The calendar always gets it wrong by a bit.
Tonight’s going to be the longest night.
At least for those of us who will be spending it alone.
Yes, while everybody and their best friend’s other dog are getting together with their friends and families and that weird guy from work, we the lonely will be sitting at home all by ourselves and trying hard to keep our hearts from breaking.
Or at least, hold the pieces together.
Yes, it’s Xmas Eve, and as usual, my friends are all off spending it with their families while my family is an entire continent away. The closest relative that I know of is my Uncle Jim, and he’s both Muslim and in Toronto.
Plus I barely know him.
As for members of my immediate family, it used to be that I could claim my sister Catherine as the geographically closest sibling.
But that’s when she lived near the western border of Quebec. But now she is living her best life as a high flying government official in Washington, DC, and that’s at least a bit further east than Manalapan, New Jersey, where my sister Anne lives, so Anne is now the closest to me in terms of physical distance.
In term of emotional distance, they’re all dead last.
That’s not entirely their fault, however. I am as capable of reaching out to say hello as they are, at least from their point of view.
From my point of view, well. social anxiety is a bear and mine makes it very hard to reach out to anyone for any reason ever.
I try but then this withering frost hits me and I shrivel up inside like a dead tree in winter and the feeling that nobody wants to hear from me and will resent my even reminding them that I’m alive overwhelms me and I crumble.
After all, as far as I know, they are getting along fine without me. They certainly don’t seem to me pining for my presence otherwise they would contact ME.
But an alarm just went off in my head warning me that now is not a good time to be entertaining such bitterly self-pitying and maudlin thoughts.
To stay safe, I need to stop those chains of thought before they can tighten their grip on me and choke all sense of reason and reality out of me.
As long as I tread carefully around emotional landmines – and there’s a lot of them right now – and keep reminding myself that everything will go back to normal on Monday so I just have to make it through the night, so to speak, I will be fine.
Besides, it would be absurd to die just because I feel sad. Especially when there is a very non fatal way to deal with it : cry.
Yes, cry. We men suffer greatly from our cultural programming against crying.
Well I am not going to keep doing it. I am going to finish this half of my blogging then lie down, turn the lights out, and do my best to have a damned good cry.
Wish me luck.
More after the break.
No more tears
Well, I didn’t end up crying.
In fact, my depression did me dirty by making me forget all about my intention to cry by making me very sleepy instead.
And being the invalid that I am, I rarely have a reason not to go to sleep when I feel sleepy, and having no caffeine in my system to help ward off a big nap attack, I have lost most of my ability and motivation to resist sleep.
But now that sleep, like everything else, is an agent in my depression’s deviltries, I have to be suspicious of my sleepiness too.
But what I really want to talk about tonight is my long history of passivity.
I mean, I’m never intentionally passive. It just kind of happens.
I swear that will be a joke when it grows up.
Anyhow, extreme passivity. Previously, I have described it as being caused by my equally extreme reluctance to leave the cozy and disgusting nest deep in here where I first withdrew from life while being raped.
That’s also the Trog’s cave. The place he never wants to leave and squeals like an anally violated pig if anything, no matter how good, tries to take us out of there.
As far as it is concerned, the outside world is worse than utter annihilation. It’s that unnamable menace, the Worst Possible Thing, that which is so horrible that nothing specific you can conceive of can possibly encompass it.
And that all comes from that extreme withdrawal from the world. That is what causes the Inward Tide in me that crushes everything like heavy gravity and is always pulling me down, down, down.
It’s a very powerful force that underlies my entire psyche. In fact, I get the feeling that force is the engine behind the entire demonic shitshow that is my depression.
So to change that, I would have to reach down to that fundamental sense of safety that got shattered when I was raped, and somehow convince it that extracranial reality is not necessarily a bad thing and that time voluntarily spend outside of my head might actually be pleasant and pleasing instead of like being naked at midnight in the tundra.
Hmm. That sounds familiar.
That would involve changing a very very deep setting in my emotional BIOS. Not the sort of thing one can reason oneself into.
Not without their being a hell of a lot of emotional work going on too.
But I can start here : I’m not afraid any more.
The real world is not a scary, harsh, and hostile place I need to avoid as much as possible to minimize exposure.
I am perfectly capable of leaving this fetid nest of mine, walking straight out of this cave, and handling myself in the fresh air and sunshine.
I am not a trembling hothouse flower doomed to cling to whatever gardener I can find who will protect me from the real world.
I can do this. I can go out into the world and cope. I can fuck up, learn, and move on. I can finally develop as a person.
I can be a true blue bonafide grownup.
It won’t even be that hard.
Look out world, I’m comin’ for ya!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.