Haven’t talked about my smooth façade lately. So let’s do it.
What sparked this was a YouTube comment I left recently where, in my usual rambling (but entertaining) manner, I stumbled into talking about how I have all these problems and life has totally passed me by because of them, and yet, I never let my illness show when I am around others.
Around other people, I snap on my smooth façade , and for the most part, I seem calm, relaxed, confident, friendly, and affable.
And that makes sense around strangers. They don’t need to know how fucked up on the inside I am. But I am this way around my close friends too.
And they know better than anyone else in this dimension how weak and confused and hapless I am. So it’s not like I have them fooled.
Now as I always need to say when I discuss this topic, I am not just pretending to be a calmer and more put together version of myself, I actually feel that way.
I guess I got traumatized at too early an age for me to have developed a true “mask” so I learned to actually change who I am instead.
I’m so…. metamorphic.
It’s far from bulletproof. For example, it didn’t keep me from having a low grade panic attack (sometimes amping all the way up to full blown freakout) for the entire time I was in Kwantlen and VFS.
But it’s still there. I am sure I didn’t seem like I was freaking out when I was at those schools, although I imagine the more empathic people figured it out.
The question, as always, is why this façade exists and why I can’t imagine actually letting it drop and being “the real me” around other people at all.
I guess we all have a social mask we use to protect ourselves when dealing with others. It’s a basic part of being human. No reason I would be any different, I suppose.
Even though I often am.
Where the bullet really hit the bone is with my therapist, Doctor Costin. He is the one person in the world I should be able to drop the façade with and yet, I can only manage to partially disable it even with him.
The “real me” is that frightened critter crouching behind my invisible wall and he works very hard to make sure nobody ever sees him and how truly awful he is.
Well, how awful he thinks that he is, anyhow.
But that’s not the full picture of the “real me” at all. Not by a longshot. There is also that tremendous sea of untapped anger in me that just wants to scream bloody murder at the world for all the pain I have inside me.
And that’s another thing I don’t want to show the world, even though it would do me a hell of a lot of good to vent it all.
TO be honest, I’m afraid of what I might do if I let that monster out of its cage. I know that it’s my fault that it’s grown so huge and psychotic and powerful – I am the one who has suppressed nearly all of my anger all these years even though I arguably had a lot to be angry about.
But I feel like if I give in to that anger, I will lose my god damned mind. And I might not ever get it back.
Maybe that’s just an illusion that my depression uses to scare me aware from things that might threaten its control over me, but even so, I still have ot deal with it.
It would be nice if I could tap into that rage and turn it into the motivation to get my big fat butt out of this big fat rut and make some god damned changes in my life.
I’m working on it.
More after the break.
I freaking love absolutely everything about this.
I love the music, the art style, the voice acting, the script, the fact that it’s cyber-noir, and even more than that, it’s furry!
I want more!
I hate time
Sort of. It’s complicated.
I’ve fallen back into the habit of feeling this stab of panic and shame every time I realize how much time has passed without me doing anything productive.
This is clearly one of the ways my depression beats up on me. It would be one thing if that feeling goaded me into frantic action like I was my go-getter of a sister Catherine.
But I ain’t like that. The goading just makes me retreat into myself even further, and I supposed in the end, that’s the point.
My depression’s real agenda is to keep me “safe” by keeping me in this tiny little coffin of a life, far away from the cold hard world that deep down I am sure I can’t handle.
Dunno why I feel that way. Taken at face value, there is nothing about an average “normal” life that I can’t do. I could work a job, pay bills, do dishes and laundry (or hire someone to do them), pay my rent on time, the works.
And yet, when I imagine going out to face that big old world out there, I shrivel up inside with existential terror and I can’t go forward at all.
Leaving me stuck where I am. Which is, again, the point.
At some point in my recovery, I am going to have to make a (metaphorical blood sacrifice. I am going to have to give up a little part of myself and I am going to have to do it willingly and deliberately even though I know it will really, really hurt.
Above all, I am going to have to walk through the fires of my fears and show them that they cannot keep me penned in any more.
I’m working on it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.