Right now, I feel like you could spread my brain on toast.
It’s for the usual reason. Namely, that I have had some fo my difficult sleep and now I am the usual combinations of dizzy, confused, disoriented, sweat-soaked, half-asleep, and just the tiniest bit nauseous.
Holy shit, I remember dreaming that I was walking through a commercial district and people kept coming up to me to complain about how I smelled, and it kept escalating as people started actively telling me I should leave and eventually everyone on the street had stopped waht they were doing to say “leave!” over and over. And then a cop showed up to lead me away. I think I might have been homeless.
Jesus, brain, what did I ever do to you?
That dream is clearly a product of a whole bunch of my dee psychological issues. My social anxiety, my feelings of being toxic and horrible, of being so bad I don’t even deserve to be around, my intense feelings of shame, all of it.
And the thing about it that strikes me the most is that I didn’t stand up for myself at all. If that happened in real life, the chip on my shoulder would get activated and I would fight back verbally, and as you patient readers know, I am very very good at that.
It wouldn’t necessarily be the smart thing to do – especially if I mouthed off to the cop – but it would be a way of retaining what self-respect I have and I would be proud of myself ro having defended myself instead of just giving up.
But in the dream I just got sadder and sadder. It definitely was something that had happened to me many times before and I had that “oh god, not again” feeling the whole time. I was totally resigned to my fate. All I felt was shame and despair.
So, ya know. Not a good dream.
I can only hope that this dream is part of the process of my overcoming all those issues and healing from the old wounds that cause them.
And now I feel crappy emotionally as well as physically. Great.
Oh well, this too shall pass. Just like it did last Thursday.
It was a pretty rough therapy session because I was in the selfsame mental state the whole time and so it was very hard for me to think and that meant for a slow and painful session as I tried to force my burning brain to work.
I am all about the long sequential sentences today. Like a litle kid.
Kid : OK, so, then Billy said I was stupid and I said he was a poopyhead and then Ton said we were both being retarded and Billy and I told him we’re not supposed to use that word any more and he asked why and…
As difficult as the session was, I managed to voice a lot of my fears and anxieties, and as a result, when I left the therapist’s office I felt great. There was a spring in my step and I was walking on air.
The fact that I was emerging into a gloriously sunny day was probably a factor. But mainly, I think that my mental defenses were down and that lets a lot of raw unprocessed emotion find release.
So I had gotten rid of a lot of my bullshit. Like I’d had an emotional enema.
Again, sorry for the gross imagery, but its fits so perfectly. I have been severely emotionally constipated for a very long time (like most North American men) and, well, there’s only cure for constipation and that’s for everything to come out.
In a way, it’s sort of amazing the way our bodies and minds can store all this unprocessed emotion. One would think that one might eventually run out of room. Perhaps that is when people have their big nervous breakdown or midlife crisis.
Or in the worst case scenario, a sudden burst of violence.
That’s why it’s “always the quiet ones”. A lot of us are quiet because, for whatever reason, we can’t express ourselves in a normal and healthy way, and that means the pressure inside us build and builds.
Thus, some kind of involuntary release becomes inevitable, even if all it results in is depression and suicidal thoughts.
It’s what turns someone into an artist, or at least one of the things that can do it. You take a quiet repessed person who has a lot of emotions that need to come out and you give them art as a way of relieving the pressure and boom, you have an artist.
Hence my need to write. Whatever the normal thing is to do with all my emotions, thoughts, theories, and dreams, I can’t do it, and so I need to do it by writing.
That’s a mucbh slower method than, say, a huge emotional breakdown, but it works. As wr all know, I am not, as far as I can tell, capoable of huge dramatic emotional breakdowns. No matter what happens, I just keep on going, like a depressed Energizer bunny. No breakdowns. No crises. No hospitalizations. No interventions.
Just the quiet agony of depression and the things I do to try to deal with the pain.
Because it never stops. Some days are better than others, but the pain never totally stops. It’s like arthritis of the soul. Even in those rare times when I am feeling good, it is still there, grinding away in the background, and ready to sink its teeth back into me at soon as it can.
After all, things have to return to “normal”, don;t they? Even if normal is terrible. SO the minute I catch myself being happy, the contract goes on my joy, with orders to kill my happiness as soon as possible and by whatever means necessary.
And the sad truth is that when the assasins succeed, a small but powerful part of me sighs in relief and says “That’s much better. ”
God, that’s depressing.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.