I have to link this here for reference purposes, but for God’s sake, do not watch it.

In fact, I considered talking about it without linking it at all, but that felt wrong too.

I won’t recap the plot. That would defeat the point of warning you off it. All I can say is that it involves a hunter and a wolf and her dead cub and it is incredibly, heartbreakingly, almost sadistically sad.

And I truly wish I had never seen it.

Because I can’t handle things where bad things happen to animals. I am way too sensitive and far too much of an animal lover for that. Things involving animals go straight to my big soft heart, and so, like I said in my comment, I really could have used a trigger warning to warn me off that fucking thing.

And to top it all off, it happened in animation, which also has direct access to my feels.

And to make this crystal clear : I hate the people who made that goddamned thing right now. Part of me is still rational enough to note that those people did nothing wrong, they just helped express the animator’s vision like with any other piece of art.

Hell, I will even admit that I have written things almost as sad as that. And my intention wasn’t to make anyone suffer.

It was to get the sadness out of me and on to the page. Hence the recent Fruvous stuff.

But right now, I don’t care. I hate Toniko Pantoja and everyone else who made that fucking animation. I am sitting here all busted up inside writing with tears in my eyes because those people made that thing and I was unlucky enough to click on it.

I am even kind of mad at YouTube for putting that shit in my feed.

And I know that I won’t always feel this way. There’s even a fairly good chance that once my sadness fades, I will declare it a masterpiece, like I did with Grave of the Fireflies (don’t watch that either, things only get worse and worse for the children).

But right now, I loathe it. Why did you put all that in my head, Toniko? I didn’t need this. I didn’t want to be blindsided by all this heartbreak. I didn’t need to be filled with rage and grief over a mother wolf who doesn’t even exist.

Like I have said many times before, being sensitive isn’t for wimps. More callous people have no idea how someone like me suffers.

A drop of poison is harmless by itself, but add it to a body of water…. a glass of wine, or someone’s bloodstream, or my deep well of a soul… and it can poison the whole thing.

Still, I would never want to be less sensitive. The depth to which I feel things and the insight that it brings are very dear to me, and a vital part of who I am.

And I have seen what a harder, more callous, less merciful me would look like.

And it’s not a pretty picture.

More after the break.

Drowning in the dark

Going through a wave of depression right now. I guess that goddamned wolf video knocked some stuff loose and now I have to deal with it.

And that’s a very good thing in the long run. There are worse things in the world than being sad and depressed.

Like being numb, for instance.

At least when I feel bad, I feel alive.

But whatever. Like I always say, I don’t let being depressed get me down any more. This too shall pass. It’s just the weather.

In fact, when I was lying in bed after blogging this afternoon, I deliberately sought out the pain I was feeling and leaned on it, exhorting myself to FEEL IT! FEEEEEL IT!

I couldn’t keep that up for very long. But it’s a good, healthy start towards breaking he habit of pulling back from negative emotions and burying them in favor of leaning in and feeling all I can of it in order to get it over with as quickly as possible.

I am finally hooking my genuine desire to feel things so I can feel alive with the actual circumstances under which I usually hide in numbness and illusion.

Bring the pain. I want to feel it. I hunger for real emotion like a starving man, and like a starving man I am not picky about what it is I eat.

So pain, sadness, depression, rage, darkness, and whatever else I got lying around is all equally good fodder for countering the forces of numbness and nullity inside me.

I don’t want to live like a specimen on ice any more. I want to be really here, and to feel like my world is really here too.

I just need the courage to walk through doors I know may slam shut forever behind me.

The courage to commit, basically. To make a choice and live with it, no backsies. To go forward when you know there is no possibility of retreat.

That’s a very hard thing for an Avoidant Personality Syndrome to do. We’re a timid, fitful bunch deeply entrenched in a “run and hide” (or flee and freeze) strategy that makes its opposite, “stay and fight”, seem utterly unthinkable.

Impossible, even. That can’t be done. That’s not even an option!

Of course it is. Unthinkable and impossible are radically different things.

And lord knows, I have a very combative side to my personality. A part of me that wants to struggle and fight and get hit and hit back and use my strength without restraint.

So if I can just learn to think of my depression as the worthy opponent I have always ought, maybe I can focus more of my energies on destroying it.

After all, I would never let someone I love be treated the way I treat myself.

I just need to learn to love myself.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.