A little less depressed than yesterday. When I was a little less depressed than the day before. So at least the trend is in the right direction.

I still feel really sad inside, though. What I probably need is a good long cry, but being a North American male, my ability to cry was culturally removed from me at an early age and now it’s not something I can actually choose to do most of the time.

Guess I should go looking for sad movies, then. Or something profound. We tough and rugged emotionally constipated self-destructing men need some kind of emotional laxative before we can let the tears out.

And I am luckier than most. Having very little invested in any sort of macho image and being an open-minded liberal kind of homo, I have vastly more cultural “permission’ to be vulnerable and open and “girlie” than most men.

Nor do I feel shame when I cry. Usually, what I usually feel is relief, at least once the storm is over. Crying is built in to us for a reason. It’s probably the most potent form of emotional release we have except maybe sex.

And that releases an entirely different set of emotions. Although some people do cry after sex, so there’s that.

Once those floodgates are opened, all kinds of emotions can sneak out. A lot of people “store” repressed emotions as physical tension. Release the tension, and whoosh!

I suppose the obverse is possible – people who have sex (or just get super horny) aftert crying. Again, once those doors are open…

Still, that one strikes me as unnerving. Not judging…. just sharing.

Anyhow, back to crying. So I don’t feel ashamed of crying and I am not trying to prove what a hardcore macho stud I am to the world and I have “permission’, and yet the tears do not come from me very easily.

I guess the waterworks don’t work when so much inside of you is frozen. I am so emotionally repressed and alienated that often feels like my emotions and I are in different rooms. That emotion-repressing circuit in my mind is way too strong for my own good and someone needs to teach that thing when to lay off already.

Still, writing about it helps. I  can feel emotion rising within me as I drill down towards it. I want to “let it all out”, like people say to crying people in movies, but everything is so damned cold inside me and my taps are all frozen shut.

Oh well. If I keep working the system like I have been doing by writing stuff like this, eventually I will reach the state of holy fragility where it will take very little to break things open and let all those good, healthy tears out.

It’s happened dozens of times in my life. Usually I do not see it coming. But I can recognize it in hindsight.

Subjectively, everything is going along as usual on the conscious level. But something is building down below. Then something I watch or read will be the pebble that starts the avalanche and out come the tears.

It often seems cosmically ordained – like the universe gave me just what I needed when I needed it.

But of course, that’s got it backwards. The universe didn’t give me anything. Once I was in the state of readiness, the next thing that came along and was apropos was going to set off the reaction.

But it is still a comforting thought to entertain. It would certainly be nice if the universe did me a solid instead of mostly ignoring my shy and broken self.

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Day in and day out. I am so good at staying out of the way that very little has even the slightest chance of happening to me. That’s how low my level of involvement with life has become.

And I think that damages me in ways beyond the obvious effects of social and emotional isolation. I think the lack of event and content itself has a corrosive effect. Our minds are not designed for a virtual life that only exists inside a computer.

I think on many levels, my body is starved for stimulus. It’s like I am in solitary confinement of my own devising. All I “see’ are the same four walls around me in this same bedroom all day.

Of course, that’s not what I am looking at. I am staring intently into this here monitor of mine. I am fixated on the flashy colorful world inside my computer. The place where I really live, not the space time coordinates where my meat puppet happens to reside.

So it’s not exactly like the tortuous and barbaric conditions prisoners in solitary face. But I think it has some of the same effect.

For one thing, all I get from this here computer is sight and sound. Taste and smell I can get from the food I eat, but touch is something I get precious little of.

That’s part of what makes going Outside so stressful to me. Suddenly, the stimulation to my skin goes from peaceful to turbulent as the air currents of the outdoors swirl around me and  create temperature differences and all sorts of other things that normal people who don’t spend all their time indoors never even notice.

I am making progress, however, because some of the time that extra stimulation is actually quite soothing to me. It feels so good to feel something there, and to be out in the fresh air where my skin can truly breathe.

Yes folks, my skin has breathing issues too.

Now if only I could feel the same way about how much louder it is outside. Lounder and more chaotic. Noise of any kind can come at you at any volume from any direction at all times, and that freaks me out sometimes.

Oh well, baby steps.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In this case, h is a theoretical mathematical symbol for “the smallest possible number”.

It’s sort of a sideways infinity,

So yes, I am feeling slightly better today. Or at least somewhat alive.

Still having problems staying out of bed. Spent a lot of time sleeping and a lot of time playing games on my tablet in bed today.

It’s a good thing I can’t play my PC games in bed, or I might spend all day there. Only get up to pee and poo and get food.

That’s actuallly not that different from how I live now, come to think of it. On the physical level, that is. Assuming I sat up in bed to play the games.

But psychologically, they are worlds apart.

Besides, with the way my health is going, I am going to end up bedbound eventually anyhow, so I might as well enjoy my time being able to get up and move while I can.

Let’s do an inventory of just how sick I am, shall we?

Yes we shall.

Peripheral neuropath is killing my fingers and toes. I have so little feeling in my fingertips that it is like I am constantly wearing skin-tight gloves. I routinely get bizarre sensations in my feet. Stabbing pain (as in, I can feel the needle), erratic tingling, the sensation of hot water being poured over my toes, and of course, the feeling that a hot poker has been jammed between my toes.

You know. just the routine effect of nerve cells dying.

I have a sore on top of my head that just will not heal. And it likes to ooze. So I end up going out in public with this huge section of clotted hair that I can do little about except clean it up as best as I can in the shower.

And that just buys me a little time.

And it’s not alone. My skin just plain does not heal any more. I have scratches that have had multiple birthdays. Mosquito bite scars that remember Obama. Odd little bumps of no known origin.

Presumably, I will eventually be a dermatological nightmare of broken and bloody flesh in the vague shape of something that once was human.

Sleep apnea continues to murder me in my sleep. God knows the damage being done to my entire cardiovascular system, not to mention my poor beleagured brain, when I smother many times a night in my sleep.

Judging by how bad I feel when I wake up sometimes, where I feel like I am being crushed under a heavy atmosphere and it takes time for me to reinflate to normal pressure, it’s pretty fucking bad.

My blood sugar is, presumably, atrocious. It’s a wonder I haven’t starting bleeding maple syrup. All that sugar in my blood is damaging pretty much everything in my body over and over again. A dose of death with every heartbeat.

And now I have to face the fqact that my pneumonia permanently damaged my lungs. That heavy, scratchy feeling that I felt in my lungs when I came back from the hospital that I assumed would go away in time did not, in fact, go away, and in fact has only gotten worse. I have started coughing like a smoker now and then, big wracking wheezing coughs that scare the bejesus out of me.

But the crown jewel of all my ailments is, of course, the depression, because it’s the bastard that keeps me from being able to look after myself properly and thus enables the rest of it to go on unabated.

I honestly need help. I need someone to help me keep track of all my ailments, someone to supervise while I take my meds, test my blood, get exercise, and do all the other goddamned things I should do if I don’t want to die.

That’s a mighty big if. Let’s just say I don’t want to suffer.

I don’t think I would need full time care. Someone who visits for a couple of hours four or five times a week would probably be enough.

But it’s high time I faced the facts : I can’t take care of myself. I know I have been saying that for years now, but this time I am fully accepting my own lack of competence. I do not have the willpower, the instincts, or the perspicacity to look after myself.

If I was my own pet, I’d be arrested for neglect.

This is not an easy thing for any man to admit. Even one as, shall we say, nonstandard as I am. There is a presumptive duty to look after yourself for men in our culture and failure to do so means you failed as a man and should be deeply ashamed of yourself.

It’s why so many of us suffer in silence, to the point of dying premature deaths from entirely treatable conditions. To admit to anyone, even a highly trained medical professional who sees this kind of thing all the time and is professionally bound not to judge, that we cannot take care of ourselves without help, is to utterly surrender all self-respect and gender status and that is a price that is too high to pay for some even in the face of death itself.

And denial is always easier. It was just a headache. Oh, I had some indigestion, that’s all. A little heartburn, no big deal. I must have worked out too hard. Sure, I get tired sometimes, but I still do my job and take care of my family, so what the fuck else do you want from me?

And the ultimate, and the one I am most guilty of : Well that was weird. But I feel better now. So it must not be that big a deal.

Time to go back to my distractions so I can stop thinking about it.

I don’t want that to be my epitaph. But the depression makes it so hard for me to cope. Life overwhelms me so very easily. And I don’t know what to do about it.

But here’s the breakthrough : I am finally willing to admit to myself that it’s not just a matter of me figuring it out over time. I am not going to come up with a clever solution or write my way to some world-shattering realization that will make everything revert to normal and just walk away from all this shit.

It’s not going to get any easier. This is it. This is what I have to deal with.

This means that my Next Thing is clearly to get some kind of help. That might involve checking into some kind of facility.

I must admit, the time I spent in the hospital, I was the healthiest I had been in a long time in terms of my diabetes.

The key thing is that I admit that I cannot do this alone.

And I have been very alone for a very long time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Also : The long gray hell.

I’m Canadian. Both are fine.

Been quite depressed today. That feeling of my energies pouring out of me whenver I try to gather my motivation has returned. I feel heavy and fragile and disgusting.

I feel like if an animal bit me, it would die of poisoning. That if I spit in the reservoir, thousands would get sick. That if I took a dump in the forest, everything within a mile of it would die from the lichen to the deer.

And a tiny part of me wants that kind of thing to happen. My suffocating id wants something big, toxic, and horrifyingly deadly to happen as a result of my releasing my inner pain into the world. It wants to unleash pain and suffering and dying terrified and confused unto the world just to express the pain and suffering and dying inside me and force the world to fucking notice how much fucking pain I am in.

It would be like an emo apocalpyse.

Or maybe I will just go Godzilla sized and rampage through the Lower Mainland, screaming out my rage and pain as I rip shit apart, stomp on moving cars, take out helicopters with my toxic breath attack, and finally show the world that I am alive and I exist and they are going to have to factor me into their equations from now on.

I clearly have some serious fucking issues.

But the thing is, I am all too aware of the irony of my situation because as much as I am mad about being ignored and neglected and been made to feel like I don’t even exist for my whole life, I also know that I played a huge part in that by hiding away.

I’ve very good at that. I have mastered the art of hiding away from absolutely everything and thus becoming invisible to the world. If the world fails to notice or validate me, it’s because I have been actively avoiding its notice for a very long time.

Not that I have a choice. Anxiety and depression force this kind of living on me. Only this level of isolation can keep those hungry hounds at bay.

I can’t handle it out in the big ol world with all its noise and light and unpredictability. It’s all just too damned loud, on every level, via every stimulus. Part of my deep weakness and fragility is this extremely low physical and social stimulation tolerance, like I am a member of the House of Usher.

And it forces me to live in a cage.

Despite all my rage.

And I want things to be different. I want to be strong. I want to go out there and face my fears and get used to the world and get over myself and get healthy.

But all that requires a kind of traction that I just don’t have right now. I can’t push forward because there is nothing to push against. The best I can do is tread water in an endless sea hoping to one day find dry land again.

Until then, I am helpless, hopeless, and ready to drown.

Been sleeping a lot today. I would love to be able to say that it was because I had no choice like yesterday afternoon, but nope. This was depressive sleep, what people are calling “depression napping” on the internet these days.

It’s a lot like depressive eating, or an other form of self-medication. I sleep to escape reality. I sleep to survive time. When faced with hours and hours of empty worthless time in every day, I hibernate instead.

It’s so much easier than actually dealing with things.

Not better. Just easier.

Still can’t make myself cum. I can get real close but somehow the magic moment of healthy squirts never happens. And yet I am still horny so I have to keep trying.

I think I liked it better when I was less horny. I don’t know how to deal with such a demanding libido. It would be one thing if I was emotionally healthy. Then I could just use a hookup app like Grindr or go to the baths or whatever.

But I am too fucked up for that. Every option available is smashed to pieces on the rocky shores and coral reefs of my intense interpersonal issues.

As much as I really crave cock right now – my mouth is watering as we speak – when I try to imagine any of the ways I would actually acquire access to some, that ice cold fear envelops my soul and freezes me to the spot.

I can’t imagine hooking up with some stranger I don’t even know. I have trouble doing far less intimate things with people I don’t know.

To be honest. I don’t even like sharing an elevator with strangers. Not that there’s anything wrong with them – it just strains my resistance to my own neuroses.

It takes effort to hold the forces that say everyone hates me and finds me repulsive at bay, even for as short a time as a three minute elevator ride.

The baths are out, too. The one time I went to one, it was practically deserted and os I did not get overstimulated.

In either direction.

If it was crowded and loud, I would not stand a chance. And it would have to be crowded for there to be the kind of sexual access I crave.

I have this fantasy where I go to some place with a busy men’s room, like a mall, and take over a stall, and put a sign on the door that reads, “Free Blowjobs! Inquire Within!” on the door, then sit down on the bowl and wait for customers.

It’s ingenious, really.  If someone opens that door, I know exactly why. Therefore, I have a role. I am the crazy guy offering to suck any dick that opens that door.

Why do you think I call them customers? It’s the ultimate customer service job.

I assume that I would get kiicked out eventually. That’s not the sort of thing any public institution wants to be known for.

I might even get arrested, although I wonder what the charge would be.

After all, it’s not prostitution. I’m not charging anything.

And you know what would be the best part of being arrested?

The trial would be HILARIOUS. Imagine all those stuffy legal types turning red as a beet as they describe my crime.

Imagine my fun as I completely refuse to show the slightest bit of shame and in fact treat the whole thing as a simple misunderstanding about something perfecly innocent and act like I have no idea what the fuss was about.

Might even make it into the news cycle. It would certainly be lurid enough.

It would be a hell of a thing to be famous for. I get tingles just thinking about it.

Now excuse me while I lie down and talk myself out of this.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or at least mine are, from time to time.

Today I had one of those afternoons. All I did this afternoon was get my ass kicked by terrible yet mandatory sleep that felt like it was trying to kill me, with occasional breaks to get up and pee… a LOT.

I think I am on the other side of it now. Maybe not totally out of the woods but definitely way past the halfway point. The trees are thinning and I can smell lilacs.

In fact, there is even a chance that if (when) I nap again after I am done blogging, that I will get one of my rare and precious beyond measure periods of actual, restful, peaceful, restorative sleep.

It’s a poor payment for an afternoon of being tortured in the dark, but it’s still very nice.

I was honestly starting to worry by the end of it. This attack was a lot more severe than usual. I felt like the life was being squeezed out of me. There was this feeling of heaviness and pressure, like I was on a high gravity planet, or maybe deep under the ocean where the pressure can crush steel.

And the sleepiness was so strong. I couldn’t do anything because my mind was so goddamned drained. I have a new game I was eager to play, but it was not in the cards for me this afternoon.

No wonder I have precious little trust to spare for the world in general. It does things like this to me all the time. My life might seem very sedate and safe but it isn’t.

It’s just that my dangers are all internal and lurk within the depths of my body and my soul, so they are easy to miss.

But on a metaphysical level, I live a life of constant danger, struggle, and stress. It’s like being in a jungle warzone all the time.

No wonder I can’t sleep properly.

And no wonder I get so damned tired sometimes. Tired of fighting and hiding and waiting and straining and fearing and fleeing and all the goddamned bullshit of this goddamned bullshit war.

Somone get me a goddamned ceasefire.

I would probably be better off with a way, way, waaay more relaxed attitude towards life. I feel like a big part of my problems is that I am constantly trying to force myself to be the way I feel I am supposed to be while another part of me, the defiant rebel part, fights back against that with all its strength and guile.

So it’s like a constant and highly absurd solo arm wrestling match.

If I could just get that angry, stubborn, controlling part of me to calm the fuck down and stop trying to force the rest of me to fit into its mould, maybe I could, in a relaxed and judgment free way, let things assume their natural, stress-free positions in my mind and then see where I can go from there.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

But instead, I am like my buddy Nietzsche, constantly at war with myself. There is no shortcut to peace for me. No matter what, I am doomed to get there through blood and fire and pain, or not at all.

And I have wasted a lot of time choosing the latter all the time.

So be it. I will let the fires of hell burn the impurities from my flesh. I will frog-march myself through the fetid swamps and fens of my own filthy existence. I will lance the boils and drain the sores and purge the toxins and do everything else so that I one day can be clean.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am not my dirt. That cleanliness IS possible. That underneath all the grime and stinking filth, beneath the scabs and the pustules and the sores, way below the walking miasma that surrounds me is a good clean boy who is innocent and pure and counting on me to find him and rescue him.

I’m working on it, kid. That well you fell down is mighty deep and it’s going to take a long time to drill down to you. But we will do it. One day you will be free to walk in the sunshine again and get back to the important business of growing up.

So hang in there, kiddo. And enjoy the toys I send you.

I kind of feel like I am in Purgatory. Or, if Christianity bums you out, I am in my own bardo. Either way, I am going through painful experiences as a result of a spiritual journey to rid myself of my sins and attachments to my current life so that I may be reborn into the world free and clean.

At least I would like to think so. It is very human of me to want my suffering to mean something. To represent progress towards a goal. One that would justify the whole god damned shit show.

But for all I know, none of this means a goddamned thing and I am doomed to suffer in increasingly large doses until I die a pointless and pathetic death without ever having contributed anything meaningful to society.

And my epitaph will read, “Never has so little been done with so much”.

Yeah, well, all that potential don’t mean jack shit if you are too broken to use it. Like I said before, it’s like having a fancy car that doesn’t work.

It doesn’t matter that the thing COULD be amazing to drive. It ain’t going anywhere.

And really,  why would it matter what it could do IF it was fixed when it’s not likely to ever get repaired?

Maybe I would be better off abandoning the broken car and all the dreams attached to it and go in search of something mundane I can work with.

But I don’t think I can do it. Those dreams mean too much to me.

Guess I am stuck here forever then.

Might as well get used to it,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

First off, this is what I will be talking about.

It’s an episode of a CNN show called This Is Life that is all about us funny furry type people in the furry community.

Or should that be the Furry Community? Whatever.

Like nearly all furries, when I found out a show was going to do an episode on us, I cringed inwardly. We have had some very bad representation in the media by people who only saw us as hilariously pathetic perverts to be mocked and exploited, and because of that, my default reaction to any kind of media coverage is “I wish they would just leave us alone in our own little world. ”

This attitude of mine is woefully out of date. It has been a long time since a certain horrible episode of CSI (to which I shall not link because I don’t want to get all mad again when I am trying to talk about something good) which treated my community with absolutely no respect.

And I love that show. So it really felt like a betrayal.

Anyhow, all the media coverage in the last decade of which I am aware has been respectful, sensitive, open-minded, and understanding. The days of being the bottom of the nerd social pecking order are over, people have added us to their mental lists of colorful but harmless weirdos, and in general, everything is cool.

But some impressions do not fade, so I doubt I will ever really trust the media.

Anyhow, the show was actually really, really good. It was sensitive and understanding and managed to really get to the heart of what being furry means to people by depicting our community through the eyes of three people who have used it to get over serious problems and who have found, in the furry community, a place where they can be themselves by being someone else.

Some of us can only be ourselves when we are wearing a mask.

Which brings me to one of my only criticisms of the episode, and it is a very minor one, and quite common to media coverage of our community.

It goes like this : the episode focuses very strongly on fursuiters. All three subjects were fursuiters and only a few snatches of voiceover acknowledge that there are those of us who do NOT fursuit.

In reality, of course, only about 10 percent of us fursuit, although that number is climbing rapidly among the current generation of young furries as the knowledge of how to make one’s fursuit is digested and spread by the community.

Still, there’s a lot more nonfursuiters than fursuiters. But I do not blame the media for fixating on the fursuiters because they are so amazingly visual.

The camera just eats them up. They are like cartoon characters come to life. Furries outside of the fursuit community are merely nerds in animal T-shirts. But the fursuiters are very visibly distinct.

So whatever. I can live with it, no problem.

I was instantly hooked into the episode because the very first subject was a woman who suffers from intense social anxiety.

Um, hello? That’s me.

And like me, she found that the only way around that was to become someone else. In her case, it was a fursona whom she eventually turned into a fursuit, and in that fursuit, she becomes a totally new person. Someone bubbly and gregarious and energetic and very very friendly.

Also me. Obviously. I have never taken being Fruvous to the point of turning him into a fursuit, mainly because I can’t sew and I don’t have the money to buy one.

But it’s essentially the same. We furries create a version of ourselves that can do what we cannot and be who we want to be. Our real world lives revolve around the people we happen to be – the product of accidents of fate over which we had no control and about which we were not consulted.

Our fursonas, on the other hand, are custom crafted creations made to fit us perfectly and let us be who we need to be.

And the episode made me wonder what it would be like to have a fursuit of Fruvous. It could be quite amazing for me. I see videos of fursuiters interacting with people in a really fun and lovely way and I think, “I could do that!”.

And I want to. It seems like it’s not just loads of fun but also very fulfilling. I want to make people happy – it is what I want more than anything else in my life.

A fursuit could allow me to express my hidden exuberance and friendliness just like I do as Fruvous online. And that’s a prettty amazing prospect.

I have been wondering how to become more like my fursona. I really wish I could be just like him in RL. He has a lot more fun than I do, and no social anxiety. In fact, he’s quite bold about meeting new people and has a very wide group of friends and is generally well liked and popular.

In other words, he’s me as an extrovert.

And who knows, maybe even me as I was meant to be before being raped at the age of 4 took all that away from me and turned me into the fragile cripple who is typing these very words that you are reading.

Thank you for that, by the way.

Anyhow, the rest of the episode is also awesome. The other two people are a fellow with crippling PTSD who has to live all by himself way out in the middle of nowhere in order to control it and a woman with both lupus and another rarare genetic disorder who went from being super active and sporty to limited to a wheelchair in the space of six monthys. Both also used their fursuit fursonas to escape their problems.

It ended with the host attending her first furry convention. It was interesting to see it through her eyes because, as a grey-muzzled furry, I often forget just what a strange and wonderful world furry fandom can be.

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go pretend to be a fox for a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am feeling a lot of free-floating anxiety right now.

It’s like a state of continual mid-level panic. Not an actual panic atttack, per se, although one could happen at any moment given the right stimulus.

It’s more a sense of just being freaked out by life in general. I can’t seem to exit this mode where practically everything provokes a “panic and flee’ type avoidant response and each one of them raises my background anxiety level and ratchets up the pressure on the death grip some alien hand seems to have on my heart.

And it makes it so hard to cope.

The worst part is that I don’t seem to have any resistance left in me. I can’t fight back. The fear and avoidance come and I just melt and give in instantly.

It’s not even a decision.

What happened to my defiance? Where did my rage go? How did I lose all the traction under my hooves that was so vital in my pushing back against this bullshit?

Somehow, I lost contact with whatever dry land I had forged in this vast ocean of turbulent ocean within me and once more I am drowning within myself and at the mercy of the tides and the storms.

The brave and proper thing for a smarty pants type like myself to do at a time like this is to realize the folly of this eternal and infinite n-space retreat and turn to face the ghosts that haunt me, and try to make some kind of peace with them.

But I can’t seem to do that. I try and I just end up further freaked out. It’s like I can’t handle anything any more. I have lost all basis for self-control and the only way I know how to cope with that is to bury myself in my video games as deep as I can and let the mental engagement and energy that takes bleed away the energy of the anxiety and give me some measure of calm.

The closest I get to actual defiance is these attacks of nihilistic rage where I hate everything and want to utterly annihilate everything around me in order to make some goddamned room for me to think inside this echo chamber in my mind.

Well now that was ironic.

Here I am, talking about being anxious and panicky, when the phone rings and it’s somene I know and they are freaking out about something.

And at first my reaction was to panic too. I was not in the frame of mind to be able to handle it. My friend was freaking out and confused and my intitial, cowardly instinct was to pass the whole mess off to Joe.

But he ain’t home. And I am glad, because it meant I had to pull myself together for my friend and try to help him calm down by being the cool and gentle voice of reason.

I am pretty good at that, when I can get a grip on my own bullshit.

And you know what? After helping him, I feel a lot calmer!

And that’s just so… me. The need to be there for someone else combined with the somewhat protean nature of my mind combined to make me transform into a calmer version of myself and now I feel a lot better.

The anxiety is still there, but now it’s at a distance.

So once more, I can do for others what I cannot do just for myself. I find that highly amusing and even sort of lovable, in a mildly crazy way.

It reminds me of when I was still at UPEI in the early 90’s and planned on becoming a practicing psychologist. Not a psychiatrist – that required medical school and I had no illusions about being capable of that.

I could probably have handled the learning. It’s the practical I was sure I could not do.

And all I really wanted was to be people’s therapist. To be there for them, to listen, to do my best to understand, to help them through their own forests of issues and gently prod and push them into releasing all the pent up bullshit that was holding them back and making it hard for them to cope.

To me, that seemed like the best possible thing to do for a living. Helping others like that would have been extremely satisfying to me. To be able to strike back at the forces of depression and madness seemed like the highest calling to me, and that was the job I could imagine liking so much that it was a joy to get to work every day.

And my experiences playing (very) amateur therapist for friends on an ad hoc basis have comfirmed all of that. Doing it gives me a glow of pride and fulfilment and a feeling of having done what I am supposed to be doing on this Earth.

So who knows. Maybe I should chuck the whole writing for a living thing for now and go back to school to become some kind of therapist or counselor or whatever.

Of course, there is nothing keeping me from just declaring myself to be, if not a therapist, then someone who is willing to listen to you and help you the best he can for, presumably, a hell of a lot less than an actual professional therapist would charge.

I know there’s websites where people more or less crowd-source therapy. Where you can sign up and be either therapist or patient depending on how they feel that day.

I would appreciate that flexibility of role and lack of formality and commitment. And it could be very good for me to help others.

It would certainly lend desperately needed meaning to my life. And more than that, it would go a long way towards making me feel like an asset to the world instead of feeling like I am nothing but a liability.

But I am not a liability. I spread sunshine. I make people happy just by being around. I make people laugh and make their day better.

And not everyone can do that. It’s quite the gift.

And thanks to today’s events, I can finally feel that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well here I am, sitting in my fave seat in my fave White Spot, tippity typing on my tablet’s virtual keyboard, and contemplating life.

I am oot and aboot today because my check was late due to the postal strike (grr) and did not show up till yesterday, ergo today was my first chance
to cash the goddamed thung. Lucky my bank (Vancity, represent) is open from 9:30 am to 3 pm on Saturdays, otherwise I would have had to wait until Monday, and that would have been a huge hassle and probably led to my having to borrow money from my friends.

Andci haaaaaaate borrowing money from my friends.

So that was my motivation to get my behind out of my room and out into the cold cruel world.

It’s been fine.

Took a cab to the bank. What the heck. It felt like luxury.

And now I get a little day out where I can have a nice lunch then do a little shopping at Pricesmart (shop smart… shop Pricesmart) before taking a cab home again for some well earned laziness.

It’s just like I’m people!

There’s. so little content in my life that merely running a few errands feels wonderful because, for this brief glittering time, my
life has direction and purpose.

Why I cannot provide this kind of purpose for myself is the million shekel question.

My best guess is that there is something wrong with my connection to my life force and the world. There is just plain not a lot of life in me, and there never has been. I have always delicate and hesitant and ready to bolt at any second.

It is an id thing, of course. My rape severed my connection to mine as I retreated into my mind in order to deal with the trauma. I guess I died inside in order to survive. What was left of me was fragile and trembling and unsuitedunsuited for survival like a chick who hatched too soon.

Like I keep saying, I can feel what is missing in me. I look at healthy people and marvel at their strength and vitality. Compared to them, I feel like a chalk cartoon of a person, flat and empty and only superficially appealing.

Back home now, and feeling okay. Saturday has return to its usual calm. Life is good, or at least, not currently actively painful. 

That will have to do. 

Now, on with the angst! 

Now I know that what I am saying is crazy. By that I mean, the product of a thought process distorted by mental illness and thus not representative of reality.

But this is about how I feel. So let’s just take “crazy” as our baseline and move on.

This lack of vitality of which I speak, combined with the chilling numbing effect of depression in general, is why I am always going on about being dead on some level.

Well, if you lack life force, what else can you be but dead?

And I want to return to life. To resurrect myself. But there are some very deep problems I have to overcome first because as much as I want to return to the realm of the living, I am also terrified to do so.

I have been keeping my skeletons in the deep freeze of my heart for a very long time now, and as a result, there’s an awful lot of them. When the adrenalin and life force start pumping, those skeletons start to wake up and it feels like if I don’t clamp down hard on that adrenal response, I am going to be torn to pieces, Night of the Living Dead style.

Probably not a realistic fear but tell that to my amygdala.

And life kinda sucks when you live in mortal fear of your own adrenaline. In fact, I am thinking now that a lot of my anxiety comes from that inner conflict.

The healthy part of me wants to restore life to my cold dead flesh and leave the shadow of my icebound castle to go out into the world and become what I need to become.

But the depression thwarts it by responding to the increased heat by turning up the AC and freezing me out by at least as much as the heat was increasing, and often by a whole lot more.

That’s how my depression punishes me for trying to escape, you see. Via a wildly disproportionate response to a non-crisis.

The paralells with a facist totalitarian state just keep piling up.

So the struggle continues. Recovery, through this lens, is a process of learning to disable and suppress this instinct to clamp down on my own attempts to heal.

I want to live. I want to live. I want to live.

Repeat until believed.

The fear involved is a very slippery thing that is very good at hiding from all attempts to get a grip on it. I suppose that’s how it’s lived this long. And as long as that fear remains, healing is going to be a constant struggle.

One thing I know for sure is that the cure for my problems will not come in the form of self-analysis and endless blogging. Those work but they work very, very slowly.

In fact, it’s downright glacial.

So if I ever hope to speed up the process, I will have to think outside my tiny little box and start contemplating experiences that might help it along.

Dunno what those might be. Might be a trip to a Buddhist temple or some nice little out of the way Christian church of some friendly and middle of the road denomination where the people are nice people and don’t mind a non-judgmental secular humanist sitting in on their services and soaking up the vibe.

Or maybe it would involve me fucking my brains out at a gay bath-house or similar orgiastic type situation.

Whatever it takes to finally thaw me out and let me open my heart to the world without fear and without reservation.

Maybe then I can truly be alive.

Maybe then, the Blue Fairy will make me a real little boy.

Maybe then….. I will finally grow up.

I will talk to you  nice people again tomorrow.

Our relationship with time changes over… um. time.

When I was a kid, nothing was fast enough. Tiny delays felt massive. Postponement of something i wanted was agony. I always wanted things to go faster.

With my hypercharged brain, it was like I was a Pentium with a custom OSand the world was running on a 286 running Windows 1.

As I got older, this effect lessened, and around when I was in my last year of high school, I synced up with reality and it was awesome.

Things felt like they happened at more or less exactly the right time. The days felt like they were the right length. I still got impatient about things sometimes but for the most part, the glorious combination of the lengthening of my sense of time and my hormones FINALLY slacking off a tad from their pubescent high water mark meant that I went through my days finally freed from that goddamned fire burning in me.

We didn’t start the fire, by the way. It’s been always burning since the world starts turning. We didn’t start the fire.

That’s actually some pretty clunky phrasing. It’s been always turning since the world starts turning? Yikes. But it’s a Billy Joel song, so it doesn’t sound wrong when he says it because his songs are so musically beautiful.

Anyhow, I am convinced that being in sync with time is one of the reasons my college years were the happiest time of my life. Not the only reason – having cool nerdy friends to do fun nerdy stuff with quite often for the first time in my life was the big one – but the time thing sure helped.

But of course, that does not last forever and by the time I was in my early 30’s I was just starting to get that “stop the world till I can catch up” feeling.

It wasn’t too bad at first. More amusing than anything else. When I felt it, I would just smile and give my head a shake then jump right back into the fray.

But it just got worse and worse with time until some time in my late 30’s, I started to feel pretty panicky about the whole thing. Subjectively speaking, it seemed like everything was speeding up. But I was savvy enough to know that I was slowing down.

Still, the panic was real, and so I dealt with the issue the only way I know : I thought about it obsessively till I figured it out to my satisfaction.

That’s when I started seriously thinking about our sense of time. ^[1] It’s not something I have ever heard talked about in the media. Not directly. And I have only ever found passing references to it in psychology texts.

Hence my not having a decent name for it.

And that’s when I had my crisis where I got totally freaked out by this sense of subjective acceleration and started to wonder whether the rest of my life was going to be like a slideshow where each picture is further apart in time than the previous one.

Lucky, it was a productive crisis^[2] because that’s what led me to realize that this sense of accelation was an illusion caused by our minds having more and more memories to navigate and that slowing things down.

The days have exactly the same number of minutes as always. Time passes at the exact same rate. There is still the same amount of time to get things done.

Time – the real, objective kind – can’t be changed. It’s as regular and logical as anything can be in this Universe.

So you can feel free to ignore the silly sensation of acceleration, knowing it to be just a quirk of how memory works and possibly the fact that we live a lot longer than when we evolved and therefore our minds are not optimized for storing, indexing, and accessing the amount of memories we accumulate by the time we are 40.

That thought is what has gotten me this far. It’s the thought I use to beat back the darkness when that feeling of panic and helplessness rears its ugly head.

As patient readers know, I am the guy who, as a kid, conquered his fear of the dark via the relentless application of logic via telling myself over and over that there is nothing there in the dark that was not there in the light.

Thus, I conquered my fear via mental strength and discipline.

Well, and the fact that I was just plain fucking sick of being scared. That’ s a very important factor in a lot of my life changing moments. I reach the point where my growing irritation at something ignites into full blown being pissed off by it, and then I make big changes with that energy and the resulting kamikaze fanaticism that means I will do whatever the fuck it takes to defeat “the enemy”.

That mode is kind of scary when seen close up. Sure, it seems pretty awesome when it’s fueling important life changes, but that same thing could lead me to doing some pretty fucked up shit if it attached to a person or institution.

Being someone who is literally capable of anything has its downsides.

Dammit, I have gotten lost in my own asides again. Where was I?

Oh right, time.

As it stands now, I feel like I have a handle on the whole false acceleration thing. At least it’s keeping pace with the slowing of my reflexes. And I take great comfort in knowing that slower is not necessarily stupider. In many ways – the most important ways – I feel like I am smarter than I have ever been.

I might not be lghtning fast any more – or at least, not reliably – but I have so much more insight and wisdom and above all depth to my intelligence that I don’t feel like I have really lost anything.

Intelligence is great and all.

But wisdom is worth its weight in gold.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Good therapy session today. Got some stuff off my chest about him interrupting me. Never got around to talk about him interrupting me to argue with me specifically, but I am learning to accept that I will never say everything I meant to say in therapy because there’s is too damned much of it and too much going on at the time to be thorough.

The main takeaway for me was the realization that I scare people away with my neediness. When people get close enough, they can sense how enormous my need for love, affection, nurturing and all is, and it scares the hell out of them because it feels to them like it could swallow them whole in one bite without even slowing down.

That’s the ravenous void inside me that makes people back away from me. That’s the hungry hole at the heart of me that is or at least feels like a threat to others. People feel, not enitrely without cause, that to get too close to me is to risk annihilation.

And it doesn’t matter whether or not I mean them any harm. The harm is going to happen regardless of my desires or intentions, or so it seems.

There is one thing I know for sure is that this deep and terrible hunger in my is very real. I have been emotionally undernourished for a really long time and on that level it has made me as dangerous and unpredictable as any starving man.

And it means that I am not entirely in control of myself. It’s possible that I might hurt someone a lot before I could stop myself.

The temptation to compare myself to a starving vampire is strong. One might be the most virtuous vampire the world has ever known but if the Thirst is upon you and some poor human catches you at the wrong moment, they might be dead and drained before you even knew it was happening.

This devil’s desire to drain til dead is a terrifying thing to contemplate, but I am glad I am consciously aware of it now. That’s the first and most important step towards figuring out how to deal with the problem.

Ideally I want to be able to express my needs in a way that reassures people that I am not, in fact, going to eat them. I am not sure how that would work, because the needs are quite real and I am not inclined to pretend they are not there.

Perhaps I just need to accept that despite trying to be as user friendly as possible, I remain not entirely safe to be around.

That doesn’t sit well wtih me, though. I can’t accept the idea that I don’t have control over myself. That means I would either need to decide I can live with totally hiding it for the rest of my life or that I can fully accept that I am a goddamned predator looking for someone I can drain the love and affection from then move on to fresh prey.

Those options…. aren’t any better. To put it mildly.

Then there’s the intensity with which I express my emotions  – emoting volume set to 11 – can make people feel utterly lost and like their own sense of self is threatened by the sheer power of my self-expression.

That’s got to be pretty frigging scary. It makes me a great storyteller but without the distance of the storyteller/audience relationship – when it’s just normal interpersonal interaction – it’s like deadly voodoo magic.

I would have made one hell of a shaman.

I’m just sayin’.

Part 2 : My Butthole Has Frostbite

Well poop. My mouse isn’t working.

And it’s a very weird malfunction. Get this : the buttons work, and the laser on the bottom lights up, but I can’t move the mouse cursor at all.

Or at least I think I can’t, because the mouse cursor has disappeared. It could be that it’s turned invisible. Wouldn’t THAT be a kick in the cunt.

And the thing is, it happened very suddenly, while I was playing a game. One minute I am playing Dishonoured 3 : Death of the Outsider and then suddenly the mouse movement up and dies.

It might be malware of some sory. Some hankerin’ thirst queens idea of a joke. I practice safe downloads and never dload from unknown sources or anyplace that seems kind of hinky.

But I do browse porn sites quite a bit, and they have been know as spreaders of computer viruses and such, so that’s a possibility.

The other possibility is that there is something wrong with the laser. That would fit with the fact that the buttons and mousewheel work but movement does not. The buttons and mousewheel don’t depend on the laser at all.

It seems as bright and as red as ever, but it’s not as if I spend a lot of time looking at it.

And this, on top of the fact that my monthly cheque has not arrived and cheque day was yesterday. There’s a postal strike on, so I am not exactly susprised, but it still pisses me off because I need that money.

You know, end of the month, end of the money. I have a few bucks left from last month’s cheque and a little bit saved up on the card, but that’s not going to last long.

Plus, ya know, Joe is going to need my rent money not too long from now.

So between the mouse and the check. I am feeling rather stressed right now. My little world has broken down in two places.

At least I still have my tablet, so I will not be completely cut off without a working mouse. And you can do a lot of things with just the keyboard in Windows, albeit in a very slow and clunky kinda way.

Plus, I have not yet tried everything to get the fucking thing working. I have not tried switching USB ports, or looking at mouse pointer settings, or checked for kinks in the mouse cord. And so on.

So all is not yet lost. Worst case scenario is that I buy another mouse from Amazon.

But it’s still stress I could do without.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Now where was I?

Oh right. There is something terribly, terribly wrong with me and there always has been.

And it makes me socially weird. People can sense my wrongness and it creates this distance between me and them because it makes me seem like something strange and gross that they probably don’t want to touch for fear of getting it on them.

I am so very, very broken. Like I said yesterday. I can feel all the places where things are missing in me that are present in others. Parts of me are dead and other parts are absurdly latent given my age. Huge parts of my psyche are nothing but tiny strips of frozen gristle to mark where pieces of my heart should be.

Instead, there’s just a big sign that says, “This space intentionally left blank”.

I feel like I have been very sick for a very long time. And that’s not wrong. When I got raped, many things inside my mind got broken, and because nobody knew and I was far too broken and timid to tell anyone, those severe psychological injuries have remained untreated for 41 years and counting.

And it’s made me a cripple. Psychologically speaking. There is so much I can’t do and can’t explain why. How do you explain to people that you are all shriveled up and dead inside? That your heart and soul are twisted and atrophied like a crippled limb, and that makes simple things impossible for me to do?

It’s not like it shows. There’s no such thing as a wheelchair for the soul. I can’t go around on crutches for the heart. I look like a zillion other big fat hairy dudes. Generic Nerd Type Three : Big n’ Fat.

So I limp painfully through life, bewildered and wondering why the hell the world is so much harder for me than for others. And thinking that means I am something horrible. ?Unlovable and unworthy, a strange and unwholesome lizard, malodourus and slimy, who darts about its tiny dark cave because it’s better than dealing with the Warm Ones.

I wish I could cleanse this tainted flesh from my dank and rotting soul. I wish doctors with lasers could open up my skull and blast all the bad stuff out. I wish I could take a pill to make me vomit it all up in one enormous act of emotional emesis.

I wish I could find waters so pure that to drown myself in them would make me clean.

But life is not that kind, at least not to me. Life saw fit to make me “special’ and stick me with this bizarrely polarized life where I am both mentally astounding and pathetically weak and helpless. Amazing potential without the wherewithal to use it. A vault full of treasures and no key.

And seeing as I am 45, a man, and enormous. it’s not like anybody is ever going to swoop in and give this little hothouse flower the structure and nourishment it needs in order to thrive and bloom.

Like my therapist said, I have to do it myself.

And I can’t. So I’m fucked.

I am just plain not strong enough. Strangely enough, being psychologically crippled makes pulling yourself up by your bootstraps rather hard. My only realistic hope is to find someone who can help me keep it together enough to function, and that is just plain not going to happen.

For one thing, it’s clear to me now that I am just plain too heavy a burden for anyone to lift, let alone carry. My therapist has been in practices for decades and he can’t handle it. And if he can’t, who can?

Like I said before, people take a look at the real me and all my needs and back the fuck off as fast as they can because all they can see is a burden so great it would crush them and they don’t want it to grab on to them like a drowning man and end up killing us both in the process.

And I don’t know what I can do about that. I try so hard to be easy, you know? Easy to love, easy to like, easy to be around, easy to get love from.

But deep down, I am not easy at all. I am intense, and dark, and complicated, and incredibly dangerous to touch. People correctly sense that underneath all my charm and wit and charisma lies the blackest of black holes and the only hope they have for survival is to stay as far away from my event horizon as possible.

And that’s been true all my life. Since the day I was raped, everyone in my life who might have helped me wanted as little to do with me as possible instead. My parents treated me like I wasn’t even supposed to be here and my siblings formed a world of their own before I was born and had no interest in letting me in or giving me a share.

My teachers found me as repulsive and pathetic as my felllow students did. I was too much of a mental mutant to be able to connect to people my age. And adults sure as fuck wanted nothing to do with me.

And now I know why. I was the only person who couldn’t see just how fucked up I was and how my attempts to be friendly to people only made them flee me all the harder, or worse, abuse me to make me go away.

But of course, nobody would tell me these things to my face. That would be work and I clearly did not warrant anything but the absolute minimum of effort.

So here I sit, looking down the barrel of a meaningless life where the deck was stacked against me from the start.

Need a lot of help.

Nobody will help me.

Can’t help myself.

So I am completely and totally fucked.

It’s going to be the exact same bullshit life till the day I die. No career, no husband, no sex, no life. Just more video games.

And it’s just not fucking worth it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.