p (a serious compliment became a meme, because I’m slightly insane like that).

Anyway, that’s what attracts me to them. They’re gorgeous and they’re driven. And I think about what I would do in their life, how I would add to it, and the answer is, I’d just try to be useful. I could keep in touch with venues and handle payments. I can build computers and deal with the backups and storage for all the video and audio files. I can help move gear in and out of venues. I can drive. I can pay for things this person’s income can’t afford yet.

And this is the point at which mental illness comes forward. I have had crushes on celebrities before. Haven’t we all? My crushes were rarely romantic. Mostly I wanted someone I looked up to and cared about to acknowledge I existed. None ever did. Out of all the fan letters I wrote, none ever received any indication that they were even read, much less a reply. I never stayed a fan after that. I can’t love someone who ignores me. Everyone ignores me. Ignoring me isn’t special, it’s hateful. And before you ask, no, I was not one of those weirdos who found their actual home address and sent the letters directly there. I went through the fanmail address, like a normal person. Geebus.

So I’d move on. I tried to meet celebrities I cared about in person from time to time. The first one I ever tried to meet was R. Lee Ermey. I got to the place he would be at only to discover that you had to pay to meet him, and on top of that, the line to meet him was about 3 miles long (no, literally, 3 miles). So you’d pay some money ($20? $50?) and then stand in line for hours, and you got 15 seconds while he signed something and said a few words…I didn’t try to meet another celebrity I cared about for the next 10 years. After 10 years, I had forgotten how it worked, and I tried to meet another celebrity, this time from youtube. I did get to speak with the man himself, but…I didn’t enjoy the experience. As I said, the thing I want most of all is for them to care about me, and they just don’t. They aren’t well-formed sociopaths (I’ll explain that in a minute). It’s utterly unreasonable for me to want what I want from them. But I do. I haven’t found the patch for that particular bug in my personality yet.

What’s well-formed sociopath? So, sociopaths get a bad rap because everyone hears the term and says “oh, serial killer, murder, and generally bad person!” but that isn’t actually the case. If you are a sociopath who is raised in a loving home, and treated with respect and tolerance, then you grow up to be a person with an intense love of other people. You become the kind of person who becomes a career fireman, explosives ordinance disposal, or other high-risk society protecting job. You are willing to die for people you’ve never met simply because you love them for the fact that they are humans. It’s like how a dog (golden retrievers are great examples) just loves everybody. It doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve done. It just loves you because you’re there. But unlike a dog, there’s the full intellect of a human behind that love. That makes it intense in a way I do not know how to describe.

The badly-formed sociopaths? The military makes a lot of them. And there are more than a few serial killers who are sociopaths. The children you know/knew who torture squirrels, cats, dogs, and other living creatures (setting them on fire, crushing them, etc) are sociopaths. Good or bad is actually not yet determined. Even the well-formed ones may have tortured mammals during their childhood. Why? Because to the sociopath, the world is a sandbox. There are no rules. And rules only apply if they are universally enforced. A rule that is only sometimes enforced isn’t a rule. If nobody ever says to them “don’t torture that animal!” and explains why it is wrong, then they think it’s ok. If they abuse the child in making that point, they make the child worse. You have to fix a sociopathic child with love, never hate. They have to be taught that people are worth protecting, rather than worth nothing.

Like everything, it’s a spectrum. You get end up with people raised with enough love that they won’t murder anyone, but enough hate that they refuse to care about the common good of humanity outside of the people they personally know and care about.

Anyway, hat value would I be in this person’s live? I would live to serve them in exchange for them caring about me and what I do for them. I used to believe people when they said that wasn’t a good way to live. What the fuck do you think a stay-at-home wife or mother is? Sure, some of them are leeches, but many of them want nothing more than to focus everything they have on being the best mother or wife they can be. They want that to be their profession. Acts of service are a valid language of love, for both giving and receiving. Any language can be the basis of a healthy and functional relationship.

The exact moment I realized that my joy at finding this new musician had crossed from reasonable to unreasonable was in the moment when I was seriously considering becoming a patreon to them for the sole purpose of pledging something silly like $400 a month to them (their top tier is like $30). Why would I do so much? Because the reaction I wanted was for them to go “holy shit wow, who are you? What do you want?” because that’s the normal reaction such people have. It’s the same reason I tried being a sugar daddy to get around my issues getting anyone to date me. I want to use my money to get my foot in the door and start the conversation. And that is just an utterly unhealthy place to come from. Especially with this musician. Even though they would be many commonalities and shared interests between us, they wouldn’t be able to see them.

And, most of all, what happens the day I don’t get what I want? What happens the day an e-mail gets ignored, or gets a short reply, or I realize that this person will only ever entertain my existence as a courtesy, and will never become my friend? I get sad, I get lonely, I reset, and nothing gets better, except that the other person got some money and I got false hope. It’s a mental.fucking.illness.

But hey, improvement. I identified and acknowledged the problem faster than ever, in just 2 days from onset. That’s a hell of a lot better than I’ve managed any time in the past. Normally it would take months or more.

I do think I will try to meet this person, but I will be methodical about it. If they have a U.S. tour I will see what cities and try to pick a smaller one. Meet them in person (this individual tends to also collect the tickets themselves, because that (used to be) the scale the operated at). Get a feel for their energy and interest in other people. See if there’s a door to crack open, or if it’s firmly sealed shut to anyone that doesn’t meet their obvious visual and hobby standards.

If I just shift my focus a few degrees though…this person has a clear focus and goal in their life. I don’t. I used to want to lose weight so I’d be attractive to women. I lost the weight and nobody cared. And if you think it was a personality problem, I took my exact same profile and put it up with the photos of an average guy I went to college with. I had the exact same profile in every detail except the pictures. And you know what happened? In 16 hours that profile got more views and messages than I’d gotten in the last 5 years. It was purely down to looks. I’m apparently ugly. I don’t understand that. Everything’s where it’s supposed to be and correctly shaped. But whatever.

I thought I had to have a career and stable employment. But again, nobody cared. Having a job was ‘expected’ despite so many women dating guys without them. I…the problem isn’t that I’m some sort of incel. The problem is that every goal I’ve ever set for myself I’ve either obtained, only to find out that the thing I wanted wasn’t at that goal, or realized that the goal was pointless and would not yield any desirable outcome.

What I want is to live my life in service to someone else who I deem worthy. What I want is to be valued for that service. I suck at setting goals for myself. Let me make your goals my goals. That’s what I want. I want a direction to fall back in when my own methods fail. I want somewhere to run that isn’t my own mind. I want, in the most realistic sense, a home. Not 4 walls of plaster and wood. A home, a place where people know me and care about me. Even if that home is my car. I want a home. I want a people. I want a tribe. I want a community. I want a person. That’s the root of my mental illness. I’m lonely. I handle it well compared to many, but just because I don’t take my loneliness out with bullets and bombs doesn’t make it any less damaging to me and society. It just makes it more private, and easier to ignore.

I need a goal.