The veil of sadness is toxic to both those who wear it and those they touch.

Been pondering this whole “pathetic aura” business. I am still working to imagine and understand what a more confident and respect-worthy (I will never be respectable) version of me would look like.

So far, all I can see is a sort of Zaphod Beeblebrox / Judiciary Pag sort of person. Talented, smug, sarcastic, aloof, deeply convinced of his own brilliance and ability to talk his way into and out of whatever strikes his fancy, and determined to get as much of the good stuff as he can while exerting the least amount of effort he can get away with.

In other words…. a prick. The kind you want to beat with a shovel.

But none of that necessarily precludes being a nice person. Obnoxiousness might be irritating but it’s not a crime in and of itself. I could be all that yet still be a basically good guy who loves helping people and looking after them and who will always do what he thinks is best in all situations.

Heck, none of that precludes being a fun guy to be around. I might get on people’s nerves, but if I am a fun, funny, charming person (and I know I can be that), they will likely forgive me. Or at least most of them.

Some people are so dedicated to a life of grumpiness that they loathe anything that even mildly suggests they should relax and have fun.

These people are beyond my powers to save.

So what’s left to me is to somehow integrate those two pictures of myself, the Zaphod and the sweetie,  into a single identity. I wish I could think of a role model in this. Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdcage is kind of in the ballpark. He’s funny and eccentric and ridiculous^[1] and emotional and maternal. And occasionally sarcastic to low IQ twinks he has to perform with, which I love.

And I admire his courage. He has made his decision to be who he is even knowing it’s ridiculous and that it makes him a kind of a caricature and a joke. I wish I could be so bold and so free. Maybe I will be once I unpack enough of all this goddamned emotional baggage and find the suitcase where I packed the real me.

I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

But there’s still that veil of sadness between me and others. It’s a lot lighter than it used to be, a lot lighter than my deadly duvet of depression, but it’s still pretty heavy and it makes it so hard to truly connect to others and be there with them in realtime.

And I crave that connection so badly. I want to come in from the cold. I have been such a good dog and I think I should be allowed back in the house now, with the people. I don’t know what I did to end up tied up outside and ignored but whatever it is, I am very, very sorry. As sorry as I can be. And it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s lonely out here, and I can hear the people inside the house getting together and having fun, and I can smell the food I don’t get to eat and feel the love I am not getting either, and I would very much like to come in now, please.

Pretty pretty please.

The coming of Halloween has reminded me of what a lonely and sad child I was. Trick or treating all by myself, getting these brief glimpses into people’s warm and happy lives, going home when curfew struck to console myself with the food I had so painstakingly gathered. That’s what it was all about, right? The candy?

I always did very well on that score. Insert joke about Halloween being the example of to get a fat kid to exercise here. I covered a lot of ground in my merry greed.

But I would have traded my entire half a garbage bag full of candy just to feel included. To go somewhere where I was valued and loved and cared for and accepted, instead of being relegated to the shadows where the light of day never shone.

My belly grew but my soul shrank. As did my world.

So how do I escape that world and enter the world of humanity? How do I go from the cold and dark into the warm summer sunlight? Where do I go inside to get to home?

Perhaps my current state could be likened to a state of convalescence. I am healing but not yet healed. There’s a lot of very painful work ahead of me if I want to get better. But I am willing to put in the effort and the strain and endure the fear and the pain if it will make me whole again.

Insert rap beat here.

I think this image has occurred to me a few times before, but if not, here goes : one image of recovery that recurs is of a spring practice in my home town, namely shoveling the snow on your yard out onto the street where it will melt and go down the drain. That way, you get rid of the snowbank way faster than if you let it melt on its own.

Totally illegal. What if we had a cold snap? You could have turned your street into a rink!

But lots of people did it anyway.

And that what I feel like I am doing as well,. I am methodically shoveling the snow from the snowbank around my heart onto the street, waiting for it to melt, and shoveling more.

Over time, I can feel the warmth of the sun better and better, but I am still buried deep and I don’t know when that last shovel full will disappear and the green grass below will finally get the light of day on it again.

But the thing about winter is it always ends.

Mine will too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I hit upon a very rich vein of personal insight last night, and I want to explore it further in tonight’s blog entry.

Specifically, the idea that I am stuck in an “attract care” mode. It explains (at least in part) my tendency towards passivity.Part of me is always hoping someone else will step in and look after me, and relieve me of the burden of taking care of myself. Perhaps that even explains my tendency to neglect myself.

That same part of me is hoping someone will step in and give me the guidance and structure that I never got as a kid.

Kids shouldn’t have to raise themselves. They’re not good at it. They’re not qualified. But that is what I ended up doing. There were people who were there with me, but nobody was there for me. I grew up terribly alone.

Part of that, I recognize, is the illness. Depression. I withdrew into myself very deeply, and in doing so put up a wall between me and the world that I am still struggling to overcome. There were people on the other side of that wall who might have been able to help me. But when I laid down in that snowbank and willed myself to die, I gave up on life.

It’s the only thing you can do when you come to the conclusion that you are powerless to avoid the pain.  I was getting bullied all the time. Neither the teachers nor the administration at my school seemed able or even willing to intervene. All they wanted was for me to go away, just like at home.

It was a message I was pathetically accustomed to receiving.

I might have gone to my parents if I had been encouraged in any way to consult them when I was in trouble. Instead, it was made clear to me that I wasn’t to bother them with my life issues because they were too busy to view me as anything other than an irritating burden. I was always made to feel like I was not merely the lowest priority in their lives, I has zero priority, a null set, and therefore there was no logically possible condition in which I would matter.

It occurs to me that this attitude of pathetic need for nurturing probably contributed to people’s not wanting to deal with me. Especially when combined with my precocious and unpredictable intelligence. I have talked before in this space about the mixed messages I put out. A powerful mind, especially one like mine that sees through the social illusions and mental grooves that limit most people’s reality, sends a very strong message of power. In my case, it apparently comes off me in waves like being next to a power substation. And yet, this attitude of entreaty and eagerness to please sends an (at least) equally powerful message of being lower status than everyone I meet.

And when the human brain processes those kinds of messages,  power but not status, the emotional output of that process is “bad alpha”, and we HATE incompetent alphas.

So what I need to do to move forward is to change the message I am putting out into the world. I have to stop being the sad dog that wags his tail whenever anyone even looks in his direction and find a way to be someone people can respect.

Note, I do not mean by this to say I am planning to change who I am. Just that I need to change how I come across if I want to get closer to people without creeping them out.

We will take the need for improvements in personal grooming and care as a given.

The voyage to a less pathetic me has to begin with the ability to imagine the destination, and I am not there yet. I have no idea what a more respectable me would be like. I have been the sad version of me for so long.

The lack of employability and resulting low income lifestyle had done a number on me as well. I hope to correct that via my VFS education and my natural abilities, but that’s six months away and I would kind of like to feel good about myself before then.

Besides, when I am hustling for a job out there in Entertainment Land, an air of pathetic neediness will not serve me well.

Without a clear vision of the version of me I want to project into the world, I will have to kind of feel my way around till something occurs to me.

Certainly, I need to lose (or at least, conceal) the feelings of hopelessness and uselessness. I am not as incompetent as I often feel. It’s true that I have difficulties in doing some things, but that’s due to factors beyond my control. It in no way attaches to me as a person, any more than my eye color or my allergies.

Another thing that has to go is the desperate longing for positive attention. People inherently avoid people like that. It’s cruel but understandable. People around someone who is nakedly needy makes people uncomfortable because it feels like said person is asking for far more than you would normally give in social circumstances.

So I have to come across as more self-contained. And yet, at the same time, I can’t come across as closed off and aloof. It would be very easy for me to go into that mode. It feels like it’s the next setting on my personality controls. I am already prone to isolating myself and doing my own thing. Why not turn that into an asset?

Because I would come across as a total penis, that’s why. Plus, my warm personality is the power core of my charisma and I would be a fool to cut myself off from that powerful an asset. I can be downright magnetic when I have my head right.

The trick is to get my head right.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.