AND YOU MAY ASK YOURSELF

WELL? HOW DID I GET HERE?!

I really am glad I don’t have 90% of these questions floating around.

Standup comedian Tyler J. Horvath mentioned here how therapy helped him deal with that kind of bullshit.

That’s why I’m glad to have lost my internal monologue. Such peace.

Sometimes I wonder if having aphantasia and anendophasia is an advantage?

I have nothing going on in my noggin. Just quiet quiet and info is there when I need it (still trying to figure out how that works).

This is the only station that comes in at night when I’m trying to sleep. The volume knob is broken so the best I can do is try to drown it out with an audiobook or movie or something so I can fall asleep.

Sometimes it might not be such a bad idea to listen to this DJ: I recently went to a class reunion. I felt really guilty for ages because at the graduation ceremony—where the graduates walk onto the stage in pairs—I had, back then, turned down a girl I’d had a one-night stand with a while earlier in a truly awful way.

That was one of my worst moments, I still believe. Back then, I hadn’t even mustered the courage to tell her myself; instead, I sent someone else to do it—and to make matters worse, it was one of her best friends. I blamed myself for that for years and years afterward because it was so utterly pathetic.

So, twenty years later, I finally worked up the courage to bring it up with her when we finally met again and we had talked for some time. We had a great conversation; I apologized, and it turned out that, fortunately, my mistake hadn’t affected her at all: she could barely remember it.

That was a huge relief for me. Not that I thought she wouldn’t get over me or anything, but I would never have forgiven myself if it had affected her in any way. That wasn’t the case at all, which was such a nice thing to hear. We sat together for a long time—and later, we were joined by the other girl, who’s still her friend today and who, back then during that short-lived love triangle, told her what I should have said.

The girl, whom I had so heartlessly rejected at the time—or rather, the vibrant, awesome woman she has become—reminded her friend of that, and we laughed about it. She’s doing great, too, and it’s all water under the bridge—just a fading memory that didn’t hurt any of us, although I was certainly to blame for how things turned out back then. Even though it was school years, and such escapades may lose their significance in adulthood, I’m still glad I dug up this ancient story so that we could finally close this chapter together and be good about all that fuzz I might have caused back when it mattered.

So, to make a long story short: The inner voice certainly spouts a lot of nonsense and exaggerates when it hears only its own echo, but sometimes it can help to take up its stories and share its messages with others. Chances might be, that they have a completely different perspective on things that our inner self might sell to us as an unsolvable problem.

This might be a bad example, since, on the one hand, it might make me seem like somewhat of a womanizer—which I’m not—and, on the other hand, because it presents inexcusable behavior as excusable, which wouldn’t be right, either. But what I’m getting at is that it can’t hurt to question yourself—and that works best when you face things head-on instead of turning them into castles in the air that they may never have been.

This whole situation recently has brought that fact home to me again. Maybe someone even in a completely different situation will get something from it, too. Please be so kind as not to wait decades to try…

Edit: of course, I don’t just mean things you regret because they weren’t right toward others, but also opportunities you might think you missed, self-doubt, and all that—it’s probably not that bad at all, but just the same old tune this DJ keeps playing in your head.

Could you not post stuff so close to home mate?

Hungry and bored. Borgry? Hured?

LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR MY INTERNAL MONOLOGUE OVER THIS SOCIAL MEDIA.

Drinking shuts a lot of that bullshit up.

“Time to wank?”

My DJ just played “Back Dat Ass Up” up on a loop for most of my twenties.

Both, buddy, both, with a side note of horny.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD