I hear it’s a very good movie, but for the moment, it’s an unrelated blog post title.

Back to not being able to let people in.

It is not without cost, and I am not just talking about the icy starvation I talked about the last time, although that’s more than enough.

I think I suffer from the numbness of the interface layer as well. I think that the lack of the emotional input that should be there is painful in and of itself, and that I avoid social contact as much due to this pain as due to the usual social fear.

And I suspect that this pain is the palest of shadows lesser, but of the same kind, as the pain autistic people feel. And possibly also the pain that drives some sociopaths to act of violence and sadism.

Deep down, we know what should be there. And so even when the part of us that senses the missing thing is dead or numb, part of us cries out with pain from its phantom, like when your foot falls asleep.

Technically, you are not in pain. Pain is a sensation, not a lack of sensation. But some deep inner warning system is tells you something is WRONG.

And whatever part of you receives the input from that mental limb is picking up nothing but painful static and a tortuous kind of dial tone.

Holy shit. Kids today will have never heard a dial tone. Let alone dialed anything.

I think this pain fuels and informs my social anxiety. On some level, it hurts to be around people, even when it is otherwise quite lovely.

Luckily, I am not the sort ot turn that kind of thing into some grand philosophical system of misanthropy. I have never been able to image the grapes to be sour simply because I want them and can’t have them.

Maybe I would be better off if I was. The deluded seem so much happier.

This painful isolation of mine began at an early age, as we have discussed, and so I don’t know how much of my sense of abandonment and feeling that I was lost and neglected is legit and how much was simple due to being sealed off from the world by the traumatic scar tissue from my early childhood rape.

Sex has such a powerful effect on us that it’s no wonder some retreat into prudery. If some stranger had walked up and socked me in the jaw, sure I would have been upset and I would have taken quite the blow to my sense of trust in the world, but it would not have been the same kind of deep trauma.

It also would have been something I would have immediately told people about and the perpetrator would have instantly been seen as a villain and dealt with accordingly. Because no dark and tender taboos were involved, the situation would have been easy to talk about and deal with, and I would most likely have seen justice done.

But because it was a sexual attack, I never told anyone about it. That’s common in victims of sexual assault. The deep sense of violation brings with it a very deep sense of shame. It’s the only way the brain has of interpreting the experience.

Intellectually, you might know and believe that you did nothing wrong and that it’s the perpetrator who should be ashamed, but on a deep level that doesn’t matter because it’s something far deeper than reason and logic that has been injured and nothing rational can penetrate that deep.

I have internal injuries, and those can be tricky to spot.

I still think someone should have noticed how poorly I was doing outside the academic arena and arranged some kind of intervention.

The right child psychologist could have done wonders for me. Or even just someone who cared enough to invest sustained effort and lots of love in me despite what an odd little creature I was.

I try to imagine what it must have been like to be around a highly unpredictable and willfully independent child as I was. I did not follow any of the usual patterns of behaviour people expect of a child.

I had little to no interest in toys. In fact, I never really “played” in the old fashioned schoolyard sense. You never would have found me happily building a sand castle or pushing a toy car around making vroom noises.

I never saw the point of that kind of thing. Even then, I was constantly hungry for mental stimulation, and toys don’t provide that on their own.

It would never occurred to me to make up little stories to go with my play. No Spaceman Spiff for me. I can only assume that most children do this sort of fantasization because of some deeply programmed social instinct.

And even back then, I was not one to act on instinct.

And that should have been a sign that there was something very wrong with me.

I was not going through the usual stages of development. I was not doing well emotionally or socially. I was very ill, and nobody knew.

They were too dazzled by my precocious intelligence to imagine that there was anything wrong with me. And those who knew better found me strange and unpleasant to be around and therefore did not want to deal with me at all.

And I was too shy to demand attention.

If I could go back and start over (preferably skipping infancy, because eww), I would be one feisty little kid. I would not allow myself and my concerns and my wellbeing to be ignored. I would kick up a fuss whenever I was being neglected and given my native IQ and sharp mind, I would have a lot of fuss volume.

And I sure as fuck would not let myself be bullied or let my bullies go unpunished by the authorities. I would demand action and if I did not get it, there would be heck to pay.

I’d be too young for hell.

But it’s far too late for that. All I can do is try to cope with reality the best I can.

That’s all any of us can ever do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about my dizziness again, and the effect on my emotional state.

To recap, I have realized recently that I am slightly dizzy pretty much 24/7. Even just sitting here, the small movements my head makes as I type give me a tiny bit of vertigo. I feel like my head is one of those watermelons spiked with vodka and every time I move, the vodka and watermelon juice slosh into a new position.

It made me a little nauseous to type that.

It’s so fucking hard to be me.

No wonder I have the urge to go to bed all the time. As anyone who has suffered from vertigo can tell you, the only way to stop feeling so dizzy is to lie down. That removes the feeling that you are constantly in the danger of falling, and lets you rest you head on a pillow and keep it more or less level.

It has to be a sinus thing. Or maybe blood pressure. But sinus would make the most sense. My sinuses get blocked up and cause there to literally be flud slshing about in my head. I’ve had bad sinuses all my life and they only very very occasionally caused vertigo before, but it’s the most plausible explanation that fits the facts.

And that means it’s probably right.

And so I have been introspecting on this idea and how it relates to my emotional state, and I think it goes all the way down to the core of my current malady. It would explain the suspended, frictionless feeling I have had lately. Like I have no traction in life, and no impulse, which is what I call the sort of twitch of life that drives me forward.

It’s hard to explain. And if I try, it will only cause topic drift.

Unsurprisingly, when you feel like yuou might fall at any second and that you are suspended in a frictionless fluid like a pickled specimen, it makes you feel kind of insecure. And that insecure feeling is poison for my fragile mood.

I talk about safety a lot with my therapist. He’s shown me that a lot of depression has to do with a potent prioritization of safety above all other concerns and regardless of the cost to other areas of my life.

That, obiously, comes from having been hurt at a very tender age. As I have said here before, that fundamentally wrecked my sense of safety and left me anxious and insecure because I always feel like danger is lurking all around me.

The bullying didn’t exactly help with that either.

And so I float through life, without the ability to impel myself in any particular direction (and how does one choose from a vast ocean of options anyway), feeling as trapped and helpless as a fly trapped in amber, and dependent on random fluctuations of my internal chemicals and, for all I know, the cosmic background radiation to decide when I will have energy and drive and optism and the ability to move forward in life.

It helps to have a reasonable goal, and by reasonable, I mean one I can achieve despite my issues. Signing up for Kwantlen was online, and ergo within my wheelhouse.  Ditto VFS. It took relatively little sustained effort to get the whole thing start and then it had its own momentum that I could surrended to.

In order to combat this mucousoid vertigo (fancy, no?), I am going to have to resume my vigilence over the state of my sinuses, and keep both my nose and my ears clean. I felt an itch in my ear the other day, and in the process of scratching it, I discovered that my aural canal was very clogged, and upon clearing it and its twin, I felt a great deal of relief. I guess when the pressure and the sloshing are there for long enough, I stop experiencing them consciously.

I am good at that. Pushing things out of my conscious mind. Too good for my own good, to be honest. Sure, it is what gives me the sharp clear logical mind that sees so much and that has so much room for big ideas and complex creativity, but there are some things which should have override priority because they represent valuable information on how to be less miserable.

In other words, some emotions should have permission to kick down the door, shotgun in hand, and say “All right, nobody here is getting out alive unless we deal with this shit RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”.

But no. I just drown myself in my distractions, never getting traction enough for action, choosing the numbness of inaction over the dim prospect of successful transactions almost every single time.

That may or may not have been poetry.

Perhaps I am emotionally dizzy as well. I feel so disoriented and unable to focus sometimes. Like I have some kind of malaria type malady that saps my energy and makes my life that of the invalid of old.

Except, of course, that they had people taking care of them. At least some of the time.

Maybe that’s the key, though. They knew they were invalids and had a certain sort of place in society that was understood and accepted. We don’t have that now.

And maybe what I really need to do is stop pretending that I am a functional person who just needs to get over a few things and face the fact that I am a fundamentally broken person, just as surely as if I had muscular dystrophy, and the wisest thing I can do is to accept that fact, gather what assets I have, and try to use them to build some kind of a life for myself. One that takes my limitations into account.

I think that, deep down, I have had this feeling that one day, when I have success and romance and a career, I will simply walk away from the fever dream that has been my entire adult life and then I will be a normal healthy person.

And that’s definitely the direction I want to go – but I have to accept that I might never get there. And realize that I am not a temporarily embarrassed healthy person who is going to snap out of if any day now and only then will I start truly living.

I’m alive now. I should be living now. Forget all my dreams and lofty ambitions and concentrate on being as happy as I can be with what I have.

And stop waiting for the bus of life to arrive, because it ain’t coming.

I’m just going to have to learn to walk.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.