Feeling weary and apathetic at the moment, not that I care.

I mean, technically, it’s the usual angry apathy that comes from getting sick and tired of the shrieking cacophony in my head from all the voices and words and thoughts and notions and feelings and ideas and whatnot all trying to get out at the same time.

And it makes me want to scream, “Shut up! Shut UP! SHUT UUUUUUUUUP!”

And then, when I finally get silence, say “Please form an orderly line and your concerns will be addressed shortly. ”

Oh, if only it were that easy.

Speaking of which, I realized recently that one of the things that makes someone a writer is a tendency to retain words.

For most people (I assume) words are transient things that pass through their minds unmolested. They don’t retain them, think about them, analyze them, or file them away.

But to a writer, words are powerful and precious things, and we want to share them with others. In fact, I think the whole thing operates based on the basic human instinct to communicate information to one another.

Problem is, all those words build up in our minds. Input vastly outpaces output. This creates a pressure inside our minds that can be unbearable.

It can even make us crazy. Legit.

Writing is the only way out. Learned that the hard way. Only via writing can we get some of those goddamned words out and clear a little breathing space for ourselves.

One seemingly sane notion as to how to solve the problem would be to learn to just plain erase those words. Fuck them if they are such a hassle. Clear everything out and start over, and maybe be a bit more selective this time.

But that would feel like murder to me. Genocide. My words are my babies. My children. My darlings. And my treasures. If I have anything of worth to give to this world, it’s my gift of words, and I have been carefully hoarding, refining, and perfecting them for as long as I can remember.

And ultimately, all my other major mental processes feed back into the word center of my brain. All my deep ponderings, all my razor sharp analysis, all my comedy and sense of the absurd, all my spiritual longing, and every other blessed things beavering away in the capacious and cacophonous cavern of my cerebrum all feed back into that massive warehouse of words in my mind.

I word, therefore I am.

Everything else about me is extraneous to this purpose. I can see that now. Not to deny my own humanity or discard my individuality, but I can see and feel my purpose so clearly now that it fills me with fear and awe.

But you know what? I think I’m going to let whatever this is happen anyhow. I feel like complex structures are compressing and collapsing leaving only clarity behind.

And it feels pretty good. Almost…. cleansing.

More after the break.

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Follow your heart

One of those lessons droned into me by all the pro-social messages in 80’s cartoons was that I should “follow my heart”.

And I never disagreed, exactly. But I never understood it either. As far as I could tell my “heart”^[1] contained a lot of emotions but no directions. It never told me to do stuff. It was just a place where I felt my feelings.

So what is there to follow?

These days I can see what a narrow and ignorant view that was. The idea I was too blind to see is that you follow the positive feelings in your heart in search of more.

That still sounds sort of…. wrong to me. My legacy rationalist software insists that such an approach is madness because the heart doesn’t know anything and understands even less, so how good can its guidance be? Might as well follow the wind.

But I am learning. I am spiritually upgrading myself. The truth is that the heart knows a lot of things, especially about how to find happiness.

In fact, looked at properly, it seems insane to try to deduce what might make me happy via logic and analysis when I can just ask my heart directly.

Plus, my heart is where all the love and acceptance and warmth that my depression has denied me is stored up and waiting for someone or something to release it.

Another frequent pro-social message of my childhood was to be “true to yourself”^[2] and again, I never disagreed but I didn’t understand it either.

How could you be anything but yourself? No matter what you did, you were doing it as yourself by definition. Right?

I get it now, of course, and it’s intimately connected to following your heart. Being true to yourself means being the person you are inside, straight from the heart, without trying to force yourself to be some pre-conceived idea of yourself.

That never works anyhow. The real you is always squirming around and trying to get free of whatever mold you’ve trapped it in.

The iron suit never REALLY fits.

But like with following my heart, I am in transition. Learning. Growing.

It strikes me as darkly hilarious that here I am, brain the size of a planet, and yet I am just now learning things that healthy people learned at such an early age that they don’t remember ever not knowing it.

Being raped smashed my little mind and sealed me away in this cage. A cage that was supposed to protect me, not imprison me.

But what truly traps me is not the cage. The cage is nothing but icicles and frost. It can’t hold me. Might as well be cobwebs on a giant.

What keeps me trapped is fear. Fear of what life outside the cage would be like, all exposed like that.

That cage has been far, far too small for me for a very long time^[3]. I’ve had to live all cramped up and paralyzed just to stay inside it.

Time to stand up and face the world, I guess.

Or at least build myself a bigger fucking cage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.