Well, it’s Thursday, so I suppose I should talk about Sunday.

As patient readers know, I have been working on getting in touch with my anger for a long time and recently I have had some success in overcoming the feeling that if I so much as open the door a crack on all that suppressed rage, I will turn into some kind of rampaging rage monster and go on a ten province rampage of murder. rape, and tacos.

I really like tacos.

And I could feel the anger building in me over the last week or so. Bitter, sarcastic remarks about whatever annoyed me started bubbling up to the surface and it was taking an increasing amount of energy to keep myself from saying them.

And well, you don’t need a Euler line equation to figure out how that’s going to end.

This all came to a head last Sunday. I will try to be brief but here’s how things went down, more or less :

La Gang and I, plus Garth, were planning to go visit R. Graeme Cameron’s place so we could salvage what we could from his enormous stockpile of BCSFA-related memorabilia before he moves to Nanaimo at the end of June and has to recycle most of it ’cause it can’t come with him.

I promised you brief. I didn’t promise you simple. And I could go into why he has to move away from us but it’s a whole thing so I will just say that I want to kill his evil psycho parasite of an ex wife.

Seriously, Alex. Fuck you.

Anyhow. That was the setup. And last I heard, we were going to make this trip “a few hours before FRED”.

Apparently, from that, I was supposed to deduce that by “a few” they meant “five”, and that if I wanted to go on this trip, I was supposed to be ready by one.

Or noon, actually, because that’s when Joe and Julian actually left.

Julian woke me up at something like 10:30 and told me that he and Joe would be leaving soon. I assumed that they had decided that they would get an early start on things and that I would be going with Felicity later in the day.

But nope. That’s when everybody was going. Nobody told me this. Nobody told me that the plan was to stay there for three hours either. So I had none of the information I needed in order to make the deductions everyone assumed I would make.

Even though they know I am clueless by nature and don’t make those sorts of deductions even when I have all of the necessary information and the deductions are far simpler and more straightforward.

So for definitely not the first time in my life. I got left behind. Plans changed, nobody told me anything, and somehow, mysteriously, these new plans did not include me.

For someone with my issues, this is Very Very Bad.

As you know, I constantly battle the feeling that nobody really wants me around and that people are happier without me and will ditch me any time they think they can get away with it and don’t have to tell me to my face.

And of course, people never “intend” to do these things. If they did, they’d feel guilty about it. What happens is a lot subtler than that.

People just don’t think of me.

My friends claim they “expected” me to deduce the real plan from the information I had, but that is total bullshit. The truth is, they just didn’t think about me at all. They made their plans without any thought to my place in it and I got left behind as a result.

I mean really. Who in the world would take “a few hours before 6 pm” to mean “be ready by 1 pm”? Nobody, that’s who.

And despite my intentions, all this came to a head at FRED. I really didn’t want to have the big huge argument that I knew would come from this confluence of factors at FRED, with all the other FRED goers held hostage while the argument raged on for an hour or more, and I deeply regret that it did.

But it had to happen. I have to stop letting myself get stepped on by people and this was the turning point on that. I had to express my anger at getting hurt to those involved and live with the consequences. There were no other options.

Why? Because that’s the next step on my path to recovery. I have reached the point where I must assert myself and through doing so exert my right to exist and have needs and have those needs taken into consideration by others.

And that is bound to seem unjust to those who feel like they have been doing that all along,. And I am sorry for that. It is not their fault that they did not know they were hurting me. After all, I didn’t say anything about it or indicate it in any way.

But that does mean things are going to change in my life and those changes will not be optimized for the comfort and convenience of others.

They will be optimized for maximim improvement in my mental health. That doesn’t mean that I will not take other people into account. It just means that their concerns will no longer hold a higher priority than my own.

And I know this process is going to be ugly, and that to those who know me, it will seem to be a sudden change in personality on my part and they might miss the “old me”.

Too bad. The old me is dead. I have uncorked the bottle of my true self and that means I will have to learn to deal with a full range of human emotions, including anger.

I have to integrate my id into my psyche if I want to come back from the grave.

And I want that more than anything else in this world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As in, I am writing this after gpoing to my doctor.

I feel good about the fact that I finally got my shit together enough to make the appointment and get my ass there.

For one thing, it got me out of the apartment into a beautiful sunny day. It’s the perfect day for me : blue skies and sunshine withoutit being too hot.

IThat is ideal weathr chez moi. The outdoors, but with air comnditioning.

Speaking of sunshine, that actually came up during my appointment. My GP, Doctor Chao, mentiuoned how my symptoms might be due (at least in part) to a Vitamin D deficiency. I mentioned that I don’t exactly get a lot of sun, and he said he didn’t think anyone did any more.

And that opened up a whole thing in my mind because he’s right, and that means most people are walking around Vitamin D deficient, and iwhat does that mean for society?

According to the great god Google, the main symptoms of vitamin D deficiency are weak bone and muscles. Yikes.

Dunnoi what that has to do with my mental fog, but whatever. I trust my doctor knows what is is talking about.

The easiest solution would be for me to start drinking milk a lot. Milk had both calcium and the vitamin D I need to use it. But meh.

Milk tastes good but it’s kind of a hassle because you have to be sure to use it all before it spoils, so you have to make a guess as to how much to buy at a time, and then it becomes this whole thing.

Besides, I haven’t been a mild drinker in so long that I bet it would make me sick.

Anyhow, back to the doctor’s office. I told him about how I haven;t toiuched the CPAP machine in years and why, and he didn’t seem to know what to think of that. I can’t uimagine I am the first patient to ever decide that CPAP was not for them, but he did not seem to know what to say.

I guess he didn’t expect it from me for some reason.

Anyhow, I then went on toi tell him about my growing issues with memory and other cognoitive functuions. I told him ghow I kept forgetting things and how I felt like the dog in my mind was getting thicker and that I was worfried that sleep apnea is making Swiss cheese out of my brain.

Not in those words, of course. He speaks perfect English but it;s not his native tongue and so I try not to throw too much verbal razzle dazzle at him.

He, of course, immediately wanted a whole bunch of tests done on me, and that is when I really shined because I told him quite firmly that the reason I never get the lab work done is fasting – I can’t.

If I go too long without food, I could die, Blood sugar crash,. Boom. Bad way to go.

And the kicker is that whatever test it was that demanded a 10 hour (!) fast from me, oit had nothing to do with my diabetes. The diabetes one is called a hemoglobin A1C test and it works my taking a lot of blood cells, all of which were created at different times and therefore have different blood sugar levels encoded into them, and averages them out to get a picture of how my whole blood sugar scene is going down.

So fuck whatever this other test he was giving me. I have a fresh lab req with zero fasting on it and that means I will be going to the lab a block from here and giving them my pee and blood and about a week later we will have some idea of WTF.

I have pondered possible outcomes. It could be that everything  comes back as A1  hunky dory on my testing, in which case shit woiuld have to escalate into some other form of testing, undoubtedly unpleasant.

So on that level, I would prefer the tests to come back with what is wrong clearly spelled out in numbers.

The worst case scenario would be that everything comes back A OK and there is nothing to indicate anything is wrong with me whatsoever so I am stuck knowing it is “all in my head”.

Well, actually, the worst case scenario would be finding out I had cancer so bad it was metastitizing to other people. but that’s hardly likely.

Finding out there was nothing physically wrong with me would be depressing, but it would still be something I could work with. It would simply mean that I needed to talk about it in therapy (something I plan to do tomorrow anyhow) and work on my psychological issues if I ever want to free my mind of this fucking fog.

It might be that the fog is there because of that numbing effect of depression I have spoken about. In response to emotional trauma, the brain produced a numbing agent in order to protect itself while it heals.

But some things don’t heal. And the numbing agent never goes away. And further trauma also never heal because too much of the brain is too numb to deal with them.

And voila, you’ve got yourself a depressive.

So it might be that my mental fog has gotten thicker and stickier because I am trying to deal with some very heavy shit in my mind and therefore numbing agent production has stepped up to compensate.

I have decades of suppressed anger and bitterness to process and the process ain’t gonna be pretty. I have little experience regulating rage and right now I feel like I have a particularly sarcastic version of The Hulk inside me that wants to verbally lash out at anything that pisses me off and it is going to take a while to integrate that part of me into my psyche in a balanced way.

So I am feeling quite cranky. And that’s new for me.

Guess I will have to learn to deal with it like a normal person.

What an utterly bizarre idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.