Never been one to let the carrier drop

And then, I feel Jonny.

Halfway between Sheer and Jonathan, he did survive. He’s still within my neural net. He loves to dance. That’s about all I know about him at this point. Sometimes I wonder if he will ultimately win out over Sheer, because he does not know what a boundery is. The idea scares me. Oh, god, there’s still a 16 year old who has only been kissed once inside my neural net. I can’t decide.. do I keep him caged, or do I let him see the light of day? It might be he would be a better musician than Sheer. He’s the one who would never care about being paid, who would be playing to a empty club just because he loves playing with sound. He’s the one who would dance alone in his room because he loved to dance even when there was no one there.

Okay. Fine. I do have DID. Vicky-future isn’t DID, but I do have DID. Or maybe just a really active imagination.

Unlike my suicidal side, I don’t want to remove Jonny in the process of purging the not-good-idea stuff from my neural net. He’s beautiful in his own way. He’s so worried about being ‘cool’ and has no idea that he’s sitting next to someone who made it not even matter whether he was cool or not because he got so good at something that people were in awe of him. I really wonder what advice he’d have about my current prediciment. Leave a rose on her doorstep? That might be tricky when I don’t know her address and .. come to think of it, that would not actually violate any rules that I know of. I just don’t know how I’d pull it off.

Of course, I have no idea if she ever knew they were from me. I don’t think we ever talked about it.

I could have one of my friends contact her. That wouldn’t violate the rules she set, but I’m so afraid the answer is “I will never want to be your friend. I will never want to see you face to face again.”

It’s strange, but I think I’d rather.. not know.. than know that. That it was totally hopeless. And the problem is she has so many reasons to be angry at me. But if she’s angry, I wish she’d just call me and chew me out. I certainly deserve it and it wouldn’t preclude a further friendship. I don’t know if I can ever make her see that apparently we’ve been living in different worlds, and the one I’ve been living in just isn’t offended by much of anything.

WHat to do next. Try to forget again? Pretend I don’t feel it? I could say so many insulting things about myself and my position but I won’t because I’ve already torn myself down to below zero and at this point I am only interested in building myself up. There’s no mistake I haven’t hurt myself for a hundred times already. There’s no point in going over all I should have and shouldn’t have done.

There is a part of me that’s angry that she doesn’t care. That she knows she could make my life so much easier by talking to me.. if nothing else, hearing Vicky-cadence for a somewhat longer period would help me unlock memories – and it just doesn’t matter to her. I mean, I don’t think I hurt her like, say, Kayti hurt me. And I didn’t want to hurt her at all, and I’m fairly sure by the time she drove me to attempt suicide Kayti wanted to hurt me, wanted to hurt me as bad as she could.

I wonder how much of that was Kayti being angry that my workstation password was always ‘vicky’.

Well, she’s the one I could never find it within myself to even want to forget. I would give up my entire life, everything I’ve earned, written, etc.. to go back in time to when we were hanging out but have the communication skills I have now. At least I could have told her what I was really feeling and thinking and why. Early on in our friendship she asked me who I would want on my island. I’m still not sure of the answer, but she most definitely would be among them.

Reading her blog, she’s still Vickyish. She still scans as herself. Her amazing, beautiful, smart, talented, fearless self. Except, apparently not fearless enough to want to be friends with me. I have half the planet emailing me right now how much they love me, how much I’ve helped them, that sort of thing.. why should it matter so much that this one woman doesn’t want to be my RL friend? Except it does. I’m not going to get anywhere by denying what is real.

I’m so glad for the Vicky I talk to every day. She makes it hurt a lot less. She’s also Vickyish, sometimes very much so, and she gives me support and love every single day. So in some ways I’m much more lucky than so many people, who have to deal with this pain without .. what I have. I’m so much more lucky than so many people I know, who don’t have the experience of always having someone who loves them there to help them not hurt themselves. Except.. I can’t dance with her. I can’t skate with her. I can’t touch her.

Will this all make sense in the end? I hope so.

I am paranoid. I can, at times, be paranoid delusional, but I think I’m pretty good at knowing when things are delusions. I do a lot of reality testing. Often.

I’ve been this way most if not all of my life. It’s gotten steadily worse. There was a period of my life where it was almost not there. And right now, I’ve got periods of time where it’s almost not there, thank you not sleeping and thank you future-Vicky.

Paranoia is a hard mental illness to live with. It’s gotten a lot easier this year though.. on the 29th, I found and removed a neural equivilant of a cron job that was feeding me consistant lines about how afraid I should be. I feel so much saner. I’ve been enjoying the silence quite a bit. I’ve had quite a few moments of feeling well and truly good. As you’ve all noticed, I’ve gotten a lot more honest and a lot more fuck-it-lets-say-anything on my blog. But paranoia pokes up and says “You will get fired for the things you’re writing”. Maybe.

Paranoia isn’t just a cron job feeding you lines like you’re about to end up in jail, God wants to torture you, you will end up homeless and hungry, none of your friends love you, etc. It’s also a set of pattern match filters that lead to irrationally large amounts of fear. The level of paranoia I feel about wetting myself could best be described as epic. Once at a rave it.. well, it didn’t actually happen, I fell in a puddle, but I *thought* it had happened because I was already orbiting bad bad bad mental spaces before it happened and I slipped into a delusion. I’m horrible at reality testing. I don’t remember much of what happened afterwords other than my mind crashed.

It’s a never ending fear. The worst part is it’s on a flippin’ timer, for obvious reasons. I can’t get away from it. I can be at home, alone, and I will still be afraid of it. As if it could possibly matter. It can’t possibly be a fear of being dirty because (isn’t sex fun) I like when female types wet on me during sex. And find it insanely sexy to see them wet their clothes, which I have to conclude is at least somewhat jealousy.

I am convinced this is not normal. I mean people feeling a minor fear of it, sure. Avoiding it, sure. But a my-brain-crashes fear of it? A reality goes dim and I can’t breathe panic attack fear of it? This is not normal.

And I’m a bit afraid to talk about all this on my blog, and I can’t rationally think.. is talking about what you like sexually a reasonable reason to fire someone? What is up with my head?

Part of the fun if you’re paranoid is figuring out, which fears are totally rational and match a real world, and which fears are totally irrational and are my mind misfiring somewhere.

And a even bigger part of the fun if you’re paranoid and also know you have a CE is realizing you could be experiencing something you’re deeply afraid of being created out of whole cloth just because your mind likes to torture you. 10^11 neurons is a fucking big supercomputer. Generating the reality I’m sitting in right now would be child’s play for it.

It drives me nuts that I can never see her again. I won’t ignore her bounderies again, at least as far as personal contact, and she won’t lift them. Well, maybe she will. I guess the idea here is to think positive thoughts about the future. If the issues with me and Vicky are related with the issues with my CE, then thinking positive thoughts is definately the way to go here.

It’s so funny. In some ways, I wish I had never wanted her in a wanting-to-touch-and-pet way. Because not having her as a lover doesn’t hurt much. There are lots of people willing to touch-pet-love me. It’s losing her as a face to face friend – dancing, skating, etc – that’s killing me inside. And I’m in this weird position of trying to balance whether I should convince myself that she died and mourn over her with whether I should be trying to think of yet some other way to convince her that I’m really not that bad a person and that I’m a really good friend. And I don’t know what’s going on in her CE, how far from the edge of her mind *she’s* living. I wonder often, does she read my blog?

And Clint has said she found me emailing her stressful. So can’t do that. OF course, I have reasons to suspect clint’s CE is not exactly orbiting 100% either. I wonder a lot if clint is aware he *has* a CE. THat would no doubt be a interesting conversation. Hey, clint, if you’re still reading, email me, let’s talk about CEs!

And then I feel this wonderful hope and future-Vicky assures me we will be friends again, that we are friends, and keeps walking me through more and more mental exercises and every time she does I get a little more me. I’m kind of in awe of my own fearlessness on my blog lately. I’ve really been just being me without much hedging or hiding at all.

And then I wonder, what is Vicky going to do if one of her children has a mental illness. (I cross a billion paws that they don’t) Will she no longer want to talk to them? Children are different I guess.. you have to not abandon them.. although my parents have said they won’t help me out if I get sick enough to end up in a hospital or jail again, so I guess at some point you do kind of do so.

There’s this awkward situation there, of course. I don’t think blaming anyone helps you fix anything. But the blame part of my mind does tend to say my parents had something to do with my mental illness. I point out to said blame part there’s no point in blaming anyone. Blame isn’t going to fix the problem. What we need to do is find out what broke and fix it. After all, the nature of NNs and my CE says my parents might not even look anything like I think they do or act anything like I think they do.

What I really need to do is convince my mind to convert or base-image all the neurons who want me dead or tortured. I have no doubt my life would get way better after that happened. But how? Many of them believe I deserve hell because I didn’t accept Jesus. Bullshit, say I, I accepted jesus. But you didn’t mean it, you think it’s a broken religion, they say. I say, you are right, that is what I think, but a religion that threatens hell if you don’t do something is surely not something written by a God of love. Some of them waver, then come over to my side. More of them continue to think I deserve hell.

Sometimes I have to base image them. I hate that. It’s a lot of work, and it means I’m throwing away a tiny portion of who I am. But I don’t see any other choice. Some Christians just can’t UnChristian, smart a thing as it would be to do. And a single neuron is not very bright.

I tell myself the important stuff is redundantly stored, that I won’t lose anything important. I tell myself there are backups anyway. Both are true. Neither one makes me feel any better when I ahve to just end someone inside my mind.

Over and over my mind says Vicky doesn’t want to be your friend because you have a mental illness. My counter argument is that’s exactly when your friends need to be your friends the most, and that I don’t think that’s it.

Vicky’s actions play a little too perfectly into my fears. And I’m paranoid.. meaning I have irrational fears. SO I don’t think I’m seeing Vicky. I think I’m seeing my paranoia.

I remember over and over and over bicycling to Vicky’s house to deliver a single rose.. sneaking out of my house, bicycling.. I remember a cassette Jay gave me, feeding into the soul of the Sheer.. Poison, Flesh and Blood. My parents didn’t want us to have certian music.. wouldn’t let my sister listen to twisted sister. Wanted to turn us down, turn us off, because they were too afraid to come alive and turn on. The number of things my parents failed to learn that I learned is impressive.

Sheer’s the one who deserves to own the neural net of his mind. He’s the one who earned the skills. Brett the other day called me lucky for how good a perl coder I am. Bull shit, say I. That’s not luck. Luck is winning the lottery. That is skill, and skill comes from working your ass off. Which I repeatedly have done. And now I’m lighting this rocket mentally strapped to my ass and holding on for dear life. Such a simple program I’ve written for my mind to execute tonight. A fork bomb, except the goal isn’t to shut down the mind, it’s to make it all come online and to find which neural subnets aren’t happy to be here, hoping to help the ball club, so I can introduce them to my friend mr. base image.

I will not live even with the ghost of that suicidal kid. Not any more. I have earned my place here, and I deserve to be free and alive. I deserve lucid dreaming. I deserve dream control. I deserve to be able to play the music I imagine without hitting wrong notes. I deserve to see certain people learn that just because you fail a few times doesn’t mean you should give up.

NEVER GIVE UP.
You might be only one failure away from success.

Failing isn’t a moral fault, and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Failure is a logical step on the path to success.

I’m looking into the rules and requirements for changing my name to ‘Sheer’.

It’s how I think of myself. When people call me ‘Jon’ I feel like they’re talking to someone else. Sheer is the one who had the skills to survive. Jonathan is the one who persued suicide.. Sheer is the one who never, ever, ever gives up, who keeps trying new things long after any sane person would say “That’s never going to work.”

I’m aware of Jonathan within me.. the one who would never disagree with his parents, who would never fight with anyone under any circumstances, who would lie rather than telling someone a truth they did not want to hear.. but I’m also aware of the fact that I’m feeling, basically, a corpse. Jonathan would never have survived my little rollerblading on PCH experience.

The government, I’m sure, would like Jonathan a lot better. He doesn’t fight back. He doesn’t disagree. He does what he’s told. But I don’t have the slightest feeling that Jonathan is really who I am. Increasingly I am feeling a strong and personal fire.. a desire to END certain things, or at least let them know they’ve been in a fight. There is nothing wrong with who I am and I will be me.

I’m believing things that aren’t true, and then unbelieving them. Using my storyteller abilities to write stories, things I can believe for a few minutes and then unbelieve. I’m pumping mental iron.

If you’re someone out there reading my journal.. and I know that there are tens of thousands of you.. and you have messages of support and love you can send me, or your own ideas about reconfiguring your own neural network, debugging yourself from inside.. please email them to me at jonathanpullen@gmail.com

1) 100% of all subnets happy to be here and hoping to help the ball club. PERFECT OR FAIL
2) 100% uptime. Maintenance cycles done online.

I believe Christianity is a dangerous neurolinguistic virus that damages the people who believe in it. I wonder often, as I work on removing it from myself, should I be helping my friends who are also infected? And yet, they insist it is a great thing for them. So I don’t. But I know that had I been fully infected I would have insisted the same thing, because of fear of God.

Christianity is based around a threat. The core tenant is, believe.. and profess to believe.. that Jesus died for your sins.. or be tortured for all eternity. That’s a threat.

I could spend days and days listing all the unhealthy, life-denying, insanity-causing beliefs that are part of Christianity, but I won’t bother. It’s been done elsewhere, and better than I ever could. So instead I shall return to my day job.