I think so. I think this is not normal, and if it isn't normal then it might do me in.

But it could also be a coping mechanism that I've developed over the years because telling myself all these negative things was the only way to motivate me.

I believe that was influenced by the way I was raised. Operant conditioning and such. But it's also a part of the negative feedback loop that might have made, now that I'm alone with my own thoughts, reinforcing the same tired patterns day after day and seeing the worst in the world get to me and letting it validate my cynicism and morbidity.

It's like, if you're inclined to that way of thinking throughout your entire life, how do you accidentally discover someone dying like this and not let it get to you? How are you supposed to "get over it" and do the thought suppression or whatever that all of the other mature people around me seem to handle reasonably well?

It's like, basically I never learned how to do that, and it does hurt me in a sense.

So I need to unlearn that and learn something better.

But maybe that's also why I'm thinking of these things and incorporating them into writing the way I do, because of this counterproductive way I think and how the frustrations I want to express can be expressed with my thought process, that people aren't usually trying to think counterproductively in this manner so I have some kind of insight that people with more self esteem will never find, because they don't personally understand the problems I have.

Kayne West was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. They put him on medication and if I'm remembering correctly he said it took away some of his creativity.

If Kanye West wasn't bipolar then we might never have known him as Kanye West the way we do today.

I think about that sometimes, for some reason.

So it's like, what is the part of me that needs the help? Okay, so I ought to improve somehow, because I pretty much always have room for improvement, in general. Maybe art is therapudic. But still, if nobody knows what you do and validate you for it, it's like you're screaming into the void, and that's how I see myself as alone a lot of the time. Not validated for the things I do. Nagata Kabi's definition of "alone" that she picked up from one of her sympathetic Twitter followers. Even though I do have a few people that validate the things I create, it still doesn't feel like it's enough, and don't know at what point it will. Or if it's even supposed to be enough at some point, like if I was some kind of genius in the top X percent of people (I'm not, I'm somewhere in the bottom half) and somehow did everything perfectly I'd just be happy and satisfied one thousand pages and ten thousand upvotes later, after hundreds of comments from people whose faces I'll never know reading "this is the best thing I've read today" and "thanks for the words" and "cool", when I reach middle age and can just kick back and watch the entirety of Star Trek without worrying about what impact I'm going to make on the world every single day.

That being the only reason I do these things.

It's like when people start saying a sentence that begins with the words "In life, you should" and talk about making interpersonal contacts, people that will at least talk to you in good faith and not call you "salty" for getting frustrated at your errors. Because you are going to be put through adversity and fail over and over no matter what you do, and you need to have a healthy way of managing that if you're going to survive. I mean, of course I'm going to get frustrated if I choose to play Persona 5 and end up getting my ass handed to me over and over again. I can't help it. What do you expect me to feel instead?

It was a miracle I managed to meet a single person that understands that kind of frustration and never judges me for it (well, almost never) and has a practically infinite amount of patience and takes time out of her work day to do administrative things for my sake and talk to me (she isn't a therapist, she's someone I can have a legitimate relationship with in the mentor-mentee sense, the kind I don't have to pay to receive - you know, the ones normal people going to see a movie together always have). She never yells at me or tells me something matter of factly like someone smarter who tells me everything I don't know like it's obvious and intimidates me, like they're in a totally different intellectual sphere, and what were you doing with your life all those 24 years to not know that simple thing? And the only reason I met her was because I had a mental health diagnosis. And still the first time I met her I treated her like absolute shit, and only by being put in my place by people who knew better than me did I realize that my behavior was terrible, a firable offense at any other company in any other set of circumstances, and so I learned from my mistakes, and a year later if it wasn't for her I'd probably be either homeless or dead.

I'm just ranting at this point, excuse me.

But I guess the reason I'm writing all of these words out in the open, on a handle that's indexed by major search engines and adtech companies and will be publicly searchable for decades to come, is because all I wanted was for someone to listen, but not just listen really - to also get to know on the level of a friendship of some kind. To not worry about having a social filter with. The people I mentioned are essentially family that will never cross me and keep me in check out of a parental sense of wanting to do right. But I don't have people you can call hard-won friends, the ones you meet at Deerhunter concerts and are of legal drinking age and have jobs and overcome hardships as their own independent person. The ones you're responsible for keeping or losing. I've never understood these kinds of people in the same sense. I've either lost all their trust or, more commonly, lost interest in them when I felt I couldn't say the things I wanted without worrying about whether or not the next word out of my mouth was going to lead them to dump me in the middle of a nice little social outing together in a foreign country and have me pay my own train fares back. I don't mean this metaphorically.

So yes. In a sense, I guess you could conclude from reading all of the above that, indeed, I need help.