WARNING : The following is about as sad as it gets. Heed the warnings at the beginning very closely. This shit could break your heart.

Went down the rabbit hole of animation memes today, and ended up here :

And after watching that, I understandably had a bit of a cry.

And that is something I desperately need to do : cry. Even time something manages to make me cry, I feel a whole lot better once I have had a nap afterwards, and from this I conclude that I have an inland ocean of frozen tears inside me yearning to get out.

Like all North American men, really. Our culture is so fucked up.

I went through a lot of bad shit when I was a kid. I got raped, bullied, ignored, neglected, brushed off, thrown to the wolves, and treated like I shouldn’t even be alive.

And that’s just the active stuff. I also went through hundreds of hours of boredom and social isolation as the pariah of the school who was too smart for his own good and spent his days bored in class and terrified of his fellow students, all alone.

And through all that hell, I never cried about it. Not after the first year of school or so. Typical emotionally constipated male, taught to bottle everything up by a society that punishes any sign of vulnerability or weakness in possessors of a Y chromosome.

I mean, if I had cried back then, it would have attracted more bullying. Blood in the water effect. It was bad enough that I cry when I’m angry.

Crying when I was sad was out of the question.

And even when I was alone, I did not cry. I didn’t know I should. I was so alienated from my own emotions, locked away in the airless void of my intellect as I was, that the notion that crying might make me feel better would never have occurred to me.

I mean, crying sucks. It feels bad. Nobody wants to cry. And crying makes you feel out of control, and being out of control is the greatest of all male sins.

So why not avoid it entirely if you can?

It’s only been within the last five to ten years that I have gained enough wisdom to be able to answer that question : because avoiding it costs you more than you can possibly imagine. You have to be dead inside to keep all that emotion at bay, and that is way too high a price to pay for anything.

Like I keep saying, I wish I could just turn a valve and have all my repressed emotions melt and rush out in a massive, glorious, world-shattering flood.

Sure, I would probably lose my mind completely for a while. But after the waters receded and the land dried out, all that would be left would be what is truly me, without all the issues and problems and emotional garbage piled up and pretending to be me.

And who knows. Maybe when I grow wise enough, I will be able to find that release valve and use it to let absolutely everything go.

Until then, I dig.

More after the break.

---

Don’t give up

Oh crap, why do I keep watching these things?

Also sad, and very much about depression.

But it has a happy ending!

When I was watching that video and thinking about our one-eyed protagonist and his relationship with the fluffy white kitty who is trying to understand him, I found myself feeling glad that I had gone through all my depression alone because that meant I wasn’t also dragging someone else down into my own personal hell.

Guilt like that would kill me.

But then I thought, that doesn’t sound right. Maybe if I had someone else in this sad little world of mine with me, it wouldn’t be as sad. Maybe the right person could have helped me find my way back to the light. Maybe instead of dragging them down, they could have lifted me up.

It’s at least possible. But I know I don’t really believe it at all. To my diseased mind, the only thing that could happen to someone who tried to help is that I would drain them of all the positivity and hope and encouragement they had and they would end up broken and depressed just like me…. and it wouldn’t even help me for long.

I mean, I even have to be careful not to destroy my therapist with my negativity. I have tried to truly open up to him and he was just as terrified and helpless in the face of my darkness as anybody else.

Which was depressing.

But more importantly, that video made me aware of a deep and terrible fear that I didn’t even know I had, one that set off another crying jag.

I am terribly afraid that the people who love me will get tired of trying to connect with me and failing, and will, with sorrow in their hearts, give up on me and leave.

And that’s why I don’t get that close to people. The wall stays up and people stay at arm’s length because I am convinced, deep down, that if they get any closer to me, my darkness will try to devour them and I will either destroy them or they will run away screaming and never come back.

Makes me feel like a starving vampire who knows he can’t get too close to any mortals or he won’t be able to stop himself from feeding on them.

I know that sounds crazy and I know that nobody who knows me would agree with my dire assessment of myself.

But that’s because I have been protecting them. Shielding them. All the fluff and sweetness and silliness and wit rests on an all-devouring void that roils and rocks with rage and hate and chaos and greed and the mindless desire to destroy.

No wonder I would rather be the person I pretend to be.

And I don’t know what to do with my pet void monster. There has to be a way to express its energies in a constructive way and thus dissipate it over time like Hawking radiation.

I know I need to do more. Be more. Take all this madness in my head and use it as the fuel to, as the video says, keep climbing.

So please don’t give up on me, my friends. I know it can’t always be easy to love a guy like me. But know that I do truly love you dearly and I am trying as hard as I can to cross the interstellar void between us and find my way back home to you.

I love you all so much. You’re my lantern in the window on a cold dark winter night.

Please keep the light on for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.