WARNING Before you read the following, know that I am FINE and in no danger of self-harm, I just had some difficult emotions to parse and for some reason did it in rhyme.
But I am FINE. Got it?
OK, you may now read the following.
Sometimes the shame’s so bad that there’s nothing I want more
Than to hide my shame away and slip out life’s back door
To finally escape all the nothing from before
And escape this absurd tragedy and hide in the nevermore
For it to finally be over, not another day to live
To never have to cope again, no trauma to outlive
To run away from everything, no more sins to forgive
And for once, stop being so goddamned passive
But like everybody says
Tomorrow is another day
And there will still be games to play
And I will still have things to say
And the world will still turn anyway
So I guess I’ll stay
I guess I do have suicidal ideation now and then. In passing.
And now that I am working hard to open myself up emotionally and feel all that there is for me to feel, I am going to be dealing directly with a lot of those emotions that lead me down that path and thus I will be, like I have said before, dancing ever closer to the fire because that’s the only way I can become pure.
Well, OK, I’ve never said it that way before. Must still be in poetry mode.
What I am saying is that I will have to get closer to being crazy before I can become sane. I have to stop being so damned numb and that means a hell of a lot of stored emotion is going to thaw out and drop into my consciousness like a tab of acid in a glass of water and that means I will have to deal with them.
By feeling them. Not just suppressing them all over again.
Because like I told Doctor Costin last week, the only way to get rid of emotions is to feel them. That is their only way out. You can’t just delete them like they are files on your computer. It’s either feel them or carry them around forever.
And when you have been suppressing damned near everything except for a tiny little window of feeling that doesn’t disrupt your sad little life too much, like I have, that means you have a massive backlog of every damned emotion to work through.
Luckily, I don’t have to do it in realtime. Otherwise it would take me 47 years to get through it all.
And I ain’t gonna live that long.
Fat men don’t make it to their 90s.
I’ll be lucky if I make it to my 60s.
But it is still going to be some pretty rough fucking going. I have a lot of rage and bitterness and sadness and grief and shame and guilt to work through, although with myriad other emotions, and the only way I am going to make it out alive is if I learn to leave my over-rational ego and punitive superego behind and spend a lot of time just feeling things and listening to all the things my id has been trying to tell me all these years but I was too ignorant and distracted to listen.
I won’t be able to do it all at once and it won’t be easy or fun. But I yearn for emotional emesis and I will do whatever it takes to make myself clean and whole again.
Even if it means feeling the really bad stuff again.
The road out is the road in. So expect to see the same things, only in reverse.
More after the break.
What my depression does
I think it expresses how I feel inside.
At least, that’s how it seems to me right now. When I try to imagine my depression not being there, I get this feeling like something vital inside me is not being heard and that thing is angrily turning the depression back on again.
And there’s a clue there. Anger. I think a lot of what the depression expresses is anger. A deep and terrible anger about all the pain I have suffered in my life and all the ways in which I was treated badly and all the ways I was too weak to help myself.
Mostly due to being too deeply withdrawn into myself to engage with reality. You can’t stick up for yourself when you are crouching behind your invisible wall.
Wall? What wall? How could there be a wall? You can see me right here! *waves!*
Anger at myself for being such a wimp and a loser and a coward. Anger at the world for leaving me in such a wounded and vulnerable state. Anger at all the people who could not handle me as a child.
Anger at all the people who can’t handle me now, either.
Oh, they can handle my carefully curated persona. Good old friendly fluffy Fruvous, harmless and brilliant and funny and silly and sweet. Why, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Not even if the fly really had it coming.
And yet pop culture tells me I should just relax and “be myself”. Ha ha ha. If I did that, I would make Mister Hyde look like Mister Rogers.
I mean, I dunno. Maybe I would settle down eventually, once I got all that rage out of my system. Maybe I could “be myself” then.
Assuming I hadn’t gotten gunned down by the cops yet.
More seriously, it would still be a bad thing. I think the only way it could work is if I moved someplace where nobody knew me and figured myself out there.
YOu know, the sort of things you’re supposed to figure out in high school and college. Who you are, what you like, what’s your personal style, how you can get along with others, what’s your love language.
Mine is Esperanto. Which explains a lot.
I don’t speak Esperanto.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.