Crash Landing into This

[Viking Fox]

I'm trying ACE from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. 

Acknowledge your inner world

Connect with your body

Engage with what you are doing. 

What I am engaging with is awareness. I have a tendency to get overwhelmed by emotion which pulls me away into thought. But it's the simplest way to being that I have found. 

I've read Scott Kiloby's book on addiction and another called 'The Unfindable Inquiry'. I couldn't get the inquiries to work for me because the feelings don't budge and I get frustrated. 

The only real relationship I have is with God. It's the only thing that makes me keep going. If I didn't believe in God and meaning, I wouldn't have the energy to keep going. "Get busy living, or get busy dying". 

There is a line in the Sermon on the Mount about how to those that have, more will be given and to those that don't, more will be taken. But Christ also said that some that come first will finish last and some who come last will finish first. I bank on the latter. The odds and reality are against me. People don't like me. Even counsellors, mental health nurses, they all find me, not anachronistic, just eerie and oddly placed. 

When you have little and you lose more and more, I see that Christ wasn't cruel or disdainful. He was trying to warn people. He was trying to help. He was acting with love and compassion. I go like a yo-yo between Christianity and Buddhism. Christ used prettier and more elaborate language. Buddha was more to the point. Neither pulled their punches with what they said. I don't think there was anything disingenuous or duplicitous in what they said. I think they were sirens ringing out to everyone for everyone's sake. In the Narnia Chronicles there is a character, I forget his name, who followed the evil White Queen. In the end Aslan let him into Heaven because he was fundamentally good, but just followed the wrong leader. 

I haven't the slightest idea how to be likeable. I have failed at that. Once people get to know me, they don't like me. I get it. I've had enough feedback to get the general gist of what I am like. I'm trying to get at what morality is. If someone doesn't like me, System 2 thinks something that System 1 criticises. System 1 controls emotions. I predominantly feel shame. So...

A - "Shame"

C - 

E - Awareness

I'm alright in small doses. To be fair, I don't understand the rules about how to interact. It seems like a rigged game. And it's all about Persona at the start. I genuinely find it surreal. I know that I can say a little bit, but I have to stop wherever the line is. And I don't know too much about where the line is. I talk to people but the conversation turns to how I think rather than engaging with what I am talking about. It's very difficult for me to articulate this. Every single relationship I have ever had, once I start to act and speak authentically people don't like me. I don't mean that I am the world's biggest victim or that I am special. I can't connect with people. And regardless of how to analyse or interpret that, the end result is always the same. Nobody calls me or texts me. People stay away from me. I have no friends and I haven't had a girlfriend for 8 years. We're around - people who aren't likeable. Some people are beautiful, some are not. Some people are successful, some are not. Etc etc. Some people have shiny charismatic inviting personas and some people have the opposite. I've had the same conversation over and over where people tell me the exact same things to me about me. And that's usually right after I open up and start talking authentically. People tell me to be more authentic, but as soon as I do I get ghosted or get a polite talking to about how I overthink and intellectualise. And I can go round and round in circles. But I haven't the faintest idea of how to feel or get connection with people. I have no clue about why my sense of humour is uninviting  or why people don't get my jokes. I'd much rather not be spouting all this and instead be out in the world living life. 

Christopher McCandless, I forget how his surname is written, wrote, "Happiness is only real when shared". That was before he died stranded on a deserted bus in Alaska in the Spring.