Today was a therapy day, the first in two weeks, and so I guess you know what I will be talking about today. Slow cooker recipes!

Prepare it in the morning and eat it in the evening!

OK, for this easy and economical recipe, you will need to brown two pounds of stewing beef, add three cup of bacon broth and a cup of mandrake root, then dance around a blazing bonfire naked with obscene Celtic poetry written on you with the blood of the Old Ones….

Woops, sorry, wrong recipe. That is for…. something else.

Actually, I will talk about what went down in therapy for a change.

I was talking about how hard it is for me to get over my horror at contemplating how I am pushing 40 and have done absolutely nothing with life, no job ever, no relationship ever, no nothing, just endless video games and Internet.

I told him about how I can not get over how pretty much anyone would consider someone who had gotten to the age of 38 (39 next month) without ever having a full time job or supporting himself to be a great big loser to beat pretty much all losers.

And even outside of that, just the realization that I am approaching middle age, half my life gone forever, and I have nothing to show for it… even just that realization is like an enormous weight pressing down on me and holding me down, and how I just did not know how to sift that enormous weight off myself so I could move on.

And my therapist suggested that what I was experiencing was grief for the lost 15 plus years of life that depression has taken from me, and that what I needed to do was to mourn them. Take the time to think on them and what they meant to me and experience the loss, and then eventually, find a way to let go of them and bury them in the past where they belong.

And he is right. That is exactly how I should treat this problem. Especially the thinking about it part. I have mostly avoided thinking about it because it horrifies, shames, and depresses me and if I think about it, it give me self harm type thoughts.

So I thought there was no point thinking about it, it could only end in badness. But if I think of it as grieving, then suddenly there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Grieving ends. You might not know when it will end, but eventually, it ends. You bury the dead and move on. You do not forget them, but you let them go, and go forward with your life.

And that sounds pretty good to me. It means I have to spend a lot of time thinking about something which is very painful to me, but I think I can do it if I feel like there is some kind of point to it all.

Of course, oce I rid myself of that burden, I will have to face what lies beyond, and who I would be without it, which might be far harder than the first part. That is the other big thing we talked about this morning : identity.

One of the problems with having a life like mine, with nothing to hang my identity on but my depression, is that I really have no idea who I would be without it. Depression has been with me for so long that I am not sure I know how to separate myself from it. And the idea of going into the future with no defined identity whatsoever is terrifying. (And sort of exciting, in a way. )

I honestly think that issues of identity are the biggest barriers to the personal change people crave. We reject things which do not conform to our sense of ourselves, things that do not “fit” in our image of ourselves, even if those are the very things we want the most in life. You cannot change who you are until you change your idea of who you are, or at least, who you can be.

Luckily, I have been slowly developing an idea of who I could be without the depression and social anxiety holding me back, so I would not be heading into an identity vacuum were my mental illness to disappear into thin air like smoke tomorrow.

In fact, in my better moments, I am pretty sure that I have it in me to be a pretty amazing guy. Funny, sweet, charismatic in a quirky way, lovable, intelligent, creative, and one heck od a good cuddler.

Sure, there are a lot of attributes I do not have. I will never be particularly neat, or good with my hands, or organized, or decisive. (Or will I?)

But I have a lot of assets. I could really make a name for myself in the creative fields. I am not the useless pathetic individual my depression (and the voice of my sister Catherine from so long ago) tells me that I am.

And one of these days, I will get myself straightened out enough to silence the chaos of choice multiplication inside myself, take some decisive actions for a change, and somehow get myself to a place where I can do myself some good and connect with like minded people.

There is probably a lot of soul searching and therapy between me and then. When I can remember to have it, I have faith that if I continue to unburden myself of the deadened, leaden weight of old frozen emotions and continue to try to unlearn the bad thinking in order to make room for the good, eventually I will simply rise from my grave and simply walk away with it, the path pleasant and clear in front of me, and my grave filled instead with my dead forgotten past.

And I will never look back.

Having a Bad Awakening following the usual Bad Sleep, and so I am not feeling so hot right now.

Specifically, I feel distinctly out of breath. I must have been deep into the sleep apnea this time, because I woke up feeling like I had spent a few years in a dusty closet with a couple of moldy mops and a bucket of soured rinse or ten.

Even as I type this, I am experiencing bouts of intense desire to yawn, and that is always a clear sign that you are not getting enough oxygen to the brain. That is what a yawn is, basically : a special reflex used to make you take a great big breath and get that oxygen deep into your lungs.

So here I am, feeling half smothered, with blocked up sinuses (stupid hayfever, that is probably what brought this sleep apnea bullshit on) and a feeling not entirely unlike death deep down in the core of my being, trying to yawn and use deep breathing exercises to bring myself back to within at least a stone’s throw of the land of the living.

Mostly, what I want to do right now is just lay back down and try to pull myself together in a nice dark room with maybe a little music on so I can just chill out and concentrate fully on slow deep soul breaths and then maybe get myself back together a bit.

But, it is Writing Time, and that is something I never miss no matter how I feel. Managing to put a thousand words a day out is the only thing that makes my life worth living, sad as that is, and I absolutely refuse to let anything deflect that.

I am coming to a period of dissatisfaction, though, when I become increasingly discontent with the usual daily diary diarrhea and want to put together something more substantial, like an essay, or even better, a short story of some sort.

Or heck, even a poem, if it is long enough.

So hopefully this will percolate in the cast iron kettle of my brain for a while and then I will come up with something besides this useful but meaningless drivel.

I have been struggling to find a way to translate the backup I made of this blog into something readable. I wanted to just use Blogbooker, a very cool website that turns your WordPress XML backup into a nicely formatted PDF book, but it says the XML backup this blog spits out is full of XML errors and I do not know a damn thing about XML so I don’t know how to fix it.

It is a pity, too, because Blogbooker did a lovely job with the backup of the Million Word Year and I was so looking forward to having something similar for this blog to take with me should I decide to depart for Tumblr or whatnot.

But alas, it seems it is not to be. I might get an XML debugging program and see if I can ferret out the errors that way, hoping to more or less bluff my way through, or I might not. We will see.

Then I tried a plugin that said it would export my blog to text, which is exactly what I want, just a big text file with all the posts in it, in order, with subject lines and dates.

But no, instead, it put them in a tab delimited database type format suitable for importing into a spreadsheet program like Excel or OpenOffice Calc.

But I didn’t want a spreadsheet, I wanted a text file, or a PDF, or the like. Something readable by humans, specifically, me.

Oh well. I have the XML file and this tab delimited thing, and I can always beaver away at those until I come up with something. I managed to open the XML thing in OpenOffice Writer (the word processing component of it) in such a way that it is more or less readable if you ignore a bunch of XML garbage in between the entries, and so if I wanted to go through that and extra the Good Stuff, it would not be too onerous a task.

The main point is, I will lose no writing if I decide to jump ship and go blog on Tumblr or Blogger or something like that. It will all be there on my hard drive, waiting for me to sift through it all and pan out the gold from the river silt of my ramblings.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, Therapy Day, the first in two weeks. Last week my therapist was on vacation to spend time with his grandchildren, and let me tell you, I have not enjoyed the extended time between visits. I really missed it when I did not have therapy to go to last week, and I hope it is a long time before he has to take another Tuesday off.

I have come, it seems, to rely on that once a week chance to really express my emotions to someone who can help me birth those deep down dark demons that weight me down. It is not always a pleasant experience, and sometimes he drives me nuts with the whole “I think you know the answer… ” routine that therapists seem to love.

But in the long term, it does me a lot of good, like writing a thousand of these soul searching diary entries all at once in terms of therapeutic release, and I look forward to tomorrow’s session.

Afterward, I will cash that GST check, and hopefully do that lab work I keep putting off. It all depends on if I can stand to (and remember to) go ten hours without eating.

That is always the hard part, the fasting. It is unpleasant, to say the least. Getting blood drawn and providing a urine sample, those are not fun but they are no big deal.

But going ten hours with no food, only water… that sucks.

Wish me luck with that.