Feeling ugly today. But in a fun way. Like I am a silly ol troll or ogre from a children’s story, one who is ugly in a cute way and not scary at all.

Of course, when I write children’s stories, they feature hardcore nudity.

Why? Because I’m a pervert, duh!

Been contemplating my relationship with order, or lack thereof. I know for sure that, deep down. part of me craves a neater, better organized, more rational and efficient life, that represents that side of my mind better and that pleases me to behold.

The problem is that there is a much bigger part of me that absolutely loathes that idea and rises up to brutally demolish any and all plans in that direction before I can even fully form the intention to clean up around here.

There is something deep and dark inside me that hides in all the chaos and the clutter and the filth, and it (in other words, me) fears exposure like Dracula fears sunlight.

And I could not tell you what this dark thing is. I suppose if I could, that would be a form of exposure via the spotlight of consciousness. All I can tell you is that there is a great deal of very deep and potent shame attached. The kind of shame that tends to be attached to matters concerned with the elimination of waste.

You know. Potty stuff.

So that’s all part of the mix. Part of me is terrified – deep down terrified – of what I have been holding in coming out and views that possibly as, like I said yesterday, the Worst Thing That Could Happen.

But why? What could be so bad? Whatever it is, I am probably far better off without it and the only way to get rid of it would be to let it out, so why not?

What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like we are dealing with a physical toxin or even actual bodily waste here. This is purely psychological. If whatever it is comes out, it will be in the form of emotions and possibly words.

So what’s the big deal?

It must all tie back to when I was raped at the age of 4. A lot of us survivors of child sexual abuse carry a deep dark sense of shame, as if the abuse made us into something dirty and disgusting and shameful.

In fact, that’s true of all rape survivors, regardlessof age. And it’s so unfair. We didn’t do anything wrong. We’re the victims here, not the perpetrators. They are the ones who did something shameful and horrible and disgusting. They should be the ones who feel dirty and spoiled, not us.

And yet here we are. We, the innocent victims, literally feel like shit, and the rapists probably went on with their lives never even thinking about it again.

My rapist, the man who shattered my life forever, probably went back home to his family that day feeling great. He had gotten his dark urges out without violating his own kids, and he had that warm happy feeling one gets after taking a really good shit.

There’s that Freudian butt stuff again.

In fact, I bet he considered that to be one of the best days of his life.

It was, obviously, the absolute worst in mine. Bar none.

But even recognizing the unfairness of my feelings of being a walking talking turd sandwich that is so disgusting and horrible that nobody could ever love him does not make those feelings go away.

At best, it helps me handle them a bit better.

No, I think there is no linear, rational way to actually rid myself of these feelings of filthiness and contamination. I think whatever the successful method is, it will involve the sort of transcendant mystical thinking which operates purely on emotion with which I am almost totally unfamiliar.

I am a victim of my own rationality on many, many levels.

That’s one of them.

I mean, I grasp the theory of it. That kind of thinking (or rather, feeling) involves following the emotional connections of the mind without the limiting factor of logic, reason, or any need to make literal rational sense of it all.

It’s the sort of thing people experience under the influence of powerful hallucinogens. In those situations, those inner connections take over the person’s entire consciousness.

I have never had that happen (while awake, anyway) but I feel like I reach something like that mode when I am writing my thoughts down as they come. It’s especially potent when, like in last year’s book, I am translating those thoughts and feelings into the potent imagery of fictional prose as I go.

By doing so, I begin to approach that mystic state where inner reality is projected into the consciousness in a way that feels nearly real.

But I wish I were even braver. I greatly admire the poets and writers who are willing to fully embrace this dream logic state of mind and write their words without thought as to whether anyone will understand them or even care about them.

They are the ones who create truly powerful art that comes from those deep dark recesses of the soul. Their imagery is powerful precisely because it comes unfiltered from the part of the mind that generates dreams when we are asleep.

I think I have gotten close to that in my writing a few times, but not as close as I wouild like. I think it would be very interesting, not to mention highly therapeutic, for me to try to write like that, without worrying about whether my audience will understand it or like it and concentrating entirely on expressing what needs to be expressed in the most vivid and true way that I can.

But I am scared. Leaving the cold comfort zone of my rational linear mindset is very difficult for me. It has been both my weapon and my shelter against the darkness of the world for as long as I can remember, and I am scared that if I leave it in order to explore the dark and tangled woods of my deep emotional life, I will never find my way back.

Quite probably not a rational fear, but still, it remains.

So I dunno. Maybe one day you will come to this blog to find that the latest entry is my doing my level best to write down every thought as it comes to me, or at the very least to follow those emotional pathways wherever they want to take me.

If so, sorry in advance if it makes little sense to you.

But it might just do me a world of good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Normally, by way of explanation, I would link the video that today’s blog title came from here. It’s usually just whatever song is stuck in my head when I sit down to blog. Sometimes, it relates to what I was planning on talking about, but most of the time it does not. It’s just whatever random bit of music is looping in my brain.

To be honest, a lot of the time I have no idea what I am going to talk about until I actually start writing, if then. Sometimes I don’t have a clue what I am going to write until I have written it.

Writing can be quite fun that way. It can be a voyage of self-discovery, where you find out what you think about something by writing about it. Far too many times, I have written a long bit about something or other in this space then sat back and said ‘Wow, I had no idea I felt that strongly about that thing. ‘

It’s a little crazy, but it’s a lot of fun.

There is something qualitatively different about writing down my thoughts as opposed to just thinking about stuff. It’s like each thought is at the top of a tall stack of thoughts, and writing one thought down causes the next to pop up into my consciousness.

It’s like Kleenex!

It’s curious how the act of writing the thought down makes all the difference. It’s like once it is written down, my brain recognizes that it doesn’t have to hold on to that thought any more because it’s now stored offsite, so to speak.

And that’s a powerful thing. Emotions are information, as I have said before. Ditto for our thoughts and opinions and so on. They remain in our minds until they are transmitted. Only when out cognitive hardware gets the “message received” signal can it let the emotion (or whatever) go and give you back the mental resources that said information was taking up.

I am pretty sure that the pleasure of unburdening yourself is largely a feeling akin to how it feels good to put a heavy burden down in the physical sense. It’s a combination of relief and release.

I feel like I have been trying to explain that to people for my entire life. But people get locked into the emotional-retentive cycle where the most important thing in the world is keeping the emotions in and from that point of view, letting them out in any form, no matter how therapeutic, is worse than madness. Worse than evil, even.

It’s The Worst Thing Possible, more or less.

And I know this because I am in that pickle myself. My whole mind is structured around this inane and damaging retention routine. I have a very deep (and very Freudian) terror of the things I am keeping in getting out.

And it’s all so pointless. I am a big believer in “better out than in” and that is especially true for emotions. People are way better off when they have enough emotional release to keep up with demand in their lives.

In fact, that might be the dividing line between the happy and the depressed right there. Happy people have enough release to keep the emotions from building up and taking up mental resources and making the mind too slow to balance its mood properly.

It’s like us depressed types are you elderly relative’s computer with all the toolbars and extensions and viruses that makes it run reeeeeealy slow.

In this metaphor, ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) works as a temporary fix for depression because it reboots the brain and, for a while at least, your mind is operating without all that extra junk loaded.

Sadly, more often than not, the patient’s brain gets really good at loading all that crap all over again really fast, so ECT does not always work in the long term.

Anyhow. Back to…. um…. whatever it was I was talking about!

Writing. Right. It is this release of thoughts and/or emotions and/or whatever that has made me ‘addicted” to blogging daily. I “need’ to blog because it is only via blogging that I can clear some space in my mind away from all the chatter of all those unexpressed thoughts all screaming for attention all at once.

In other writing news, I am a bit annoyed with myself for completely forgetting about NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month) this year. It happens every November and I have used it as a motivator for me to write a novel five or six times now.

But I totally blanked on it this year. Did not remember it until someone mentioned it on Facebook today. Even if I started tomorrow, I would have missed three full writing days, and so it would be a bit of a stretch to start now.

More importantly. I have absolutely no ideas about the project. Nothing. In previous years, I at least had some notion of what I wanted to write going in. I at least had some kind of starting point and a vague idea of theme.

But because I have given the whole thing zero thought until today. I got nuthin’. So I would be starting totally cold. And that would be a bitch.

Yet I am not giving up on the idea. I am not worried about making wordcount – I am highly prolific when motivated and so I know I can make up for lost time.

Heck, last year I upped it from 1667 words a day to 2000 words a day just to make the math easier to do.

So I know I can catch up. The question is whether I have an idea of what to write that I feel strongly enough about to actually write the damned thing.

There is also freelance work to consider. I was hoping to do more of it.

So I will mull it over. Maybe I will challenge myself to write a standard fiction novel, with no science fiction or fantasy elements at all.

If so…. it will probably get political.

We shall see. For now, I am just another obscure blogger.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.