And yet again, I feel a bit better today than I did yesterday.

Managed a bit of crying, which probably helped. Not much, just a few minutes of sobsat a time, but it is definite progress. If I keep trying, maybe I can stretch and massage that emotional aperture till it gets used to opening on demand.

Why yes, just like an anus! You’re so smart.

When I was younger, there were periods where I could do that. And I was somewhat proud of the fact, which I suppose is typically male of me.

Well, unless you pussies, I have the self-mastery and discipline to be able to cry when I need to, without any fear of judgment. Which means I’m BETTER than you!

Sadly, that is exactly how the male mind works.

Sadly, though, those waterworks need to be used and maintained or they rust up and seize on a fella. Or in my case, freeze up.

Depression can freeze anything if you let it.

I’ve been working on trying to disconnect my self-worth from concepts of productivity. I should not be judging myself so harshly on what I “get done”. All that leads to is even less productivity because now I am too depressed to do anything besides throw myself into my video games even harder to escape.

If artistic productivity, including the kind I get paid for, is truly my goal, then the method to achieve that is to be as kind and forgiving and loving to myself as possible.

After all, flowers bloom in the warmth of the sun, not the cold of night.

So once more, things circle back to being a hell of a lot nicer to myself. I have fallen back into hating myself after getting at least partly out of the habit for a little while, and I want to get back to loving myself again.

But it’s clearly a lot more complicated than just “hey, stop doing that!” can solve. I tried it that way and what ended up happening was that the negative self-judging emotions accumulated. And when they finally broke through and expressed themselves, it actually felt good to start hating myself again.

So clearly I have to deal with those emotions, not just suppress them. I have a lot of latent rage and, as a depressive, I am accustomed to taking it out on myself.

I truly am my own abuser.

Ergo, in order to save myself from myself, I would have to find a way to externalize all that goddamned anger, and that has been one of my large assortment of betes noir for a very long time now.

Seriously. Look it up. I have been talking about that same thing in this blog for ages.

It’s just so hard to let the anger out into the world when I am still so afraid of it. Afraid of what it might do, or rather, make me do. I can feel its urge to despoil and destroy seething in the back room of my consciousness and it frightens me. I don’t want to become the monster it wants me to be. I refuse to let that happen.

But there is a very good chance that this entire notion of Monster Mike is actually just a bullshit illusion my depression creates to protect itself. It knows that healthy expression of emotion will have the same effect on it that sunlight does on Dracula, and so it creates these nightmare visions of horrible behaviour to scare me out of trying it.

And that’s not even counting the fundamental truth that it is precisely the kind of emotional suppression that my depression thrives on that causes the kind of emotional imbalance that the depression then uses to justify more suppression.

It’s a nasty cycle and the only way out is to let that damned emotion out somehow.

And I have been getting better at it over time. I let at least some of the steam out now. I can vent from time to time, usually in this space. It is by no means proportional to the size of the job but it is still a hell of a lot better than no venting at all.

And the more I let that steam out, the less crazy I feel and the less dangerous letting more of it out seems.

It used to be that I couldn’t even imagine opening the floodgates without imagining myself exploding in an orgy of brutal bloody violence directed at total strangers that would only end when the police shot me dead.

Now, what I picture is merely me being a total prick to a lot of people as I vent a lot of anger verbally by striking out at all that offends or annoys me without restraint.

Still not good, but definitely way better than a massacre.

So who knows. Maybe if I keep working away on finding healthy and relatively non-destructive ways to release my rage, I will eventually get to the point where all I worry about are the same sort of attacks of irritibility that are considered normal in others.

That’s still the paradox to me. I know, in my head, that most of the world accepts that sometimes people are in cranky moods and doesn’t make a huge deal of it. Just finds ways of dealing with it without branding said person some kind of horrible social criminal because it’s understood that everyone feels that way sometimes.

And I understand that and accept it. I even admire it. It seems very sane to me.

But when I try to apply that thought to myself, everything falls apart. I am far too keenly aware of my emotional effect on others to let myself just be a prick sometimes.

My therapist thinks I don’t give people enough credit for being able to handle what I might dish out, and he is probably right. My sense of my power to harm people with my anger is probably vastly exaggerated.

But it might not be. I have a lot of power I don’t use. Verbal power, emotional insight, and so on. By those powers combined, I could really hurt people.

And that’s something I just can’t accept.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The trend continues : I feel a little better than I did yesterday.

Even my unpleasant sleepy afternoon was less unpleasant and less sleepy than before. So there’s that, at least. Whatever the fuck it is I am going through, it’s going well.

I have a theory on that, actually. Of course. It’s a bit tricky to explain, so bear with me.

Basically, over the last year or so, the part of my mind where I store emotions I am trying to dodge has been slowly but inexorably shrinking. As this happens, my ability to avoid dealing with things shrinks with it. I no longer have these vast spaces within me in which to hide. I used to keep everything out of focus and blurry in order to keep from seeing things I didn’t want to see, but now everything is in HD and sharply focused.

The result is my current emotional state : depressed. Without the ability to sideline unpleasant emotions, I now have no choice but to actually process all my bad mojo and negative emotion and the result is my current state of depression.

I think that is why this particular depressive period is hanging around for so long. I have a hell of a lot of emotions to process that means feeling them.

And I definitely feel like something is happening within me. Something big. Every day of sadness and despair gets me that much closer to something and it is this sense of progress that helps me the most when the darkness is closing in.

In fact, on one level, I don’t even want to feel better. I am getting something important done with all this sadness. Leave me to it.

It gets awfully cold in his heart of mind, though. Also a part of the process : I have a lot of emotional coldness from decades of isolation to deal with.

That glacier sitting on my heart is going to make things very cold as I push iceberg after iceberg out of me and into the great big sea to float away forevermore.

I call it “birthing my ice”. Because I’m strange.

I have been so damned lonely in my icy prison for a very long time. When I was raped at the age of 4, a wall of ice descended between me and others, and I have been all alone on my side of the wall ever since.

And that’s kind of a big deal. I have been emotionally handicapped for most of my life. There could be all kinds of love and affirmation and validation on the other side of that wall an I would never feel it.

And I am forced to ask myself a brutally tough question : how much of my sense of being ignored and neglected is real and how much is an illusion created by this inability of emotional signals to make it across the vast void within?

I have heavily invested in the idea of myself as a victim of emotional mistreatment by others. And it’s true that I was not treated well by others, including people who were supposed to be there to look out for me and protect me.

But the day to day loneliness could, in part, be due to this emotional isolation caused by a reaction to a severe emotional trauma at an early age.

And it’s a hell of a thing to realize that your interpretation of your own past might be inaccurate. Perhaps I was unreachable. Adrift on an ice floe, there was no way for anyone except perhaps a highly trained child psychologist to reach me, and so those who tried soon gave up and got out of my cold sad world as soon as possible.

I had to lay down for a bit.

The word ‘incommunicado’ just popped into my head. That is what I have been for all these years. Not in the simple and straightforward sense of not being able to be reached for communication, of course. I am communicative as fuck.

No, I am incommunicado in the more complex sense of being there but not really there. Or not ALL there, as they used to say.

I can be sitting there in front of you, live and in the flesh in living Technicolor, and I am chatting in my usual lively way, and yet in a very real sense I am not there at all. I am a million miles away on my icy little planetoid and simulating being there with you via some kind of telepresence system.

Perhaps I would be better off if I was not so good as dissembling. I hide my problems from others so well that I never attract the sort of nurturing I need.

But I can’t stop hiding my problems from others until I stop hiding them from myself. I would much rather be the person I pretend to be than the person I really am, and while I am pretending, I can fool myself into thinking that’s true.

I have trouble even imagining being any other way. If I stopped pertending and simply expressed my emotional state all the time, I would be pretty goddamned unpleasant to be around. I would essentially be a lunatic, either hyper irritable or hysterical with fear nearly all the time and ten times dangerous because I would use all my verbal and emotional gifts to inject my madness into others, like Hamlet does to poor Ophelia.

Or is it Cordelia? I can never remember.

And my connection with others is slender enough with me doing my best to be as lovable as I know how to be. I do what I can to give people reasons to put up with me. If I didn’t do that, nobody would want me around at all.

I can’t afford to be unpleasant to be around. I have zero faith that anyone would stick with me through that kind of shit.

I know I wouldn’t.

So I am doomed to go through life wearing a mask of my own face. One so convincing that even I don’t know what is real and what is artifice.

And that’s exactly how I want it.

I will talk to you nice poeople again tomorrow,