What the hell, let’s keep going with this brand of therapeutic flagellation
The hardest thing to convince my deeper self of when it comes to this enormous shadow of shame I live under is that I do not deserve it.
Logically, I know that I don’t. Being weak and dependent on others is hardly a major crime. Feeling so bad about not being able to look after or support myself is not only unjust and unjustified, it’s wickedly self-fulfilling too.
After all, the worse I feel about myself, the less I can do. If I want to exit this death loop, I am going to have to forgive myself for being broken.
Even phrased like that, it sounds absurdly unfair. I’m not the one who broke me. I’m just the person who has made the best of a broken life. Barely holding myself together when my inner world is a warzone inside a hurricane and I have nothing but my tiny lean-to to protect me from the hellstorm outside.
And the only way all of me fits inside is if I stay all curled up into the smallest ball a big ol’ ox like me can be.
OK, consciously exiting that metaphor.
So I know, on some level, that all this shame is undeserved. But it’s been such a deep part of me for so long that it is hard for me to imagine it not being there any more.
Once more, I feel like I would need some kind of symbol, bridge, or talisman to ground me and make me feel calm and safe enough to leave the shame behind.
Something (or someone) I can believe in enough so that I don’t feel so alone and vulnerable and abandoned in the world. A hand to hold, perhaps, one attached to someone strong and positive and supportive who truly believes in me.
You can believe in me too. I’m pretty sure I’m real.
I have all this darkness and pain and feel so toxic inside that it’s very difficult to believe that I am something good. Something worthy.
Something that can can stand in the sunshine without shame.
Proud to be seen. Glad to have people’s attention. Free of the urge to run away and squeeze myself into a crack to hide like a fucking cockroach. Able to look people in the eye without being afraid of what people will see in me as a result.
I am a creature of darkness and night. Illusion and misdirection. Shame and furtiveness.
There’s a lot of light in me too, but only others can feel it. Then I can feel it as it reflects off them. It’s a strange way to get around the part of me that’s broken,.
And all the while, there’s a rotten apple at my core. A leaky reactor powers my ship. A lot of bad blood needs to be bled before I can rise up whole again.
And I’m bleeding as fast as I can.
More after the break.
Pierre Trudeau used emergency powers against the FLQ.
His son is using them against the FLQanon.
Shame, shame, double whatever
Still drilling down into this shame thing because it’s a big part of my depression and its attendant syndromes and that seems vaguely important.
I want to wipe it all away. Hit rinse on myself and wash all that poisonous self-loathing and internalized hate and jagged pieces of broken emotion off my soul and down the drain where they can never trouble me again.
But you can’t get rid of any part of you without dealing with the emotions in you that said thing is expressing.
Jot that down, it sounds important.
If you try, said thing will just keep coming back. At best, all you will do is force it to come back in a different form. But you will still be no further ahead.
Problem is, it’s very hard to distinguish between the emotions that are the cause of my depression and the ones that are the result of my depression.
I suppose in the end there is no difference. Like space and time and matter and energy, the two are so interchangeable that they are really two aspects of the same thing.
Which is true, but not very helpful, as Felicity would say.
She’s very wise. Knows a lot that I don’t, that’s for sure.
I keep wondering where I can find my solid ground to stand on. My one fixed point where I can place the fulcrum of my very long lever and move my world.
Everything is so variable and soft inside me. We all know why – I am overtly hostile to any kind of stability or order in my inner world because that freaked out little animal in me associates any form of fixity or rigidity with a loss of adaptability and therefore a risk to my safety because I might be “trapped” in the “wrong form” for a given situation.
So I feel compelled to brutally rip apart all stable elements inside me in order to maintain this state of maximum possibility.
Which makes me unsafe in a lot of other ways due to my lack of internal structure and the kind of intestinal fortitude it takes to make it in life.
Life requires permanent commitment to some version of yourself. You have to become someone specific and then invest in that persona. You can’t keep all your options open indefinitely. At some point, you have to choose.
Otherwise you will remain a helpless blob of nothing for the rest of your life. Because of your refusal to become someone in particular, you will remain nobody at all.
Time to make up my mind who I am, I guess.
Easier said that done.
I mean, I get enough option paralysis trying to decide what game to buy on Steam.
Imagine how the infinite possibilities of selfhood strike me.
Well, as always, the only solution to option paralysis is passion. So who do I feel like I am, deep down? Who do I feel compelled to be?
…….honestly, I am drawing a big ol blank here.
But I will keep thinking on it till something emerges.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.