You know, because of all the cotton in my head.

OK, so I’m a fat Q-tip.

I have been pondering somkething I have never named before, not exactly. It’s this particular version of stress response and/or depression ^[1] that I have experienced many, many times in my life without really taking a look at it.

It’s the sort of thing that empties my mind and fills the empty space with a kind of thick, fluffy substance that blocks all complex reasoning and soaks up the negative emotions, leaving me in the state I have referred to previously as “slap-happy”.

But the thing is, that version of me can cope, sort of. It definitely can produce the minimum effort to convince people to go away and leave me alone when I am feeling intense social anxiety but I am too timid to confront the person or even just politely ask them to go.

It’s still an giddy idiot, however. It’s kind of like being drunk without the muscle relaxing portion of it. I feel dizzy and disconnected and an eerie kind of calm comes over me because my world has been narrowed down by all that cotton to a size I can handle, and nothing seems to be that big a deal.

I’ve turned into that person during job interviews, while talking to my GP, when I was dealing with very serious matters that require the very kind of thinking that is being suppressed, and even when just dealing with the people in my life.

There’s been times when even dealing with my roomies Joe and Julian seems like a massive challenge and makes me panic attack big time. And I love those guys and trust them more than any other non-relative in the world.

But depression doesn’t care. If my chemicals are fucked up enough, anything is possible. Like when I was living on Duchess Street in a bachelor apartment with a shared bathroom, and I would get too freaked out to use the communal bathroom (because someone might SEE me!) so I would pee out my ground-floor window.

And the thing is, the cotton was there big time. It’s not just something that flares up in times of stress then goes away. The more I think about it, the more I realize that in the long term, this “cotton” is the foundation of my depression.

It’s what sits there displacing my rational thoughts and draining me of vital energy. All the recovery I have ever done, since freaking 1999, has been a process of taking that long term cotton out for good, and thus getting my mental real estate back.

And I guess from there I am forced to conclude that the cotton is made of repressed memories and emotions. That the cotton is actually the “ice” I have been talking about with all my water metaphors over the years.

Only more cognitive than emotional.

I am not sure what happens now that I am fully cognizant of it. I would like to think that is is possible to clear that shit out as an act of cognition, but that’s probably just my overconfident ego thinking it is master of my mental domain.

It isn’t though. It is, at best, the keeper of the castle for my ice palace. The is so much more outside these walls than the cold dead world in which I live.

But it’s so quiet. And dark. So little stimulation. It keeps me calm.

And end up substituting mental stimulation for literally every other form of stimulation except for food.

Is that sad, or what?

Anyhow, back to the cotton-pickin’ topic.

The really deadly thing about the way I walk about with my head full of cotton is that, because I am too timid to attract attention to myself by letting my problems show, I have become extremely good at hiding my problems.

So when the world asks, “How are you doing?”, I smile and says “Just fine, thanks!”, even if I am dying inside and the rot is beginning to show.

It’s like when I was in the hospital for what turned out to be IBS when I was in my early twenties. I was not just in the midst of a terrible IBS attack, with my guts working hard every day to find new ways to tie themselves into knots and cramps so severe, I could see my stomach ripple like it was full of nervous ants.

I was also malnourished, dehydrated, and in a mental state best described as apocalyptic level depression. I was scared and weak and if I tried to sleep, I had nightmares right our of Revelation, with streets boiling like tar pits, blood red skies, and horrible insectoid creatures moving almost too fast for the eyes to see.

In short, it was the worst time of my life.

Then a couple of orderlies come in to fix up the room for my eventual roommate, and instantly I am smiling, being charming, cracking jokes, and palling around with them.

Then they leave, and I go right back to being miserable.

Now think about that. Think about how I became this totally different person while there were people there and I had an audience.

Think about how that was my response to the stress of them showing up. That was my instinctive reaction. Hide my pain completely under charm and wit.

Think about what those orderlies would have said if one of the nurses had asked them how I was doing. “That guy? Oh, he’s FINE! Funny, too!”

But most of all…. think about how, when I was in that mode, I actually felt a hell of a lot better. It wasn’t entirely an act. For that short time, I was every bit as happy and healthy as I was pretending to be.

But the moment they left, I was back to being myself.

Is it any wonder that some of us end up trying to become that person?

It doesn’t work and it never can.

But it’s a very nice idea to think about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.