Right now, I am still hesitating before taking the plunge into the real world.
Feels like I have opened the door and then just stood in the doorway, enjoying the fresh air but in no hurry to actually go out.
Kind of like a cat in that sense.
Today has been plagued by fuckery re : my weekly shower.
First, a worker calls me up at 12:30 pm and asks me why I am not there for my shower.
And I’m like, “Um, because it’s not till 2:30 pm?”
But no, apparently my appointment got moved to 12:30 pm at the last minute. Apparently, they left is a voice mail to tell me this at 10 am or so, while Julian and I were at Wound Care.
Today my dressings were changed by a nurse named Svetlana. That’s such an awesome name. Feminine but with a butch edge to it.
Anyhow, I guess we are partly to blame for missing the 12:30 pm shower time because we failed to check the voice mail when we got home.
I am thinking we should give them Julian’s number instead of the landline number we have for the apartment.
Then again, in that case, if they wanted to talk to me, Julian would have to hand me his phone, which is a little awkward.
So mebbe not.
Anyhoo, then therapy happened at 1 pm. Chatted with Doc Costin a while, like I do. Went over my whole “dark ride” metaphor with him, where I’ve been living life like I’m going through a dark ride, like a tunnel of love or It’s A Small World, and the various exhibits (?) have been fooling me into thinking they are reality when it should be obvious that the real world is that big carnival outside this ride of mine.
The one us “failure to launch” types are sure is going to kill us if we go out in it.
i have a new theory of that re : me.
I think I am so sure that the real world will destroy me, despite my having all the skills needed to handle it, is because I went through absolutely none of the developmental stages needed to prepare me for adulthood.
As a result, I know, on a deep down animal level, that I am not ready to be a grownup. And that’s an important bit of info. In the wild, young animals that go out into the big wide world before they are ready get eaten.
The problem is that human beings are the most complicated animals on Earth and that’s why we have so many developmental stages to go through on our way to becoming a respectable tax-paying adult.
Miss any of those stages, and you’re fucked, because there is no way to finish them as an adult. It’s not like every public educational institution has a course called “Remedial Childhood” that can take you through all the development you missed.
And I missed more or less all of it.
Starting with kindergarten. Not getting to go to that put me behind all the other kids in terms of psychosocial development right from the get-go.
And that led to my become a social pariah with no friends and who had to hide from his fellow students during recess and lunch to avoid being bullied.
And that’s why i missed all the other developmental stages because they all require a peer group. So emotionally speaking, I went absolutely nowhere.
But my marks were stellar, so what’s the problem?
I was a robot that went to school. I feel like I am maybe around 8 years old, emotionally speaking. And there is no way to catch up on all the social development I missed now.
I’m like 45 years too late.
And FUCK those people who say it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
I can’t very well go to kindergarten now, can I?
More after the break.
Bonfires in the fall
No matter what the calendar says, it was definitely fall today.
I was VERY cold going from the car to Wound Car and back. Goosebumps galore. So I guess it’s time to start wearing my jacket when I go outside.
I always faintly resent that. I really enjoy being able to just walk out the door in my usual T-shirt and jeans in the summer and having to go back to wearing my bulky leather jacket again feels so restrictive.
I will soon get used to it again, of course.
Speaking of fall, when I was very little, I didn’t understand why every fall, the neighborhood would smell all smoky.
It wasn’t until the middle of elementary school before I realized that people were burning the leaves that had accumulated in their yard.
You know, the ones that fell there. In the Fall.
And I kind of feel like that’s what I am doing these days : burning the detritus of all my deferred emotions and watching the smoke disappear into the crisp fall sky.
I know that I can’t literally feel every single thing that I have suppressed over the years. It’s not like it’s all perfectly preserved inside me like it was on tape.
No, what accumulates is more like emotional potential. Every suppressed emotion adds to the total electrical potential of my amygdala and now and then something will cause that potential to arc into the conscious mind and I have one of my highly needed attacks of actually feeling things.
For which I am always extremely grateful because I feel so much better afterwards.
Well these days, I am trying to set that shit off on purpose. It now seems absurd to wait around for the random moments when the emotional charge discharges on its own.
I want to feel everything. Everything that is in me to feel. I don’t want to hold anything back out of fear of “losing control”.
Fuck the delusion of control. I will be far more in control of myself without all this emotional residue clogging up my pipes.
I see the way out and it’s emotion.
I can handle that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.