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.