Background music for today’s blog entry :

Holy crap, MC 900 looks so young in that video!

Man, I’m old.

So today was Therapy Thursday, and that went well, in that we got into some really deep shit. The deeper the better, as far as I am concerned. If the answers lay at the surface, I would have cured myself years ago. I go to therapy in order to have someone help me access deeper layers of my psyche that my manic monkey brain.

I told him all about how shit went down last Tuesday night. Kind of therapeutically relevant. It took a few tries to get him to realize that I was talking about something very serious. Serious, as in feeling “not safe” in the very specific way that only people who have been suicidal (and those who try to help them) understand.

Don’t worry, folks, I am okay now, more or less. I’m safe.

The killer I referred to in the title of this blog entry (I refuse to call them ‘blogs’, because that’s stupid) is the assassin inside me who kills my hope, self-esteem, confidence, and worth before it can ever take hold. It’s that ruthless entity of the mind which tells me that I can’t do anything right – that literally everything I do, I am doing it wrong – and that stabs me in the back with an icicle of harsh judgment for the smallest of mistakes, and makes my daily life one of torment and terror and a constant anxiety that varies in intensity but never truly goes away.

Unless, of course, I stay in my playpen of media and food and hanging with the fuzzies. In that tiny little world, I am safe from this demon, more or less. After all, if you don’t struggle against the bonds, they won’t hurt you! Well, not as much, anyhow. The more I push at the bars of my cage, the more the demon beats me back and tells me to behave.

It’s constant, brutal self-judgment, and it’s got to stop.

I also told my therapist about my anger paradox : I refuse to take it out on anyone else, and I know I want to stop taking it out on myself, so where is it supposed to go?

And guess what? He didn’t know either. Not that I expected him to know, really, but some sort of suggestion would have been nice. But no, I have set up an irresolvable paradox within myself. Without the unconscious mechanism of irritability to express and externalize my anger, there is no middle ground between taking it out on myself and taking it out on others.

It’s not like I can choose to let myself become cranky and then pretend I didn’t “mean” to hurt people with my anger. Other people might have that option, but as in much of life, I know too much. I know that choosing to put yourself in a position where you know you will hurt people, it’s exactly the same as choosing to hurt people directly. And I won’t do that.

I vowed never to take my bad mood out on others. That’s what my father did and what I swore I would never do. I was very young when I swore that oath, but that only makes it all the more powerful. My entire personality is structured around not letting that happen.

That means I put a very high (perhaps too high) value on self-control. If someone can’t control themselves, they should stay the fuck away from people until they learn to do it. Hurting others by lashing oput at them just because you’re in a shitty mood is absolutely unacceptable to me. Especially if they are people you claim to love.

It should be like dogs. If you keep biting people, we’ll make you wear a muzzle.

But at the same time, I recognize that there are problems with such an absolutist attitude, and that it leaves very little room for people to simply be human. Such harsh absolutes are almost never healthy for the people subject to its rule.

For one thing, it assumes that to express anger around people in any way is to hurt them. And that only works if you assume that everyone is as sensitive as you are, times ten. There’s probably forms of irritability that would seem harmless to the world but which would do me a hell of a lot of good.

I think that’s why part of me was actually reveling in how depressed I was Tuesday and was actually sad that it had to end. As depressed as I was, I was actually expressing emotion and reducing the intense pressure of my vast and deep vault of suppressed emotion.

And that felt so good that I never wanted it to end. I wanted it all to burn.

(EXTREME GROSSNESS ALERT! SCATOLOGY AHEAD! SKIP NEXT PARAGRAPH TO AVOID!)

So help me God, it was like taking a huge, hot, nasty shit when you have been sick for a while. It may involve deep, gut-wrenching, searing pain…. but it feels so good to get all that nasty stuff out of you that it leaves you kind of wishing it would keep going till you are completely empty, so you can start over.

(NOTE : It is never good to be totally empty if your bowels are not done freaking out. Ever had the dry heaves? It’s almost as bad from the other end. )

I wish I could take control of this process of catharsis. I wish it didn’t take external events to force the emotions out of me. But as I am increasingly aware, anger to me is like sex is to people raised in traditional religious homes. It’s there, and I don’t deny that I have it, but I can’t express it, handle it, or even look it in the face.

I just go on pretending like nothing is wrong and acting like I can keep this up forever.

But I can’t.

Not if I want to be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.