Last night, I suffered a terrible emotion blow, and while I talked it out with my therapist (if you are going to get a terrible shock, might as well be ten hours before therapy), I want to record it here too because it hurt like hell and sent me reeling for a time and that is the sort of thing that one should record in one’s diary.

Which is what this is… more or less.

Now, don’t worry, nobody died or got cancer or said something really hurtful and mean to me. It’s more personal than that.

See, at something like 2:30 last night, I was on my way to bed, chatting with Joe and Julian as I went, and just by sheer coincidence, my declamatory wanderings led me to our bulletin board.

What a great time to check on what is next on my calendar, that very important appointment with the gastroenterologist to see about the largish holes in my abdominal wall that seem like they are kind of a big deal.

This is an appointment that was made last October for an appointment in March. I have been waiting a long time for someone to take this whole “holes in your gut” thing seriously. It seemed sort of urgent to me when my GP told me about it, but apparently the medical establishment doesn’t think so.

And the thing is, I was sure that appointment was for the 22nd of this month. That’s even the date I entered into the “reminder” program on my tablet that I downloaded specifically to make sure I did not flake out on the appointment.

But it wasn’t the 22nd. It was the 12th. As in yesterday. As in I FUCKING MISSED IT.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook already know the story. This was such an enormous smackdown from the post-VancouFur high that I had been enjoying all week, and so unexpected and at a time when I am at my most psychologically vulnerable (when I am sleepy), that it struck me like a sledgehammer and left me feeling… well, I’l let myself explain it.

This is what I posted to Facebook last night, shortly after the revelation :

Well, FUCK. I just realized that the super important gastroenterologist appointment that I made IN OCTOBER (there’s a bit of a waiting list) was yesterday the 12th, NOT the 22nd like I thought.

So now I get to walk around with two holes in my abdominal walls for God knows how long because I fucked up.

And so now I feel stupid and scared and hopeless and depressed. The news hit me like a highly appropriate punch in the gut. I feel anxious and fragile and a little dizzy and disoriented.

What can you do if you are not fit to take care of yourself?

So yeah. I was a tad upset.

And as you can see, some old tapes started playing in this big old brain of mine. The ones that say I am incompetent, that I am not fit to take care of myself, that if I was my own parent I would lost custody of myself, that I am alone and helpless before a cold and uncaring world that would shatter me into a million pieces and leave me to die in the cold as soon as look at me.

Sorry if that sentence leaves you tired.

Having gotten to sleep on it, then talk to my therapist about it, the wound is not as painful as it was before, but I still feel very hurt and busted up and fragile and vulnerable inside. This thing activated all my deepest issues, like my profound feeling of abandonment and neglect, and the feeling that I am an abandoned baby bird, or maybe a very old tadpole, and entirely incompetent and incapable of doing the right things by myself.

And when you are nearly 42, there’s just plain nobody else. So if you can’t take care of yourself, you’re fucked.

And yeah, I know all that is quite irrational. Realistically, I have a problem keeping appointments when they are more than a month or two away.

And that’s it. It’s a problem, granted, but it’s hardly a ringing condemnation of my life competence. Everything else I more or less manage to get done. I feed, clothe, and shelter myself. I make it to GP and therapy appointments. I do things like reapply to VFS and get my taxes done. I take my pills and my insulin.

But that’s not how it feels. Damn depression sucks.

People have no idea what kind of a world we absentminded people live in. I am constantly paranoid that something I have forgotten will turn out to be super important and bad things will happen and it will be all my fault.

So I try to double check everything all the time, but it’s never good enough.

But I will get over it. The healing has already begun. I have faith that I will recover from this and maybe even grow stronger because of it. Sometimes one needs a short sharp shock to the shell in order to remind you that the shell is even there.

And that maybe you would be better off without it, in the long run.

But this deep down terror and insecurity will still be a problem even when this wound is nothing but a thin white scar. I feel like I got a glimpse of both the angels and the demons of my nature in the past week, and while I don’t feel the best right now, I think it has been a very spiritually productive week in more ways than one.

In two. Two ways. That’s the number of ways. 2 is more than 1.

So while I will be processing this blow to my psyche for a while, I will also be trying to hold on to the lessons I learned about myself at VancouFur about being a very funny dude and having no reason to hide from the world because I am awesome.

I just have certain issues with remembering certain hard to remember things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.