I had another idea for today’s column, but that will have to wait. Not in the mood.

Good session today. I tried to explain my whole ill fitting armor thing to my shrink, and I think I got it across to him. I have been killing myself inside for a very long time. I took refuse in my own intellect and used its coldness to protect myself from my own emotions, but that is a very bad long term strategy.

Because the thing about using analytical detachment as a primary emotional defense is that it casts you permanently in the role of the observer. You can’t be the detached observer who figures everything out unless you distance yourself from reality and only deal with it like it’s an intellectual puzzle.

Hence, you are forever on the outside, looking in. You cannot feel the emotional reality of life. Consequently, the world seems very cold and harsh. You are numb to all its beauty and complexity and as you slowly starve yourself of necessarily emotional sustenance, you feel emptier and emptier inside.

You are, in a word, frozen.

I realize this about myself now. I have had a sense of needing to thaw out for a long long time now, but I thought it was just about traumatic memories of the past, or just a question of accumulating unexpressed emotions.

But it is far more dire than that. I have been killing myself every damned day for a long long time. This bubble I live in has crippled me and kept me from actually going out into the world and experiencing life, and maybe learning something that no amount of intellectual omnivory and deep contemplation can ever teach me.

Another thing that came up in therapy today is the idea that for a very long time, I have thought that I was my intellect, and my intellect was me. After all, being so flipping smart has been get of a dominant theme in my life, and the one thing I know about myself is that I am dazzlingly smart.

Not that it has done me a lot of good so far, but whatever. That’s just my bitterness talking.

But I am not my intellect. I am me. I would still be me even if all this intellectual muscle went away. (I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, but I would still be me.)

There is so much going on beneath the spreading jungle canopy of my vast and weighty mind. This distancing yourself from the world via chilly intellect has blinded me to it for a long time, but I am a person, not a frontal lobe. I’m not just a brain in a jar somewhere. I am a full human being, and should live like one.

I cannot wait for that bus pass to show up!

I also tried to explain my atypical assertiveness issues to my shrink, with mixed results. It is a difficult thing to get across.

My problems are atypical because I have no problem asserting myself in a lot of situations. The subject came up because he was warning me, as he had before, that once I have the bus pass and am out in the world, I might encounter rude and unkind people out there in the big ol world.

And I told him I am not worried about that, oddly enough. I have no problem verbally defending myself in an argument or a confrontation. If someone is rude to me, I have no problem giving them both barrels of my high verbal skill, and with deadly accuracy.

I have never had trouble defending my beliefs in an argument, either. In fact, when I was in late teens/early twenties, I had rather the opposite problem. I love to argue and it showed. I had to learn to rope that shit in pretty hard and accept that the world was not full of intellectual jousting opponents, no matter what that crazy part of the male brain kept telling me.

I have also never had stage fright. Like I said before, if anything, I am more comfortable on the stage than in real life. Life is so simple on the stage. You know exactly what it expected of you, and all you have to do is go out there and do it.

Real life is rarely so simple.

So as you can see, I lack a lot of problems that a lot of shy and/or unassertive people experience. And yet in many ways, I am just as crippled as they are.

My social anxiety makes meeting new people incredibly difficult. In many ways I am excruciatingly shy and timid. When I meet new people I tend to freeze up inside, and end up functioning in a way that feels bizarre and out of sync to me, which doesn’t make things any easier.

And boy do I have trouble asking for things. One thing we discussed is what happens to me when I visit my GP. I might have a bunch of questions I want to ask about real health concerns going in to the appointment, but the minute the doctor shows up and asks how I am, I say “Fine!”.

My therapist helped me understand exactly why this is. It is not just because the doctor is an authority figure. It is because I can sense his impatience and how he would really rather I say I am fine so he can get on to the next patient. As my therapist said, they get paid the same for a 3 minute appointment as a ten, so they are encouraged to just ram people through the turnstile as fast as possible.

And his impatience is exactly like my parents’ impatience with me. They were always busy and/or tired and I could tell what they wanted for me was for me to say I am fine because then they can go back to ignoring me and I can go back to fading into the wallpaper like I was supposed to do.

All in all, a very fruitful session.

Welcome back to Angstville. Wow, it’s like we never really left!

I have realized quite recently that I have been trying to force myself into a certain unrealistic and inhuman mold for a very long time. I can remember, in fact, deciding that I would brutally and mercilessly hold myself to a very strict (and unrealistic) standard of behaviour and otherwise force myself to be the way that my agile and domineering mind dictated I should be.

This was done without mercy, and was based on the assumption that if I forced myself into this mold and held myself there long enough and hard enough, I would have no choice but to become that person.

Call it foot binding of the soul.

And like foot binding, it technically works, but the cost is far too high. You get the shape you wanted, but at the cost of becoming hopelessly crippled. It is an obscenely unnatural thing to do to a person, and the result is a twisted and deformed person who cannot function in society any more.

Boy, does that sound familiar.

So that shell I keep trying to come out of is more like a suit of ill fitting armor (hey, that’s the name of this blog entry) that I have locked myself into assuming that I would just get used to it, but instead, it has left me bent and deformed and unable to function in a normal way.

And what happens if that armor is removed? Well, what happens to any invertebrate deprived of is exoskeleton? After so long in that armored shell, the creature inside is a weak, pink, shriveled worm who cannot function without the support of the armor any more.

And soon, it dies of what I fear the most : exposure.

And there is a word writ large across the bell of my carapace.

The word is : REASON.

I have been strangling myself and freezing myself to death by trying to force my living, breathing, complicated, and fundamentally illogical human self into a dead, sterile, simplistic, and unrealistically logical mold.

And of course, that mold can never truly fit. Like Procrustes, you always end up stretching one part of you or cutting off another in order to make it fit.

Life should be a great deal more ergonomic than that. You cannot live by the cold circuit of life alone. This is what people of Mediterranean and Equatorial cultures understand (finances, not so much).

They understand joy, celebration, passion, and living your emotions openly and fully, be they positive or negative. They celebrate, they grieve, they argue, they love, all with an understanding that all these things are needed in order to be human and that to deny them is to pretend you are a robot, not a human being.

And not a happy robot, either.

You need the inputs of both the hot and cold circuits in order to have a warm, rich, happy life. The cold circuit is the smart circuit, the one that figures things out, the one that restrains us and lets us control ourselves, and without it we would barely be human.

But self-control, as in all things, is good only in moderation. If the cold circuit dominates, you go past self-control, through self-denial, through self-loathing, and all the way into self-destruction.

And I mean that literally. Destruction of self. If your cold circuit goes out of control, it begins ruthlessly suppressing everything from the warm circuit and if that goes deep enough, it destroys the very foundation of identity, the feeling of who you really are, underneath the carapace.

A lot of people in that situation start feeling like they are so empty inside that they must be nobody at all. They are so disconnected from the person insider the armor that they conclude the armor is empty. Nobody home.

But that cannot be true. If you had no self, you would be effectively dead, a puppet with no strings and no puppeteer.If you are a live human being, there is someone in there, and if you feel empty inside, odds are that person is quite cold and lonely and could really use a friend.

“Stop making sense!” is a pop psychology motto that I remember from the pop psych heyday of the 1970s. And for most of my life, I have thought it was just about the dumbest thing I could remember, right up with “love means never having to say you’re sorry. ”

But I think I am starting to get it now. Why should every action be held to an impossible standard of sensibility? Why do you need to be able to explain and defend everything you do? Why impose this unreasonable standard of reason on yourself and make yourself miserable by trying to always be “right”?

And what about that poor abused person locked inside that fortress of logic and self-restraint? What must they think of the world in which they have been forced to live? A world that allows for no humanity, no freedom from judgment, no joy, no warmth, no simple, childlike happiness?

Of course that person is going to conclude that the world is a harsh, cold, unforgiving place. Theirs is, and it is all their own doing! By holding themselves to a harshly inhuman standard and then punishing themselves for the slightest deviation for it, they have become, in effect, their own police state.

Well it is high time for a revolution. The soul needs to be free, and it can only free itself if it casts off the shackles of overweaning reason and learns to just be itself, feathers and all, whatever it may be.

Be irrational sometimes. Be unreasonable when you need to. Forgive yourself your frailty, your imperfection, your inability to meet your unrealistic ideals.

Forgive yours for being human.

Dolly Parton once that said, as near as she could figure, the secret to life was to “discover who you really are and then do it on purpose. ”

And you know, I think she’s right.

Yup. We’re back to angst and the constant re-examination of my childhood.

Therapy can get kind of repetitive like that.

I have been pondering what it must have been like to deal with me as a child (again), and it has occurred to me that I was quite the bag of troubles.

Highly sensitive, highly intelligent, and yet neither confident nor strong, I was almost custom designed to not be liked. Because this is what I figured out today.

People cannot stand people who come across like they could be alpha, but aren’t because they are weak.

It brings out depths of contempt rarely applied to our personal lives. If someone gives off leader signals but fails to actually live up to said signals, we hate them for failing us, in essence.

People hate mixed signals. They hate them, in a sense, more than they hate people with unmixed but very negative signals. They might not like the person who radiates hostility and danger, and they might not trust them, but they respect them more than they do the mixed signal strong-but-weak person.

And that is what this all boils down to : respect. Respect is extremely important to us humans. Weakness may well elicit compassion but if they do not respect you in the first place, they will still not want to deal with you.

We can’t stand being around people for whom we have no respect. That’s why marriages break down when the couple no longer respects one another. You might hate each other’s guts for decades, but if you have no respect for your partner, the relationship is doomed unless you regain it.

People we hate infuriate us, but people we have contempt for disgust us, and disgust is the opposite of compassion. That’s why the evil aliens are bug eyed monsters who ooze slime. Or zombies.

Doesn’t matter, as long as they are gross. That way, we will have no compassion for them and feel really good about slaughtering them by the hundreds.

Makes me want to write a science fiction story where the alien invaders behave exactly like standard big eyed monster but are adorable. Morally identical, but I bet we’d feel worse slaughtering hundreds of aliens if they all looked like baby koalas.

Anyhow, back to me and my life. On the one hand, I was extremely intelligent. That is a classic leadership signal. It is the second most powerful one, in fact, after strength of presence.

And I am just now realizing that I have always had a strong presence as well. I learned to mask it at an early age, but there was a lot to mask.

Especially as an adult, because as an adult, I am not only highly intelligent but I am also large, and size coems with its own set of social assumptions. We tend to associate size with power and power with authority, and so if you are big but weak you arouse a contempt that a smaller weak person would never face.

Small people have trouble getting respect too, but for different reasons.

If you’re a weak man, you will get more contempt from women than from men. Another man might have no respect for you if you are weak, and they might dismiss you or mock you, but they won’t hate you for it.

But in my experience, women hate weak men with a passion and act as though we have personally failed them. That is the price of all gender nonconformity, of course. Women who are strong get the same kind of hostility from men with ideas that women should be all weak and nonthreatening.

Respect is the difference between a wounded warrior and a wimp. It’s the difference between an elder statesman and a historical nobody. It’s the difference between the sad friend you help and the depressed friend whom you just start avoiding altogether because they are socially unpleasant to be around.

So my advice to alpha negative males like myself is, if you want more long term compassion from people, to work on convincing people that you are someone they should respect who is temporarily down in the dumps and who could be back in respectable condition with enough help.

If you can do that, people might actually be willing to get close enough for long enough to really help. They might even respect you when you have no respect for yourself, and that is a precious thing indeed.

Depression makes that hard, though, and makes it far easier to simply broadcast your weakness to others in the vain hope of attracting some help.

That’s how it should work. You need help, you get help, end of story. But the hard cold truth is that without respect, there is contempt and disgust, and where those exist, compassion dies.

If people do not respect you, they will avoid you. That is why people have so little compassion for the homeless and people on welfare. They have no respect for these people in need and so their response is one of anger and contempt where there should be compassion and caring.

I have not even been respectable, in the true sense of the word. I have always been shabby and slobby and sensitive and smarter than was good for me. Somehow along the line, I never learned how to compose myself and make myself easier to respect and therefore easier to love.

I have realized that I have the potential to be a very powerful individual, in the social sense of the world. Someone who radiates power and confidence and respectability. I have the intelligence and the presence to do it. I would just need to learn to focus my personality through a strong ego, be unafraid to be exactly who I really am,
and let the chips fall where they may.

And it would be perfectly okay for me to do that. None of that means I have to become a raging asshole. I could still be a warm and wonderful guy.

Just a more respectable one.

I think I could manage that.

(Dearest Felicity, I am going to be talking, in part, about your wonderful cat Nero’s untimely death in this blog entry. I will completely underdstand if you choose to skip this entry. I do not wish to make your grief any worse. It’s just that his passing has stirred up a lot of old memories and dormant emotions about the cats I was lucky enough to have in my own life and what it was like when they died, and I need to write about them in order to work through them.)

My dear friend Felicity suffered a loss in the family recently. Her cat Nero, only seven years old, died after a long and painful illness. For a while, vetrinary medicine kept him going, but by the end he was in severe pain and had to be put to sleep.

She is grieving terribly for her lost feline friend. It is bad enough that we outlive our pets many times over. But to have one die so young after watching him waste away in pain is just too cruel, especially when no certain cause is found for the illness.

It is cruel, it is unfair, it is senseless, and it is horrifying in its arbitrary and random brutality.

I have been where she is far too many times. I grew up in a house full of cats, all with their own wonderful personalities, and all very much loved. I might not have had a lot of friends growing up, but I had cats, and there was many a day when I watched television accompanies by three or four of the locals, whom I would pet and fuss over and play with during the commercials. Often one (or more!) Of them would be curled up on my lap, purring away as I stroked it, the two of us the very picture of cozy contentment.

There were so many over the years. There was Minou, and her daughter Duchess. Then Blosssom adopted us by having a litter of kittens on our back porch in the dead of winter. She begat (becat?) Ace (named by my sister after Ace Frehley of KISS), Noodle, and Billy. Ace later begat Trigger, Headline (for her black and white fur), and Coug, named after the mascot for Cougar brand shoes.

I am sure I must be missing a few, but that is most of them.

That is nine cats, all coexisting in a three bedroom home along with two adults and four kids. I was delighted, of course, being a cat loving kid.

But looking back on it, it does all seem a tad whacky.

I like to tell people I grew up in a cat house.

Nine cats, of course, means nine deaths. We were quite lucky that, despite them all being indoor/outdoor cats, most of them lived to the ripe old age of twelve, and some even more than that.

But their deaths still hurt, and I still miss them all, as well as the other critters I have known as an adult. I regret that my instinct to reassure my parents that I was OK made me just nod and say “Okay!” When my mother would tell me a cat was gone. It must have seemed to her like I didn’t even care.

I did care, I cared a lot in fact. But I did not know how to grieve back then, let alone express negative emotions. So all my suffering was silent, internal, and inconclusive.

I treasure all the memories I have of all those wonderful little souls. To mean, animals are people, it is as simple as that. Sure, they are not as smart as me and you, but neither are children. And that is how I see pets : eternal children, and us their lucky, lucky parents and caretakers.

So when I say that Felicity suffered a death in the family recently, I mean exactly that. I am not being facetious, sarcastic, or glib. Pets are members of the family, full stop. They are fuzzy little people to me.

I have gone many years now with no animals in my life, and I really miss them. If I ever start making a living as a writer, I plan to get my own apartment in a pet friendly building, and two cats.

Pets give us so much in the time they are with us. They give us love, companionship, affection, entertainment, and even a little bit of chaos to keep our lives from being too routine and predictable.

And they ask for so little in return. Just food, shelter…and love.

Rest in peace, dear Nero. At least you are beyond all suffering now.

Been dodging a big dose of sadness for a few days now, and sooner or later, it is going to get me.

Not sure where it is coming from, but as I have not had any life trauma, bad news, or underprocessed food lately, I am just going to assume that it is part of the long digestive process of recovery. I have reached a point in the process where it is necessary to process some sadness on a conscious level, so I am stuck with it.

So some quiet moment soon, I will consciously let go of all resistance and try to just let this shit happen. Resisting it is still my default position. I automatically shove it back into the outer darkness when it dares to set one toe into that terawatt spotlight of my conscious mind. It’s instinctive.

But not good, not int he long run. We might have to suppress our emotions at particular moments because there are things we just plain have to do on any given day, but you can’t afford to let that kind of thing build up or before you know it, you’re like a hoarder buried beneath your hoard of emotions.

But you are not your hoard. That’s the vital distinction all hoarders of all sorts need to make. You could lose it all and be just fine. Better, even, because losing all that garbage has freed you to truly be you, the you that you were before the hoard, the you that you still are, under all the junk.

The secret is to learn to let go. Like Zen mastery, it is a most difficult simplicity. When you learn it, it can be as simple as releasing a balloon and watching it float away, over the horizon, never to be seen again.

That’s the difference between expression and repression. Expressed emotions go away. Repressed emotions stay.

Another thing contributing to my sadness apart from emotional processing is that pent-up, crazed, caged tiger feeling has been creeping up on me. I have been trying to deal with it, but it builds nevertheless.

And it’s begun to have physical symptoms, like joint pain, muscle twitches, and headaches. Isn’t it cruel how the symptoms of stress can be so… stressful?

I think the problem is that I am reaching the manic-ish part of my cycle, the opposite end from the one where I sleep all the time and have weird, intense dreams. My body needs exercise in order to excise these demons, and yet it is still very hard to convince myself to exercise of my own volition.

The anti-action bias is strong in this one. I associate stasis with safety. When I am still of body, my emotions settle and become quiescent and easy to ignore. I can sit there with my tablet playing video games and live in a world almost entirely of the mind, everything else shut out Not one little bit of myself experiencing the real world in any meaningful sense. A sort of poison paradise, my own private dystopia.

It makes me sick and I hate it, but I hate it like a junkie hates junk, knowing that it has power over me, that it is my addiction, my god, my escape, and my doom.

I wish I could just crush this sell of mine, take a sledgehammer and smash it into dust, and hence destroy my lines of retreat and force myself to go forward.

But I am too scared. Getting out of my shell for a little while feels good, like taking your winter clothes off ont he first day of spring. You get to air yourself out and breathe free for a change. You stretch, look around, and enjoy the sunshine on your skin.

Holy Hannah And Barbera, this week feels like it just zoomed right by.

Seriously. It feels like I wrote the last Saturday entry yesterday. Maybe the3 day before, tops. This thing where subjective time speeds up as you get older is really the pits. No wonder old people want to slow everything down. I’m only forty, and already I feel like I am always running to catch a bus.

And I know it’s just a trick of memory and consciousness. As we get older, our consciousness of time just keeps on expanding, and so the number of “consciousness units” in a day gets smaller and smaller, especially as recorded in our memory.

These units are the lynchpin of how our minds measure time, and while that works well enough in the short term, it can’t handle our modern world of clocks, artificial lighting, and alarm clocks, and so subjective time and objective time become almost entirely disconnected.

That’s also why boredom makes time go slower, by the way. With so little stimulation, the mind has insufficient input to turn into consciousness unitd, and so it ends up creating them very, very slowly.

It is kind like your mind sets down one concousness of time marker per X amount of stimulation, and the number of markers in a given length of objective time equals our subjective sense of how fast time is going by.

Now enter aging into the equation. When you are young, the world is bright and fresh and new and very stimulating, but you lack the breadth of consciousness to make long consciousness units, so days seem to last forever.

As we get older, our mind expands and the consciousness units get bigger, and we end up feeling like everything goes by so quickly these days.

I am not quite sure that all hangs together, but you get the idea.

I just keep telling myself that no matter how it feels, the day still has

1440 minutes in it and they take just as long while they are happening as they did when I was a little boy.

I need that reassurance, because without it, this ride is just too damn scary.

I am typing this entry on my tablet via my fancy-schmancy Bluetooth keyboard tonight. Now that I am a little more used to it, I feel very writerly sitting here on my bed, glasses on, studiously typing away. Perhaps in the future, this is what our standard view of The Writer Hard At Work will look like. Not the quill pen, the typewriter, or even the word prcocessor any more.

Remember when a word processor was a standalone unit the size of a small TV? I really wanted on of those, back in the day.

Heck, I still kind of want one, even though I have far more logical and pragmatic ways of accomplishing the exact same goal.

Then again, part of me still wants a Speak n’ Spell. I guess some desires neer die, they just get sent to the back files.

Today has been normal for me, which means it has been about as productive as a bee hive with only one bee.

And it’s a drone.

I feel like I am building to something, though. The boredom and dissatisfaction with spending my days like I am waiting for a ride is building every day, andI am hoping that if I tender that tender little flame long enough, it will eventually get big enough to burn through the numbing,soothing cold of my anti-action bias.

And I am getting truly sick and tired of it. And that’s a good thing. It is the kind of unhappiness that brings change, and boy, do I need change.

Preferably a dump truck full of toonies large burlap sacks. Ha ha ha.

I was talking about change with my therapist yesterday, specifically the nesrly perfect folly of wanting the results of change without anything actually changngm because change is scary and hard.

If you are not happy with who you are and want to become a stronger, happier, healthier person, then logically speaking, you want to change who you are.

And yet so many people are miserable in their lives and hate themselves and wish everything was better, and yet violently and vehemently fight any kind of change in themselves or their lives.

They want things to be better without anything changing. In absurdium, one wonders if some of these people would turn down a lottery win if they just didn’t feel up to it that day and couldn’t handle the stress and the hassle of it.

I can say this because I wasted decades of my life as one of those people. Sure, I wanted change in an abstract sense, but the reality of it scared the hell out of it, and I not only refused to do anything to initiate it, I ran away frm it when it happened.

No more. I now accept (some days more than others) that what I want is chan within myself, and that means leaving the crappy but familiar behind and reaching for the superior but unfamiliar and holding it tight until it becomes a part of you, and thus replaces dead tissue with healthy, living flesh and blood.

For the first time in my life, I accept the necessity of transformation. It is only by transformation that we can evolve, and it is only via evolution that we can transcend what we once were and become a better version of ourselves.

Some problems are too big for incremental bug patches to solve.

You need to create a whole new version of yourself. You keep all the features that work, but redesign everything else based on what you know now.

That is the transformation I desire. The transformation I will. The transformation I open myself to.

Because you know what?

I deserve better than this.

There is a better me inside me just waiting to be born.

I think it’s high time we induced labour.

Hello, faithful readers. Today has been a fairly good day, and I wanna tell you about it.

To start with, today was a therapy day. I had a good session. I am growing a little uncomfortable with my therapist’s tendency to tell me about his own life. He doesn’t take a lot of my time to do it, but I still feel things might be getting a little too familiar.

It’s hard for me to say that, because I am by nature a friendly fellow, and I am never keen to set up boundaries between people if it can be helped.

But this one, I should probably set.

Anyhow, other than that, it was a good session. I told him about the emotional crisis I went through Tuesday night. I didn’t mention it in my blog at the time, but Tuesday night was really rough for me. A lot of emotional stuff that had been building for a long time finally came to the boil, and I felt absolutely miserable until I managed to use blogging as a way to express the turbulent and painful emotions roiling inside me./

And all without actually talking about the crisis. Weird. I guess I just really needed to act. Feelings of pointlessness and stupidity and futility were building and my background anxiety levels were burying the needle. Only a matter of time before that pot boiled over and I had to actually, you know, feel things.

Makes me glad that sometimes, suppression fails. Better to have it fail than to have all those emotions turn inward and rip me apart inside.

It’s like how some computer connector cables are signed to come apart (and be easily put back together) if they get tugged on too hard. Better to have to click the thing back together than to have the cable break, or worse, have it damage the jack(s) it’s in.

Everyone needs a safe failure mode. Don’t you think?

So anyhoo, I am glad I had that crisis Tuesday night. I need to have more of those. Or rather, I need to have small ones all the time instead of things having to build up to a crisis point and then kerblooey.

I feel way better now than I did before the crisis. I feel calmer and lighter and like there is a lot more room inside my head with all those emotions gone.

As usual, the blowout doesn’t solve the underlying problem. That’s what therapy is for. A blowout just clears the deck for the time being, it doesn’t keep the same thing from happening again.

So I want to take this whole thing further and used this respite to dig deeper and try to find some of the deep damage that causes all this trouble, and push on it to release the toxins and its pain.

Only then can I heal.

So after said session, we went to Money Mart, and I bought a $45 money order (for $51). The chick ahead of me in line was super torqued about some charge she was getting for cashing her check. Apparently there was a $20 fee that she did not understand or accept, and she was getting pretty worked up at the lady behind the counter over it, and radiating angry vibes like crazy.

The phrase “That’s YOUR karma” was used, which is West Coast for “Fuck you, you evil piece of shit”. As if this charge was the lady behind the counter’s fault! She just does what the computer tells her. She clicks a few clicks and it prints out the charges and she charges them. She can’t decide to skip one. If she did, she would have to either replace the money with her own cash or risk losing her job when she came up short.

And I am pretty sure that a place like Money Mart, where the employees handle tens of thousands of dollars in cash every single day, would be pretty damned strict about that kind of thing.

So yeah, not happy about ending up absorbing that tense and negative crap. If I am around it, I absorb it, I don’t have a choice in that. You begin to see why I am so damned sensitive.

But it’s all good, because I got my money order, stuck it in an envelope with the stub of the invoice, and stuck it in a mailbox.

In other words, I finally sent in my fee for my bus pass, and should be getting my pass in the mail in about a month. The wait will suck, but at least I have started the timer, so to speak.

So that feels good. The whole business with trying to find the Internet pay option and being frustrated at every turn and then thinking I could pay at Money Mart (nope!) took a toll on me in terms of frustration and disappointment, and a previous, weaker version of me would have just lost track of the invoice and given up on the whole thing forever, or at least until next year.

After all, I have done that with so many other things when they got too complicated or stressful for me to deal with. But that didn’t happen this time.

Instead, I worked through all those negative emotions and, in essence, got over it. Tuesday’s crisis probably helped. I gathered the stuff together, made a plan, and executed it, despite what I had been through.

And I am quite proud of myself for that. I got it done. I will get the bus pass. It is really happening.

Maybe there is hope for me yet.

I’m not as broken as I used to be.

My therapist is nudging me towards lowering my Paxil dose from 25 mg to 20 mg. I am open to the idea but I don’t feel quite ready yet. Close, but not yet.

I feel like I am still dealing with the effects of lowering it from 30 mg to 25. In the long run, I am far better off feeling my emotions, no matter how negative, rather than keep them asleep with Paxil.

But in the short term…. well, you have to survive today to get to tomorrow, right?