Introspective Thanksgiving 2012 l2icks0r! garbage...

[N3ur0n0saurusl2exs0r!!!]

Looking forward to life for me isn’t about looking forward to going forward but is simply about having a reason for living. I believe having something to look forward to is vitally important for my overall health.

I’ve learned that I don’t derive true satisfaction from life by way of a job or some intellectual pursuit but instead from excitement which for me comes from something fun and physically intense. I regard the most amazing things in our world as physical things. Physical elements are universal and go beyond age, language, culture, and terrestrial understanding.

While I do thoroughly enjoy my non-physical endeavors, to the degree of being able to say that I love some of them, none of my most memorable ones have been more powerful than what I have experienced from my most memorable physical experiences. Yes there have been some highly intense non-physical events in my life, mostly comprising of emotional trauma, but I see them as being two dimensional by breaking them down into characteristics of intellect and emotion. Most physical experiences, save something of a sexual nature, comprise of both intellectual and emotional components that go along with the physical aspect of the experience itself. For example, the experiences of intellect and emotion gained from physically participating in a mixed martial arts fight has an intensity that is indescribable compared to the intellectual and emotional experiences gained from simply observing a mixed martial arts fight. The physical aspect of participation in a fight not only augments both the intellectual and emotional components of the experience itself but also increases the magnitude of what is felt both intellectually and emotionally.

“The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” - Aristotle

Both my life and my health are in shambles right now and have been for years. I feel I have a responsibility to myself to improve my quality of life by addressing my many problems as well as I can. The approach my father would recommend to me for improving my life would be all about “buckling down” and to devote 100% of my time to putting the work into improving things. He would leave no room for having fun. Work would always be the priority until my life became more manageable. I believe this ethic of his came from growing up very poor within a hardcore Catholic upbringing and so eliminating fun from the equation until things were better was the only way he really knew how to handle the difficulties of life.

I definitely don’t work the same way my father did.

For me removing fun from my recovery in order to devote 100% of my efforts to getting better has actually hurt me in the past. Having fun during dark times is a stabilizing force that allows me to handle a greater amount of stress, depression, and anxiety that keeps me in a more productive state of mind. I believe my father’s approach to improving things was more of a penance inherited from Catholicism whereby he thought he didn’t deserve to have fun until things were handled.

So what is fun to me?

For me fun is a necessity that is forged by a good balance of risk and challenge whereby both interact to fortify my emotional resilience. Too much of a risk can create too much fear. Conversely, too much of a challenge can promote a greater possibility of failure. Honestly I hate challenges but I have long been attracted to risk. There is a bit of a conundrum here in that if risk turns into failure there is a price to be paid which usually manifests itself as physical injury which is a gigantic destabilizing force. Therefore fun can be detrimental to my emotional health and can negatively affect my recovery. I’ll never stop pursuing fun though. I don’t think my acceptance of the consequences stemming from fear will ever change. I believe that if you are afraid of risk then you are afraid of living because life is risk.

“The worst of all fears is the fear of living.” – Theodore Roosevelt

In closing, I may be a mess teetering on suicide at times but that is only the way things have been, and are right now, but not how things should be looking into the future…

Yours truly, Thanksgiving day l2icks0r!…