It is time for me to  to give birth to all that’s ugly and horrible in me so that I can, at long last, be clean.

Don’t worry. It’s won’t be like, all at once, like explosive diarrhea.

But that is what it is going to take for me to become who I really am. I can see that very clearly now. There will have to be a very big purge of negative thoughts, old tapes, personal demons, ghosts of the past, and deathly chill of the grave.

So less of a purge and more of an exorcism. Hey, it’s almost Halloween, I’m allowed to get a little ghoulish.

Isn’t that right, Vincent Von Ghoul?

I’ll that that as a yes.

Anyhow, it has occurred to me that I will need to go through a lot of emotional emesis ^[1] in the next little while if I am to disinter me true self from under all the accumulated rubble of the last forty years or so.

And, like actual emesis, no matter how necessary it may be and how much better I will feel afterwards, it will still be a painful and disgusting and disturbing experience.

But I am ready. I am sick and tired of my depression and I am good and mad enough to do something about it. A large portion of my energies are being directed into shoring up and inflating my self-worth to at least normal healthy dimensions, and anything that gets in the way of that has got to go.

Not sure exactly what form that will take, but you can be fairly sure writing will be involved, and therefore, so will you, my dear and patient readers.

That’s nothing new, I suppose. I’ve been coughing up the badness on these pages since 2011, after all. But it might increase in intensity and vividness, and might come in the form of fiction.

Probably horror via some easy metaphor.

Exorcism and such.

Had therapy today. Another Therapy Thursday. Session went reasonably well. I did most of the talking, which is usually a good-ish sign, because it means I had both a lot on my mind and the energy to spit it out.

My therapist has trouble keeping up with me when I am like that, sadly. But so would most people. And I wasn’t even going at full speed.

If I expressed myself at full speed and maximum density, people would think I was insane. Or possibly that they were.

Either way, not good.

I told him about my recent uptick and explained some of the stuff I have written about it in this space to him as well. And of course, by talking out loud to a sympathetic audience about it, a bunch more stuff that I hadn’t thought of before came up.

I have so many issues that they pop up like tissues from a box of Kleenex. Take oneout and up pops another, and another, and another…. till the box is empty, I suppose.

I have no idea what having that box be empty for the first time in my adult life would be like, but I am keen to find out.

The most important thing is to remember that I am awesome. I am an amazing dude with boatload of talents both general and specific, and I have a lot – and I mean a LOT – to offer the world.

And I am confident that, sooner or later, I will hook up with some way to unleash my talents upon the world, especially after getting rid of all that dirty ugly scar tissue.

See how I brought it back to the topic like that? Classic.

Because the thing is, none of that garbage is me. It’s just stuff that has happened to me. I’ve made the mistake of thinking its dirty and disgusting nature means I too am dirty and disgusting for far too long and it is high time I flushed it out of my system.

With some kind of…. soul laxative.

And to that end, I am now, at last, to accept my own awesomeness as an a priori fact which requires no proof. In fact, I am shifting the burden of proof entirely onto reality.

It’s up to the world to prove I am not awesome. And the evidence to do so will have to be pretty thorough and complete.

As in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” level thorough and complete.

As far as I am concerned, all the evidence points to my being a great guy. Not perfect by any means, but high in awesome things like kindness, morality, empathy, sympathy, nurturing, and the urge to shelter and protect people.

And that’s just my “nice guy” assets.

It’s possible that, in the past, one of the things people liked about me was my humility. That’s going to change, sorry. It’s not going to go away – I will always be someone who believes in keeping it real and not being a dick to people no matter what.

But I might come across as more brash and confident now and that is sure to distress some people who know me.

Sucks to be them! Because I sincerely do not care. Life’s too short to cater to people who preferred the sick version of you.

I was sick. Now I’m better. This is the real me. Deal with it.

I am also done with worrying so much about whether I will become an egotistical asshole. If it happens, it happens. I will do my best to avoid it or at least to keep it within reasonable, tolerable levels, but if that’s the price I pay for my happiness, fine.

Because the truth is that I am amazing. A big ego is justified. I haven’t had one before now because I was sick, but now I am ready to claim my throne at last.

This is my kingdom and I shall rule it as I see fit.

Bring on the dancing boys!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, my wallet went through the washer today.

Totally my fault. Didn’t check the pockets like I should. Also, put my pants in hamper with wallet still in the pocket.

And I can feel that old familiar chasm opening up inside me, ready to stuff my self esteem in its cavernous mouth, chew on it messily, swallows, then poop out depression so fast that it’s universally hailed as a triumph of metabolism

But I’m not going to let that happen this time. This time I’m going to put a stick in that mean ol alligator’s mouth so that he can’t bite down on me.  And then I am going to pull myself out of its jaws and walk away unscathed.

Because really, it’s no big deal. These things happen. To everybody.  Maybe they happen to me slightly more others, and maybe they don’t.

The body of evidence is wildly insufficient to support either claim.

And so it is my choice whether I want to see this as yet another example of behaviour that fits into an overall, damning pattern of unwise actions.

In other words, I can see this as me being a dumbass again and having that spiral into an all encompassing self-loathing that makes me question my right to live.

Or I can see it as one of life’s speedbumps and gaily motor onwards.

Because really, how much does a thing like this really matter? My money is fine. I take back every bad thing I have ever said about Canada’s switch to plastic money. It’s saved my ass two or three times now.

However, I am keeping the smack I talked about Stephen Harper. Fuck that guy.^[1]

And my ID seems to be fine too. Once again, yay plastic. The stamp that won me that Xbox One S looks a little worse for wear, but the website said I probably won’t need it anyway. And that makes sense, seeing as they are taking 6 to 8 weeks to verify my identity for some reason.

Surely in that amount of time they can get all the information they will ever need in order to prove that I am, indeed, that guy that entered the winning code into the website and that said code is, indeed, a winning code and the odds against me having just made a lucky guess are astronomical.

The actual game piece is merely the delivery mechanism for the all important code.

So really, no harm done. Yeah, it made me feel kinda stupid, but that’s as far as it needs to go. I did it, it was dumb, but no harm was done, so it’s over.

Conclusions drawn from this data point about my fitness for being alive and other negative extractions from the date are neither warranted nor justified.

And really, what do incidents like that matter compared to the beauty and magnitude of my abilities? It’s not like a prediliction for certain kinds of mistakes invalidates anything else I can do.

I mean, think of any person known to have an extraordinary talent. As an example, I choose Tiger Woods. He’s arguably the best golfer there has ever been. Sure, his career ended on an embarrassing note, but nobody really gives a shit about that in the long run. He will always be the greatest.

But for all I know, he’s even more absentminded and clueless than I am,. I don’t know what he’s like at home. I don’t know what kind of shenanigans his loved ones and servants have to put up with. I don’t know if his personal assistant has to juggle like a madman just to keep him from wandering into traffic.

And the thing is, it doesn’t matter. He’s an extraordinarily talented golfer and made a lot of money for a lot of people, including himself, with his skills.

Compared to that, whether or not he has top notch life skills is so trivial it barely exists.

So yeah, I’m a bit of a goof because I’m a head in the clouds thinker and dreamer who is too absorbed by the world inside his head to pay sufficient attention to the world outside it. So what?

So was Sir Isaac Newton, and he practically invented modern science.

So really, what is needed here is perspective. One of the many ways depression fucks with you is that is shrinks your perspective down to a pinhole size, and that can’t help but make small problems look very large and keep you trapped in a world where the simplest of things are enormous challenges.

And it is possible to fight that, but only when you are ready. It’s not a step the average depressive can take until they are quite a long way down the road to recovery like I am.

But me, I am crazy for perspective. I want to see things from all the angles so that I can get a sense of what is really going on and, most importantly, get a sense of the true scale of things so that I can prioritize.

And so it is good for me to gain some perspective at this point on my journey. These little errors of mine are not important enough to even count against my self-esteem, let alone devour the whole thing.

I will continue to be my sweet and  funny self no matter what, and in view of thing, my error prone nature is merely a charming eccentricity.

Nobody cares if a person of great talent can balance their checkbook.

So who cares if I launder my money now and then?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.