Came across this marvelous song recently, and it got me thinking.

I love that song so much. It’s so full of hope and courage. It’s positive, but not in a rainbow farting reality denying hippie way. It’s a song that says “If we stand together before the night, we can make it through to dawn together. ”

That’s a kind of positive message that makes sense to me. Psychedelia never has. Don’t get me wrong – I am totally down with the whole groovy, free love, flower power vibe.

But I have never cared for the whole drug thing. The “better living through chemistry” thing. I wouldn’t deny anyone their bag or anything, but to me, it seems like it just turned a lot of people into mindless lotus-eaters who couldn’t handle reality and therefore had very little effect on it.

So to me, in a sense, the big crash after the big high that happened in the 1970’s was the best thing that could have happened to the Movement. It let people jettison the Cloud 9 con and get real. People had to leave Cloud Cuckoo Land, and that was a hell of a comedown for a lot of people. But it resulted in people having to come to grips with a lot of things that the hippie crowd just didn’t want to deal with, man.

Of course, I might be biased, because I was born in 1973. My life from birth to age 7 was in the 1970’s. I absorbed the decade on a cellular level, and anything from that era can trigger enormous waves of nostalgia in me.

It’s entirely involuntary. And not entirely unpleasant.

Not entirely pleasant either. For reasons that definitely come from Crazytown USA,. I mistrust nostalgia intensely.

For one thing, strong feelings of nostalgia give me a feeling that is too similar to one of my reality-shaking attacks of intense deja vu. I hate those. They make me so confused and I feel like I am going to loop back in time and lose everything I have gained in the intervening time, and have to live it all over again. I get dizzy and faint and nothing feels real, and that terrifies me to my core and shakes my sense of reality entirely.

And I hate that.

So there’s that. There is also the promise I made to myself while I was having a pretty shitty childhood that if I ever thought that this was the best time of my life, shoot me in the fucking head because it sucked.

And I haven’t changed my mind on that. I had a very bad childhood. Not as bad as some, but no kid should grow up as alone as I was. It’s a wonder that I came out as sane as I did. Such isolation and bullying often produces entirely unstable individuals.

Thank goodness for the entertainment industry And the stabilizing influence of a middle class upbringing. And being so god damned smart, I suppose.

The jury is still out on whether that was a good thing. On the one hand, having such a strong intellect is a huge asset when it comes to regulating your behaviour, and my extremely pragmatic mind anchored me to reality in so many ways.

On the other hand, being locked away in my ice castle did me a lot of harm, and kept out the warm emotions I needed so very badly. I am still thawing out from that. I might have been better off in the long run if I had been forced to deal with my emotions instead of freezing and studying them in order to try to make sense of the world.

Nietzsche was right when he talked about how life must be lived to be understood, instead of killed, stuffed, and studied like so many butterflies in someone’s collection.

Fascinating image, says my mind. Fuck off, Spock.

A name for part of my problem just popped into my head : detached id. The id is still there – it is our primal animal selves – but it has been disconnected from the core psyche by a retreat into pseudo-rationality in order to escape negative emotional realities.

This makes someone like me fundamentally unbalanced – polarized – by this flight from deep emotion. Nearly every deep drive is replaced by cold curiosity and frozen fascination. And they make very poor substitutes.

So what happens? The pain of this disconnection makes us retreat even further from our emotional selves and the problem gets worse and worse.

I’m on the path to recovery from this fundamental error. I can look behind me and see how far I have come from the frozen and fearful human wreckage that I was for two decades. I am far more connected than I used to be, and I am also a lot more confident.

Those two things are – not to be cute – connected.

But I can also look ahead and see how far I have to go. I am still pretty scared and fragile. I feel like I am still somewhat of a timid creature tiptoeing through life, ready to bolt and dive into his burrow at the slightest provocation. It will take some time and dedication and a concentrated effort of will to push myself into all the experiences it will take to lose the fragility, find my inner core of strength, and feel comfortable in my own skin.

And a lot of that will come from building my career as a freelancer. This weekend has shown me quite vividly how merely blogging could never be enough for me again. with no episode to write, I have way too much time on my hands and it becomes a burden, and I begin heading in the general direction of depression.

Even though I have a video game to play that I am thoroughly enjoying. It’s just not enough any more. It occupies my mind and makes the time go faster, but after a while the restlessness and dissatisfaction start creeping in and time becomes a burden.

The thing is, I have stuff I could and should be doing. I’m just not there yet. I am still stuck in the “work and play” mentality, where there are the things I have to do, and once that is done, it’s playtime.

The road out does not go in that direction. The two must become one.

Only then will I learn to truly be alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Cometh the night, on itth thadowy thlippers!

Or something like that.

Hi folks. After not blogging for four day, I feel like I was on a long lonely journey for that whole time and now I have come home and boy, have I missed you nice people!

I mean, you actually read what I write! Despite the very strange and sometimes extremely dark contents of my stressed and fractured  mind and my leaking them all over the electronic page in full view of the discerning public, you keep on reading, no matter where this journey of mine takes me.

And I am so very, very grateful for that.

That theme of something shameful in me needing to come out has been on my mind lately. A lot of victims of child sexual abuse have to cope with a lifetime of feeling dirty and gross and like we are some kind of horrible disgusting thing.

Violation does a lot more than merely upset us. Ask any rape victim. Regardless of the ages of the people involved, the violation of self – in both the body and the mind – leaves a terrible wound. It damages your sense of safety because it shatters your sense of control over what happens to you on the most intimate possible level.

There are some deep rules to society that we never experience consciously because they are so rarely violated. One of this most basic, yet most complex, is our sense of will – of permission. We live our lives, at least in the modern world, with the assumption that we are in control of our own destiny That people need permission to do certain things to us or with us. That even those with he most power over us will respect those boundaries because violating them simply is not done.

Rape is the most potent form of this violation because it centers around the most intimate thing people do, and that’s sex. Sex involves parts of our bodies that we cover up in public and about which we tend not to talk. Not only that, but if there’s someone else involved, it not only involves their most intimate body parts as well, but even in non-penetrative sex it involves some very intimate contact with said body parts.

And if the sex is penetrative, well…. that’s another person’s body entering your body’s most private area, whatever the orifice involved is. That’s the most intimate you can be with another human being outside of an operating room.

And even there, there’s rules.

Myself, I was violated when I was only three years old. Back then, in the Seventies, most people didn’t even know (or at least, acknowledge) that child sexual abuse was even a thing that happened. That even COULD happen.

This meant predatory pedophiles acted more or less with impunity.

I certainly wasn’t ever going to tell. I did not even have the words. And it would not have helped if I had. Odds are, it would have only made things worse, and I think I was better off without the additional trauma of having adults angrily telling me I was lying and just making up dirty things just to get attention because that kind of thing didn’t happen!

For my younger readers : people really thought like that in the bad old days. Seems crazy in this world where people are hyper-vigilant about pedophiles, but there was a time when pedophilia was so unthinkable to people that they refused to believe it existed at all.

And that meant punishing the victim. God, the past sucks.

The thing about my feeling like there is something horrible and shameful about me is that I lack the psychological apparatus of guilt to put it into a cultural context. I certainly never blamed myself for the incident. How could I? I was only three years old when it happened.

What could I possibly have done differently? Reasonably speaking?

And yet, that sense of being horrible on the inside persisted. I didn’t feel like I had sinned. I never even had the concept of sin taught to me. If something was wrong, it was because it hurt people, not because it violated a list of rules.

I’m pretty sure I was better off that way. I know for certain that I am better off without that whole “original sin” bullshit. I’m convinced that the whole concept of oiignal sin was invented by old priests worried about someone gaining power over them by “cheating” – that is to say, by actually not sinning.

But I digress.

I think my sense of something horrible, toxic, and shameful deep inside me stems from something more primal that religion or guilt or any of that crap. I think it stems from the fact that I was violated at an age when diapers were not that far behind me and I was learning the basics of how to do stuff like clean myself.

I know this because when I imagine all this stuff “coming out”, I feel exactly the kind of deep, deep shame that accompanies violation of toilet rules.

I trust that the Freudian overtones of “there’s something disgusting inside me and I have to get it out” do not need to be explicitly explained.

In those terms, I have been emotionally constipated for my whole life. This is not uncommon in British-derived cultures. Our display rules for emotions are extremely strict compared to other cultures like the French or the Spanish.

We keep it all locked away. All except that particular strain of lunatic known as “the writer”, who pushes that stuff out for the whole world to see then cries out “Love me for this!”.

Amazingly, it’s been known to work.

This subject surfaced in my mind when I tried to imagine my room being totally clean and neat and tidy. It sounds good on paper, but when I imagine it, I get this feeling like something dark and horrible and deeply shameful is rising up inside me and it’s going to COME OUT and that would be the WORST THING EVER.

And besides, if all my bad stuff came out all at once…. who would I be afterwards?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.