I have been tasked with coming up with a final script for our trailer, and I am determined to give it my all this time, and that means powering through all the bullshit clogging my brain and making it hard to think about it because there’s all these emotions in the way.

Emotions that make it impossible to go forward because they force me into a state of indecision. It’s like my brain is locked into immobility like a seized engine, and gunning the engine will only end up grinding your engine to pieces.

So hit it, emotions!

The important one is pressure. I am beginning to learn that I can only handle pressure by completely ignoring it and approaching things as challenges that will help me grow, not burdens that will break me down.

When I think about the fact that all these people are depending on me, I feel intense panic. Perhaps when I am more seasoned a writer, I will confident enough to just shrug that off and say “No problem. Bring it on!”.

But I’m not there yet.

I don’t want this panicking to be my reaction. It makes me feel weak and foolish. I want to regain the crazy self confidence I had not that long ago where I was determined to conquer the world with my crazy strong writing skills and full of vitality and ambition.

I mean seriously. WTF happened to that guy?

I just have to keep telling myself that the nervous rabbit freaking out part of me is not the real me. That just a temporary mask I wear until I heal enough to take it off.

The real me is the guy who relishes challenges and attacks each problem with vigor and the awe inspiring power of his gigantic brain.

I know I can write this thing and make it kickass. My bare bones version was OK. But it had none of my signature pizzazz and comedy sizzle. I want it to be 60 to 120 seconds of solid entertainment. I want it to spread because it’s funny and funny travels.

I know I can do it. I have the talent and the ability and the training. All I need is to generate the pulling power to pull the cork out of the bottle with my creative juices in it, and let things flow. I know I can make it happen!

Well, that made me feel a little better. What else?

I feel like there’s a lot of threshold anxiety involved as well. As the name implies, threshold anxiety happens when someone is afraid to cross that threshold from one situation to another.. This is especially prevalent when the transition is to a “bigger” state of being. like moving from your small town to the big city, or finally telling the person you are dating that you love them.

It’s a transition to a state with far more variables, most of which are unknowns, and it is easy to fall into the trap of eternal “not yet”. Well then…. when?

And what is worse is that your sneaky little metaconscious mind knows that if you keep putting the transition off, the problem will go away. It will go away because you have tragically and irrevocably let people down, given up on yourself, and chosen the safe and familiar terribleness over the new and challenging improvement.

But you feel safe and calm now in your fetid little hidey hole, and you have successfully pushed everything else out of your mind by diving deep into your distractions, and so everything is OK.

Actually, it’s awful. The boat is both on fire and sinking. But you’ve locked your cabin door and turned the radio on really loud so you don’t hear the screams and get back to reading this really good novel you’ve been reading, and then you pretend that everything is just fine and whatever problems are out there will go away on their own.

And then, when you’re floating in the icy North Atlantic, your last thought before you slip beneath the waves tio an icy tomb is “Why do these thing keep happening to ME?”.

Hmmm. Kind got off on a rant against myself. That’s new.

At some point, if I don’t clear the creative clog, I am going to have to write the damned thing through sheer force of will. Drag myself over the miles like a child carrying a bag that is too big for it so they have to push it along.

I don’t want it to come to that. For one thing, it will hurt like a bitch. I would much rather reach deep down and find that spark of feisty fire that acts as the pilot light to the propane oven that is my soul.

Great, now I am nostalgic and homesick.

And if that feisty fairy magic doesn’t work, there’s always rage. Fuck my limitations. Fuck the supposed limits. Fuck indecision and especially fuck fear. I will batter down the gates of heaven to get what I want. I will stir the seas till they rain like a thousand storms down on the cities of the world if I don’t get what I want. I will take a sledgehammer to every part of me that gets in the way of my ambition.

And then I’ll get REALLY MAD.

I think I am getting there. I am getting to the point where I will be willing an d ready to go forth and write the shit out of that thing. I am itching to evolve. I want to leave the wimpy scaredy fragile me behind in the dirt and stride forward with a confidence stride and my head held high because I am awesome.

And that remains true no matter how many times I fuck up in humiliating ways. Fuck that. I am going to make content so fresh and new and powerful that it changes how people look at art forever.

And get rich in the process!

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

First up, sorry there was no blog entry yesterday. As usual, my poor time management skills are to blame. Well, that, and having therapy in the afternoon and hanging out with my friends in the evening.

Tonight should be interesting. A bunch of us from the Secret Informant gang are meeting at a restaurant here in Richmond called Uncle Lu’s for a casual meal and a chance to bond.

I am pickled tink that I have a chance to mingle and maybe make up for not going to the shoot. I am going to do my best to be extra sparkly and try to be a fun as I can without putting too much pressure on myself and giving myself an apoplexy.

I went through a bad cycle about it yesterday. In a Facebook chat window, I asked the group when and where the dinner was going to be. And it took a long time for someone to finally tell me.

Plenty of time for my paranoia to start to work and makes me feel like this was it, they were not telling me because they had decided to get rid of me and didn’t want to get into a whole “thing” by telling me yet. I was going to end up rejected again, pushed out, and it would be my fault for being such a loser.

Those were the thoughts and feelings going through my head yesterday. I know they are crazy but they happened anyway. I am hyper paranoid about rejection and exclusion and getting left behind.

It’s happened. That’s the thing. So my worries were crazy but not entirely unfounded. Tghat’s what happens to the kid that doesn’t fit in. They become a foreign object in the social body of the group, the one person who hasn’t bonded and become tuned to the same channel as the others, and that can spell doom.

I have reached the point, finally, where I am at least willing to entertain the thought of allowing my identity to become immersed into a group. I think I can stifle my paranoia and anxiety long enough to open myself up to the experience.  Let my guard down and take things as they come without all my bells and alarms ringing in my head.

I hope that’s all it takes, because if not, I have no idea what to do I lack the “making friends” skill. Socially speaking, I am way, way behind. Socially retarded, one might say. And so I’ve never actively made a friend in my life.

If I get friends, it’s by accident,. not design. Sad but true.

I hope it’s possible to fix my broken social antenna. The jury is out on that. Those monkeys raised in isolation int eh infamous Harlow study never got better, as far as I know. They remain freaked out by other monkeys for the rest of their lives, and never stopped reacting to attempts at befriending them as if they were personal attack.

I can relate.

I had a low blood sugar incident (LBSI) a few days ago. It was, of course, awful.

It’s true that I had been undereating. It’s something I can’t seem to stop myself from doing despite the risks. After an LBSI, I am good for a while, but eventually the fear fades and I forget and then the stage is set for the next one.

I have thought about why I do this to myself, and what I have found is that I get a feeling of pleasure from self-denial. It makes me happy to deny myself food and thus save money by making my supplied last longer. Makes me feel tough and strong and clever.

So that’s the mental impulse I need to stop. The next time I feel that way, I will stop myself and remind myself that this is exactly how I get into trouble.

In other words, it’s dumb.

The LBSI came upon me suddenly, as usual. I had been playing Witcher Three for a while when I decided I should probably get up to get some water and something to eat.

The moment I stood up, I started to shake while sweating profusely. Either of those by themselves might be harmless, but when they happen together, it can only mean that my body is freaking out over low blood sugar and stuff is starting to malfunction.

So once more, I had to marshal my situationally limited mental capacity in order to do what was needed to save my fucking life.

And it was bad. I had already been tired and sleepy before I got up, so my mental capacity was already somewhat diminished. Then the LBSI hits and suddenly I am almost completely incoherent.

Luckily, I inherited my father’s ability to be calm in a crisis, so I was able to go to the kitchen and grab an apple and a bottle of fruit juice.

The fruit juice was particularly inspired. I had been wishing there was some kind of sugar drink around for rapid short term treatment of the problem, but then I thought, “Wait…. fruit juice has fructose!” and that would have to do.

What followed was me sitting in the living room,. roboticly eating an apple and drinking the fruit juice, soaked in sweat and waiting for the world to stop vibrating.

Eventually, the food and drink to effect and I was able to go back to the kitchen and make myself a more substantial snack and through it, struggle back to normalcy.

So yeah. Another brush with death. For no other reason that I neglected to eat. I can’t even say I forgot. No, I chose not to in order to get that little thrill.

I really want to break these bad circuits in my brain. The ones that encode a whole system of response that is highly self-destructive.  And yet, because they have been reinforced by repetition for so long, they are the easiest thoughts to think.

They are the path of least resistance.

And the path of least resistance sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. After all that talking myself into it that I did in the previous blog entry, I ended up not going to the first ever shooting day for Secret Informant.

I just…. couldn’t. I spent yesterday morning and early afternoon in intense psychological conflict, the good and healthy part of me at war with the bad and sick part of me, and in the end, the bad side won.

And that puts me in a precarious position now because I have managed to hit pause on all the self-loathing that would normally accompany such a failure in my life, and now I feel like I have taken myself hostage and need to be talked down before I pull the trigger on all that self-hate and engage in a freestyle orgy of self-destruction.

The sad truth is, it feels good at the time. Partly. It’s the pleasure of a vented id, I suppose. And a kind of sick, sick vindication of a very dark self-image.

Anyhow, I figure this blog entry will make a good platform for talking myself down off the ledge, so that’s what today’s jumping-off point will be.

So to speak.

My first thought about how to tackle the situation was one of catharsis. Pour all that negative self-evaluation onto the page and then work on repairing the damage. It’s a method that has worked well before – getting it out of your system can be amazingly liberating and you find that once you have expressed it, you do not have to think it or feel it any more.

But as tempting as that sounds, and I mean that sincerely, for some reason that seems like the wrong approach today. Perhaps I am evolving emotionally and now find it mopre important to support my positive self-image than to vent my tired spleen.

On the other hand, maybe the truth is that I am enjoying the sense of detachment I am feeling right now far too much to get into the dirty business of throwing all my nasty thoughts out onto the page.

Either way, let’s move on.

One of the hardest things about recovery is failure. Depression makes a person prone to catastrophic all-or-nothing thinking that is highly maladaptive. Depression leaves us sufferers with so little faith in the world that we only truth experiences that continue to deliver a high level of reward, and then only sparingly.

It’s like eating a piece of cake and only having enough faith in life to believe that there will probably be another forkful after this one, if you’re lucky. To you, it seems extremely possible that something horrible will happen between bites. Something so bad, it will ruin the entire experience. And we can imagine lots of ways for things to go wrong.

So when we start believing in ourselves, it is very fragile and the slightest setback can bring the whole thing tumbling down like a house of cards.

Hmmm. Just got a nibble on a job writing gay supernatural romance novels. Cool.

Anyhoo, with time the edifice of our self-worth stabilizes, but without external support, it remains very fragile.

And all it takes is one “failure” to threaten it.

And I am not talking about failure in general. I am talking specifically about failing to overcome your depression when something important comes along.

Dammit. I’m speaking generally instead of personally again.

I can think of all the reasons I should have gone. But I already listed those in the previous blog entry. And I am sure there will be consequences. And of course, it’s easy to judge myself from my secure place in the future and say “You should have just sucked it up and gone, idiot!”.

But I was going through a lot of shit psychologically speaking. So I can’t even say that going was a possibility, let alone a reasonable option.

And I will learn from this, I think. Next time something like this is coming along, I will be ready to really dig deep and find the motivation to get my ass out the door.

Admittedly, since I graduated, I have not had to do that very much. School generates its own momentum for me. I have a much greater sense of commitment to the school I am attending and a much higher level of the fear of missing out and falling behind as well.

Now it’s just me, and my own issues, and in the case of the shoot, knowing I am not really needed. I still wish I had gone – for the group bonding if nothing else – but looking at the variables, it’s no surprise that I didn’t make it.

And there will be many shoots in the future. I will catch up.

The deal now, then, is self-forgiveness. So I didn’t make it. That’s bound to be the case some of the time. I am an unhealthy person, especially psychologically, and it’s to be expected that now and then, the disease is going to win a round or two.

The thing to do is to hit the reset button hard and fast. Get back up on that horse. Refuse to draw enormous conclusions based on one data point. It’s the exact same challenge and your score is reset to zero. Time for Round 2. FIGHT!

The thing to avoid is using this as an excuse to stop trying and give up on myself. That is loser thinking. And it’s completely illogical as well. Why does a long string of successes mean nothing but one loss means everything? Purely statistically, I am far more likely to succeed next time, based on previous results.

And talk about shortsighted. To give up at this point would be to sacrifice my entire future in order to get very temporary relief from an inner tension.

So no, I am not going to go there. I will forgive myself, take some time to lick my wounds, and be out there hitting it hard again in no time at all.

I can be my dreams. I just have to stay awake.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Weird thing : turns out they had planned to shoot tomorrow, Tuesday, before I got the good script in. Makes me wonder if they were going to shoot the bad one, the one that was way too wordy and repeated itself and basically sucked so bad it put me into a depression for like ten days.

Or at least, that’s how I saw it.

Now about that shooting of things tomorrow : I only found out about it recently, and I am trying as hard as I can to convince myself to go. I am still kicking myself for throwing a hissy fit and skipping the filming of the short move my group did in VFS.

And I know damned well that the most important kind of credit is one that include on set time. The industry needs to know that you can be on set without freaking out or getting in everyone’s way or otherwise being a detriment to the operation.

So I have to go. But its a struggle to convince myself to do it. To talk myself into it. My gut level response to something with so many unknowns – including this all taking place in a restaurant I have never been to that serves a cuisine with which I am not familiar.

This is the place : Hapag Ihaw Ihaw. 

Even the name intimidates me.

And the thing is, I know that I am not needed there. Well, not in my official capacity as a writer. Sometimes writers are on set for quick rewrites and things, but that can be done over the phone or the Net without having to force us introverted writer types to be on a set which is loud and chaotic and full of novel social situations and bright lighting.

But I am getting the feeling that my official job of writer is not going to be needed much. So I am angling to be a producer and director as well. In fact, I want my job title to be Creative Producer. It captures what I want my role to me : someone who oversees the creative side of things and keeps the big picture in mind so that others can concentrate on their individual jobs.

And, ya know, makes sure things are done right.

I have trust and control issues.

So what I want to do tomorrow, once I convince myself to go, is to meet everyone, be pleasant and helpful, look for little jobs I can do, and generally broadcast what an asset I am to have around.

I am dying to see what it’s like when people who know what they are doing are doing things. I have yet to be in such an environment. Seeing that magic coming together, in all its chaotic and crazy splendor, will make it worth the trip even if I end up just sitting by the sidelines while more competent people get shit done.

My paranoia is that I will once more find myself sidelines and slowly pushed out because people just don’t want to deal with me. Nobody actually makes the decision, because that would mean admitting to themselves what they are doing instead of maintaining plausible deniability and letting the herd take the blame.

To some, that would sound like raving paranoia brought on by depression. But this has happened to me many times in my life. I try my best to fit in and get along, and be nice and funny and pleasant to be around, but the body social rejects and ejects me nevertheless and I end up feeling highly unwelcome and then, because I am all about making things easier for other people, I throw myself out.

I am not of the body. And I never will be.

Oh well, Worst case scenario, I just end up inventing my own job and going my own thang. Perhaps that’s what hardcore individualists like me have to do. People who insist on being themselves no matter what. People who refuse to change themselves just because the pack mind says so.  People who are themselves first and everything else second. People who refuse to compromise themselves.

Assholes, basically. Socially maladjusted misfits who somehow never learned that everyone has to give in to fit in, at least a little, and that fitting in brings a plethora of benefits invisible to the uncompromising ego.

Feeling like you belong, for one. Like you are part of something. That it doesn’t have to be you against the world in a battle to define yourself. Feeling safe because you have people who will go to bat for you when the time comes. Feeling comforted by the closeness of others, especially on the emotional level. Feeling warm because you are on the inside now instead of always being on the outside looking in.

In other words,. not being insane.

But oh, it’s so much better to be mentally ill, miserable, and “free”. Everyone should envy how much autonomy I have. After all, I am living a life according to the very individualist principles on which democracies are founded!

That must be why I get so much respect and why all the chicks (with dicks) dig me

Oh well, part two : the wellening. It’s people like me who create things which are truly fresh and unique. The things that change the landscape of art by breaking new ground. And why? Because they are so incredibly themselves.

At some point, though, I am going to have to figures out a compromise between my unrelenting need to be myself and actually being able to be close with people.

Aren’t the comforts of normalcy worth a little compromise of self?

Would it really be so bad to let my identity dissolve into a group now and then?

Billions do it every day and they don’t feel like they have been fatally compromised. They don’t feel like to let that happen would be the equivalent of death because this super stubborn self is the only one they have ever known. They don’t feel ice-cold apprehension and red-hot panic battling it out in a cage made of claustrophobia taken to an existential level when they even THINK of being part of a group identity.

I am one deeply broken unit.

Luckily, that leads to great art.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talk about that brutal inner prosecutor of mine.

I don’t know how to shut it off. That’s been firmly established. They say a lot of recovery is about self-forgiveness and that certainly applies to me. I am constantly tearing myself apart with the harshest and most unfair judgments imaginable. Judgments that basically amount to nothing I do being even remotely good enough.

Whatever I am doing, I am doing it wrong and I shouldn’t have even tried. That’s the voice of my depression and at this point in my life it’s a very strong voice. And it’s pretty much been able to act with impunity and without mercy for a very long time.

Whatever I do, it’s never enough.

And I know it’s a deadly feedback loop, where my lying cheating fascist prosecution attacks and hurts me then uses the fact that I am broken and wounded as further proof that I am horrible and worthy of punishment.

I know that this closed-loop emotional response system is deadly toxic because the same emotions circulate over and over again without being expressed, and the system, maladaptive to the end, responds to this not by forcing an outlet into existence but by shutting down most of its functions and devoting all of its remaining energies to containing the toxic sludge inside me instead.

And the toxins accumulate and the slude becomes more and more radioactive and I end up losing 20 years of my life to depression.

Well, depression and the ability to totally mask my symptoms when others are around. My invisibility reflex has cost me dearly in terms of help and nurturing opportunities because nobody can help you with problems you actively work to conceal from them.

I assume that a lot of people had some idea that I was dealing with some serious shit and had major issues. Or at the very least, they got that there was something wrong with me. I probably put out a pretty weird vibe.

Mixed messages, for sure. I try to be fun and interesting and entertaining, and I’m a sweet guy. And I know I can be very charming and charismatic when I am “on”. But I am also awkward and alienating due to my total lack of socialization as a child, and the resulting awkwardness as I try to think my way through social situations most people navigate through via trained instinct.

It’s like the normal majority all have telekinesis and I am the poor guy trying do everything without it, and then judging myself mercilessly for not doing it as well as them. And they don’t even know that they have it and so they are genuinely puzzled by my inability to do that which is incredibly simple and basic for them.

And try as I might, it’s still an invisible disability and one without a name that immediately explains my problems and so I end up being this pathetic bumbling buffoon who is doomed to forever be apologizing for making the sort of mistakes that people have never seen before and making people maybe not want me around.

Like take Friday night. Please. I was at Felicity’s parents place, hanging out with her and Joe and watching videos like we do, and at one point I ended up needing to use their guest bathroom.

So I do my business and wash my hands and think nothing of it.

next morning, I get a message from Felicity saying I left the faucet running. and it had run all night as a result.  Yes, I somehow forgot the “turn off the faucet” step of washing my big ol hands.

And I mean…. who does that kind of thing? Crazy people, that’s who. Mentally intact people do not. And this is the kind of thing happens to me over and over and over again and there seems to be nothing I can do to stop it.

All through my childhood,. I was told I could prevent these mishaps by  “just paying closer attention to what you are doing.”

And I try, I really do. But no matter what, it never adds up to competence. If I pay more attention to one thing, I let another thing slip. It’s so demoralizing and depressing to know that despite your best efforts, your life is going to keep bringing you back to the same humiliating place over and over again.

I hope some day I am famous and respected enough that the bizarre brain errors of mine are seen as a charming eccentricity and symptomatic of the high cost of genius.

Or at the very least, that I get enough money for it to no longer matter.

I do wonder sometimes if there is something physically wrong with me. Like there is some subtle but deep error in how my brain works that keeps me from being able to cope on a physical level.

I’ve talked before about how my brain prioritizes its inner processes over anything to do with reality. So I never know when something internal will overwrite whatever it is I am trying to do or remember or whatever and I am left struggling to cope with the resulting loss of realtime cognitive coping power.

It makes for a highly unstable mental environment.

And yet, it is also what give me my magic powers. Those powerful internal processes are what power my creativity, intellect, and insight. I am constantly struggling to truly understand the world and that means that many tracks of correlation and deduction are running at all times – even in my sleep.

Especially in my sleep.

With my conscious mind asleep, those rude and greedy inner processes have the whole mind to themselves. No wonder I wake up tired all the time.

It never stops.

In some ways, I feel compromised. because I know this intense prioritization of internal processes is the source of a lot of my problems.

But I could never give up the benefits of them.

I mean, if I didn’t fill my mind with all this stuff, something terrible would happen.

I would have to live life in the real(time) world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just to get this out of the way : water imagery!

I have been contemplating the iceberg that sits on my heart and keeps me from being able to totally relx around people, let alone be truly open with them and thus connect with them on more than an intellectual level.

I can feel it\ there, a gnarled knot of tension and fear and paranoia, and compared to it, the rest of the the ice around my heart is a  half-cup of lukewarm slush.

It’s where all those miles of frozen tundra inside my soul come from. It is the frigid prison I built for myself to keep the world OUT and be SAFE. Safe where nobody could touch me. Safe where I knew the arctic winter cold would kill anyone who tried.

And some have tried, and died, banging their hearts on some mad bugger’s wall. I didn’t know how to let them in. Presumably I did know at one time, but after a while these things get rusted in place.

It’s not their fault. I just couldn’t relate to them. They were… normal. They had normal childhoods with normal parents who fussed over them, scolded them, looked out for them, worried about them, and fought with them.

I couldn’t be part of that world. Not with all that ice in me. I was stuck in an over-intellectualized trap that kept me safe… and isolated. I could never let down my guard. Not with people who live in the real world, undetached.

I still don’t know if I can be part of that world. I’d like to be. Heck, I long to be. part of that warm and shining world that I saw in the windows of other people’s houses. I would look and wonder what it was like to live there. In that world.

But I lacked the language and the mental flexibility to recognize what the problem was. I suppose that was part of the shared reality of my family. I would look into those houses and wish I was there but then I would admonish myself and feel guilty because I could neither see nor articulate what they had and my family did not.

Life just seems more…. real in there. It was a world full of people for whom icy intellectualism is not an option so they had no choice but to deal with things as they come and do they best they could with the muddle of emotions and thoughts that life had given them.

Sometimes they act on emotion. And they don’t feel ashamed of it either. That’s an acceptable thing in their world. These people did not grow up in the kind of regime of extreme emotional hygiene I did.

In many ways, my mother is a very sweet, kind, wonderful person.

But if you are afraid to upset your mother because you love her so much, that does not leave a lot of room for honesty, and without honesty, there is no intimacy. No connection. I feel like my siblings and I all got the same programming mixed in with our sloppy joes on Saturday night,.

That programming said : always be peaceful and calm and happy around Mom. Don’t let any negative emotions show because she will get upset and she is such a strong projecting empath that the negativity will come right back at you, along with the terrible guilt about having upset her.

So I don’t know about my siblings, but I never told her a damned thing about what was really going on in my head or my life. Around her, I was always OK. Fine, really. No need to worry about little ol’ me. Nothing to see here. Move along.

That left me with nobody I felt I could talk to about my problems. And no way to express all my negative emotions… including the suicidal ones.

And the thing is,. I think I internalized this regime of always being A O K as far as the world was concerned. It was definitely not okay for me to not be okay. I knew deep down that what people wanted was a response that reassured them enough so that they could go back to not thinking about me.

Like this little alarm went off in their heads now and then and they realized they had been ignoring me for a long time and there was probably something they should be doing about that. Probably.

So it was easy for me to give them that signal they wanted. I knew that no good could come of saying anything but that I was fine. People wanted to maintain the momentum of their daily lives and if I had given a non-OK response, it would have ended up in an emotional train wreck as people reacted with a level of shock commensurate to my suddenly projectile vomiting blood while my head rotated.

Get your kids the Fun Time Exorcist Sprinkler Toy today.

That’s how unexpected a non-OK response would have been. A non-OK response would have forced people to deal with me as a human being when they were so comfortable forgetting I existed.

No way that would have gone unpunished. No way I rated even one percent of that kind of emotional investment.

My conception was an accident. Do I was born already an inconvenience. An imposition. And my family was quietly determined to keep the disruption to their lives to an absolute minimum, and that meant minimizing me.

And to this day, I feel like I don’t have a right to exist. Like I am a detriment to all who know me and nobody ever really wants me around or wants to hear from me,. and if I am lucky enough to accidentally get some attention, I am comeplled to do my darnedest to entertain them as best as I can in order to encourage them to keep the attention coming for as long as I can.

That last thing I would do is reveal anything remotely negative or serious about myself. Then people would run away in packs because I was already wearing their patience thin just be attracting their attention and reminding them I exist.

Any negative emotion coming for me would be a patience-snapping unendurable imposition of the highest possible order.

So I kept everything locked up tight inside. Nothing else was safe.

And I learned to disappear. After all, that’s what seemed to make people the happiest. When I did my level best to preserve the illusion of my nonexistence.

Don’t talk at the dinner table. Don’t attract attention to yourself. Never ask for anything, ever.  Not even if your life depends on it. Go along with whatever your parents ask of you, They are both busy and tired and they have enough on their plates dealing with their three older PLANNED children. The ones they INVITED.

So you’ll just have to fit in wherever. Or not. We don’t care either way. Just don’t bother us by having any kind of needs or wants or desires or anything.

Meanwhile, I was drowning at the bottom of an icy-cold ocean and being crushed by the pressure.And I didn’t even know it.

It persists to this day. There’s a lot of things I would like to talk over with my mother AND my siblings, but that would disrupt THEIR lives, and so no matter how much it might help me, it’s completely out of the question.

My needs never even enter into it. I am worth absolutely no investment of time, energy, consideration, or even mere thought, or any other conceivable resource, whatsoever.

And that’s why I grew up to be crazy,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.