Wow, that makes this shit sound important.

Just got back from therapy and shopping (but not shopping therapy). Good gravy was the local PriceSmart packed. And it’s been like that since Xmas. I think it has become the common hub for all the apartment blocks going up around here (like the one I am sitting in right now) and that’s straining it to its limits.

And mine. My anxiety was peaking into the red zone due to the population pressure. I am not eager to return. It’s the closest one to us, and it’s more or less on the way back from therapy, but oy. I can’t hack that kind of crowding. That’s why I had to stop going to furry meetups. They got too crowded and my anxiety buried the needle and I ended up spending all my time squished into a corner of the balcony where I knew there could only ever been a person on one side of me.

And even then, I would get super anxious when there was more then a couple other people on the balcony. God, mental illness sucks. Part of me was having a great time, and really enjoying the success of this thing I put together (namely the local furry community). But my craziness had the upper hand.

In therapy today, I told my therapist about how it seemed like there was this vast lake of anxiety within me lurking just below the surface of my emotions, and no matter how calm I think I feel, it can come bubbling up to the surface at any moment.

It’s that anxiety that drives my self-destructive need to escape all the time. It’s what powers this freak-out panic reaction to even the smallest of things. It’s like this vast reservoir of carbonated liquid at high pressure, and the only way to keep it from releasing all the anxiety gas dissolved in it is to stay very, very still.

And that’s no way to lead your life.

So the problem becomes, basically, how do I drain the lake? How do I get rid of the fucking bubbles? How do I get rid of this massive static charge of anxiety so I can lead something like a normal life.

Well, as normal a life as a weirdo like me can ever have. Maybe a better term would be a “happy, healthy life”. The kind of life I want to live. Whole, sane, strong, happy, secure, filled with warmth and joy and humanity.

Another thing we talked about in therapy is my using my deep well of untapped rage to power my recovery. Being a liberal intellectual type, my therapist could not quite stand to ever wholeheartedly endorse anger. Anger is scary and unpleasant and makes people do bad things! It’s the opposite of the happy fluffy sunshine flavoured world a lot of liberals try to live in.

I wonder if that’s why they come across as so shrill? They often are very, very, angry about things that they really should be angry about, but they can’t quite express it as rage, only outrage, and that’s not the same thing.

What liberals, and me personally, need is the punk rock primal id anarchist impulse to scream “FUCK YOU!” and throw a metaphorical brick. The evilcrazystupid conservatives have no problem with that, but liberals shrink from it.

Outrage leads to complaining. Rage leads to action.

Anyhow, back to me. I see this reservoir of deep, deep rage from all the pain and injustice I have suffered to be like the emergency power supply of the spaceship of my mind. It’s not something to run on forever, but it will provide vitally needed energy to the ship’s engines so I can power out of the dark nebula of my depression and reach the open space of mental health and contact with the Federation.

I may have mixed up my metaphor in there somewhere. Man, I sling those around a lot.

When I need energy and motivation, I can just remember how fucking angry I am at how life has treated me, and scream “KILL THE MACHINE” as I throw myself into battle with the vigor and abandon of an aged Klingon who has decided that today truly is a good day to die.

In a way, what I need to tap into is that primal “NO” that makes the Terrible Twos so terrible. That deep, irrational, non negotiable defiance in protection of self is a key part of people’s psychological defenses, and I feel like I lost mine somewhere, back when my parents were teaching me to be “reasonable”.

Well sometimes you have to stand up for yourself, and your Self, regardless of whether it’s reasonable, logical, sensible, defensible, polite, correct, or even moral, because it’s your own psychological health on the line, and nobody else’s.

Suddenly I understand seemingly completely irrational, angry people who make a huge fuss over something that is not even a big deal. They are, on some level, defending themselves from a threat to their ego.

That doesn’t make them any less of a douchebag. But it does explain it better.

So somewhere between “angry douchebag mad at the world” and “depressed loner who hates himself” lies the way out for me. I’m not entirely averse to producing some extremely angry art. After all, it was punk and metal (and therapy) that got me through high school. I could make some super angry shit.

I just have to get to the point where I truly feel the rage enough to speak up for myself. Not against the world, but against the forces of evil within me who have kept me locked inside a cage in my own mind for decades now.

I mean, the world hasn’t exactly been wonderful for me either, but first things first.

Well I have rambled on for long enough. Time to go eat some lunch then snooze for a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s the amount of idea I have of what I want to write in this thing tonight. I actually have negative idea of what to write. As in, if you allowed a normal idea for a blog entry to collide with the amount of idea I have right now, they would both be annihilated in an explosion of thought.

Not a lot on my mind today. I continue to find ways to struggle against my afternoon ennui. Today’s solution was to do my baking at 5 pm instead of 11. That gave me something to look forward to all afternoon.

And that kept things going, more or less. I felt the edges of the pit of depression I tend to fall into every afternoon, but I managed to keep out of it this time.

Although part of me still wants to just lay down and cry. And later on, I probably will.

Crying is amazingly important. And yet we men are raised to see it as a weakness, or at least, a crisis. Like, if we are crying, it must mean something is terribly wrong, like you just lost all feeling in the left side of your body or see blood in your vomit. And this simple bit of machismo is astonishingly crippling because crying is actually a vitally important part of how humans cope with their emotions.

And just like having a runny nose, nobody actually wants to do it, but it serves an important function and things would be a hell of a lot worse if your nose didn’t run.

You’d drown in snot! Trust me, as someone with chronic sinus issues, it’s possible.

And the thing is, men don’t even feel safe crying when they are all alone. A typical man raised in my culture could be ten miles out in the woods in the dead of winter, with no human around for miles around, and still be unable to just break down and cry because of that Inner Male inside of all of us that is just waiting for a “sign of weakness” to pounce and grind out face into the dirt. “Oh, look, the little baby is CRYING!” he sneers.

And while being an openly gay man gives me an out for some of the more homophobic stuff (because I am not worried that someone will think I am gay, like a lot of straight dudes), that’s only part of the whole male paranoia deal.

It’s like we are constantly fighting an inner dominance battle against an invisible opponent. Who is that opponent? Who knows? Maybe it’s a specific person from their past, like a bully, or a parent. Or maybe it’s more like an abstract concept, like “society” or “the universe” or “life”.

But one thing’s for sure : you can never let your guard down for even a moment, because that is when he/they/it will GET you.

And it’s this kind of thing that drives a lot of male insanity. A lot of really aggressive men are responding to a deep and terrible feeling of vulnerability and insecurity that drives them to constantly prove they are the alpha male and that makes them feel being feared is the one way to be safe.

Where women have the Beauty Myth, men have Performance Anxiety. Women think men have it easy because they just have to show up clean and dressed whereas woman have to go through the whole bizarre female grooming marathon.

What women don’t get is that sure, he just has to show up… in an expensive enough car, with enough money to buy her gifts and take her out to fancy restaurants and above all signal that he is an alpha male who can treat her like a queen.

Oh, and he has to have a cool, alpha job, and an apartment that meets the woman’s high status standards, and so that cool job had better pay a lot of money, and oh, lest we forget, while woman with respond with righteous ire if you dare to suggest they conform to any prescribed gender role, the man has to be upright and manly and strong or he’s branded a “wimp” or “loser”.

Now I am not saying these perceptions are actually accurate. They are only as accurate as women feeling like they are fat and ugly and nobody will ever love them because they don’t look like supermodels.

Men have their own gender hell, is what I am saying, and it is just as destructive and unrealistic and corrosive as the one woman live in. It’s different, but it’s just as bad.

There’s been a meme going around about this MIT professor who left a long, heartfelt, anguished comment on some message board on what it is like to be an omega male nerd and why that might make some people like him hate feminism.

It’s not really feminism they hate. It’s women. Feminism merely makes for a good scapegoat, a way to hate women in a way that is cloaked in the far more acceptable form of objecting to an ideology, or a movement.

They hate women in the exact same way that some women hate men, and for a lot of the same reasons. They view the opposite gender as something they can’t help but want but can never had because they are somehow not good enough, as society judges it, and never will be. And this causes incalculable pain to people of both genders.

Because of this, there will always be extremely bitter people of both genders who lash out at their hated opposite via whatever means they have at their disposal. In this day and age, they can do it with the most hurtful words they can think of on all the various fora of the Internet.

Both side have valid points, but then ruin those points by using them as a cudgel to beat on each other.

The only way out is to just plain stop making blanket statements about any group.

That’s part of what humanism is all about. We are people, not labels.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.