My inability to cry is really bumming me out lately.

Because I can feel the tears welling up inside me. There is a large buildup of sadness in my chest and in my mind, and it would feel so good to let it all out. My inability to do so is like emotional blue balls at this point.

And yet, when I try to let loose, I cry for maybe five seconds max and then it all dries up. And those five seconds are not very satisfying or productive.

The floodgates refuse to open, and I hate it.

I wonder if my antidepressants are to blame? Specifically Paxil, Wellbutrin’s action is wrong for this problem.

It pumps you up. If anything, that’s the opposite effect.

Paxil, however, is different. As far as I can tell from having been on it for 20 years, it mutes your emotions and thus makes them way easier to deal with.

I remember when I first started taking it, I felt lightheaded and numb all the time. This was not entirely pleasant but still beat the hell out of wanting to walk into traffic.

That lasted a couple months or so, and then one day I realized I was thinking clearly for the first time in a very long time.

It was like waking up from a very long nightmare. I became a Paxil fan in that moment.

And I have been waking up ever since. Every little bit of progress towards recovery has felt like waking up just a little bit more.

Presumably, because the suffocating protective numbness of my depression has retreated just a little bit.

I have been self-sedating for a long time. Wrapping myself tightly in my cloak of paralysis, hating my immobility but too dependent on how well it keeps the real world out and cancels out my pain to ever let it go.

Well, not all at once, anyhow.

But I swear I used to be able to get the tears out. Every three months or so, I would lay down in bed and have a good cry, and it did me a world of good.

I always ended up wishing I did it more often. But I never did.

Stupid North American male emotional constipation and internalized fear of seeming weak or vulnerable even to yourself.

And now I seem to have lost the ability. Presumably my depression sensed that it was helping me and found a way to shut that shit down because it wants me all to itself, all the time, forever.

Well fuck you, depression. I am never going to stop fighting you. I will never give in and surrender. I will resist you as hard as I can every single moment and that means my victory is inevitable.

For you are finite. Limited. Fixed. There is only so much of you, and there’s less of you every day because you are melting away under the heat of my raging id.

And soon, I will storm your final citadel and defeat the dragon known as Wound, and final victory will be mine.

Your days are numbered, depression.

And I will dance on your corpse.

More after the break.

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Pushing it out

Welp, guess it’s time for me to figure out yet another angle to push from in the hopes of ridding myself of more of my toxic buildup of suppressed emotion.

Once more, I dance around the obvious and disgusting physical metaphor.

Right now I am feeling somewhat alienated. Not too bad, I have certainly had it worse.

But there is a chill running through the warm center of my good mood and it is making me feel like I am not really here.

Or there, for that matter.

More like I am in quantum superposition between and above both states. In one sense, I am between here and there, but in another, I am nowhere at all.

I spend a lot of time in between. It stems directly from my pervasive aversion to making decisions. To picking option A or option B.

To making any sort of commitment.

As a result of this fear, I have become an expert at not deciding. If there is a way to either choose both A and B or avoid choosing whatsoever, I will find it.

I think that’s a big part of how I became so devious and tricky.

Of course, this low decision lifestyle is not a happy one. The number of things one can do without making hard life decisions and accepting the possibility of being wrong is vanishingly small. As weaknesses go, it’s extremely limiting.

I would be far better off if I had enough id to feel the drive to always go forward and thus I had something goading me into making a decision so I could get on with things.

But I don’t have that kind of id. Not yet. For now, my id is still largely untapped and inaccessible to my conscious will.

Hence my freezing to death in the ice palace at the center of my soul. The place where I put this lonely cell of mine.

The door’s not locked. But I can’t leave. Not yet.

After all, beyond these frozen walls lies the dreaded Real World, with all its stimulation and demands and complexity and urgency and immediacy.

Out there, I have to deal with things in realtime, with no time to think. So there is no way for me to figure out what the “right” move is.

Out there, it’s football, not chess.

I only know chess. Football terrifies me.

But that, too, is a crippling restriction. The Real World is a rough and tumble place where you have to go with your gut and trust your instincts to survive.

This, too, terrifies me.

But if I dig down, I know that I am brilliant even in realtime, that there are worse things than fucking up (everyone does, it’s how they learn), and that the biggest catastrophes make for the best stories.

This is why I am trying to draw on my deep reserve of smug cockiness.

Something has to get me out of this place!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.