Guess I need to chew on this bone some more.

This version of myself that I present to the world – my social self, which I have taken to calling my “smooth façade” – is not phony and it’s not an act, but… it’s not the “real me”.

The “real me” would be whoever I am without the smooth façade concealing me. . I have absolutely no idea who that is because the façade has been in place almost seamlessly for as long as I can remember.

I suppose the person I am in those rare moments when I am not consuming or producing media would be a good place to start.

But I work hard to make sure I never have to be that person for very long.

Which, as we discussed yesterday, is a big problem. I should not be afraid to be who I really am but one of the major symptoms of Avoidant Personality Syndrome is the feeling that deep down you are something nightmarishly horrible and ugly and toxic and disgusting, and I am still in the process of getting over that.

Still, it might be useful to contemplate a little social nudity now and then. To at least try to imagine what it would be like to stop “masking” and “be real”.

Whatever the hell THAT means.

That’s the thing. I am such a cipher unto myself that it’s hard to even contemplate being the “real me” because I have no idea who the fuck that is.

I have done a remarkably good job of hiding from myself all these years.

I suppose when you hate yourself as much as I used to, you don’t really have a choice. You hide from yourself or you destroy yourself.

I so totally internalized my bullying and neglect. Sigh.

But it’s not like I don’t have clues to who the “real me” might be. One of the things that makes my smooth facade so smooth is that none of its components are false at all.

Like I have said many times before, it’s all the “real me”. Everything you see in that picture is 100 percent myself.

It’s just not the full picture. You don’t get to see the full picture. Nobody does.

Especially not me.

To be honest, I have so many facets and modes that I can’t possibly fit them into one picture. It’s like trying to capture all of the Grand Canyon in one snapshot.

I can’t even imagine being forced to be just one person. How confining!

The most important thing for me to remember is that there IS a real me. Someone is wearing that mask, and it’s the same person who made it, fitted it, adjusted it, and adds to it every single day.

I am the ringmaster of this whole sideshow of sadness, and every thing that happens needed my signature on it to make it legit.

I may not know who I really am… but I know that I really am somebody.

Let’s try to figure out who.

More after the break.

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A little bit worse

My health’s crappiness level has been trending upwards lately, and it has me worried.

I am dizzy when I get up more often, and usually that comes with a sinus headache (or what feels like one) centered smack dab in the middle of my forehead, right where my mystical “third eye” wpuld be if I were Hindu.

Not that I could ever be a Hindu. Cows are too damned tasty.

This headache is accompanied by dizziness and nausea and an all too familiar feeling like I am, despite all appearances, actually in the back of a flatbed truck going 80 miles an hour on a well paved highway.

I get the feeling I am still not keeping up with the hydration demands of my body. I need to get back into the habit of always having a glass of water on the go and taking a few hearty gulps from it periodically.

But it’s more than that. I think the sickness in my skin is getting worse too.

I’ve been through this hundreds of times in my life. The clogging of my pores gets worse and worse and I get sicker and sicker till the fever finally breaks, my sweat dislodges the clogs, I start sweating normally, and suddenly I feel a WHOLE lot better.

The feeling of relief can be quite intense, leaving me downright giddy.

Which is fine when I am home and can jut lay down until things stabilize, but can be kinda scary in a manic kind of way if you’re, say, at an outdoor event like Pride.

That was a nasty incident. Pride already tests my psychological defenses by being so crowded and loud and chaotic.

Crowds don’t bother me at all because nobody notices you in a crowd. You’re just one of the hundreds of faces they will see and intantly forget.

But crowdING triggers my claustrophobia pretty bad.

Now where was I?

My skin is sick. Right.

I really need to solve the shower/bath issue. There has to be a safe way for me to get truly clean. I just have to call upon my clever foxy mind to find it.

There’s no way around it. I have to somehow reconnect with the government agency responsible for getting us cripples the equipment we need.

Which would require buckets and buckets of the exact kind of gumption and initiative I lack. Of course.

So I am not going to rule that out yet. I might get inspired to at least get the process started one lazy afternoon.

But alternative solutions that did not challenge my mental health issues quite so much.

What I really need is some sort of advocate or agent or social worker who can hold my metaphorical hand and help me navigate the system.

But do such angelic persons even exist? Maybe.

A long, long time ago, I dealt with a disability advocacy group in downtown Vancouver near the MEC and they helped me get on disability.

Don’t remember what they were called but perhaps they or something like them are still around for those of us whose disabilities include being terminally timid and shy.

Once more, the prospect of developing a really huge ego occurs to me.

But that seems like an awful lot of work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There is a site I spend a lot of time on with the unusual name (and URL) of Yiffer.xyz. 

I spend a lot of time there because they have an absolutely massive collection of furry comics available for free.

And yes, I feel a little guilty about that. None of the creators of these comics are getting paid by Yiffer, I am sure, and I am enabling this piracy by hanging out there.

But I need it.

I need it because reading the gay furry smut I find there makes me feel better. And not just better about being gay and a furry, but better about life in general.

Because these comics exist in a place where gay sexuality is not merely accepted but normal. Where mean can express both love and lust for one another in an open and accepting way. Where I can witness men who love one another on all levels, and see the dynamics of male/male relationships, and imagine a world where I might just fit in a lot better than I ever have in the real world.

In that sense they act as my ersatz gay neighborhood. That, and Tapestries. Between the two, I can express so much more of who I really am than in RL.

Which is sad, in a way. I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if I had not had furry text based environments to use to explore my larger than life personality and all the ways in which I needed to express and expand who I am.

Who would I be without Fruvous? I can’t even imagine it. My imagination is so much bigger than mere reality can contain that I had to create a fictional extension of myself just to be myself.

Some of us can only be who we really by wearing a mask.

And by doing so, I found out that I can be a very vibrant, lovable. sexy, adorable, and hilarious person when I am not limited by accidents of birth.

In the Furry world, you can make the person you are on the outside match the person you are on the inside, and that’s a truly magical thing.

Especially for us weirdoes.

And for the record, I do want to be more like Fruvous. I feel like the person I am as Fruvous is in many ways an idealized version of myself and the sort of person I want to be in the real world.

He is so much more open and expressive and confident than I am. Unlike me, he is not afraid to turn his personality power up to 11 and that is a huge part of his appeal. He has no conflict between a desperate need for attention and a terrible fear of being noticed and exposed.

He can turn on the charm and the wit and the warmth and if it works, great, and if it doesn’t, whatever. He can be silly and broad and clown around and have fun in a way I’ve never been able to in life. And he can express all the nurturing and “maternal” instincts I have alway been too bound up in gender stupidity to express.

So being him has been a great help to me…. but it’s also been a great crutch.

Maybe without him, I would be forced to learn to express myself in the real world, and therefore be way more engaged in life and not so damned cloistered.

Maybe without him, I would burn out and fall apart and be even more miserable than before because I felt like there was no hope for me at all.

I doubt I would survive that. There is a reason that I don’t have a history of suicide attempts and maybe being Fruvous is a big part of that.

Because no matter how low I sink, he stays afloat.

And that means a lot to me.

More after the break.

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A vacation from being myself

It occurs to me that this is what being Fruvous affords me – a break from being myself.

Which is both good and bad.

Bad, because I need that break because I don’t want to be my real self. I don’t like being me. I don’t want to have to do it.

I’d rather be the person I pretend to be. If I had a choice, I would keep mask and throw away the person wearing it and I would just be Fruvous forever.

Thank God that’s not an option.

And I know how very wrong this disavowal of my true self is. That is a very unhealthy and in many ways unfair way to look at things. I “should” learn to love myself for who I really am, warts and all.

Just add it to the long, long list of things I “should” do but don’t.

And I am working on it in my own way. I have come a long way from hating myself so much that I couldn’t stand to look in the mirror for fear that the wave of hate and rage and utter contempt against the person I saw would consume me.

Yes, it was really that bad. And not that long ago, relatively speaking.

Now, though, I have become quite good at beating back the flames of self-loathing with an internalized litany of all my good points and the genuinely amazing truth of what an extraordinary and unique person I am.

I don’t think I have terminated the painful emotions at the root of the self-hate yet, but I at least have it boxed in into a tiny little corner of my mind.

The good side of being Fruvous is that it has allowed me to explore, expand, express, and elaborate on many aspects of myself that my social anxiety/avoidant personality disorder keep me from exploring in the real world.

I can’t imagine trying to find my way in the RL gay community with my issues, my age, and my weight. I can’t do night clubs – oh boy, loudness AND crowding, two massive triggers for me – and more intimate events would scare the crap out of me.

I would need a native guide. Then maybe I could do it. Someone to whom I could turn when I don’t know what to do because I am socially lost. Someone I can count on to be friendly and nice to me when my demons are telling me everyone hates me and wishes I would go away.

Someone to be my rock of sanity to cling to when I am going crazy.

It would be a tough job. But if I could find someone who could do it, I might just end up wanting to marry that person.

If you’ll be my rock, I’ll be your clown, your songbird, your safe haven, and your dear sweet doting mother, all wrapped up in one package.

And so many more things besides! I can be a lot of things.

But only to the man who can be one solid reliable thing all the time that I can rely on to be there when I need him.

Not sure who would want that job, but I swear I can make the right man so happy.

Resumes are now being accepted.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.