Mental outage - the masochist within

Gotta tell you folks - strange things are happening. I've had an attack of one of my very favourite shortcomings, hence the lack of activity on this blog and my otherwise much enjoyed spare time practice of spamming Baka-wolf. I'm honestly not sure what is wrong with me, or if it's anything that can be helped at all, but one thing is for certain: I really bloody hope that I'm not the only one who struggles with this strange mental hurdle. But I'll come back to that later... First of, let me explain what I'm talking about.

This particular manifest of the insanity that is inherent in the human psyche is one that I feel has been growing more dominant in my mind as of late. And besides being horribly annoying, it is also just downright strange. So what is it that's wrong with me, you ask? Well, for reasons unknown I have a rather extreme, almost phobic fear of commitment of any sort. It seems to me that my mind likes to blow even the smallest of obligations out of proportion, making it seem like some gargantuan hurdle that I can't possibly overcome. It may be a result of my semi-dormant nature as a self-loather, but for whatever reason, this sets in motion a spiral of self-reinforcing negative thinking that ends only once I've hit rock bottom. But then again, normal negative thinking shouldn't be able to affect my sanity to this extent. It's time to be specific about what the effects of this strange mental barrier are, so let me use this most recent case as an example to illustrate the phenomenon in all its magnificent weirdness...

The essence of my problem can be summarized in a single sentence: The more that I'm aware that postponing it will only worsen my situation, the more I postpone it. Now, after opening this blog I started to feel an obligation to keep it updated with at least a couple of entries a week - something that shouldn't be too hard since I have lots of stuff to talk about. But as I started to think of it in light of this new self-imposed commitment to write new stuff with relatively short intervals, I started to fear that I would at some point fail to update it frequently enough. Especially as the last part of my venomfangx response was overdue while I had promised that it would be done really soon - both to myself and to those few who may have been reading this blog at the time - did the fear that I would fail to live up to that promise grow to the point that it was enough to start the process of postponing my writing while dreading it with increasing intensity as the number of days it was overdue grew larger. Ultimately, this seemingly endless chain of "oh no, I should've done this x days ago, now it's already this late" continued until a few days ago when I finally felt that it was far too late to salvage anything anyway. Once I'd reached that point of resignation, I was able to sit down and start writing this entry with no trouble. To tell you the truth, I sometimes wonder if I'm a masochist on some deeper, subconscious level, seeking to punish myself by doing things that I know are gonna hurt me, simply because I know it'll hurt if I do it.

The most frustrating part of this is the fact that while all this is going on I can easily rationalize why it shouldn't be happening at all, and yet I seem to not even be in control of my own thoughts on these occasions. It's the strangest feeling to experience first hand, for it somewhat feels like I'm just a spectator in the theatre of my own mind. Sitting inside are several people that all have a specific role in the picture. There's a guy running about on the stage, trying to meet the expectations that are associated with the role; Then there's a person sitting in the audience and laughing at how ridiculous the guy on the stage is while booing at him; And there is a person sitting even further back, feeling removed from the situation and being slightly amused by the whole ordeal. I guess you could say that the guy on the stage is having an attack of stage fright when I have these mental spasms. That's actually somewhat accurate in describing the kind of feeling that I get when this happens to me. It's like stage fright in that you know that you must do something, and yet the more you know that you must do it, the more you also absolutely cannot do it. You just wish you could load a save game from before you made the promise to do it so that you can escape the inevitability of your predicament. Unfortunately, life has no save game function.

Also, if you hadn't guessed, this subconsciously masochistic brain seizure is also the reason why I stopped frequenting Baka-wolf after having made a few friends there and started spamming as a daily routine. And I fully blame that god forsaken activity meter. Trying to keep it at 100% undoubtedly triggered my commitment phobia and made me lose it altogether. Alas.

Oh and as for why I really hope that I'm not unique in struggling with this mental hurdle... I know myself a good deal more than I feel comfortable about, to tell you the honest truth. You know that feeling? And I know very well that I have the mentality of an under achiever. I will give up if I can at all justify it to myself, and so the last thing I need is a mental disorder to fall back on and use as an excuse for not fighting to live as a functioning member of society. I have, through the past many years, been able to shrug off the various self-doubts and other hardships that life offers with clenched teeth, due to the knowledge that everyone else is going through the same trouble and yet seem to be doing okay. However, if I was given the nifty excuse that my particular hardships are worse than those of the average person, then I would no longer have that reason to keep on fighting to stay afloat. With this in mind, even if I do suffer from a slight mental disorder, I wouldn't want to know about it.

After all, ignorance is indeed bliss.