[Absolutely nothing related in any way to Debian or Free Software here, so you can just skip ahead]
As some of you may be already aware of, I suffer from
OCD, in a very mild form. If left untreated for long enough time, in my case it was years, it leads to
depression. A good one. You can end up in
Learned Helplessness Land, where your closest companion will be your inner voice, constantly criticising you, blaming you for anything that happens, I even used to believe I brought bad luck to the people I was with or met.
I strive for perfection, and the world is not perfect, not everything is under my control, and OCD is just a jail. In my case it is cleaning and re-arranging stuff. My perfectly shiny jail.
Some of my friends think it is so bourgeois that I have a person come clean my house every week. Maybe they do not understand that I can t clean, because I can t stop. The same way an ex-addict can t take $SUBSTANCE_OF_CHOICE. When I get stressed I tend to clean, and when I start cleaning I just don t stop. One stupid example of how ridiculous it can get: doing the laundry in an empty laundry machine so that it is clean inside. I can kill my plants by watering them too much, specially Cactus, dist-upgrading all my machines every morning, and then several more times a day, even if i know there will be no updates available at all.
And while I am doing it, I don t enjoy it. I can t stop, control it or decide anything. I follow very strict rituals, things have to be the right way, following a very complex set of rules that make sense to no one else but me. Well, not even me. But I have to, I don t choose to, and that is where the jail comes from.
I think it all comes from my childhood, in a very chaotic household, at a deeply disturbed family, with an abusive, alcoholic father and a very overwhelmed mother, the only thing I could control in my life was that my room was clean and arranged, as opposed to the rest of the house, and my homework perfect, as opposed to the rest of my life. The same way anorexics feel in control when they let themselves starve to death, because they control the food they eat, their hunger and their bodies.
My father also turned up to be psychotic, manic-depressive, and what not. When my mother finally forced^W helped him to stop drinking, I had this hope that things would be fine, but they didn t really improve. I was eleven. At the beginning it was the drinking, then the mental illness, then the aging, but my worst fear has always been to become him. To do onto others what was done to me. When I was 16 I already knew I would never have kids. I can t even bear to think that I could fuck up the way my family did. I can t even bear the thoughts of passing these genes onto an innocent baby. I specially hate the idea of bringing a new baby into this fucked up world, with so many kids out there so helpless, as myself as a kid, that nobody wants. I would definitely adopt a kid one day, if I was sure I would not repeat certain behaviours on him/her. If a doctor would put it in writing with his own blood.
In 2004, wanting to kill myself, even with a
well thought plan and a written unofficial will (who gets my laptop, who gets my clothes, who gets my money, and so on) I went into treatment. Some of you might remember I was kind of MIA at the time. I was on
Prozac,
tranquilizers, and a year and a half therapy later, I was fine. I was even happy! That was by Debconf 5, after being fired from a job that was hurting me, giving up a 15 years relationship that had become unhealthy for both of us, the death of two very dear friends, and other looses not worth mentioning in this blog post that already gives too much away, I was finally happy. My life radically changed, my jail was almost gone, my fears were under control, I was finally free.
But, recently, a very dear friend of mine got sick, not any near what my father was or had ever been, but I saw myself in a mirror. My worst fears paralyzed me. My inner voice whispered I would end up being him. Again. And again. And some more. So I had to fight my I can do this alone pride, called my doctor and I am back on all the crap that will probably fuck my brain chemistry in the long run, and back on therapy, which is the only resource that will be really helpful for my life. I am not as bad as I once was, and it is going to be much easier this time, but I am scared as hell, because I though this was gone forever. But my friend got sick, and I had a stressful couple of months at work, and (yay!) I started cleaning again.
My physical health is also reflecting what I am going through. I am in a very acute
UTI episode. The amount of pills I take in the morning is getting scary now. The pain and the burn are hardly bearable, and I have become unwillingly an early riser. I wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 am, and go to bed somewhere between 8:00 and 10:00 pm. One of the side effects of the painkillers is I can t really focus my sight at the moment, so my computing is painful and limited.
Being unable to concentrate on the computer I engaged in compulsive house improvement.
* I changed every light switch and power outlet in the house without turning the power off. Dangerous? Sure. Am I proud of my new skill? You bet!
* I revamped a very old and crappy piece of furniture I found in the trash. When the lady that cleans for you has a better cell phone than you, and you can t afford new shoes for the winter, you start looking at the stuff other people throw away in a different way. In a very different way.
* I lost ten kilos, and the clothes I wore to Brazil fit again. I am fixing the broken bits, because I can t really afford to get clothes of my new size anymore either.
Some pics of my achievements (some work is still in progress):
You might have noticed my web server is down at the moment. I hope this post explains why I am timing out. My server is called aenima, latin for soul, and quite incidentally.
Yes, that is a separate volume slider in my regular mixer for MPD, my music
player. Here's how to do that:
First we'll need to create a huge /etc/asound.conf:
