Category: Mental Instability

Aaaaand I’m back!

Hey kiddies. Long time no post. Seems I’ve sort of neglected this. I think at one point I had an audience of as many as 20 people. I’m pretty sure we’re back to zero now. A lot has happened. To all of us. When I started this blog it was many many years ago. I was married, I had two kids, and my wife was going slowly insane. We still don’t know exactly what is wrong with her, but I have a few amateur armchair suspicions. What’s important is after a long drawn out legal battle in a justice system that is skewed against dads and, in particular, atheists, I divorced my wife and eventually got residential custody of my kids. My kids went through hell and there was nothing I could do to stop it. They’re both grown adults now, and I think they turned out pretty well despite everything. And by everything I don’t just mean their mom. I made plenty of mistakes myself. The difference is that I own my mistakes. Anyway… rambling again.

Another impetus for this blog was the trauma of leaving a religious cult. Those folks fuck with your mind, and I spent a lot of years sorting through who I was and what I believed. As part of my recovery I took a class in Logic and Critical Thinking and it was the single best thing I ever did for myself, although it changed my life irreversibly. I’m now an atheist, a science enthusiast, and (by American standards) a crazy ass whacked out deranged libtard. That’s American for “I care about people I don’t know.”

I sorted through a lot of things on this platform. Actually, it was another platform and it’s been so long now I don’t even remember what it was. But it had an orange logo. I imported everything here. That’s probably about the time I lost the handful of followers my blog had at the time. Sometime around then Facebook and Twitter became the bright shiny new thing. I started tweeting. A lot. Don’t go looking for it, that account is gone. When Elon Musk went full on far right psycho I deleted the account. I don’t really have a social media presence left. Not as Dr. Cowboy anyway. But while I was doing the incessant tweeting thing, broadcasting every stupid thought that popped into my head out into the interwebs, I stopped blogging. I got married again. This time to someone with mental conditions that range in the two digit range (e.g. she was diagnosed with more than 10), none of which I knew about when I took those vows. So that was fun. I learned all about narcissistic personality disorder. And antisocial personality disorder. And a few others. I popped back in for one more blog post in 2019 in the middle of that shitstorm. I don’t think anybody read it. I doubt anybody will read this either. The blog has always been for me, with the rest of you invited along for the journey. I’ll probably keep exploring all of those topics, because the trauma from all of them still lives in my head. I’m still working through all of it. And now, we have orange Jesus in the white house. And every trigger I’ve accumulated over the last 2 1/2 decades is being triggered again. We’re gonna explore that too. I’m gonna have a hard time getting through the insanity that’s coming our way. Hopefully we can get through this together.

We’ve had quite the journey, y’all. Where do we go from here? Well, the country decided to elect an over the top narcissist with apparent dementia and a felony fraud conviction and a history of insurrection and stealing classified documents. Because why the fuck not? What’s the worst that can happen? Well we’re finding out day by day. We’re only a couple of weeks into the second term and the shit is flying fast and furious. I’m not going to be able to keep up with that, so don’t look to me as a news source. Plenty of others are doing that already. I’m here for us regular types who didn’t drink the orange koolaid, and are trying to keep our sanity intact while deciding what to do. When we studied Nazi Germany in school some of us wondered, or perhaps even asked by the teacher, “what would you do if you lived through that?” I think we can say for certain now that most of us gave a bullshit answer. Most of us should have said “not a goddamned fucking thing.” I don’t want to be that one. I intend to resist. I intend to keep people safe. I intend to be the person who hid Anne Frank, not the one who turned her in. Although sometimes I wonder if I’m not in danger of being Anne Frank. Let’s hope it doesn’t get there, but folks, we can’t assume anything yet. We’ve got at least four years of this shit to get through. One hopes our form of government holds long enough to retain elections for that long. That’s not what happened in Germany. Or Russia. I mean, technically Russia still has elections, but… c’mon. We all know, Vladimir.

So once again I need this outlet. I have no idea where we’re going. Let’s start finding out.

Healing From Narcissistic Emotional Abuse For Men Part 1

Dearly beloved are you listening?

It’s 5 in the morning. I’m not up early, I’m up late. Once again, I can’t sleep. Some nights I sleep like a rock. Some nights I wake up every hour or two. Some nights I don’t sleep at all. This is one of the latter kind. My mind just won’t shut the fuck up. It just won’t.

Chances are you found your way to the post because drumroll you’ve recently been in an emotionally abusive relationship with a narcissist (why is that word so fucking hard to spell?). I’m so smart, see how I guessed that? Surprise, I have too. That’s why (surprise!) I’m writing this post.

You mImage result for sexy manay have noticed something oddly different about this post than other posts, links, books, YouTube videos, etc. etc. that you may have run across in your search for emotional validation: the words FOR MEN. Odds are, you’re not. In my journey that’s the first thing I discovered, almost all victims of emotional abuse by narcissists are women. This can be a little problematic if, say, you’re not a woman. I’ve already become fairly frustrated with my search for self-actualization. The first audiobook I purchased on the subject was late last night. I downloaded it and set it to play on my tablet. Being aware of the skewed gender distribution of narcissists and their victims, I tried to find one that was at least somewhat gender neutral. That’s not all that easy. So many have taglines along the lines of “is he a narcissist?” “thousands of women have found hope in this book” etc. etc. I thought I found one so I dropped some much needed cash on my recovery and started listening with the intention of drifting off to sleep after finding some comfort. I quickly became frustrated as the book talked about narcissists and their victims in VERY gender specific terms. Rather than finding healing I’m finding my self-doubt growing. I’m a man. Am I really the narcissist? Was she right all along? I’m I really to blame for everything?

So finding my anxiety heightened rather than assuaged I went back to searching for books that were, perhaps, gender specific but in the other direction: Empathetic men victimized by narcissistic women.

Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Bupkis.

Apparently society is simply under the impression that all men are the same and none of us have any kind of emotional vulnerability. I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. Highly sensitive men might be a minority but we definitely exist. I know a few who just happen to not be me. So here I am, sleep deprived, anxiety plagued, depressed, and in desperate need of attention to hygiene to say “This shit happened to me too.” That is not to say that if you’re a woman you might not find some value in my writing, but I’m writing this for me. This blog has always been by me for me. I’ve never had a large following at any point. I think at one point I might have had twenty or so regular readers, but in checking my blog stats this morning on my blog that hasn’t seen a post since 2016, my blog had a grand total of two hits for 2019. I’m pretty sure they were both me. That said, if this helps you nobody will be more excited than me. Follow along. Maybe we’ll find some peace together. First, a little background on me, just in case anybody who isn’t me reads it.

The space that’s in between insane and insecure

Image result for wut

First of all, I use profanity. A lot. If that makes you uncomfortable, you’re on the wrong blog.

My name is Dr. David Grey. No it isn’t, but that’s not important. It is to you. What am I a doctor of? I’m not. It’s a fake degree. I printed it off from an unaccredited diploma mill years ago to make a point about how worthless degrees from unaccredited institutions are. I know a few “experts” spreading around woo (a term that means bullshit) with “Dr.” prefixed on their name. A little digging shows that their degrees are worth about as much as mine. Hence, I’m a doctor. Strictly speaking my doctorate is intelligent design or some bullshit like that. If I find the PDF with my degree I’ll be happy to post it.

I’m a musician. That’s the label that describes me the most completely. Music is my love, my sanctuary, my therapy, and my life’s blood. I started playing the violin at age four. I was concertmaster for all of junior high and always in some kind of titled seat through high school. I won the solo competition with my high school orchestra, played in the the local youth symphony, and went to music camp every summer. I went to college on a double scholarship for violin and French horn (picked that one up in 6th grade or so).  My college professor destroyed my wrists and ended what was once a promising career. I washed out of college shortly after.

I got married in my early 20s. I fucked around and did a lot of nothing. I went to community college half assed and worked crap jobs. This went until around age 29 or so when my wife got involved in a religious cult. I was indoctrinated shortly after. After a bit more than a year of psychological abuse I left the cult. I went through that clusterfuck by myself. Nobody knew what I was going through, and my wife was still in the cult. I pulled myself through that crap alone, and I’m proud of that. It was fucking hell.

Related imageAbout a year later, as I was getting ready to divorce my wife because I had no intention of having children with her and having them be raised in a religious cult, my wife surprisingly left. Excited at what looked like the restoration of my marriage, we had our first child some nine months later. i cleaned my act up and got a computer science degree and began working as a software developer. Far from being the restoration of my marriage, it proved to be it’s undoing.

Image result for crazy eyesMy first wife apparently succumbed to some form of mental illness. It was difficult to spot at first, but ten years later it was undeniable. I’m not a psychiatrist so I can’t say what it is with any certainty, but from what I’ve learned it bears a lot of resemblance to schizophrenia. Who knows. The short version is ugly divorce, custody battle, lots of mental trauma for all involved, financial ruin, foreclosure, therapy, and eventually me and my boys were more or less ok. She ran off to Texas or something. Nobody knows where she is now.

Somewhere along the line, circa 2008 or so, I realized I was an atheist. Religion had done so much damage to me that not only that but I had a really long angry period where I was a full on anti-theist. A lot of that is chronicled on this blog. Then, blogwise, I disappeared around 2016 or so. The parts you missed were, after a few more bad relationships, I thought I found the one™. There’s no explaining this. For some reason I became enamored of a highly religious Republican voting abortion protesting blonde bombshell. We married last June, she left me about a week ago. And now we’re all caught up.

Nobody’s perfect and I stand accused

I’m not going to tell my story in chronological order. I don’t need to, I lived it. I’m going to go over the parts that matter in the order my stream of consciousness puts them on this page. Like most people I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to put the pieces together to figure out what happened. So little of it made sense. No conflict is entirely one sided. I know I fucked a lot of things up. The narcissist always tries to put the blame on you, and that’s what she’s been doing. It’s a form of gaslighting, and it’s painfully effective if you’re highly sensitive. This is where a lot of the pain and confusion for me comes from: the inclination I already had to blame myself for everything. When the other side is also blaming you for everything, it spirals out of control.

Since things really went to shit about a month ago, a lot of people who have known her a lot longer than I have have reached out to me and given me a lot of info I didn’t have before; things that really would have been helpful to know before saying “I do”. But last night a good friend said a word to me that really kind of hit everything home for me: Narcissist.

It hadn’t really occurred to me that she was a narcissist, but with that word locked in place so much of it begins to make sense now. The thought had crossed my mind, and I even looked up the symptoms of narcissism previously, but she didn’t seem to match enough of the signs to convince me. A total lack of empathy sure, but not all the signs matched in my mind. So I kept that to myself and filed away. I never said the N-word to anybody, but unsolicited they said it to me last night. Once I knew that other people saw her a narcissistic, I knew I wasn’t crazy for thinking that. The unbearable pain, the out of control crying, the binge drinking, the chain smoking, all signs of the emotional abuse I’ve gone through. I hesitate at that word, abuse. It makes it sound so intentional. I don’t think it was. I don’t think she knows why she behaves the way she does. Certainly if you approach her with concerns about her behavior it immediately sets her into a rage. It’s like there’s some kind of demon deep inside her head that hits the panic button as soon as anybody tries to help her.

I think I’m going to wrap this post up at this point. It’s obviously going to be a multi-parter. I have no idea how many parts there will be. This is a journey. This is about me trying to find my way back to normalcy, to learn to love myself again, to recover and function from the complete and total devastation I feel. Only in the last few days have I even been able to function at all. Every day I’m a little more productive. I’m getting there.

Night

A dark room. I sit in it alone.

A knock at the door. I get up to answer. It’s not my door.

I pick my book back up. A beep from my phone.

Sale at Sears.

I put the book down.

I can ease the pain for one night. But tomorrow will just be that much worse.

I could die all at once, but instead I die just a little and go to sleep.

After all, I have tomorrow to get through.

Masks

We all wear masks. Each of us. You’re not quite the same person you are when you’re hanging with your old college friends that you are when you’re sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with your parents. We play roles.

Some of us are better at it than others. Some of us go further than others.

There’s a raging internal torment going on inside me. There might be one going on inside of you too. I don’t know. Why don’t I know? Because you hide it.

Just.

Like.

Me.

My masks are well defined. I’ve even given some of them names. I’ve taken this to an art form. As I arrive at work in the morning while my internal monologue is screaming at me about how pointless everything is, how empty and rancid my life has become, a friend texts me to ask how I’m doing. I look down at the screen and imagine replying

“I’m desolate. Hollow. Empty. Hopeless. I want nothing more than to die right the fuck now. How are you?”

I look over at Antonio and say “I think you had better take this.”

He says

“I’m wonderful, darling. How is my favorite beautiful princess this morning?”

Send.

Cheesy. Over the top. Flirting so obvious that it can’t possibly be taken seriously. That is Antonio. He comes in handy for certain people. The reply comes back “You’re in a good mood this morning!” No, I’m not. But I want you to believe I am, and I succeed.

I studied acting when I was younger. I was good at it. I think I was good at it for a reason. In method acting, you create a character in your mind. A living, breathing, thinking person that lives in your mind. This character is part your invention, and part you. You put it on like a costume, and you become the role. You don’t just say the lines in a convincing manner, you literally become the character you’re portraying. Their thoughts become your thoughts. Like an add-on module to yourself.

I have several of these characters. They don’t have lines in a play to read. They’re characters that I’ve created over the years to get me through day by day. People who can pretend to be normal for me so that nobody sees the empty pathetic shell behind the curtain, only the great and powerful Oz.

Heath Ledger died from this, by the way. He was so disturbed by the character of the Joker he had created that he overdosed while trying to cope with it.

Sometimes the masks come instinctively. I don’t even notice myself putting them on. I can’t help it sometimes. It’s like I can’t interact with any other humans without finding a role to play. Like my entire life is one long bizarre stage play with a multitude of roles all played by me.

But there’s one problem: sometimes, when nobody else is around and I have no role to play, when it’s just me, I wonder if there’s a real me under there, if any of these characters I play are in any way comprised of my real personality. If I have a real personality…

The answer: I don’t know.

O Hai! I haz a blog!

I’ve been mysteriously absent from my blog lately. Well, not so mysterious. Many of you know I fight depression. That’s pretty much the explanation in a nutshell. I’ve fought it for years. I was on medicine for it earlier that ironically made my mental state more unstable than I was without it. The rest of 2012 got kind of fucked up for me. I had my heart broken in a way I don’t think it ever has been, not even that girl from high school compares. I went in to kind of a downward spiral. I’m still at the bottom of that. I’d like to say I’m clawing my way back up, but I’m not. Not yet. I’ve driven nearly all of my real life friends away leaving me alone with my cats. Yep, I’m the crazy cat lady now.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time on Twitter, and I’ve found a few like minded people there. It’s strange getting support and encouragement from people I’ve never actually met when my real life friends all ran away. Welcome to the 21st century. Maybe this is better. When I was in high school there was no internet. We didn’t have cell phones. There was no mechanism for people having similar experiences to connect. Today there is. While I’m concerned that we seem to be spending less time actually connecting in person these days, I’m not so sure this is all bad. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It is what it is.

I’m still having dreams about my ex girlfriend. It’s like I’m tapped in to some strange alternate reality where we never broke up and we’re happy together. Deliriously happy. I hate those dreams, because I wake up from them. They make real life seem like a nightmare. I wish I could stop having them. I have a few theories about why I’m still hung up on her, and why I fucked it up in the first place, but I’ll save those for another blog post. I intend to start writing here again some more. I apparently completely missed January.

Hello February. Fuck you, people who blew me off then expect me to write “Happy Birthday” on your Facebook page. You can suck it.

Humans is dumb

To be honest, I don’t blog here for you, I blog here for me. I enjoy getting a little attention just like everyone else, but if I never got another page hit, I’d still keep blogging. It’s like therapy. I put the innermost thoughts and feelings out here for the world to read, knowing that nobody (or at least mostly nobody) I know reads this shit.

That said, every so often I’m a little curious if anybody is reading it, and if so, how they got here. One of the nice things about a blogger account is the fact that they give you those stats for free.

But then, of course, I’m inevitably disappointed, as life is wont to do. How do most people find my blog? One of three ways.

  1. That stupid metaphysical post from a couple of years ago. I fucking hate that post. I’m tempted daily to delete the fucker.  That one seems to get the most hits.
  2. You may have noticed that many of my pictures from older posts are missing. That is, unfortunately, permanent, and the reasons are complex. Well, not that complex, but I’m not going into it today anyway. Even so, I seem to get a lot of hits on my Religion series of posts, where I made a series of demotivational posters titled “Religion: I’m not afraid of gods, I’m afraid of their followers” and put several images of religious abuse including the twin towers. One of them gets a lot of hits. Which one? the stack of naked men from Guantanamo. Seriously? You sick fuckers.
  3. I get a lot of hits for some combination of the words “Lindsey Lohan nude”. Because a while ago I put up a joke post titled that which had basically no content. Yep, I get the guys looking for nude pictures of Lindsey Lohan. You sick fuckers.

I was hoping to get a mild following of people with similar issues, possibly people who want to engage in dialogue. As you can see, I have almost no comments whatsoever. It’s not the kind of thing to drive me off from writing this blog, like I said, I don’t do this for you people, but I was hoping for a little reassurance that the rest of the human race isn’t made up of a bunch of sick fuckers. Still waiting.

Why can’t you…

To those who say “Enough already, just get over it!”

Fuck you.

To those who say “Just move on already!”

Fuck you.

To those who say “Geez, why can’t you just deal?”

Fuck you.

To those who say “I don’t have any problem getting up in the morning. I don’t have any problem moving on. What’s your problem?”

Fuck you.

It’s that fucking easy. Some of us have a little more shit to deal with than you do. For some of us, just getting the fuck out of bed is a challenge. Some of us have to find a reason to live EVERY FUCKING DAY.

Instead of judging everyone else as inferior to yourself, stop being a fucking dick.

You want to know why? Fuck you, that’s why.

Meh…

The blasé I’ve been feeling lately seems to be total. A handful of events have happened over the past few days (a couple of them just today) that would have normally (normally being within the last year or so) have made me ecstatic and bubbly or emotionally devastated me. But they didn’t. It really is like just sort of watching a movie that I’m not emotionally invested in. It’s actually kind of cool, I’m just kind of taking everything as it happens. A mere decade ago this was something I was striving for. I believe the Taoism concept that embodies this is Wu Wei, but I could have those concepts mixed up these days. It’s basically the idea that lies at the heard of Taoism which translates into western philosophy as “go with the flow”. I’m kind of doing that over the past few days without even trying, it’s just happening.

I would best describe this as emotionally numb. The irony of this condition is that with the severe anxiety and depression I’ve been feeling over the past month and half or so, I was actually about to ask the doctor if there was medication that he could prescribe that did exactly this: made me feel nothing. Not nothing, that’s not quite accurate. Just numb my emotions. Make me more or less stoic. Numb the pain.

And all I had to do it was drop my depression medication. How’s that for irony?

I described this condition to a close friend, one who I can usually confide in, and she seemed to think this was a bad thing. I disagree. After the emotional roller coaster I’ve been on for months now, a quiet leisurely raft ride down a calm river is an incredible relief. I don’t think being emotionally numb is a bad thing for a while. I’m sure this isn’t permanent, but it’s a nice change for now. I feel so much calmer.

What prompted this post, though, is the fact that I sat down to do my evening twitter and/or blog rant, and I couldn’t work up enough irritation to rant about anything. Quite honestly, at the moment I just don’t fucking care. Politics, religion, the ex wife, none of it is really provoking an emotional response from me that I can translate into a good rant. It’s a little weird, but I’m going to roll with it. So, no rants tonight. Sorry guys.