How does one go about healing a 46 year old Wound caused by rape?

That is the question I am grappling with now. Now that I have locked on to this deep and terrible Wound at the center of my mind as the source of all my mental health issues and debilities… what now?

Heck, how do you heal any kind of trauma, whether it’s a 46 year old child rape or how sad you are that today’s blueberry bagel had fewer blueberries that usual?

The only thing I know how to do is to keep digging up the fossils of past hurts and bringing them back to life by writing about them here.

And that helps. That “works”. It may not always seem like it, but everything I write here helps me enormously by letting me reduce the pressure of unexpressed thoughts and emotions locked inside this skull of mine.

The deep psychological navel gazing helps most of all, of course. It is basically me trying to be my own therapist and dig up the bad stuff so I can expose it to the healing light of day and watch it melt away.

I’d melt the whole damned glacier all at once if I could. Apportez le deluge, and to hell with the consequences.

Maybe I would lose my mind for a while. I would certainly lose control. End up flailing around spewing raw emotions everywhere like an out of control fire hose until I catch up with the backlog.

I must admit, that idea has a certain chaotic appeal to me. I rather like the idea of being able to press a metaphorical button and surrender control till I am healthy again.

And who knows what would be left of me when the waters recede? I still don’t know what parts of the person I think of as myself are the real me and what parts are just more of that dirty black ice my depression has fooled me into thinking of as me.

Because rhat way, you see, I will confuse loss of depression as loss of self, and as we all know, loss of self is the one true definition of death, so my mind will fight tooth and nail to defend the very depression that plagues it.

Depression is such an ugly thing.

Well I have had enough of it. I am not my depression and as far as I am concerned, the angels of mercy are free to borrow Michael’s sword and excise the entire tumour right now and I will just have to learn to live with whatever is left.

Maybe, like with chemo, some healthy tissue will also be destroyed in the process. That would be sad, but as long as the damage was minimal and I kept important things like bowel control and the lyrics to Tragically Hip songs, it would be worth it.

Of course, it ain’t that simple. As always, my recovery will be a lot more like trying to disarm an impossibly intricate bomb and having to patiently follow each tiny wire back to its source before carefully disconnecting it.

I’d rather go in there with a chainsaw, but you do what you can do,

More after the break.

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Escaping through the senses

In my recent journey through the vast network of YouTube videos about being an INTJ^[1], one of the things that came up that really stuck with me was the idea that we INTJs with poor mental health can often site a poor relationship with our senses as a major contributing factor.

That sentence was way simpler before I had to get all INTJ precise about it.

But it’s true. My relationship with the sensory world is terrible. I have lived most of my life via screens. TV screens, computer screens, tablet screens, and so on.

As a result, I have paid precious little attention to the real world all around me, and this has not been an accident. For the most part, I have treated the real world as an irritating distraction from my screen life.

This is bad.

There should be balance. The real world anchors the mind and limits how far into madness our neurotic brains can wander. Without this tether, I end up feeling like I am not even real, or maybe that I am real but the world isn’t.

Neither position leads to happy outcomes.

And I know this, and yet, I still feel an icy hand grip my heart with fear when I think about leaving my screens for a while.

The things I do on screens are how I regulate my mood. Quite irrationally, I feel like without the screens, I will descend into madness. It feels like there would be nothing I could use to escape my inner demons and therefore they would GET me.

This, needless to say, is a remarkably poor survival strategy.

Because it means the demons pretty much have the place to themselves. They can (and do) run riot with self-destructive urges, desperately acting out like neglected children in a vain attempt to get my attention.

But I tune them out, like a bad parent.

Nevertheless, the path is clear : if I want to escape this cage of mine, I am going to have to do it via my long neglected senses and spend more time in the “real world”.

Just typing that send a chill through my heart. Am I really that afraid of reality?

Ayup. I guess I am. Damn.

Ironic given how much I have always prided myself on being a “realist” who is not afraid to deal with the harsh truths of the real world. Pragmatic, and so on.

Sure, if we are still within the world of the mind, where I feel safe.

Take me out into the REAL real world, and I fall apart.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.