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.