Don’t worry. This isn’t another sex post.

Not yet, anyhow. Ya never know where I will end up.

Anyhow, the hardness in question is not sexual. It is a hardness of personality and of temperament that I wanna talk about.

For as long as I can remember, I have had this sense of a pressure to “toughen up”. To be more solid and unyielding instead of my soft squishy self. To put some serious muscle onto my mind and soul so I am truly strong and resilient enough to face the truth and tackle my problems head on and really master my life.

And for all that time, I have avoided it like it was a deadly assassin.

Because in a sense, it is. I know that in order for me to “grow up” in this way, something inside of me will have to die. Something beautiful, and tender, and delicate. Something incredibly precious to me that I am simply not willing to give up.

Something I value more than life itself.

Call it what you like. A tenderness of temperament. A softness of the soul. A kind of trembling innocence hidden deep with my cynicism.

For most of my life, I have thought of it as my sensitivity. Not quite a precise enough term but whatever.

And I treasure it. Not just because it’s my secret garden where I hide from all the hate and ugliness of the world but because it’s also the source of my power.

Well, one of them, anyhow.

I know that this super sensitive part of me is the key to my deep empathy and understanding of my fellow humans. And from that flows so much else about who I am and what I do and how I see the world.

To me, my sensitivity is one of my senses and “toughening up” is like choosing to partly blind yourself or deafen yourself.

How can you willingly deaden yourself to things you know to truly be there?

But here’s the thing. There is such a thing as too much sensitivity. You can be far too tender to function in the world.

I think of it as being someone with a terrible skin condition that makes handling even ordinary objects extremely painful because your skin is now too tender.

The House of Usher would also be a good example.

There is a reason we sometimes put on gloves to do rough work. It allows us to handle things that would otherwise be too painful to do.

And it’s not black and white. It’s not a matter of being totally sensitive or completely insensitive. It’s not a matter of choosing between being blinded by the light or going completely and totally blind.

That’s childishly self-defeating thinking. The goal is not to abandon all sensitivity but to simply scale back the sensitivity to a level where I can cope with reality.

And yeah, for that a little of me has to die.

But in order to be truly free, you have to give up a little part of yourself.

I guess this is mine.

More after the break.

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A little less sensitive

There. That’s a good way to put it.

“I want to be a little less sensitive. ” I can handle that.

I think part of the problem is my fear of that dark Mister Hyde part of my personality I talked about last week.

The Monster. The Ogre. The Brute. The version of me that doesn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone but himself and feels no responsibility for the consequences of his lies and manipulations and distortions of reality.

In fact, he finds them quite amusing. Oh dear, what a mess I made, Those poor people.

Evil laughter ensues.

The more I describe him, the less of him there is in me. The true story of both Hyde and the Hulk is that neither would exist if Doctor Jekyll and Bruce Banner did not refuse to accept that their dark sides were as much a part of them as their higher motives.

I know I am both shadow and light. Like Good Kirk at the end of the Two Kirks episode of the original Star Trek, I triumph over my dark side by embracing it.

We’re all me in here. No need to fight.

I’m afraid of this dark version of myself because I know how bad I could be if I let him loose. There is enormous power in this broken body. The sort of power that could bend history itself to my vision if I stopped being limited by human decency.

i think what I am truly afraid of is my own power running away with me. Going to my head. I fear losing who I am in a rush of power and influence till all my noble intentions are dead an buried at sea and I am fucking with the world purely for my own twisted amusement and to further glory in my own power and genius and superiority,.

A lot of the world’s worst leaders were weak people who came into power with what at least started as good intentions but who soon became corrupted by the vast temptations to use the power to get back at those who wronged them and remark their world in their own image and otherwise gratified their wounded pride.

Maybe the people who deserve power the most are not the righteous downtrodden who have always been powerless but those who have had power for a long time without being a dick about it.

Just a thought.

Anyhow, I am not lying or exaggerating when I say I could be that kind of monster. A Hitler or Mao or Pol Pot (with whom I share a birthday).

I have the prerequisites : I’m a loser misfit who is charismatic and articulate and moved by a great sense of injustice who is a very compelling public speaker, the kind of person who distorts human reality around him by sheer power of personality.

Vastly powerful yet personally very weak and small.

That’s the formula for the worst kind of tyrant.

I know that seems like a ludicrous thing to worry about.

But I know what I have inside me.

And I am terrified of what I would become if I let it out of its cage.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.