Had one of those moments when I lock eyes with my insanity today, during therapy.

It happened when I realized, not for the first time but definitely for the most intense, that there are so many thing I know about myself but do not actually believe.

Of course, most of them are positive.

You all know the story. I’m crazy smart, never had to try hard in school at all. I have a lot of creative talent and an imagination so vibrant it makes Technicolor seem like low rez black and white. I have a penetrating and insightful mind with extraordinary understanding of how things really work and what things really are. Plus I am a genuinely nice fellow who sincerely wants to help people and make everyone happier.

Even grumpy people!

And even as I was typing out that litany list, I was making a “wanky wanky” motion in my mind. My mind was using my overdeveloped sense of irony to disarm and deflect any potential ego boost I might get from the fact that I am, in many ways, extraordinary.

Like I said on Monday, somehow, it’s never enough. I have to acknowledge the truth of those positive things about myself because the evidence for them is too strong to ignore.

But I don’t believe them. Not really. I acknowledge the truth of them if pressed, but the emotion is simply missing. They don’t feel true, and even if they are true, they don’t matter. Not really.

Why? As my therapist quite adroitly, because if they were true, they would come into conflict with the negative emotions I talked about on Monday, and that message of worthlessness and pointlessness and existential guilt is (or rather, has been) far stronger than mere reality.

And it’s true that those assets have not been a lot of use to me yet. But that just leads into the Catch 22 of the fact that I don;t get rewarded for them because I don’t do anything to get my art in front of more eyeballs (or in more ears, or whatever), and the reason I don’t do that is I don’t have the confidence to do so, confidence that I could only get by having some success with my art…. you know, that old pile o’junk.

And for now, I just don’t want to run in that mousewheel at all.

Over and over again, I feel like my mental illness has a physical presence in the subjective realm of my mindscape. It’s have and thick and terribly, deathly cold. It flows back and forth in my mind like a very thick and heavy fluid, like it’s ice-cold corn syrup oozing back and forth in there, chilling and polluting all it touches.

The good news is that the process of recovery, of mental healing, reduces its mass over time. I get rid of that bullshit, spreading it onto the page with my words and leaving it to dry out, melt, and evaporate.

It’s slow like glaciation, but just as inevitable.

Another thing that popped up in therapy today was the idea that I am trying to bring the two extremes of my personality, represented by psychotic egotism on one end of the scale and total nihilistic depression on the other, together into a single balanced whole that will be far greater than the sum of its broken parts.

I have realized that I was trying to close a massive psychic wound before, but until today, I didn’t realize what the forces keeping that wound open were. I have been pulled in two directions (at least) for a long long time.

And it has largely been fear of the raving lunatic egotist in me that has kept me clinging so hard to its equidistant position on the opposite side of the scale. There have been times when I felt like I must be the smartest person who has ever lived and that I was some sort of god of the mind, to the point of feeling so powerful it was clearly lunacy.

And those moments scared me so badly and so deeply that I suppressed that feeling with maximum force, and in a sense, returned to my usual level of self-contempt with a hearty sigh of relief.

As those my self-loathing is any more rational. But hey, it’s at least familiar. And one of the deepest delusions of depression is that there is somehow safety in the negative, that if you think bad things about yourself, the universe will somehow recognize that you are already hurting and leave you alone.

Hurting yourself to stay safe is a particularly elegant form of delusional self-destruction. It leads to actually fearing happiness, as if being happy makes you a beacon to all misfortunes seeking a target.

After all, if you’re happy, you might let down your guard, and that’s when life will get you.

Of course, when I tried to explain this action of bringing the two extremes together to form a greater whole to my therapist, it came across as a tad mystic and opaque. It was pretty hard to explain to him what I meant by it all. And that made me realize something else, something that does not fit well into my hyperverbal mind.

I realized that no matter how eloquent I am, no matter how intricate my understanding of myself and the world, no matter how much time I spend in both my forms of therapy, there can still be things within me which are just too subjective, deep, and subverbal to be explained to another.

And the fact that I really don’t want to admit that to myself and that a big part of me stubbornly insists that there are only things I haven’t articulated and communicated yet speaks very eloquently of my own deep left-brained bias towards that which exists within the light of reason and mistrust of all that happens in the dark recesses of the mind.

Like, say, that entire other lobe of the fucking brain.

That’s a very me way of looking at things, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.