I have a shadow within me, and it’s as evil as it is dark.

Most of my life, I have ignored it and kept it deeply suppressed. Every time it emerged from the background noise of my cacophonous mind, it frightened me with its menace and malice and willingness to hurt others for its own amusement. So I shoved it back down all the harder, and went on thinking about how nice a person I was.

But lately, as part of my recovery process, this shadow has emerged from suppression and I find myself wrangling with it and feeling its presence a lot more. Not all the things that recovery un-suppresses result in life giving catharsis.

Some set up shop and stay.

And of course, part of me automatically wants to treat this shadow of mine as alien. That’s not me… that’s something else. I am a sweet, nice, compassionate, and empathetic person. I might have a lot of problems, but morally I am flawless. Any evil, therefore, must not be a part of me. It must be Something Else.

That, of course, is total bullshit. Everything within you is a part of you. Trying to label parts of your own mind as “not you” is not only false but dangerous to one’s sanity. It is literally impossible for there to be anything in your mind which is not a part of you, both physically and mentally. Such artificial divisions can only harm.

So my shadow is a part of me just like my compassion, my wit, and my love of cucumber.

What is it made of? Well, certainly rage is a major component. I have suppressed a very large amount of anger in my life. And when I say suppressed, I do not mean that I bit my tongue when I wanted to say something angry, or took a walk around the block to get my temper back under control.

No, I suppressed my anger so deep that I don’t even feel it. When bad things happened to me, I did not get angry, I just got sadder. The anger component was pushed so deeply into my subconscious that I wasn’t even aware that it was there.

But it was there alright. Suppressed rage is one of the most dangerous forces in the human mind, and as mine accumulated, it formed into the part of me I now call my shadow.

And that shadow wants to be fed. It wants me to express that rage through violent action. In my case, that would most likely be verbal. I could do a lot of damage with words. Words are my bitches.

That’s the problem with suppressing emotion. The longer you do it, the stronger the resulting beast gets, and in my current mental state, I am dealing with a heavily suppressed id that is stoked that it is finally getting attention, and wants to hurt and take and revel in its own power.

The other component to my shadow is, I think, a deep feeling of powerlessness. I have been a very passive person for all my life. someone who did not go out and explore and conquer the world of his own volition. Instead, I retreated into a world of video games, books, and eventually, the Internet, where I could stay in my room, safe from the big loud scary world out there.

That meant that I had a very weak will. The idea of wanting something, acting to get it, and then having it was largely absent from my life. I told myself that this was because of lack of money, and for the most part, that is true.

But it also came from a deep and terrible cowardice that kept me agoraphobic and homebound and unable to take part in any of the perfectly free activities, like going to a park or the beach, that were available to me. I was so crushingly afraid of the outside world that having to go anywhere filled me with panic.

And the thing is, that does keep a lot of bad things from happening to you. But the cost is way too high. Good things can’t happen to you either, and mere safety has never been enough for the human soul. It wants pleasure, it wants fun, and when it doesn’t get them, it starves.

So my shadow is made of impotent, suppressed rage, and it is closer to the surface than it has ever been, and I honestly don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want to be evil, I don’t want to hurt anyone. But the process of recovery demands that these long suppressed emotions find a voice and a way to express themselves in the world, and I do not know how to let that happen in a way that is not destructive.

Writing this blog entry is a start. Writing this had let out some of the pressure. It will be a little easier to be me for the next little while. But it’s hardly a permanent solution. I will have to find some way to let out all this rage.

I suppose I could write really violent and brutal horror stories. That’s one way to exorcise my own personal ghosts. Trap them on the page, knowing they will be released upon reading. It’s a form of violence against others, but one in which the people receiving the violence are doing so willingly, more or less.

Fair warning, gentle readers : if I pursue that form of release, you will be the immediate recipients, and you might be shocked at the sheer malice that comes crawling to the surface when I open up my barn door for a change.

I really wish I could somehow get to the post catharsis peace and happiness without having to do the actual catharsis. This is by far the hardest thing in my recovery for me to deal with. I can deal with sadness, trauma, neglect, abuse, or anything else that comes up. But this shadow of mine fills me with despair. How can I deal with it without becoming a monster?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Time to talk about sleep again.

Something like three weeks ago, I did the pill refill thing with my therapist. This time, we added a drug called trazadone to help me sleep. Quetiapine had not been doing the trick for me lately so I thought I would call in extra help, as it were.

Quetiapine has never had a really strong effect on me anyhow, except for when I was first taking it. Most of the time I have been taking it, it has been only the gentlest of nudges towards sleep. An elusive and evanescent state which, if I catch it when it happens, smooths my ride into slumber and helps me get all my busy, active thoughts to go the heck to bed already and let me sleep in peace.

But that’s only if I am lucky. My busy, active thoughts can shrug off the effects of Big Q quite easily, and so I have to be aware enough to get them pretty quited down before the drug kicks in and be in just the right frame of mind for it when it does.

And frankly, that is a tricky thing to me. The whole reason I need help getting to sleep is that I have this hyperactive mind that constantly has a hundred things on the go and that makes for a very loud and volatile mind space. While I am awake, this is not that much of a problem. I mean, it probably is a huge part of why I have trouble dealing with reality (I am too busy dealing with my inner unruly mob) but it only becomes a big problem when I am trying to get to sleep.

Then, it becomes like a parent trying to get their kids to calm down and go to bed. And I have so many goddamned kids. I’m like the little old lady who lived in a shoe over here. I spend all day seeking mental stimulation, and when it comes time to sleep, my mind is so stimulated in the opposite direction as sleep that it’s no wonder I have trouble getting to sleep.

It would be different if I could mentally exhaust myself. If I had a more normal, healthy mental setup, I would be able to stimulate myself until I was totally mentally worn out and then sleep would come naturally.

But that doesn’t work for me, at least, not consciously. I can stimulate myself all day and still have lots of mental energy left . It’s the one area of my mind in which stimulation leads to more energy and not less.

Part of that is that it is hard to find something that absorbs even a majority of my mental energy. Sure, video games are fun and absorbing, and chatting online is stimulating and sort of social, but it is a rare time indeed when those keep even a majority of my mental energies.

It’s just like during my school years, when I would look like I wasn’t paying attention to the teacher at all, but really I was hearing and absorbing it all, it just didn’t take up a lot of my mental energy, so I was also daydreaming.

(I’m not proud of that, by the way. How frigging rude of me. Would it have killed me to pretend to be paying attention? But when you are a kid, you don’t think of teachers as people. )

If I could find activities that truly absorbed all my mental energy the same way college exams used to, then I could probably exhaust myself. I suppose the closest thing I have come to there is writing a book. That usually soaks up most of my mental energy, to the point where I can’t even have music on because it takes away too much of my mental energy.

So maybe I should just write books all day. I don’t know.

Anyhow, back to trazadone. The idea was that I would not take the trazadone unless I felt like big Q wasn’t cutting it any more, and that didn’t happen until Thursday night.

I just could not get to sleep. I felt like my mind was frozen. I have been in that state before. It is not unpleasant in and of itself. I’m alert, I’m sharp, I’m coherent. It would be a great state to be in when I had a lot to get done.

But I never have a lot to get done.

And of course, it’s a nightmare for trying to actually get to sleep. I try and try but my mind just will not relax. It’s like trying to stuff an inflated hot air balloon into a briefcase. It is just plain never going to happen.

So I took a trazadone. And it worked quite well. The ice keeping me awake melted and I slid soundly into sleep. Got up in time for therapy, felt fairly well rested. I did feel very slightly sedated. It was like a slight warm tingling.

Last night, same story. Big Q was not cutting it at all. So I took my trazadone. And it helped me get to sleep.

And kept me there all freaking day today.

At least, I think it was the trazadone. I have sleepy days with or without chemical assistance, so it might just be that. One incident is one datum, and one datum does not a trend make.

So I will take it again tonight to see what happens. If it consistently makes me sleep really heavily, I can live with that. Might even be healthier for it.

But if it gets too hard to shake off when I want to in the morning, I might have to rethink it. My therapist says it is okay to try just half a pill, and I might do that if things get too hard to deal with.

It really irritates me to not be able to be awake when I want to be awake.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.