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!