Time for me to bitch about my life, that is.

I recognize the symptoms. I have been feeling angry and trapped and stressed out lately. The thought “I hate my life!” keeps popping up despite my efforts to avoid thinking like that. I am getting that feeling like I am a zoo animal going insane in its cage.

So it must be time to let some bad stuff out. But there’s a small problem.

My life is going pretty okay right now, honestly. Not a lot to bitch about.

My finances are decent. I am going into this month (cheque day was yesterday) with $83 in my pocket. That is always a good feeling. Financial security does wonders for my emotional security.

My health is OK. The heat is still bothering me but I manage. I have been getting on-again, off-again symptoms of acid reflux, especially after I have lain down in the afternoon, and I am definitely going to talk to my GP about that next time I see him.

But otherwise decent. I am cutting back on the carbs a little and taking more insulin lately because my blood sugars are a little high. But it’s not too bad.

I don’t have anything to stress about. Vcon is coming in the first week of October, and I will have to start planning for that soon. But that’s hardly a major stressor.

And of course, I am still mentally ill. My depression is always there, some days bigger, some days smaller. It’s not like my recent upswing in mood and recovery has solved the whole problem. I still have a lot of work to do to tunnel my way out of my big thick shell.

But that’s always there. So I figure what is really going on with me is just the usual accumulation of unresolved emotions that sooner or later I have to deal with by throwing them onto the page.

At least this time, I am choosing to do it sooner rather than later. I won’t have to ask myself “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

Because I did.

So let’s see, what is cloggin’ my noggin lately. Well, there’s that frustrated feeling. Feel trapped, bored, restless, angry. A vital part of me definitely wants out of this cardboard box of a life of mine. I am not satisfied with my lot in life. I want more.

And yes, that’s ironic given the vid I did recently.

But I do not have a lot of my hierarchy of needs met. I am no comfortably middle class person looking at all their possessions and achievements and thinking there must be something more.

I am a very bright and capable person who has accomplished very little in his life and who needs to get around to having an emotional adolescence already but doesn’t know how.

I told my therapist how I think I almost entirely missed out on being a teenager when I was one. I experienced none of the usual rites of passage. No first kiss, “first time”, first relationship, first breakup, first boy/girl party, none of it.

I was just too isolated, especially after I stop being friends with Jason Heisler and the rest in Grade Ten. He was pretty much my only link to normal teen life, and with him gone, I was a ghost. I went to school and came home and watched TV and played video games and that was it.

I sometimes wonder what was wrong with me, that the instincts that drove other teens to explore their social space and learn to adjust to society never drove me anywhere.

Partly it’s because I am simply too reasonable, logical, and sensible. Reason has been far too dominant in my life, which might sound odd coming from the mentally ill, but the two things actually go together.

Issues normal people would solve by following their hearts and doing what it told them are instead left unsolved because I demand to know the reason behind everything I do, and if it doesn’t make sense to me, it never happens. It gets stopped at the door by the bouncers and never let in.

As a result, I have quite a crowd out there.

And as much as I would like to just throw the doors open and let them all in at once so I can get this interminable process over all at once, I don’t think that is even possible, let alone advisable.

All I can do is try to plow through the backlog, day by day, hoping that one day I will clear it.

There are times when I feel so frustrated with my life and so crazed by my confinement that I want to throw my computer monitor against the wall and kick my computer to pieces. Throw out everything I own and start over again from scratch. Dissolve all the petty ties in my world and just storm off into the far distance with nothing but the clothes on my back, a backpack, and whatever cash I could lay my hands on at that exact moment.

Of course, I am far too sensible to do such a clearly irrational and irresponsible thing. That would be giving up all the security I have in the world and throwing myself on the mercy of a life that has not been terribly kind to me in the past.

But as the sober and responsible owner of a soul, I do have to ask myself why I feel that way, and can I give that part of me what it wants without so extreme a measure.

There’s no need to smash the cage when you have the key to the lock, after all.

Unless the real problem is that you are addicted to that cage. I do sometimes feel like my real problem is being too timid to deal with the real world, and that all this navel-gazing is as nothing compared with the power of just going out there and doing things.

But I…. don’t feel like it.

And maybe I never will.