Taking the focus away from myself for a change, I think today I will talk about the Internet critter we all know and loathe, The Troll.

For those not up on the patois, a troll is someone who prowls the various comment sections, message boards, and other such regions of the Internet with a single intention : hurt people with words. Say whatever you can to cause the most anger, pain, sadness, and distress in those who read your words. The angrier and more upset they get, the more you like it. You thrive on outrage and misery, and there is no kind of response that does not increase your pleasure, because your greatest joy is to create as big a mess as possible.

In other words, you are pond scum.

What got me onto this subject was this bit of investigative journalism from news.com.au about the subject of trolling and the trolls who do it.

Now before I totally launch into the subject, let me draw a distinction : there are two kinds of troll – there are the combative and unpleasant people who cause a lot of problems wherever they go because they have short tempers and obnoxious personalities… and then there are the real hard-core trolls whose only aim is to cause harm, intentionally and with great zeal.

I am only talking about this second group of people. The first group is problematic, but lack intent to harm, so they are another subject.

First, it should come as no surprise that the article states that trolls tend to be people coming from a state of weakness, often people with no other power in their life but their ability to inflame and destroy on the Internet. Anyone familiar with the basics of the psychology of abuse would have predicted it would be so. People become abusers not simply when they become angry, but when they feel a lack of power and control in their lives.

The abusive act, then, whatever form it takes, is an act not just of rage but of hyper-controlling someone and using your power to dominate them, to push them so far below you that you feel elevated and powerful and totally in control.

It is a malfunction of the volatile social dominance hierarchy of our primate pasts, meant to establish our position in the hierarchy, not provide an anger outlet and psychological release.

My father controlled my childhood household via his anger, and he has someone (I learned later in life) felt he has very little power or control in his work life, so he came home and took it out on us.

But where does this leave our trolls, who take it out on strangers?

That is the beauty of it, in a way, from the troll’s point of view. They can just hop on the Internet and vent all their anger and bile and hatred on total strangers who have no power of retaliation. The Internet throws the door wide open for the potential abuser, giving them billions of victims, none of whom can fight back in any meaningful way.

The targets of abusers are often simply targets of opportunity anyhow. They take their rage out on whoever is near them, be it spouse, child, subordinate, or what have you. Whomever they feel they can abuse and get away with it. So trolling makes sense in that sense of the word.

Often, the troll has a rather impenetrable set of beliefs which might not be consistent with one another, but which makes them extremely difficult to reform. They tend to have a sense of self-righteousness (like all abusers), feeling that their actions are somehow justified, either directly by “deserving” it, or at least by leaving themselves open to attack.

They tend to also believe that what they are doing is a harmless sport even while also reveling in the harm they do. They justify this to themselves with the notion that people “take this whole Internet thing too seriously”, so in a sense, they are blaming their victims.

This, despite the fact that if people did not react as they did to the troll, the troll would not enjoy their trolling nearly as much.

This is the meaning of the constant refrain of “do not feed the trolls” on the Internet. The only way to deal with these people on an individual basis is remarkably similar to how to deal with children who throw tantrums (and that is no coincidence) : ignore them. All responses, no matter how angry or witty or piteous or especially outraged, make the troll happy. Their goal is to have as large an effect as possible. The only way to not be part of the problem is to ignore their comments completely. Give them absolutely no response whatsoever.

Unfortunately, that only works if everyone does it, and not everyone is going to (not that I blame them, they are only human), and that is why this sort of thing cannot be handled on the individual level alone.

The best solution I have seen that does not involve the labor-intensive solution of people hand-moderating every comment or post is a rating system for individual comments, where each comment starts with a score of zero and other users can either add a point or subtract a point.

Add in a default setting where users do not see comments with negative scores, and you have a workable system where trolling comments are pushed out of view rapidly.

It is not a perfect system, by any means. People can vote down comments simply because they disagree, and there is the problem that if someone acts fast enough, someone can vote a comment down right after it is posted, thus keeping anyone else from seeing it.

But it is the best solution I have seen so far. Mob justice is certainly not the best justice, but it is certainly efficient and it suits the Wild West nature of the Internet.

And it robs the troll of most of their ability to do harm.

Well, once more it is time to write again, and once more, I feel like crap.

Spent most of today asleep. These sleepy days are just a part of life for me, it seems, although I am filled with lingering doubt as to whether going back to bed because I am still sleepy is really always the best policy. Maybe if I got up and did something at least a little active, I would wake up and perk up and feel energetic and not need more sleep at all.

On the other hand, maybe it would just make me more tired. And then I could end up in a situation where I have to stay awake and cope with things even though I am incredibly sleepy and therefore I have a lot less mental energy available for coping, and therefore feel vulnerable and slow and scared as hell and extremely stressed out.

That is a great deal of why I am so addicted to my bed, so to speak, and why I get nervous in situations where I can’t just sleep right away when I need to do so. I am afraid of getting stuck in that psychologically vulnerable and incredibly stressful state. Afraid to the point of it becoming its own phobia, or possibly just a sub-phobia operating within my social phobia. As bad as I have felt in social situations before, it is nothing like the active misery I feel if I am very sleepy and yet have to deal with the real world and social situations.

Obviously, sleep is the central issue here. If I had a solid, regular, normal sleep pattern, eight hours a night and no need to nap during the day at all, ever, this would not be an issue. Ideally, this would also lead to greater powers of concentration and focus, something I sorely lack.

I know that if I could just focus my considerable intellect and various talents onto one thing and do that thing the best that I could, I would be far more productive, and therefore I would feel like my life had some meaning because I had all this something I had made out of nothing, and might even get, like, MONEY from it or something.

That would do wonders for my self-worth. Right now, I feel like I have a lot of potential that is just not going aywhere because I am so unfocused and messed up. And I have been giving myself a lot of grief over that, angry that I continue to waste my life when opportunities abound and I just have to do something with them in order to make life better for myself.

But perhaos what I am blaming on my own lack of character and pathetic nature is actually at least in part due to sleep issues. I have a legitimate medical issue (currently untreated) called sleep apnea, and it is known to cause problems like inability to focus and feeling kind of sleepy all the time, and I have been blaming my character for something entirely outside my control.

Well, somewhat outside my control. I have not actively tried to get my sleep apnea treated lately, and in the past, I have had a lot of trouble making the appointments. But then again, with my lack of ability to concentrate due to lack of sleep, that is hardly surprising, is it?

So maybe this sea of fog I seem to live in is not entirely the fault of me just being lousy at being a human being, but the medically valid symptoms of a condition I already know I have, and which I have been trying to get treated for some time, but the condition itself (as well as my other medical issues) have complicated that process prohibitively.

This at least partly takes me of the hook for my failures in life, which is somewhat of a relief. I have been struggling against the effects of not enough oxygen to the brain while sleeping (not to mention the resulting massive deficit in the powerfully regenerative deep REM sleep), for such a long time that it is a wonder I have a single wit left to me.

So instead of beating myself up for not getting anything done with my life, I should be patting myself on the back for making it as far as I have despite the challenges I face.

After all, I wrote a million words in 11 months. I wrote a 50,000 word book in 25 days. I write 1K words a day on this blog just to keep in practice. Way back in college, I wrote a play in 24 hours that got rave reviews from audiences and critics alike. Everybody said it was damned funny, which is rather the point with comedy.

So it is not like I have done nothing. There have been signs of life, so to speak. I might not do all I wish I could, but I have to forgive myself of that because I am playing the game with considerable handicaps holding me back.

And I have to stop torturing myself with “If only… ” scenarios, where I flog myself brutally over how great it would be “if only” I could pick an avenue of expression and dedicate myself to it, or “if only” I could get out of the apartment more and do more things in the outside world, or “if only” I had a part time job that brought in the money to do more things, or any of that bullshit.

Like my friend Felicity says, “You can only do what you can do”, and so I need to just accept that I have limitations, and judge myself solely by what I can accomplish given those limitations.

Perhaps the real issue underlying all of this is the inability to truly accept my limitations. The creative mind balks at accepting any kind of limitation, even those of nature and reality itself. And it is a sad, sad thing indeed to truly accept that you are a cripple.

But it is worse than hating yourself for not doing things you are actually incapable of doing?

I will have to give this some serious thought.

Meanwhile, I am going back to sleep.

In the classic heroic arc, the hero (in other words, us) has to go through a long, grueling ordeal with no end in sight, and they have to just persevere and never give up hope and all that good stuff.

And we, the reader, can go through this with them, because we have the privileged position of knowing that they make it, sooner or later. After all, this is heroic storytelling, and the hero always wins. So we know they will not die crossing that untamed wasteland or vast sea of sand.

They will make it. Otherwise, the story would end right there, and that would be stupid.

Well, lately, I have been feeling like I am going through my own desert, and unlike the hero of a story, I have no such guarantee of success. But like the hero, I really have no choice but to keep going, because if I stop, I will die.

Maybe not physically, but just as irrevocably.

Besides, like the hero of many a tale, I am at the mercy of forces outside my control now. I probably could not stop what is going on inside me now even if I wanted to, which I do not.

I have been saying that I will have to go through some bad times before I get to the good in order to recover. I have a huge emotional backlog to process, and well, you do not suppress the good emotions (hopefully), it is the bad stuff which has to be brought to the surface and felt fully before you can let it go and reclaim another part of yourself.

And that just plain is not going to be fun.

So that is my desert. Perhaps there is the occasional oasis, where I dislodge and dispose of yet another enormous layer of emotional detritus and get to momentarily bask in the feeling of being lighter and stronger and more whole, but then it is back to the path only I can walk, and only walk alone.

So that, at least, would put my recent struggles with feeling frustrated and angry and unhappy into some kind of meaningful and productive context.

I have been having periods where I just do not feel like getting out of bed, because seriously, to do what? Play Facebook games all day? Yay.

But eventually, you get bored of being in bed, too, and you have to get up and face the day, no matter how you feel about the prospect.

In some ways, this is actually a more typically depressive mood. A lot of people report not feeling like getting out of bed when they are depressed. One might mistake this, then, for the opposite of progress.

But I think it does count as progress. I have brought my depression to the surface and I am struggling with it directly now, instead of being undermined by it constantly but never looking it in the eye and asking it what it’s fucking problem is like I am doing now.

And the going might well get still rougher from here on. There is no guarantee that the fight will be brief, or pleasant, or easy, or fun, or of a predictable length or cost.

But I know I will win, because I will never stop fighting, and I give no ground. Victory is inevitable. Especially if I continue with therapy, which I have every intention of doing.

That big ol’ bulldozer will continue pushing the garbage out of my subconscious mind and into the conscious, and making me deal with it, and I will deal with what needs to be dealt with and consign the rest to the void.

Sometimes, the sadness is profound. It is a lot like mourning, or at least, how I imagine mourning to feel. A feeling of sadness, and loss. A feeling like you are reaching out for something, trying to get it back, when you know very well that it is gone forever.

A feeling that part of you has died, and you have to let it go, but you can only let it go a little at a time, like grains of sand flowing through your fingers.

What am I mourning? Well it sounds maudlin and cliched, but I suppose I am mourning my childhood, or rather, the one I never got to have because of all that happened to me.

I am still stuck on that idea of it never being too late to have a happy childhood. I really want that to be true, but I will be damned if I have any idea how the hell that works. I will ask my therapist about it on Thursday, I suppose. Maybe he has some idea.

I have a sinking feeling that it only applies to middle class middle aged people who are having a mid-life crisis and have the resources to go do all the things they never got to do as kids, and buy all the things they wanted as kids, and all that jazz.

That is not much use to a dirt poor half-person like myself. Besides, I do not think of my childhood in terms of fun I never got to have, or the pony I asked for every year but never got.

I think of it in terms of profound loneliness and all the social and emotional development that I missed because I was such a misshapen misfit, brilliant in some ways and retarded in others.

But nobody thinks you have any problems as long as your grades are good. And, admittedly, I was not the easiest kid to deal with. But whatever.

Point is, at least I have some idea how to mourn for the childhood I did not get to have, and to some extend, for the child I never got to be.

But I have absolutely no idea how to fix things, to correct what went wrong in my childhood via positive action in my adult life.

Maybe I have to finish mourning first.

Already, I am feeling the pressure and tension from my decision to reject that whole “I hate my life” jazz. I have had to very deliberately and firmly suppress that very thought a number of times today, and right now I feel like I am only keeping it at arm’s length by a sheer act of will.

The boredom and frustration with what my life has to offer is palpable. It is like a great cloud of dark energy roiling around inside me, looking for an outlet.

But I am denying its usual outlet, namely taking it out on myself. That is really no outlet at all, of course, Venting emotion at yourself is futile because nothing is really released. It just gets move around. You cannot fix a closed system like that.

At some point, things have to actually leave the system, not just move around inside it.

Keeping the “I hate my life” thoughts down is tough, but doable. Trying to see my life in a positive light, well… that is going to take a long time.

Reversing one’s spin like that takes more than an act of will. It takes an act of belief, and we depressives are notoriously poor at believing in anything positive. We are afraid to, afraid of being crushed by disappointment, so we take cold and corrupting comfort in taking the least positive, and therefore least exposed to the possibility of disappointment, positions possible.

It makes us feel safe. After all, if you stay down in the muck, you can’t fall again. Right?

But you can’t truly live your life like that, crawling around on the ground like an infant, and then wonder why everything seems so big and imposing and your world seems filthy and disgusting and hard.

You have to stand up and face the world and risk falling again. And if you fall again, get up again. It is how we all learned to walk in the first place, and it is how we must go forward in life. Not for anyone else, but for ourselves, so that we can be happier and stronger and more alive.

So we can be how we want to be. How we dream to be.

And think about those long ago days of learning to walk on our own.

First step, pull yourself onto your feet. Where would we be if, after the first time we fell down, we had decided that the floor was just fine for us, and these urges to pull ourselves up were just irrational desires to do scary things that could only lead to pain?

And at first, pulling yourself up to your feet is enough. You look around at the world from this new perspective, and it feels good. It feels right.

But then, from this new perspective, you see something across the way from you, and you want to go to there. Something draws you towards this other thing, and at first, you might drop down and crawl there.

But that feels wrong. And so you take your first big steps… but most importantly, first you have to let go of what you are holding on to in order to stay up.

This is a vitally important step. It is, in a sense, an act of faith to let go, with both hands. You have to listen to the voice telling you to do so, even though standing up by holding on to something is all you have ever known.

If we were capable of rationality at such a tender age, you might think this irrational. Give up the tried and true, known method of clinging to things in order to follow some strange urge to let go and move toward some distant object? Without even CRAWLING? Madness.

Luckily, we are too young to know better, so we do it. We let go, maybe learning to stand first, but often learning to walk before it occurs to us that you can just stand still without falling over.

And you fell, over and over again, and cried, and got frustrated, and maybe even went back to crawling for a little while longer.

But you got up again, and tried again, and eventually, you reached that distant object, just toddled on over and grabbed onto it, and just like that, you had learned something amazing and new.

Because remember, the point of the exercise was not the goal, it was learning to walk.

And we all did it. Nobody reading these words failed that particular test. We all pulled ourselves up, we all faced the void between where we were and where we wanted to be, we all tried to close that gap and failed over and over again, often getting hurt in the process, and yet we all persevered and learning to toddle, and then to walk, and so on to running and skipping and jumping and all the rest.

And not because we knew we would succeed eventually. And not because we had faith in ourselves, either. We were not capable of either of those at the time.

You did it just because you had a desire so strong that it drove you to keep on trying to fulfill it no matter how many times you fell down.

Luckily, back then, you were too young to count them, anyhow.

So how come we were so smart back then, when so many of us forget that lesson in our adult years? To just keep trying till we learn the way?

Granted, there are times when the only thing to do is give up. We learned that we could not reach up and touch the Sun, no matter how high we stretched.

But still, I think a lot of us, as adults, have made the decision to stay on the floor instead of pulling ourselves up against by our own two hands, and learning to walk.

And if you can learn to walk, who knows?

Maybe you can even learn to fly.

There is a gorgeous “blushing peach” sunset out my window, I am full of passable microwave pizza (should have taken the time to bake them in the oven, they are SO much better that way), I have a comfortable seat and a connection to the Internet, and a thousand words of self-expression laid out in front of me, waiting to be filled up with whatever I wish.

And I am working hard to be content with that.

That is where I am in my personal therapy journey right now. It is not a new revelation that I need to focus more on the positive and less on the negative, or that I do not do myself a service when I get angry and disgusted with my life, but lately, these thoughts seem to have reached a stage of fruition inside me.

So right now, I am working on just plain squashing flat all this “I hate my life” bullshit. Those are the next kind of thoughts which I will firmly suppress any time they come up. No more “I hate my life”, “my life sucks”, “I am frustrated beyond belief with my life”, and so forth and so on.

Those are valid feelings and there is truth to all of them. But I will no longer let them express themselves in the old tired nonfunctional way, where all they do is make me more depressed and less willing to engage in reality and thus only perpetuate themselves.

Being angry with myself and my life simply does not work. The raging father inside me has has plenty of time (to say the least) to try his method of motivating and improving me, and clearly, his method of anger and pain is not working. In fact, it only makes things worse.

You cannot beat motivation into yourself. Not when your life long response to pain is withdrawal. All you can do is beat more withdrawal and isolation into yourself. May that is the idea. Maybe the real plan, the one you keep secret even from yourself, is to beat you to keep you exactly where you are, so you do not have to grow up and face the great unknown that is the real world.

You can grow used to anything, even Hell. Especially when it is your Hell, with all the players playing their parts in order to maintain the status quo and protect you from the world outside your cell.

So I am going to reverse my tactic and try to spur growth and recovery in myself by embracing the opposite pole, the all-accepting mother, the path where you learn to truly understand and appreciate what you have, and instead of trying to goad yourself forward with the whip of anger, instead to give yourself time to relax and accept where you are, then gently entice yourself forward with the carrots of kindness, warmth, and the wonder that leads a child to explore his or her world and see what there is to see.

I do feel that I suffer from a tragically interrupted childhood. All that golden sunshine wonder, all that feeling safe and protected and warm as a child… that was taken away from me at a very early age by sexual abuse and bullying.

I withdrew into myself, and that isolation kept me from practically all social development. I can see that, and more importantly feel that, very clearly now. So much coldness inside me from all those years spent so very alone, without even a mother to comfort me or be my rock.

Oh, she was present physically, just not emotionally.

And that is supposed to be your last line of defense, isn’t it? Your mother? No matter what else happens, Mom is always there with a hug and a glass of milk and emotional support?

Well, not for me. No emotional support, no milk, latchkey kid, mom watched her soap operas, then made dinner, then watched TV with my Dad for an hour or two, then went to bed.

Lather rinse repeat.

And the older I got, the less we did as a family too. We had separate lives. We might as well have just been roommates instead of an actual family, or at least that is how it seemed to me.

I know it may seem like I go over the same territory again and again in these posts, but digging up all the skeletons buries in your soul takes a lot of time and effort, and sometimes you just have to keep unburying the same old bones over and over again until their time in the light is enough to melt them and release them from their tombs and then you can slip them back into your skeleton at last.

And suddenly, you are just that much more whole and complete, and your meat sits a little easier now that it has a better framework to rest upon.

So…. wow, I wandered off into poetry again. The point I was trying to make before I fell down my own navel shaped opening was that I am going to try my best to be more positive and to love what I have, and accept my life and my situation.

If I spend a whole day sleeping, that is just fine. It was a relaxing day and I probably needed it.

If all I do of a day is sleep, write this blog, and fuck around on the Internet, that is fine too. It is my life, to be lived how I please, and I should not excoriate myself just because I am not doing what I cannot currently do, and what all this self-hatred is keeping me from doing anyhow.

They say it is never too late to have a happy childhood, and I sure hope that is true, because I am increasingly convinced that I desperately need a do-over.

So much went so wrong.

I need to start over from the day they decided I did not need kindergarten, please.

The battle continues. Spent most of today asleep, after staying up until around 7 am or so. And I probably had a choice in the matter, at least for some of that sleep.

But I slept the day away, and now I am here wondering what the hell I am doing with my life.

There has to be thing I could do to keep myself awake and interested in the world. I want to do that just for health reasons. I want to stay up all day and sleep at night, like regular people. I have a strong feeling that getting my life to follow a more natural cycle would do wonders for my health, both physical and emotional. I think a normal sleep cycle would help a lot with my sense of well-being, which is of course the foundation of mood, even more than the oft vaunted self-esteem.

I would feel better if I felt healthier. Stronger, more robust, more physically secure. Fewer little pains and aches to keep me always feeling like I am doing something wrong and being punished for it.

That has got to be toxic to the self-esteem. I want a healthier life so I will feel better in my skin, in my self. But I can only pursue it in my usual sideways stumbling way.

Beats no progress at all, I suppose. But sometimes I grow very frustrated with all this indirection and long to be able to just set a firm goal and head directly for it in a straight line.

But not to be too cute about it, but I can’t seem to do anything straight. I was born bent and have to do everything crooked as a result.

Oh well. I get somewhere eventually, sort of.

One good thing in my sad little life : I finally got around to making actual classic cornbread in the bread machine recently, and the stuff is phenomenal.

Moist, soft, delicate, sweet, and with the most amazing crust… thin and crisp and tasty, almost like a crepe or a simple pastry. I think it is my favorite of all the breads I have made. It’s nothing like any other cornbread I have ever had, but at this point, I do not care.

I will likely make it again when it runs out, which I have not done with any other of the breads. That is how good the stuff is, I swear.

I think the secret is in how the egg and the cornmeal interact. Plus, there is just a little honey in it, enough to make it a little sweet. In fact, the body of the bread tastes just a little like French Toast, which I think is pretty kewl.

So that is one little personal project that has turned out quite well. An excellent end to the little saga of having to first find the corn meal, then make the semi-failed Anadama bread that turns out to be pretty much just molasses bread (wrong kind of sweet), then finally get the eggs to make cornbread, then being too busy with other things to make the cornbread, then finally making it.

And it’s quite boffo!

Other than that, nothing much up in my sad little life. Got a game for the Wii currently but it is pretty dull so I will likely pop it in the envelope and send it right back. Just endless dungeon grinding, and I am so sick of that crap.

In fact, Facebook games have spoiled me. I need constant stimulation and variety now, or I can’t be bothered. From this point on, I will stick to Wii games that are more action oriented than the one I have got now. That is still something I can’t get from a Flash game on Facebook.

Maybe get a fighting game next, or at least something with lots of violence. What can I say, I have a need to pound the hell out of evil things. Even a pasty white fat nerd like me feels the urge towards combat and violence and whatnot.

Maybe that is a male thing, maybe it is a human thing. But I am pretty sure it is built-in.

We are just lucky that we have a culture that provides us with so many ways to satisfy those urges in a socially benign way. Sports, violent vengeful movies, highly competitive video games, all the various forms of adventure, good versus evil type television shows.

They all help us poor testosterone soaked males scratch that anti-social itch that would otherwise lead us to look for someone or something to test ourselves against amongst out fellow humans, and it would not be pretty. I doubt civilization would survive.

It would be warlords and anarchy pretty soon.

But oh well. That is not going to happen any time soon… or at least, not directly. I do worry that what I call testosterone poisoning will yet lead civilization into oblivion, which is why I am such a strong supporter of women being involved more and more in things like political negotiations and police work.

Not that I am naive enough to think that a world run by women would be a world without war. I can see how someone might get that idea, but women have their demons and their darkness too. Both genders have their madness. Neither is safe without the other.

But as the world is now, men are still in control, especially outside the modern world, and it leads to war and pain and death and blood, and if there was enough female influence to balance things out, I bet we could get a handle on a lot of the problems that come from full-grown men acting like teenage gang leaders but with real guns and real soldiers and real rape and everything.

Women bring a different perspective, often an admirably pragmatic and sensible and compassionate one.

We could use a lot more of that in the world, don’t you think?

Not in the best of moods, not sure why.

I could blame the facekini.

Just based on the word, you would expect it to be a bikini for your face, right?

And you would be right.

Chinese people are wearing masks made of bikini type material to the beach in order to avoid tanning, because right now in China, pale skin is considered attractive.

This is what that looks like.

Now if I saw people on the beach dressed like that, my first thought would not be “Oh look, Chinese people looking to avoid the sun. ”

I would think “Holy crap, Nazi Beach Commandos! Where the hell is Hasselhoff when you need him?”

And I will admit, I have old fashioned ideas about what the beach is for, but seriously, if you are going to wear a mask to avoid the sun, why go to the beach? Isn’t there a cave you could crouch in with your vampire friends, or maybe an indoor pool with no windows?

Sunshine is, to me, a basic part of the beach experience. You swim, you snack, you hydrate, and you bake your body on the sand, getting the effect of a dry sauna without the risk of meeting weird old Scandinavian guys who ply you with strange liqueurs and take advantage of you without ever even calling make or even a note once in a while for God’s sake.

So while the facekini is not likely directly contributing to my feeling down, perhaps a lack of sunshine is at least part of it. I spend so much of my time indoors that I only ever get direct sunlight when I am walking to or from Joe’s car, and that is really sad.

It could be possible to have seasonal affective depression in the middle of summer, with a life like mine.

And lately when it is nice out, I find myself looking out my bedroom window at that sun drenched world full of happy people enjoy the wonderful weather, and I ask myself, “Why can’t that be me? What is wrong with me that I can’t be part of that world? Why am I inside and sitting in front of this damned computer when I could be out there having fun and enjoying the real world?”

And of course, there is no simple answer for that. A lot holds me back. This ice cage of fear around my heart that keeps me frozen deep, far away from the world, has many locks and many keys.

In some ways, it is simpler to melt the cage than to pick the locks. Simpler, but not easier. Picking the locks is what therapy is all about. You painstakingly unlock all those padlocks of frozen emotion around your heart, with the progress being slow and the effort being continuous and painful and harrowing.

Melting the cage, on the other hand, is simple. Just let warmth into your heart and the cage melts on its own, big sheets of ice falling off and crashing to the ground inside you, melting away forever.

Easier said than done, though. First, you need a powerful source of warmth, and if depression and fear have had you in their grips for a long time, you are certainly not going to be able to generate that warmth all by yourself.

And honestly, depressive people are not easy to be around, so you might not have much luck attracting the kind of personal warmth you need or keeping it around for long enough. The kind of warm outgoing people that might generate the sort of personal warmth you need tend to find depressed people, well, depressing, and do not hang around us long. They thrive on interaction and we do not give much back.

The second factor is worse, though : you might be surrounded by warm, helpful people who would love to help you, but you cannot feel their warmth through the ice around your heart. If it is thick enough, the ice “protects” you from the warmth, not the other way around.

And so you conclude that nobody cares about you because you cannot feel their warmth, because that is easier to take than the realization that lots of people care about you and you are just too damned numb to feel it right now.

Looking back at my own life, I know there was people who tried to help me. But they couldn’t, not really, I was too far gone, lost inside my endless icy plains and frozen towers, and the best that they could do was shout down the well and hope I would hear them and respond.

I feel bad for whatever I cost those people. It cannot be easy trying to reach me, especially when I did not even realize anyone was trying at all. I am sure I left some people with a hoarse voice and a curious case of frostbite for their efforts. If so, I am truly sorry.

But you have to understand, it is worse for me on the inside than for you healthy people on the outside.

This is why I worry about how I interact with people, though. I know that I could, were I less self-aware, just plain suck someone dry via the void inside me, or even just casually and thoughtlessly freeze someone through their very core with a glimpse into my true self.

A starving vampire am I, one who is terrified of the depth of his hunger, and afraid to get close to anyone lest he lose control and drain them of their precious, precious life warmth.

So I keep people at arm’s length and dwell on the Internet, which is mostly fantasy and imagination anyhow, and stay in my cold little realm, and with the help of my therapist, pick away at those locks.

And maybe when enough of them have fallen away from this lonely heart of mine, I will be able to go out into that sunlit world and find the deep warmth that I really need.

And finally, my heart will know springtime.