That’s what I could use right now. But I can’t seem to manage it. Yet.
I’m part way there. I can get a cry started. But then some inner mechanism of the mind shuts it down again almost immediately.
And there goes the waterworks.
I can feel that whatever it is that shuts things down is doing so as some kind of defensive control method. Like some deep part of me reacts to my crying like it is some kind of attack, or maybe more like a containment failure, and swings into emergency mode to plug things back up again.
Which sucks. I am very, very sick of being a victim of male emotional constipation. I have a hell of a lot of emotion that needs to come out pronto before it causes some kind of internal meltdown.. or manifests itself as psychosomatic illness.
Expressing emotions is like using the bathroom – you’re a fool to think you can avoid doing it forever, and if you don’t do it in a controlled and regular way, you will end up doing it in an out of control and very bad way, and definitely not at a time and place of your choosing, either.
Hence guys who would rather beat their kids than cry,
Come to think of it, my father clearly needed a good long cry to help him get over all the evil shit his satanic father did to him. Not to mention the crap he took from his boss Ian.
But he took it out on us instead.
Jesus, it’s like Ian abused us by proxy.
Anyhow, once more I feel the need to communicate with my deeper self only to be reminded that for me, that’s a long distance call.
And there’s sunspots jamming the signal.
Turns out that the higher you grow, the less you know. That’s why people much stupider than me often appear to have great wisdombecause they are much closer to their deeper minds and are far more accustomed to listening to their instincts and acting on their emotions and “following their heart” than I am.
Because they have no choice. They don’t have all this mental hardware to rely on.
But lucky me, I do.
Women have a head start too. They aren’t socialized to keep their guard up at all times because if you don’t, someone will use your “weakness” to hurt you.
Boy I hope us Gen X types are the last generation to have that poison in our veins. Now THAT I will freely label as “toxic masculinity”.
There are so many of us men in the world, especially in British derived cultures, whose psychological torment could be ended by a really good cry.
And I am sure that I am one of them. I might be somewhat more enlightened about the subject than a lot of dudes but that doesn’t mean I am any less emotionally bunged up.
I just express myself better.
More after the break.
Learning to feel
It ain’t easy.
All my instincts are wrong. The deeper I probe, the more I realize how much being this painfully bright has cost me.
And all to maintain “clarity”. And staying “in control”. For fuck’s sake.
To keep these analytic tools of mine razor sharp, I have sidelined almost every emotion in favour of keeping my world utterly cerebral.
And Heaven forbid that I should do anything purely out of emotion. Oh no. That would mean being out of control and we can’t have that.
Better to be so numb as to be half out of my mind all the time. Apparently.
Like I keep saying (repeat until believed), I want to live. I want to feel. I want to be a real person and not this shambling half-real wreck of a potential human being.
I mean, intellectually, I know it’s my world that isn’t real to me, not vice versa. But that’s not how it feels to me. I feel hollow and empty and insubstantial, like the shadow of a ghost, and I can’t feel my world.
And when you really think about it, being a ghost in the real world is a lot less scary than being real in a ghost world.
At least then, most of your world is real.
Amounts to the same thing anyhow, at least subjectively.
The only path to resurrection (assuming I was ever alive to begin with) is to carve through all this dead or dormant flesh to get to the still-living core underneath and let that be the green shoots that lead to a whole new tree.
A living tree, where the sap runs and the dew falls and dead leaves give way to living green growth that stretches toward the sunlight, eager for its warmth and lght.
And its love. God do I need love. Lord knows I can’t feel my own.
I’ve always been on the outside looking in. Even within my own family, I always felt like I was not really allowed to be there.
They just put up with me out of pity.
In many ways, I was a family of one. There were my parents, my siblings, and me, the uninvited tagalong that was never allowed to relax and fit in and feel like he belonged.
Because he didn’t. They made that clear.
My parents had no time for me. After all, they had full time jobs and three growing kids to raise. They had no time to spare for unwanted surplus progeny.
I would have to survive on whatever morsels of attention and validation fell from the table of my betters like a church mouse living on communion crumbs.
Looking back, I am starting to see my whole childhood as one constant low grade panic attack, at least when other people were around.
It’s like I was always afraid of being told to fuck off and go away. Even with family.
I don’t remember that ever happening.
But that was the vibe I got.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.