Reality Avoidance Syndrome

*note I am not a mental health professional except as relates to my own life and mind. Nothing I say should be construed as advice.

Many years ago I coined a term, a phrase to name a situation that seemed to keep coming up in my life and in the lives of those around me. Reality Avoidance Syndrome is in a nutshell just the idea of people distracting themselves from their own personal and/or public reality to make it all tolerable. I still do this somewhat at work, to avoid my feeling like a captive, I listen to music or comedy or audio books and my mind goes elsewhere. The problem is that just like any addiction, it is easy to ignore the problem and the ramifications, and sooner or later you forget that you've been using distraction medicinally and have so much built up unprocessed angst that has been walled in a back corner of your mind, that you now have a big festering pile of feces to deal with. No one really wants to deal with a big steaming pile so it gets ignored and ignored until it starts pouring over the top of the wall or pushing its way out through the cracks.  The problem is we now live in a country where our primary export is entertainment (ie distraction) and the majority of the population of this great nation is so addicted to it that it is blind to the often unpleasant truths that are around us.

I am not without my own guilt in this, and for me the problem began very young.  I am told by my brothers that after our mother deserted the family I experienced a period of being borderline catatonic, which I have no memory of. I was about 3 years old after all. I have to believe this was a self protective mechanism to shield part of my psyche from the loss of our mother, so I freely admit there are times and places where a certain amount of compartmentalization of feelings is a necessary tool to going on with life.

However there comes a time when we must each unplug, disconnect from all distraction and reconnect with ourselves, heal our own wounds, heal the injuries to relationships with others and ourselves.. process all the debris of our lives, learn from it all, discard the trash but hold on to the love, and move on, better and stronger for the lessons learned.

In the end, love is all that matters.

Default State of Misery

Adaptability is undeniably a skill, an asset that tends to ensure survival, but it can have its dangers as well. When your default state is misery you will, as a coping mechanism, detune yourself from how you feel until it becomes automatic, autopilot taking you through the haze of work but also life outside of work.. ..and thus you miss out on huge pieces of your life. Important pieces, like the slipping away of a relationship with family or friends or a lover, the declining health of others, and even of yourself.
I once marveled at how life can mirror the act of riding motorcycle, in that where you look you tend to go. You have to focus. You must see past the problem to avoid driving straight into it. This is where I find myself, needing to look through the problem to navigate my way out of it.

It is said that mourning a relationship can be harder than mourning the death of a loved one, because death is final but the romantic heart holds out hope for another chance, even if it might never happen or even be what we want or need.. and I am undeniably an idealist and a romantic. Unfortunately my profound dislike for my employment has caused (forced?) me to dissociate from myself and my life so much so, that I have literally been absent and missed the past six years. In that time I have lost one great job (laid off with opportunity to be rehired but resigned CXX level position foolishly), lost both of my uncles, lost a relationship with marriage potential with a good woman, and most costly of all, handily discarded a huge chunk of my life bouncing between being numb and being miserable. I know I need to figure out my life again in the absence of this all, and start actually living again. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that.

Time to Wake the hell up.