Gee, even typing that made me feel like I was tempting fate. What the fuck do I think will happen? I am too much the materialist (in the philosophical sense) to think the universe is just waiting for the cue to come beat me to death with an irony stick.

Anyhow, I feel like pushing the old ego forward today, so that is what I am going to do. I apologize in advance for the fact that some of this will be things I have said before and hence the thing comes off as a tad ritualistic and compulsive.

But I have many years of self-loathing to counteract, and it is going to take a lot more than one dose to do it.

It seems crazy now to think of how long I have hated myself when the evidence of the opposite was so apparent. (What a neat phrase. ) Lots of people like me, both in person and online. How does that jibe with self-loathing? Do I think all these people are stupid, or somehow defective?

I guess it’s another case of impostor syndrome. I felt I was fake, a fraud, like the people who liked me would reject me with a vengeance if they only knew the “real me”.

If they could see all the ugliness and filth inside me, if they could see what a horrible, useless, pathetic, low creature I was, they would push me out into the darkness out of sheer disgust.

But now I can see that they were seeing the real me. I am really like that, a sweet friendly understanding dude with a wicked wit and a brain the size of a planet. It was the dark and disgusting me that was the illusion. Others saw the good in me when I did not, and I am very grateful to them for that.

And I won’t lie. Self-esteem is still a struggle. That paragraph about how I used to see myself was very dangerous for me to write because I could feel all those old feelings of self-loathing rising up like a ghost inside me.

And the really awful part is that in a very sick way, those feelings tempt me. There is a satisfaction in self-loathing, a feeling of perverse protection, in just giving up on yourself completely and letting the dark tide win.

But I am on the right path now, and I will not step off again. I will push back against the darkness until I drive it out of my head entirely. I am in this to win it.

So maybe it is good to bring up those feelings every now and then. All the better to defeat them.

Now where was I? Oh right, what a great guy I am.

I know we’re not supposed to acknowledge how awesome we are. I know it is considered very arrogant and selfish to talk about how great you are. But I don’t care. I am increasingly convinced is that the only way to destroy a big depression, at least for me, is to have a big ego.

Like I have said before, there is no middle ground. You can’t change the balance of the scale by sitting in the middle. You need to add weight to the opposite side.

So, I am a pretty amazing dude. There is no reason why I should not go out into the world to seek my fortune. I have nothing to be ashamed of and I have a lot to offer in my correct milieu.

Granted, I am not much good at the practical side of things. But this modern world does not require that of everyone. You can be an entirely impractical person and still contribute invaluable things to society. I have a lot to offer the world as a writer and creative type. Works of the imagination are treasured in this modern life.

Compared to that potential, all the little things of life seem pretty unimportant. I could very well make a living via writing, and then I can hire people to take care of the other stuff.

So what if I’m a hothouse flower, ill suited for life in the real world? This world has no shortage of hothouses, if you know where to look and you keep an open mind.

I am blessed with many talents. I should be very grateful for that. Viewed as a whole, my talents provide a formidable toolkit to use against a cold and uncaring world. Intelligent and sensitive with a great depth of understand and crazy good verbal skills… sounds like a writer to me.

And I need to keep reminding myself that I excel at the other side of writing. I do fine on the first side of writing too, of course, the stuff about sentence structure and paragraphs and tight writing and all of that.

But my real genius is in the less tangible stuff, like imagination. Notice how often critics praise an author’s imagination (especially in sci fi and fantasy) and how rare it is that they praise the spelling.

Also, it is very important for me and for all struggling writers to remember that it is foolish to compare your writing to the writing in one’s favorite books, because the writing in the books has benefited (really? Only one T in that word? Looks wrong. ) from the hard work of a professional editor and a whole slew and a half of other people who work for the publisher.

So sure, your prose may not seem as polished and perfect as theirs, but that’s only because you are comparing your rough stones to their cut diamonds. If you had the same people working on your book, it would look just as good.

So cut yourself some slack. The important thing about a book is that it be enjoyable to read. What a publisher wants to see is writing with that spark of life in it, and that comes from creativity, not technique.

That doesn’t mean that you can forget all about the other stuff, it just means that it does not have to be as good as the books on your bookshelf before you dare send it anywhere.

No publisher expects to have perfect prose dropped in their lap. “Wow, this is perfect! Send it directly to the printers!”

They just want something they can work with.

I think that lowers the bar to achievable levels.

That’s it for today! Seeya tomorrow folks!

At first, recovery felt like investigation. Just a basic survey, gathering clues as to where I had buried my heart, picking up bits of broken warmth and shattered ego where I could. Nothing really penetrated. My heart was buried too deep for any sunlight to reach it. Buried down deep, where it is always cold.

Then, it felt like drilling. Excavation. I had a good idea where it was, but it was buried so deep that it took months and months of steady digging just to reach the chamber where it was held, and further months to carefully remove all the layers and layers of rough cut stone and pure smooth ice that swaddled it.

At that point, I was beginning to feel things. A vague sense of warmth, a delicate feeling of connection. It was not much, but it gave me a sense of direction, a target for my drill. It is how I found my heart in the first place.

But now, I am in the heart’s chamber and the casket is exposed. I stand on the brink of opening it up and letting my heart shine into the world for the first time in decades. It will shine a warm and dazzling glow, focused through the lens of a brilliant mind, and many will be warmed and comforted by its light.

However, first, I have to fight the demon who guards the casket, and that will not be easy. The demon has grown fat and strong by having things all its way for a very long time, and it knows that this is the final battle. This is the endgame. This is a life or death struggle, and it is not going to die without a fight.

But I have a secret. I have the key to its defeat, and I will thrust that key into the demon’s cold and spiteful heart.

You see, I know its name, and when you know a demon’s true name, it cannot resist you.

Its name is Nothing. It is the void wrapped in anger. It is the freezer that has kept my heart frozen all these years. It is the malevolent force behind my self-loathing and self-destruction. It is the demon that buries icy daggers in my flesh and denies me the integration I so desire.

And right now, I am wrestling with it. It is strong, but I am stronger. I am fully committed to this fight, and I cannot lose, because with every victory, the demon loses strength, and I gain it.

So it is just a matter of time. I will crack its armor, strip it bare, then plunge my dagger into its heart and it will die forever. It might be a very long fight, but I have nothing but time.

And I will never, ever give up. I can smell victory and that gives me the strength to drive ever onward toward it. My goal is in sight and no force in the universe can keep me from achieving it. My strength of will is my courage, and my long years of isolation are my engine. I will not be denied.

And when victory is won and the demon defeated, I will open the casket, take my wounded heart lovingly in my arms, stroke it soothingly and tell it everything will be okay. For my heart is a lost and lonely child that has been wandering in the dark and the cold for a very long time, always looking for the way home but never finding it.

And when it is calm, and warm, and safe again, I will gently slip it back into my chest, and I will be a real little boy for the first time in a very long time.

Damn, I get poetical sometimes. That is the skeleton of a pretty excellent story I just wrote. It would star a lonely robot who
has been looking for its heart, but cannot find it until he meets a man who can show him the way.

And then he has to go to the planet where it is, and search for where it is buried, and drill down to find it, and then do the whole demon fighting thing. It would be wearing its metaphors on its sleeve, granted, but perhaps it’s all the Once Upon A Time I have been watching lately, but I am perfectly fine with writing something that reads like a fairy tale.

Fairy tales have their power precisely because they are so very clear and obvious in their symbols and meanings. Their simplicity makes them accessible to everyone, even children, and like a lot of children’s stories, the fact that we absorb them when we are children ourselves makes them especially strong.

Childhood is, after all, magic. The world is magical to a child precisely because they understand so little of it, and one definition of magic is things that work and you don’t know why.

Hence Clarke’s Law about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. From the point of view of a human being of even just 150 years ago, our world is full of magic and wonder that they could not even begin to understand. They simply do not have the mental machinery to even understand the principles. We easily forget just how much you have to know to function in society because we all learn it as children, and it is so ubiquitous that it fades into the background.

But to a child, it is all magical. They can’t understand how any of it really works, and they definitely do not have the right spaces in their heads to develop a comprehensive world view, so to them, everything is magic and every adult is a wizard.

That is why fairy tales make so much sense to them. They offer a version of the world they can understand, with rules that make sense to them. No wonder so many people grow up wanting to live there.

Me, I wanted to move to Narnia.

That’s all for today, folks. See you tomorrow!