Once more,. I shall do the psychological equivalent of sticking my finger down my throat in order to get rid of the poisons I have been swallowing for all these years.

An unpleasant image, I grant, but apt. And way less gross than the alternative.

I don’t know where to start. I know I am still not “done” I still have so much that I I need to “bring up”. I can feel it inside me, toxic and slimy, lurking at the lowest points of my psyche like polluted groundwater.

I’m just so fucking sick of it. You know what I mean? Sick of the whole damn thing. Sick of this life I live. Sick of counting off time till it’s respectable to die Sick of being myself, so limited and broken and weak, instead of being the powerful, competent, strong person who does a lot of good in the world that I know I can be.

That person, thqat version of me, lives inside me and struggles to emerge.

It’s taking longer than I anticipated.

But each day, he grows stronger and more real. More and more. he emerges as the real me for longer times and in fuller force.

Some day, I hope to be able to leave the old me behind and just be that guy all the time, and leave this stupid life behind as I finally, at long last,  bloom.

But I have a lot of fear and shame to overcome first. And rage.

So much rage.

The shame, or rather the depth andthe  pervasive nature of it, is a releatively new discover. Right now, all I can do is look at it from a distance and admire its rippling toxicity while I wonder how the hell I am going to deal with it.

And it’s attached to so many of my other issues. Certainly my crippling shyness is rooted in it.  In turn, the shyness is connected to my deep social anxiety.

Those things I think people are thinking about me when I am out in public alone are quite clearly all coming from me. The idea that people hate me and wish I would go away and are maximum outraged that I would even dare to leave my home and expose the world to my horribleness sure ain’t coming from them.

They are merely that which I use to externalize that emotion of self-loathing.

And as we have seen, that feeling comes from how I was treated as a child, and honestly for the rest of my life as well.

People do not want to be around me. I disturb them. I stand outside the walls of their social reality and by doing so, remind them that the walls exist and that there is a far vaster universe,. both inner and outer, that lies outside those playpen walls and that’s a thought that scares the crap out of them.

Plus I intimidate them. I don’t mean to. But most average people have never met anyone as smart as I am and I never learned to cloak my raging IQ and only show a safe amount of the iceberg, so I radiate intelligence on many frequencies.

And that is semi-intentional. I really want people to think I am brilliant. Not in a threatening way. Just in an admiring way.

I’ve been crazy freaking smart for my whole fucking ilfe and I would really like to start cashing in on that, please.

Regardless of intentionality, the point is that I scare average people because they can feel the power of my mind and yet I do not produce the signals that allow them to put me in a category they understand.

My signals are mixed, is what I am saying, and that confuses people so much that if they had their choice, they would rather I was a total asshole who was arrogant and dismissive and rude, because THOSE, they know how to handle.

Better a defined and understandabe evil than an undefined mysterious good.

And the mixed messages are semi-intentional as well. I defy categorization as a matter of course. I demand, with every fiber of my being, that I be treated as an individual, as me, and not some collection of categories into which I can be neatly filed.

And people hate that.

This defiance is so core to my being that I can’t imagine being any other way. And I know that I instincively preserve my undefined status and give interestingly vague answers to question I feel are too nosy or reek too much of categorization.

This can be very annoying to people. They want to be able to get some kind of clear idea of what and who I am.  They need to do it. There’s just plain too many goddamned people in the world to treat them all as individuals.

And yet, I defy it. I suppose, on some level, I feel like this will force people to deal with me as an individual and thus enable us to communicate as equals.

It doesn’t work that way. People don’t like being forced to do anything, let alone forced to deal with someone they barely know as an individual, and so they do what any smart animal does to avoid being trapped and just don’t deal with me.

Problem solved, at least from their point of view. They can quickly pave over the cracks in reality I have opened and go right back to their normal lives and never even think about me again. if they can help it.

It’s like I come across as lazy but powerful predator who is made all the more dangerous by his shapeshifting abilities and general mysteriousness.

I’m a friendly predator. I come across as harmless, which I am. But I think that for some people. the impression of being in the presence of a powerful predator never goes away, and they are disturbed by me.

After all, a friendly tiger is still a tiger, right? Sure he’s friendly NOW, but….

It seems impossible, but I guess I am going to try to come up with a version of me that I can live with who can restrain his need to prove how smart he is all the time just enough to stop unsettling people.

I don’t want to do it.

But it’s my only route to getting the positive social signals I so desperately need.

Things going well.

People liking me.

Feeling relaxed and safe amongst strangers.

People treating me nicely and my treating them the same.

Feeling like I am useful and worthwhile.

And so forth and son on, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

I think that’s worth being a little more open to the idea of being socially defined.

I am a very lonely man.

And it;s time I opened the door.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Bastard, as in illegitimate.

Caught myself in the act of being self-destructive tonight, as I made the meal I am currently eating, and I decided it was something I really wanted to explore in the blog entry for today.

First, some quick recent history : Yesterday,  instead of going to therapy (see yesterday’s blog entry for why). Joe was nice enough to take my first to my bank so I could deposit some cash  onto my reloadable VISA and then on to do the usual weekly Costco shopping but with the added bonus of me.

See, usually said shopping is done while I am in therapy. Anyhow.

Sadly,. we did not end up going to Costco, though it was not for lack of trying. But the parking lot was absolutely packed. We circled for a while but then gave up when it became apparent that it would take a while before we even had a shot at a parking space. So we went to PriceMart (shop Mart…. shop PriceMart) instead.

Aside : God this area is densifying out of control. All these high rise apartment buildings are being built in a four block area near the Skytrain but nobody is building the rest of the new infrastructure required to support that bump in population. Why? Because poiliticians are the whores of the real estate developers, that’s why.

Anyhoo, at PriceMart. I ended up buying two pints of my fave new discovery. Chapman’s Sugar Free Ice Cream, and two bags of microwave burritos.

The burritos were part of an effort to make my diet contain more calcium and protein. Buttitos are great for that. They have cheese and beans, so there is your calcium and protein right there, and they zap up in like two minutes, plus they are delicious.

The ice cream’s part of an effort to make myself happy by putting food in my face.

Been working on that one for a long time/.

So I am taking the burritos out of the freezer when I feel a pang of guilt about how much more freezer space I am now taking up with my stuff.

And that’s crazy. Completely crazy. Not in any sense connected to reality.

Because why should I feel guilty for using up more of the freezer space that I have as much right to as either of my roommates? It makes no sense. I am nowhere near taking up a third of the space, and there is plenty of their stuff in there too. So why on Earth do I feel guilty for taking up more?

The answer involves two related forces in my mind : my feeling that I have no right to be here, and my compulsive self-minimization.

You can see how one leads to the other. I feel like I have no right to even be alive, and thus I feel like I should at least make an effort to make sure I am the smallest and lightest burden on people’s lives that I can be.

It’s how I was raised.

And this pervasive guilt for taking up space and air and other resources that should be going to other, worthier people (in other words, everyone) is one of the prime forces in my personality and especially in my depression.

It’s why I live my life in a constant state of cringing apology. Like I have to apologize for even being alive. I was an unplanned child and throughout my childhood., I was treated like I was a dog my family regretted buying.

It’s not my fault. I didn’t ask to be here. I just showed up.

It was made very clear to me by the way I was treated that I was not important at all. I was, at best, a warm afterthought, and should be happy that I get anything at all.

I emphasize : this is not something I was told. It’s how I was treated. And how you treat a child matters a million times more than what you say to them.

Although, come to think of it, multiple times in my childhood, when looking at pictures of me as a preschooler,. my brother said “You used to be so cute. What happened? ”

He meant it as playful teasing, but it really hurt.

What happened? I stopped being a puppy and became a full grown dog.

If that comes as a shock to you, then you’re an idiot.

So I grew up with this intense and pervasive feeling of illegitimacy. Like I deserved nothing ever. Everyone and everything in the universe was more important and more deserving than I was, and therefore absolutely anything I got, I did not deserve and should be both grateful for it and feel guilty about forever.

And that feeling still haunts me to this day. And it’s very easy to exploit. I was trained to always be accomodating and helpful, so even people who are not particularly selfish or greedy can come to take my ready compliance and desperate desire to be helpful for granted, and end up walking all over me without even knowing.

But that’s rare, because I would have to get in people’s way in the first place for me to end up getting trod upon. And I don’t do that.

Early on in my life, my sister told me that I was useless and that the best way for me to help was to sit quietly and stay out of the way.

I took that to heart.

The result is my life as it is now. I am so dedicated to staying out of the way that I find it hard to do anything which involves making myself visible, let alone actually acting like I have some kind of right to something.

Hence my agoraphobia. I can only feel calm and safe when I am tucked away in my bedroom playing video games and otherwise just killing time because anything else requires making myself known and present to people and I can’t handle the shame.

That’s why the closest thing I have to a social life requires me to wear a mask, a mask called Fruvous. I know that I, Michael Bertrand, deserve nothing in this world.

But maybe Fruvous does.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And yet, here we are.

Misery continues to stalk me. It has lost a lot of steam lately but it is still there, waiting to pounce me in an undistracted moment and make me hate myself and the world and life all over again.

But I don’t really care.

That’s the thing about this. Even when I feel really depressed, like I’ve bene feeling lately, I don’t take it that seriously. I know it’s just chemical garbage that has accumulated in my brain due to a very large backlog of unexpressed emotions building up in my mind and turning toxic.

I am not what I feel. I know this now. And no matter what bullshit is going on in my head, the world has not changed. Nor have I. Nor has the actual truth of my life.

So to me, it’s like any other illness. It sucks when you have it You’re glad when it passes. You do what you can to make it pass as quickly and painlessly as possible.

But it doesn’t change who you are.

And yet, I still have some of that chemical bullshit to vent. And to vent it, I kind of have to pretend like I am still the far sicker version of myself and let out all those negative feelings about myself and my life in order to drain my inner swamp.

And the thing is, I don’t feel like it any more.

That super negative post was sort of a accident. I knew I planned to vent some of my darker emotions – hence the title of the blog post – but I had no idea it would snowball into such a big and blatant barfing out of all that bad stuff.

When I embarked upon the blogging, I had only the dimmest idea of what I was getting myself into. I thought that, at most, I would go on some angry, cynical, bitter tirade against the many injustices that have plagued my life.

But nope. I went kersploot instead. All those thoughts I combat and suppress came pouring out of me in a catastrophic cascade of biblical proportions.

I can’t seem to stop alliterating lately. It’s the sort of spontaneous, uncontrolled ordering that forms in a hyper-creative mind that has become oversaturated with potential.

It’s the kind of thing that happens with schizophrenics. The sort of “something out of nothing” process that is the basis of creativity go out of control with schizophenics and produces far more creativity than a normal conscious mind can handle.

And that’s where the voices and other hallucinations come from.

Luckily,. it’s not that bad with me. But I have felt a rise in synchronicity in my life as things seem to spontaneously align themselves, and assuming I am not the Chosen One of some ancient religion. the boring but probable cause of that is that my mind is finding a way to attach meaning to meaningless patterns.

Under this theoretical framework, the idea is that the seeming rise in coincidence is merely a by-product of a mind that has become super-sensitive to patterns.

Yeah, like that. Thankis, Al!

Anyway, enough of that academic bullshit. I can play professor for as long as I like. It comes to me naturally. That’s why it’s so easy for my therapist to get drawn in by it.

I am still pissed off about him fucking off somewhere for two weeks, leaving me sans therapy for three weeks.

It’s a calendar thing. Trust me, it makes sense.

Have I complained about this yet? No? Then it’s about time.

Yes, my therapist is taking two weeks off. Isn’t that fun? In our last therapy session, I asked him why he doesn’t get a locum (substitute doctor) like any other specialist.

And he seemed shocked and confused at the very thought. He told me there’s no such thing as a locum in psychiatry. And he didn’t even see that as a problem.

But I ask you : what other form of medical therapy would leave a patient high and dry for three whole weeks just because someone went on vacation?

“Oh, your oncologist went on vacation. You’ll just have to start your chemo over again when she gets back. ”

“You’ve got a tiny surgical screw bouncing around in your bloodstream due to surgical error? Better hope it doesn’t kill you before the surgeon gets back from the Bahamas.”

“Sure, your child could die horribly without the second course of antibiotics, but it will be worth it if Doctor Halford comes back with a really nice tan. ”

See what I mean? I’m a very ill man My weekly therapy sessions are the tiny drops of medicine that keep me from being totally crazy.

But hey, finding someone to fill in for you would be such a hassle and nothing bad will happen to you (because it’s “normal to do this” and it’s way easier to just skip the due diligence literally all other fields of medicine so that psychiatists can go on vacation without having to worry about their patients at all.

And after all, what’s a patient’s suffering compared to a therapist’s convenience?

He’s taken a week off before. And I have never liked it but I had no choice but to learn to cope with it.

But this time it’s two weeks and I severely resent it. And I am sick and tired of being the person who takes the pain in order to accomodate other people’s plans in order to be “reasonable” and “understanding”.

From now on, I am no longer easy to neglect and ignore. If I am getting stepped on, I’m going to squeal, and if my squeal isn’t listening to, I will bite. HARD.

So when my therapist comes back, I am going to tell him just what I think of this neglect.

And he will say something about how therapists are people too and need time off like everybody else does.

And I will reply that I am not saying you can’t ever go on vacation, I am just saying that you have a responsibility to make sure your patients are okay while you are gone, instead of just shrugging it off.

That’s how responsibility works.

And you, Doctor Costin, have a responsibility to a lot of very sick people.

And if you ever want psychiatry to be treated as a valid form of medicine, you will act like it is.

Meanwhile, have fun while I suffer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been having that difficult sleep lately.

You know, waking up sleepy and disorineted and dizzy and all that. As usual, it’s a real drag, and kind of depressing.

Speaking of depressing, sorry about yesterday’s post. Especialll sorry if it worried you. Do not worry, I am fine, and I was never in any danger.

I just had to let all the negative thoughts out..

And that reminded me that I don’t want to keep suppressing the negative stuff., It needs an outlet. And yet, when I halt the nagative thought and replace it with a positive one, that is exactly what I am doing.

Besides, the thoughts come from real emotions and changing the thought doesn’t really change the emotion. The new thought shows up too late for that. I have already felt the emotion. Stifling it at that point is counterproductive.

Wow, am I having trouble staying focused on the blogging right now.

Anyhow,. my point is that cognitive capture and replace is not enough. It works in the short term in that it pushes back against the negative thoughts but in the long term it does little to change the underlying emotions that are the real problem.

So much for the purely cognitive approach.  I’ve always thought that emotions are far stronger that mere thoughts anyhow and that we are, fundamentally. emotional creatures that can use logic and not the other way round.

Perhaps the real name of the game is redirection. Instead of blocking the negative emotion, redirect it into a less harmful form of expression.

Not sure what that would look like, but it sounds good in theory.

And like I have said before, I am not happy with any approach that pits my mind against itself. The war between the healthy part of my mind and the depressed is mostly just racking up casualties while resolving nothing.

Perhaps redirection is the wrong way of looking at it. That’s still a pretty strong intervention and a form of inner conflict.

Maybe I would be best off not resisting any of my thoughts or feelings. Just let them all flow through me. Above all, let nothing accumulate.

Sounds all Zen and great in theory but reality is not so pure.

There has to be some kind of middle path hidden amongst the weeds and bracken of my turbulent inner life. Something sane and balanced and efficient that balances all the emotional vectors to create some kind of inner sanctum from where I can progress to a greater state of spiritual and moral development without completely losing my mind.

Or perhaps that is still too Olympian. Maybe what I really want is to eschew detachment and do a deep dive into the dirty depths of my demented soul, digging through the debris and feeling all the suppressed and broken feelings that I can until I run out.

Funny how, despite all the calibrations and convolutions of psychological theory, it always comes back to Freudian analysis : digging out suppressed emotions and giving them expression in order to set them free.

I’mma go back bed nao. L8r sk8rs.

Post-Paragon meeting now.

Still no clue as to the solution for my waste disposal issue. Suppressing the negative thoughts doesn’t work. It doesn’t get rid of the badness, it just limits the effect.

And then all that nasty stuff accumuates in the tissues of my mind like I have a failed kidney until the psyche has to dump in a post like the one I wrote yesterday 

And I’m not done. There’s still a lot of stuff in me that has to come out. I am not sure how I am going to accomplish that because I am not sure what all I have left to say.

But I am sure I will think of something. This nausea I feel cannot be denied. I feel a lot better than I did yesterday but I have a long ways to go before I am clean.

And I can be clean.

I have to keep telling myself that until I believe it.

Because normally. I think of myself as filth. And filth cannot be clean. I have felt like no cleanliness or purity or even wholesomeness could ever attach to me because I was the very thing those things are defined as lacking.

Again, this is common amongst adult survivors of sexual abuse. Being violated at such an early age (in my case, 4 years old) makes us feel like we are permanently soiled.

And that’s incredibly unfair, of course. Why should we feel bad when we aren’t the ones who did anything wrong? The abuser is the one who should feel like they are toxic. They are the ones who violated an innocent child just to get their rocks off.

It’s called masturbation, asshole. Google it.

The strange thing is that I find it hard to even be angry at my assailant. The crime is too big in my mind for that. My mind can’t wrap itself around this terrible trauma enough to get angry at it.

It’s like a bomb went off on my block and I am still in too much schock and too disoriented to even begin to think about who did it.

Seeing as it happened 40 years ago. I think I can say I won’t be getting there any time soon. That’s too bad, because it would probably do me a lot of good.

A large and important part of me died that summer day in 1977. Being able to get good and angry about it would go a long way to helping me recover from it.

And I could blame my father for leaving me alone and naked at that spa or I could blame the spa for not keeping an eye out for me or I could blame the pig ignorant times I grew up in where child sexual abuse was never talked about and so every victim felt like they were the only person this happened to and had absolutely no way to process the event at all. let alone tell an adult.

I could even blame the son of a bitch who actually did it.

But somehow, I just don’t have the energy.

I’m too busy trying to survive the damage for all that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

They sent villains here because they are already pretty negative to begin with

Depression’s really bad lately. Pretty sure I am headed towards some kind of crisis.

Every moment that I spend undistracted,. I feel bad. The vast sucking sound within me is louder than ever before. Everything I do seems so meaningless and pointless and yet, despite the multitudinous plethora of options that seemingly exist for me to make something of myself and my life, I feel powerless to do anything to fix the situation I am in and make myself feel good for once.

I am tempted to list off a couple dozen possibilities I am not (and cannot be) pursuing, but that would only be self-torture and that can only make things worse.

So suffice it to say that none of that shit matters because none of that shit is going to happen any time soon. The easy and logical and sensible options are not easy enough for me. Any solution I could actually pursue would have to be so diminishingly easy that would be barely detactable by known science.

In other words. it does not exist. Fuck it. Whatever. I can’t explain it, I can’t justify it, and I can’t get over it either.

This is my Hell..

Actually, Hell might be preferable.

Demon : You know, you don’t seem to mind the torment all that much.

Me : Honestly, I am just happy someone is paying attention to me.

Sad but true.

So I keep myuself distracted. But that is losing its effect. It gets harder and harder to keep the thoughts about how fucking worthless my life (and by extension, mjyself) is and how everything I do is meaningless time-wasting that I can’t see ending until the day I die.

One bright spark : I probably won’t live to see 50 anyway! Yay!

And it’s not technically suicide as long as you are not deliberately failing to take care of yourself properly. I do what I can. I have had next to no sugar since Xmas. I eat fresh fruit with every meal. I get plenty of fluids.

But I don’t test my blood and I don’t take my insulin any more and I probably have a sky high blood sugar level and I barely move enough to avoid being classified as inanimate and all of that is most likely killing the fuck out of me.

Especially when you throw in my untreated sleep apnea. The diabetes kills me when I am awake and the sleep apnea kills me when I am asleep.

Just kidding, folks.

The diabetes kills me while I sleep,. too.

Oh, and they are doing it against a background of severe obesity, also untreated.

Basically, I am a time bomb. One of these days, I am going to keel over at the computer. And I will probably die then, because nobody will even know until it is far, far too late for anyone to save me.

But hey. If I am truly unlucky, I might live. And then I will be free to live out the rest of my brutally foreshortened life in a hospital bed with tubes everywhere, or walking with a cane or crutches, or getting around on one of those fat guy scooters.

But you survived! It’s a medical miracle! You should consider yourself lucky!

Yeah right. Fuck you to death with an IV pole.

Basically, I feel like this.

Only I’m not oking.

And the pathetic thing – the truly, cringingly, horrifying pathetic thing – is that ended up in the hospital actually sounds kind of good to me.

Because nobody expects much of you when you are in the hospital, or otherwise visibly quite sick. My current life would be considered a smashing success “considering”. And I would finally have people taking care of me.

Almost as if I mattered! How decadent.

And it will totally be a vfitting end to a pitifully sad life. Do absolutely nothing with my entire aduilt life and end up dead before 50 have never made anything of myself despite all that “potential” I have been wasting and that only exists to heighten my sense of failure and my negative self-image.

I’m just kidding, folks.

It’s not pitiful.

I don’t deserve pity.

I’m a throbbing pustule on the anus of life. My worth is so far into the negative that I can cancel out the worth of ten highly comptent surgeons just by being in the same room as them. I am such a liability that I could drive Google into abject bankruptcy.

It would take a thousand lifetimes to feel all the shame I deserve.

My entire life had been one long skidmark left by a dog who’s been “scooting”.

I guess that dog would be me.

I’m getting angrier too. I guess pain does that to a person. The setthing flames of the urge to lash out with verbal violence grows inside me daily. Things – little and big – piss me off more and more and the unholy fire gets hotter and hotter and sooner or later it is going to burn through all my firewalls and then bad things are going to happen.

Like, nuclear meltdown level bad. All that radioactive horribleness I have been both suppressing and purifying for my entire life will reach critical mass and I will explode in some horrible way and do things I will hate myself for until the day I die.

And that day might come pretty soon after the meltdown.

But who am I kidding. That won’t happen.

I’ll have a total psychoilogical breakdown when I take it all out on myself instead!

There I will be, in a rubber room somewhere, in a straitjacket because despite me claustrophobia\fear of confinement it is the only way to keep me from harming myself or others,. gibbering and spuming and rattling off long string of polysyllabic nonsense while slowly but firmly banging my head against the wall.

Wanna know the most pathetic thing of all?

That actually sounds kind of good to be right now.

At least I’d be happy.

Just kidding folks…. that’s not the most pathetic thing.

The most pathetic thing is that I feel a lot better now.

I will talkj to you nice people again tomorrow.

Fucked if I know.

My birthday is coming up in 12 days (on May 19) and I have no idea what to ask for yet

As usual. This is my standard process.

When you are used to having very little money and thus very few options, like me, it is very hard to leave that mindset. Most of the world’s bright and shiny stuff is not even the vaguest of possibilities for me and so I have learned to turn off the consumer craving part of my brain because it can only lead to pain.

But then my birthday or Xmas comes along, and suddenly I need to wake that part of my brain up and ask it what it wants.

And it doesn’t want to wake up. And so far, I have not figured out how to force it. I am pondering some sort of visualization exercise along the lines of “Imagine that you’re…” but so far nothing stirs the wanting part of my brain.

At least,. not in a useful way. I tried “imagine you just won the lotterty”, but all that got me was “I’d start buying real estate. ”

“Imagine you have a $5000 gift certificate for Best Buy. ” Um. Hmmm. That’s not helping either. Because I have no idea what I would want that I don’t already have. It’s not like I have a use for a big screen TV or a badass stereo system.

And even if I did, I am hardly going to ask for one.

I suppose a better monitor might be nice, but I am pretty happy with the one I have. Ditto my keyboard and mouse. My computer can handle whatever video game I want it to play. so that’s cool.

Maybe a new computer chair. Something really ergonomic, with loads of back support and butt cushioning. I spend most of the day sitting in front of the computer, so any kind of comfort gain would pay off right away and really pay off over time.

“Imagine you literally can have anything you want.”

Now this could be interesting.

First thing that comes to mind : a boyfriend. One who is sweet and kind and gentle and nerdy who thinks I am brilliant and is happy to help me with reality in exchange for my endless love, support, and affection.

If I had that. I wouldn’t need much else.

Apart from that, even the prospect of univeral indulgence doesn’t help me start wanting things very much. The things I want most aren’t things. They are intangibles. Things like a job writing for TV in a cool n’ groovy workplace where people know how to work hard and have fun at the same time. Someplace where I will be valued and appreciated and recognized as having worth because of both what I can do and who I am.

Yeah. That would be nice. Not the sort of thing a friend can get you, though, unless that friend happens to be a new projects manager for Netflix.

I mean, apart from romance, what I really really want is to get a chance to grow up. To be able to support myself and not feel like I am this huge burden on everyone. To be able to stand on my own two feet and say “I am contributing!”.

To finally feel like I am a legitimate grownup who has had the sorts of life experiences (like love and career) that make for a well-rounded person who lived their life to the fullest instead of what I do now, which is the exact opposite.

Like I said. Intangibles. Things you can’t buy at any store.

I have been trying to think of something that would help me get my career going but I can’t think of anything. It’s not like motivation comes in pill form. Nor does courage, or the ability to heal profound psychological damage overnight.

I’m the only one who can free me from this cage, and that’s kind of hard to do when you are STUCK IN A CAGE.

Maybe I should be hospitalized. I don’t know. Pretty sure I couldn’t do that just by asking anyhow. Even if I said I was feeling suicidal.

I keep pondering the concept of the “support network” that is supposed to be key to the recovery process for us depressives.

And I can’t avoid the conclusion that I don’t really have one.

Not that I totally lack support. My friends support me. I love them and they love me. I know I can count on them. That’s not the issue.

The issue is me and my inability to open up to people. The most important part of a depressed person’s support network is the person or people to whom the patient feels they can talk about absolutely anything wthout fear of negativbe consequences.

I don’t even feel that way about my therapist. I know I should, but I don’t.

I’m the man in the mask, the vile behind the smile, the dark demon who hides behind a brilliant facade. And no matter how much I tell myself that it’s perfectly safe to share (almost) everything with Doctor Costin, I hold back there as well.

I just don’t feel safe enough to grant him access to the dark country of my soul.

I mean, he forgets that I am sick sometimes. He is swept away by my personality like every else is when I focus on them and that means I can’t trust him to shut me down when I unconsciously misdirect things into “the show”.

I need a therapist with the self-discipline to stay focused on our shared therapeutic goals even when I am, without knowing it. tempting them to have fun at my carnival sideshow instead. Someone equipped to keep pushing me when I am resisting and to go right for the jugular when that’s what is best for me.

I can take it. Harsh truths burn away the scrub abd promote new growtth. It might hurt but it makes me stronger in the long run.

In a sense. I need a therapist who is way more of a bastard.

And nobody can get me THAT for my birthday.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ready to blog, that is. Or ready in general.

That’s one of the problems with having your head in the clouds by default. Things take me by surpirse because I am not paying attention to the here and now. I am in my usual deep processing state, even when it is wildly inappropriate for the situation I am in.

It’s that inward tide I keep talking about. My gravity well. Anything I do in the world takes a constant input of energy in order to resist the powerful forces that draw me back into myself if I let up for even a second.

Like just now.  I just spaced out for a good solid five minutes. An observer might wonder what had happened to me to make me sit still with my eyes focused on an imaginary horizon for so long.

And it’s been worse lately. I slip into reverie even when I am around others and should really be focusing on them.

And I can’t help it. The pull of that inward tide is especially strong lately and that means that all it takes is one unguarded moment and I am gone.

It makes me feel even more insecure than usual.

And yet, in another, more fatuous way…. it’s kind of nice.

Because recently,. these involuntary withdrawals while with others are not like the spacing out I do when I am alone and trying to blog.

They are actually quite soothing, in a somewhat infantile way. My mind relaxes and I feel warm and comfortable and secure.

And how could I resist that?

I honestly think I am regressing on some level. The image that comes to mind is myself in my early childhood being soothed by the sounds of the adults talking around me even though I did not know or understand what they were saying.

That’s the feeling I get. Just being happy to be around people while also being in my own little world.

Not that I space out while people are talking in the present day. It hasn’t gotten that bad yet. Nor do I space out when I am replying.

Instead, I space out the moments between conversational topics or any other sort of natural pause in the conversational flow.

And I have had no complaints so far, so I am probably making too much of the whole thing. I think (and hope) I am keeping up my end of the conversation without seeming too distant or distracted or like I don’t care what people are saying.

Damn it, it just happened again. Totally spaced out. Those internal processes of mine took over and I was a million miles away.

And it is hard to say what I was thinking about. Everything and nothing, like the Zen folks say, I guess.

I go back to the term deep processing. What is really going on is that I am relaxing my conscious mind so that the million and a half internal processes I have going on all the time can operate with maximum resources.

Which would be fine if it only happened when I wanted it to happen.

But it happens the second I stop moving, so to speak.

And it’s wearing me down.

Took a nap. Now I’m back.

I don’t like interrupting my blogging in the middle but sometimes I have no choice. This was one of those times. I was feeling very tired all of a sudden.

It was probably a stress reaction. The main reason I have never been able to stop taking multiple naps during the day is that I use said naps to reset my background anxiety level to zero before it spills over into foreground anxiety.

Not a very healthy strategy, but it’s what I have got.

When I am out in the world on my own, the fact that I can’t retreat into sleep when things get too scary can cause anxiety in and of itself.

Welcome to the nested fractals of anxiety.

Luckily, that only happens when some other stimuli gets my anxiety going. Normally I am quite calm and possibly even enjoying the sunshine and fresh air.

In that sense, I could consider my agoraphobia partially cured. I can go run an errand and not feel much anxiety. I guess a year of going to VFS helped.

My social anxiety is alive and well and living in my soul, but the agoraphobia is partly subdued at least.

But only partly. Because the truth is that the main problem, actually getting myself out the door, remains as formidable as ever.

It’s that old ill predictor again. It convinces me that I will hate going out and that it will be nothing but an anxiety nightmare and all the usual bullshit.

It all boils down to resistance.  The damage in my brain makes it so that just walking out that door means overcoming an incredible amount of inner resistance, and that makes the simple act of walking out the door a positively Herculean task.

There’s a world of stuff I could do instead of rotting away in front of this computer all day. I could go to the beach, once the weather gets a bit nicer. Could do me a lot of good to spend some time soaking up rays, letting the heat from the sand bake the toxins from my skin, and maybe taking the occasional splash in the water.

But there is still a part of me that needs a very strong motive to even consider going out into the world. The idea of doing it just for fun is a total nonstarter.

That would mean going out in the world voluntarily instead of because I have to in order to accomplish a goal.

And that seems like utter madness to my sadly still very ill mind. I need the motivation of a necessary mission – like picking up meds – to get me out that god damned door.

That’s what makes me an urban hermit.

And it sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A funny thing happened during my therapist’s appointment last Thursday.

Out of seemingly nowhere, he told me that sometimes he forgets that I have problems.

And that’s my therapist talking. The person who knows more about my problems than any other person in the universe. He forgets that I am sick.

It’s a rather shocking thing for one’s therapist to say.  But I instantly understood.

Because I put on such a good show.  If I am relaxed and feel comfortable, like in my therapist’s office, I come across as a  warm, charming, witty, articulate, insightful, and above all totally self confident guy.

I seem like the last person in the world who was wracked by neuroses and tormented by inner demons so profound that they have kept him from having an adult life.

And we know the reason why. I learned to hide my illness at a very young age. At first, it was self-protection. Reaching out for help only to be rejected or (worse) ignored taught me that there was no use looking for help because nobody could or would help.

Nobody. Anywhere. Ever.

So I grew a mask. A persona. One who tried as hard as he could to be interesting and funny and fun to be around in a desperate attempt to get people to pay attention to him for a while.

That meant sticking everything that was not fun into a deep dark trunk behind the curtains and only ever being bright and warm and fun.

If I could pull that off.I might just fool people into ignoring that I was horrible and worthless and revolting and should never have been born and the world would be a much cleaner and nicer and  happier place without me.

For the most part, this did not work. People went right on ignoring and resenting me whether they were my age or adults.

But it was my only gambit and I clung to it so ferociously that I am still doing it today.

The good news is that there is a certain truth to the whole “fake it till you make it” . I worked so hard to be that shiny happy person that eventually it worked.

Chalk one up for doing the thing that isn’t working until it works, I guess.

And as patient readers know,. I also became dependent on this bright and shiny mask of mine. He was and is, quite frankly. better than me.  I would much prefer to be the person I pretend to be than the loser I am.

Try not to think about that too hard or you’ll get dizzy.

Fruvous (my fursona) is an extension of this. He is an idealized version of myself that I invented and have developed over the decades. As him, I can be that lovely and lovable version of myself without any of my usual burderns or distractions.

In that sense, he is the ultimate manifestation of my social mask. As such, it goes without saying that I would rather be him than me.

Being him is a hell of a lot more fun.

Now if this was some kind of heartwarming narrative in which Warm Values are taught, someone in my life would get a glimpse of the real me and at first be upset and confused by the disparity but ultimately the plot would give them a golden opportunity to tell me that they have seen the real me and they like it, too.

And then there would be a warm gooey wonderful moment where I realize that I don’t need to hide my true self any more and do some small, brave thing to prove it.

That doesn’t happen in the real world. But it’s a nice thought.

In the real world. my disguise is nearly flawless. The fact that I like being that semi-fake version of myself a lot more than being my utterly wretched real self has caused me to develop that mask to the point where very little can make me drop it.

Even,. as we have seen, in the therapist’s office.

It’s so much easier for me to be witty and fascinating and warm and interesting there just like anywhere else. And that’s what I am comfortable doing.

But it doesn’t get me anywhere.  The show is not therapy.  The mask stays on. That’s what enables my therapist to forget that I am sick.

I forget too. That’s kind of the point.

So it takes focus and discipline for me to keep the mask off in therapy.  And it’s disappointing to see that my therapist, despite all he knows of me, can’t see through the disguise enough to help me in that respect.

I am just that mesmerizing, I guess.

This is why the question of “just being myself” has always confused me.If my social mask…. let’s call it Fruvous mode… was entirely artificial and not a part of me, then it would simply be a matter of not doing that any more.

That’s neither a simple nor an easy task. granted.but my case is more complicated/.

Because I like being in Fruvous Mode. It’s not some kind of artificially enforced person I was forced to adopt in order to fit in and get along or to avoid embarassing my middle class parents or anything like that.

I am Fruvous.  Fruvous is me. Just not all of me. My persona – fur optional – is not a lie in the traditional sense of the word.

It is, rather, a lie of ommision. It’s a real photograph that has been carefully cropped to conceal the ugly truth. It is an expertly edited news story that supports the dominant narrative in a way that seems honest and natural. It’s an ugly picture with a beautiful frame. It is a fresh coat of paint on a used car that’s a total lemon.

And that version of me is the real me – just not all of me.

Trying to figure out where the real me ends and the me I have created begins is a puzzle beyond my comprehension.

And is it even necessary?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight, we are taking another deep dive into the issue of my un-dissolvable identity in order to figure out just why the I am so goddamned determined to be self-determined.

First off, a timeline. As far as I can tell,I have always been that way. But put a small question mark next to that statement, because I am not totally sure that I was that was before school happened to me.

From what little I remember about my preschool life, it doesn’t seem like I was stubborn and willful back then. Not in the same way or to the same degree, anyway.

I do remember once incident. When I was a little one, I developed a quite alarming abcess in the upper right portion of my mouth. The thing eventually grew to being around three inches long and took up most of that part of my mouth, which made speaking and eating difficult.

So I was slated for a combination surgical removal of the damned thing and an exploratory surgery to find out what the fuck caused it.

That meant I had to get a bunch of medical tests done beforehand. When you are operating on a three year old, you want to make damned sure you know what you are doing.I approve.

But the manner in which they were done was less than ideal.

My first blood test,  some nurse at the medical center got my blood by stabbing me in the finger with a hooked needle.

I am not making that up. Back in 1976,  the standard way to get blood from a baby or very small child was to stab them in the fingertip and collect blood from the wound.

So when it came time for ANOTHER blood test, I sure as fuck wasn’t going to let THAT happen again. They tried it, I fought back with every inch of my body, and so they decided to try it the normal way, with a needle in a vein.

Boffo. But it was my mother who took me to get it done, and that turned out to be a bad thing because my mother is deathly afraid of needles and therefore so was I.

The laws of nature say that if Mama is afraid of it, so is the child. This makes a lot of sense in the wild,and it’s how a child learned what to fear and avoid.

So when the time came to actually draw the blood, I freaked out. Being the cunning runt that I was, I asked to go to the bathroom that was part of the lab.

And then I locked myself in and refused to come out until they promised me that I would not have to face the needle.

And eventually they did. It was a lie, of course. This was a medically necessary test and there was no way they would ever skip it just becuase I was being (very) stubborn.

And by the time I opened that door and let them grab me and take the blood, I was tired and bored and starting to feel ashamed of myself for causing such a fuss and so I was resigned to my fate and didn’t struggle at all.

Even at that young age, I grasped that this was not a uwinnable fight.

I tell this story not just because it is funny and SO me, but because it showswhat an odd child I was.

Most kids would never even dream of locking themselves in the bathroom to avoid a needle. They might struggle and cry,, true, but that’s as far as it would go.

And alot of kids would have just gone through with it because that’s what their parents wanted them to do.

Somehow. I was different. I had my signature combination of stubborness, intelligence, and temper even then. And that made me kind of hard to handle.

Bet that young lady doctor still remembers the incident. Heh heh heh.

And this was before I was raped. So clearly this is my basic temperament,.the kind that never changes for the rest of your life.

My school records prove that.

It’s not that I was an angry kid with a problem with authourity  who was always looking for a way to strike back.

Most of the time, I was a fairly placid and agreeable kid. That’s what made me such a handful.My teachers never knew when the other side of my personality would emerge.

If we are talking full on tiny tower of righteous anger mode,. it was usually when I was scared or upset.  But that was not something anyone would have been able to predict, least of all me.

I was just too weird a kid. Nobody knew how to deal with a kid like me,.

It can suck to be unique.

Oh right. I was going to talk about the identity thing.

That’s the problem I have with ever, ever, EVER letting my identity being subsumed in any sort of group identity. It’s why I am such a non-joiner. I won’t join teams, sides, armies, political parties, bowling leagues, or online fan forums

This is not a choice on my part. I would rather be at least somewhat of a joiner. Being part of something bigger than me could do me a lot of good. It’s not normal or healthy to be this extreme.

But I can’t help it. Just the thought of my individuality being reduced to that as one interchangable part of a whole makes cold sweat break out on the back of my neck and fills me with the dangerous kind of fear, the scared animal kind of fear, the fear that could turn into rage or other insanity at any second.

It’s cornered rat fear.

The bottom line is that I absolutely must be myself and only myself at all times. It’s who I am and who I need to be.

I’m like a wild animal who might well come around your back yard if fed and might behave in a friendly way towards you and who might even let you pet him as long as you are alone and he can see what your other hand is doing.

But you will never, ever, ever get him to come inside.

And if you try to catch him, you will never see him again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My entire personality is based on keeping something in.

Make that a lot of somethings in.

But I don’t know what they are. All I know is that these things are dark, horrible, hateful, detestable, digusting, toxic, and deeply deeply shameful.

And if they got out, something horrible would happen.

Dunno what it would be. But it is literally unimaginably bad.

This is how a lot of survivors of childhood sexual abuse feel. We feel like we are nightmarish garbage on the inside and if people knew who we really are,. they would scream, recoil in horror, and run for the hills.

That’s certainly how I feel. Not quite sure who that “real me” might be. That’s what happens when your entire mind is structured to bury those memories in a grave so deep they will never, ever see the light of day again.

Because the number one person you are hiding them from is yourself. I don’t remember being raped. I remember being in the shower stall with someone and I remember making the decision that this wasn’t really happening and that I was going to take my mind away until it was over.

And it’s never come back. Not fully. I feel like part of me died that day, and its corpse wraps around my mind like a moat and keeps anyone from ever touching me again.

Even if I want them to.

Even if I am desperately reaching out to find someone, anyone, who can make me feel real. Like I am really alive. Like I count. Like I matter. Like I register in people’s mind.

Like I am not all alone in here any more.

Even if I am dying inside from emotional starvation and the dead tissue rots inside me and poisons me so thoroughly that I can’t remember what purity feels like.

It seems nice.

And in some ways, it is the stuff trying to get out that keeps stuff from coming in. The corridor is blocked and the emotional inputs from the outside can’t get through until the stuff that wants out gets out of the way.

Because that’s the thing. If it was simply a matter of not accessing certain memories, there wouldn’t be a problem.

But that’s not how the mind works. My mind still wants to finish processing the bad stuff and that means bringing it into my conscious mind and making me re-live it so that the memories can finally be put away for good.

And this part of the mind strains against the blockage with a pressure that increases day by day. Emotions pile up at both ends of the corridor and my mind remains in a permanent state of stalemate. A kind of emotional detente.

And there’s lil ol’ me squashed flat in between. No wonder I sometimes feel like I am between two plates of glass on a microscope slide. Opposing pressures within me keep me squashed so flat I am almost two dimensional.

And yet, somehow I live. It’s not much of a life. granted, but somehow I keep going.

My freedom can only come from somehow resolving the tension. Something somewhere has to give.

The bad stuff has to come out.

I am fascinated by how horrifying the thought is to me. To release all my industrial waste into the world seems like the most disgusting and shameful thing I could do.

But I am getting to the point where I don’t give a shit any more. Take my pollution, world. It’s your problem now. I have been holding it in for forty years and I am goddamned sick of (and from) it.

It’s coming out whether you want it to or not. Deal with it.

Oh, and I suppose I should tell you that I have been refining it for all that time, reducing it to a hyper potent meta-toxin that can skeletonize a cow in three seconds.

Then it eats the bones.

It’s also a potent mutagen, so fair warning, the forecast calls for giant malicious mutant zombie animals over the next few decades.

Oh. And it smells worse than sewer leak at the junkyard.

I hate to be so environmentally irresponsible, but this is an emergency. This poisonous bile is threatening the entire facility and all the good people who work here.

So it’s dump or die, really.

Any large release on my part is going to take more than I have been doing. That much is clear. I am increasingly convinced of the need for something big and profound in my life. Something bigger than all my petty intellectualizations and the sad little world I live in. So much bigger than it sweeps them aside like anemic cobwebs and changes me in the ways I deeply need to change.

And that is not going to come from thinking about it. Thinking rationally and logically about things is a wonderful thing but lately I am keenly aware of how small and limited it truly is when compared to my emotional issues.

No, I need some kind of profound spiritual experience that breaks me open inside and lets all the bad stuff out so that I may, at last, be cleansed by pure waters and greet the day with a pure and honest heart and a clean and untainted soul.

I am not yet sure what form this experience would take. I am open to many things. Meditation might get me there. Travel could do it as well.

Or maybe what I really need is to find a nice middle of the road Christian church and sit in the back during a service so I can soak up the vibe and try to grok the whole thing.

Who knows. Maybe I would even join. Whether I believe in God or not seems like a petty perservation compared to what I would get out of being part of a community of people who open their hearts together in prayer and song.

I might not believe in God or Biblical literalism or Christ’s divinity.

But I fervently believe in Christ’s message.

And I can seem myself falling in love with a church.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.