What, exactly, is this coffin sized jail cell of mine made of? And what routes of escape does that suggest?

The first answer to the first question that occurs to me is : fear. It’s made of fear.

But like all swift, easy answers, it’s true. plausible, appealing, and woefully inadequate.

Because why fear? What kind of fear? Where does all that fear come from?

I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all some elaborate con job I have been pulling on myself in order to protect myself from some deeply dreaded realization. A circus sideshow full of bright lights and dazzling colors purposely designed to keep me too distracted to ask dangerous questions about the man behind the curtain.

Jesus, I do go on a bit.

And it has to be a very complex and delicate con job because I am not easy to fool. I have a very powerful analytic engine running at the core of my psyche and it is always hungry for things to pull apart, examine, deduce from, analyze, and finally synthesize new information from, and it can tear apart lies and delusions as effortlessly as I digest my latest meal.

So this part of mind that hides things from me has to be pretty damned clever.

Digging deeper, my hell is made of emotion. Fear is one of those emotions but it’s hardly the only one. It’s just the one I find easiest to grapple with.

I am not, despite that gigawatt generator in my mind, very good at dealing with my emotions. That’s why I have to write about them in order to process them.

In a healthier specimen, these issues would be resolved via some healthy non-rational process running deep in my emotional core free of interference from my overweaning intellect and all its machinations.

But alas, I am still of the breed that insists everything must make sense. With no shortcuts, no intuitive leaps, and definitely no “just because.

So I have to just keep writing on this blog like I do and talking to Doc Costin once a week like I do and hope that I eventually gnaw my way through my thick layers of dead scar tissue around my heart till I break through to something worthwhile.

It all seems so hopeless and slow, though. Like I am trying to get through a brick wall by digging at it with a teaspoon when there is a perfectly good door right next to me if only I could free my mind enough to see it.

I guess those walls will come tumblin’ down when I don’t need them any more, an observation I first made within the first year of this blog.

And it started in 2011.

This suggests that at some level, this terrible tomb of mine is keeping something else out even more than it is keeping me in.

But what am I so afraid of that it could make this captivity seem preferable?

The quick and easy answer would be “reality”.

But we all know that the quick and easy answer is always wrong.

More after the break.

---

What the key to heaven is made of

Catharsis. That’s what it’s made of. I have such a massive glacier of unresolved emotions in me that only occasionally snap off into icebergs that I can then melt into something like actually dealing with things.

And it’s taking forever. At this point, I can’t even be sure I am losing glacial mass faster than I am accumulating it

For all my brave talk, I still suppress most of my emotions.

And to me, the next step is as obvious as it is almost unthinkable :

I have to start actually acting on my emotions.

I feel faint just from typing that sentence. It’s all well and good to explore my emotional issues withing the safety of my own mind but actually acting on them??

But I have so many!

Seriously! My mind is such a whirlwind of emotions at all times that trying to pluck one from the maelstrom and act on it feels as futile as trying to hold a lottery drawing in the middle of a tornado.

Of course, I know that the whole reason I have this inner whirlwind is that so many of my emotions go unexpressed that they are so cramped together that they have merged into something like Night On Bald Mountain from Fantasia.

And thus was born HEAVY METAL! *devil horns*

I can’t shake the feeling that if I opened the door even a tiny crack on my feelings vault, the door would fly open as hosts of my personal demons, the skeletons in my closet, and all those goddamned ghosts of things that might have been come shrieking out to freedom, leaving poor lil old me shattered and insane.

But maybe that’s just another of depression’s guardian illusions and I would actually just fine – better, in fact – once the flood subsided.

I would just have to hold on tight to my grip on reality until the flood is over.

I can do that, Probably.

And again, that’s all well and good if it is all happening in my mind.

But once acting on these latent and potent emotions enters the equation, shit gets ral, dawg. I might do absolutely anything while in the grips of emotions flooding through me like water from a fireman’s hose.

Once more, I wish I could just press a button and flush the whole damned system. There is nothing in that massive ball of chaos and madness that I want to keep. I would be fine with hitting the reset button and starting over, without saving first.

Fuck it. That emotional backlog of mine can go straight to hell and up Satan’s asshole and back again. I don’t give a shit.

I just want to be free of all this baggage so I can go out into the world with a light heart and clear mind and an eternal spring in my heart.

And I am going to make it there some day. I promise you I will.

I just have some heavy housework to take care of first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.