I feel like I am in a burning down phase right now.

That’s the phase where enough of my emotional garbage has surfaced to allow for a good clear burn off. The disgusting gunk is spread out on the ground so that the sun can dry it out, then raked back into piles and ignited with a flint, a tinder, and a little rage.

And then I can just stand back and watch it burn away slowly. Like a peat fire, it’s smokey and smells pretty bad, but when it’s done, everything is clear and clean and better than before. The system has been purged and for a while, I can feel the sun.

Eventually, though, that deep inner process will drive more gunk out of the system and onto the surface, and the whole cycle will begin again.

It’s not as zero sum as it seems, though. That deep inner process is slow but its results are final. The dead intentions and smothered feelings and grimy memories are gone for good, and the system as a whole runs better now that there’s less of my personal bullshit clogging up its pipes.

The burning hurts. But it also feels good. The feeling of relief makes the pain more than worth it. And some kinds of pain are not that bad.

Fear of pain does more damage than mere pain ever could. We are not and cannot be free until we learn to choose pain and thus free ourselves from its tyranny. The ability to say, “I know this will hurt but I am doing it any way because I want the result” is the first and probably the most important step towards adulthood and maturity.

To the childish, animalistic mind, choosing pain is madness no matter what the result might be. After all, animal instinct’s biggest rule is “seek pleasure and avoid pain”. It’s such a basic part of our minds that we can even convince ourselves that blatantly short-sighted and self-destructive actions are the “intelligent” or “sensible” in a deeply cowardly way.

But then again, intelligence has always been able to cloak its cowardice in virtue. Even when the choices cowardice makes are stupid as hell.

Once we can not just choose to do the painful thing, but to do it with eyes open and with full intent, we can cross the threshold and claim our reward.

Because this is not about mindless self-denial or some abstract notion of self-discipline for its own sake. This is about enabling our own happiness by expanding our powers to get what we want regardless of how we feel or whether or not it involves pain or sacrifice or scary,  hard decisions.

The voice of immaturity will try to convince you that whatever is painful (or scary or whatever)  can’t possibly be worth it. After all, you’ve done without it so far. And what kind of idiot chooses to suffer? Better to avoid it.

But imagine you have a toothache. You know damned well that the only way to get rid of it is to go to the dentist. But going to the dentist is scary and hard and dentists do painful and weird stuff to you.

So you just sit there and suffer due entirely to your own cowardice.

That’s a pretty cut and dried example and most people wouldn’t do that. But people do the equivalent all the time. Including me. Especially me.

Anyhow, that’s all old news. Where was I? Oh right, the burning.

There’s this image that recurs to me from time to time. It goes like this : there’s a place up in the mountains, a kind of natural temple where people can climb a twisting path up and down the bare living rock to a place at the end of the path, where it dips down and then just suddenly ends.

People go there and stand on the lip of the abyss to sacrifice their pain and suffering and damage to the gods as a way of declaring themselves to be free of them. They go there and they scream it all out in brutal honesty and call upon the gods to take their burdens from them and set them free.

But this is not an act of servile contrition or self-abasing supplication. This is an act of a very deep kind of pride, the kind that drives out unworthy feelings and puts them in our hands so that we can hold them high over our heads, roar our challenge at the sky,  and let them burn away into the air in a wrenching act of incendiary sacrifice.

I can see it clearly in my mind, as if I’d dreamed it very recently. But it’s not a dream, or at least, not the kind you have in your sleep. It’s something that pops into my head fully formed now and then, and each time, more details are added.

That;s what creativity looks like from the inside, at least for me.

Poetically speaking, I guess you could say it’s a place inside of me. I think of it more as a place I wish existed in the real world. Some place where you can sacrifice your pain and sorrow and all the other things we need to shed if we are to be light enough to fly free.

My desire for personal growth, for spiritual evolution, is very strong. It is, in a sense, what I desire the most, although my methods for seeking it might seem rather circuitous or at least indirect to an outside observer.

I learn. I think. I experience things. And I grow. Not as fast as my ambition desires, but I know of no other way.

Perhaps if I had the capacity for spirituality, I would grow faster. With spirituality (or mysticism, or religion, or faith, or whatever you want to call it), transformation is possible, as is the option of facing your demons directly.

But alas, I must forever toil in the cold light of reason’s ignorance and that means doing everything the hard way.

But at least when I get there, I will remember the route.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

snark, v. : to lash out at something or someone with sarcasm and/or wit.

I have been feeling very snarky lately.

And while it’s not fun, I am choosing to look at it as a sign of progress. It means that my deeply suppressed anger and bitterness are surfacing and trying to find a way to express themselves. And by itself, that would not be a problem. Express away.

But of course, it’s not that simple. It wouldn’t be that simple even if I were an average person with average verbal skills. People can hurt one another plenty that way.

But I am heavily armed when it comes to verbal battle and my kind of sarcasm can do a lot more damage to people because it has all my frustration and irritation behind it, which is then being focused by my outsized verbal skills, emphatic insights, and incisive intellect.

So yeah. I pack lasers beams, y’all.

So I have to be extra careful. I don’t want to hurt people. I want them to respect me, not fear me. And I believe in never hurting anyone by accident. That’s my definition of manners. And I hold myself to a very high ideal on that front.

Perhaps too high. Don’t know what to do about that.

On the other hand, I don’t want to outright suppress this urge to be snarky to people. It’s a healthier form of dealing with my anger than burying it in an emotional hole and having it rot there and poison my mood. I might not have a healthy and non-destructive way to express this snarky rage yet, but I am still better off choking back the words than swallowing them and letting them damage me that way.

It’s like having the things Basil Fawlty says under his breath going on in my head.

I will find am acceptable focus, I am sure. Maybe I will start a political rant type vlog. It would help me to get a lot of things off my chest. Or maybe I will finally go through with my plan to join some major forum or find the right Reddit board and unleash my verbal might on some deserving douchebags with odious opinions.

Both would be ways to work out my anger with words. I don’t seem to have the capacity to do it physically. I have tried the whole “beat up a pillow” school of dealing with your anger and it did not help much, just made me feel absurd.

And all the time, I was thinking “But this doesn’t MEAN anything!”.

So apparently my rage requires a living target. Something deep and primal inside of me needs to lash out at the world that has hurt me so much, and that world, as far as I can tell, does not include pillows.

I’ve always gotten along fine with pillows and their kin.

And of course, I know who the villains are in this rage filled world inside me. They’re the bullies who abused me, the teachers who ignored it, the family that made me feel like an unwanted stranger in my own home and who were never there to support me at all, the random people who froze me out and made me feel like I could never belong anywhere, and the list goes on and on.

None of those elements are things I can address now. The teachers are all dead or retired (or both, I suppose). My siblings, I believe, now know how bad I had it back then and how I felt like I wasn’t welcome in my own home. The bullies are, quite frankly, meaningless to me. Of all the guilty parties, they are the ones who cannot justify their actions or deny what they did. I doubt any of them think what they did to me was A-OK. And the random people were just reacting to a very weird and sort of disturbingly pathetic kid who was as hard for them to relate to as they were to me.

I’ve had my own little planet like the Little Prince for a long time, and it sucks.

Much harder to address than my anger is my very deep nurturing deficit. Men are kind of not supposed to want or need nurturing, even gay men. When we do, people lose respect for us entirely.

Especially women, but that’s not exactly an issue for me. But why do you think women mock men for “turning into big babies” when they’re sick? You think they would say that about another woman? Of course not. But when men want someone to nurture them, they get mocked and rejected.

Anyhow, I don’t know what to do about this nurturing deficit of mine. I fear that it is one of my “thirsty dogs”, aka a deep need acquired young that can never be fully fulfilled. It might well be that I could find a person who was willing to look after me in the way I need and even retain the ability to respect and love me at the same time, and it would never be enough for me.

That could lead to a very dark place where people feel like I used them, and then discarded them when they ran out of love to give. And they would not be wrong.

But I have a lot of love to give too. I have a very strong desire to look after people. I would love to have a man in my life whom I could dote upon. I guess my ideal relationship would be two people spoiling the heck out of each other.

That could work with the right man. I am a very giving person. I would give of myself freely and happily to the right man. And all I ask for in return is someone strong to look after me and make me feel safe.

Wow, that is the textbook definition of daddy issues. I am obviously looking for a surrogate father figure. That could lead to… trouble.

Oh well. Better trouble than this endless pit of loneliness and isolation.

Something’s got to break down these walls.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.