Today’s script looks remarkably like yesterdays. Same shitty sleep, same me sitting here with smoking brain bearings trying to come up with some words to type, same feeling of aching and tiredness and confusion and discombobulation that I usually feel after a trip through the dark and unwholesome smoke that shrouds the secret island in my mind, where all my dreams come true.

And if you knew my dreams, you would know that’s not a good thing. Sometimes, even my nicer dreams are kind of unpleasant. And my nightmares are sometimes oddly soothing.

I am telling you, it’s a jungle in there.

Like, take today’s dream. Great production values as always, just spectacular, really, but I could not tell you what to make of it. My dreams don’t seem to have meanings or even dominant moods a lot of the time. They just sort of happen, like scenes in a confusing art film that is supposedly challenging you to “find your own meaning” but is really just full of crap.

Not that my dreams are full of crap. My head, maybe, or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. But not my dreams. My dreams are poop free.

Anyhow, in today’s dreaming, I was at some kind of high class function that was taking place in a museum, and there were various events happening in various nooks and crannies of the museum, and I wandered into one where a bunch of elegantly dressed and quite chic looking people were drinking champagne and playing some kind of trivia game.

Trivia? All right! My kinda milieu.

So I found a seat, and the idea seemed to be that anyone could answer the question, but if you got it wrong, you were out of the game. Harsh, I know. Seems designed to make sure nobody answers unless they are sure of themselves, but hey, what can I say, it was a dream.

I even remember one question. We has been shown a video clip of a European style cartoon where cartoon animals were have a really big and elegant party (kind of like the one I was at… hmmm… ) and then the question was “If there was three skunks… and five otters… ” and now I am thinking, “oh shit, a visual memory question, I am so screwed!”

“… then on what shore of the island can you find giant floating gummi bears tethered?”

Everyone, including me, just stare at the screen. There’s some nervous giggles. I completely did not remember seeing a giant gummi bear anywhere.

The options “1. North 2. East 3. South 4. West” appear on the screen. I look around at my fellow players and joke “Anyone want to just take a one in four chance, and guess?” A few people laugh, and a few others shake their heads. Nope! Nobody likes those odds.

Then, later on, when there’s only me and maybe six other players left in the game, there’s an announcement. I don’t quite catch what it is all about, but I thought it said something about the next rounds of the game taking place at a different location.

Just when I am getting around to looking at my fellowe players and saying “So, do we have to… ” there is a mechanical sound like when a ride at Disneyland starts up… and the whole room I am in, which is now saucer shaped in a way I didn’t notice before, begins to move. I look out a window and I see parts of the museum begin to slowly slide past us, like they were stops on a subway.

I look around, astonished, and one of the other players says “Oh, the whole thing goes… “. I laugh with delight and surprise, and say “This museum must be VERY well funded… “, to which my fellow players laugh indulgently.

As we begin to pick up speed, another fellow passenger says “you know, they have released the restraining mechanism… we are free to roam around now!” and everyone seems happy about this (I don’t remember being restrained, but at the time, it felt like I had) and I get up and start looking around at the vending machines along one wall of our surprisingly large moving compartment, because I have suddenly realized that I am ravenously hungry.

But all the machines look like they have nothing but light snacky foods and juices, and I want something substantial. Then I come across one for what it calls “Korean sub sandwiches” which sounds good to me.

But it’s this weirdly complicated vending machine, and while I am trying to figure out just what the system is, the dream shift and now I am in some sort of slightly futuristic sandwich shop, and I am trying to figure out my order with the guy behind the counter, whom I somehow know is also the owner of the restaurant. And I am having a heck of a time ordering because I am not just hungry but suffering from the effects of low blood sugar, so I am incoherent and have trouble staying focused.

My problems attract a crowd, and the guy behind the counter begins playing to the crowd, and I play along, because it is all pretty funny, me having trouble ordering a simple sandwich and the counter uy trying to help. It becomes like a comedy routine and the crowd is treating it as such.

Eventually, I get my sandwich ordered, and he is making it, when I realize I want some dessert, too. So I go over to this little condiment island type station and grab some prewrapped cookies and such, and go back to the counter.

But by this time, he has not only finished my sandwich, but rung it up too, and he makes a big show of being annoyed with me for adding things to my order. The audience laughs at this too.

I meekly suggest he could ring up the sandwich and the desserts separately, but he shakes his head and insists he can add it all up in his head.

And that’s where the dream, or my memory of it, ends.

Now, what to make of all of this? I have no idea.

Maybe I was just bored while asleep.

Did you go to kindergarten?

Really? What was it like?

Because you see, I never went.

I have mentioned this fact once or twice in my blogging, but it came up today in therapy, and by discussing it with my therapist and especially judging by his extremely shocked reaction to the fact that I had not gone and why, it has really come into focus for me as a source of my problems.

First, the bare facts : I didn’t go to kindergarten or preschool. My first experience of school was Grade 1 in elementary school.

That is more than a little unusual, don’t you think?

In fact, judging from my therapist’s reaction, it’s not only unusual, it’s downright unheard of and on some levels, downright horrible, to be honest.

So how did this terrible thing happen?

Easy. They didn’t have enough seats for the number of applicants at the local kindergarten, so some of us just had to go. Locked outside the Garden of Children.

They tested us, and decided that because I was so precociously bright, I did not need kindergarten. So if someone had to be left out in the cold, clearly, one of them was to be me.

This would have been around 1977. As I recall, the kindergarten program was not run by the school board but by the local Catholic diocese, and therefore, I suppose, they had no legal obligation to take me in. They were not part of the education system. They were free to exclude if they felt like it.

And that’s what happened to me. I got excluded.

And my parents, being very busy and in general already quite used to mostly ignoring me, the unplanned and inconvenient child, did nothing to fight this. Apparently, they thought kindergarten was optional too, if they even gave it that much thought.

I suppose I could have kicked up a fuss, self-advocated, and demanded kindergarten for myself.

But in my defense, I was four years old. I barely knew what it was, let alone that I needed it. And back then, I still trusted that the people who were in charge of my life knew what they were doing and had my best interests at heart.

Later, I would learn that largely, they had no idea what they were doing, and that mostly what they wanted was for me to go away and stop being a problem. My best interests were not high on their priority list. I was on my own.

So what effect did this exclusion have on me?

For many years, I figured it had no effect. From what I gathered, kindergarten was just a bunch of kids playing with toys and listening to stories, and as a kid I was not all that into toys, so what could I have possibly missed by not going there?

Fool. What I missed was primary socialization. Despite the system deciding I did not need kindergarten because I was so bright, kindergarten is about far, far more than merely teaching kids certain things.

It’s about introducing kids into a nonthreatening, low pressure atmosphere where they can learn all their primary social skills without the need for academic performance. They learn to get along with one another, to make friends and to relate, to share and sing together and enjoy themselves.

Robert Fulghum was right. All you ever needed to know, you learned in kindergarten. And I didn’t go. I didn’t learn any of it.

So when I entered school in Grade 1, I was both extremely advanced academically, and severely retarded socially. All the other kids had been through kindergarten and I had not. They were way ahead of me.

And to be quite honest, I have never caught up.

Early today, before therapy, I was pondering the fact that I really was never a teenager. I think I went through puberty without actually going through adolescence. I never did any of the things which typify the teen years. I never rebelled, I never acted out, I was never sullen and bitter. I never tried to explore my burgeoning sexuality. I never even looked at my fellow students in a sexual way.

But after my therapy session, I realized that it’s no wonder I was never really a teenager. I was never really a child, either.

I was never like other children, especially in those early years. I never saw the point of getting into that sandbox and pushing your truck around and making vroom noises. I couldn’t see the point of playing on the monkey bars or playing tag. I liked books and TV, mostly, and later on, video games.

Looking back, I wonder how I ended up so damn intellectual so early. Is this inevitable for bright kids? Why was I looking for the point of everything?

And of course, you can’t say what the point of playing with trucks in a sandbox is, not in a way that would make sense to a child anyhow. There is no point. It’s play. Part of the definition of play is that it had no purpose other than itself.

What the hell was wrong with me, really? I don’t say that in a self-judging way, I just want to know why I was such a weird kid.

Well, not going to kindergarten probably had something to do with it, come to think of it.

My therapist was quite horrified that the system could so callously exclude me from what he considered to be a completely necessary step in any child’s development.

I wish I could say that I am surprised, but I have been treated thus my entire life. I can’t recall a time when I felt there was someone looking after me, someone protecting me, someone who took care of things so that I would okay.

Instead, I have been ignored, excluded, shoved aside, abused, neglected, punished for needing help, made to feel unwanted and unwelcome in my own family, and more or less completely deleted from people’s minds and made to feel guilty every time I reminded them I exist.

No wonder I’m fucked up beyond belief.

And that’s just the early childhood stuff.

Mp3 : (The Verve) The Drugs Don’t Work

Tonight, I figured I would spice up this diary entry by including the mp3’s I am listening to in the text. Who knows, maybe some time I am going to look back on this entry and it will be crystal clear how each mp3 change meant a subtle mood change in the writing.

We will see.

Made fried rice (with hot dog pieces and onions!) tonight for dinner. This is noteworthy only because it is part of my attempts at nudging myself towards doing more cooking. I like to cook, and cooking results in better meals than my all too frequency “peanut butter and jam sandwich, side dish of junk food, and a piece of fruit” meals.

At this point, anything, absolutely anything, that gets me on my feet and moving around and that keeps me from hotting that fast forward button of life known as “sleep” so much is a good thing. I have been living half alseep for a long time, and it’s time to wake up.

Mp3 : (Sister Sledge) We Are Family

It’s just that there’s so much to do, and I’m tired of sleeping.

I know why I have lived like that, though. It’s a subtle form of self-medication. If you life a completely sedentary life, very low key, barely every straining yourself at all, then you defeat your anxiety by never adding enough energy to your system to activate it.

Mp3 : (Violent Femmes) Blister In The Sun

It’s like being on tranquilizers all the time, except you are accomplishing it via lifestyle instead of via chemicals. And you learn to do it essentially by classic conditioning. When you do other things, you experience pain from the depression/anxiety. You are eventually conditioned by your illness to stay in the depths of dysthymia all the time.

It might not be healthy but it’s safe. And when you are stalked by enormous anxieties, you are looking for anything which makes you feel safe, whether it’s heroin, religion, or lassitude.

Of course, this means that depression is not merely a traditional illness, it’s also an addiction, and should be treated as such.

Mp3 : (Ram Jam) Black Better

People are not merely depressed, they are addicted to their depression. Like any addiction, it becomes the focus of their lives to the point where it becomes not just their life but their entire lifestyle while at the same time becoming the core of their identity.

Thus, the very idea of having to live life without the depression as a shield between them and the harsh realities of the world shakes a depressive to the core. It presents them with entering the unknown on a subjectively massive scale, namely venturing into the world without a established lifestyle or a sense of their own identity any more.

Mp3 : (Flaming Lips) Vaseline

This kind of existential fear cannot be discounted. A depressive might say they want to recover from the comfort of the feeling that said recovery is not going to happen any time soon, but if they were presented with the idea of an instant cure, one that means they forever give up their ability to become depressive again, they might well find themselves balking without even knowing why.

Mp3 : (Devo) The Girl You Want

Depression is, after all, a coping mechanism. It’s a highly maladaptive one, but it’s still a coping mechanism, and you cannot just threaten to take away someone’s primary coping mechanism and expect them to be perfectly fine with that.

Mp3 : (The Tokens) The Lion Sleeps Tonight

You have to give them a superior alternative, and you have to lead them to that superior alternative via steps they are capable of making. It’s no good to just point to the distant horizon and say “Your salvation is over there somewhere. ” There has to be guidance, someone to point the way through the maze, to help break it down into achievable steps and then beckon from the other side of each step.

Mp3 : (Jesus Jones) Right Here, Right Now

Of course, this approach takes a lot of patience and endurance, and requires the therapist to pan carefully in advance, something not many of them seem prepared to do. They tend to only think of you when you are right there in front of them.

Mp3 : (Maureen McGovern) The Morning After

Speaking of therapists, tomorrow is a therapy day. In fact, I will be in therapy around 12 hours and a bit from now. It should be an interesting session.

After all, last week’s session was basically one long argument, with my therapist getting his first taste of the angry, bitter, hostile, accusatory me that lurks below all the warmth and wonder and wit. It is a side of myself that I, myself, had not seen in a very long time and that I had more or less forgotten existed, but in retrospect, it was pretty obvious that these long banked embers would flare into brilliant searing light once we started poking around in my brain with therapy.

Mp3 : (Sonny and Cher) I’ve Got You Babe

I confess, I am scared. My urge is to play it cool and be all “this should be intriguing” and “I am looking forward to how he will react to the last session” but that’s bullshit. I am scared that I will have scared him away, and that he will tell me he doesn’t want me as a patient any more, and all the other stuff I wrote about last Thursday.

It might seem like an unfounded and irrational fear, but I have broken people and scared them off from trying to help me in the past by being stubborn and hard to deal with.

Mp3 : (Marvin Gaye) I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Admittedly, a lot of that was when I was a child, but then again, that’s when people gave up on me because I was too hard to handle, so…. that’s the latest data, so to speak.

We will see how things go tomorrow. If he gives up on me too, I don’t know what I will do. There may be no person alive who has what it takes to get through to me. Mp3

Mp3 : (Patrick Hernandez) Born To Be Alive

If so, I am afraid of the darkness into which that will lead me.

Most peculiar, mama! Whoa!

Feeling strange today, but mostly in a pleasant way. It’s a fresh and crisp kind of weird, like I woke up with a clean break from previous reality and now I get to decide just what kind of weirdo I will be today.

This is mostly likely because of the big soul dump I wrote last Thursday. Like I always end up saying after one of those, I just have to let out all the badness I can now and then. It builds up inside me making me feel crazier and crazier, and I just have to spill it all out onto the blank page and let the vast printable wasteland of the Internet’s infinite ream soak up all the blood, guts, and filth that I am drive to cough up.

Well, we’ll say I cough it up. It comes out one way or another, anyhow.

I also often say I should do it more often, which is an easy thing to say when you are basking in the post purgative afterglow, but quite another thing when that has faded and you are back to trying to live your life in your usual semi-soiled state.

Sure, it would be great to vent more often, but I am not sure I could take it, honestly. And quite honestly, I am quite afraid of what lurks under the top layer of filth on my soul.

So I have been simply shedding them through a natural erosion process which is slow, but it is what I can handle, and I am just going to have to learn to live with that.

I am still determined to deny myself all forms of self denigration. I plan to shut the “taking it out on yourself” channel completely, or at least, give it a damn good try. Obviously, I can’t just will myself to become a total sociopath who is incapable of self-reflection or guilt (and I wouldn’t if I could), but I still plan on cutting the “taking it out on myself” channel out of the system entirely.

I want to switch my polarity from “absolutely anything can make me feel bad about myself” to “I am completely awesome in all ways except for that which the universe absolutely forces me to accept”.

The second position seems far healthier. I know that it has risks, and I am pretty sure that in my attempts to develop a more positive self-image and correct for my self-loathing bias, I will over-correct more than a few times and act like an egotistical jerk now and then.

But you know what? There are far worse things in life than being a jerk now and then.

And depression to the point of spiritual paralysis that keeps you from growing up at all for 20 years is definitely far worse than occasionally having to apologize for getting a little to into yourself.

After all, I’m a nice guy, I’m funny, I’m charming in a quirky way, I am crazy freaking smart, I have tons of creative talent, I am sweet and sensitive and silly, and I have a unique point of view that is delightfully askew from the mainstream.

SO what if I am not that good at mundane things? So what if I am a clueless hothouse flower who does dumb shit all the time? Who cares? For all we know, any famous and admirable person you can think of was just as dorky and lost as we are, and we just don’t know about it because it’s not the sort of thing biographers or tabloid journalists care about.

You will never see a headline saying “BRAD PITT LOSES CAR KEYS FOR THIRD TIME THIS MONTH” or “KURT VONNEGUT’s BIOGRAPHER REVEALS : HE WAS A SLOB” or “NOBEL PRIZE PHYSICIST HAS AWKWARD BLIND DATE”.

A lot of famous people are probably terrible at life, and need people in their lives to take care of the details of life or they would be completely helpless.

For the most part, it seems to me, human beings get roughly the same amount of potential at birth, and the better a person is in one area, the worse they are in all the others.

So people of peak talent and ability do not have a lot of “points” to spend on the more regular, everyday parts of their lives, and hence are stumbling fools when it comes to the areas outside of their big talent(s) or skill(s).

And that sure describes me. I am a clumsy slob distinctly lacking in life skills. I do dumb shit all the time. I am not well suited for the real world. I am a dreamer who is only weakly attached to “reality” and who lives in a world inside his head most of the time.

And I have used all that as an excuse to hate myself for a long long time, but really, how much does that stuff really matter? I have so many other assets. Who cares whether you are a neat housekeeper or a skilled book stacker if you have talent and charisma?

That said, the real problem is that I socially isolate myself, which would be fine if I was of a rugged all-climate outdoorsy kind of plant that could do quite well on its own, but I am not. I am that hothouse flower, and people like me need help with dealing with that “reality” thing so that our blooms can bloom and our talents can really shine.

How do I get these people? I am not sure. But I think part of it is simply cleaning out my closet and getting rid of all the negative baggage that I can, and hence, make myself simply more rewarding to be around.

then people will like me, and want to help me, and if I can keep that up, eventually I will meet the right people who can help me interface with the world better, and I can start to really grow.

It’s the meeting new people that is the hard part.

… and deeper in… meh.

Still not feeling especially wonderful. I get the feeling that this feeling of desperation, frustration, irritation, and inchoate mindless rage is not going to go away any time soon. I am in this for the long haul, and it will continue until I either learn to focus it into activity and let it out that way, or until it cracks my mind open like a coconut and lets all my crazy out, leaving me a drooling barking lunatic who spends the rest of his life in a straightjacket to keep him from playing with himself in public.

And the way I feel right now, I could go either way, really.

I just want some fucking closure. Some progress. Some god damned relief.

I just want out.

I truly do hate my life. It feels wrong to say it, but I cannot deny the truth.

My life disgusts and depresses me. I am just a fat sack of shit living in my own mess and eking out a pathetic existence banging words into a blog read only by a few close friends (thank you, thank you, thank you!) and otherwise wasting his life away on video games and Internet chat while his health slowly deteriorates and the Grim Reaper patiently waits for this particular nonentity to die the early fat guy death so clearly preordained for him.

I look at all that, and I want to throw up. What a poignant waste of a life. Can’t someone help this man out of the pit and into the light?

The answer, of course, is “nope, and he can’t do it by himself either, so he’s basically screwed”.

It really strikes hard just what a horrible bitch of a disease depression is. The powers that be pay a lot of lip service to removing the stigma from mental illness, but from the other side of their mouths, they say “well, sure, if you can cancer or something you could, you know, prove exists, we would be moving heaven and earth to try to save you, but because your illness is invisible to sight and X-rays and we pretty much have to take your word for it that you have it, we all secretly think you are just a loser who should pull himself together and stop being such a pussy, and that is why we just give you some pills and then turn our back to you. ”

Not that I am bitter, or anything.

But basically, if you have an illness that makes it impossibly hard to ask for or otherwise seek help, and it’s not something people can see like a missing leg or even being blind, then you are screwed. Nobody knows you need help, and if they find out, they don’t really care. They can’t afford to care, because your problems are so huge they would crush a normal person.

You are a drowning fat person and no lifeguard dares try to save you, because you will clearly just drag them down with you.

And I am not sure I don’t agree.

My last therapy session was very rocky, as I mentioned before, and it brought up a lot of the fears I have about ever truly opening up to anyone, even a therapist.

My fear has been, for a long long time now, that if I really do open up to anyone, drop the containment field and expose them to the warp core of my madness, that my problems will simply open wide their starving jaws and devour that person alive. That the intensity of the heat and hard ration alone will annihilate them and leave nothing but ashes and greasy smoke and a stain.

Put less poetically, I have felt that if I open up to people, truly open up and not just present an edited and filtered version of myself, that anyone trying to help me, or even just like me, will find out what I am really like and be exposed to all the anger and pain and resentment and evil that I have suppressed all these years, and they will be so horrified and disgusted they will simply flee screaming into the night, never to return.

And my tussle with my therapist yesterday did not entirely convince me that this could not happen with him. I am pretty sure that my anger and bitterness and sarcasm (and tendency to nail people where it hurts with expertly aimed barbs when I am hurt) have somewhat alienated my therapist, and if I am not careful how I handle things from now on, he will be looking for an excuse to get rid of me as a patient, because I now frighten and disturb him.

And of course, being a therapist, he will try to make it seem like all he is interested in is what is best for me. You know, “clearly this is not working out, I clearly do not have what it takes to give you the therapy you clearly need, so I think it would be best for the both of us if you sought therapy from another provider… ”

Mark my words, it will come to that. He simply won’t be able to handle me, and will try to convince me to go, and when I completely fail to fall for that bullshit, he will come up with some bit of legalistic form shuffling bullshit to get rid of me somehow. Boot my sad ass out and slam the door shut behind me.

Because he can’t handle me. Not the real me. He probably can’t enter the Dead Zone, the Killing Fields, the Demon Twilight that exists in the heart of my mind and survive, and so he will flee, and I will lose the one chance at real therapy I have had this decade.

I don’t know if there is anything I could have done to stop this, either. Sooner or later, therapy is going to open up this part of me, and the therapist will have to deal with an angry, bitter me who has a lot of issues to work out that are not pleasant or pretty, and that angry bitter me will have all my arsenal of verbal, intellectual, and intuitive powers when it speaks the words of anger, and I don’t know if there is anyone anywhere who could take all that and come back for more.

And if that’s the case…. if there is little or no chance I can actually get therapy that works… then I feel I will end up going in a dark, angry, bitter direction that will not end well.

It would really suck to find out you have no choice but to be crazy.

Today was a therapy day.

What, on a Wednesday? What madness is this? Has the calendar swallowed it own tail and then gotten very ill and looked up its insurance coverage online?

Relax, it’s no big. The Doc called me up last Thursday in a bit of a panic and, after some phone tag, we managed to connect and he told me he needed to move my appointment to Wednesday instead of the usual Thursday. He sounded pretty stressed about the whole thing.

So being the cool, laid back, and flexible fellow I am, I said “sure!”. No big. I can deal. The time matters more than the day of the week. We do the therapy at 8:15 am because Joe (my amazingly awesome roomie) works the graveyard shift and gets off work at 6:30 am, and is usually up till around 10:30 am before going to bed, so 8:15 fits his schedule nicely.

So anyhoo, I had been feeling really dark lately. Angry, irritable, depressed, frustrated… that “caged animal” feeling.

So I kind of had an inkling that today’s therapy session would not be smooth and quiet. Doctor Costin has been encouraging me to open up and express my anger more. He even actively encouraged me to do so in our last session.

Well, today, he reaped the windmill.

I won’t go into what all we argued about. It would be indiscreet, for one, and tricky, for two, but mostly, it just does not seem all that important. Now that I am fully out of the situation and all calmed down back to more or less baseline, I can see that everything we argued about was more or less irrelevant compared to just how I was feeling.

So on some level, I feel that I was in a crappy mood and took it out on my therapist.

For me, that is, quite honestly, progress. I have a great deal of anger and bitterness and resentment deep down inside, and because I have been working very diligently at cutting off my impulse to take all that out on myself, it has instead been bubbling to the surface and manifesting as, well, let’s call it “grumpiness” for the moment.

And normally I would feel incredibly guilty about taking out my bad mood on my therapist, or on anyone at all, because I vowed as a child that I would never, ever take things out on others. That is what my father did, and to me, that seems like the ultimate of evil on a personal level.

It’s why I believe so strongly in self-control and it has been a deep part of me for a long time.

But I have realzied lately that I have taken it too far. Normal people are grumpy sometimes, normal people have mad moods sometimes, and these act to externalize and hence express and release their emotions. Without that outlet, the anger can only reflect inward and cause depression, self-destructive behaviour, and incredibly low self esteem and personal energy levels.

And while this seems like treason to me in many ways, part of me is increasingly willing to entertain the notion that if it’s take it out on the world or take it out on myself, maybe the world has it coming. You know what I mean?

I mean, what has the world done for me lately?

Jack shit, that’s what it’s done.

More seriously, though, obviously just “taking it out on the world” is not good enough. I am far too old to adopt a simplistic hostile attitude toward the world like some angry teenager who has just figured out the world has problems and therefore sucks.

And I am certainly not going to make a habit of taking out my bad moods on random strangers (or close friends) just because I can. That is still evil and wrong. I am hardly willing to turn myself into a raging dyspeptic asshole just for the sake of catharsis.

I like being a nice guy, dammit!

So the idea is to find some constructive (or at least, not very destructive) way to let all this crap out when things start getting dark inside this soul of mine.

Taking i out on one’s therapist is always a possibility, I suppose. After all, he’s paid to deal with everything a patient can dish out, whether it’s laughter, tears, anger, or ennui.

I am pretty sure my Doc did not quite know what he was getting into when he invited me to express my anger, though. I have a great deal of passion and intensity that I normally do not show to the world. I tend to keep it way down because honestly, it scares the crap out of people and tends to leave them pretty singed, to put it mildly. And of course, I am normally so mellow and sweet and polite that having the furnace of Hell open up when I am mad is quite a surprise to people.

Add in my finely honed verbal skills and knack for both deep and penetrating observations and high concentration acid sarcasm, and the fact that I am a big fellow and hence somewhat imposing and even scary when I stop compensating for it with the aforementioned sweet and mellow attitude, and you get a person whose anger can be highly destructive in force and hence who should keep it banked.

Or at least, that is what I have thought. But maybe it would not be so potent if I did not have so much suppressed emotion to focus through it. Maybe if I had other ways of letting these negative emotions out, I would not have to fear that if I let my anger out at anyone, it will just plain annihilate them like a whelk in a supernova.

One this is certain : if I am not going to take it out on myself any more (and I am not… that option is off the table), then it has to find another place to go, or it will simply build up until something I can’t control happens.

It’s release the energy, or melt down.

I think I will choose release.

This issue had been bubbling and burbling on the back burner of my broken brain for quite some time, and today, I decided it was time I tried to write it out.

I am a sweet guy. Sensitive, understanding, genuinely interested in people and their problems, with a strong urge to help others and give them someone who listens and understands. I give good advice. I have a great deal of warmth and benevolence to my spirit. I would give the whole world a hug and tell it everything will be okay if I could.

Children love me. Once they get over the size factor, it’s like I am a big teddy bear to them. They appreciate that I am gentle with them, that I treat them with respect, that I listen to them and answer their questions, that I look out for them without being too controlling about it.

Animals love me too, because they know I am a big softie and love animals and love to pet cats and dogs and other critters. They can sense it. I have made friends with many an animal that, according to its owners, did not get along with anybody and in general did not like people one bit.

Well, that was before they met me.

And yes, I’m pretty smug about that.

So that is the warm and fuzzy wonderful side of my personality. It’s one I quite like in myself and one of which I am quite proud. The world needs all the sweet people it can get.

But then, there’s the other side of me. Another facet to the jewel, so to speak.

It has to do with the way this big brawling brute of a brain of mine works. Being an INTJ, I have a mind which is built for swift, incisive judgement. I am born to analyze and render judgement. My mind quite ruthlessly separates the truth from the fiction, distills the drops of goodness from the gallons of raw information, pierces directly to the heart of things without hesitation or mercy, and shatters through illusions at the speed of light.

At the heart of it all is a fanatical search for the truth. My “reality instinct”, that drive that causes all human beings to try to figure out what is really going on, is incredibly strong. So strong, in fact, that sometimes it frightens me.

I often have moments when I feel like my mind is pulling me along behind it. I have the leash, but it has control. Comes, I think, from having a lonely life with a lot of time for thinking and no social input telling me I should slow down. So I developed a mind so strong at that kind of thinking that m poor weak will can’t always contain it.

Sometimes, in fact, this rampant bear of a brain of mind has even overridden my compassion, and I consider my compassion to be my prime virtue, the one that is the basis for all others, the one that is my ultimate dividing line between good and evil.

And that is the problem. These two facets of my multifaceted personality sometimes come into conflict, and I am not sure how to bring them into greater harmony.

I have had the experience before of someone asking my opinion about something, and then being startled and hurt when the person they think of as this sweet guy suddenly comes out with a brutally direct, intensely incisive, no holds barred analysis that cuts right to the quick and spares nothing and nobody in its incision and candor.

It’s not something that has happened enough to be a “thing” with me, although that is quite possibly mostly due to my intense social isolation. But it is indicative of the conflict.

Now I am studiously avoiding that whole “which one is the real me?” bullshit. That is a very bad road to start down, and can only serve to increase the inner conflict by implying that it has to be one or the other in a patently useless false dichotomy, and thus setting up an inner war that can serve no purpose but to increase the conflict and suffering of the soul.

So no, I don’t ask “Which one is the real me?”. They both are. They are different facets of the same jewel, and the jewel is me. I am not my facets. I am the jewel.

The fact that these two facets appear, from the outside, to be inconsistent with one another does not mean that they truly are.

I would, however, like to learn to harmonize these aspects of my personality so that I do not accidentally hurt people with my blunt assessments.

It really makes me feel my socially isolated upbringing when I realize just how powerful that brutal drive towards the truth can be. When you are all alone with your thoughts, it doesn’t matter how savage and relentless your desire for the truth has become.

In fact, it can be a good thing. I am sure that this drive for the truth is what has given me great insight into how things really work and what is really going on. And for a writer, such insight is priceless. Helps a lot when trying to help others, too, because you have deep understanding of where they are coming from and that can mean a lot to people.

But this insight can be deadly too. You have to learn the hard way that not everybody sees things as clearly as you do, and that a casual remark about something that is obvious to you can actually come across as a brutal criticism that leaves a person feeling deeply stung and humiliated and like you have just stripped them naked in public.

In a bad way.

I think this is at the root of why I find it hard to get close to people as well. I am always afraid that I am going to hurt them unintentionally. Like if they get close to me, I will be unable to control this dangerous part of my mind and it will lash out at them and I will be left feeling horribly guilty and helpless and filled with the urge to flee.

Wow, no wonder I am so messed up. I didn’t know this about myself till I wrote it.

Well then, I declare this act of public therapy a success. Thanks, folks!