Fruvous didn’t remember deciding to do this.

As he sat before the back door of the house next door to his own, trying to work up the nerve to make himself known despite the terrible fear currently making his tail tremble and his paws twitch and his little heart beat so fast you couldn’t tell one beat from the next, he tried to remember how he got there.

All he could remember was a great and terrible emotion with no name that has started rising within him when the kibble ran out. This emotion grew and grew within him until finally it filled him completely and then just like that, he found himself here.

And he knew what he was here to do. But he was too scared to do it.

Once more, the nameless emotion came to his rescue. It lifted his front paw to the door and set his claws against it, and made him scratch at it, loudly.

The whimpers were all his, though. He’d been doing it a lot lately but this time he was doing it for someone to hear, and a lot of the fear and pain and suffering and heartbreak – oh, the heartbreak – he had suffered lately came through in them.

For a little while, nothing happened, and the bad voice in his head told him that was because nobody wanted a wretched little rat-fox like him and he should give up and go away before he got into trouble.

But then the door opened and their youngest child, a girl home for Xmas from her first year of school, peered out at him, and made a little noise of surprised.

“What’s out there, dear?” said an adult female voice from deeper inside the home.

The little girl gaped at Fruvous for a few more moments, cleared her throat twice, then shouted, “Mummy, it’s the fox from next door!”

“That’s impossible, dear. They moved away weeks ago. That house is vacant, nobody is left there at all, unless… ”

A middle aged woman’s face appeared in a back window, her expression one of dawning suspicion hardening into angry disapproval.

She, too, made a noise of surprise not unlike her daughters, and after clearing her throat she said, “My god, it’s him. That poor thing. Those bas…. um those bad people next door must have left the poor thing behind!”

Fruvous just sat there, tail slowly wagging. He was trying to find the energy to beam friendliness at them like he used to but he was too scared, so all he could do was wags his fluffy tail and try to look cute.

The effect was quite pathetic.

“Well don’t just stand there, Stacy, let the poor thing in. He must be cold and hungry. ”

Stacy glanced back at her mother, her eyes wide with wonder. Could this really be happening? She slowly pulled the door wide open and smiled at Fruvous.

“Come in, little foxy!” she said, startling Fruvous a little. And part of him wanted to run away then, but the girl’s smile was so warm and friendly and inviting, like a little sun, that it calmed Fruvous enough to step through that doorway into the warm and well lit home and accept whatever the consequences may be.

Immediately, he was surrounded by children, who at their mother’s insistence stayed back a few feet so as not to crowd or trap him.

When the door closed behind Fruvous, he very nearly fainted. He had never felt so small, so wretched, and so broken as he did standing there trapped, with all these strong and healthy people looming over him.

“That’s it, children. Give him lots of room. He’s probably not used to being around people any more, the poor thing. Nicolai! ”

The eldest child, Nicolai, aged 10 and a half, snapped to attention. “Yes, mother?”

“Go get the poor thing some food. Give him the leftover stew from last night. Pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds first, though. Don’t want the dear thing to get tummy cramps from eating cold stew. ”

Nicolai was never happier than when he had a mission, so he scooted off to the kitchen with a grin on his face.

“Now Stacy, go get the big basin…. no, not the big one, the poor thing would drown in it… um, get the little pink basin and fill it with water so he has something to drink. ”

Stacy tore her eyes away from Fruvous long enough to nod to her mother and scamper off on her own mission.

“And what will I do, Mama?” asked Raisa, the middle child.

“Ah yes, Raisa, you stay here with our new guest and keep him company. ” said the mother before disappearing into the house to see what the other two were up to.

Raisa sat down a little closer to Fruvous. “Don’t worry, they’ll be back soon. ”

Fruvous was too busy trying to adjust to his new surroundings to worry. He had forgotten how many sights and sounds and especially smells there were inside a house, and he was drinking it all in.

But his fluffy little tail was wagging steadily now. The warmth felt heavenly as it soaked into his fur and into his bones, and everyone here seemed so nice.

So somewhere deep inside him, a tiny little flame of hope was born.

Soon, Nicolai and Stacy returned with their burdens, and nervously, they began to set them down in front of Fruvous.

“No… ” said their mother, making Fruvous flinch. “Put them down by the fire. Our poor little friend needs to warm up. ”

Plate and basin were duly placed in front of the fire and Fruvous followed Stacy’s smile as she beckoned him over to them.

“Go ahead, little foxy. ” said Stacy softly, in a voice that sounded like an angel to Fruvous. “Eat up. It’s okay, you’re warm and you’re safe now. ”

Tentatively, Fruvous approached the bowl of stew. He was so hungry and it smelled so good that he wanted it very badly. But was this really for him?

A nod toward the bowl from Nicolai said yes, and slowly at first, then with great concentration and determination, Fruvous began to eat.

And it was the best thing he had ever tasted in his entire life.

And as he ate, Raisa gently stroked his fur, and told him, “It’s okay, little one. You are safe now. We will love you and protect you. You will never be left all alone again. ”

Raisa glanced at her mother and her siblings before adding, “You are home now. ”

And at that word, Fruvous laid down on his side and cried as all the pain and fear and coldness and darkness of his life before this place came flowing out of him.

And the children took turns petting him as the tears flowed, and they were very happy when the crying stopped and Fruvous started pushing into their hands as they pet him.

And when Fruvous stood up, shook out his fur, and barked happily to them, the whole family, even gruff old Pape, gave a little cheer.

It was up to little Nicolai to make it official. “So, mama… can we keep him?”

“MyNicky, “: said the mother, eyes wet with tears, “I can’t imagine doing anything else. ”

And they cheered again.

---

That should be the end of it, although who knows, I might want to write about how Fruvous settles into his new home one day.

And I just want to reiterate : I am one hell of a writer.

I need to write more fiction. It’s so much more satisfying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Ya know, all that bullshit I have heard for all my life about how it’s important to have the3 right attitude might just be true.

It’s just not that simple.

Or maybe it is, I don’t know. Maybe my own blinkered ignorance has me thinking that you can’t just choose to have a different attitude towards life when you totally can and I am just afraid to see it because then I would have to change.

I don’t fucking know. And I don’t fucking care, either, really.

Maybe life doesn’t always require answers, for fuck’s sake. Make shit up!

Regardless, from where I am right now, it feels like an attitude adjustment is more something I have to work towards than something I can simply will into being.

Maybe I’m wrong. Doesn’t matter. Fuck it.

I know that I still have a lot of negative emotion within me to deal with. Whole fields of pain, fear, aversion, and of course our old buddy anger lie waiting for be harvested and processed into the healing my shattered soul so badly needs.

Man I am getting expressive. I may lapse into poetry at any moment.

Recent revelations have certainly sped things along. Getting to the root of my whole feeling like I did something to make people stop loving me as a child has been a godsend in terms of moving a massive amount of emotion so that it can be expressed through words and thus finally dealt with by lil ol me.

Must remember, I don’t have to remain frozen in place waiting for love. Nothing bad is going to happen if I am not “ready” when some imaginary entity wants to pay attention to and validate me. The “Fasten Seatbelt” light is off and I am free to move around.

That needs to be my new mantra. I am free.

Perhaps part of the problem is that this absurd notion of waiting to be loved was, and is, in fact, my last connection to the belief that someone out there does care and will, some day, come to rescue me.

Like I have said many times before, the worst fear of all children is abandonment, and I think hanging on to that belief was a way for me to dodge the realization that I had, indeed, been abandoned by absolutely everyone.

That little fox Fruvous just keeps waiting for the people to forgive him for whatever he did and let him come back inside and me warm and loved.

And as heartbreaking as that is, do you really want him to stop? What then?

And what then for me? If I can truly convince my inner fox child that nobody is coming, it will of course break his, and my, tiny little heart.

But they’re not coming, precious. You are truly on your own. And it’s up to you whether you just lay down in the snow to die of a broken heart, or get up out of that snowbank and get out of that cold back yard and go find some nice place where there’s fun to be had and people will love and appreciate you.

You might even already be there.

More after the break.

---

Point of no return

“They’re never coming back. ” whispered a cold but kind voice in Fruvous’ ear. “Face it, my soft friend. They moved away and left you behind. They’re gone now and they are never coming back. Time to get up and move on. ”

In reply, Fruvous simply whimpered and huddled down even deeper into his own fur, back turned to the mouse, muzzle facing the back fence.

If he just stayed like this, he could pretend it wasn’t true. He could pretend the house was as full of light and life and activity as always. He could convince himself that the sounds from the other houses were coming from his, and that everything was normal and good, and the worst possible thing ever had not happened.

All he had to do was make sure to never, ever look at that cold, dark, empty house with nothing but shadows for windows and silence for doors again, and he could keep pretending everything was still okay.

Well, as good as it had ever been, anyhow. Ever since the day they put him out here.

And he had to stay just like this, back turned to the world, because there was another voice, just as cold but nowhere near as kind, waiting for him out there if he dared to look at that awful soulless house again.

And it said things like, “What did you do THIS time, you little red rat, to make them go away? It must have been something truly awful to make them go as far away from you as possible and never come back. You must be a bad, bad fox. Maybe even the worst fox ever. So tell me, you rotten little rodent… WHAT DID YOU DO?”

“But that’s just not true. ” said the kind voice. “You were the best fox ever for them. You were never a bad fox They were just bad people. And there are good people out there who would love to love a sweet little fox like you. But you have to get up and leave this place in order to find them. ”

And Fruvous knew the voice was right. It was just easier, for some reason, to think of himself as a bad fox than to face the fact that the people he loved with all his heart and soul were not good people at all.

He still couldn’t bring himself to blame them for leaving. He would have to think about that later. And he still couldn’t look at that awful dead house that used to be a home.

But he could look at the gate into the backyard that the youngest child had left open for the first time ever. And he could look at the giant bag of kibble the youngest had ripped the top off of and left splayed open on the ground, and the garden hose that had left running for him, and know that for at least a moment, someone had loved him enough to make sure he wouldn’t die of starvation or thirst before running away to get into he moving van and go away forever.

So he couldn’t be that bad of a fox, could he?

And if someone loved him before… maybe someone else could love him again?

So he turned to face that open gate, and think about things.

And for a while, he even stopped whimpering.

---

I will now lay down and cry for a bit.

But I just have to say that I am one hell of a writer.

Not bad for a fox, eh?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I feel like my message to myself about not needing to “wait” for rescue or for someone to love me any more is not really getting through to my deeper mind.

Otherwise known as my inner child.

The fact that those two are the same thing seems to elude even the most resourceful of mystics. Pity, because it would make their world much simpler.

Regardless, I think I may be doomed to having to just keep telling myself that same thing over and over again until it truly sinks in.

Repeat until believed, and all that.

Which means, dear readers, that you are going to be reading it again and again.

Sorry about that.

I think one of the primary things keeping me in the old loop, besides habit, is the fact that the alternative is unknown to me, and involves taking on a lot of responsibility for myself and my fate for basically the first time in my life.

All my life, I have drifted, just going along with whatever was expected of me at the time. And when nothing was expected of me, that’s what I did : nothing.

Well, nothing except entertain myself, that is. It’s not like when nobody expects anything of me I just stare, glassy eyed, at the nearest wall.

And for me, the only stream I know how to drift down is school. That is literally the only thing that has ever propelled my life besides two ill-fated attempts at romance.

Never change coastlines and countries in pursuit of romance, dear readers. Or at least, not without securing a work visa first.

Look, I never said I was prudent.

But mostly it’s been education that moved me. No education, no motion. Just the endless mental masturbation of fucking video games.

Nobody hates junk like a junky hates junk.

I drifted (or coasted) through the regular school system and UPEI. I drifted through Kwantlen and VFS. At all other times, I was dead in the water, trapped in the doldrums by mental illness and the resulting spiritual weakness.

But things are going to change. And the first thing that’s going to have to change is that I need to stop drifting and pick up the oars and row, god dammit.

But to where? Once more, the Infinite Corridor of Infinite Doors rears its ugly head.

Maybe I am trying too hard. Maybe I don’t need to find the “right” path at all. In fact, maybe I would be better off just trying the first thing I can think of that appeals to me.

That way I would at least get something done, even if it turns out to be “wrong”.

Maybe for some people, trying to be prudent and only make “smart” moves is the wrong path, and they are much better off following their natural enthusiasm down whatever paths strike their fancy and learning from the resultant mistakes.

That way, that marvelous enthusiasm stays healthy and strong and they never have to worry about “finding motivation” at all.

And maybe I am one of those people.

Maybe I need to stop trying the “right” option or the “safe” option and lower the bar to “whatever seems to be better than doing nothing but play video games”.

That seems like a much saner and smarter way to go about things.

More after the break.

---

Adventures in ordering in

Another way for this seemingly simple process to fuck up.

I decided I wanted Chinese food. Not an easy decision around here as there are LOTS of Chinese restaurants – hell, around here even the sushi places are Chinese – but very few of them serve “Chinese Food” as we know it here in North America.

I looked over a bunch of places. All too weird or too expensive. Since when did charging $22+ per dish become the norm??

So I decided I wanted Mexican food. Not an easy decision seeing as there are very FEW Mexican places here in Richmond. But I figured I would give good old Taco Del Mar a bit of my business.

Nope. They have either disappeared from Skip the Dishes or were never there in the first places and I used to order from them via DoorDash.

Until THEY decided they hated prepaid credit cards. Grr.

Places like that say it’s because of “security risks”. By which they mean “poor people”. They didn’t like us poor people being able to buy things with credit cards like we were actual valid human beings so they booted us off their platform.

Fine, Now Skip gets my money, NOT YOU.

Ahem. Anyhow. No Taco Del Mar but apparently we have a place called Chipotle’s now. Not a part of the American chain by that name, I don’t think. From what I have heard in American Media, their Chipotle’s has a radically different business model.

So I order. And I wait. I mess around making images and watching YouTube like usual. Around 20 minutes later, I check the app on my tablet. It says it is STILL in the “finding a courier and confirming your order” phase.

Uh oh. That’s like the first phase!

I wait another ten minutes. Still stuck there. So I try to cancel my order so I can order from somewhere else.

The app tells me I can’t cancel my order now.

Motherfucker says WHAT? Now I feel trapped. Like I am suddenly in some Kafkaesque hell where I never get my food and never get my money back.

So I fret. And I stress. And I am building up a head of steam and ready to go full Karen on some Skip employee who answers their help chat thing when the phone rings.

It’s my food. It’s here.

Turns out it was just that the app had fucked up. Everything was actually going fine. My food was not even later than it usually is.

Good thing I didn’t go ham on some poor help desk chat person, then. Hehe.

Anyhow, that’s my evening. How was yours?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was looking forward to today’s Therapy Thursday session with Doc Costin because I knew I had a hell of a lot to tell him.

And tell him I did. I pretty much talked the whole time, which is rare for me. Usually I run out of gas at least a couple of times per session.

Not this time. Not ever again, maybe.

I told him all about my recent revelations about feeling like it was somehow my fault that layer by layer, I lost everyone I could count on, ending with my own damned mother.

And that’s when I became a victim of elementary school depression. Once it was clear that I had absolutely nobody I could turn to in my world, I turned inward almost entirely and became the vacant vessel for media consumption you see before you today.

All I know how to do is entertain myself.

And that is so very far from enough.

So forgive me for repeating myself, but I have to keep reminding myself : I can do stuff now. I don’t have to stay frozen waiting for the next time a little attention and validation happens to come my way so I can reward it with my positive grateful glow.

I can leave my lonely post in that wintry back yard and go off to explore the world and find new friends and discover new realms and finally know what it means to be alive.

That means leave my cozy, crappy nest, though, and voluntarily entering a state of higher stimulation, and that’s… hard.

Somehow, I need to stop being so afraid of stimulation. My current stimulation level – emotional, social, sensory – is so very low that any kind of change to my situation has to involve going up the stimulation gradient.

Which means I can’t stay down here at the bottom any more.

And that means I have to break the self-hypnotic trance I have been living in for coming up thirty years. It’s like some kind of closed loop of consciousness, and if I am to exit frozen fox mode and finally become a real little boy, I will have to truly wake up.

And that scares the hell out of me. But really, what doesn’t?

At some point, I will have to turn and face the fear instead of fleeing it. I will have to let the anxiety catch up to me and endure it no matter how fierce or long a storm it is.

But what then? That’s the real question. If I get over all that fear, I will be left trying to actually figure out what to do with myself again, which scares the willies out of me.

I know I can’t “solve” a problem that big. Too many variables. Ergo I cannot “figure out” what I should do with myself.

That leaves what I want to do.

And that’s no solution because I want to do a lot of things. So which one?

There has to be some way to choose a path that comes from deep within me and that feels intuitively “right”, or at least right enough for right now.

I guess I am trying to avoid being hurt.

But there are worse things than getting hurt.

Like rotting on the vine, and getting hurt THAT way.

Life hurts. Get used to it.

More after the break.

---

Fading into night

Had a bit of temporal confusion earlier.

Woke up from a nap, looked at the clock. 5:57 pm. OK, cool.

So I get up and take a eat at Miter Computer, and then the alarm goes off on my tablet.

WTF? Why would I set an alarm for 6 pm?

Pick up the tablet, turn off the alarm, look at the time again. 8 pm. Not 6.

Dunno how I misread 7:57 pm as 5:57 pm. But I just lost two hours., Jarring.

One thing that strikes me about the latest version of the narrative of my early childhood is that at no point did I feel like I could just ask for my needs to be met.

I was too timid for that. Besides, through their actions and attitude, my family made it clear that they were barely tolerating me as is. That’s why in my attempts to be “good”, I tried to exist as little as possible.

TO be undemanding and low maintenance and agreeable. I was alway eager to do whatever was asked of me.

But not a lot was asked of me.

Not directly, anyhow. I was just informed of things,. Like that I would be doing my own laundry and my own clothing shopping and getting myself to and from school every day entirely on my own and getting very good grades all by myself.

In many ways, I raised myself. If it wasn’t for Mom cooking supper every night, I would have had very little involvement with her at all.

What keeps running through my mind is : didn’t anyone notice how much I had changed? How I became a radically less confident and happy kid at one point (the rape) and how I just got sadder and sadder over the years?

But people don’t notice what they don’t want to notice. They wanted to pretend I didn’t exist and I did everything I could to assist them in that.

I was telling Doc Costin today that I don’t think my parents ever forgave me for being born. For coming along in the first place.

They never planned on having a fourth kid and I admittedly defied my mother’s tubal ligation to be conceived, so to say I was a surprise is a vast understatement.

An unwelcome one, at that. My existence was resented when I was still in the womb. And I’ve realized that I was never considered an equal to my siblings.

I was always an “extra” expense. MY parents have actually said, in my presence, that they were “already busy raising three kids” when I came along.

So I was left to my own devices most of the time. It was just expected that I would fit myself in wherever I could. Certainly nobody was going to make room for me.

And it was doubly certain that nobody was going to give up part of their current share of the parental love, attention, and so on so that I got an equal slice.

So I survived on whatever crumbs fell from their metaphorical table. And I was grateful for that. Grateful that I ever got anything.

Because it was clearl that I deserved absolutely and literally nothing.

I didn’t even deserve to be alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Got some things I need to tell my deeper self.

Hey there kid. Listen….

You never did anything wrong to make the people around you stop loving you like they once did. You were a very good kid who would have done anything your parents or siblings asked of you.

They just didn’t ask for much.

You were always a sweet, bright, loving kid that any parent would be glad to have around. Always cheerful and funny and silly and kind and warm.

The fact that you got ignored and made to feel like you literally deserved nothing ever, not even existence, was not your fault at all.

How could it be? You were just a little kid doing the best he could.

And absolutely nothing you did or even could have done would have justified the way your family and your teachers treated you.

You didn’t deserve it, kid. You did nothing wrong, and there is nothing wrong with you either. You’re not useless, or gross, or wrong, or broken.

Above all, you are not disposable.

You deserved all the love and care and value that any other kid got. That every child should get from their parents and their siblings and their teachers and their schools.

Yes, you were a strange child. But weird kids need love too.

You were a wonderful kid, and the fact that those closest to you could not see that means there was something wrong with them, not you.

You tried so hard to do what was expected of you.

You even tried to disappear, like everyone wanted you to.

And you deserved so much better. You still do.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that there is no way to “fix” what was done to you, now or then. Certainly, as you well know, no amount of being the best kid you knew how to be and passively waiting for someone to love you was ever going to work.

The silver lining of that, though, is that you can finally stop waiting. You are free to finally go out into the world and try to live some kind of life without worrying that you have to be “ready” when the random boon of kindness and attention comes your way.

You can stop trying to be the best fox ever and try instead to be a happy one.

Know that you are worthy and worthwhile and valuable and good. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You have every right to live and thrive and take up space and resources and do and get everything that everyone else gets.

You don’t always have to be on the outside looking in. You can go right inside where it is warm and safe and be welcome. People want you to be there. They want to include you. They want someone as delightful as you in their lives.

And they will be lucky to have you.

So go on in. Take a seat at the dinner table. And dig in.

You won’t be missing anything.

More after the break.

---

A little rain

Feeling rather depressed at the moment.

Hardly surprising. I’ve been doing a hell of a lot of emotional heavy lifting lately and that is bound to leave a person rather drained and empty feeling.

Honestly, I think I am just tired. I’ve been sleeping okay lately but that doesn’t mean that I am not in sleep debt of some sort.

My world is so isolated from the natural flow of life that my circadian rhythms are syncopated rather erratically. I never know exactly where I stand in terms of sleep.

I might feel bright and energetic one minute and ready for the coma ward the next.

It would be different if I had a job or school or something else with regular hours. I could adapt to something like that no problem and then I would have a regular time for things like eating and sleeping.

Instead, I just nap a lot. And I know that is not a healthy sleep pattern. And I am trying to break myself of it, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.

There’s that whole “using sleep to reset my background anxiety level to zero” thing.

And use sleep to hide from reality and fast forward through life anyhow. The hours I am asleep are hours I don’t have to fill with video games and other inanities.

All of which are beginning to just…. not do it for me any more.

I need more. I need purpose and focus. I need something to strive towards. I need something that takes me out of this invalid lifestyle and into a bigger, brighter, better world where I can learn and earn and connect with the human race.

I have been frozen in place for so long. Waiting for someone to love me, I guess. Tryinf hard, in my own way, to be the best darn fox I can be.

But there is no point in that. Nobody is watching and nobody cares. There is zero chance someone is going to come along and see how “good” I have been, or how sad, and rescue me from myself.

The only one who can do that for me is me. And I am busy trying to get sane.

Or at least switch to a happier form of crazy. This long, dragged out, depressing doldrums of a life might keep me distracted and “busy” but it does not make me happy or even relatively content.

There is a big difference between being happy and just not noticing how sad you are.

At least I make images now. That is one tiny tiny step toward greater productivity. Granted, most of the pics are not exactly the kind of thing one shares with the world (at least, not without bulletproof anonymity), but plenty of them are completely innocuous and most of those are, in fact, rather sweet.

I mean, look at these three pups.

That’s a pretty good Xmas card right there.

I really am a big ol marshmallow at heart, ain’t I?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sorry that I’m so melodramatic lately, but trust me when I say, I need this.

All right. Here are the stages.

Stage alpha (ages 0-3) : Happiness. Innocent joy. My mom is home to raise me. She is warm and affectionate and kind and loving. She is a teacher and I am her eager little student, I am quite the little charmer and tend to be a hit wherever I go. This seems perfectly nature to me.

Stage 1 (age 3) : My mother goes back to work. I am entrusted to my babysitter Betty. I miss my mother a lot but Betty is pretty awesome so it’s not too bad. And every day, when my mother comes home from work, I am super happy to see her and greet her with a great big hug.

This is also the age at which I learn to read.

My best friends are Trish from next door and Janet from across the street. We are a single unit in the summer.

Stage 2 (age 4) : I am raped by a stranger in a shower stall in my father’s gym, a placed called The Spa. Dunno why my Dad took me there. I also had nearly drowned in the pool of The Spa earlier that day.

It was an eventful day. Dad was apparently not good at watching over me.

Stage 3 (age 5) : Trish and Janet are a year older than me, so they go off to grade 1, leaving me alone with Betty. Betty is still awesome, but I am a lonelier kid.

Stage 4 (age 6) : I go to school for the first time ever. No kindergarten for me. At first, I get on great with my fellow students. I am popular due to my charisma and budding abilities as a performer. Once more, I am a hit.

That all comes crashing down when a little shit named Trevor, jealous of me, starts pointing out how fat I am,I had no idea how to defend myself or my new status, so just like that, I slide down to the bottom of the pecking order and that’s where I stay for the rest of my life.

I honestly have no idea what it is like to be respected.

This is also when the bullying began. And my advanced level of intelligence means I am bored a lot of the time. I begin to dread going to school.

Stage 5 (age 7) : For the first time, I get bullied on the way to school. This is the final nail in the coffin and I am now fully agoraphobic. The only safe place is home.

Stage 6 (age 8) : My mother goes utterly cold on me. Previously I coped by telling her about my day while she did the dishes after supper. Often I would give her a hug when I was done. And this went fine for a while.

But after an incident in which she not only did not respond to anything I said, but when I hugged her she didn’t turn away from the dishes to hug back and instead just looked back at me for a moment like she had no idea who this thing assaulting her was, my little heart was broken and the last bit of love and life and light in my light was gone.

I withdrew into myself deeper than ever before. What else could I do?

And that’s about the size of it. Between the ages of 3 and 7, things just kept getting worse and worse for me.

I guess past that point, they couldn’t get a lot worse without involving something that might have actually engendered sympathy for me.

And clearly I did not deserve that.

More after the break.

---

Shifting a mighty load

Freudian interpretations welcomed.

Nothing I have discussed before in this space is as big as this whole “Fruvous in the back yard” thing. Turns out the trauma that wrecked my childhood was not just being raped – although that was bad enough.

It sure as fuck didn’t help.

But no, the real trauma was something a lot deeper and more diffuse and hard to define. It was this feeling of being abandoned by everyone by degrees, starting with my mother going back to work and ending with her rebuffing me that one night.

She didn’t even look at me like I was human. She looked at me like I was yet another awful thing she had to endure.

Looking back, she was probably just incredibly tired from having to be a full time teacher AND a full time housewife.

I think she was depressed, too. It definitely runs in the family.

In fact, it got all six of us at one time or another. With my father, it manifested as rage. With my sister Catherine, it manifested as a high level of anxiety,

For Mom, I think it made her numb.

Nevertheless, that look she gave me hurt more than I could possibly express. It crushed me in a way nothing else every has. Not being bullied, not being betrayed by friends, not being let down over and over by my teachers.

It’s like that look was a knife that severed most of my bond with my mother.

Subconsciously, I kept her at arm’s length after that. I still loved her and cared for her, but I was never close with her ever again. Not really.

That look put a wall between us that has persisted to this day. I will probably die with it still there, even though I wish I could tear it down.

I love my mother. But the brutal truth, and it rips my heart in two to have to say this, but the brutal truth is that I don’t trust her.

Not in the sense that I think she’s a liar. In the much more important sense that I don’t trust her to be there for me, to care about me, to put my needs above hers, or really to be a mother in any really important way.

To be even more brutally honest, after that look, she wasn’t my mother any more.

She was just a nice lady I lived with.

Because if I can’t trust you to be there for me when I need you and I would never bring my problems to you and there is really no way I would ever rely on you for anything because whatever it is, it will be taken away and I will have to do it myself, then how much of a mother are you really?

I hate to break it to you, Mom. But you weren’t much of a mom to me.

Not back then, when I needed you the most.

And I think that hurt me more than even being raped did.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I, uh, made another video.

Came out a tad earnest for my tastes. Meant it to be more emotive. had to settle for using a child voice instead.

Cheap, but effective.

God, I hope not.

And I don’t think that I am. But then again, I wouldn’t know, would I?

Not if I have been faking who I am so long and so well that even I am completely fooled by it and think that is who I really am.

But then again, doesn’t that mean it has become who I really am?

Or is there another me lurking beneath the false one, with its own motives and agenda?

And wouldn’t that be the REAL real me?

After all, someone built theses masks or “modes” of mine, and chooses which one to wear in any given situation.

I guess what I am afraid of is that this deepest self is radically different from the person I have grown accustomed to thinking I am.

That deep down I am something much darker and angrier and a lot less “nice” than I thought, and poking around with it will cause the false me to crumble into dust and fall away, unleashing Dark Mike on the world.

Why am I so invested in people thinking I am a super nice guy, anyhow? Why do I have such a strong desire to be liked?

Is that all part of this “fawning” thing? Does that mean I could…. stop?

And do I want to?

On a gut level, I think I want people to like me due to empathy. I want the emotions I am receiving from people that are directed at me to be happy pleasant ones, and when I know I am the cause of those warm happy feelings, it makes me happy too.

And I radiate that happiness back out to you, and voila, holy synergy.

And I know that I am not “faking” being nice. I do genuinely want people to do well and be happy and I love to help people whenever I can.

But is all that just another way I am trying to make the world love me?

If so, it’s working. I’m a lovable guy.

On one level, I can see how I was just trying to use what I had when I was a wee one. I was smart and cute and charming and so I used those things to try to get people to give me love again.

But I guess when you show up for Grade 1 without having been through kindergarten and therefore all you know how to do is suck up to people older than you, you are entirely unprepared for dealing with your peers.

Back to the issue of my fakeness.

Well ultimately, I guess I have to retreat to my defensive position of, “no matter how I got here, this is who I am right now. ”

But is it? Maybe it’s just the only person I know how to be. A persona honed over decades of being Fruvous online.

I think that ultimately, even Fruvous is only a partial reflection of who I am. There is a lot to me that doesn’t make it into Fruvous, or for that matter, into the Michael John Bertrand the real world knows either.

A lot of me remains in shadow. The deep dark shadow cast by the big bright light of my personality and charm and whatnot.

A lot of it is stuff I know is there, but don’t really “own” as being part of who I really am, like my dark urges and my rage and my secret short temper and so on.

But it’s all me. That’s who I really am too, even if I don’t want or like it.

I guess I need to dream up a version of me that includes everything.

That’s going to be so hard that I shrink away from the very thought of it.

But it’s something I gotta do.

More after the break.

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I’m still waiting

It just occurred to me that maybe the real reason I can’t get my life started at all is that I am still trying to be the best fox ever while waiting for that back door to open and someone will come out to tell me that because I have been such a good, good fox, they love me again and are going to let me come back inside and be safe and warm.

Meta[phorically speaking, obviously.

I mean, I spent my childhood passively waiting for some love and attention to come my way again, and trying to be “ready” for when that happened so I could make the most of it and maybe, just maybe, if I was cute and charming and funny enough, I could convince people to hang around and pay attention to me a little longer.

Now that is a hell of a curse to be laid on a kid : to desperately need love and attention but feel utterly powerless to actively seek it.

I mean, I dunno. I think I might have tried ways to get attention when I was younger, like in grades 1, 2, and 3. I don’t seem to have any specific memories of it, but I think that is because those memories are sealed off as being far too painful.

Because when you are already a painfully shy and nervous kid, it’s very very hard to work up the nerve to ask for anything, even just a moment of love and attention.

And when your weak and tenuous entreaty is rebuffed not even in anger but with the casual ease with which one blinks, that utterly crushes your spirit.

And it confirms that you do not matter, you have no right to exist, what you want and need means absolutely nothing, and unlike your three siblings, your parents will never forgive you for being born.

What can a child conclude from that except that there is something incredibly, deeply, and terribly wrong with them?

My self-esteem never stood a chance.

And that’s why all my brains and talent never meant much to me either. If they meant nothing to my family – and they did – then why would I care?

Everyone just took them for granted. Michael gets good marks. Good, that is one less thing he might need help with and therefore another good reason to continue not ever thinking about him so we can pretend he doesn’t exist.

And I tried not to exist. And I am still trying not to exist.

In the past, I came close to trying so hard I made it true. Got rid of myself at last.

Maybe when I’m dead, they will love me again.

After all, I finally gave them what they really wanted all along : a world without me in it.

And then I will never have to deal with anything ever again.

I am not suicidal. But that still sounds dangerously good to me. And there are times when all that is truly keeping me alive is the defiant determination not to let the depression win, and the prospect of future fun.

Oh. And the certain knowledge that my harming myself would hurt everyone who loves me, even my distant and largely uncaring family, in a deep and terrible way from which they would never fully recover.

And most of them don’t even deserve that.

So I hang in there and cling to life even in those moments when I can’t remember why. I know that whatever sadness is passing through me will pass and I will be glad I lived to see another day of life.

After all, I do have a life to lead, such as it is. And people who love me and care about me and want to keep seeing me around.

That’s enough to protect me from depression’s icy entreaties.

I wonder what I will do for Xmas Even this year?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Becaue it’s Fight, Flight, Freeze… and Fawn.

And whoa Nellie, doe my deeper self not want me to talk about this. I am basically dragging it kicking and screaming into this subject.

But we all know that’s where you find the good stuff. Psychologically speaking.

I am beginning to understand my life as a combination of a freeze response with an extended fawn response as I have desperately tried to make the world love me.

Because despite the impression I may have given off, my childhood was not all bad. I have fond memories of being the center of attention wherever I went because I was this super bright, charismatic adorable, precocious freckle faced kid straight out of Central Casting who effortlessly charmed and bemused adults wherever he went.

But that changed. I was the Christmas puppy, fun while I was still small and cute, but they everybody got tired of me when I wasn’t as cute any more, and stuck me in the back yard and forgot all about me except for very begrudgingly giving me the absolute minimum amount of care they could legally get away with.

And I felt the chill of their withdrawal of affection, and I think I have spend the rest of my life trying to get it back.

Trying to figure out what I did wrong to make them not love me any more, and to do whatever I can to get any kind of positive attention at all. And to that end, I had to be the perfect little doggie, well behaved, completely undemanding, cheerfully obedient, low maintenance, and ready to try to make them laugh with silly tricks at a moment’s notice.

And this was all just to make the most of the moments they reluctantly spared me. I was powerless to seek the attention I craved so badly. That would risk “bothering” people and making them upset with me and that would be horrible.

Because when you are desperate to please, the worst possible thing you can imagine is to displease anybody.

So I stayed the perfect passive puppy, helplessly waiting for someone to notice me and maybe give me a pat or a scritch or even just a goddamned smile.

It almost never happened, but hope springs eternal.

What made things change on me, the version of you in my head helpfully asks?

Well I got older and less cute.

And my Mom went back to work.

And I was raped.

Yeah, I can just bet I was a lot less “fun” after the rape sent me fleeing deep into my own mind and I became far more fragile and withdrawn.

So right when I needed them the most, my family abandoned me.

In their defense, they didn’t know. Nobody knew besides me and my rapist. And he probably forgot all about it.

Just another fun day at the Spa. If I raped a toddler, it must be Tuesday.

As for me, I functionally forgot all about it until I was an adult. What else could I do? There was no way I could live and function with a trauma that huge in my mind.

So I “forgot”: all about it. I misfiled the memory. The effecvts of it continued to devastate me and reduce me to a trembling shadow of the happy little charmer I used to be.

And nobody in my life, not even my babysitter Betty, ever wondered what the fuck happened to me.

And to this day, my response to the world is to try to charm it. That’s why I am so funny and charming and interesting and fascinating.

Because I am desperate to get you to love me, and keep you paying attention to me.

And that’s the nutmeat of why this topic is so hard for me to talk about : because I am terrified to find out I am not “really” the sweet wonderful guy I think I am.

I don’t think that is actually possible. I am what I am, however I got that way. But I cannot help but wonder : what would I be like if I was completely sure that people loved and valued and appreciated me?

And that shit is going to keep me up at night.

More after the break.

I had to make that image. I’m sorry.

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The stuff up there

I’m sorry, but I have to add more to the sad fox pic.

He smiles and wags and really turns on the cuteness any time anybody so much as glances in his direction. With all his little heart, he does his absolute best to beam nothing but the purest, warmest, friendliest, most lovable and adorable emotions to anybody he can see.

Surely this has to work eventually. Surely one day, someone will realize what a delightful little creature he is, and maybe even see how lonely and sad he is, and want to come into the backyard that is Fruvous’ whole world and rescue him.

But it never happens. Nobody even comes close.

By far, his happiest times are those brief moments when one of the family, usually the youngest child, begrudgingly and with great protestations comes out to refill his food bowl and break up the ice in his water bowl.

Oh, how he dances around them with joy. Oh, how he longs to bark and yap to express the exuberant emotions surging in his little heart because finally, he is not alone.

He is far too happy to notice how the child refuses to so much as look at him. How the child avoids eye contact, and how his face twists into a snarl of contempt at Fruvous for being the cause of him having to endure this indignity.

“God damned stupid dog. ” he mutters as practically throws the dry dog food into the bowl and breaks ip the ice in the water bowl with the toe of his muddy boot.

But Fruvous doesn’t notice any of this because he is so glad to be with people again. Finally, they came back Finally, he is not alone. Finally,. they love him again.

And when that back door closes in Fruvous’ face once more, as he knows it will but prays it won’t, not without letting him back Inside anyhow, Fruvous face falls, and big wet tears fall from his big foxy eyes, and he goes to his special spot where the brnnches overhead are the thickest and he flops down and quietly (so as not to get in frouble for making noise) cries himself to sleep, wonder what he did wrong this time to make them stop loving him again.

And in the morning, he will get up off the ground, and face the sun, and try to figure out ways to be an even better fox.

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Jesus Christ, why do I have to write this shit?

I guess this is how a writer cries.

I will tak to you nice people again tomorrow.

I relate to a lot of this.

While I am way too proud to ever pretend to be stupid in order to better relate to people, I can completely relate to that feeling of being “locked out” of social closeness by a force you do not understand but can clearly feel.

And feelings are the answer, for the record. The difference between you and them is that they are somewhat blindly following the emotions of their social instincts and you are far too cerebral for that.

So despite how it seems, they don’t exactly know something you don’t.

They feel something you don’t allow yourself to feel. And they follow that feeling. Your cerebral mind treats things like instincts and drives as noise and filters them out.

But as we keep discovering in astrophysics, there is no such thing as noise. There is only signal we don’t understand yet.

Now as patient readers know, I was a very weird child. And by that, I don’t just mean that other people thought I was weird.

I mean that I was not like other children in most important ways. I did not engage in imaginative play with toys, making the story up as I went. I never had an imaginary friend. I never had a stuffed animal or blanket I carried with me everywhere and treated, in some ways, like it was alive.

I didn’t see the point of toys. After all, they didn’t DO anything. In a world that had TV, video games, and cats to play with, toys could not compete.

The imaginary friend thing was never going to happen. I was too clever and logical for that. I couldn’t have an imaginary friend because I knew they weren’t there.

Same goes for stuffed animals. I knew they weren’t alive. So what was the point? I had real cats to pet and play with.

Most of what the other kids did seemed pointless to me. Running around, playing in the sandbox, climbing the monkey bars, playing rough games.

I wanted to know why I would do such a thing.

They didn’t need to know. They did them because they seemed like fun and/or because other kids were doing them and they enjoyed them so they kept doing them.

They were following instincts that my mind treated as noise.

And once more, I am suffused with the feeling of a deep and terrible wrongness about my childhood. I look back on the cold and lonely boy I was and I can feel the gap between him and the other kids very keenly and it sounds, in my mind, like a jangling, discordant alarm bell indicating that something is very, very wrong here.

And it feels very, VERY cold.

It’s a feeling I need to work my way through, I think. It’s a summation of a million different instances of feeling alienated as a child, and I feel that if I can bring the feeling up and stay with it long enough, I can thaw out that part of my frostbitten psyche and maybe even come out the other side of it a saner, more whole, healthier man.

Or at the very least, a warmer one.

More after the break.

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The slow thaw

I wish global warming would hurry up and melt MY permafrost.

Just kidding folks. We’re all going to die.

The more I think about my idea that my recovery so far has actually been a long con by my depression, a delaying tactic designed to feed me just enough of a feeling of progress to keep me from doing anything more drastic while, realistically speaking, not threatening my depression’s supremacy at all because at this rate, I would be lucky to make significant progress against it three weeks after I die.

So clearly, this war needs to accelerate. To hell and back with all these petty skirmishes. Fuck this slow attrition. It’s time to launch an all-fronts offensive with one goal in mind : unseat the enemy for the purposes of regime change.

Now if only I knew what that meant.

In practical terms, I mean. Actions. Obviously I know what the words mean.

Once more, I am faced with the illusion that is the Infinite Corridor of Infinite Doors, wherein my depression tries to convince me that there are far too many possibilities for action for me to ever be able to choose among them.

But I am on to that con. Sure, if I had to calculate which option is the “right” (read : safe and pleasant) one, that would be impossible.

But I don’t have to do that. I just have to pick something that seems fun and/or interesting and/or meaningful to do, and try it.

Because in the end, it doesn’t matter what the “right” path is. All that matters is finding something that might improve my daily life.

And finding some kind of hobby or job or the like should do just that.

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I’m kind between games right now.

I have games. I have the aforementioned Final Fantasy XIV Online, which I impulsively bought for $25 and can’t return.

And so far it’s pretty…. meh. The setting is colorful and fun, and the systems seem very well thought out, and it runs like a dream on my PC.

But meh. Nothing about it makes me want to play it. The basic truth of MMORPGs is that they are mostly endless grind with tiny bits of plot to try to make it seem less grindy.

It does not work.

But the thing is, it worked for me with the two MMORPGs I played to death, Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76. So I am left wondering what they had that FFXIV Online seems to lack.

Better writing, I suppose. Writing that made me excited to grind through the enemies in order to see what happens next.

And a much better grind-to-story ratio. FFXIV has a lot of “go kill 8 of these and 8 of those” and not nearly enough “bring the sacred bones to the Shadow King so that he may read your destiny!”.

The same goes for another MMORPG I have, Genshin Impact. I got it because it is massively popular and I figured I would see what the fuss was about.

But yawn. It’s aggressively anime, which means little to me, and there seems to be some decent worldbuilding going on, but ultimately, meh.

I guess after a top notch game like Baldur’s Gate 3, and before it another excellent game called Kingmaker : Wrath of the Righteous, my standards are set very high.

Maybe I will reinstall one of those.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.