Time to squeeze a wound to milk it of its poison and clear my poor infested system of a couple dozen parasites.
More or less.
My mood is not good right now. Physically, I feel a little better than yesterday, but emotionally I feel moody and depressed and poetic.
Makes me want to go to my Gothic mansion at midnight and brood, my heavy brow furrowed, as I peer down at the waves crashing against the jagged rocks below my parapet, and wonder how a just and loving God could permit the creation of such a benighted and illborn creature such as I.
Then I’d go angrily bugger a frightened but eager stable boy.
Well this is MY Gothic mansion, after all.
I suppose I am not so much depressed as melancholy, which is not quite as bad. At least I actually feel sad, which is a far healthier emotion than depression.
I’d rather feel sad than bad.
In fact if I try real hard, I can even feel sorry for myself. Historically that has not been possible because historically, I have not felt like I deserved better.
But now I do feel like I deserve better, more often than not. I am learning that despite what my terrible childhood taught me, there is nothing horribly and irrevocably wrong with me that makes me a toxic liability like nuclear waste that no person could love or even tolerate without wearing a hazmat suit.
I am really on fire with the imagery today.
Point is, there’s nothing wrong or gross or repulsive or whatever about me, and I deserve a nice happy fulfilling life as much as anybody else.
Kind of sad that the above is a radical, life-affirming statement for me. I spent most of my life feeling like I didn’t even deserve to take up space, let alone be alive.
There was a commenter in one of my Reddit thread videos that talked about how her family seemed angered and/or irritated by everything she did so her solution was to try to disappear, to be invisible.
Her circumstances were much more severe than mine – but I can relate. Nobody seemed to want me around. Nobody paid attention to me. I was this amazingly bright student and nobody gave a shit. Not my siblings, not my teachers, not my parents.
So neither did I.
I have very few memories of feeling relaxed and accepted around my own family. I was always kind of scared.
A lot of that was due to my father’s volatile temper. granted. But even when he wasn’t around, I felt like I wasn’t really wanted and people were only tolerating me, and then only when I did nothing to remind them of my existence.
And that negated me. It destroyed my sense of self. I felt, and feel, like I don’t exist, don’t matter, don’t count, don’t deserve anything ever, and shouldn’t be around.
I am so glad that I am finally learning to overcome all that bullshit.
I deserved, and deserve, better. I deserve to be up there in the light and the warmth of the sun with everyone else, and god damn it, I am going to claw my way up there or die in the attempt.
Meanwhile, I will play a lot of video games.
More after the break.
The real me
I get to decide who that is.
It’s the ultimate expression of existential freedom.
I contain multitudes. We all do. The choices we make in life reinforce some of those multitudes at the expense of others and that, in turn, becomes the “real” us.
Excessively self-aware people like myself get to make these choices consciously. Most people do not. They choose based on an instinctual sense of self.
I lack one of those. Though I am working on it.
So instead, I choose more consciously. And my first choice, the one that opens the door to all the rest, is to reject and absolve myself of all previous notions of who I am.
It’s tabula rasa time, baby. A clean slate.
So that sad flailing fat dude wasting away on the shelf because he’s too scared and depressed to go outside his tiny little safety zone?
Gone. Poof. Dried up and blown away in the wind. Dust.
Because that was never the real me anyhow. The fact that it was the person I thought I was for a very long time has no bearing on its truth.
A lie does not become true merely because it persists.
No, the real me is confident to the point of cockiness, upbeat, determined to make the best of every situation, willing to scrap for what he wants, and never lets anything get him down for long.
So sayeth the fox.
The real me is also a big gooey sweetheart. Compassionate and caring and with a strong desire to support and nurture others. The real me wants to give the whole world a big warm hug and ask it how it’s doing.
Then listen…. REALLY listen….to its reply.
The real me is also a hardnosed pragmatist with no patience for idealistic bullshit that does nothing but increase how pleased with themselves the speakers are. He wants solutions that work, not ideals that accomplish nothing.
The real me is also a deep-water mystic who probes the depths in order to find the place where everything comes together and bring back golden truths from the dark bosom of the night.
The real me is also a trickster and a magician and a wearer of masks. Gifted in illusion and master of semblances, he hides his true self behind the brilliant illusions and fantastical tales he weaves.
All these facets are part of my real self. To ask which one is the real me is like fanning out a pack of cards and asking “Which one is the REAL card?”.
All of them, or none of them, or both. I am every single one of them.
Though I am beginning to suspect I might not be playing with a full deck.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.