I got a phone call from my Aunt Eleanor on Monday, and today, I decided I needed to write about it.

Now don’t flip, I didn’t get horrible news or anything. Relax. Breathe deep. Go to your happy place.

All better? Good.

This phone call was quite unusual for a couple of reasons. First of all, I do not know my Aunt Eleanor at all. I have been told I met her once, but I was so young at the time that I have no memory of it as an adult.

I have a very vague memory of a nice lady with a big car? Maybe it was her? Maybe not.

Anyhow, she is my father’s sister, but while I have met my father’s other siblings when I was fifteen and so have fairly clear ideas of who they are, Eleanor has always been a mystery to me.

So having her call me up out of the blue was unusual to say the least. She had been trying to get me on the phone all weekend, but I was always either asleep or out of the house.

It was Monday when she finally called when I was on the computer. And we had a very pleasant conversation. She seems like a sweet person. She asked me a bunch of questions about myself, which I always appreciate because it shows the person is interested in me.

I know for some people, being asked a bunch of questions about their lives would make them very uncomfortable, or even downright hostile, but I am a pretty open person. I do not keep a lot of things secret and I certainly don’t act like I feel every piece of information is strictly “need to know”.

One thing I learned from our conversation came from when she asked me about what I get up to, and I told her that I suffered from depression.

She said that she was not surprised because her mother, my grandmother, was in and out of mental institutions all her life.

I had no idea this was true, and it certainly sheds a lot of light on my situation. I had wondered where the mental illness came from in my family. Now I know.

Lucky me, huh?

I am not surprised to find out she was in and out of the loony bin though. My father’s father, my grandfather, was, as I have mentioned before, Satan. He was a sociopathic compulsive liar who beat his wife and kids and quite possibly molested them too. I know he molested other kids, and used to ask my sisters all kinds of creepy questions.

So yeah. Horrible, horrible person. Glad he’s dead. Rot in hell. It’s a wonder that any of his children became functional adults at all. They must be a resilient breed. Or maybe their mother was a good influence on them when she was around.

My god… I just realized. If she was in the mental ward, that means the kids were alone with him. What a horrible thought.

Its things like this that make me almost forgive my own Dad for being such an asshole. Almost… but not quite. There is relative sanity and then there is getting the job done right. He did not.

Anyhow, after this pleasant conversation with a nice older lady, I was talking with some friends online when I had one of those rare moments when I learn something about myself by telling it to someone else.

I mentioned that I had gotten a phone call from my long lost Aunt Eleanor. Someone said “Lost?” so I explained all about how I did not really know her at all, so she was lost to me.

Someone else said “And this is a good thing?”, presumably thinking of some of their own relatives who they would gladly lose.

So I said “Well yeah. I am trying to open myself up more to nice people who mean me well. ”

And then it hit me like a splash of enlightenment across the brain. I am trying to do that, and what’s more, why haven’t I done this before?

I have walled myself up in my own little world for so long that I did not even realize that there are people out there who love me and want me to do well.

Or rather, I didn’t feel it. And I have to ask myself, why? Why couldn’t I feel their love?

Well, to cut myself some slack here, the main reason is probably simply that my brain chemistry was too messed up for anything like that to get through.

Depression isolates you not only by making it hard to be around others without your anxieties going crazy and making it so that social contact is downright painful, it also makes you incapable of feeling the positive emotions that people all around you are desperately beaming your way.

And that convinces you that, despite all the evidence, nobody cares about you. Not really. Not enough. After all, if they really cared, you would feel it, right? So they must be doing something wrong. They don’t love you right.

And from there, it is easy to build a whole worldview based on that. A world which is cold and callous and brutal and uncaring and unfair and hostile to people like you.

But having your hand fall asleep does not actually make the world a place covered in pins and needles. Your hand has changed, not the world.

And so having your positive emotions fall asleep due to depression does not mean the world is cold and devoid of all hope and pleasure.

It just means that you can’t feel them for now.

But more than just the biochemical problem, I think that I have walled myself off from the world in order to protect myself for a long long time, and for what seems wildly insufficient reasons to me now.

So what if I don’t have a lot in common with a lot of people? So what if I tend to be on a mental plane of my own? That should not keep me from accepting the love and caring of others. It does not mean that by not understanding me, they are rejecting me. It does not mean there is something wrong with them, or with me.

It just means we are different. I am an odd duck, true. But that should not keep me from opening my heart to the caring of nice people who mean me well.

It’s not all good news. It makes me realize just how cold and distant I must have seemed to people behind my thick emotional wall. And I really regret that.

But today is a new day, and there will even be another tomorrow. I can learn to open myself up and feel what has always been there on the other side of all that taiga and tundra in my soul.

Sure, I might also get hurt.

But I would rather skin my knee a dozen times than chop off my legs!