I am still wrestling with the question of my emotional self.
Because it’s not like I am a cold fish.
Not all the time, anyhow.
I am a warm, empathic, caring, friendly guy, more or less. I have no problem expressing my emotions when appropriate.
Well, that’s not true.
That’s how I like to think of myself, and it’s true enough but only up to a point. Past that point I am somewhere between “cold” and “just plain not there”, emotionally speaking.
But this isn’t about how I come across. It’s about how I relate to myself.
At the moment, I feel like my brain has bullied me for my whole life. I was “blessed” with such a powerful mind that it easily overwhelmed my far weaker emotional self and basically took over and shoved my emotional self into the back corner of my mind.
And I let it because I didn’t know any better. Like I said yesterday, resisting it never occurred to me.
After all, for all its flaws, it was at least a form of power I actually had, and it’s not like I had shit else going for me.
And so my world became very narrowly confined while seeming like I had the whole universe open to my incredible brain.
Then there was the documentary I did about the Jonestown massacre. It wasn’t very popular at first, but now it’s become a real cult classic.
After all, I can “see” so much. I “understand” so much. Things which are the sort of impenetrable mysteries that beggar people’s souls and define entire lives as people struggle to comprehend them are intuitively obvious to me. I understand more of how the world works than most college professors with PhDs. Even the supposed great minds of history seem so tiny and limited to me.
And that’s great and all.
Unless you want to actually do something.
Because then you have to stop looking and start doing, and that takes motivation. And motivation is an emotion, and therefore must involve more than just “seeing”.
And all my motivation is locked up in a tiny cage of fear. It’s this deep and terrible terror that freezes my motivation like an arctic blast whenever I try to escape that cage.
Something inside me is convinced that if I escape my microscopic comfort zone, something unimaginably horrible will happen, and so it freezes me out in order to “protect” me from that fate.
I can’t tell you what that horrible thing is.
Because it’s unimaginable.
But I have a guess or two. Maybe I am afraid of growing up. Maybe actually leaving this larval state will require me exceeding myself and that is always very scary if we have a fixed view of ourselves.
For every butterfly born a caterpillar dies, and all that.
I am the thing that can become the thing that I want to be.
Repeat until believed.
Time to surrender all form so that I might be born anew.
And this time, I mean it.
More after the break.
This thing I’m doing
As in, this thing I am doing right now, by typing these words.
Blogging. Journaling. Mental masturbation with an audience. Call it whatever you like.
But I still want to know what, exactly, I am accomplishing by doing it.
Besides the obvious things, like expressing myself, giving myself something purposeful (ish) to do every day, practicing my awesome writing skills, and that kind of thing.
What am I accomplishing psychologically? How does this aid my recovery? Is this getting me anywhere?
It feels like it is. The mere act of getting thoughts out of my head and into the world helps me a lot because it reduces the pressure of thoughts in my head, and thus turns down the cacophony a tad.
And that helps a lot. But that’s just symptom relief. Welcome, for sure. but it does not contribute to my long term mental health.
But I also feel this blogging thing does help with my recovery as well. As I write these words, I am essentially acting as my own therapist as I express my emotions and my problems and my illness through words.
This works because I feel safe with words. Words have been my friend for my entire life. Expressing myself on the page like this is probably the only true outlet for my emotions because it bypasses all my social damage and lets me express myself at my own pace, without fear of interruption, with nobody to dismiss my concerns or treat them like a personal attack or any of that destructive crap.
Lack of interruption alone makes it better than my therapy with Doctor Costin.
He knows I don’t like it but apparently he just can’t help himself. Just sitting quietly and listening as I ramble is beyond him, I guess.
Not that I’m bitter.
Anyhoo, my point is that this does accomplish something other than pressure relief. It helps me sort through my thoughts and dig deep into my psyche as the emotions I express cause others to pop up in their place.
And who knows what will top the stack next?
So this blogging definitely helps me in the long term.
But it does so very, very slowly.
Really, it almost seems like therapy in slow motion sometimes. Sure, I express my emotions here, but only a tiny bit at a time.
I guess that’s so I don’t feel like the whole reservoir is going to come splurting out at once in a torrential flood, destroying all that I am entirely.
Though honestly, that would probably do me a lot of good in the long run.
Forget “tear down the wall”. Blow up the dam! Loose the waters! Free us from having to spend so much of ourselves on holding back the flood! FLOOD THAT FUCKER.
Ah, if only it were that easy. Just say the magic words, and boom. Beneficial emotional crisis instigated. Time for the reckoning.
But who knows. Maybe I will get to the point where I am ready to unleash the flood some sunny day.
Or maybe I will get good enough at expressing myself that it won’t be necessary.
Or maybe I’ll just die.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.