Therapy is Driving Me Mad - So I'll Leave Therapy

Over the last couple of weeks and days I have increasingly descended into a miasma of introversion. It was a week or so ago when I decided that the reason for this was therapy. The little sub-audible whisperings of therapy-memory. I am blah blah blah etc. Which is why blah blah blah etc. Which is why I need to blah blah blah etc. I suppose I have been becoming increasingly two opposites - terribly terribly cross and terribly terribly apologetic. These two whirl around and around picking to speed until ... this morning I start talking quite calmly about the fact that I hate it then my voice becomes louder and finally I realise I am crying and The Snark (my ex-boyfriend/co-inhabitant) has quietly arm-enfolded me and I am explaining how thoroughly ... um ... DISSOLVING the whole thing is. To be imprisoned in a room with someone who thinks you have gotten it all wrong - and, not understanding it really, to agree and think IF I AGREE WITH YOU WILL YOU PLEASE JUST MAKE THIS STUPID ILLNESS GO AWAY?!? PPPLLLEEEAAASSSEEE?!? You know, that's her JOB. When people are somehow physically unwell - they just get cured. When people are somehow mentally unwell (even in some minor obsessional way, like me) then they get ... DECONSTRUCTED. And what is left? An intact body and no mind? No personality? A workable being/non-person/somehow-acceptable-person with nothing else? So you see if she wants to take away my personality - then I hope she has a new one waiting in the sidelines. She doesn't seem to. She doesn't seem to want me to have this personality or any other. And so I am retreating and retreating in a sort of passive-aggressive conscious catatonia. If everything I say and do is going to be unfavorably critiqued by her, I'd better not say or do anything. It's a life, you know, not a novel. If it's not stylistically in keeping with the others on my shelf - well - I'm not going to damn well rewrite myself for the sake of symmetry. If that will mean that I will have my life critiqued by idiots who don't/can't/won't mind their own business - then fine. I'm sure I can withstand that. If I don't have my foundations chipped away at regularly every fortnight by someone paid by the NHS/government to do so. And yes - the whole thing does make me paranoid. It points out to me the extreme differences which can exist (usually covertly) between my experience/theory-of-everything and those of ... those of the people who have had their views ... officialised? And then I have to pretend that I garee. And they know I'm pretending. And they try to make me better so that I don't have to pretend any more. And I look at them with incomprehension and a growing sense that they think that I'm mad. Simply - mad. And can't see that I'm mad. And I look at them with a growing contempt for the lack of their logic. Their inability/refusal to realise/agree-with-me that their views are no less of a sham than mine. They are just an easier sham. A sham that works for them. A sham that does for them what they want it to do for them. Whereas mine - amuses me. That's all I want really - for life to amuse me to entertain me and not to damn well expect too much of me. Not that I'm not capable of it - just that I hate it. And I (frankly)consider myself far to important to give up everything I enjoy - anti-social/removed/detached/pathological - as that may be - simply so that they will think I'm telling the truth when I exclaim in mock-surprise 'OF COURSE you are right - I should care dreadfully a lot about whether people like me [I've tried that - it didn't work] and about whether or not my world-view tallies with that of other people and about whether or not I fit into your capitalist society - yes pour the shame of me over me and how much better I will be! How much tamer [insert social-cohesion-producing fake-laugh here]!' Whereas actually I want to tear your face off. And call you an impudent bloody moron. And hole-punch your tongue [yes, I can see that...]. AND so on AND so forth until you finally LEAVE ME ALONE. Or make stop what I want you to make stop rather than making EVERYTHING stop. It would be far simple to just knock me out if you're going to take away my consciousness (in hiding from you) as well as my habit... And then I would have an excuse to retaliate. In refusing to attend any more therapy sessions, I am dismissing you. Dismiss whatever insults your own soul, Whitman said. Yes, well... GOODBYE. FUCK VERY OFF. I'm tired of trying to look at the world and finding that I can't really because my vision is too blurred with panic and wrongness and suchlike and trying to breathe and finding that I cannot I cannot and wondering if I am doing that on purpose to plummet myself into oblivion away from IT ALL. Yes - a lot of what I do I do on purpose. A rebellion. It's my life and I'll fuck it up if I want to, fuck it up if I want to, fuck it up if I want to, you would fuck it up too if you were so besieged by people trying to save you from yourself as though your self were something to be saved from. I'M. NOT. THAT. ILL. Get over it. What I am is very seriously tired of being defined, in a snowballing sort of a way, as some sort of tortured waif because I do this one little thing... It could be a lot worse. I'm tired of explaining of apologising of talking about it. I want to live as though it had never happened. As though it isn't happening. As though it will never happen again. I don't want to talk about it. Yes - I am talking about it now. But the point is - I am much more than a few unfortunate self-tearings. And maybe - has nobody ever thought of this - maybe I sometimes do that because I am overwhelmed by being happy...? A lot of the time, believe it or not, I really am terribly, almost faintingly, happy. And then I want to throw myself into the sea, smash myself against walls, somehow rend myself into atoms and dissipate into the ENTIRE UNIVERSE! Because it simply isn't fair, being one person - being at all limited. I don't live - I simmer. A lot of the time I want to scream - for one reason or another. But this focus on the wrongness of hysteria is so restrictive - I can't breathe in in, this corset of words inflicted on me by people who whom I don't agree. I DON'T AGREE!!! Is that alright with them? Evidently not. This is my arrogance. This is my lack of acceptance of other people. BUT WHAT BOUT YOU ACCEPTANCE OF ME?!? Do I not count? Saintly as the idea seems, of me accepting everyone in order for them to then accept me, it seems very biased, very torturous. In fact, pathologically torturous. I suppose what they want me to do is not to fling myself onto the ground and scream 'accept me - stamp on me and tell me I'm mad and kill my personality and accept me because by that point I will like you so much!' - I think they want something more subtle, more insidious. They want me to GIVE IN. NEVER!!! NEVER!!!!!! NEVER!!!!!!!!! They CANNOT make me. In that lies my autonomy, and I WILL NOT rescind it. This may all seem a little overwrought. The point is, though, I'm fighting for my life. I'd rather pull my hair out, tear myself limb from bleeding tearing dying limb, than give up on my identity. The first time I will allow myself to rot, to decompose, to come apart - is when I am dead. If my life is a game (and the metaphor appeals to me...) then I'll play it how I want. And anyone who doesn't like that doesn't have to play. I don't NEED anyone apart from ME. I'm perfectly happy on my own. I feel most that I am myself on my own. With other people I bend myself out of shape. And then stand horrified looking at the vandalism. I am going to BE MYSELF. And damn the consequences. Is that OK with you? If not, BYE.

Nothing to Declare - Just Some Pics...

Ugh

So... I've noticed that when I have pulled lots and lots of my hair out I feel really really aesthetically hideous. Which is really quite odd, as the rest of the time I generally feel somewhat Narcissistic... Perhaps it has to do which the level of control I feel I have over my appearance. When I pull my hair out I feel... Fatter. Which is absurd, because, medically-speaking, I'm not "overweight" (to put things into perspective, I'm 5 foot 7-and-a-half and 11 stone 4, which, according to the National Health Service's Body Mass Indicator calculator, is on the heavy side of healthy, but healthy nonetheless ). I would like to be slimmer, yes, but it's not exactly a major issue for me - most of the time. But when I pull my hair out lots and lots - even my face feels wrong. Typing this I feel as though my face is all wrong. Probably because I am tense because I am writing about Trich. But it feels ... too big. Like a carving of a face. Perhaps I feel too noticeable. And I feel, as I have mentioned, fat. Not just usually fat - a little bit delightfully plumpish like someone who eats one too many chocolates - no. Not self-indulgently fat. Fat like someone who eats fish and chips every day washed down with vast quantities of beer (which I don't - though both of those things in moderation do not entirely not appeal to me). I remember feeling SO MUCH better about myself when I had more hair. I remember flouncing in to university and listening to lots of people compliment me on my hair. It was fairly enjoyable. And now - I'm back to square one, almost. Practically no hair at all. I don't look all that bad, in my estimation - but hair does a lot for a face, and I certainly look, well, ODD, without hair. Prettily odd, but odd nonetheless. Not that I look all that un-odd WITH hair. That's not exactly my goal. Ugh ugh and more ugh. That's how I feel at the moment. And it doesn't help when the people around me tell me to stop being ridiculous and that I'm only trying to get them to tell me how pretty I look - because that's not it at all. I'm not fishing for compliments - I'm just expressing the way I feel. Hopefully only temporarily the way I feel. Because (all 'but I'm an intellectual bookish bluestockingish thing who doesn't really care about the way she looks' protestations aside) I really DO care about the way I look. I want to like the way I look. I'm USED to liking the way I look. I liked it better that way. So I want to recover that feeling and stop bugging those around me with my (rather painful) insecurities.

Having Reterned From Therapy...

So - I went to my therapy session. So - yes it was as always a little too intense. But - I think I begin to understand what my therapist means and, to some extent, agree. My main goal OF COURSE is to stop pulling my hair out. However - if I have to rewire my brain not to panic quite so much before I can achieve that goal, so be it. It's true - I do mostly pull my hair out when I am panicking about something or other. Which I do rather a lot - to the extent of feeling my heart beating away at my ribcage and being, because of that, in a fair amount of physical pain. Why? What can possibly be happening, quite so often, to trigger that level of alarm? I'm a girl not a forest faun ... and all that jazz. Well... For reasons I won't entirely go into here (no-one needs to know the exact details - except perhaps me - and I'm not sure even I do...), my brain (and I am quite prepared to believe this) has been wired to have a somewhat hyperactive alarm-system. So I am a little to often seemingly faced with two options - FIGHT or FLIGHT. Or, I suppose, fainting ... but that probably comes under the heading of FLIGHT. Not that I actually faint. I have been known, in extreme cases, to fling myself onto a bed or a sofa or a floor (whatever's handy) and sob - but not actually to faint. So I need to rewire my brain - to attain a new and more workable level of alarm-system. OK. I suppose I'll just have to be brave. Damn it - in so many other ways I really am. But I think I've attained such a level of endurance of alarm that actually I'm often not altogether aware of it. I'm used to ignoring it. To inwardly saying to myself 'It's perfectly alright, you know - you're being absurd - you really will just have to get on with what you're doing - KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON'. Keeping up a narrative-of-the-sensible is an awful lot less scary that listening to/reading The Narrative of Somewhat Excessive (in the Circumstances) Alarm. I am living like someone is some play by Sartre. And the Existential angst of it all is getting to me. Rationally, I really to believe that the world is, at least potentially, DREADFULLY dangerous. ANYTHING could happen. I am terribly (literally) imaginative. All this is rather OCD-ish. Invasive thoughts and all that. But part of me whats to stare these invasive thoughts in the eye (do they only have one eye? Are they, collectively, a cyclops?) and say to them 'I have you so I'm damn well going to endure you because I can take it'. But simply because I can endure something doesn't mean that it's a good idea (and then I come up against the slight - note the irony - problem that I don't actually believe in objective 'good', having had my ethical/ontological world shattered a couple of years ago by Nietzsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil'). OK - let's rephrase that then: simply because I can do something doesn't mean that it will lead to a more-enjoyable rather than a less-enjoyable state for me. Even if it doesn't ACTUALLY matter if the emotion that flitters across emotional whiteboard-linked-up-to-the-projector-of-my-sensory-input-equipment is JOY or TERROR - well, I like joy more. And if it's all meaningless, what does it matter if I meaninglessly choose joy over terror? 'A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.' (Oscar Wilde) *cue 'it's my life'*

Therapy, Therapy, Therapy...

Tomorrow, I have therapy... And the homework my therapist set me does not exactly meet with my undivided self-congratulation. My therapist has this theory, see, that my hair-pulling is linked to a desire she thinks I have to keep people rather at arm's length... To cling onto my pedestal like that barely-worshiped god Agatha Christie wrote about in one of her short stories... And so... She asked me to keep a diary recording my Interactions With Other People... Only I wasn't quite sure WHAT ABOUT these interactions she wanted me to record. So, retrospectively (because, having procrastinated for most of the past two weeks, I wrote most of this diary tonight), I have written a sort of Virginia-Woolf-esque stream-of-emotions. I'm not sure that was quite what she wanted. I have also thought about implications of the setting of the homework, i.e. that I need to change the modus operandi of my inter-personal interactions (initial reaction: why should I ?!?) and that I am somehow getting something wrong at present (apart from being somewhat shy, I'm not sure that I am...) and that my social life has a causal effect on my experiences with Trichotillomania (which, apart from - I'd say rather inevitably - making the Trichotillomania worse when any major social catastrophe occurs, I'm not sure that it does...). I feel... apprehensive. I'm going to have to admit to my procrastination. I'm going to have to race (probably in a tearing hurry - because I'm always in a tearing hurry if I have an appointment to go to - procrastination again) through the mean streets of Boscombe to the room in which my therapy occurs all the while trying not to be lynched and cannibalised by the roaming locals (what looks they give me, as I flutter by in my flounces and burgundy-coloured hats and vast faux-fur-collared coats! It is like an illustration of The Bohemian V The Proletariat). Scared scared scared. Of the rather intense therapist in front of whom I will sit, clutching the arms of the chair with white hands. Attempting to defend my world-view. Against the onslaught which I know is meant to help me - but which terrifies me. I AM HAPPY AS I AM. Apart from the Trichotillomania. She says, almost laughingly, that she can't wave a magic wand. But I want her to. There's a part of my mind that says that to wave a magic wand and get rid of my illness is her JOB - that that's what she's THERE for. And I can't help but feel that, if I had the money to pay for it, I COULD get someone to wave a magic wand - to at least give me an effective cocktail of drugs. Anything. But stamping my feet and having tantrums won't help. I HATE THERAPY. But I want to be better. I do so want to be better. So I will go - and I will endure it - and I will rant about it afterwards, all the while hoping that this questioning of my very deeply-held views - views which, were anyone to discount in any other context, would lead to the discounter being called, at least silently in my head, an idiot, indeed that's all the thought I would probably give them - will have the effect of stopping my hair-pulling. As an utter egotist, therapy is VASTLY challenging for me. I hate the idea of HAVING TO artificially try to agree with anyone. To override my authentic feelings and thoughts. But my authentic feelings and thoughts haven't saved me from Trichotillomania. SO - I demand of myself that I will do EVERYTHING in my power to help myself get better (and yes I have this somewhat dual view of myself - as what I do and what I want to do - how I am and how I want to be; I am a perfectionist).

Trich World

Today I looked at Trich World (a site for Trichotillomaniacs) and am at this juncture very enthusiastic about it. So... My plan henceforth is to write a blog there are perhaps copy my blog there to my blog here... I think that makes sense because then both my non-Trichotillomaniac friends who want to know how I am and the people already following this site can still read my blogs, but I can also reach a larger audience. Very happy!

Comfortably Numb - or - 'Don't Knock Neurosis'

I have very little to report - as a Trichotillomaniac I have been, today, a complete failure. I pulled one hair, one single hair, out of my head - and it was sticking out - and I couldn't be bothered to get any scissors (MISDIRECTED PERFECTIONISM ALERT! MISDIRECTED PERFECTIONISM ALERT! BLEEP BLEEP!). That last outburst is the result of having, during this long long Summer Holiday from my Place of Education (otherwise known as the experience of being a graduate) allowed my sense of humour (which had, while I was at university, turned into something I would like to think of more as wit than as mindless hysterics, generally) to revert to my old, pre-university running around with arrows and pretending to shoot them at trees (this actually happened earlier...) and bursting into volleys of laughter for no reason in particular. While the friend I was with made an animated aeroplane on the computer - NNNNNEEEEEOOOOOWWWWWW - making it fly becuase I said that if it didn't fly it wasn't a plane. *blushes* I am 22! Anyhow. Along with all that I have not really been worrying about anything. Or, if I have, I have been not really caring enough about it to keep worrying about it for long. I suppose this is how most people live, most of them time, delightfully infused with the sense that they are terribly important, and that they world is terribly important, but that there isn't very much they can do for about/for/regarding either, so they might as well not worry about them. The alternatives are the following: 1: joylessly martyr oneself on the alter of the world, thus adding not a jot to the aforementioned (no no no no no!) or 2: martyr the world, if necessary, before one martyrs oneself, because, of the two, oneself is more one's own responsibility than the word is. Indifference-in-the-face-of-one's-own-limited-capacities is possibly the most pragmatic of these three options. But is that selling out? I rather think it is. Not selling out any more than most people sell out - but selling out all the same. But my foremost priority has to be myself. And if not striving for anything means, strangely enough, that I don't tears myself to pieces like piece of machinery on full steam with something jammed between its whirling cogs ... good. Rest and recuperation. Effort expended is not always proportionate to reward reaped. Indeed, Excess of Effort Expended (EEE) seems to be directly proportionate to wReakage Reaped (RR), i.e. the undoing of what was done when one was not overexpending oneself like a rubber-band pulled round the world. The point being, my relationship with my Trichotillomania is neurotic.The following is from Wikipedia:

As an illness, neurosis represents a variety of mental disorders in which emotional distress or unconscious conflict is expressed through various physical, physiological, and mental disturbances, which may include physical symptoms (e.g., hysteria). The definitive symptom is anxieties. Neurotic tendencies are common and may manifest themselves as depression, acute or chronic anxiety, obsessive-compulsive tendencies [as in my case], phobias, and even personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder or obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. It has perhaps been most simply defined as a "poor ability to adapt to one's environment, [absolutely - why should I - I may be ABLE to adapt to my environment, but I rather think my environment should adapt to me! And, if it's not able to, does that mean that my environment is neurotic...?] an inability to change one's life patterns [in my case that of self-creation, happiness, panic, self-destruction, miserableness, and self-renovations, cyclically), and the inability to develop a richer, more complex, more satisfying personality (I try to create myself definitively - and am thoroughly alarmed when I notice any change concerning myself - it seems like the changing of the paint of The Picture of Dorian Gray - some sort of deviation from what I have, very rationally, decided to be - an imposition of small-scale evolution into The House of Art).

Actually, I was rather self-destructive during the last ten minutes. *puts on hat* Possibly because my pop-up-blocker suddenly decided that it didn't want to block pop-ups and I found myself suddenly confronted by a wall of sound and light blared by some tabloid I was casually scrolling through - as I sometimes do, because the tabloids are so much more dramatic, so long as I don't have to pay for their trash. *sips blazingly hot coffee*

Why the above train of thought (about neurosis)? 'Martian Time-Slip' by Philip K. Dick (1964). I read it a couple of days ago. I have been reading Philip K. Dick novel after Philip K. Dick novel lately. Thus far I have read circa nine. Three of them in the last week. I find them - terribly terribly comforting. In them, people are bewildered by things much as I am bewildered by things. And they seem to get along with much the same mixture of panic and delight and amused-ness and sheer wonder-filled detachment as I do. Quite apart from aliens (or is it quite apart...?) they seem to be about alienation. Or at least - about the varying degrees between being utterly alienated and utterly osmosis-ed. I can relate, to varying degrees, to both of those - which is perhaps why I am less familiar with the middle-section of experience. Anyway. The following chains of words (mind-forged-manacles?) struck me as having a bearing on the subject of this blog:

'It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.' That reminds me of the moment, quite some time ago, when I said to someone that I wished the world were controllable via remote control. And they said something to the effect that it would be rather less entertaining and surprising if it were. And I thought that it would be simply rather less potentially frightening if there was that sort of graceful gliding around to no purpose one finds in visions of unalterable Edens. If I pull all my hair out, at least it can't be imperfect. It can't be imperfect if it doesn't even exist. (Unless, of course, with Aquinas, one considers existence a necessary predicate for perfection...) But then the same could be said about my entire self - hence perhaps my occasional impulses to go not-at-all-gently into that black night - to fling myself very dramatically from something like Manfred (Byron's Manfred, not P.K.D.'s Manfred). But then what would be the point? I wouldn't be around to enjoy my lack of imperfection, my dust to dust and ashes to ashes would scatter like an exploded window-to-the-soul (MY soul) and prance into panthers, flutter into starlings, burst into the stars from whence they came... And suchlike. And I wouldn't be around to see it, except as inchoate atomic portions of other selves, animal, mineral or vegetable. So utter self-destruction is out, unless something very dreadful were to occur. It just wouldn't be cricket. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON and all that. I'm not a French Existentialist. I'm a post-Wilde-post-Ancient-Greek-Hellenism-post-modern-post-Nietzsche-sensualist-with-unfortunate-Post-Christian-Saint-Ascetic-tendencies. If that sort of conveys the cultural soup I find myself drowning in. No - not cultural soup. There's no such thing as culture any more. I'm not being an elitist snob. What I mean is - there is no such thing as cohesive culture (Dostoevsky perhaps saw the beginning of this), there is only Post-Culture. We are reviewers of all that has gone before. Nothing really new is being done - it can't be, because we have only aggregates of Past Times stitched together like dead Frankenstein's monsters - reanimated by the vitality of the people dressing up in them. The point is - I am then left with the rather mammoth task of constructing myself, on rather a moment-to-moment basis - or just playing along and feeling like rather a fraud. I remember the time when, having long outgrown my little pine child's bed, I was bought a new, rather more adequately-sized, bed. I wanted the double, rather square one, with the dark surround and then I would put a dark board over my window so that there was no light (I decided) apart from the artificial one (which was somewhat central) and then the squarish room would be perfect (apart from the door not being central (I wondered if I could cover it up...). I was told that I could have the bed I had chosen. And then a bed was delivered. A totally different bed. 'There has been a mistake!' I exclaimed, my heart pounding, appalled by the enormity of the dissonance between what I had expected to happen and what had actually happened. It was nightmarish. I tried to liaise with my mother. Tried to make her see the horrificness of what had just happened. Tried to persuade her to absolutely not take the packaging off in case that got in the way of sending the bed back and getting back the right one, the one which had been ordered. She informed me that this WAS the bed that had been ordered. But that was impossible, I told her - I had been told that I could have the bed I had chosen. Well, you have this one now, she told me. And ... so ... I absolutely refused to let her take the packaging off the thing. I absolutely refused to sleep on it. Eventually, a relative I was more likely to obey came round (was probably asked to come round) and persuaded me, still utterly traumatised, to take the packaging off and accept the thing as my bed - which I did, out of sheer politeness. My squarely-symmetrical room never did come about. But - even now - I can't help but wonder why the Hell I couldn't have just been allowed to do what I wanted? Why was what I wanted so unreasonable just because those around me didn't emphasise?

'...a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.' This, to some extent, is why I am somewhat nervous about the therapy I have been undergoing. Pulling my hair out is, my therapist says, a tool, a tool with which I let myself off the hook, so that society (which, she says, I seem to see as something generally hostile, people-I-am-not-ever-so-slightly-nervous-of being the exception to the rule) won't expect anything of me, so that I am seen to be flawed and broken and am left alone. Well - what's so not-sensible about that?!? If everyone were to/were to be allowed to interact with me all at once - OH the chaos. I would much rather flit from flower to flower and avoid the weeds. Surely that's what everyone does, to the best of their ability? Anyone who willingly endures being around anyone they can't stand is more or less self-harming in a manner I consider to be actually more harmful than what I have done. And what's the alternative, exactly? Hide? (Agoraphobia. I've seen what that does to people. It turns them into strange, pale beautiful creatures who expect more and more and more of themselves, because they are terribly out of touch with what everyone else actually achieves - until they dare not go out for fear of being unmasked as being utterly inadequate. When they are very far from being utterly inadequate. That is my experience of the thing, anyway.)Stride around looking formidable? Accept everybody as equal in the eyes of The Lord, despite having only my own necessarily judgmental eyes to look through? I reserve the right to pick and choose my allies and - to some extent - my enemies. About most people I am benignly indifferent. That probably manifests itself far more favorably than the more passionate attachments of Most Other People (an entity referable-to as MOP - or THE MOP - which is, I suppose, preferable to THE MOB). My therapist (in, to some extent, disagreement with me) doesn't want to substitute the Trichotillomania-tool for some other tool. She wants me to stop using any such tool at all. And to LIKE EVERYONE! Or that's how it seems to me. And the idea fills me with horror. It feels like falling into some nightmare pool of flailing THINGS and being subsumed into them. Just writing about it makes my heart race, as though I should run away from it. 'From childhood's hour I have not been as others were I have not seen as other saw I could not bring my passions from a common spring...' (Poe). I want to be apart from the rest of the world, to some extent. Otherwise what's the point of being a single individual at all? It is like expecting me to be humanity, all at once, a Krishna of whirling limbs omnipresent and timeless-and-yet-somehow-time-permeated - all at once. Very Panthiestic - but I'm not ready for it yet, not until I die.

What does the future hold, between now and my dissolution? Well - as I told myself year after year in little videos filmed for myself telling myself, with compassion, that if, by a certain fixed date, I didn't stop pulling my hair out, I would kill myself (on compassionate grounds - how strangely happier I always felt after I had made those videos, as though I had given myself a date beyond which I was guaranteed not to suffer), I would rather like it to be Trichotillomania-less. Don't worry (if you were): I'm not in the least suicidal now. I very rarely have been ever. A handful of times - like, probably, most people. But those videos expressed absolutely the horror I feel at the idea that I will pull my hair out for all of my life. It would be, for me, a defeat. An absurd defeat. It would not be worthy of the best that I am (post-modern value-judgment-less-ness aside, for a moment). If there's anything I damn well will get my own way about - it's this. And if that means not sinking my teeth into happiness quite so ruthlessly and in quite so exhausting a manner - resting and recuperating, in other words... - then so be it. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be...