Technically, this is a On The Road post as I am currently eating lunch at school… for the last time ever!

I can already tell how bad I will miss this place. It’s been my second home for almost a year. It’s been the focus of my life the whole time. I’ve loved my time here (mostly) and when I go home today, I will never see it again, at least as a student.

I am definitely a way, way, way better writer for having been through this program. Every workshopping of my stuff taught me so much, so fast. It was way better than simply being told things because it all related directly to my own work and therefore I could immediately contextualize the information and thus better integrate it into my own method.

I wasn’t the best at being a student. Oh well. I am still wickedly talented and crazy smart and goofily charming, and fully committed to spreading my works to every nook and cranny of the Internet until, don’t look now,  but it’s soaking in it.

I originally wrote that as “spreading my seed”, but that means something else.

Still, the forecast for the next week or so is for intermittent showers accompanying a moderate to severe nostalgia system, with a tsunami warning as waves of sentimentally, some as tall as a four story building, are predicted for Friday and possibly straight on through the weekend.

I am still scared of the upcoming existential void. Come Saturday, I will be released on my own recognizance, and I always get nervous when I have to be my own keeper, because historically, I have not been very good at it.

But I am trying hard not to worry about the details. The most important thing is to free my mind and find my motivation and (and this is the most important part), feed it.

The more times I follow an impulse to completion, the more I will be rewarded for it with a sense of accomplishment, and that will make my sad little id grow into a healthy, hearty, robust id that easily counterbalances my overdeveloped ego and punitive superego.

And maybe then, I will be a whole human being, and not the half-formed creature I am and have been for such a long, long time.

When I was a kid, I was told I was sure to grow up big and strong.

Well I got it half right.

Time for me to go to Last Class, whatever the hell that is going to be. Knowing how things are run around here, my guess is that it will be half-assed, disappointing, and insulting.

But I could be wrong

I am sort of worried that grad will be deeply underwhelming. I mean, I’m not looking to throw my cap in the air, but a little pomp and circumstances would go a long way toward making me feel like the staff values us.

That says a lot more about me than them. For them, this is one graduation ceremony of the six they will do in a year.

But for us…. it’s the only one we will ever get.

Gotta scoot. More when I get home.

Here’s more, but I am not home. And I am proud of that.

Here’s the thing. I have finished my last class. The head of the writing department showed us a great pilot called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel  and I will not attempt to summarize the plot because it would not do the show justice.

What the show has is quality. Everything is done so well that the whole thing goes does effortlessly and the era (early 1950’s) is expressed with such exuberant excellence that it feels realer than real. I have never seen era expressed this well, ever. From the fashions to the speech style to the buses going by in the background., everything is era-perfect to the point that is feels like you are watching a documentary from that era.

And the script is full of that rapid-fire verbal fencing Bogey and Bacall dialogue that I love so very, very much. And the humor is genuinely witty. Not surprising, considering that the show comes from the creator of Gilmore Girls.

That show had a lot of faults, but a lack of witty dialogue was never one of them.

In the morning, we did a  table read of one of my scripts (Episode 2 of Sam), and I was very pleased by all the laughs my stuff got. Everyone loved the script and that was just the shot in the arm I needed to bolster my confidence.

I write super funny shit. Someone will see the value in that.

Right now, I am hanging around until the screening my classmates and I are putting on tonight. We are going to watch all the student movies we made, and it should be a hoot. We’re doing it in the Main Theater and it is a lot like a tiny movie theater. Lots of my classmates are bringing people, so it should be a full house.

The part where my pride comes in is that I was not, initially, going to hang around. I was going to go home like usual and not attend the screening at all, and presumably get super depressed when I knew that my classmates were together and having fun while I was home in Richmond being miserable.

But I stopped myself. Not all at once, but fairly quickly. I realized that going home would be the exact kind of thing that leads to my social isolation, and gives people the impression that I don’t like them.

In reality, the problem is that I don’t feel like I deserve to be with them. I avoid social engagement because it brings on the social anxiety and makes me feel conspicuously vulnerable and exposed. A very loud voice in my head screams that nobody wants me there, everybody hates me, everyone wishes I would leave, and if I don’t leave, it will bring on the social nightmare of rejection, ostracization, and expulsion.

And I know that, behind that enormous wall of fear that my anxiety disorder creates, are people who enjoy my company and want me around.

And yet, just typing that previous paragraph took a large act of will. I had to overcome a lot of deep resistance to the entire notion that anybody, anywhere actually wants me around ever just to make my fingers type the words.

And right now, even though I typed those words five minutes ago, I still feel shaky and out of sorts from the experience. Part of me wants to delete the words out of a pseudo-superstitious feeling that daring to claim such an outrageous thing as truth will bring doom and annihilation down upon my head.

It’s a powerful thing, and fighting it takes a hell of a lot of mental horsepower. But there is no way I am turning back. I am committed to the fight and I will jump atop this monster with a live grenade clenched in my teeth before I give up.

It’s so hard to believe the truth sometimes. It seems so unreal.

But I will triumph.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my last day of class. I am totally not ready for this.

then again, nobody ever is. Sometimes, life just happens to you, ready or not, and your challenge is to deal with it.

Today’s classes went okay. I had a long chat with my teacher Kat and she made me feel a lot better about my abysmal VFS career. She reassured me that my writing is very good, and that, at to her, my main problem is that I’ve no idea what effect I am having on others.

And she’s right.

I have known that for a while now, actually. I spent such a long time locked in my own echo chamber, believing my extraordinarily distorted perceptions represented reality, that I don’t really have a sense of how others truly feel about me.

It’s part of my being almost totally oblivious to my surroundings. Some of those surroundings are people.

I fought this revelation at first. After all, I am Mister Sensitive, right? I am always worrying the effect I am having on others. To a fault, really…. it means I put other people’s emotions ahead of mine and it makes it very hard to simply be myself.

But then I realized that it was not a matter of sensitivity. It’s a matter of awareness. I am sensitive to everything I perceive. But that tends to be limited to verbal stimuli. I can hear shades of emotion in people’s voices, grasp what is going on in subtext, and so forth and so on. But body posture and facial expression? Not nearly so sensitive. In fact, I often have trouble maintaining eye contact with people because I hate seeing myself in what I think is their judging, hating, resenting eyes.

This self-loathing thing runs very, very deep in me. I have mentioned this before, I think, but I spent many years unable to even look myself in the mirror, because if I did, a huge wave of self-loathing would rise in me and I would want to kill the person in the mirror.

And it’s still not easy. I have a huge mirror in my bathroom and I rarely look into it, even though it covers so much wall that the only place it doesn’t reflect is the shower. I still feel that burning self-hatred when I see myself most of the time. I have to take slow, careful looks at myself with my psychological defenses up. That’s the only way I can restrain the hate I feel for the…. thing that I am.

It gets better over time, though. My self-esteem has risen over the time since I started Kwantlen because, even though I keep screwing up, the fact that I was competent enough to make it through class day after day despite the physical effort and the much, much greater psychological strain of overcoming my agoraphobia and social anxiety each and ever day in order to get my ass to class.

That kind of thing is not to be ignored. It’s a huge deal for me to go out in public, amongst strangers, every single day. I had to overcome a lot to get to where I am right now, days away from graduation. Sure, I might not have comported myself in an ideal way, but I overcame a serious disability to get to VFS and to complete my course there.

Viewed that way, it’s pretty amazing that I made it this far.

And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I did not manage to both get my education and overcome my biggest psychological hurdle,namely learning to fit in. I couldn’t learn it as a child being bullied in elementary school and I still haven’t learned it at the age of 43. There is a hell of a lot of panic and anxiety and self-loathing in the way, and underneath all that, there is the social damage that a lifetime of isolation has caused me.

I grew up alone. That should never happen to any child ever.

It’s a hurdle I want to overcome for a number of reasons, from the purely professional to the deeply personal. I don’t want to be so isolated. I don’t want to be a lonely planet too far away from its star to get any warmth from it. I want to live a robust, engaged, connected life where I share in the common feeling and become a part of humanity instead of freezing to death in the vacuum of space.

I am tired of being on the outside looking in, afraid to try to come inside because freezing to death is better than being rejected and cast out into the cold again. Plus I don’t want to poison other people with my infernal toxicity.

After all, contact with me can only make life worse for people, right? And they know it, too, which is why they do their best to avoid dealing with me.

I’m hard to deal with and easy to ignore. So I get ignored.

Even today, when I made suggestions in class, most of them went over like a lead balloon. Actually, I take that back. A lead balloon would get more attention.

Instead, the things I say don’t fit in people’s minds and they just blink and move on like I had never said a damned thing. Teachers have told me that they think I contribute really good ideas. But if that’s true, they have a funny way of showing it.

I really don’t know what I am doing wrong. So it must be one of those things that comes with proper socialization – a sense of what people can and cannot understand. I have the verbal skills for that but not the social ones.

The only cure is social exposure. But clearly that won’t do it by itself, because I have had tons of it since the day I started Kwantlen, and I am still a lonely planet.

Clearly, some door within me has to open and let the sunshine in. Let myself be changed by the social inputs I get. Do my best to catch up.

I have been frozen for so very long.

I hope I can thaw out before the frostbite kills me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. Period.

After all, it’s not like I will have any homework!