Well it’s been a while, so I suppose I should remind myself of how amazing I am.

I don’t want to. The thought still causes me pain, to be honest. That’s how fucked up my motivational pathways are at this point in my life.

Overmind : Hey you! You’re an amazing person full of warmth and wit, with gifts enough for three people and a unique genius all your own!

Conscious Me : Must you remind me?

It gives me a headache-y feeling, like a bright light or loud noise.

Well, they always said I was bright. Turns out I am so bright I irritate myself.

But why? Why this resistance?

Let’s see…. well, there’s that old standby, responsibility. As a lifelong Spider-Man fan, I know that with great power comes great responsibility, and that scares the webbing out of me, to be honest.

I’m not sure why the idea of taking responsibility for my power is such a terrifying thought to me. Maybe because then I would kind of have to do something with it.

And that would mean figuring out what to do with it, and hello option paralysis.

But no. That smacks of my depression’s bullshit. Another facile dodge. Yet another smokescreen hiding yet another unpleasant truth I don’t want to face.

It takes a lot of work to hide things from a megabeam mind like mine.

I hate my depression, but I have to admit, it does work hard.

I definitely get that feeling like something is trying to pry me out of my safe warm little hell when I think abou tmy own gifts. Like I am a barnacle and some very hungry seagull is trying to pull me from my reef.

In the surrealist cartoon of my mind, this is the part where the prisoner, who has been looking out his window at a beautiful sunny meadow and sighing forlornly while writing in a big book called When I Get Out, sees the door to his cell swing open, gasps, runs over without a moment to lose…. and slams the door shut again.

Then sighs, phews, and goes back to writing and sighing.

Because the truth is, as much as I want to get out into the world, I also don’t. In fact, the whole reason I am stuck in this cage is that the “don’t” force is a lot stronger.

But really, there is no cage. The cage is bullshit too. I have had the key to that door whis whole time. The only reason I “can’t” get out is that I want to keep the world out, not that something is keeping me in.

So fuck that whole metaphor. Kaboom, there go the walls of my prison, and there I am, dazed and covered in soot cartoon style, naked and exposed in that sunny green meadow. the cage blown to bits, gone forever.

Okay, now I am REALLY freaking out.

But oops, too late, the cage is gone and I am just going to have to adapt to life without it from now on.

But it’s okay if I want to lay down and cry for a while. I’m probably overdue.

---

Back to actually talking about the thing I’ve been talking about.

I really am kind of freaking out right now. It’s kind of thrilling. I feel very alive.

Scared, but alive. And that beats “calm but dead inside” any day.

---

I think that, when I have been imagining myself out there in that great big beautiful world , with a job and a hubbie and all, I have been “forgetting” to include the fact that in order to do that, I would have to give up all the comfort and safety I have right now.

As if it was somehow possible for me to leave and stay at the same time.

But no, obviously, logically, I have to choose. I can’t be both out at play and safe at home. If I want that big warm wondrous lustrous world out there, I have to leave.

Well, I blew up my prison cell. That’s a good start. In that sense, I already left.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the waves of panic and terror to subside.

It’s not like I could go back. Not now that I know the whole cage thing was bullshit and I was free to go the whole time. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle. I can’t pretend that I am more trapped than I am any more.

Honestly, I think that at the root of it all. I was just afraid to grow up. Afraid, perhaps, because I don’t feel like I have grown up on the inside at all, and so to me, adulthood means being a child in an adult world.

And I have no faith that I can cope with that like, at all.

And that speaks to a very deep lack of self-confidence. Specifically, a lack of confidence in my ability to adapt and grow stronger when faced with difficult situations.

And that, in turn, is largely a fact that I have not done that much in my life. I fled the difficult situations instead. Retreated into my shell. Hid from my pursuers.

The pursuers were also bullshit. Truth be told.

I find myself wondering how I would have turns out if someone or something had somehow blocked my avenues of escape.

What if something had forced me to stay in the game and play?

Looking back on my life, I find myself thinking about how much life let me get away with. And is still letting me get away with.

I mean, I never even had to learn to study.

And it’s been that way my whole life. It’s all been too easy on one level, and way too hard on, let’s face it, all the others.

I never had to learn to overcome things that seemed scary and impossible at first. Never had to struggle and defeat my fears and toughen up.

I’ve always been far too skilled an escape artist for my own good.

Well fuck that noise. I am going to stay out here in the sun.

It’s not like I have a choice.

After all, I blew up my cage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, the opposite of this :

In my case, those clouds are my depression.

The real question, though, is not what would it take to burn those clouds away or what forceoutside myself is strong enough to rip them off me like a Band-Aid.

The real question is. why do I keep producing the clouds in the first place? What is my depression merely the smokescreen for? I can’t ever burn the clouds away via some kind of mental effort if another, deeper part of my mind desperately needs those clouds there and will do whatever it takes to keep them there.

The quick, simple, and misleading answer would be that it all comes from the primary trauma of being raped when I was four years old. And like all quick, simple, and misleading answers, it’s true….. up to a point.

Yes, that trauma was what caused me to throw up that curtain of smoke in the first place. I took my mind away when I was being raped, and it has never come back all the way. Instead, I became that timid turtle I described before. We will call him Ted.

And like that turtle, I only came out of my shell the bare minimum amount I had to in order to deal with reality. Most of the time, I stayed safely tucked in with all my distractions, with my only window into reality being the screen of my computer or the pages of a book.

You know…. safe places I can control where no matter what happens, it can all disappear with the click of a mouse.

It’s like my distractions play out in an annex of my imagination that I share with reality but which is safely, predictably, and controllably unreal.

So yes, that primary trauma made me retreat into my own mind… but that was 42 years ago, and there has to be a lot more going on outside that veil of smog by now.

Or maybe that is just something I am telling myself to distract myself away from having to face my primary trauma.

It’s hard to tell. Which is the point, I suppose.

Somewhere in my mind is a program which has been running ever since that fateful day when I was raped by a stranger in a public shower stall, and that program’s only mission is to keep my memory of that incident buried as deep as possible in order to protect the rest of my psyche from a potentially fatal level of trauma.

There are people whose responses to such extreme trauma were far less…. functional than mine. People who only wish they had been healthy enough to live on the outside long enough to go to school and go to college and live the life I have led.

It’s good to remind myself of that now and then. Helps me keep perspective.

And perspective is very useful when it comes to not going off the deep end.

Once more I deflected myself. I am way too good at that.

So : this memory-suppressing program has been running for a very long time. And it has unlimited permissions, which means it can do anything it feels necessary to fulfill its ,mission, no matter how bad the consequences for me will be or how feeble and small and weak it makes me feel to have such large portions of my mind walled off.

So this program – let’s call it Program D, for depression – has been running with topmost priority all this time, as if the most important thing in my universe is that I be protected from these highly traumatic memories.

And I am beginning to have my doubts.

After all,. no matter how traumatic those memories are, I will recover. Maybe it was more than I could handle back then, but I am much older now and consequently I have vastly more emotional coping resources at my disposal than I did back then.

Even if consciously experiencing those horrible memories struck me catatonic (one of my worst fears), I would recover, and when I did I would finally be rid of that horrible wound and be able to go on with my life without it.

What a wonderful thought!

And you know what? I don’t have to settle for merely reliving the memory.

I’m a writer. I’m an editor. I can change the ending.

---

(INT., large shower stall. Two shower heads. White tile. A man is slowly approaching a pump redheaded four year old boy, who is smiling goodnaturedly but looks scared and confused by the situation. Both are nude. )

(The stall door is kicked open from the outside, slamming against the white tile, chips of which fall to the floor. In the doorway stands a 6’1″ 300 lb bear of a man, and he is very very very pissed off. )

(He immediately interposes himself between the man and the little redheaded boy, with an expression that promises instant and unspeakable violence if the man should dare to make a move in the boy’s direction. )

Bear : Hey Mike. Do you want to get out of here?

The boy nods.

Boy : Where’s my daddy?

Bear : I don’t know. But you can bet we’re going to find him.

The Bear leads the boy out of the stall, then turns in the doorway to face the man.

Bear : And as for you, I would totally murder the fuck out of you, but you are nowhere near worth the stain on my karma.

(SFX : Distant police siren. )

Bear : I have, however, called the cops. Enjoy life in prison as a short-eyes. Goodbye.

(Bear then exits, leaving the panic-stricken evil man behind. )

(And the audience erupts into thunderous cheering and applause. )

---

There. I did it. I have retconned my own memories. As far as I am concerned, the official record has been amended and the badness no long exists.

What remains of the previous memories has less substance than a bad dream, and is as easily dismissed.

I’m not sure what the heck I just did to myself.

But I am pretty sure it worked.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.