If it’s Tuesday, this must be my big deal post therapy session diary entry, right?

Today’s session went quite well, actually. There was a bit of funny business at the beginning because I arrived a little early, but then discovered I really needed to pee, so I had to get the key from the receptionist, and it wouldn’t come back out of the lock, and then I could not get my zipper to go back up, and basically, it was all a comedy of minor errors fueled by my two needs : urinary relief, and not ever being even a little bit late.

But that all resolved itself, and the session began. I have to admit, I am finding my therapist’s slight hearing loss to be increasingly annoying to me. I have to repeat myself, louder and with exaggerated enunciation, quite often, and it really is a drag. When you are deeply intent on baring your soul and spilling your guts and sorting through all the fiddly little painful squidgy bits, it is very wearying to have to repeat your harrowing confessions.

The deep and irrational part of your brain can’t help but feel like this means the person is not really paying attention to what you are saying.

It doesn’t help, either, that his office has a lot of ambient noise because of the two enormous fish tanks. Plus tomorrow, he was making his own coffee via a French press, and so you had the noise of that percolating added to the mix, and he kept having to go check how that was going, so he would move further away from me periodically. And that’s also not good when you are slightly deaf and the room is full of burbling fish tank noises.

I like the fish, mind you. I especially like his enormous carp-like algae eater. It’s a lovely share of dark purple, and it’s easily twelve times the size of all the other fishies, so it makes for quite a striking visual presence in the tank.

But given the deficiencies of my therapist’s hear, I could do without the burbling of the filters.

Anyhow, aside from that, it was quite a fruitful session. We covered a wide range of things, and most importantly, we came up with an immediate and fruitful plan of action that should yield useful results and yet I felt was entirely and comfortably within my capabilities.

It goes like this. I had been talking about my desire to write my father a letter getting everything off my chest that I needed to get off my chest. I mentioned that I had tracked down an address that I thought was probably his, but I didn’t know for sure, and from there, we got into my problems with my siblings.

This is little complicated, but I will try to make it clear.

Basically, the logical way to get my father’s current address would be to email my three siblings and ask them. Surely one of them has it, right?

But here is the thing. If I do that, they are going to immediately suspect that I am not dropping him a letter just to say hello. They will recall the letter I sent Catherine a long while back, and the big ripple effects that had (that’s where I told Catherine that Dad has abused me when I was young, and she told Anne, Dave, and my mother) and think “Oh no, he wants to upset the applecart again, we better not give him that address. ”

It says something about my family dynamic that their response to the revelation of my early childhood sexual abuse was “wow, you really dropped a bombshell all of a sudden!” and not “you poor thing!”.

But then again, I am not supposed to exist, or at least, not exist in a way that bothers anyone.

In fact, preemptively, my brother told me, after that letter to Catherine, that if I had a similar letter for my mother (they live together) he would intercept it and destroy it rather than have my mother read it. Isn’t that just warm and fuzzy? Does not matter how much telling her might help me because I have absolutely no value. All that matters is what might effect him.

I told all this to my therapist, and after talking about it for a while, he helped me decide to send the email anyhow, which I did shortly after coming home. Very simple and neutral, just “Do any of you have Dad’s current mailing address? I want to write to him. ”

And now, I await their replies.

Best case scenario, all my dire, bitter predictions are for naught, they happily give me the needed info, none of the bad stuff even comes up, and they wish me luck. That would sure be nice.

But even if things go badly, I think it will be a good thing in the long run. There is a lot that needs to be said, and discussions that really need to be had if I am to stand a chance of recovering from mental illness before I die, and so if some kind of argument happens, that will probably do a great deal to clear the air.

It might not be peaceful and they might end up really mad at me, but nevertheless, it should prove fruitful. At least I will know where I stand with them, and how much they value me.

It will likely take them a while to reply, because they are all pretty busy people and do not check their email very often. So for now, I will try to put it out of my mind. I have done what I can to start the ball rolling. Whatever happens, happens.

It is not like they are a big part of my life right now anyhow. Just birthday and Xmas gifts, which admittedly help a fellow like me a lot, but still.

We were never all that close, you know?

We will see how this plays out.

Or what passes for mine, anyhow.

While I often spill my guts and then poke them with a stick on here, I rarely talk about the rest of me, so I figured I would take a stab at it tonight.

After all, who can truly appreciate my delicate and soulful musings about the tender bruising of my artist’s soul my cruel, cruel fate without a little context?

And besides, I have absolutely no idea what the heck else to write about tonight.

It happens. Sometimes, there is just no water in the well, and you gotta pump mud for a while.

Been suffering from one of my more annoying little symptoms lately, namely the one I call “temporal dislocation”. This is when I have moments, usually upon waking but not always, when I lose track of where I am in time.

This afternoon (as it turned out, it was afternoon) I had a total attack. That is when I wake up and have absolutely no idea where I am in time. All I knew was that it was daytime, and I only knew that because I could see the sunshine streaming into my window. But as for what time of day, I could not have told you. It could have been morning, noon, or twilight, as far as I could tell. I had no memory of what had happened that day, which is what I usually use to break the spell. I think about all the things I remember happening then pick the one that seems most recent and use it to deduce what time it is, more or less accurately.

There I go, deducing reality instead of experiencing it again. No wonder my thinker is such a muscular beast. I use it for so many things.

This time, I had to actually get up and look at my clock radio to center myself in time again. (I deliberately have it so I can’t read it while lying down, in order to prevent clock watching and the insomnia it causes. )

Once I looked at the time, the day’s events (such as they are) slotted themselves into my mind and I was able to center myself in time once more. I felt like I had just barely recovered from a particularly hard crash of the powerful but unstable operating system of my mind, and let me tell you, that is not a very nice feeling at all.

I used to think that my deep down worry about being only very thinly connected to reality was irrational. Just another self-made spook to torment myself into lassitude and despair, right?

But confronted with shit like losing all sense of time and not being able to access the memories of what you did that day… along with all the other strangeness in my dream and sleep life, and my variable mood, and my generally unstable inner life… it really makes me think about just how sane I really am.

And how close to the void of madness I am dancing on a daily basis.

An argument might be made that if I have not gone crazy yet (and I mean serious crazy, as in rubber room crazy) then I am not going to go there any time soon. I am well past the onset age for psychosis and schizophrenia, and not yet in the age rage for senile dementia, so medically speaking, I am not in a risk group and should probably just relax about the whole thing.

But that is certainly not how it feels. It feels like every moment of every day, I am clinging to sanity with bloodied broken fingernails, and if I was to let go for even a second, I would fall screaming into the void and be faced with my absolutely worst nightmare : being completely locked within my own mind and at the tender mercies of my personal demons.

I have no illusions as to what would happen next. I would be in my own personal Hell, the kind you can never get used to or escape, and the only cessation of agony would come from when, eventually, my catatonic body finally dies.

And after all this time, the worst part about making sure that does not happen, about maintaining the sort of iron discipline that such a vigil demands, is that I am so tired, and I have been doing this so long, that letting go is so god damned tempting.

Just let go of the rock and my sanity, and leave the real world behind for a while, and leave it to other people to take care of this stupid broken bloated body while I take a reality vacation and, hopefully, emerge saner and strong for a while.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? It would be a hell of a risk to take. What if I never come out? What if I am locked inside my skull forever? And we are back to the Personal Hell scenario again.

At least, I suppose, I would find out how much people really care about me. If I wake up in a hospital, they cared enough to dial 911. If I wake up in an alleyway in the Downtown East Side, it means they basically just put me out with the trash.

Why is it so easy for me to imagine that people do not truly give a shit about me? There must be some reason they put up with me. Yet it is much easier for me to imagine that they don’t really care and only barely tolerate me and any moment they could decide I am far more trouble than I am worth and just abandon me to my own pathetic devices.

It must be that I am afraid to believe they care, because I have been failed by the people who supposedly cared so many times in my life that I just can’t trust people any more.

At least, I can’t trust them to be there if I need them.

How sad is that?

This is not your typical “bad sleep” diary entry.

Oh, I have had bad sleep lately. Tons of it, in fact. Indeed, I may have set some sort of personal record for the most consecutive bad sleep sessions in a row, or highest percentage of time spend in bad sleep in a twenty four hour period, or something like that.

And there will be the retelling of weird dreams. Lots of them, and all very very weird. My mind releases some very strange smoke when it’s busy burning with the backlog of my sacrifices, and breathing these vapors makes me as dizzy and incoherent as any Oracle at Delphi.

The difference this time is that I am not complaining about this bad sleep. Sure, I feel like crap, dehydrated and disoriented and disjointed and discombobulated (love that word), but then again, I knew that I would when I initiated this whole thing.

See, this time, I brought it on deliberately, and welcomed it in. I have offered it no resistance. I am letting it run its course and do what it needs to do. I suspect that I am not done yet, in fact, and will go through some more after I am done writing this today.

I knew what I was doing last night when I knew whatever caffeine was still in my system from the previous night’s Denny was fading, and I was beginning to crash down from that high, and I deliberately took two melatonin pills in order to increase my downward momentum. I knew the inevitable result would be a crash that scrambled my metaphorical marbles all over the places and that I would some time in gett them back into their loosely knit bag.

But I did it anyhow, because I had gone three days without satisfying sleep, just the really shallow and unsatisfying kind that leaves you feeling more or less exactly the same as when you laid down, and I decided it was time to trigger the avalanche myself, make it happen instead of letting it blindside me and make me all depressed, and thus take control of the situation and ride it out in style.

And that is what I have done. I accepted that I would sleep a lot, and dismissed thoughts of “lost time” or sleep “stealing my life away”. Most days I don’t do anything useful besides my daily blog entry anyhow, so as long as I have done that, honestly, who cares about the rest? Oh no, I played fewer Flash games than usual. Surely now, the economy will crumble.

And at least this deep dark sleep does me some good. Usually, once the cycle is complete, I feel a lot better for a while. I have let the spooks out of my head and can enjoy some relative calm for a while. Not as many ghosts clogging up the stairwell of the ramshackle run down mansion of my mind.

Too bad they inevitably build up once more. Working on that, though, with therapy and such. Got to hold less in and that means letting more out. Funny how that works out.

Highlights of the crazy kaleidoscope carnival of my cerebrum over the last little while include :

• A sequence in which I was trapped in a record store while a demented and demonic DJ made me run circles through extremely realistic illusions of extremely gross things like raw sewage and cat puke (the illusions were about ankle deep on what had been a carpeted floor beforehand) as part of some horrible radio contest from hell, and I was not even sure there was a prize
• Another bit when I was taking, of all things, ballet lessons with a female friend, in truth just because I wanted to do what she was doing (I am silly like that), but telling myself that I was doing it so I could learn to be more graceful and less clumsy. Which would also be a good thing. When I told that to the instructor (under the guise of “I suppose you are wondering why a guy like me is taking ballet lessons”) my friend asked me “Is that a gay thing?” rather bluntly. I didn’t really have an answer for her. Sort of, but I don’t think of it that way? Kinda? Whatever.
• Then, after the lesson ended, my friend and I both had to run for the bus, which was pulling out as we emerged, and it slowed down and stopped for her, but then pulled away immediately, despite my screaming “Stop! Stop!” at the top of my lungs like a lunatic. Typical. Even in my dreams, buses suck.
• So now I am stranded in an entirely unfamiliar neighborhood, and before too long, two teenage rednecks with shotguns walk along, and before they even notice me, I know they are going to try to kill me, just for fun, you know. So then I am eluding these maniacs, and being very calm about it, like it was just average bullying and not attempted murder. I am casually dodging their bullets, first on foot and then on bicycle, till I got to a 7-11 type store, where I immediately tell the first person I see “Excuse me, but those two gentlemen are trying to kill me. ” And I call the cops.
• Then, as I am eluding my potential murderers in the 7-11, I notice a guy in a cop’s uniform. When he notices me noticing him, he immediately, via dream magic, tried to disguise himself as an employee of the store. But it was no use, I was on to him, and he said “Sorry, I can’t help… turns out I am just not, not very good at this. People, don’t vote for me again!”. Luckily, in this store, they have very cool stainless steel shotguns of justice, and this leads to me completely getting the drop on my oppressors but then I can’t get the gun to fire. It’s like the trigger won’t pull all the way. This happens to me a lot in dreams… I don’t know if it is because I deep down don’t want to kill anyone, or whether it is some weird deep Freudian impotence thing, or what.

And that is just a small sampling of what bits of strange dreaming survived the fires of my mind in order to remain on my consciousness.

So burn away, the sacrificial funeral brazier of my mind. It all has to go, everything that is clogging up my mind and holding me back and weighing me down. You are not burning anything I need and in return, you clear space in my mind to be me. I am tired of being a hoarder of the mind. Let it all burn.

May my fire rage deep into the night, and make me free.

It is about time I talked about money here in my diary, or specifically my lack of it.

I am not adjusting well to the radical drop in disposable income I have experienced in this new year. For those of you who do not remember what I am pretty sure I wrote about in here before, my rent went from $300 to $380 in the new year, a net loss of eighty dollars a month.

That would be a blow even to an employed person, but I have an income of around $670 per month, and so this financial setback represents a loss of slightly under twelve percent of my income, or twenty one percent of my disposable income.

And when you are living on as little as I am, you feel every one of those percentage points like someone is carving them out of your flesh with a dull and ragged knife.

Normally, I don’t like talking about money. I like to think of myself as creative and resourceful enough to find a way to enjoy myself and keep bopping along regardless of how much money I have in my pocket. After all, I survived many years with no income at all, so anything has to be better than that, right?

Wrong. Sure, I survived, but I was very depressed. And I was mooching off others to survive, and that was a massive black hole of negative self esteem right there.

At least now, I am not mooching off the people close to me. I am mooching off the taxpayers of British Columbia in general. For me, that is big progress, and it’s how I have been living for the last twelve years or so.

But back to my emotional state and how it ties to my financial estate. The truth is, the money in my wallet has an enormous impact on my emotional state, and I am really beginning to feel that now.

I had one month’s grace, because I had money left over from Xmas gifts plus a GST/HST refund check to protect me from the gallows cold. But all that is gone now, and all I have between me and the wolves at the door is this thin plywood plinth with a picture of a castle gate stuck to it.

And the truth is, deep down where I really live, under my happy-go-lucky pretensions, I am someone with deep deep need for material security. I need money in order to feel secure, to feel safe, to feel like I hve some kind of protection from the cold harsh world. I need money to have access to the big and small pleasures that keep people sane and that tell them they are good dogs because they are being rewarded.

Being depressed is bad enough. Being depressed and poor is a terrible double whammy.

In fact, I honestly wonder how much of my depression comes from my poverty. It seems entirely plausible to me that if I just had a better income, even just a minimum wage income, I would be a much happier and less anxious and depressed person.

Too bad the depression makes it impossible for me to work. It’s a hell of a catch, that Catch 22.

I mean, it is not like I have a lot of prospects for improving my income before the depression goes.

They say you can work from home, but everything I have seen along those lines smells strongly of being a total scam. The working from home dream is an attractive one, but it is for telecommuting professionals, not fat beached whales like myself.

In theory, that is what the writing is about, a way for me to make money on my own and try to dig my way out of this deep dark cold pit that I call home.

And perhaps eventually it will do so. I am not counting myself out. But at the rate at which I am progressing now, I am not going to get anywhere with that any time soon. I am still far too prone to let the days go by and watch my life drip away while I do nothing to improve it. It is a rare day when I can summon the energy and momentum and focus and most of all the confidence to actually face the world long enough to make a furtive attempt to advance myself as a writer before scuttling back into my cave.

Sure, it’s cold, and dark, and poisonous, and killing me, but hey, it’s home.

Perhaps I should put the high artistic ideals to the side for now, and when I have trouble finding the motivation to go find places to submit my work or looking for writing contests to enter, I should just unleash my basically greedy nature and just think about the money.

After all, lots of prominent, well respected, now official part of the pantheon of literary immortals type writers have written, at least at first, exclusively with money on their minds. History is full of great writers who starting writing not because they felt the delicate stirrings of the breath of of their muse tickling their talent buds, but because they had failed at a lot of real world things and this was a last ditch attempt to get money for the rent.

And I am a flexible and creative enough person to think that I could take any set of requirements and make something good. Even if I took to writing Harlequin romances, mine would be better than the average, because I would meet all their arcane requirements and still write a more satisfying and interesting tale than the average hack.

So maybe the real lesson I should take from all I have discussed tonight is that I should give up on finding my deep down ambition and instead learn to rely on my much more reliable and long standing greed. Money money money! I wannit.

I hope this is not the first step to becoming a conservative.

Guess what song I am listening to right now?

Another day, and here I am under slight time pressure once more because I ended up sleeping more than I thought I would, and getting that heavy sleep that makes me feel crappy, and eating my supper like three hours later than usual, and blah blah blah.

So I only have 2 hours in which to write today’s allotment. It normally takes me less than that, but still, normally I have a larger margin for error, and I am someone who needs as much margin for error as he can get at the best of times.

Because that’s the thing. I have never been good at precision, except when it comes to things that take place entirely in the realm of thought, like philosophy or language. Or comedy.

But when it comes to this whole reality gig, I have always had serious accuracy and precision issues. It probably all stems from my poor eyesight. Even with the glasses on, in many ways I am still stumbling about and taking my best guess at exactly how things work and where they are.

In fact, honestly, I think in a lot of ways, I am just using skills I learn to compensate for lack of precision vision, rather than having fully corrected vision myself.

I have been noticing this in particular when I watch movies. Often, being able to recognize who is who in a movie is rather key to understanding what the hell is going on. But I take a long time to learn to recognize faces, something which worries me on more than one level. And so in movies, I am often left frantically deducing who is who by external factors, like what they are wearing, or what makes sense given the dialogue or the plot at the moment.

This is also the case when the action is going too fast for me to recognize what the heck is going on. Many movies have lost me by doing that, and then I have to use those same powers of deduction based on the facts in order to catch up to the plot once more.

Presumably, I do an awful lot of that basic deduction and analysis all the time, without even knowing it. That is how I have been able to compensate for the lower amount of visual information I get from my real senses and how I manage to more or less function in the world.

But that kind of extrapolation is imperfect, to say the least. You can come up with a functional approximate of what is going on, but you are going to have a lot of errors and you are going to have to keep your conclusions quite modest in order to compensate for that.

So a person like me can muddle through reality and mostly function, at a low level, as though he has normal type eyesight as long as he is careful. But once you get into anything which requires a more precise view of the world, someone like me is up that proverbial dung stream without a propeller.

And what makes that especially bad is that you can’t explain to people why you can’t do normal things that normal people can do, because you are not even aware of this extrapolation yourself. It happens on a pre-conscious level, a visual processing level, and so it barely intrudes into your conscious mind at all. It is a skill you learned as a child, before you ever had glasses, and you have been doing it your whole life without knowing it.

So you can’t explain to people why you find physical things so damned hard. How even with the glasses, nothing as a smooth outline. When I look at the edges of things, they are always fuzzy and wavering. I have developed the instinct, in fact, to dart my eyes around, taking samples of my environment and deducing from there, instead of looking in one place and taking it all in.

Looking at something from one view for a long time does not help. It just reminds me too strongly of how my eyes don’t work that well and what a fog I perpetually live in. I have to keep my eyes moving if I want to get by, taking little snapshots before the fog comes in full blast, and deducing the rest.

Under that light, it is no wonder what I believe so strongly in seeing things from many perspectives in order to get the full picture, and why I find single viewpoints so limiting. I have been looking at things from different perspectives to get the whole picture all of my life.

I wish there was some way I could prove all this, prove that I am somewhat visually impaired and that therefore there are some things I just can’t do. If I had some kind of proof, like a certificate from an organization for the visually impaired, that I could show people and say “Here, see? My eyes do not work right, that’s why I cannot do X. It is not just that I am a klutz and a spaz. I am visually disabled. ”

All thought my childhood, my siblings would be trying to get me to do things, and I would not be able to do them at all, and they would want to know why, and I just could not explain it to them.

So all my life, I have felt like the world was holding me to a standard, a quite simple one really, that I nevertheless could not achieve.

No wonder I have felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with me my entire life. There was! And there still is.

I should talk with my therapist about this. It is a deep, sore issue and one that likely requires more examination than I can do by myself.

For now, I will just lay me down in bed, and give these tired eyes of mine a rest.

Overslept this afternoon, and so I will be writing today’s diary entry with slightly more haste than usual.

Don’t worry, I am sure I will be able to maintain my usual level of pinpoint accuracy and extraordinary refinement of prose.

Today was a therapy day, and that went quite well. It seems that my idea of writing out my feeling of frustration and whatnot last night worked, as I felt fine this morning, better than usual even, and hence did not end up in some petty and unproductive altercation with my therapist.

I am quite proud of that. I feel like I saw a problem coming on the horizon and dealt with it in a mature and proactive manner. These are the sorts of coping skills I am going to need if I am going to become better at managing my mental illness and getting more out of life.

So, big points to me on that one.

The subject of what happened last Sunday came up, and so I figured I would talk about it here. That will probably help me deal with it as well.

I had planned to go to this month’s BCSFA meeting with my friends. For those of you who are not local nerds, BCSFA is the British Columbia Science Fiction Association. It is a group of us nerdy types who meets once a month to hang out, munch the lovely food one of the members provides, and engage in the long, wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, and occasionally quite silly discussion upon which all of nerd kind (or at least, all that I like) thrives.

And I had been eagerly anticipating it for the whole week. What happened did not occur, as in the past, because I had completely forgotten it was coming up and thus did not have sufficient time to prepare myself psychologically for this challenge to my social phobia. I had been looking forward to the evening all week. Usually, that works.

But not this time.

What happened instead was this : at around 6 pm, right as I was about to get my pre-event shower, I suddenly felt as though a thick blanket of ice had wrapped itself around my heart and my mind, and suddenly I literally could not imagine going. I had to tell my roomies I did not feel like going. I had absolutely no choice.

This, to me, is the absolutely worst kind of moment in mental illness : the times, thankfully rare for me, when you know with certainty you are not in control of yourself. When you know what you want to do and what is right and logical and good, and yet you are completely incapable of doing it. The demon of your mental illness simply will not allow it.

And yet, it was not a panic attack, or at least, not one of the usual sort. I didn’t feel anxious or panicky or trapped like I normally do if I am panicking. If anything, it was the exact opposite. It was like I was stunned or stupefied. Part of my mind was paralyzed. I tried to exert my will over it, but something vital at the very center of my consciousness was frozen.

The sane part of me was there, screaming in the dark. It just was not in control.

And of course, the moment my roomies were gone and my opportunity to go to the meeting was irrevocably gone, the ice melted, sanity flooded back into my mind and my soul, and I was once more myself… and kicking myself for not going, because now I once more wanted to go.

Looking back, it is quite obvious that this was the beginning of the negative mood I wrote about yesterday. No wonder I felt angry and frustrated and out of sorts. I had come face to face with my own madness, experiencing it, as it were, in realtime, and in a way which was quite frightening to me.

That is enough to put anyone off their game.

I think I know where I went wrong, however, and that is a good and hopeful thing. I think the problem was that, despite all the time I had in which to do this, I had not performed the vital step of imagining myself going to the meeting and then dealing with the inevitable surge of anxiety that I always feel at some point before a social event.

There is always a moment before every outing where I am seized by a moment of panic, when my social anxiety digs in its claws and says “Nooooo, I don’t wanna go!”, and usually I get over that well before the time of departure and from then on it is smooth sailing.

But this time, because I had so much warning, I just sort of accepted that I was going and that with all that lead time, there would be no problems at all, and so I never went through the “preemptive panic” stage. And then, it hit me all at once at the last minute, and I could not do a thing about it.

I won’t make that mistake again. I know what I did wrong, and from now on, I will make sure I really think (and more importantly, feel) these things through thoroughly before departure time, as unfun as that can be, and thus be more emotionally centered and prepared when the time comes.

Still, it was a chilling event. It is a terrible thing to know you are not completely in control of your own mind. Most of the time, my depression and social anxiety is not so starkly insane. I can fool myself into thinking I am more or less sort of in control of things, despite the ample evidence that I make poor life choices and that I must do that for a reason.

But Sunday night, the insanity was laid bare and I looked into the eyes of my own madness.

I am not a well man.

Been feeling rather neg lately, so I thought I had better try and ride it out by writing it out.

Like always, I thank you readers for my ability to do this. If nobody was reading… it just wouldn’t work.

I seem to be at the “rising anger and frustration” part of my mood cycle. I have a lot of free floating irritation and anger. I have trouble staying focused on things, not in my usual foggy incoherent way, but more in an irritable, fuck this once it becomes too hard, trouble standing still way.

I feel like energy is accumulating somewhere in me. I hope this means my psyche is gearing up for another cycle of volcanic (but relatively gentle) change. Each eruption is violent when it happens, but it adds another few inches to the coastline of my slowly growing island of self.

And I need that thing to be as big as I can make it. It at least has to be big enough for me to stand on with both feet firmly planted on the ground, and no longer worried that the tide will take me away and drown me in the depths of my own dissolution.

Tomorrow is a therapy day, and that should be interesting. The last time I did therapy in this state of mind, I ended up having an epic argument with the therapist for the whole session about things which seem quite pointless to me now but which at the time were most vital.

This time, I go in with knowledge gleaned from last time, and hopefully, without a succession of tension increasing events to really set me into high torque and make me ready to snap at the slightest gentle brushing up against my enormous throbbing swollen issues by said therapist.

Partly, that is why I am trying to express my feelings here tonight, in order to dissipate some of that trapped tension and maybe make tomorrow morning’s session go a little more smoothly.

I have been really enjoying and benefiting from the work we have been doing the last few sessions, and I would rather do that than end up in some other long pointless argument, truth be told.

However, the argument also served its purpose. If another happens, it would not be a total disaster. I am less worried now that exposure to my radioactive reactor core of anger and bitterness will make my therapist abandon me. That was probably never a rational fear in the first place, but I am increasingly aware of the limits of rationality and the reality of my own humanity lately, and so I am forgiving myself more readily for my less than rational moments.

After all, I am but a human being. I cannot solve every single problem by bringing my Brobdingnagian intellect to bear on it. Some things can only be solved via, shall we say, irrational means. They cannot be puzzled out or thought through or conquered via intellectual trickery alone.

They just have to be dealt with in a strictly human manner. There may be more good, when all is said and done, in a poet’s intuitive ramblings or a sweltering hot dream than in all the thinking I could do in a million million lifetimes.

Luckily, while I tend towards rationality as a default, I am not so hidebound a rationalist that I am incapable of accepting the input of my subconscious or the truth of my emotional being that I am forever doomed to go around in mad circles trying to catch my own tail as I try to use the left brain to solve fundamentally right brain problems.

You can, if you really want to, use a hammer to bang in a screw. But a screwdriver is far better.

However, I am aware that intellectualizing is a major problem with me. I “lead with my head”, which is at least as bad to do in life as it is to do in boxing. My brain is vastly overdeveloped compared to my spirit or soul, and that is disastrously wrong. It leads to a very chilly existence. The intellect sheds much light, but gives no warmth.

No mystery how I got this way : I didn’t go out and live life. You can improve your mind alone in your garret (especially if it has Internet) but you cannot grow in spirit and strength and capacity. You can’t prove to yourself that you can take what life dishes out and survives if you afraid to even get in line at the cafeteria.

I do sometimes wonder if I would have been better off if something had forced me out into the cold cruel world at some point. The depression, of course, doesn’t think so, it says I would have just died homeless and insane. And it might be right, truth be told.

But maybe I would have just gotten a job, gotten a life, and gotten my shit together. Maybe I would be a far more whole and capable person than the absurdly unbalance, unhappy, and unfulfilled person that I am right now, in this life I am living today.

I know someone who faced the cold when he was sure he was completely incapable of doing so, and is now employed and living on his own and earning his own keep. I envy that. I feel so fragile and pathetic sometimes that I just want to start over.

Just take my disability check, buy a bus ticket to anywhere, and when I get there, completely reinvent myself and never look back on this loathsome thing that I have now become. Make a clean break from the past and go be someone else for a while, see how that works out.

Maybe become someone who doesn’t take anything seriously, lives life for the lulz, never thinks about the past or the future, and who just bounces from one thing to the next with nothing more in mind than the next thing that seems fun.

Of course… I could do that right now…..