If your willing to share how would you describe your internal demons. I think most people probably have some. Some have more control than others.
My two biggest are a petrifying fear of change, and one I don’t know how to articulate well, a petrifying fear of interaction would probably be the best short description.
Change/future: when I left my old job, I had a new one already. Everyone already knew I was leaving. Actually, officially, putting in my 2 weeks notice took me almost a full workday to work up the courage to submit, and I’d already told my boss weeks earlier. I don’t like my job now, have a few other things I could consider and the financial means to do it, but I am terrified of following through on any of it. What if I don’t like it… What if… what if… what if… I don’t like what I do now, but I am comfortable doing it. I work from home and have wanted to move for over 5 years. I know some of this could be risk aversion, but it seems excessive and irrational at times.
Interactions: Even before submitting my first post here, filling out the form with why I wanted to join was hard for me to do; submitting my first post was terrifying. Even now I have a little worry every time. Its getting better with time, and I do what I can to fight it, but its always there. It took me 10 years before I clicked the watch button on an artist’s page. I’ve never been “normal” and I guess I had some fear of being “found out” or shame? dunno. I was afraid someone I might know would be there. I don’t know why, that’s why they’re demons. I recently joined a few discord servers, I feel like an imposter, that I don’t belong, that nobody wants to hear what I have to say, or I’m being in the way. I don’t know if its just some social anxiety, or something deeper.
My biggest demon is my anger. If Dante’s Inferno were real, I’d end up in the fifth circle, where “the sullen (the passively wrathful) lie beneath the water, withdrawn, ‘into a black sulkiness which can find no joy in God or man or the universe’.” It sucks. It hurts me every single time. Just today, I spend three-ish hours working on a video project in Kdenlive, but there’s something about gifs that I don’t understand that makes it render all wrong (“Rendering a project with variable framerate clips can lead to audio/video desync” but transcoding into an edit-friendly format doesn’t work because something something GPU drivers). It’s a stupid little thing that I’m trying to make, nothing important, really (only to me, I guess), but seeing it all fall apart hurt so much. After two attempts to fix it, I ended up yelling at my computer. I took a notebook and smashed it against a sharp bit on my squat rack again and again before tossing it across the room. I don’t like seeing my neighbours because they must’ve heard me scream at least once by now. It’s weird. I’m not like this usually. But when tech doesn’t work and I don’t understand why, that makes me extremely angry. If there’s a reason, even if it’s a dumb one (looking at the nm-applet in Linux Mint), I’ll be fine, but when errors are hidden behind a veil that all the googling in the world can’t lift, that’s what triggers me.
This behaviour might shorten my life by a good bit, but idc. It also makes me sad every time. My therapist told me that I shouldn’t hold my anger in and instead use the energy it gives me to bring forth positive change, but I don’t think he understood just how angry I could get.
Idk, I’m just tired. Being silly online is a great distraction, but it won’t fix my life. Idk if anything can fix my life. My throat hurts from yelling. I don’t want to go outside or see anybody for a few more hours. I wish I could stop being so angry, but it feels like I”m fundamentally broken.
Sorry, I just needed to write this.
No need to apologize.
I like tinkering in all things electronic, so if your still having issues and want second set of eyes, let me know and I’ll see what I can find out.
Personal anecdote, feel free to skip:
I can somewhat relate, there are somethings that make me angry to the point of wanting to break or hit something, but not to the level you describe. I once broke an almost new pasta rack and threw it across the room because I felt like it ruined my first attempt at making pasta that I was already frustrated at that it was sticking too much.
Thank you, that’s a very kind offer, and I’ll keep it in mind when I run into issues like that again <3 As for the video, I ended up cheesing it by recording the preview window with OBS. It was a small (500 x 700) video, so I could just circumvent the whole rendering part without much of an impact on video quality. That’s a lesson learnt for the future, I guess.
The pasta story is definitely relatable. I’m still trying to find coping mechanisms for situations like that, but it’s hard because all the coping mechanisms that make so much sense when I’m level-headed just fly out of the window in the heat of the moment.