The Real People Project

Well, I've really been going through with the 'Interacting With Real Humans' plan. This means that I actually meet people in person and speak to them without typing on a keyboard. So far, it's been challenging.

A few months ago some total stranger came up to me at Barnes & Noble and chatted with me, and I happened to pass him on the street the other day when I was out walking. He was sitting by the sidewalk and I recognized him and said hello.

We chatted a little bit, and it turns out that I'm uncomfortable chatting without a purpose. He mentioned that he needed to get something from a website and he didn't have an internet connection, so I latched onto that as the favor that I would do for him.

It's painful for me when I meet people, discover that the conversation doesn't entertain me very much, find out that I don't have much in common with them, and decide that the whole thing is totally useless and neither of us have anything to gain from it at all. When I feel like that, my mind starts calculating 'What can we gain from this?' In the old days the answer was always 'Nothing. Say goodbye as soon as you can.' But now I am actually looking for something to gain or something to give. Getting that printout for him gave me a purpose. The idea is that he will be a human contact who might eventually be useful to me. Again, I feel guilty about viewing people as 'useful' instead of just enjoying their company, but it's very difficult for me to find anybody whose company I enjoy. Over and over again, I discover that I just don't like doing any of the things other people like to do, I don't like talking about the things that other people like talking about, I don't feel understood by them, and so on. I like people in a sort of detached way, from a distance, without any real closeness. And I don't like socializing for the sake of socializing - I like to be busy, I like to work, I like to have a goal.

However, this person fulfills the purpose of the Real People Project, because if I need a ride someplace, or my house burns down, or I run out of money and need somebody to buy me dinner, I have one additional person on my list of contacts who might possibly be able to help with those things.

I am getting a sense of 'Favors/promises owed to me' and 'Favors/promises I owe to others.' Anytime I tell somebody that I'll do something, no matter how small of a thing it is, it gets added to this list. If I say I'll call somebody on the phone at a certain time on a certain day, I have to do it. I am starting to feel like a 'dealer' somehow because I keep talking to people in a 'sales pitch' tone of voice and scheduling which hour of which day I'll meet somebody somewhere or call somebody. And I have hardly even met anybody yet - how on earth will it be when I am socializing with a dozen different groups of people? It is all very businesslike and artificial, very forced, detached. It's like I'm continuing to do work, instead of 'having fun' or 'socializing' or 'relaxing with friends.' Everything feels like it has to be done for a purpose.

I like that feeling. It's done for a purpose, but I'm the one who decides what purpose (aside from the goals and purposes being decided by 'them,' as in the voices). It's different from going to work every day and being told to do this task or that task, to be part of a machine that someone else built. This time I am the one building the machine.

Favors/promises get postponed whenever anything goes wrong in my life. For instance, I postponed my trip to West Virginia that I talked about with my MySpace friends (sorry guys) because first, Mom said she wasn't sure when they were going to New Jersey to sort through my grandmother's stuff, and then, even after that was settled, my finances were so bad that I was having trouble paying my bills and felt too anxious to try making a trip anywhere. I'm still not ready for that.

I don't yet have any criteria to decide what priority level the various tasks will get. That's too complicated for me right now. I'm just kind of saying yes to whatever I feel comfortable with, meeting people as friends, network contacts, but not as boyfriends/sex partners - I don't think of this as dating. What I'm doing is networking and interacting with the real world. It will become obvious very quickly that there is a need to make boundaries and limits. Socializing is overwhelming.

The second person is a co-worker: we've been planning and postponing a trip to the coffee shop, and I gave her a phone call and left a message. We are trying to find time to talk to each other about our lives, our experiences, our relationships, and other things that are in the 'types of things females talk about with each other' category. It's very unusual for me to have any female friends who I meet locally. I have female friends online, but not people who I hang out with regularly. Female friends are something I had back in college and in school. Since then, I've usually had only one local friend at a time - whichever guy I was dating - and this comes to a grand total of two guys over a period of eleven years or so (while I've lived in State College). I had a couple of housemates a few years ago when I lived in another apartment, but I didn't stay in touch with them when I moved out.

I have reason to believe that toxic mercury/silver amalgam dental fillings inhibit social interaction. I have definitely felt better since I removed the mercury filling. I've had other disturbing symptoms from the new plastic fillings, and that's another story, which I've already written about, but overall, I FEEL better.

I had to reach a state of desperation before I quit hoping to meet 'perfect' people and just accepted whichever random people happened to appear. 'Trying not to stalk somebody' was a good enough incentive to push me to meet other friends instead of piling up all of my social needs onto one guy who decided to avoid me and totally stopped communicating. I would have just gone back to normal except that I kept waking up every day hearing voices urging me to try to talk to him again, and waking up to voices claiming to be him, and going to work every day and fighting with them as they told me 'ask him this, ask him that, ask him if he's receiving your letters,' and so on.

(I distinguish between 'fellow sufferers' and 'button pushers.' Fellow sufferers are people who are lying in their beds passively hearing voices whether they want to or not. Button pushers are people who own and operate the equipment and computer systems used to do this attack. I ALWAYS assume that people are fellow sufferers and NOT 'button pushers.' I know, 'button pushers' is a silly name to call them, but it's meant to emphasize the fact that they are consciously, knowingly operating a piece of mechanical equipment instead of just talking 'psychically.' I decided years ago that if you are ONLY using a 'telepathic' or 'psychic' method to talk to somebody, then you are INNOCENT of any attack. Psychic/telepathic activities CANNOT be done at will or controlled by you yourself. If you experience a feeling of control, I believe that's fake. You are being deceived. My experiences led me to decide that all telepathic experiences are fake nowadays. I still don't know whether humans had psychic powers hundreds of years ago before this technology was invented.)

If you've never experienced a bunch of voices in your head commanding you to do things, it's hard to imagine what it's like. You constantly battle to figure out which activities are in your best interests, and which activities are destructive and harmful to you and others.

There is something I call the 'Unison Conflict,' which happens whenever you AGREE with what they tell you to do. You immediately feel the urge to do the OPPOSITE, or just do something else, or refuse to do that thing, merely because they told you to. If a real person had told you, face to face, 'Do this,' then it would be agreeable. But when somebody forces a voice into your head, and you have no choice about hearing them, it's totally different: it's a physical assault and battery, a physical attack, and you can't bear to agree with a physical attacker even if YOU WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE AGREED.

This is similar to the Iraq Invasion. The Iraqis want peace and security too, but they'll be damned if they surrender to the American army trying to FORCE them to be peaceful. Don't hold a gun to someone's head to force them to do things that they already want to do. That's the stupidest possible way to get them to do it. On the occasions where I 'agreed' to go along with things (please note, there can be no such thing as 'consent,' by definition, whenever somebody puts a voice into your head), it was only because I happened to be in a good mood, or I was on drugs, or other things that made me more suggestible. And it gets exhausting to constantly fight them. But once again, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CONSENT with regard to voices in your head. You can't avoid them; you can't tell them 'go home and let me sleep,' you can't tell them 'I'm at work right now, let me think,' you can't tell them 'I'm meditating and I need to make a decision right now' - THEY DON'T CARE. They always just keep talking, keep zapping, totally ignoring what you want, not caring about your right to sleep in peace, your right to meditate without being disturbed, your right to choose whom you interact with and when and where you interact with them.

The third group of Real People has been as challenging as the first two. It's starting to feel like a reality show, a soap opera, and a romance novel mixed together. (I know, that makes it sound trivial or petty. If they wanted it to be something, they would want it to be a great drama, a great adventure, something of importance. But for me, it has been such a miserable and unpleasant experience that I can't view it as anything noble or heroic. It is something painful that I endure, something I doggedly and wearily work through, without gaining much. From my point of view, I have lost a lot, and gained very little.) I don't know what the results will be. Everything that I've kept secret for months is suddenly pouring out. We are all talking to each other, about each other, and people are gradually starting to understand what the hell is going on here. It's a great relief to get it out in the open finally.

I don't know what will happen - I am blind to this particular future, because they won't stop attacking while I meditate. In the old days, I would have meditated to look at the likeliest possible outcomes of this situation. I would have foreseen numerous possibilities. I would have felt confident, prepared, ready for anything. I would have felt relaxed, strong, and not surprised by any turn of events.

That cannot be done now. Every time I look at the future, my body is physically attacked with zaps. That began shortly after my therapy with Judith Swack. I used to be able to plan, I used to be able to foresee, I used to guess what was likely or unlikely. That's destroyed now. This is a terrible evil. To destroy someone's ability to think and plan for themselves is to destroy their ability to function at all independently. I was never meant to just 'trust and obey.' I was meant to think for myself. But in this situation, with pain and weariness, with resentment, reluctance, bitterness, anger, and hatred towards the attackers, I operate blindly and wait to see what their purpose is. If I had wanted to live that way, I would have been religious.