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.