Never. Not even once. Even while hanging out with my best friends in college. Evem while hanging out with my best friends today.
Hell, even while opening presents with my family on Christmas Day. Even then, I didn’t feel like I belonged there. Even then, I felt like there was The Parents, The Siblings, and me, the accident, the unwanted guest who can’t leave, the burden, the afterthought.
Even at my happiest and most relaxed, the deep down true core of my being is locked away in a freezer vault with his head tucked into the corner to shut out the world outside his skull that has been so cruel to him.
Now exactly how much of that is other people’s fault and how much of it is the result of my emotional damage is unclear, and likely to stay that way.
It’s impossible to determine.
I do know that there’s been a really thick glass wall between me and others ever since I was raped. Thick, because I had to retreat pretty far into my mind to escape the trauma.
And glass because it was and still largely is invisible to me and to others. I act remarkably like someone who is whole and intact and emotionally present. I’m friendly and affable and funny and sweet. I don’t visibly push people away, I am not prickly or rude, and I am almost always polite, pleasant, and accommodating.
But it’s all a scam. I’m not really here. I’m a hologram. A facsimile. A shadow of a shadow. An illusion so cunning it even fools me most of the time.
Like a diver in a wetsuit, I can swim as close to all those pretty colorful fishes that I want so badly to be with… but I can never touch them.
That which protects me also seals me away from everything I want.
The ocean of numbness I swim in keeps everything far, far away.
No wonder I never feel like I belong. Tender feelings like that are no match for my savage arctic defenses.
How can I feel like I belong when I’m not even really here?
The real me is locked away in that freezer vault like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain, running the whole show from an undisclosed location at the bottom of the sea.
And I don’t know how to be any other way.
Maybe I should stop fighting it and give in to the urge to becoming a mocking, sarcastic, derisive and dismissive asshole.
Might make for a refreshing change. A moral vacation, if you will.
There has to be some way to build a connection to my id. To learn to accept my passions and my instincts without making them conform to some rationalist review panel that vetoes practically everything natural or wholesome or good.
Why can’t I just live in a relaxed and natural way? Why can’t I just be myself? Why can’t I just let life flow through me?
There has ro be some way out of the freezer vault.
And I will keep searching till I find it.
It’s not like I have anything better to do.
More after the break.
Knot in a sack
(WARNING : Poop talk.)
Right now, feels like someone tied a knot in my gut.
Which means I am constipated.
No mystery as to why : because I kept delaying gratification. defecation. [1]
For no good reason, I assure you. Because I didn’t feel like stopping my game of Fallout 76. Or I was too sleepy to bother. Or I was about to eat and a deposit of any substantial amount tend to send things sloshing to and fro down there and that kills my appetite.
Little dumb things like that.
And the thing is, when I keep putting it off, the contractions still continue but because there is no outlet, the contents of the trash compactor on the detention level get compresse instead, forming a dense ball (or to use the medical term, a “bolus”) in my guts and that then gums up the works.
It’s like I swallowed a baseball whole. Like a snake.
And so now there is nothing I can do but hydrate thoroughly in order to keep everything soft and wait for things to work themselves out.
It’s up to the fates at that point. Might be easy, might be rough, might be so bad it feels like I am giving birth to a red hot boulder.
Luckily that one is rare and usually follows doing way more very inadvisable things than merely skipping potty time.
Thank you for reading this section. Writing it had been oddly cathartic.
Today’s been quiet.
Not a lot going on chez moi on a Saturday. I’ve slept, I’ve eaten, I’ve blogged, I have (of course) played a lot of Fallout 76.
Well, it was that or do something with my life.
And I have slept. Feeling sleepy now, in fact. I think that, no matter how much sleep i have had during the day, once it gets dark my melotonin levels swing and I get sleepy and lazy and want to curl up and hibernate.
Wake me when it’s time for my heart procedure.
Or don’t. I would prefer to be able to sleep through it this time, but I somehow doubt I will be so lucky.
Dunno why I had to be awake for the angiogram. It’s not like when I had a gastroscopy and I had to be awake so I could sit upright and thus keep the path through my digestive tract as much of a straight line as possible.
The same could be true of my heart arteries (hearteries?) but during the angiogram I was flat on my back.
Whatever. I am sure they have a good reason for it. Maybe I need to be awake so I will go “ow!” if they get something wrong.
Hopefully it won’t come to that.
I suppose that there’s some degree of risk with all invasive procedures. But I am pretty sure the risk involved in continuing on with a bum ticker is much worse.
Oh. And I managed to order Pizza Hut tonight, but only because they still take cash.
And I am pathetically grateful for their pity.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.