Last night, my brain gave me convincing evidence of how deep it has sunk into its obsessive nature with its latest target. I dreamt I was walking along a forest trail in Virginia when I spotted a bear coming out of treeline. It started pursuing me. As I was running away, knowing that bear would likely catch up to me, I saw a figure jogging my way. It was Sissy Spacek, aged about mid-thirties or forties. I waved and yelled. “A bear is chasing me! Run away, Sissy!” She stopped, looking shocked. The bear jumped onto my back and started chewing on my shoulder. Sissy was still there, eyes wide, not knowing what to do. I yelled again, “Sissy, run!” She snapped out of it, turned around and fled.

Somehow I survived being mauled by a bear. Sissy found me some time later and seemed sad at the extent of my injuries. She asked me why I focused on saving her while a bear was already trying to eat me. I said, “You’re extraordinary. If one of us should fall, it should be me.” I woke up immediately with tears in my eyes. It was two in the morning, and I wasn’t able to fall asleep for the rest of the night.

I’ve decided to try therapy again. I don’t believe in psychotherapy; it feels to me like the whole industry is a scam, whether or not they’re aware of it. I’m even more suspicious of its origins. But the site is close, and I figured that I may as well talk to someone who has no choice but to listen. The reason for this decision is that I’ve been unemployed for more than a year now, I’m 41 years old, my savings are running out, and I feel completely paralyzed. I worked tirelessly throughout most of this last year trying to figure out how to turn my software-development abilities into money. Nothing worked. Worse yet maybe, I lost my interest in the most promising projects. And I can’t be arsed to even redesign and update my curriculum to send it out there.

I fundamentally feel that there’s nothing for me out in the world, that every job I could possibly end up at is just going to be torture for a sensitive, permanently-bruised man with high-functioning autism and Pure O OCD, who can only endure the weight of being conscious by engaging constantly in escapist daydreams or by losing himself in elaborate projects, who can’t stand being in the same room with another human being for more than a couple of minutes without enduring mounting anxiety and wanting to leave. To have a chance at life, I would need to press a reset button and hope for the best.

These past few days I’ve been dragging a loss of motivation on top of everything else, that may be some level of depression. I can’t manage to care about any of my programming projects except one which is basically finished for the purposes I use it. The other programs I use on a regular basis (for audio mastering and YouTube video rendering) were finished some time ago and they warrant no further work. I love turning my song lyrics into songs through Suno, but it serves no purpose other than my emotional satisfaction. For most of the day, I’ve sat at my desk idly, being unable to muster the motivation to do anything. I can’t even passively watch a movie.

I’ve been thinking about the daydreams I’m drawn to. I suspect I have quite the powerful inner theater, which helps me disappear from the real world whenever I don’t want to deal with it. I find those daydreams so compelling that I find little point in reading other people’s stories instead. After I became haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s Alicia Western, I imagined myself in my time-traveler form (which is a vastly improved version of myself apart from the time-traveling) going back to 1972 and preventing Alicia’s suicide. Then I help improve her experience of being alive by showing her movies and songs from the future and alternate timelines, and also by buying her a mansion in which she could start to figure out what she wants to do with her life now that she has decided to stick around.

Ever since I became obsessed with Sissy Spacek to the extent that she randomly appears in my dreams, my daydreams have shifted into visiting the Spacek family in the late sixties as my time-traveling self. Back then, Sissy’s brother had been diagnosed with leukemia, a condition that eventually killed him (Sissy includes one of her brother’s heartbreaking letters in her autobiography; the poor kid spent the last stretch of his life terrified and lonely). They moved temporarily to a rented apartment in Houston in order to follow his treatment. I introduce myself as a time traveler, and I show them a tribute video of Sissy for them to understand how I came to learn about their existence (actually, this video). I give Sissy’s brother the cure for his leukemia. Once they return to their small hometown of Quitman, Texas, I hang out with them for a while, showing them Sissy’s movies and also other cool stuff from the future.

I thought briefly that maybe this is how wannabe parents get before they make the (usually mistaken) decision to have children: perhaps they just have the instinct to show cool stuff they like to a captive audience who feel indebted to them. Then again, it’s not really the same: I love Sissy’s personality. If you have a kid, they could turn out to be someone you wouldn’t even have wanted to cross path with in the street. I never got along with my siblings to any meaningful level, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid engaging with them. But clearly my daydreams include the common theme of being able to hang out and enjoy together experiences with people I’m actually fascinated by. It just happens that I haven’t encountered in person anyone that truly interested me, even the girl I dated the longest many, many years ago.

I guess that’s all I had to say for today.