There are a lot of links I could be sharing with you tonight. Great stuff. Funny, insightful, interesting stuff that I have culled from my Facebook feed, all ready to be share with all you nice people.

But I am not going to do that. I am tired of linkspamming you folks and it is about time I got back round to pursuing this blog’s primary function, which is to give me a place where I can air my thoughts, express my emotions, and generally externalize what so desperately needs to be externalized.

Gotta let it our, or it will do you in.

I knew that tonight would not be yet another links night the moment I caught myself thinking “I don’t have to diarize tonight, it’s not like anything has happened to be lately… “

NO. We will not go there. That is just the sort of self-destructive minimizing bullshit that kept me from even having a diary or a blog for decades and that still keeps me from corresponding with my relatives the way I should. You don’t wait for “something” to happen because the nature of depression will ensure that nothing that happens will ever seem “important enough” to share.

This only works if you suspend all judgment and just write out whatever the hell is on your mind at that exact moment. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s important, interesting, or “good”. This is not about achieving something else. It’s about the act itself. It’s about letting some air out of that overinflated bag of stress and distress and unexpressed emotions that is always trying to carry you away from all you know and love beyond the horizon of pure and utter madness.

Sometimes we do not fear falling. We fear letting go, and never being able to make it back.

So how do I feel right now? Weary, kind of. I feel really tired of… something. My life, my circumstances, my restrictions, my limits, my activities… something. I wish I could just make it all fo away even for just a little while, so I could catch my breath and figure out where I am.

They say life is a marathon, not a sprint. If so, I feel like I am hitting the “wall” that joggers and other runners talk about, where you feel tired and dispirited and like you can’t possibly go on.

They say that if you keep going, eventually you push through the wall and find strength and courage and a profound sense of victory like nothing you have ever felt before.

I hope that’s true, because I am so damned tired of my stupid fucking life.

And I feel like there is this existential rage that is always burning away in me. A rage that stalks me like a predator, and that I am just barely eluding in this elaborate chess game of life, and then only by using all my wit, skill, intuition, and ruthless cunning.

And yet, it’s also sort of a seduction. To be honest, the line between the two gets pretty vague sometimes. All that unintegrated raw energy, all the passion and anger and lust and ambition, makes my shadow a mercurial, multifaceted being who shifts from predator to lover to righteous avenger to brutal juggernaut to accuser to prosecutor to many other things I can’t even think of right now.

It is my other self, a living, breathing, seething reservoir of unintegrated emotion. It used to be so big that it almsopt squeezed me out of existence, but these days, it feels more like an equal, a partner, a nemesis sometimes but also a friend and a companion.

And I know that as this long slow process of integration continues, it will get smaller and smaller. It will never eat me… I will eat it, bit by bit, over time. It will become a part of me and I will be a more whole, sane, calm, relaxed, comfortable, happy, and above all balanced person.

But until then, it will continue to be, amongst many other things, the beast in my cage.

There is so much undeveloped potential in me. And I am not talking about the kind of “potential” that people told me I had when I was a lonely wunderkind. I guess I still have plenty of that, I dunno.

The idea of getting even more intelligent makes me sort of scared. I already have more brain than I can handle. I am not sure I need even more.

Anyhow, the potential I am talking about is all those things that most people have done long before they reach my overripe old age. Sex, relationships, dating, cohabiting, raising kids, getting their first job, getting a college degree, getting a career…. all of those potentialities are in me somewhere waiting to be activated when I finally get around to having a fucking life.

And sometimes I get so sad, looking over all these mechanisms I can sense waiting to spring forth inside me, and the idea of trying to have my adolescence now, at long last, fills me with despair.

The world I have miss seem so big, and I feel so very small. Everyone else is so far ahead of me, and that long stretch of road between me and the rest of the pack seems impossible to overcome.

And I know I am supposed to be all “everyone runs their own race, stop comparing yourself to others, you have been very ill for a long time so it’s not fair to compare yourself to them” enlightened, but you know the problem?

I am just plain not feeling it.

I have a lot of healing to do before I get to that no doubt highly desirable level of enlightenment. Until then, I am going to mourn the loss of the person I could have been.

Only when that process is complete can I move on to be the person I want to be.

I will still have one foot in the past until then.

Day Three of me thinking about myself. Probably the last one for a little while.

Getting bored of myself.

Today has been the usual uneventful blur of time online, time asleep, and time eating and watching something via Netflix.

Or trying to, anyhow. My Netflix reception is terrible lately, especially around suppertime. It’s always been slower at that time (presumably a lot of people get home, cook supper, then sit down to watch an episode of something via their Netflix) but for the last three days, it has been completely unusable between the hours of six and eight in the evening.

And I am getting seriously annoyed. I may even complain to the company if this keeps up, and my non-Canadian friends should know that it takes a lot to piss us off enough to actually complain.

We are just too polite to do it, most of the time.

Oh sure, we complain all the time… to each other. We are actually quite big on complaining about things like government, the weather, even bad service at a restaurant.

But we wouldn’t complain to the actual restaurant staff unless it was really, really bad.

Otherwise, it would just be too rude.

And I like that we are a grumbling, complaining, but non-confrontational people. I think it has a lot to do with why we are such calm and polite people. We complain to one another about things and that dissipates a lot of our anger without their being any serious need for confrontation.

It’s not that we can never, ever confront. We just need a really good reason to jump the fence of politeness that makes Canadian society work.

Tomorrow, I get to do two things I will enjoy : cash my first big $946 check, and go to therapy.

Granted, saying you enjoy going to therapy opens up a whole forest of prickly issues. One might even crudely argue that if therapy is fun, odds are it is not doing you any good.

After all, the real progress comes from confronting (there’s that word again) the demons of your past and letting them go by finally finishing processing those painful emotions.

So I would never say that therapy is fun, but still, I do enjoy it. I am quite comfortable with unlocking deep pains with the help of my therapist. I am not the sort of person who resists the therapy they are there to experience. I am not only willing to confront those demons, I look forward to it, because afterward I always feel a hell of a lot better.

And not just in the short term. It’s more than mere stress relief. Once you have truly defeated those inner demons by facing your fears and your deep deep hurts, you get a little piece of yourself back. It’s the piece of you that has been dedicated to holding that pain for so very long.

Nothing in the human mind can be erased, only concealed. When we suppress our emotions, they do not go away, they just disappear into the subconscious where they drain your energy, deplete your mood, and drag you down.

The pressure to finish the job of processing the emotion never, ever goes away. You cannot simply outlive that kind of internal injury. And when suppression becomes a habit, that pressure just builds and builds, taking up more and more of your mind and your soul.

So I am a big believer in the power of catharsis. A lot of people’s problems would go away if we all could just look inside, find those terrible wounds, and let go of all the pain associated with them. Let it all flow through you. Experience the traumas again, if that is what it takes. Go back to that terrible day, and find what part of you got left behind there.

Easier said than done, of course, but I am not claiming it’s simple or easy. That’s why you need a therapist to help. They can guide you through the process, both bringing those demons up and helping you deal with them when they have arrived.

My therapist finds it odd how I have such clear self-knowledge and be so open to therapy. I would like to think it was because I have an amazing mind and a kind of intellectual fearlessness that lets me go anywhere and deal with anything in my mind.

And that is certainly part of it. But mostly, I think it’s just because I am so socially retarded that I never developed the kind of defense mechanisms that normal people have to defend their egos.

After all, they had to develop them just to make it through adult life. You can’t go out there and face the world unless you develop some way to protect your self-worth.

But I have managed to avoid all that. Lucky me. I have merely orbited life.

And let me tell you, the view is great from up here, but it is so terrible cold.

But whatever. I will have more money now, and with it greater self-esteem and a feeling of security that should do wonders for my mood.

I will feel less like a pathetic loser at the ass end of everywhere and more like a vaguely competent grownup who can even, on occasion, do whatever he wants just because he feels like doing it.

That should help with my profound sense of illegitimacy that plagues me and which poverty only reinforces. There is nothing quite like always worrying about money and rarely if ever being able to indulge yourself that makes you feel like you just don’t count.

And that’s a feeling that still comes to me far too easily. I am thinking that at therapy tomorrow, it will be time to open up the vaults and let some more of the bad stuff out.

I can feel the arctic chill from those freezer vault doors swinging open, and I think it may be time for another truckload of bitterness and rage to come out.

Suit up, demons…. you’re on.

Well I am on Cloud Nine right now.

Cloud $946, to be precise!

What I hoped for but never dreamed would actually happen has happened. I got my monthly cheque today, and even though my Persons With Disabilites (PWD) status is not official until Nov 1, I still got the new, enhanced amount.

And that amount… is nine hundred and forty six freaking dollars! W00T!

That’s an increase of almost $250 per month, a 36 percent increaseand that will make a huge difference in my life. Even after Money Mart takes their three dollars on the hun (Atilla?), that’s still $918 in my pocket every single month.

Rent, utils, and whatnot are $400/month, leaving me $518/month for various and sundries.

Needless to say, I am pickled tink. That’s almost $130/week, or if you want to get really cute, something like thirty dollars a day. A DAY.

For me, this is like winning the lottery.

I was certain that I would have to wait until the check in November for the beginning of this bounty, and let me tell you, it would not have been a fun wait. I am subject to painful levels of anticipation when I am looking forward to something big, and a month of that would have been potentially quite excruciating for excitable ole me.

So, phew on that! I got me a nice fat check and I am going to make me some *plans*.

One line of potential is finally getting my little mini studio together. Get whatever cords I need in order to make my video camera talk with my computer again, rearrange my room a little in order to maximize performance space, and best of all, finally get a decent green screen, one that comes with a stand and hopefully sufficient foolproofing so that even a highly inventive fool like myself can make the damned thing work.

Then, I can take this whole making videos thing to the next level. Oh, and I would probably also get an SSD drive for my computer specifically for storing and editing video, because SSD drives are basically just huge Flash drives and hence are FAST.

Honestly, I would love to have a brand new computer, and I might work up to that eventually, but that is the sort of thing that you have to do in stages. This month the CPU, next month the motherboard, and so forth and so on, and right now, I am all about the instant gratification.

I am going to have such an awesome Xmas! I will be able to afford to send my family actual gifts, and not just Xmas cards.

Nothing fancy, of course, but still…. actual gifts!

Another line of potential is my wardrobe. I have a decent amount of clothes now, enough to see me through the week, but I want more.

Specifically, I want more pants, motherfuckers. I want to get up to at least seven pairs of wearable-anywhere pants, plus more comfy pajama bottom type things for lounging about.

I already have more than seven shirts and seven pairs of socks. So if I hit the magic number of seven completely functional pants type garments, I could wear a total fresh outfit every day of the week.

And that is something I have been contemplating. I have been wondering what would happen, both creatively speaking and in terms of mood, if I simply treated the stuff I do like a job, and so I get up at eight in the morning, shower, groom, and change into a fresh set of clothes, and then sit in front of this here computer from 9 to 5.

I have noticed that getting showered and dressed energizes me, and it has made me wonder if a lot of my feeling of frustrated ennui and lack of motivation has to do with this near-sleep existence I lead, never far from my bed and napping many times during the day.

If so, then changing that via the vital rituals of showering and dressing could really be a big game changer for me. It could be just what I need in order to give my life some momentum and focus and put me in the right mood to send stuff to publishers and write to editor’s specifications and beat the bushes for some sort of freelance work, and all that other stuff that I “should” have been doing long ago but have never had the focus or determination to do.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on a change of routine, but I think that if I can make the transition into thinking of being a writer as a job that I will work from nine to five every weekday (with an hour off for lunch, of course), I will have incentive to think up things to do with all that time.

It’s a big step, and I won’t be doing it any time soon, because I will be writing a novel in November (1667 words a day… no problem from the guy who wrote a million in a year) and that is not the time to suddenly change everything up.

I have my basic concept for the book (won’t be short stories after all) and some scenes plotted out in mt head, but as usual, I will most likely be flying by the seat of my pants.

It’s not the smart way to write, and every year I think “Next time, I will write an outline first!”, but that is just not how my muse works.

What gets me to write every day is that intoxicating sense of possibility that you can only get from something that is not planned out in advance. Writing a book when I already know everything that is going to happen sounds like the definition of dull to me.

And sure, that probably means my novels will never been intricately plotted masterpieces of precision clockwork (although you’d be surprised at how much I can keep in my head), but at least they will get written, and that’s something.

All I need to know is what happens… tomorrow.

After that, who knows?

Still feeling more thinky than linky. Sorry.

At least I have finally gotten around to making a folder in my browser for links I might feel like sharing at some point. This is a very large efficiency improvement over just leaving their tabs open till I use them, which was the previous “system”.

It is something I had been meaning to do for a long long time but never got around to it. But when I decided I wanted to end the link stream and talk about myself instead, I really had no choice. It was that, or end up with a browser with so many tabs open that it crashes.

So now I just save the links. Next time I feel like doing a big link dump, I can take another look at them, same as I do with the science stories for the Friday Science Whatever.

My mood seems to be solidifying lately. The big negative emotion dump I wrote last night did its usual good job of making me feel a whole lot better. I still feel sort of sad and lost, but at least I don’t feel so overwhelmed and overburdened any more.

Every time I do one of those sessions of emotional emesis, afterwards I end up thinking “Man, why don’t I do this more often?” And I don’t have a wise or clever sounding answer for that.

I guess emotional retention is a habit which is hard to break. I sometimes wonder if I have been over-prioritizing being able to function at my admittedly minimal level when I should have been concentrating on whatever it is that makes me more functional in the long run, even if it means falling apart in some way in the short term.

But I just don’t do that kind of thing, or at least, I have never done it before. I am the poor sap who just keeps going and going, driving on four flat tires with the emergency brake on but never breaking down completely, oh no, not me.

In my childhood, I was supposed to be invisible. I was to never have problems, never ask for anything, never draw attention to myself, never need anything. I was not planned, I was not wanted, I was not valued, and I certainly wasn’t welcome.

But I was still, of course, expected to go to school and do well, and as it happened that was never a problem for me. But I had to learn to manage it all myself.

I had my own alarm clock. I got up on my own. I dressed myself in clothes I had washed myself and often bought myself with the Children’s Allowance money my parents gave me that was supposed to meet all my clothing needs.

Can you imagine making a kid who was still in elementary school buy his own clothes? Absurd on the faith of it. But my family operated on the principle that, of course, Michael will do whatever it takes to make himself less of a burden on others.

It’s not like he’s a person with his own desires, ambitions, and needs. He exists to not exist, and if he can’t manage that, at least to not remind us that he exists.

So I got myself up, dressed myself, groomed myself (poorly), walked to school alone, was alone (kind of by preference, because loneliness is better than torture) during recess and lunch, walked home alone, let myself in, and spent nearly all the time at home alone too.

If it hadn’t been for supper, I barely would have interacted with my family at all. And those were fraught with peril because of my father’s unstable mood.

On a good night, everyone ignored me. I certainly was not allowed to speak. When I did speak, my family looked at me like I had just beamed in from Mars.

Where did YOU come from and how did you get in here?

So I learned, in a minor way, to be very independent. I did it all myself. My existence was practically hermetically sealed. I could live in a house with five other people and barely interact with them at all.

I think it is the instincts that I developed then, the ones that let me handle myself and get through school despite a lot of things being very wrong in my life, that now propel me forward and make it impossible for me to fall apart, have a breakdown, or otherwise lose my shit.

That’s just…. not allowed. I have to be self-sufficient like that. I have to do it all myself and not ask anyone else for help. I have to keep it together enough to get through a day. I can’t just fall apart because there is nobody out there who will put me back together.

That is the stark reality I face now in my quest for healing and understanding. This profound feeling that there is nobody out there, absolutely nobody, and that means that I have to keep myself together and cope with every day alone, no matter what, because there is NOBODY ELSE.

I can feel this incredibly strong sense of their being nobody out there for me as a vast and deadly coldness within my soul. It’s not the coldness of a winter’s night or the coldness that lies in the heart of a snowbank in February.

It is the cold of space. A perfect vacuum. And it seems so vast. It cuts me off from others because, just in order to survive all that isolation and loneliness, I had to stop believing in others.

Unfortunately, that level of functioning, the kind that got me through school, is not nearly enough for dealing with the real world.

And so… I haven’t. I have instead clung to whatever let me avoid it.

I have never been strong enough to deal with the real world. I have always retreated from it into my safe little intellectual world.

But what do you expect from someone who had to raise themselves?