Because nobody is strong enough. Or so I’ve always felt.
Not completely, obviously, or I wouldn’t have bothered talking to Doc Costin for fifty minutes a week for the last decade plus.
Then again, the fact that I have talked to him that much and I am still crazy after all these years suggests that maybe he can’t help me either.
Talking to him DOES help, though. Some weeks more than others, but there is really no substitute for talking to another human being in realtime. One who knows your history and your problems and your psyche, so you don’t have to waste time explaining yourself and can get down to the nitty gritty.
But as patient readers know, he’s not strong enough either. I can’t truly be open and honest and “myself” with him. When I try, he gets just as overwhelmed and frightened and utterly lost as everyone else.
And I know why. It’s because I’m radioactive.
Not in a toxic sense, necessarily. But something fundamental in me automatically collects, refines, concentrates, and stores things, and I have an enormous stockpile of highly refined but unprocessed emotional toxic waste built up in me like some kind of existential superfund site, and when I let down my guard and try to really connect with someone like a therapist, I can’t help but expose them to all of that.
And nobody can handle that.
Even Radioactive Man would have to put on anti-rad gear. And a lead lined codpiece.
And all that radioactivity is only magnified by my powers of expression. Between my verbal gifts, my charisma, my force of personality, and the sharp contrast between my darker than VANTA black “true self” and my usual persona, I am a creature built for self-expression to my very core.
Load in that high energy fuel that I have been hoarding because I had no way to express my darker side for so long, and you have a recipe for being a man alone on a very big castle on a very lonely island far, far from the mainland.
Like I’m in a one man leper colony.
And because of my radioactivity, I can’t truly get close to people. I can be warm and sympathetic and silly and caring with them, but they are not truly getting close to me in an intimate emotional sense.
Even my friends in Le Gang can only get so close. I love them too much to risk hurting them with my radioactive nature. Hurting someone I love that way would destroy me.
So even though I love and cherish and value them and feel lucky as hell to have them in my life, even Joe, Julian, and Felicity are just an audience to me at the end of the day.
In that they never truly get that close to me. There is always that invisible but inviolable wall between me and them that, like the fire curtain at an old Globe style theater, is there for the audience’s protection more than my own.
Maybe I am wrong about all this. Maybe I could drop my shields right now and everyone would be just fine. Maybe I could just let it all go kaboom and then pick up the pieces and use them to make a new me and it would all work out great.
But IO am too afraid of hurting others and too afraid of my own power to try.
Maybe I need to work on that. Maybe I need to finally grow into these abilities of mine.
Maybe I need to grow my soul.
More after the break.
The other reason
The other reason nobody can help me is the elephant in the room : my high IQ.
And while it’s probably not true that someone has to be smarter than you in order to be able to help you on a psychological and/or spiritual level – as long as they have understanding you lack, they can help you along your road – my mind burns so white hot that it is effectively radioactive too.
And the same thing has happened with the superfund site, too. All these years when it seemed like I wav doing nothing with my life have led to my becoming more intelligent and more talented day by day via the same processes that made me that way.
A fringe benefit of not growing up, I guess.
At this point, I am genuinely concerned that my mind will get so hot that its molecular bonds break down and it dissolves into plasma.
Some argue that this has already happened. Many times.
The obvious but inadequate solution is to start harnessing all these coruscating energies to do great and amazing things, or to at least make me a living.
Which sounds great on paper but it won’t work. (Story of my life, really. )
Because it all comes back to what I was talking about yesterday : for whatever reason, when I go to activate myself and get going, there is no gas in the tank. Whatever it is that people need in order to get up and get moving just plain ain’t there.
It’s all dammed up inside me somewhere. There is a mighty ice dam keeping my life force from being able to inhabit and inspire me, and I don’t know what it is.
I know this much : it has a lot to do with fear. And not just anxiety. I am talking a deep level of stark animal terror. The kind that makes you want to shrink into a tiny little ball and then disappear forever.
The kind that makes you afraid to be alive.
Well I was never supposed to be here in the first place.
I was never invited in to my family. They never asked for me. And they made sure to never make me feel welcome, either.
No wonder I am polluted right at the source.
And at some point, I am going to have to hike uphill till I find the source of that pollution and get it the fuck out of there.
Only then can the waters of life reach my thirsty soul.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.