In order words, save me from myself.

I’ve talked before about the steel machine of my mind. It’s very left-brain : it sorts, divides, analyzes, reduces, purifies… and eliminates. It is as cold and merciless as the guillotine’s blade, and while I have in some ways enjoyed that and the feeling of power and control (and hence, safety) it gives, it should come to nobody’s surprise that I am also its chief victim.

There’s a line from Silence of the Lambs where, after Lecter brutally and presumably quite accurately psychologically dissects Clarice, she turns to leave, and as she does, she says “Maybe you should turn that high-powered perception on yourself.”

Or something like that.

And presumably, Lecter doesn’t do that. He takes all that overactive superego, harnesses it to his considerable intellect and projects it outwards. He does that to such a psychotic extent that he, in a sense, fed it live victims. He turned people his overactive superego told him were unworthy and turned them into something it approved of, namely fine food.

All to keep his machine from turning on him. Total externalization.

I, of course, have the opposite problem. I absolutely refuse to ever take my crap out on anyone at all. That’s what my father did and that’s what I refuse to ever do. If my machine needs feeding (and out of control superegos are always hungry), it has only one source of food, and that’s me.

And, in a minor way, the bad guys in video games. I guess.

So I am my own torture victim, my own lab rat, my own punching bag. And I have never known anything else. There’s never been a time when, even unconsciously, I took it out on others.

For one thing, in order to take it out on others, you sort of need subordinates. I have always been the social omega. if I ever had people within my social circle over whom I was dominant, I sure as heck didn’t know it. I really don’t want to be above or below anybody. I want me to be me, and you to be you, and we’re both just cool like that.

And the thing is, once you deny yourself permission to take it out on others, there is no going back. You no longer have the excuse of ignorance, so you can’t just start taking it out on others without knowing what a shitty thing you are doing.

And yet, the machine feeds. It is always hungry because it can’t actually give the psyche what it needs, which is love, acceptance, inclusion, and so forth. All it can do is use intellectualization to distract and harsh analysis to destroy. The pain drives the id’s rage and the id uses the superego machine to express that rage, and there’s no way out so it all stays in.

That’s how love defeats evil, by the way. By giving it what it really wants and soothing the pain that is the cause of it all.

My therapist has suggested that there are healthy ways to release the anger. Beating up a pillow and so forth. And I suppose that would work for at least the physical tension aspect of it all.

But no amount of non-destructive rage externalization is going to make me feel the love, hope, safety, and acceptance that would make me whole once more.

It might, I suppose, help clear the way to feeling it, though. Like I have said before, maybe everything I have ever wanted is right there outside my wall, waiting for me to let it in.

Like this music video :

In it, Elvis Costello is in a photo booth talking about being lonely and looking it, too, while people are giving him love in the form of kisses throughout the whole thing. And at the end, he looks at the pictures, and they all show him alone.

There’s people who love and accept me in my life. I know there is. But depression makes it very hard to feel it. I have that big block of ice in my soul, keeping me numb.

And all the while, the machine feeds on my frozen flesh.

So maybe getting all that anger and other unprocessed emotion out of my system would open my up more to feeling the love that is already out there. I have friends. I have family.

Why can’t I just let them in?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But it fills me with a terrible fear, the kind that comes from too deep a level to require an imagined consequence. It’s the mortal dread that is bigger than your conscious mind can handle, fear on an identity level, as thought if the dread event occurs, it will simply destroy you, like a gnat in a supernova.

That is, of course, highly unlikely. But the fear of melting remains.

I’m sorry, but I just have to link this song again.

What I need, I guess, is my own personal flood, where spring finally comes to this wintry heart of mine and all that frozen emotion within me melts like wax and the tundra is flooded with all that I used to be.

And I will say goodbye to flesh and blood, metaphorically speaking, and maybe even give my island to survive. Clinging is a hard habit to break but it’s also not really getting me anywhere either.

And after my forty days and forty nights of drowning in a sea of my own tears, the waters will recede and I will be left with nothing but who I really am.

And from there, build a new life.

Sounds good, but I don’t know how to trigger it. Or I do know, and I am just too scared to admit it to myself.

Maybe all I really need to do is let the sun shine in.

It takes a while to get to the song, but it’s worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.