…I did not, in fact, burn to death in a raging inferno.

I know, I know… I’m as surprised as you are.

The alarm stopped shortly before I stopped blogging, leaving the second half of last night’s blogging as mute (but eloquent) testimony to my personal ordeal.

In a way, it was good that I was blogging when it all went down, because it allowed me to work through my feelings and my panic in realtime and ultimately led me to realize that I could probably handle the situation by myself if I needed to.

And that’s good to know. One less thing to be paranoid about.

One down, eleventy billion to go.

I think that I am a lot more capable than I give myself credit for and that I have an awful lot of learned helplessness to work through if I am going to make it to emotional adulthood before I make it to my no doubt premature grave.

I’ve been thinking a lot about coldness and ice and such as pertaining to my internal landscape. No surprise there. I have had a very cold and lonely life, especially in my childhood, and that has left me frozen solid inside.

But every day, I thaw out a little bit more.

It’s all the fault of that goddamned overactive parasympathetic nervous system of mine. All that coldness is really my body hyper-over-responding to the “threat” of my own anxiety and fear by spraying everything with liquid fucking hydrogen in order to “keep me calm” instead.

That where the “wall of fear” comes from. My entire fear of reality^[1], in fact. When my deeper instincts are trying to revive me by getting me to try to expand my world even just a little bit, it’s this overreaction that punishes me for daring to think outside my tiny little box by hosing me down with bone-chilling ice-water on the inside, thus killing any and all motion and freezing me in place.

Perhaps what I need most is to react to that by pulling my frostbitten and flash frozen self to my feet and carrying on anyhow.

Sometimes the most radical act you can do is just staying alive.

No, I’m not going to link to the song.

On a deeper level, I feel like there must be some way to keep the deep freeze from turning on in the first place. Presumably, this involves increasing my feeling of safety, which is a very complicated thing to do when your own psyche threatens and torments you on a daily basis.

I can’t stop hurting myself until I stop hurting myself. Typical stupid Catch-22. Doesn’t mean that stopping it is impossible, just that doing so will require an upgrade in consciousness that lets me see it in a bigger, higher, more complete way.

And by definition, you can’t understand a higher level of consciousness until you have it. If you already understand it, you already have it. That means that striving for a higher level of awareness is always an act of faith : faith that you will be better off as a result.

And it may well not seem that way at the beginning. Expanding one’s consciousness is not the clean and simple and rainbow candy colored experience New Age hippies make it out to be when they’re trying to sell you on their spa.

It’s a brutal, messy, difficult, and visceral experience. At least if you’re doing it right.

More after the break.

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35 not 28

I’ll keep this short because I’ve said it so many times before : it’s a five week month for me, and that, as usual, sucks.

Makes no sense to make me live for five weeks on what normally only has to last four, should be a 25 percent bump in the non-shelter part of my monthly deposit for times like this, they only get away with it because we disabled people are weak and poor, etc.

There, I got that off my chest. That should hold me till the next one.

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I’ll never tell

Been pondering why I just don’t tell people about stuff I am dealing with.

It really highlights how important this blog is to my mental health because the things I can’t seem to bring up in life can be let out here.

Bur why do I keep everything to myself otherwise?

Well there was nobody to tell anything to when I was a little kid. Nobody wanted to hear from me, not my parents, my siblings, or my teachers, and I had no friends.

And even when I did have friends, they were not exactly the kind you open up to.

So I guess I learned to keep everything in by default. What else could I do with it? There was no place for it to go.

And that just kept going when I grew up. High school had been friendless and lonely, and people wanted to hear from me even less.

Plus by then, my sisters were in college. Not that I was ever all that close to them.

In fact, I was never all that close to anybody. And it’s hard to say who’s to blame for that. My parents and siblings, I guess, for brushing me off or just plain ignoring me whenever I dared to try to reach out to them.

And even now, when I am fifty years old, I find it very hard to overcome those deep tapes that say nobody wants to know about my problems because nobody cares and trying to bring it up will just lead to a rejection that hurts far worse than loneliness and my mental health issues never will.

Opening up just lets in the cold. It certainly can’t lead to the warmth of human connection, no matter how badly I want and need that.

Nowadays, I wonder if I can open up at all. Maybe those doors have rusted shut for good. Maybe I am sealed inside for good.

But I reserve hope that for the right person, I could open wide.

But there’s a reason I process my emotions by writing about them.

Namely that writing is something I can do all alone.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.