Hi there MJB fans! Here I am, coming to you from the infamous Room 364 at the swankier than thou Burnaby Accent Inn as I prepare to attend that yearly pow wow of the bow wows, Vancoufur 2014.

Right now, I feel kind of sleepy, which is annoying, as I hope to be attending Movie Night at the con in around 1.5 hours. Sure, get tired NOW, why doncha,

I am also somewhat annoyed by the lack of wall sockets in this room, which is currently forcing me to type this communique with the tablet bouncing precriously on my gut.

Ah, to heck with that. So I run down the battery. It is tricky enough tp type on this thing in the best of times.

My mood continues to drive me inward, against my will. I find myself unwillingly and unknowingly tuning out during conversations because my inner thoughts and processes take over my consciousness.

And I hate that. I was hoping to be LESS introverted by now, not moreso. But apparently, whatever I anm going through takes up more of my mind han a mere background process is afforded.

So it takes over, and I feel like I am losing my mind.I have a loose enough grip on reality as is. Some days, it is very hard o hear the real world over the noise in my head, and one of my greatest fears is of losing my grip and plunging screaming into the gaping maw of madness.

Well that is enough for now. Blog at you tomorrow!

I realized today that I have been depressed lately.

Spent another day in bed, sleeping, looking to avoid reality and press fast forward on life. Classic depressive behaviour.

I think I just failed to recognize it because my extensive emotional reintegration has been slowly robbing me of the sort of emotional distance that I used to use in order to remain analytical about myself.

I am more whole than ever, and that is wonderful, but it means I will need new tools for handling myself. The old tools are dying every day now. I will need new methods based on actual emotional growth to replace the old methods based on intellectualization and mental growth.

I cannot keep treating myself like a deep and fascinating problem to solve. That kind of detachment kills.Instead, I will learn to set my massive crystalline sphere of glittering analysis aside, and live like a human being instead.

I have been keeping myself away from my fellow humans with isolation, both mental and physical, for a long long time, and it is a very poor long term solution. Nothing living can survive in that kind of cold for long.

So I have been pretty depressed lately. Honestly, it feels good just to admit it. I realize now that I have never really dealt with my depression in realtime before, as an event in time instead of just a attribute of myself.

So, last couple of days have been crappy and depressive. I retreated from reality and hid in sleep a lot.

So what? I’m a depressive. This happens. It’s the main symptom of the disease. Some days are good, some days not so much. I am dealing with a lot of stuff lately and that has required a certain amount of retreat into my inner world.

Heck, for all I know. my psychological health absolutely required this extra sleep time in order to deal with all the emotions emerging from the frozen morass of my mind. I have certainly been dreaming a lot.

I had a dream today that I was laying into some American right winger about how anyone who rejects helping the poor is anti-Christ and therefore not a Christian.

This is, in a way, a wish fulfillment kind of dream, because I would really love to do that, especially in a public forum where my point of view will be seen by many others.

The American right really needs some angry reformers to take them on with all the fire and energy of a Martin Luther about how far from Christ’s love they have strayed.

And to be honest, the dreams where I get super fucking angry about something are probably very healthy for me in the long run. I have a lot of latent rage stored up, and anything safe catharsis for it is appreciated.

So as I was saying, so I spent a few days getting not much done because I had to sleep so much. Big deal. That is perfectly normal for the likes of me, and nothing to be ashamed of.

I am a very sick man. Some days worse than others. That’s all.

And the last thing I ever want to do is get mad at myself for being sick. An awful lot of the journey for any modern human from misery to enlightenment is forgiving oneself for being human. For not being the idealized version of yourself that we irrationally cling to as the way we should be.

Fuck “should”. You are who you are. You get nowhere in life trying to play the hand you “should” have. You have to play the cards you got, no matter how much they suck, if you hope to get yourself up out of the mud and into the sunshine.

Another thing I realized today is that I have never felt equal to others. I have felt inferior my entire life. I have no idea what I would do in a position of true equality, where I had nothing to apologize for, everything is one hundred percent equal, and I have to really deal with people.

From the time I was a little kid, I felt like I was existing purely on the sufferance of others and therefore did not really have any rights of my own. And ever since then, I have gone from one situation to the next where that was true, whether it was being supported by friends in the USA where I could earn no income, or my position now, where I have financial equality (I pay my share of rent et al ), I only do so because the Province of British Columbia has taken pity on me.

Plus, Joe and Julian do all the housework, because I am completely incompetent.

So I have no idea what it is like to be truly equal with others. I have trouble even imagining it, and I have an excellent imagination. I have lived with this extremely deep sense of shame and inferiority for so long that I don’t even begin to know what life would be like without it.

In some ways, the idea scares me. It would be so new and different, and I would somehow feel more exposed. Being inferior to others makes great cover for those of us who are as troubled as I am. Being ashamed of yourself is a great excuse for hiding from others. Without that….

…well, you would have to go out there and deal with them, wouldn’t you?

That said, it could also be amazingly good for my self-worth. Removing that enormous sense of shame and inferiority could be just what my ego needs in order to find some sort of stable ground. I could finally become a full human being in my own eyes, just as good as anyone else, with nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? All healthy and open and pure.

So why does the prospect scare the living shit out of me?

Today has not been what you would call great.

I ended up staying in bed all afternoon, mostly sleeping or trying to sleep. But I wasn’t really tired.

I just did not feel like dealing with reality.

I am trying to be cool about that. After all, it is not like there is something I was supposed to do. Odds are, no matter what, I was not going to produce anything this afternoon anyhow.

And the case can certainly be made that getting angry with myself over something so trivial is the epitome of counterproductive. So I got into a grumpy funk and spent an afternoon hiding from reality. So what?

But deep down, I am still mad at myself for doing it. I know it’s unhealthy to think that way, but that is just how it is for now. You feel what you feel, you can’t control it or command it.

The situation is not helped my the fact that I know damned well that if I am feeling sad and frustrated and so on, I know how to fix it. Just get up and move around! Maybe get some fresh air for a change. Go outside and stay outside till the air in my lungs has turned over and I am full of freshness instead of dusty musty staleness.

But that’s just the thing. I always know what to do. Always. I have a very clever and practical mind, and it always generates plenty of ideas as to how to fix my situation. Sensible, practical, doable ideas that seem like ideal solutions.

Except for one thing. I never do them. Like Alice from Alice In Wonderland, I am always giving myself such excellent advice, but I never listen.

Clearly, the advice is not as perfect as it seems, or it would work. I can say that because I am a pragmatist. Theory can be wonderful but results are what counts. And so far, all these brilliant ideas contribute is another reason to feel bad.

I think I am dealing with my problems on too deep a level for intellect to be much help anyhow. I have pierced the subverbal, pre-intellect level of my problems and there is no thinking your way through there. There is only exploration of the true nature of one’s emotional landscape and dealing what one finds there.

This is a purely emotional process. No plans. No clever solutions. No tactics. No cutting the problem down to size with the razor sharp scalpel of intellect.

Just a slow, steady process of thumbing through my thick catalog of unprocessed emotions, looking for the key that will unlock them so I can take them into my conscious self, acknowledge and treasure and validate them, and then put then to rest.

Every emotion you have ever repressed is still within you somewhere. Maybe it’s in your bloodstream, circulating constantly, waiting to finally be expressed and adding to your depression and anxiety while it waits.

Or maybe it is encoded in the brain, sitting there in some massive dead letters office, just another form waiting to be processed by the bloated and negligent office of the mind.

Probably both, honestly.

The truth remains : the only way to deal with things is to deal with them. There is no escaping this emotional task. You can start it or stop it, but you cannot escape. Stopping means being trapped inside it forever, and those unprocessed emotions will just keep stacking up.

The only way out is through. You have to work very hard if you have any hope of cutting down the backlog. And there is no way to do it all at once, so there’s no escaping that way anyhow.

It is a long, dreary trudge and a lot of (but not all of!) those emotions will be unpleasant, so it will be no walk in the park. The journey will not be fun.

But if you stick with it, the benefits are enormous. Clearing out old emotions creates more free space in the mind, and the more free space the mind has in which to operate, the more cleanly and efficiently it can run.

And just like that, problems you have had for years disappear as the various forces at play get a chance to mingle and re-balance and resolve. Tensions are released, poisonous fog is cleared, and you feel ever so much better.

And that is your motivation to keep going. Once you have a taste of that, you want more.

I am truly grateful for whatever manages to key in to my repressed emotions and bring them out. Earlier today, I was listening to a podcast where someone asked about what triggers memory in people, and I thought back to my childhood and a particular moment where I was in my babysitter’s home and the song “Angel In The Morning” by Juice Newton was playing on the radio, and it was a gorgeous sunny day, and everything seemed perfect, welcoming and warm and wonderful.

And that memory unlocked a nice big chunk of indescribable emotion for me to process. It was too powerful and primal and prismatic to be captured in the limited palette of human language. I could not even tell you whether it was a pleasant or unpleasant experience. It was beyond that, transcendent.

It is always healthy for me to reach back to the time before I was ever abused or bullied, when I was a happy gregarious precocious little red headed boy for whom the world was fresh and new and full of wonder.

That was the last time I was entirely healthy, and I can draw upon that time as a source of health and happiness.

I can’t ever be that little redheaded kid again, but he still lives within me, under all that infected scar tissue, and the more I can connect with him, the more he can teach me how to be healthy again.

It’s just you and me, kid. Let’s go look for a way out of here.

Wow, what a whiz bang title, eh?

Poor Bear. I am thinking that I will not get back to him and his new friend until I get into the habit of writing twice a day instead of just this once, and that is not going to happen until after the convention.

Right, the convention. That is what gave me the idea of somewhere to go with tonight’s blog entry. There is a conflict within me that I assume is not present in mentally healthy people, and I want to talk about it.

See, I am really looking forward to this convention. Conventions are always tons of fun, and I thrive there. Being in a world, however temporary, of fellow freaky nerdy types is amazing for soothing the soul and making me feel free.

And a furry convention, even more so. I don’t talk much about the furry community and my furry nature here on this blog because it is not exactly a subject of universal appeal and part of me wants to keep that side of me somewhat walled off so that it will not become some sort of absurd impediment to a future career in the non-furry world.

But furries are my people, in some ways even more so than the nerds at V-con. Of course, it helps that all furries are nerds, more or less. so it is not like I have to leave the nerd world behind in order to hang with the fuzzies.

Furry is its own weird little world, but that world is a subset of larger nerd-dom. We are just a specialized form of nerd, one that is pretty low on the totem pole due to our pro-sex attitudes and openness.

We are, therefore, the nerds of nerds. Someone for them to look down on. This must make them so happy.

“Sure, I had a full Klingon wedding, slip Elvish words into everyday conversation, and violently shat myself when I had a chance encounter with DeForest Kelly…. but at least I’m not one of those furries! ”

This means that when I am hanging with the fuzzies, I feel an order of magnitude less inhibited and guarded then when I am hanging with larger fandom, where in turn I feel another order of magnitude calmer than when I am in the mundane world.

I am just a delicate little hothouse flower, when you really look at it.

So to make a long story short (TOO LATE!), I am really looking forward to this convention.

I am also, at the same time, absolutely terrified of it and don’t want to go.

This always happens to me when I am going to leave the safety of the apartment and go into the big ol world. The degree of the effect is proportionate to the unfamiliarity of the destination.

For instance, when I was first going to see my therapist, my anxiety level was extremely high. Unfamiliar environment, authority figure, the feeling that everyone hated me, difficulty with relatively simple tasks due to overwhelming panic… I remember it well, even though it feels like it happened to someone else now.

What was I so scared of?

But now, I am completely comfortable there. I don’t get pre-departure jitters any more, or if I do, they are so minor that they can’t be detected against the baseline level of my mental disturbance.

Same with the restaurants we go to. Admittedly, being with my friends is a big help with anxiety period, but a new place would stimulate more anxiety than the two we alternate between.

But you take something very big like a convention, where I will be out of the house for four days, entirely divorced from my sustaining (and entrapping) hyper-predictable home life, and thrust into a situation absolutely jam packed with people I don’t know in an environment entirely uncontrolled and chaotic by the standards of my fears.

So while I am looking forward to it, I am not feeling excited about it. Instead, I have the usual enormous icy block of fear and reluctance to work through before I set out.

This happens to me all the time. Any time I am contemplating a move outside my comfort zone, my emotional state is overwhelmed by a powerful anti-action reaction and I have to work through it in order to get anywhere.

And it’s not easy. It takes a real effort of will to contain the panic and wait for it to fade, as it always does.

It takes very good metaconscious control to remember that your feelings will change if you give them a chance. If I simply did what my emotions told me, I would go nowhere. I would be the sort of person who is always standing people up or cancelling meetups at the last minute or otherwise being very wishy washy and flaky.

Luckily, I am not like that. I would find such behaviour unacceptable in myself. I believe too strongly in keeping my word and being responsible for the foreseeable consequences of my actions to be like that.

But that still leaves me with a burden to bear, a price to pay, for every step outside my bright tight little safety circle. I will always have to struggle through the icy sticky swamp of my mental illness to get anywhere.

It takes me more willpower to go to a convention than most people use all year.

No wonder I have become such a top-down kind of person, with the intellect firmly in control to the point where I smother all the feelings inside that would inspire and motivate me.

I have had to be that way just to get anything done. People say you should just do what you feel, but I think those people have some very naive blinkers on when they imagine things your feelings might want you to do.

Because I have some very dark feelings mixed in with the good ones, and if I acted on those, I would be a horrible person.

Plus, a lot of what I want to do costs money, and while that is more possible now than it has been before, I am still highly restricted in my options.

For the life of me, I can’t tell where I end and the cage begins.

See you at the convention, folks.

I have had a sleepy kind of day today.

But the good kind of sleepy, the kind that leads to satisfying sleep where you wake up feeling relaxed and content and lazy. I love those kinds of days, despite the loss of time. Good sleep is always worthwhile.

But you can see why I am writing this blogamajig of mine at 6 PM when I could easily have done it earlier were it not for the persistent but appreciated attentions of Mister Sandman.

And normally, this being Sunday, I would have done the writing ages ago and be in the shower right about now in anticipation of a pleasant evening with my friends, first going out to eat, then getting some grocery shopping done with Felicity, then retiring to casa del us to watch videos and enjoy one another’s company.

It’s my favorite day of the week, and usually I am my usual prepared self, making sure I get my blogging done early so I am ready to go by 6 PM.

Obviously, that ain’t gonna happen this time. I am probably okay anyhow. We don’t usually actually get going till around 7:30 PM, and that leaves me plenty of time to blog and shower and dress.

Speaking of time, a couple weeks ago my therapist gave me a potential medical explanation as to why I always feel like shit between 4 PM and 6 PM. Seems that people’s cortisol levels are at their lowest then, and that tends to make people feel mighty low.

This offers an alternate explanation for my father’s dinner table tirades. Before. I always assumed it was low blood sugar. Perhaps it was low cortisol levels instead. Or both… according to the Wiki article, the purpose of cortisol is to raise your blood sugar level when needed, so if there is not enough around, it would make sense that low blood sugar would result.

My therapist suggested that some aggressive hydration at around 4 PM would help alleviate the symptoms, and I can report that it does seem to help. It doesn’t make me feel like Captain Sunshine Wonderful, but at least I feel less like a poisonous puddle of putrescent poo.

Looking forward to Vancoufur next weekend. Actually, it turns out that that dang thing is starting on Thursday instead of the traditional Friday, so there will be four days of fuzz and fun instead of the usual three.

This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I love conventions and an extra helping of the fun is a marvelous bonus. But on the other paw, that means an extra day of clothes to bring, an extra day of time away from home, and most importantly, another day of meals to budget for and another day of hotel rent share.

But I am not too worried. I will have a budget of around $400, and a minimum of seven meals to cover, so if I budget for $25 per meal, that is $175 for meals.

And I might not even end up spending that much.

That leaves $225 for the room share and sundries, plus $200 left in the kitty (meow!) for the rest of the month. I can get by on $66/week without much trouble, so no big deal there.

Of course, blogging might be spotty then, depending on the availability of WiFi. But I look forward to being able to blog from my tablet at the con. It will make me feel so modern!

Uh oh. Joe just said I need to be ready around 7 PM. Better put the hustle on.

Otherwise, life has been… normal. At least for me. Still working on somehow overcoming my inner inertia and becoming a more active person. I am giving serious thought to my “dessert a day” idea. Make one dessert item per day for a month. I can make them in the afternoons. I can even listen to my beloved podcasts while cooking. If I pull it off, I will end up with both a sense of accomplishment from actually getting something done for a change, and a stockpile of desserts that I can freeze or put in jars to preserve them, and thus have home made sugar free desserts for weeks afterward.

Who knows, it might even become a habit.

There will, of course, be a certain amount of expense involved, both for the staples like flour and for the little one-off ingredients like raisins.

But I can afford it. My income can definitely take it. And it would certainly be a lot cheaper than buying sugar free desserts from Safeway.

They really screw us over on the price for sugar free desserts because they know we have no choice. It’s buy the small number of sugar free goods available, or have no desserts at all.

Meanwhile, all those celiac disease sufferers and other gluten sensitive people get to watch as gluten is treated like trans fats and removed for everything.

I am so jealous.

Anyhow, it would be good to get back into the habit of baking. For me, baking is a joyous act. There is just something so very cozy and comfortable about baking up a batch of something yummy. It’s a very home-y kind of thing, and I adore that comfy cozy home-y type vibe.

I would make such an awesome mother. Genitals aside.

Coming to the end of season five of Mad About You, otherwise known as the Pregnant Season. Of course, there is only one way a season where one of the two main characters is pregnant can end.

Pony rides for everyone!

Just kidding. With birth, of course. I have watched one half of the two part episode The Birth so far, and I am looking forward to watching the other half.

I swear, if Jamie ends up having the baby without Paul there, I will never forgive the show.

Well, that’s enough blather for today. I am going to go take as quick a shower as I can so I can be ready for 7.

ABC Country Kitchen, here we come!

Therapy day! And you know what that means…. XANAX for everyone!

Just kidding. AFAIK, the doctors up here don’t give out Xanax like they were Tic-Tacs, like they do in the USA.

We take a tough love approach up here. Sure, we give you all the anti-anxiety and anti-depressant meds you need, but if you get sad or freaked out any way, tough. You are just going to have to ride it out.

Good session today, although I need to talk to my therapist about the difference between therapy and intellectual conversation. Often our sessions veer into intellectual dialectic because we are both intellectual people and we both love to talk with other interesting people. That’s the problem… one of us has to have the willpower to not get drawn into the magnetic vortex that is good intelligent conversation.

And I am going to need his help to keep that from happening, because honestly, I don’t have the willpower on my own. I absolutely adore intelligent conversation, and my desire for it is, as far as I can tell, unquenchable. Having a really good conversation with an intelligent and interesting person is one of the only times I feel really alive.

What can I say, I am a verbal beast. And intellectual to way beyond a fault. I feel like this portion of my life is dedicated to waking up and integrating all the parts of my person that are NOT the rational analytic brain.

Because there’s more to me than that. So much more. I feel like I have been living in the cold dark shadow of my great big brain, and I am keen to discover the rest of me, now that I know it’s there.

It’s not going to be easy.

I have a lot of permafrost to un-perma. Sometimes it seems like the job will last forever. Ever time I think I might have truly defrosted myself, I find another colossus sized tract of dirty ice and muddy snow.

But I am positive that some time soon, I will be a real little boy, with a full range of emotional responses and a keen and continuing interest in life outside my head.

That is the thing about deep chronic pain, which is essentially what depression is, constant pain on a cellular level. Any animal in pain tends to withdraw into itself and lose interest in its surroundings. And a person with depression is a mighty sick animal indeed.

But I feel right now that, at the very least, I am on the upswing, mood-wise. That doesn’t mean I am bulletproof – I felt like ten downmarket varieties of crap earlier today – but it does mean I have some upward momentum, and I plan on using it while I got it because I know that long dark tunnel will come back again.

WARNING : This is a dark ride.

It is easy to remember that every summer leads to fall, but it is much harder (and more important) to realize that every winter leads to spring. Depression tends to severely limit one’s vision, and so it is very hard when you are very depressed to remember that this depression, like all the others, will pass.

Maybe you don’t ever make it all the way out of the darkness. That doesn’t mean the time in the light doesn’t count. It makes just as much sense to live peak to peak instead of valley to valley.

Been thinking a lot about humanism lately, possible in part because I am attempting contact with my own humanity. I realized that when I talk about humanism, I am talking about a very specific kind of humanism that transcends the usual dry and impersonal secular humanism we are all familiar with.

Don’t get me wrong, that high minded humanism is incredibly important. After all, it is the source of all the precepts and ideas that are the very foundation of modern society. It is a dedication to these transpersonal ethics that make all levels of society above the family group possible.

You need to be taught to value people even when instinct does not compel you to love them.

But the kind of humanism I am talking about is far more personal and emotional. It is the Pisces kind, the humanism Jesus brought. It is the recognition of the humanity in others and how it is just like your own. It is the powerful feeling of connection to humanity that comes from understand how we are all frail, imperfect, confused naked beach apes trying to make sense of the world and life.

Deep down, we are all just lab animals looking for the door that leads to the cheese. Our complicated minds can spin us in circles and make us lose all sense of direction, but if you strip away all that monkey chatter and turn off all those crazy chemical hurricanes spawned by the weather of our suppressed emotions, we are all just little children waiting for someone to tell us what to do.

And once you realize this, you begin to cherish people like never before, and your capacity for forgiveness grows in leaps and bounds. You understand that people are people, no more and no less, and everybody you meet is unique and wonderful in their own way, and yet what unites us all is the humanity we share.

To look at another and think “That is a person just like I am, with their own memories, emotions, and history, and I love the humanity in them” is the spirit of my kind of humanism. To understand is to forgive, and when we let go of our grudges, objections, judgments, jealousies, and disdainss, we can embrace the humanity in others and live a far more gentle and forgiving kind of life.

Forgive them for you, not for them.

And if you can do that, if you can find it within you to forgive all who have wronged you and let go of all the negative feelings that are holding you back, something magical happens.

You start to forgive yourself.

Love you all, folks. Seeya tomorrow!

Guess what? My  bus pass arrived!

It showed up in yesterday’s mail. That means it took around three weeks to arrive. I mailed my paperwork in at the very end of January, and it showed up on the 18th of February.

Take that, my therapist’s cynicism!

Now very alert fans of this blog will know where I am right now purely by the subject line of this entry.

That’s right, MJB fans. I am comfortably seated at my favorite White Spot, the one at 3 road and Ackroyd, with a chicken caesar wrap (a bit dry)  in front of me, having baptized my shiny new Compass card to get here.

I am quite pleased with myself. When I got the card yesterday, I immediately decided that I was going to “kick myself out of the house” today. Not tomorrow, not the weekend, and definitely not “whenever: TODAY.

It had to be ASAP because for the likes of me, it was quite possible that I would get the card, say “That’s nice”, stick it in my wallet, and never ever use it.

It would become yet another aversion, and so I had to act before the aversve scar tissue could start to form.

I plan to make sure that I do this at least once a week, in order to keep the channel open, so to speak, And I was quite strict with myself in order to get here. I told myself I was going to do it no matter what, no argument, no excuses, just goddamned do it and no back talk, mister!

Thus, I begin the process of becoming the right kind of parent for myself. I never had anyone to make me do things for my own good (not that that would have been easy), and so I could really use some loving strictness in order to counteract my diffuse laziness. Something to make me focus and DO intead of just lurking in the mist.

I have been thinking a lot about that mist lately. I have know for a long time that I generate it myself and use it as my primary defense against the world, like a smokescreen. The world seems less scary from my little cloud, ande its vapours are soothingly numbing.

Thus, I, like most depressives, am addicted to a drug I produce myself.

But while on the faithful 401 bus today, I was pondering my confusion about chaos versus order, how part of me craves order and part of me rebels against it.

As part of that, I was pondering my slobbish lifestyle, and I suddenly realized that I was not merely disinclined to the toil and fuss required in keeping things neat and tidy.

I am actually terrified, with a deep down primal terror way down in the toilet training layer of the brain, of a clean room,and it is totally a fear of what will come OUT of me.

It seems that I use clutter and mess as an externalized version of my numbing, blurring smokescreen, and I have a great and terrible fear of what will happen if I lose it.

But what is it that will COME OUT of me if I make things clean and tidy? I have no idea. Emotions, I presume, not that that narrows it done by much. The physical metaphor is apt : it is like I will vomit up all the bad things I have had to swallow in my life.

Which is an extremely horrifying (and disgusting) thought. I have spent a lifetime trying to keep that stuff in, and hide it (and myself) from the world so nobody would know.

But the more rational, objective, externalized part of my mind knows that what I am talking about is catharsis, MEGAcatharsis, and that is something I believe in. I have no moral obligation to carry all this poisonous garbage inside me, and if I could rid myself of it, I would be far better off in the long run.

So here I stand, on the queasy border between suppression and catharsis, wondering if I have the nerve to stop holding things in and start really letting them out,

The next step could be mighty messy.

But it might just be the only way to get clean,

(We will get back to Bear and his talking parasite tomorrow. )

After finishing the blog entry entitled Afraid Of My Own Shadow, I realized that I had wandered quite far afield of my original intention for that blog entry, and so I will take another crack at it now.

I got some of it, namely the fear of the dark and nearly sociopathic side of me that is always lurking beneath the surface of my consciousness. Everyone is a little afraid of their dark side, I suppose, but for me, it is accelerated by my general mental instability and lack of cohesive identity structure.

So the dark things seem more possible to me than to saner folk.

But the other half of the equation is the feeling of latent power in my mind. I have realized that I could do great harm to others with my powerful brain and its ease with understanding what makes other people tick, as well as my general charisma and power of personality.

There is a vision of a version of myself that haunts me. In it, I am a manipulative, smooth talking, capricious creep who hides his cold hard misanthropy under sunny smiles and charming words, and who goes through the world ripping people off for his own benefit, or just fucking with their heads for his own amusement.

The kind of person who is always on the move, so that he never has to face the consequences of his actions, and who gives the appearance of spreading sunshine and happiness wherever he goes, but in the cold light of day, everyone’s wallets are missing, as is the good silverware and all the jewelry, and two couples aren’t talking to each other any more because I seduced a member from each of them, and a person who was fine is now filled with doubt about existence, and everyone feels awful.

And I am somewhere far away, laughing at their misfortune and counting the money I got from selling their stuff.

This may seem ridiculous to those who know me as I am, a sweet, sensitive, funny fellow, but that version of me is very possible. If this vision of a possibility does me any good, it reminds me that the likes of me has to be ever vigilant of how they use their gifts, and to make sure that they, in essence, stay good.

This is, perhaps, why I have always been strongly drawn to stories about people coping with new-found power. I fear my own power, and so stories about people coping with theirs (often in the form of superpowers) are both cathartic and educational.

I really want to know how to deal with all this power. I think my fear of it is part of what keeps me so locked up within myself. I have had the feeling of being a gentle giant amongst very fragile people for as long as I can remember. As a kid way, way smarter than those around you, you get this feeling that in order to stay part of humanity at all, you have to be very, very, very careful with those around you, or you will end up hurting them.

Only recently has it occurred to me that these fears might well be wildly exaggerated. People are not, in fact, made of glass, and I can lower my harsh inhibitions and let more of my big, big personality out into the world without worrying that I will end up crushing people as I ascend.

And to be honest, in a very limited and defined way, fuck them. Fuck the people in my way. If the road to my sanity happens to travel over some people’s toes, I will not let that stop me. They will recover. I need to grow.

I will, like a good Utilitarian, minimize the harm to others whenever I can. The difference is that I now consider myself to have a utility value of more than zero, and therefore my happiness can, in some circumstances, justify harm to others.

Things that benefit me have real value. I have been living my life as though that were not true, as those I was a strange void in the world of the greatest good for the greatest number. Someone for whom absolutely everyone else came first.

Given the nature of my childhood, this is not surprising. That is exactly how the universe of my childhood worked. I was the unwanted guest who couldn’t leave, and I felt guilty just for being alive, and so I learned to self-minimize and try to make myself the lightest unwanted burden I could.

That is a terrible way to live. No wonder I have such an unhealthily low sense of self and why self-worth is so hard to acquire regardless of the evidence.

I have spent my entire life trying to disappear.

I have even daydreamed about how great it would be to be able to just disappear for a while. Just stop existing for a while and thus be free of this sense of total illegitimacy.

There, family. I finally disappeared completely. Happy now? The Mistake has been corrected. The unwanted child is gone forever. You can all heave a sigh of relief at not having that annoying stranger around any more. You can go back to what it was like before I showed up unexpected and unwanted.

Sure, you will pretend to be sad. But deep down, you will be glad I am gone. The unwanted pet ran away and died, and you can enjoy life without it now.

This is honestly how a very large and unhealthy part of me thinks. It is very hard for me to imagine that people actually want me around, that they value me and would miss me if I was not around.

The dark, diseased, depressed part of me insists that nobody likes me, they just humour me out of pity, and everyone would always be better off without me around.

In fact, they would be greatly relieved if I went away forever.

The sane part of my mind knows that this is not true, that all evidence points to the opposite conclusion, and that I have nothing to be ashamed of.

But that part is not the majority, not yet. It is in control, thank God, but it is not the majority.

And that is the shadow I fear.