Sometimes I have it.

Most of the time I don’t.

In this context, when I say “push” I mean “push the boundaries of my cozy crypt of a comfort zone by going outside them”, more or less.

Most of the time all I can do is make it through another day in my usual fashion. Same old life of playing video games all the fucking time punctuated by the occasional bit of blogging, sleeping, or taking a crap.

Really living the dream, aren’t I?

A very, very sad dream. From someone with a truly terrible job.

Today was Therapy Thursday.

I think I am slowly getting better at being emotionally present and open during therapy. It’s a long road because of how alienated from my own emotional being I am, but I am making progress over time.

Extremely. Slow. Progress.

I’m feeling a lot more these days, which is some very important progress. For far too long I have wasted my life dodging my emotions by burying myself in my distractions and remaining almost fatally numb to the world.

But I am not afraid to feel any more. I have stopped cowering before the intensity of my own feelings. I want to feel it all now.

In fact, I crave it. Because I have finally successfully associated the joy of the catharsis with the sometimes quite painful emotions I need to work through.

And I want that joy. I crave it. It’s like an act of cleansing or elimination. I feel so much better when I am done.

And I have been emotionally constipated for such a very, very long time. Backed up all the way to my back teeth, even.

Which leads to the other reason I crave feeling the feelings and that is that every little bit of emotion I manage to squeeze out reduces the emotional pressure built up inside me and makes it that little bit easier for me to relax and think and function.

It just sucks that the only way I can do it is through words.

I have to write or talk about my emotions to get them expressed. This slows things down one heck of a lot.

I would be a much healthier guy if I could express my feelings more directly. And I am working on it – every day my writing gets a little more expressive and emotionally dense, and I get a little bit closer to the problem at the core of my being.

In layman’s terms, I’m fucked in the head.

At least I don’t hate myself any more. I’ve at least gotten over that. I can shut that shit down with such brutal efficiency it’s like it never happened.

There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m a great guy. Millions of employers would be happy to have me on the payroll. I can do amazing things.

I’ve just been the victim of mental illness for a long time.

And I do what I can to get better, On a good day, I can get out and push.

But most days aren’t that good.

More after the break.

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Not so nice

Another thing that came up in therapy today was my having to face the prospect of a future in which someone might see me as a threat, and how painful it was to even type those words into yesterday’s blog entry.

Felt pretty bad this time, too. Clearly I have a lot invested in my own harmlessness. The very notion of someone seeing me as a threat makes me feel positively ill.

That’s not me! I’m sweet and fluffy and harmless and lovable.

I’m cotton candy, for crying out loud!

I’m your cute n’ cuddly pal who’s happy to make YOU happy. And vice versa. I’m the nonthreatening guy who people feel safe around and open up to. People trust me.

And I love that about myself. I’m not some frustrated Brit who secretly hates “having” to be nice all the time. It’s a genuine source of pride and joy to me.

And it’s a defense, too. If people don’t see you as a threat, they don’t feel the need to engage in conflict to sort out who’s on top and all that reptile brain shit.

And if someone DOES find me threatening and starts some shit with me, it is guaranteed that they will look and feel like an asshole whereas I will be the harmless guy everyone instantly sympathizes with.

But all of that only takes you so far.

And I am so much more than that.

As always with me, what you see is real but you don’t see everything. Not by a long shot. You only see the tip of the iceberg, the puppet on my hand, the facet of my multifaceted personality that happens to be catching the light at the moment.

Or. more accurately, that circumstances instruct me to use in that situation.

And like I have said many times before, I know that I am not the facets, I am the gem. I have various subsets of my personality that I use when whatever I have that passes for a social sense makes me switch.

Luckily, this all happens subconsciously. If I had to think about it, I would be even more socially anxious than I am now.

Perish the thought.

But to drag myself back to the point, if I am going to enter the world and thus be subject to things I hate like social competition and hierarchy, I am going to have to face the fact that this means possibly being less than totally nice.

At the very least, I have to come up with a much more complex matrix of social rules than “just be nice to everyone all the time”.

And that means I will have to wrestle with some not so nice facets of my personality, like my capacity to be ruthlessly calculating, manipulative, and selfish.

I have it in me to be a particularly loathsome kind of asshole. And that would not be a problem if I didn’t find the idea dangerously tempting.

Part of me would love to say “Fuck everybody but me!” and break free of the shackles of empathy and compassion. Just go out into the world and get the things I want by any means necessary, and consequences to others be damned.

I probably couldn’t sustain that. My deep empathy and humanism would catch up to me eventually. I’d start feeling bad about the things I had done.

But by then I’ll have the money, so who the fuck cares?

Just kidding. I think.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.