Let’s get this out of the way first :
It occurred to me that one of the barriers between me and activating all the parts of me that I mothballed in order to become the stable but pathetic version of me you know and love is that doing so will make my life a hell of a lot more complicated.
That’s what dealing with the full range of human emotions is going to mean for me. And this complication, in turn will result in something still worse, at least according to the old bad unhealthy part of me :
It means I will lose “control”.
My inner world will no longer be tightly circumscribed and therefore hyper predictable and so I would have to deal with not knowing what will be happening in my mind and my soul from minute to minute.
You know. Like normal people.
Normal people don’t question their emotions like I do. They don’t squash nearly all of them in order to achieve an entirely fabricated and unhealthy inner “calm”. They don’t demand justification for their every little action.
They feel things, act on those feelings, and take it from there. Eventually they learn to control their emotions and think things through and so on, but not before establishing a solid emotional base from which later growth can spring.
But me, I fucked all of that up.
Not on purpose, obviously. It happened as a result of my withdrawing into the world of the mind when I got raped. That caused my development to skew wildly towards the mental and left my emotional development mostly stunted.
And all because things had to “make sense” to me. I didn’t play with the other kids in the sandbox because it seemed pointless and stupid to me. I didn’t have a stuffed animal I lugged around everywhere with me because I knew it was just a toy. Same with having an imaginary friend. I knew they were not there. So what was the point?
Mind you, that’s a question most adults couldn’t answer either because they have never thought about it. It’s play, and play doesn’t need to have any kind of point because play is supposed to be inherently rewarding.
And if it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong.
Looked at through that lens, the fact that I was asking for some kind of justification for doing what all the other kids did was wrong from the very beginning. It was rotten at the root and spoke of something being desperately wrong with me.
I mean, who even says these things? I was such a weird kid.
I keep looking back and wishing I had just relaxed and let myself be myself back then. Forget trying to control and predict. Go ahead and have that huge ego everyone is so afraid you will develop. Go through life with a cocky, smartass attitude that might not always be pleasant to be around, but would have at least let me be a whole person with a basis for further developing myself instead of being this emotionally emaciated cripple who is afraid of everything.
And I know it’s not too late to become that person. Indeed, I can feel that version of me struggling to free itself from its chains so it can be born and replace this tired, worn out, decaying version of myself before it’s too late.
But so much has to happen first.
Or maybe it doesn’t. I dunno. Maybe that’s just another layer of bullshit.
Either way, my big transformation isn’t going to happen right now.
But maybe not too long from now. Maybe.
More after the break.
Break the seal
No, the seal I am talking about is the hermetic seal around all the vacu-locked parts of me that have been sequestered away for so long.
That will not be an easy seal to break because, in a sense, it does not want to be broken. That seal has been protecting my internal state from all the anxiety and severe depression that used to plague me for 20 years or so, and so my deep programming still thinks that it needs to keep that thing intact or all Heck will break loose.
And I suppose it will, in a sense. In order to truly reclaim my human potential, I am going to have to open that big steel door inside me and let all my monsters and animals loose in order to get at and fix the stuff that got locked in there with them.
And I think that’s one of the things holding me back, which is why I am talking about it tonight. Hopefully by talking (typing?) it out, I can defuse some of the emotion surrounding this attempt at unleashing Bedlam, thereby making it something that is easier to deal with.
I wish I was the kind of person who could just throw open those big steel doors and let pandemonium reign as things work themselves out, but I am not.
One of my many deep and binding fears is a fear of losing my mind completely and thus losing myself as well.
I don’t want to end up in a straightjacket in a rubber room somewhere. I don’t want to get lost in thought and never come back. I am terrified of losing the last tenuous wisps of my grip on reality and end up locked up inside my mind forever more.
Maybe that could never happen and it’s just more toxic bullshit that my depression uses to keep me under its thumb. I dunno.
But it sure feels like it could happen. I have had doubts about my grip on reality for a very long time. And that makes sense given how little I interact with reality except through one screen or another.
I probably should try to make good on that whole “spend some time outdoors alone” thing. But I know damned well that I won’t.
This harbour of mine is still icebound.
And there hasn’t been an icebreaker in this region in a long, long time.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.