Have you been a good boy this year? You Christmas cunt?
Are you enjoying the performative nature of the theatre of this time of year?
I’ll start this week with a bit of observational prose from this windy beach.
Sand bashing off umbrellas as I watch the back of their heads.
Tiny tempests conceived from heated courtships
The crustaceans laugh at flailing hats and spilled Fanta.
“It is Summer” I hear her say.
Kids in towels and goggles on the bendy shore.
Collectively willing for the clouds to move.
Eat your ice-cream you little shit.
Slap on some SPF40.
Dive on in.
This is Christmas day and I’m busy as fuck, so this blog will be fairly compartemntalised as I’ll be doing it in bits. The distractions at this time of the year are as unpredictable as your reaction to seeing a Pukeko injecting pure heroine into its talons.
So I’ve not been blogging or even putting out creative work since September the eleventh, as I’ve been blessed with some intellectual property that if used in my work, can land me in a deluge of legal sludge. However, after some careful lobbying from my end, I have now broken free from the Devil’s headlock and I’m allowed to put out content. As long as it doesn’t compromise the informational boundaries that I am allowed to operate within. It’s absolutely mental.
That being said, this was a mad year wasn’t it?
I hope you all have come out on the other side with minimal mental scarring. Fuck knows I haven’t.
I have spent about 8 months of this year purely fighting with my own mental health, mostly my anxiety, self worth and self esteem.
Now I’m not new to these struggles, I have spent almost all of my adult life battling with these issues and I do believe I was born with them.
I have not suffered any real trauma that I can think of, but my ancestors lived through some tumultuous times in the past. I’m talking slavery and shit boys. So if brown eyes and curly hair and sick humour and creativity is hereditary, why not mental health issues?
So because of my own experiences with mental health, I’m pretty awesome at nipping it in the bud. When something bad happens to me, I take the appropriate amount of time to be angry or upset. I make sure that it’s a reasonable response to the activating event and avoid making any decisions during this time of irrational thinking.
The method I use for this kind of monitoring is called CBT as in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, not Cock and Ball Torture as the acronym suggests. I speak about CBT extensively in previous blogs as you may well know, and if you don’t know, I urge you to back a few blogs to get a squint at it. I don’t know what they are called as I give them random names. That’s how we do things here.
There was a time this year that my usual techniques did not work at all, but before my depression got too bad I did seek some medication. I was prescribed something called Diazepam. A drug used by Army snipers to keep their anxiety in check while killing innocent civilians. It was fucking class, I had no anxiety whatsoever, but after about three weeks of using it, I noticed that I was not enjoying the things I usually would. After a bit of googling I found out that it neutralizes your dopamine and I decided to jump back off it and just deal with the depression like a soldier. Like a real sniper should. So depression ensued.
Not gonna lie to you lot, I’m still struggling a bit, but I have been making sure that I’m doing things that are mindful but inconsequential. I’ve rekindled my love for video games and I’ve been out on the old motorcycle more than usual. Continually making sure that I’m keeping busy. But this means that I am not finding the time to relax and find some peace. Without these two things, I’m left tired all the time and I can’t find the space to work on my literacy projects. It is impossible for me to transcend to my Free Child Ego state where I usually go when I’m doing creative things. This is the only place I have the freedom to make mistakes and experiment without my inner critic telling me I’m a twat.
Another thing I’ve been doing is watching loads of Youtube. I don’t watch TV at all, not even Netflix, although I do have a subscription. I’ve been watching this lad called Taras Krul, he calls himself the Crazy Russian Hacker. He is just a dude who acquires gadgets from online stores and puts them to the test in videos. He is a Russian that I think lives in the US and he does the videos in English in his very strong accent that is barely comprehensible. I’m entertained by his empathy for the products he reviews. Even when a product fails he is so forgiving with his assessment that you almost feel sympathy for him because you know he wanted it to work. It is fucking hilarious.
But today, Boxing Day 2020, a day that I don’t ride my motorcycle made me realise that the reason I have these deep unsettling anxiety is because I have some unfinished business. I now find myself deep inside the bowels of Wikipedia learning about Gestalt Psychology, and it is fucking class.
But before I jump into that, let me get some selling out of the way.
This blog is sponsored by you, the reader and although I don’t officially need your money anymore, I do wish to at least make a few extra dollars to supplement my income. Lots of research goes into these blogs and if it helps you in any way and you would like to buy me a lollipop or a pie, you can do it here. If you can’t or won’t, that is also OK. I’ll keep doing this anyway.
A big fucking thank you for those of you, particularly the ones from the UK, who supported me when I was broke. You cunts are the best and I honestly appreciate it.
Support the Patreon if you can. I think that I have zero patrons now, understandable.
Back to Gestalt Psychology.
On a previous blog I dedicated to my wife on her birthday, I mentioned that in the year Y2K I had a massive motorcycle crash. One that nearly killed me. I had another big one the year before on the exact same date. This I call the Boxing Day curse and I have never ridden a bike on this day. It has been twenty years now.
I’m noticing a burning anxiety that I need to take a ride to overcome my fear, but more than that, I need to complete this narrative. I need to finish this Gestalt.
What is a Gestalt I hear you ask?
Gestalt is a German word, it means the sum of all parts. A ‘whole’ I guess. It tenets that humans and animals require a holistic solution to find meaning or satisfaction in activities or events.
I don’t fully understand this thing yet, I just fucking discovered it, but here is a universal example to try to explain it.
Your head is itching, this is the activating event.
You start to think about needing to scratch it. You have now acknowledged that action is required.
You mobilize and begin to scratch it.
You then feel good about scratching your head.
This is a completed action of a Gestalt at its lowest level. It is a circle that needs completion.
Another example we all can relate to.
So you’re at a birthday party that involves a massive lunch. The table is set and everyone is ready to eat. Some self righteous old goblin decides that a prayer needs to be said before you can begin eating.
You were really hungry on purpose because you knew that there was going to be loads of food, so once your physical hunger was met with the thought of eating, you already started this new Gestalt.
But now this cunt has decided to go ten minutes into you completing your Gestalt. You hold it together anyway. Who is this prick? What is Religion anyway?
You become irrational; or hangry as the young people say.
Then he finishes and you eat. You complete your Gestalt.
The danger of this example is the bit where your Gestalt was incomplete. This is the area where mental health issues can occur. This is why I am so irrational and upset today. I have a Gestalt to complete, but due to certain rules, I am unable to.
So I take this back to New Years Eve 2019.
At 11:59 my daughter and I were eyes up to the sky holding hands and collectively willing 2020 was going to be our year.
I had worked 22 years on a career that was about to peak and I had plans of buying my first house. I was nearing the end of my novel and I was to publish it in the new year. Yes 2020 was mine, and unknowingly, I have seeded some very achievable Gestalts. Not unlike an itchy head, these were pretty much guaranteed.
Then comes the Goblin of Strange and Uncertain times, the Cheeky Chest Wrestler, and it puts a stop to my plans, all of them.
With my career down the shitter and the stresses of now finding work, I was unable to access my Free Child Ego state due to having some existential issues now. No flashy job, no house, no book.
In these moments, no amount of CBT can remedy my issues as these incomplete Gestalts are not measurable, nor are they fixable.
Now let me humour you for a minute and merge this with some Psycho-Analytics.
Imagine you’re a kid of about six. Your Dad is an antisocial drunk who doesn’t pay you much attention. So you spend all of your time trying to impress him so that he can give you some validation. You perceive that he never does.
Thirty years later and your Dad is gone. Your marriage is falling apart because you spend almost all your time at work. You don’t even get paid extra. The only good thing is that your boss praises you every so often. You are chasing this praise, but when it happens you are left feeling empty. The validation you are chasing will never come, because it needs to come from your Dad. But you will always keep searching for it.
This is how devastating an incomplete Gestalt can be, and we can have many on the go at the same time.
I read that empty chair psychology works for Gestalts when they are interpersonal, but many of them are circumstantial. All of mine do not involve relationships.
Hopefully one day I find an alternative way to complete these, but I’m not really planning to. I’m just going to sit with the anxiety.
The only way I feel that I can deal with this is to acknowledge that, contrary to popular belief, life is meaningless chaos and it is up to us as individuals to find meaning. Meaning can be belief in God, it can mean a new car, it can even mean writing a blog. And although I have had offers to rejoin my industry and continue my Gestalt, I have decided to stay where I am currently.
I have ditched a career I always wanted for a career that I always needed. And even though I know it will leave one of my biggest Gestalts incomplete, I will be leaving a bigger one if I left this new ride so early on.
I guess not all Gestalts are meant to be closed. Isn’t life a splendid thing. Maybe I’ll ride the bike next year.
I’ve said Gestalt a lot I just noticed. But anyway. I look forward to learning more about it and then rattling on to you.
Have a fantastic 2021 lads and see you on the other side.
Mind yourselves.
Be kind and be humble.
