Low-energy being, the Parasite, inner conflict

I have been seeing myself as a ‘low-energy’ being these last few years. I am surrounded by active creatures who can rush from place to place, miss a night’s sleep and not be wiped out for the next week, fill their schedules and carry out routines.

Ah, these are the normal-energy people to whom I am in comparison low-energy?

I don’t normally have ‘epiphanies’, but very recently I realized that perhaps my low-energy is not due to a lack of capacity, but that my capacity is constantly drained. As such, taking on new things or doing normal-people things is just too much strain and the system shuts down. The psyche is processing constantly and all the while made anxious by a hostile society, further hampering its processing. Perhaps a degree of ignorance is required to get through it, a mask I simply cannot don so ‘late in the game’ of life. So it must be lived with and dealt with.

This force I have come to personify as the Parasite. There is something which constantly sucks and feeds away at the soul, a force which holds back and prevents rapid growth or moving forward.

But this raises the further question of what is this Parasite and where did it come from? There are definitely social forces at work, values which exalt some people and not others. The effect is something like a parasite – all other things being equal, for a person of my complexion to take a step forward will be harder than for something with a more ‘favourable’ complexion. Likewise people raised with more favourable entitlements, opportunities and expectations will be much more prepared for ‘success’ when they don their smart shoes and step into the soulless world of professionalism.

But I would not stop at prejudice, class and tribalism. That would be to mask another thing the Parasite feeds on – inner-conflict. I believe this inner-conflict to be the loss of much psychic energy, with little to no gain. For years the demands to be loving and forgiving toward abusive people was a great contradiction and waste of energy. A duty fostered by deeply instilled guilt, but also genuine need for suffering people. My empathy and magnanimity is what keeps Parasite alive, I cannot tear it away from me nor tear myself away from it. This pity is a strong source of the conflict. The human psyche is a mystery even to those of us who wish to know it, and the confrontations demanded by the deepest wounded child are the hardest challenge imaginable. But this seemingly unresolvable problem is the cause of endless, enervating conflict.

Where does this black pain come from? Once you are ‘enlightened’ you realize that emotions are ‘psycho-logical’ and that the primal pain you have to carry is forced there from an early age. But what is behind that abuse? More abuse, stretching back into history. But how far can it stretch back and where does it ‘come from’ to begin with?

The suffering we endure and that is forced onto people, abusers and abused and all alike, is an element of nature itself. It is there and it is inevitable, waiting to be inflicted upon things that live. Just as a lie spreads half way around the world before the truth catches up with it, a being suffers a thousand wounds before it even starts to process a single one.

But some of us cause less damage than others. Some of us learn from our mistakes and place onto the scales of balance a greater degree of nurturance. I do not wish to promote a determinist message when I am somewhere between ‘fate’ and ‘freedom’.

We are not doomed to cause ‘evil’ just because it is an inevitable part of nature. To survive being subsumed by that immense force often means going against the grain – against a false family history painted by idealism, against an archaic society that is always a century or so behind, against dogmatic power and the false truths of institutions, against the small percentage of dangerous and deluded psychopaths who stain the fabric of humanity.

To be good and to do good is often an immense and unrewarded burden. But it is still worth it, for without good there would be no reason for a moral being to live in this world. And we can always choose the good, all of us, even if we feel a hateful resentment and will to destroy everything around us.

We will always be flawed and make mistakes, but what can change a man’s intention but himself?

 

 

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Why?

Why were my childhood years destroyed by two abusive guardians?

Why do I have to deal with regular self-esteem collapse?

Why do I have to shut down and monitor suicidal thoughts all the time?

Why do I have to endure a life void of love or romance?

Why is who I happen to be seen as less valuable than others by a racist ideology? 

Why does morality protect the people who are guilty, but not the innocent?

Why do I have to relive traumatic episodes?

Why do I have to live with insomnia and chronic lack of energy?

Why do I have to cope with alienation from society?

Why do I have to live with the rejection that follows all of this?

Clearly the world is not balanced, and certainly not fair. There are some people for whom none of the above questions are ever asked. And some even more unfortunate people for whom life is worse.

There must be some kind of regulatory principle to account for this, to balance people’s stories. We cannot just leave society laissez faire and expect any kind of meritocracy to be established.  Leaving things be means perpetuating an ever worsening inequality of opportunity.

Some people start with an immense view of the world from the top of a hill, others start in a gutter filled with immense hurdles. Whether people succeed or fuck up is ultimately up to them, but how much harder is is to be something if you are emotionally crippled, living in constant poverty and fear of destitution, drained and trapped in your own body by extreme and disturbing emotion.

I do not want all of the shit that happened to me to stop me from reaching a place of thriving. I want support to flourish in spite of it. Society either needs to give more support and balance the books, or something will snap in all the people like me, and the outcome will force the issue.

Mental illness is a weapon of Power

Power does not like dissidents. Theresa Mays do not like activists and artists, idealists and innovators. Theresa Mays like power. Power needs a way to neutralize dissidents, and in the West this cannot be done with brute force so openly. So power instead uses despair, depression, anxiety as a weapon. Power lets the ghettos it creates do the dirty work. The human cost is immense, their hands appear clean.

Theresa Mays do not want you to be well of mind. These fucked-up soulless people want the well we drink from to be poisoned. It is not enough that their souls are spent in moral underachievement, they must pass on their spiritual disease to everyone else.

You might think that the more the system pushes down the more people will rise up, but this is utterly false. Disempowered, depressed, downhearted people will not strive for change. The riots we saw in London earlier in the decade were a childish lashing out of despair – they were not a rising up for change. Most of the oppressed will take out their anger on whoever is around them, within the cages of the estates they are forced to live on, within the abusive families they are forced to grow up in (I can tell you all about this one for sure), within the broken social systems they are surrounded by. It is people who are well of mind, confident, educated, intelligent, with their heads above the noxious smoke of capitalism who have the power to instigate change.

So the Theresa Mays want  you to be as fucked up and hopeless as possible, hooked on a cocktail of drugs and false hope to cope. You need only be capable of following orders, expending yourself on productivity, waging wars and turning a blind eye to injustice. What happens after your time in the office matters nothing, by then you are useless to them. What happens after you have ticked a box and cast your bullshit vote for some disconnected twat is immaterial to them. None of this requires you to be emotionally healthy, to follow the simple creed ‘know thyself’. We live in a cynical machine.

And a cynical person is an obedient one. They don’t believe change is possible, they will tow the line however much they intuitively know it is wrong. A despairing person is immobile, an anxious person easily controlled and desperate.

Depression is not treated by the system, it is overruled by it. Medication is prescribed, the sad soul is deemed to be a case of ‘chemical imbalance’ or individual malaise, rather than what it really is: a psycho-logical reaction to an entropic system which is destroying itself, disconnecting people from nature, a war against the imagination.

Power may not be the direct cause of mental illness in every case, but it will use it to its advantage in every case. There is no real treatment available for depression and anxiety for a very good reason. Your sadness is their growth and your despair is their hope. The system wants you to destroy yourself – either in service to it, or in the alienation  that comes from struggling against it. The system is inimical to life, beneficial only to a tiny minority. Forget about relativism and atheism and nihilism and all of this weak-hearted  bullshit – we are facing evil. There is evil in this world, something undeniably malign and insane. The worst slave morality known to mankind, where the slaves themselves will keep the wheels turning because to stop is to face a stark reality. And some people would rather die, or see everyone else slowly killed, than do that.

I can try to take a more balanced view of things, write in a more nuanced fashion. The system still provides some free support, it has not completely decayed from the days when you had half-decent housing and a NHS which seemed to give a shit. CBT for instance is still available to everyone, at least in a limited way. You can get some good from this mental training, even if it is poised toward the interests of evil. But the fact remains that this discipline does not serve to make healthy people; it is still a warped intention. It strives to make stoic, obedient drones who know not themselves, still caught in the hive, still lacking in imagination! How can the system which encourages mental illness possibly attempt to heal you?

There is not much nuance to it – the Theresa Mays want you by the balls or dying a slow death.

 

Why do haters hate?

So the haters hated, the naysayers said nay, the abusers abused, the controllers exerted their control.

 

And they failed.

 

With all of their advantages of power, seniority and material wealth, they still failed.

 

They made the journey much harder. They gave me these mental disorders and suicidal thoughts. They forced me to traverse barren lands of isolation and pass through tunnels of despair. They taught me to distrust the world and made every relationship an uphill struggle. 

 

But still they failed to drag me down to their level.

 

What drives these petty hate-filled people? What makes them obsess over others, latch onto them like limpets and try to drain them dry? What would they be left with even if they succeeded?

 

What does it matter. They don’t matter.

 

When I hear people mocking ambition I am taken back to their twisted faces, screaming desperately, afraid of being left behind. They don’t want a star in their midst – that would mean challenging themselves and admitting how much they fell short. They are unambitious in that sense; moral underachievement is their comfort zone. Ambition is what makes us want to better ourselves, it should never be mocked.

 

Without ambition I would be as bad as the people I was surrounded with most of my life. The wretched want to hold me down in the spiritual muck where they dwell, but that is not their decision. Where I end up is ultimately up to me.

 

Every time I am attacked, derided, put down, criticised or insulted by deranged and stupid people, I imagine Jeremy Corbyn standing in parliament, some Tory slime hurling shit at him, trying to divert him into that same base level of existence. If Jez can resist that much pressure in the chambers of power, then why can’t I rise above the terrible, petty little shits life is so frequented with.

 

Of course, there have also been many great friends and allies in my life, without whom I would not have survived. If you are reading this, you are one of them.

Imagine you were offered a pill…

Imagine you were offered a pill. Upon swallowing that small, white, round thing, you would cease to feel any of the symptoms of depression or anxiety disorders.

No more insomnia, no more panic, no more suicidal thoughts, no more angst, no more awkwardness, no more feeling isolated, no more feeling like an alien, no more despair.

All of these things would vanish in a matter of minutes, and they would never return. The rate of relapse would be 0%, the pill was that perfect.

Would you take it?

If you have, then you may have just destroyed a large part of yourself in one fell swoop. Seeking a purely medical solution to a spiritual problem, you would have abnegated responsibility to discover yourself, betrayed your soul in a Faustian pact.

Imagine the power it would give the manufacturers of such pills, to dominate others in such a way. Surrendering to them, you would be free from one terrible affliction but, as the saying goes, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Depression and anxiety can get in the way of ‘life’, but then, what is this life and why should we live it in this way? Insomnia can ruin a work routine, but why would the deepest part of yourself commit such self sabotage? Could it be that the routine itself is the problem, more so than the insomnia?

I see my mental health problems as a quest, an immense riddle, one that cannot be easily sidestepped or shut down. It is useful to sometimes be free from it, distracted or medicated in extreme situations, but only as a break from it, not a total transcendence. As much as I have been on my knees and begged Mephistopheles to take away the anxiety, the vulnerability, the despair, I don’t really mean it.

These dark feelings and deep shadows are there for a reason. If they were not, they would not be there. If you have any degree of sensitivity, you will look upon the world and feel as much of its despair as you do its joy. We are in a troubled time, politically, ecologically, economically, spiritually, you name it. Our systems are failing, and many of us are clinging on to them to the bitter end, for, to use another cliché, better the devil you know.

But there are those of us who, at the very core of our souls, feel absolute revulsion for these broken systems and the price they are exacting on humanity and the world of beasts and plants. This albatross around our necks (there he goes again!) is a necessary one, and is in fact the only real hope of change.

Imagine you were reading a novel, a fantastical one where a hero must overcome herself, confront her deepest demons and strive to discover what is truly inside herself. She may never fully triumph, never fully reach some ‘enlightenment’ or god of healing, but the journey she makes, the heroism of her character,  the artfulness of her life, all of these things are inseparable from her. If the hero of the tale simply popped a pill and lost all motivation or drive to self-discovery, then what a terrible tale that would make. It would be trumpeting complacency as the highest virtue.

Complacency is the curse of civilization, for all complacent civilizations are swift to collapse into decadence. The shadow that stalks us, forcing us to evolve, to get better – this is what drives change.

The pill of all-healing would return us to complacency, and thus to the destruction of our true selves. Such ‘light’ cannot exist in our grey world without doing immense harm to the chaotic, beautiful balance we live in. Already people hide from their emotions by wearing the masks of capitalism and individualism. The price the world is paying for this is immense.

I live in my own shadow, a much taller and more powerful version of myself, and I would not magick that looming power away for anything, or anyone.

There is no pill that can take away all of our problems. But there is a change of perception and paradigm we can all make – to see depression and darkness as a sign that something is wrong out there, and thus drive us, when our energy returns to us, to change it.

 

From spirit to corpus

I am currently reforming, from pure spirit into semi-corporeality. I can feel with highly attuned senses this filling out. The point of wavering, the half-way mark, I have just passed.

It does not mean I will remain this way from now on, only that the cycle is completing itself. Esteem is returning, self-repair units, silent and invisible, are patching things back together in their gradual way; sleep is easy again and I don’t see any gaping holes when I look down.

Self-esteem collapse is something familiar to me. It is a volatile and dangerous state to be in. I feel destructive, drawn to annihilating things people have got for me. It triggers an infinite feedback loop: ‘you need someone, but you are not good enough for anyone’. The friction of these energies causes internal conflict, and drains the soul of its precious resources. In this state I reject others before they do me, and then feel further conflict and guilt for it (despite the fact that it feels right). Everyone is suspect – just because they haven’t abandoned yet, it does not mean they will not. There is a strong element of despair also, things seem inevitable and unchangeable. The only way is to destroy or get away.

I know what it is to be pure spirit, to feel like you have no corporeal form, invisible and insubstantial. To feel like nothing but emotions raging. This is the space where people develop addictions and destroy all that is good in their lives.

I do not understand it, nor how to resolve it. It does seem to go away, or at least recede into the distance. I have started reading on ressentiment, and thankful to the great scholars who have done work on this phenomena. Now that I am returning to the world whole, I can use this opportunity to learn how to break the cycle, or at least delay its return and have longer days of real life.

Rethinking despair

I am someone who periodically goes though short periods of despair. In these dark moments, I feel hopeless, lost, dependent and incapable. The anxiety is high, insomnia is almost inevitable, there are sometimes thoughts of self-harm, and lots of self-loathing. The way out seems distant, and the light at the other side is no comfort in these horrible moments.

These are uncomfortable and painful feelings. They really make life feel like it is a burden to live. But I am starting to rethink despair.

Despair is not nice, but I feel it can be a drive to positive change. The feelings of hopelessness, whilst unproductive and destructive, do have the flip side of forcing re-evaluation.

We learn through failure. Strength is rising when you fall. Being proven wrong is a necessity to finding what is right.

In order to be a truly ethical and good person, we must evolve and change; for this is the way of nature. This means we need the openness to be challenged, and sometimes to be proven wrong. Being able to lose battles, it seems, is as important to winning them.

Imagine an unconquerable will, that overthrows an oppressor and takes power. What will happen when this all-powerful, immovable force stays in power for too long? What good would that do the people?

I do not advocate feeling despair, at all! It is not exactly a choice. And it is not exactly nic. There are certainly better ways I can go about having the modesty to re-evaluate my life. But despair has been an effective way of doing so thus far; a heavy price to pay for necessary change.

I know that high expectations and a need for instant results feed despair like nothing else. Its very easy to feel like you have failed when ‘not being there yet’ leads to feeling like a total failure. My challenge is to change my pace, accept that I am not there yet, progress slowly, and be patient.

This way I need never feel self-induced despair again, and can change and evolve in a healthier way. Nonetheless, those heavy days of despair were intense bringers of change, they showed my courage in continuing on through it, and I do not feel regret toward such dark  emotions.

Since Sunday I was feeling a strong sense of despair. It ended today. I do not feel exactly great, or stable, but I have made some re-evaluations, gained some courage, and change my ways according. For all the hardship and indignity, I feel again that I will get somewhere better, slowly but inevitably.