Bigger on the inside

Therapy day, angst, blah.

I have been thinking about inner growth lately. I long for it. I am so very tired of being small and puny on the inside. I want to be big and strong and filled with vitality.

And I am growing up inside, albeit not as fast as my impatient soul would like. My therapist and I talked about how I am going to have to parent myself in order to grow, and give myself the involved and caring childhood I never had.

Part of me, a very primitive and childlike part, resists that idea purely out of spite. It thinks I am owed one childhood from somebody and if I finish raising myself, someone, my parents I guess, “got away with it”.

This is not exactly healthy thinking, and holding on to that attitude is a major growth blocker. So often it is this kind of think which gets in the way of healing. Unfinished arguments left hanging in the air for decades, even after one half of them is long dead and gone. I never thought of myself as that kind of person, but then again, who am I to blow against the wind?

Part of my recovery is the slow dissolution of any illusions I might have had of sainthood. I have had a pretense of being above petty human emotion for a long time, but I don’t believe in pretending not to be human (irony!) and so that bullshit has got to go. I am giving up being apart from humanity, inasmuch as that is possible at this stage in the game, and that means I can’t pretend to be above it all any more.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not abandoning my high ideals. I am just admitting to myself that there is a lot of other, less pleasant stuff in there too, and I am going to have to deal with it.

The path to spiritual perfect has always led right through the gutters and sewers of the soul. You do not become clean by merely pretending that you are. You have to get rid of all the ugly shit inside you first.

Yes, I am talking about taking a great big spiritual crap.

I’ve felt angry lately. Nothing in particular bothering me, just that part of the emotional digestion cycle I guess. Enough unexpressed anger and irritation built up in my system to boil up to the surface and be way, way too easy to access for comfort. I really feel like being snappish and snarky with people. I’m like a dog looking for someone to bite.

Clearly, the pro-social and responsible thing to do is to either stifle that shit (probably unhealthy in the long run) or find an appropriate target for it and express it in a constructive way.

To which a voice inside me says “Laaaaaaaame.” I will call this voice my inner teenager. As you all know, I didn’t really have an adolescence in anything but the strictly physical, biological sense. Lately though, I have been dreaming up what my teen years should have been like. Me all snarky with a huge ego and copping a major attitude. Sure, I would have been an asshole, but everyone is an asshole when they are a teenager, at least a little.

Trouble is, you can only get away with acting like a teenager when you are still a teenager. You have the solid support of your parents under you so you can experiment with attitude and such and see what fits you and what gets the results you want. People expect teenagers to be irritating and cut them some slack.

If I acted like that now, I would rapidly find myself friendless and alone, and I am too old to pretend that I don’t need anybody and I can do just fine on my own. I have been on my own before and it damn near destroyed my mind. I suppose if I had done it as a teen, I might have gotten some “bad boy” attention from the ladies (tough luck for them, I’m for the boys) and I guess I would have more or less gotten away with it with no friends to lose.

But now, it would just be sad.

Still, there is definitely a side of me that just wants to tell the whole world to go fuck itself. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck everyone we know, fuck everyone we don’t know. Fuck the world.

Where does this come from? I think I just want to evict all the voices in my head. All the complications, considerations, worries, empathic dangers, and all the other noise blogging up my precious intellectual staging grounds. I am sick and tired of it being so loud in here, and I just want to push it all away so I can find some peace and quiet for once.

Obviously, that is way more about my own fucked up issues than it is about what the things I would be pushing away are actually doing. Nobody besides me knows, or even could know, about all the complicated stuff always whizzing about this skull of mine, so it makes no sense to try to hold the world accountable for not being able to read my mind.

I do wonder about other people sometimes, though. Clearly, there are a lot of people in the world who act on and/or express all or most of their emotions immediately. There is no buffer zone where they decide what to do. They just go with whatever their dominant emotion is at any moment.

And that seems like a terrible way to live to me. Rational choice is kind of important in life. I can’t imagine living life with the brakes off like that.

But sometimes I wonder if, despite how it seems to me, those people are actually happier overall because they express everything in realtime and are able to live in the moment instead of getting twisted around by overintellectualizing repressed emotions and withdrawing from the moment into intellectualism.

Who knows. Perhaps past a certain point of intelligence, you no longer have a choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Inside the warzone

Today was kind of fucked up.

Interior drama occurred today. That’s the drama that happens entirely inside my haunted head. It seems absurd that this is even still possible, but ghosts don’t die all at once.

They fade away.

In this case, I was thinking of asking Joe if he could drop me off at 7-11 on the way to work. That whole running start thing. No big deal, right? Wrong.

I got caught up in this struggle between doing it and not doing it. So many emotional factors ended up jumping into the fight that it was like a war on ten fronts in this skull of mine. My desire to get out of the house more and be more adventurous got ambushed by my remaining depressive insistence that motion is danger and stillness is safety (what I have called the anti-action bias before) and I (the real I, the thing that is me) got caught in the crossfire.

So I went back and forth and back and forth over and over again on whether to do it or not, all the while keenly aware of what a ridiculously tiny thing it was that was the subject of this titanic struggle. And that, of course, just made it worse. I totally get now why people with OCD say that knowing that their compulsions are irrational and pointless does not help at all, it only makes it worse.

After all, compulsions stem from an off-balance need to self-soothe with ritual or habit, and the worse you feel about what you are doing, the more you will need to self-soothe. The same thing happens with addictions, which, if you think about it, are just compulsions backed by a chemical imbalance we call “withdrawal”.

But anyhow, back to my day. Damn it’s easy for me to wander off into intellectualism.

I ended up not going. Of course, I feel sort of bad about that, like I had a chance to be cool and blew it. Make my life better, expand my comfort zone, all that jazz.

But then another voice pops up in my head saying that putting that much pressure on myself to do things like that is not the way to do it and is really a recipe for failure because the pressure just makes me flee. So if it is going to be a big huge pressure thing, I am better off backing off until I can deal with things in a more rational, positive manner.

But that still feels like I am fleeing when I should be staying in the game and staring the fear down. No matter how you slice it, the depression gets what it wants. Me not going anywhere, spending the afternoon burning brain cells on video games and online chat instead of doing anything productive.

On the other hand, I am saving all my money for Vcon, and the only thing really at stake was whether I would have Diet Coke to drink with my midnight snack tonight. So it honestly would not have been worth my time to go and I just would have ended up spending money I should not.

Oh, but I have done the math in my head and I have plenty of dough. The con will involve five or so meals…. that’s a hundred bucks. Registration will be something like 60 or 70 bucks. That leaves 30 or 40 bucks for the unexpected or the too good to miss, and I will still have like $180 left for the final two weeks of the month.

Plus I will be getting a GST cheque some time in early October. So I should be just fine either way.

And so forth and so on, for at least an hour and a half this afternoon. A monumental struggle of legendary scope, and all over the three or four bucks a 2L of Diet Coke would have cost me.

Oh well. It’s all over now and behind me. It’s tough seeing yourself go crazy like that, but that problem shrinks on a daily basis and soon enough will shrink out of sight.

Speaking of shrinks, I will finally be going back to therapy tomorrow. It has been three weeks since my last appointment (, Father) and I could really use a chat with him. There’s only so much I can do on my own.

Tomorrow is, of course, also the last day before the Vcon Experience begins. Before a convention, I always get the same sort of rush of feelings I get before I go on stage to perform. There’s excitement, fear, anticipation, a sense of wonder, a little reluctance, and an emotion I can only describe as THIS IS IT.

It’s quite the cocktail. Usually, it’s an emotion I can only handle in small doses. So I tend to only really think about what is coming for brief moments now and then.

That works to keep me from being completely overwhelmed, but it does make it difficult to truly plan ahead. I am sure it’s the main reason why I always end up leaving things behind that I totally need but just could not think of before I was at the convention. That kind of emotional overload reaction makes it hard to think clearly about a subject.

Oh well. No matter what, I will attend the convention, have a good time, feel a little sad when it ends, and move on.

Because Joe and Julian are volunteering at the con, we will be getting there earlier than usual. That is fine with me. I might still be a little sleepy around the edges, but at least I will miss fewer potential panels of interest.

And if I am just too pooped to cope, I can always take a nap in our hotel room.

And no huge pressure to go to every potentially cool panel or I am a terrible person for wasting an opportunity. Sure, I want to get in as much Vcon as I can. But letting that crazy pressure enter the occasional will only lead to further incidents like today’s inner drama, only more so.

And that, I do not need.

I will talk to all you nice people against tomorrow.