It’s Saturday night and I feel like I am running a slight fever. Woo.

Still feeling sort of crappy in general lately, although the psychological side of things is doing a bit better than it was earlier this week.

Psychologically speaking, I am feeling somewhat okay. Not exactly bubbling over with joy, but halfways decent. I still need to figure out a route of catharsis that does not involve hating myself.

Or maybe it is okay to hate yourself for short periods of time, as long as you are doing it entirely to get the stress and pain out of your system and afterwards you remember what a swell person you are.

I don’t know. I am making shit up as I go.

I feel like I am at least dragging myself very, very slowly towards being a more active and engaged person. I still have a huge weight of fear and suppressed or unexpressed emotions to shift before I can fully emerge into the sunlight and breathe the air of the truly sane and whole, but I make a little progress every day, and that is a reason to be alive.

And let me tell you, someone with serious depression like me needs all the reasons he can find.

I still have a lot of darkness inside me. It is always there, the suppressed anger, the frustration of helplessness, the key and tragic weakness of spirit and soul, the deep dark cold of outer space that sucks all the heat and power from my soul.

Sometimes the anger and pain well up in me so bad that I just want to hurt someday, anybody, just to externalize the suffering. Throw my pain into someone else and make them experience it instead of me, the classic definition of taking it out on someone else.

It scares me a little that I feel these way sometimes, but I am not too worried. I know that in my own deep ethics, taking out your foul mood on others is just about the worst crime there is, or can be.

That is what my father did to us Bertrand kids, and I refuse to ever do it myself.

I need to find some way to externalize all my bullshit, all my darkness, but it will never be at someone else’s expense. There has to be another way.

And if there isn’t, then I will die of my darkness before I let it victimize others. That is how evil spreads. No doubt my father was working through his own dark shit when he went on his dinner table tirades at us kids. Frustrations from work, where he was the sucker with the sense of professionalism and duty that everybody used at their pack mule so they could fuck around and be useless. Despair from the slow dissolution of his relationship with my mother (largely his fault). And a head full of serious badness from his father, a sociopathic, child beating, wife beating, pedophile compulsive liar whom I am glad is dead and could almost wish there truly was a Hell for him to be roasting in.

But see how it goes? Maybe my paternal grandfather had a father who was as bad as him or worse. Someone is responsible for creating that bad of a mess of a human being. Compared to his father, my father is a saint. That does not excuse anything he did, but it sure puts it in perspective.

And the thing is, there is such a thing as “good enough” and “not good enough”. Hard limits as to just how bad a job you can do, regardless of the challenges you face and the baggage you have, and if you do not make the grade, whether or not you got eighty percent there or ten percent there does not really matter.

You failed, and whe what you fail at is parenting, that is serious fucking business.

And sure, I know of parents way worse than mine. On paper, my parents did fine on the middle class standard of living test. I never worried about the material things of life as a kid. Being so bookish, I never even wished my parents were richer so they could buy me more expensive toys or fashionable clothes.

Though I suppose it was weird that I was not even a teenager when they just started giving me the money from the Children’s Allowance check and telling me to go buy my clothes myself. I am pretty sure that is not something most parents would do.

Isn’t it hilarious how “liberal parenting” so often looks a lot like “neglect”?

And sure, maybe I should have dealt with all this bullshit before being almost 40, but I have been busy working on a full time job called “not killing myself” and it has left me a little distracted.

God, I was so whipped as a child and a teenager. I was the agreeable child (despite what some of my teachers might have said), so eager for attention and acceptance that I just accepted whatever they asked of me without hesitation or question.

And largely, what they wanted of me was to disappear. To not really be there. To do everything I could to make it like they had never had me. Be quiet, stay out of the way, take care of my own needs, do my own laundry, pack my own lunch, buy my own clothes, and most of all, expect absolutely nothing from my parents besides my allowance and a key to the house.

None of this was done deliberately, openly, or as part of any plan. It was deeper than that. It was their whole attitude towards me growing up.

That whole “You’re still here?” kind of thing.

But because it is not something anyone ever said out loud, they don’t have to acknowledge the truth of it all, and at this point in my life, I can’t make them.

Some day, my mother and I will have a long talk about all this.

I guess I had better hurry up and get rich enough to travel.