It’s started getting dark already, and it’s only 4:12 pm.
Truly, we have entered the twilight of the year. And things will continue to darken and the night will continue to devour a little more of the day every day until the Solstice, shortly before Xmas, and maybe that’s why I am feeling morbidly depressed.
With lots of irritability and anger mixed in there too. Just like yesterday.
In fact, this is the soundtrack to my mood right now :
Two thirds dark, shadowy brooding, and one third bright and shiny rage.
I must be really going through some heavy emotional shit lately. Good. I need to do a hell of a lot of emotional heavy lifting if I am to get out from under my own avalanche.
It can be warm and cozy under ten tons of rock. Nobody can get at you there. And it’s nice and quiet and nobody expects anything of you down there.
Surely that makes a slow and tortuous death as your internal organs are pulped by the pressure worth it, right?
I mean, as long as it only happens a little at a time, so you have time to get used to it.
I don’t know why the notion of other people’s expectations weighs so heavily on me. And it really is just a notion, because nobody has ever expected anything out of me for my entire life.
Maybe that’s the problem.
Obey them, ignore them, or resent them, other people’s expectations of you form a key part of your personality as you grow up, and as patient readers know, my personality is notoriously formless and malleable.
Literally nothing was expected of me as a child, not even my continued existence. Nobody gave a shit about me. And that’s on a good day… on a bad day, when I had dared to have needs that cost money (or time or effort or attention or… ), they wished I would just fuck odd and die.
Or at least that’s how it felt to me.
Ergo, I spent my entire childhood feeling like my family could finally decide they were sick enough of my shit to be bothered to kick me out and abandon me.
And that therefore, my only safety came from giving them what they wanted by pretending not to exist and never asking for anything or drawing attention to myself in any way so they could pretend they never had a 4th kid.
If they had expected things of me, that would have meant they valued me, and that was definitely never going to happen.
Consensus was clear : I was an unwanted, unloved, unwelcome, worthless, useless, pathetic, whiny liability who never should have existed and who should really just crawl off to die somewhere. Quietly.
Again. That’s how I felt. I don’t know how much of it was “true”.
But those feelings didn’t come out of nowhere. I can tell you that.
More after the break.
The past is always present
And it will be in the future, too.
I suppose it’s one thing to declare your past to be dead, buried, and forgotten about, and another thing to actually move on.
Clearly, I have not moved on. I don’t know that I can, Not yet, anyhow.
I can’t move on because those old wounds are still open and fresh for me. And bitching about my past here and in therapy is the only way I know to release some of the pain and anger from those old wounds in order to allow a little bit of healing.
And while the wounds remain, so does my terrible childhood. To say it was all a long time ago is technically accurate but metaphysically nonsense.
If you lose a leg in an accident when you’re 12, it’s still gone when you’re 60. If your lungs were ravaged by police when you were a baby, you still need help breathing when you are 45.
The past is gone but the wounds linger on.
And I have been pinned under the weight of my wounds for a long long time. I know no other life. A long time ago, I managed to crawl out of the much deeper hole that I had fallen into when my parents took me out of UPEI, and I was barely able to stabilize myself into the form you find me in now.
But that was not a healthy form. I am still a shattered man. What’s more, I am shattered in a way (Avoidant Personality) that makes me avoid treatment in favour of continuing to hide from the world and act like I don’t exist.
I keep telling myself that I have just as much right to live and breathe and take up space as anyone else and that I am a worthy and valuable and quite frankly amazing individual, and it helps each time I do it, but the message doesn’t get through to my ruptured inner self where it’s needed the most.
But I keep on trying. That mean ol ice keeps melting, bit by bit, and that overpowering freeze response gets a lil weaker every day, and some day I might just be able to get enough dopamine through to my sodden heart that I can feel kind of okay.
Honestly, if I can make it to happy, I don’t care what happens after that. Even if I am living this exact same stupid pathetic life when I turn 60, it won’t matter a bit because I will be happy.
I want more, of course. A lot more. So much more.
But I will settle for being happy as I am, if that’s an option. I guess.
Pragmatically, I know that happiness is what we are all looking for and that if you are happy in life, nothing else matters.
But I have so much thwarted ambition! I need to be big and bright and shiny so I can prove to the world just what a wonder I am.
Is that too much to ask?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.