Woke up with a terrible feeling of anxiety and dread.
Like there was a shadow of fear laying across my very soul. Like a specter is crawling over my future grave. Like a thousand tiny demons are using my spine as a staircase.
It’s kind of interesting, actually. Spooky. But interesting.
I suppose that’s intellectualization at work, using my amazing mind powers to flash freeze fear into fascination.
It’s probably the root cause of a hell of a lot of my problems, but I must admit, it works.
Then again, all the deadliest maladaptive coping mechanisms do. That is what makes them addictive. They do solve the problem. They just extract too high a price, leaving you worse off in the long run.
Recovery, therefore, requires learning better ones. Ones that get the job done without fucking over your best interests.
However that strikes me as the sort of task that is easy to conceive but nearly impossible to achieve via direct action.
It requires the very kind of deep emotional work that I don’t know how to do and thus must keep doing via the awkward and indirect route of writing about it every day.
And I find that fascinating.
The other side of the wall
This is gonna hurt. But it has to be done.
As patient readers know, when I was violated by a stranger’s cock as a toddler, a very thick wall went up between me and the world.
It was made of transparent ice so as to be invisible. After all, the best first defense is to seem undefended and therefore not a threat to anyone.
And to be brutally honest, you’re always safest when nobody notices you.
So yeah. A lot of people’s ignoring and neglecting me was the fault of my own personal cloaking field. Without knowing it, I worked hard to be invisible.
And while it cannot be denied that people “should” have been able to see through all that and cared for me anyhow – and trust me, I am not letting people off the hook for that – the truth is that people can only do so much, realistically speaking.
So they can’t take all the blame and neither can I.
But the wound I can’t stop picking at is the question of how much of my childhood loneliness was the result of being alone and how much was the result of that god damned wall keeping people out.
I know people tried to get close to me but my bizarre invisible defense systems shot them down pretty fast.
No overt rejection, of course. That would be too overt and aggressive and require actually valuing myself enough to defend myself.
Better to just block their attempts at connection in subtle ways that really fuck with their heads while still appearing to be friendly and receptive.
I’ve fucked over a lot of people like that, but in my defense, I didn’t know I was doing it.
Still, I feel bad for those people. They were trying to be nice and open the door for me.
Instead they got a cold wind from a strange place.
And the worst part is, I doubt I could do any better now.
Thank goodness I somehow wound up with friends anyhow.
More after the break.
Speech for an old man
Imagine your favorite crusty old grump (who swears a lot) delivering this :
“You’re sick of it? Well I’ll tell you what I’m pretty frickin’ sick of….
“I’m sick of politicians who talk me like I’m some kind of spongeheaded shit for brains who doesn’t know shit about shit.
God gave me a damned good brain and I use it all the time. If that doesn’t suit you, then you can go straight to hell with no return ticket, because I don’t care.
I’m sick of TV stars feeding me bullshit and telling it’s pumpkin frickin’ pie. Like I am too dumb to know the goddamned difference. Like being old means I forgot how to think.
Well listen up, you media megastars : I don’t care how much you got in the bank. I don’t care how many of your bullshit books you’ve sold. And I don’t care how many other morons you’ve conned into following you. Bullshit is bullshit and I am going to call it whenever I see it and I don’t give a shit if that hurts your precious feelings.
Man up and grow a pair or you’ll get sent back to the kiddie table where you belong.
I’m sick of people telling me something is wrong when one side does it but perfectly fine if the other side does it.
I was raised to believe that some things are just plain wrong no matter who does it or color T-shirt they wore to the convention. I’ve had it up to HERE with this moral relativist bullcrap and think it high time people like me rose up and fought for decency, morality. and moral goddamned standards.
And finally, I am really sick of seeing just the worst dregs of humanity, people of such low character they have to take their shoes off to brush their hair, getting ahead in politics because they say the right thing…. even those a common fool can tell they don’t even mean them.
Call me old fashioned but I still think that character counts. That whether or not someone is a good person or not makes a big difference in whether or not someone deserves to lead so much as a kindergarten parade. That you shouldn’t trust someone with political office if you wouldn’t even trust them to feed your goldfish.
People like me are fed up with all this horseshit and we are ready to strike back. We are going to spread out over the nation and show up at every political rally and other even ready to call foul on every bullshit statement and moronic promise this jackasses make until they finally learn that we are NOT idiots and we’re not going to take it any more!”
And the crowd goes wild.
I Will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.