Paranoia. Paranoia is not cool. Paranoia keeps you from living. Life is just a long series of calculated events and reactions designed to drive you insane.
This is what goes on in the mind of a paranoiac. It's (usually) not really so much of a constant, conscious "Everybody's out to get me." It's just a world-view. It is a model of the universe. A way to explain the seemingly impossible coincidences of life. Paranoia usually leads to depression. It typically goes a little like this:
The world is not a place of gentle action and off-hand coincidence. It is a measured series of calculated experiences and situations designed to keep me off-balance. If the will of nature was designed to keep me from achieving happiness, there must be a reason. I can't fight the force of nature, can I? I mean, I'm just a little man. I don't have any influence on the interactions of ... well, everything. There's nothing I can do. I might as well not do anything at all. If I can't do anything, I can't be happy, because I'm only happy when I'm doing the things that make me happy. If I can't be happy, why should I get out of bed? owell. C'est la vie.
Usually a bit like that. It ends up driving you in such a downward spiral with such force, that you end up feeling helpless (again), which drives you deeper... I ended up defeating my problems by (slowly) realizing that I was who I thought I was. I am who I am. Popeye had it right all along (except for the spinach thing... eech.) This realization, though seemingly insignificant, is actually a subtle world-permeating paradigm shifter. If I am who I make myself out to be, I am whomever I want to be. If I can change myself, I can change the world around me, since the entirety of creation is based on the interaction of ... everything. I interact with the world around me. My world interacts with me. My very presence alters the world. Just think if I were to assert myself and my will on my life, and the world I have inadvertently created?!? Life can indeed be whatever I want it to be. I recently read a quote that slipped right by me. I had to read it several times before I understood what he was trying to say. Here it is:
"The subject matter ... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are."
---Stanislav Grof, The Holotropic Mind
It took me several hours for the quote to "activate" in my head, setting off several alarms, which said, "Hey! Didja hear that? Didja hear what that guy said? He said that life is what it is. Life is how you see it. Life is what happens between the moments. Read between the lines. Don't lose the forest for the trees. Look around you! Nothing matters! It's not the way it is. It's the way you make it."