Guess I need to chew on this bone some more.
This version of myself that I present to the world – my social self, which I have taken to calling my “smooth façade” – is not phony and it’s not an act, but… it’s not the “real me”.
The “real me” would be whoever I am without the smooth façade concealing me. . I have absolutely no idea who that is because the façade has been in place almost seamlessly for as long as I can remember.
I suppose the person I am in those rare moments when I am not consuming or producing media would be a good place to start.
But I work hard to make sure I never have to be that person for very long.
Which, as we discussed yesterday, is a big problem. I should not be afraid to be who I really am but one of the major symptoms of Avoidant Personality Syndrome is the feeling that deep down you are something nightmarishly horrible and ugly and toxic and disgusting, and I am still in the process of getting over that.
Still, it might be useful to contemplate a little social nudity now and then. To at least try to imagine what it would be like to stop “masking” and “be real”.
Whatever the hell THAT means.
That’s the thing. I am such a cipher unto myself that it’s hard to even contemplate being the “real me” because I have no idea who the fuck that is.
I have done a remarkably good job of hiding from myself all these years.
I suppose when you hate yourself as much as I used to, you don’t really have a choice. You hide from yourself or you destroy yourself.
I so totally internalized my bullying and neglect. Sigh.
But it’s not like I don’t have clues to who the “real me” might be. One of the things that makes my smooth facade so smooth is that none of its components are false at all.
Like I have said many times before, it’s all the “real me”. Everything you see in that picture is 100 percent myself.
It’s just not the full picture. You don’t get to see the full picture. Nobody does.
Especially not me.
To be honest, I have so many facets and modes that I can’t possibly fit them into one picture. It’s like trying to capture all of the Grand Canyon in one snapshot.
I can’t even imagine being forced to be just one person. How confining!
The most important thing for me to remember is that there IS a real me. Someone is wearing that mask, and it’s the same person who made it, fitted it, adjusted it, and adds to it every single day.
I am the ringmaster of this whole sideshow of sadness, and every thing that happens needed my signature on it to make it legit.
I may not know who I really am… but I know that I really am somebody.
Let’s try to figure out who.
More after the break.
A little bit worse
My health’s crappiness level has been trending upwards lately, and it has me worried.
I am dizzy when I get up more often, and usually that comes with a sinus headache (or what feels like one) centered smack dab in the middle of my forehead, right where my mystical “third eye” wpuld be if I were Hindu.
Not that I could ever be a Hindu. Cows are too damned tasty.
This headache is accompanied by dizziness and nausea and an all too familiar feeling like I am, despite all appearances, actually in the back of a flatbed truck going 80 miles an hour on a well paved highway.
I get the feeling I am still not keeping up with the hydration demands of my body. I need to get back into the habit of always having a glass of water on the go and taking a few hearty gulps from it periodically.
But it’s more than that. I think the sickness in my skin is getting worse too.
I’ve been through this hundreds of times in my life. The clogging of my pores gets worse and worse and I get sicker and sicker till the fever finally breaks, my sweat dislodges the clogs, I start sweating normally, and suddenly I feel a WHOLE lot better.
The feeling of relief can be quite intense, leaving me downright giddy.
Which is fine when I am home and can jut lay down until things stabilize, but can be kinda scary in a manic kind of way if you’re, say, at an outdoor event like Pride.
That was a nasty incident. Pride already tests my psychological defenses by being so crowded and loud and chaotic.
Crowds don’t bother me at all because nobody notices you in a crowd. You’re just one of the hundreds of faces they will see and intantly forget.
But crowdING triggers my claustrophobia pretty bad.
Now where was I?
My skin is sick. Right.
I really need to solve the shower/bath issue. There has to be a safe way for me to get truly clean. I just have to call upon my clever foxy mind to find it.
There’s no way around it. I have to somehow reconnect with the government agency responsible for getting us cripples the equipment we need.
Which would require buckets and buckets of the exact kind of gumption and initiative I lack. Of course.
So I am not going to rule that out yet. I might get inspired to at least get the process started one lazy afternoon.
But alternative solutions that did not challenge my mental health issues quite so much.
What I really need is some sort of advocate or agent or social worker who can hold my metaphorical hand and help me navigate the system.
But do such angelic persons even exist? Maybe.
A long, long time ago, I dealt with a disability advocacy group in downtown Vancouver near the MEC and they helped me get on disability.
Don’t remember what they were called but perhaps they or something like them are still around for those of us whose disabilities include being terminally timid and shy.
Once more, the prospect of developing a really huge ego occurs to me.
But that seems like an awful lot of work.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.