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.