Life and all that.

«Deserve’s got nothing to do with it». —William Munny, Unforgiven

Notions of fairness are just part of the moral code that we give our otherwise senseless lives. It is thankfully in our nature to want to make living with others based on ideas of social cohesion. Otherwise life would be hell for all of us.

Unfortunately, some people divert from our understanding of socially acceptable behavior and need to thus be kept at bay.

I don’t find that the erroneous idea of a «free will» is more than just part of that moral code we’ve adopted as inherently social animals. We want to make sense of the world around us. We want to be able to make moral judgments based on ideas of agency, and therefore decide if a given behavior was «good» or «bad».

Yet, to me there’s no difference between a person who murders someone for money or the psychotic person who kills their child, because a voice in their head tells them to. Both of these actions are completely socially unacceptable. What’s more, they’re both based entirely on states of matter in the person’s brain. Yet, we put one of these two in hospital for safekeeping and intensive treatment. And the other one ends up in a highly dysfunctional prison system, without treatment and frequently with the expectation of being subjected to capital punishment.

Christopher Hitchens once said «I don’t have a choice but to have free will.» I always took this as a nice encapsulation of the conundrum and self contradictory concept that is the idea of a will that is somehow free of those states of matter.

Well ventilated.

The very next day goes down as the worst in my work as a shrink so far. Things came to a head and I managed to cry in front of a patient. I negotiated an early end to my shift with my line manager and went on to have a panic attack in the car on my way home.

I thought I was dying or going to kill myself. At some point I noticed I was starting to feel dizzy and later realized this meant I was hyperventilating. It was the worst breakdown I ever experienced in my life.

I am grateful beyond words to the person who talked me out of my catastrophizing feedback loop. I could not possibly have found better words. Goes to show who your real friends are and what professionalism actually means.

The mind is both a powerful, beautiful and incredibly dangerous and hurtful place at times.

In a nutshell.

Feels like a culmination of the worst possible outcomes today. All the accumulated crap of the last few months came crashing down yesterday and I swing from suicidal scenarios to self pity [is there a difference?] to aggression and back again. Waves of emotion. No fucking point anymore.

And still I somehow manage to maintain a validating and largely non-judgmental interaction with my clients. This is hard work. What feels like playful banter while I’m doing it seems to really take it out of me after the fact.

I feel isolated from my colleagues. I feel totally invalidated. And all this was wrought by a few words that caused some neurons in my brain to trigger the devastating cascade of self-pity and self-loathing.

I’m fucking suffering here.