That’s what I am learning to do. I am learning to open myself up to feeling my emotions and experiencing life through them instead of through the icy cold embrace of reason and logic alone.

It shed light, but no heat.

But I know I have a long way to go. I know that the aperture I have opened up in my emotional retaining wall is tiny and fragile as of yet, and that for the most part I am still living under the old regime.

Namely I still mostly suppress any emotion that threatens to cause so much as a ripple in the pond of artificial calm I live in.

It’s a terrible overreaction to anxiety, and presumably the source of my body’s hostility to its own adrenaline. The icy cold and lightless world I live in is exactly what you would expect from a parasympathetic nervous system gone berserk and scrubbing so much adrenaline, cortisol, and all the other products of the sympathetic system out of the bloodstream that you are getting far less than what is needed for healthy mood.

And bingo bango bongo, there’s your depression. QED.

But there are much worse things to be than anxious. Like suicidal.

And as I have discussed here recently, I don’t think I am a naturally calm person. At thje very least, I am more excitable than I used to think I was.

It could be that if I keep widening that aperture and get access to my full range of humanoid emotions, I will find some kind of natural balancing point where I will be able to maintain some kind of actual, real, earned calm.

But whatever. Part of my journey right now is to slowly get used to the idea of a life without that lake of artificial calm. A life where I have melted the ice around my heart and thawed myself out and therefore have to deal with the waves of the ocean where once there was only all that fucking Midnight Tundra.

I so want that to be a shade of makeup. Or the scent of a manly deodorant.

That means upping my tolerance for chaos – or rather, what I used to think of as chaos. I will have to dream up a new way of looking at things if I am to get over that and make room for living, breathing, thriving life on my newly made fertile plains.

And that is going to mean finding something else to do with my rage. A very tightassed character named Regill in the game I have been obsessively playing, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, has pointed out to me just how being coldly logical and pragmatic can actually be an expression of a deep but tightly controlled rage.

It’s like the deal is that the rage agrees to be restrained by supposed logic and reason on the understanding that said logic and reason will feed it regularly with opportunities to stick the dagger in by being ruthless and cold.

All while hiding from accountability behind a shield of being “logical” and “right”.

That’s the main reason why there are all those nasty people who hide their general malice and hostility behind things like “policy” and “the rules” and “just being realistic”. Those are people whose real agenda – venting their rage on whoever is around without them being able to fight back – has corrupted whatever actual practical functions and concerns are within their power and they are power-tripping balls.

I have been that guy. Not to the point of abusing power but I know the icy satisfaction of feeling like you know the right answer where others would be fooled by emotion.

Yeah. That’s gonna have to change too.

More after the break.

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When I’m 50

Only 24 or so days until I turn 50 whether I like it or not.

And I don’t like it. If I could, I would skip it altogether and stay 49 forever.

But life’s odometer does not work like that. The arrow of time only goes in one direction and can neither be stop nor reversed.

And I have been so sick for so long.

And I know that means I should not judge myself to be a “loser” just because my illnesses have kept me out of normal life and I have never supported myself.

But I can’t help it. At least, not yet. Not until I finish mourning the person I never got to be. The “wasting” of my life and all those years that slipped through my fingers because I was too sick to do anything but play video games and mess around online.

My entire adult life so far has done down the drain, never to return.

And the future ain’t so bright either. I am just going to get sicker and sicker until I end up in a wheelchair, and after that, I will be bed-bound for the rest of my days.

However many days that is. Not a whole lot, I’d wager.

And the worst part is that my bad health is, on paper, preventable. To all the world it looks like I could easily monitor and control my blood sugar and start getting exercise and try to socialize outside my group of friends and all that la la la crap.

Well all I can say is that… well, I’ll let the late Tom Petty say it for me.

Life inside this haunted head of mine is no where near that cut and dried. I have this massive wound at the core of my spirit and just getting through the day and having some level of fun despite the anhedonia takes everything I have.

I don’t have the spoons for much else.

So all I can do is dig my escape tunnel a thousand words at a time and hope to one day escape the prison of my mental illness.

Maybe then, I will be able to finally become a real person. An actual adult.

That’s the dream. anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.