Sorry for the gross image. Could have been worse.

Was on Tapestries last night and Woofle (otherwise known as Ross Archer) was online and we ended up talking and somehow that turned into him playing therapist to me, and that led to a very large amount of my Bad Stuff coming out, and that was good.

In the long run, that is. At the time, I was experiencing an unprecedented level of psychological pain. It was really quite intense, and extraordinary.

It was basically that cold feeling I get when I am dealing with my serious dirt – the feeling like I am slowly and painfully disgorging an icicle – but turned way the fuck up and lasting for quite a long time.

In fact, I am still not entirely over it, and it happened eight hours ago.

Well, better out than in, as they say. These releases of my inner darkness always leave me better off in the long run.

I have many many tons of glacial ice sitting on this heart of mine and the only way to get rid of it is to push it out via words and let it melt in the sun like an iceberg drifting south.

I made sure to tell Ross that despite the pain I was in, he had done me a hell of a lot of good just by talking with me and listening to my bitterness and despair.

I had to cut it off when I started getting cranky though. I didn’t want to end up yelling at him just because his advice did not actually apply to me.

I have heard it all before. Stay positive. Focus on what you can do. Don’t beat yourself up. Set small, achievable goals.

Hell, that last one was repeated to me on the daily every weekday for a year when I was in the Core program at Richmond Hospital and it didn’t do me a damned bit of good at that time either.

I’ve heard all the well intentioned chipper “go team go” advice out there and none of it does me the tiniest bit of good.

All of it is true and none of it matters. None of it helps. It all tracks as perfectly sane, logical, sensible, wise, and no doubt effective advice for someone other than me.

It passes all internal checks. But it’s fucking useless.

Because none of it actually changes the emotional reality within me. None of it helps with the pain and the fear and the rage and the loneliness.

It’s all just a bunch of Pollyanna bullshit that mostly just pisses me off. I don’t blame Ross and others for that – they are doing their best to help me and I appreciate that.

But these people might as well be from another dimension when it comes to interacting with my emotional issues. A dimension where emotions are optional and easy to deal with and pain is all in your mind, man.

So is everything else. Love, hate, pain, trauma, good, evil, rage, peace – they are all in your head. They don’t need to be anywhere else.

And that doesn’t give me the magic power to just wish the pain away so I can concentrate on the positive and set small achievable goals and all that shit.

You know what those small goals do for me? They remind me of how absolutely pathetic I am.

Oh, today’s achievement is that I took a shower. Yippie fucking skippy. I’ll just call up the folks at Guinness and send a telegram back home to Mom about it right away.

The truth is that I live in a sea of pain and no amount of goal setting or patting myself on the back is going to change that one fucking bit.

If there is a solution to this whole mess, it won’t be sane or small or logical or reasonable or safe or sensible or “right” or any of that weak pathetic bullshit.

It will be something big and strong and powerful and magnificent and sublime.

In other words, it will be equal to my pain.

And I won’t get there via thinking.

More after the break.

---

Wow, bitter much?

It’s hard to deal with all my pain without all that rage coming out.

I can’t make actual sense out of why Ross’ advice, and similar advice, makes me so god damned angry. There is no direct logic to it.

Instead, it is about pain. The advice in question causes pain in me. Presumably, this pain comes from the deep traumae this advice is trying to address, and like any animal, I respond with anger towards the source of said pain.

Being someone who believes in self-control to an unhealthy degree and who is very meticulous about not blaming people for things they do while trying to help that don;t work, I refuse to get mad at Ross for it.

A less keenly self-aware and responsible person would not show such restraint. And who knows, maybe that’s a healthier way to live than my uber self conscious chess playing way of looking at the world, where there is no excuse for taking your anger out on others when they are not the real cause.

Just real handy.

That’s why I cut our conversation off when I realized how angry I was getting. And I am glad we got to that point : Suppressed rage is the reactor core of my depression and anything that helps bring it to the surface and vent it is good for me.

But I am not going to hurt my wonderful friend Ross in the process. That would be too high a price to pay. I don’t do that shit.

And maybe that’s foolish of me. Maybe I would be better off letting the rage come when it comes and vent on whoever it vents on at the time.

After all, that seems to be how most of humanity lives.

But not me. I know too much. I see too much. I have no capacity to pretend like what I do to others is somehow not my fault.

And if that extends my suffering, so be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.