As my body ages, I look at my life, not the overarching retroactively apparent storyline but the daily struggle to live.

I remember, as nauseum, my psychiatrist’s hominy, ad hominem, that I have to choose for myself that I decide I want to live.

Live life.

It’s difficult for me to participate in conversations.

It’s easy in one-to-one assessments of another person’s universe to reflect that universe back with personal anecdotes thrown in as a shield against saying anything that sounds like personal opinion.

But add more than one person in my presence and I mentally freak out, unwilling to stand out, trying to figure out the generic persona to project that hides me from the Others, not-me, with whom I must interact to survive, let alone thrive (the implied word Dr. Liddon threw at me with the directive “want to live” (paraphrasing thereabouts)).

The midnight shift feeds the real me, the one I decided I wanted to be before I met “Guin” and my life changed.

I love Guin but at the same time reject her because her presence in my life…well, it encourages or forces me to face and project the extroverted persona that Others love about me, which is really just a well-acted part I play requiring a lot of energy and concentration to maintain in order to protect the private me from the public.

Facebook and other social media exaggerate my worst attention-seeking, narcissistic extroverted traits.

I am not who people think I am.

I am happiest sitting still in the quietest place, reducing external stimuli, composing myself before composing these blog entries, writing ditties from a distance for people like Guin.

I like living with myself, like best living the life of this person I am right now, but am afraid to tell the Others/not-me that I merely see them as external stimuli, sets of states of energy in motion that this set of states of energy finds itself bumping into because it doesn’t have the self-sufficiency to live completely on its own.

It hurts the image of others I have in my thoughts to hear they are just external stimuli that I want to avoid or minimize contact with.

They have given me the strength to believe in myself, that I don’t have to be a reflection of them anymore.

I go back to my hermit life, find the simplicity I enjoyed when I slept most of the day and spend a few minutes typing out my thoughts to read to myself at my leisure.

I wonder if I can get rid of the addictive behaviour reinforced by the need to maintain a social media persona built into the sympathetic feedback loops of being a social creature.

Writing for myself is how I decided I wanted to live ten years ago.

I had not anticipated falling in love with a person whose fluid gender traits made me believe I could be someone else.

Fighting against the temporal desires of being more socially appealing all over again has turned into an annual ritual ever since I met Guin.

I almost believe that I am not an illusion.

Guin’s presence, her resilience, almost makes me believe people have souls.

Almost.

I understand self hypnosis all too well.

The self is not real.

I am an illusion.

The universe is benign.

I can sit back down on the bed, roll back under the sheets and sleep at least until the housemate comes home from work, requiring minimal attention from me to reinforce her illusions of self.

Sounds like a nice quiet idea!

Sweet dreams, fellow illusions…