Or in the words of Pink Floyd, tear down the wall.
Well, I can’t do that. It’s a load-bearing wall! So I am instead letting it slowly fade away, and thereby become extremely permeable.
Its ghost will linger for some time, a pro forma placeholder to keep the part of me that still feels the need to hide away from the big bad world happy, but eventually it will be gone, gone, hone, and I will have to learn to deal with the world on a more case my case basis instead of blocking almost everything.
A long, LONG time ago, I wrote about black-listers and white-listers[1], and I think that metaphor applies here. White-listers are people who only let a small number of approved things in and black-listers are people who only keep certain things out.
I’ve been a heavy white-lister for a long time, and while I had some idea of that way back when, I don’t think I really grasped what that meant until just recently when I became fully consciously aware of that great wall inside me and realized how it was the root of all my problems.
All my cold and lonely Midnight Tundra suffering has been because that god damned wall was keeping all the warmth and love and sunshine out. My awkward clumsiness, both physical and social, has been because it’s hard to be adroit and graceful when you are doing everything behind a big fricking wall. My inability to connect with and get along with others is entirely because of this wall between me and the world.
And all because some asshole thought he’d get his rocks off by violating me when I wasn’t even old enough to go to school yet.
I’ve suffered for 47 years because of it. He probably forgot about it a week later.
Anyhow, the wall is fading away and I am standing in that newly opened doorway, enjoying the fresh breeze and feeling the sun on my skin.
I still haven’t gone through the door but that’s coming soon. Right now I feel like I am struggling to be born unto adulthood at long last and like all births the process is painful and messy and a hell of a lot of work.
In fact, you might even describe it as hard labour. Bad dum tish.
But I know I’ll make it. There is zero doubt in my mind about that. Certain processes can’t be stopped once they get past a certain point, and this is one of them.
Plus I finally have a sense of what it means to move forward emotionally. Meaning to actually process my emotions and deal with them on their own terms, without trying to analyze them or force them into categories or any other bullcrap.
There’s a lot of mind to me. But there is a lot more than mind to me. I have a heart and a soul and a spirit and a body and I am raring to use them all.
I have been frozen in place for a very long time and it was all because of this fucking wall. So the wall has to go.
I am ready to be exposed before my peers.
Because I’m fucking awesome.
More after the break.
Best pic of Fru yet
Check it out!
There he is living the life of a glamorous thief and folk hero running around the space station above his home planet stealing from the rich and giving to the poor like some kind of fox version of Robin Hood.
If you can imagine such a thing. 😛
On the up and downs
Still getting used to having a broader range of emotions now.
I think it’s best to come at this as a kind of exploration. I am exploring the full emotional response space when I used to have my emotions nailed in place at a sort of constant low grade depression that it was easy to ignore as long as I stayed distracted.
So I stayed distracted. And ignored the feeling that I was dying inside.
Well I’m alive and breathing now. And honestly, I’m just enjoying how good that feels. My very next priority is to find new places to be, and maybe look for a flexible job on FlexJobs[2] so I can earn some cash.
Not that I have a pressing need for more money. Other than a new power supply, my computer is pretty much exactly how I want it and I can afford to keep myself in video games, although I suppose it would be nice to be able to afford the new hotness and not games from like five or more years ago.
Just once, I want to be playing what everyone else is playing, dammit.
But as patient readers know, earning money for me is not about getting better stuff, although that would be nice too.
It’s about actually pulling my own weight for once in my life. An end to feeling like a burden to everyone, especially my loved ones. The ability to, for once in my god damned life, stand on my own two feet and declare myself to be a MAN.
In other words, to finally grow the hell up.
On a good day, I sometimes imagine myself to be a pet. My roomies’ pet fox. Sure, I don’t contribute labour to the household and my upkeep requires some work and some investment and can sometimes be a little gross, but that’s true of all pets.
And like a pet, I contribute my charming presence, my adorable manner and endearing clumsiness, my comforting companionship, and my entertaining chatter.
Hmmm. That’s somewhere between a fox and a parrot.
I’m going to have to think this metaphor over. Meanwhile…
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.