Bodi's blog

This is my first serious post in around five weeks. If you’re still checking this blog regularly then more the fool you thanks. Apparently about 25 of you a day are doing so. Where have I been? I’ve been encountering something I’m going to call Snapback.

The short version of the theory goes like this:

• You live for many years with a belief set X (negative) and generally being an unhappy, bitter, negative twat.
• You engage on a ‘life changing journey’ and get into Game for a few months. Your brain is flooded with new positive beliefs and attitudes and you strive to try and actualise life-change.
• You’re pulling yourself away from where you normally lie…..
• tension builds…..
• SNAP! your inner elephant RIPS you violently back to where you were. But it gets worse, like a piece of recoiling elastic you go back beyond and out of the other side!

Which in sum means for the last 5 or so weeks I’ve had a kind of little mini-nervous breakdown. Ta da! I basically lost the plot. Since early July I’ve gone through a rollercoaster of depression, binge-eating and crash weight gain, misery, psychosis and periods of intense scary rage attacks. Luxury!

It took me a few weeks to work out what was going on and why my life seeemed to have fallen apart but I finally realised my old friend Depression was back on the scene.

Handy tips to show you’re depressed:

• Constant fatigue, despite sleeping a lot.
• Obsession with getting more and more sleep each night
• Scary binging on junk food, sugar and caffeine
• Unenjoyable excess masturbation (anything for a gram of serontonin)
• Total disinterest in anything
• Inability to function at work, function outside of work (go shopping, pay bills, etc)
• Utter, endless misery and unhappiness
• Rage
• Self destructive behaviour

I’ve had a long history with depression, having been depressed pretty much constantly from the age of 17 to 24 and then intermittently for periods of up to a year at points thereafter. The benefit of this is that I can recognise when it returns. It’s a sly little beast.

This period has been particularly bad and I attribute this to Snapback. I genuinely think my psyche has violently reacted to being pulled away from the norm and the counter-reaction has been intense.

I’m coming out of it now, I can feel it lifting, so it’s easier to analyze it. I’ve learned something really interesting and scary about human minds. Now I’m probably going to make myself sound schizoprenic here and maybe scare some people that I know but what this depression has reinforced for me is the rider and elephant theory of the brain. It’s actually taken it to a new level. I now feel that the human brain is more like multiple facets of the same personality within one brain.

The way I can describe depression is almost like an out of body experience. Like you are trapped within looking out at your own hands as some part of you takes control. You can be sitting there, gorging on your third 500g bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, not enjoying it and not wanting it yet totally helpless to stop this weird possessed body from gorging on it. It’s a loss of control. The rider doesn’t have the reins, the drug (screwed up brain chemicals) crazed elephant does… and it’s running amok.

It’s like having two personalities. A terrible, negative, impulsive one and a rational, weak, more logical and positive one. For most periods the latter is in control but with a period like I’ve just gone through the bad one takes control.

The rage and aggression have been the worst thing. In hindsight I’m pretty sure that nearly all of it’s sexual frustration. Beta Rage. The rage of the Beta with no hole to pump. Sure, anger is generated by genuine means (e.g. someone shoves in front of you in a queue, whatever) but the reaction of the brooding sexless Beta is to tremble, grind the teeth, swear under the breath then imagine repeatedly stabbing them in the neck with a biro, stamping on their face then spitting on their corpse, whereas the reaction of the man who is having hard, deeply satisfying sex three times a week with a 20 year old Japanese model is to chirpily declare “C’est la vie!” and think about puppies and daffodils.

Total utter lack of sex + depression = scary amounts of Beta Rage.

In fact I’ve been pretty much a rage monster the last month. To be totally honest I’d have to admit that most of this has been directed against women.  To be honest I hated women before I started Game and for a few months I encountered the novel experience of not doing so. During Snapback, well, oh my god, the Hate reached new levels. For five weeks I’ve literally despised all of femalekind. The kind of constant hate-filled monologue running in my head has not been the most well-balanced of musings.

Here’s some tips to spot if you, too, are having a Snapback nervous breakdown:

• You are reading Anthony Beevor’s “Berlin” on the tube and get to a bit about how Russian soldiers sweeping across Germany in 1945 raped and massacred the German women and you laugh out loud and think “Good. Serves the bitches right”.
• You see a couple of pretty young girls walking along laughing with each other and you think “Fucking bitches. I hope they get run over by a steamroller. Oh how I’d laugh. Oh yes.. how I’d laugh. Not have a chance to play games with men then would you you little whores? Ha ha ha (scary laugh to self)”.
• Sitting in the office, incapable of working, you while away the time wondering what weapon would be best to go on a shooting spree. Maybe a Thompson submachine-gun for that retro touch? Or for novetly value perhaps a WWII flamethrower?
• You suddenly notice one day you are talking to yourself out loud.
• Without any idea why you are doing so you go into Marks & Spencer, buy a massive box of cream cakes then go down by the river and sit eating them, weeping as you stuff them into your face. Afterwards you try to make yourself sick and fail.
• You suddenly notice one day you are swearing out loud.
• You lie on the floor staring at the wall for hours, unable to move.
• You suddenly notice one day you are laughing out loud for no reason.
• You become filled with a burning, murderous bitterness over the tiniest things. Marks & Spencer put the orange juice up by 25p? CUNTS. I HOPE THEY FUCKING DIE. I’d love to go to head office with an RPG and a Stetchkin machine-pistol and show those fuckers a thing or two.
• You become obsessed with weird things. Joe Satriani is a genius. I hate those cunts in Coldplay for ripping him off. Stuck up snobby middle class cock, marrying some fucking annoying shit movie star. She was ok in ‘The Royal Tannenbaums’ but I hated ‘Sliding Doors’. Calling his kid stupid names. Fuckers. How dare they steal The Maestro’s work like that. Wouldn’t be so clever with a bayonet in his neck would he? I’d love to get an M16A1 with a 100 round Beta-mag* and blah blah blah, etc, etc.

Not really normal is it? Yes, I know thanks and I’m not happy about it either. Pills? Medications? I’m kind of thinking now that maybe that would have been the best thing to do. However the unfortunate problem is these things takes weeks to kick in and doctors in this country are shit and having to face all the banal, insulting questions like “are you sure you’re not just down in the dumps” horrifies me. However, in hindsight I believe walking around for five weeks wanting to die and/or murder everyone is not a good thing so next time this happens I’m making a beeline for the happy pills.

What happens now?

I’d like to think it’s over. I hope it is. It feels like the worst is over and the smoke is beginning to clear. It seems to be burning out. I don’t have the energy for all the rage anymore. I feel like I’m slowly starting to regain control. If this doesn’t continue I’m off for some pills.

To try and help the situation I’ve finally grabbed enough of the helm-controls back to implement a few course corrections:

• I’m going to go to the gym every lunchtime
• Start trying to give up the mood altering binge foods: sugar and caffeine. As a start switch to bingeing on savoury food. (I’ve been here before, that’s a good start)
• 2 weeks 2 days without chocolate (the most dangerous of all legal mood-altering substances)
• Find a fit whore with big, firm tits and fuck her once a fortnight. It’s not as good as “free” but may help.
• Go on a sex holiday
• Start this blog again
• Get out of London more
• Sign up for online dating. It’s not my ultimate goal but I’ll pump anything at the minute to help with the rage levels.
• Start boxing or Muay Thai classes. Hit things and be hit. Helps with the Beta-rage.
• Start gaming again.

The last one is the hardest. The house of cards I’d built from February to June now lies somewhat  higglety-pigglety. I really don’t feel in any way in the right mindset to begin gaming again. I’m struggling to be positive. However, I need to fight through this and accept it’s a bitter pill and that it will do me good. I don’t expect to pull from it but just getting out, meeting new people and having the odd rewarding chat with a woman will be worth it. I think it’ll help.

I do feel pretty shattered into pieces by The Snapback. Do I blame Game? No. I blame my own abnormal brain and mental illness. I’m still glad I did Game. I’d like to try give it another chance. It’s important because I feel I’m at a post-Snapback crossroads:

• Get into Game again
• Give up, decide I’m too fucked-up for it, do online dating or go off live in Asia and live the Beta-dream

The second one seems a cop-out. Oh Bhodisatta! Don’t forget what the Great Experiment is! You need to give it a fair chance. One more go… please elephant… just give me one more go.

*it’s really called that. What more appropriate automatic weapon feed-system could there be for a Beta-rage rampage?