It’s harder than it sounds.
I could rail against my mind fog. Shake my tiny fist at the sky and yell, “Damn you, mind fog, I wish you’d go away forever!”
But I don’t wish that. Not really.
I know that I’m the source of the fog (remember, everything in your head is you) and that going around constantly in a daze serves a vital purpose, namely acting as a sort of soft focus lens to make reality less scary.
And by scary, I mean overstimulating. I think.
Still working out how overwhelm and anxiety fit together in my mind.
Anyhow, the mind fog blurs everything and makes it seem like things are further away and less intense than they are and thus preserve the inner sanctum of my mind in which I have been hiding for most of my life.
I can feel that duck blind of the mind quite clearly now. I can feel how it has acted as both camouflage to hide me from the world and as a kind of shark cage to protect me from it when the camouflage fails.
Above all else, nothing and nobody touches me. Not the real me. Not the crazy critter who lives inside that cage. He can get extremely close to people without them ever truly touching him and he’s so good at it that they never know that hiding inside all that cuddle warmth and snuggly sensitivity hangs a cage of ice colder than space itself.
And I know that this is a big problem for me. I know that I can confuse the hell out of people with the mixed signals I put out. That’s the main reason I tend to keep everyone at arm’s length – from that distance, I can be Mister Sunshine and nobody can sense the little man on the inside who is scared as hell of pretty much everything.
I know that if I am ever to get into a relationship, I will of course have to get one hell of a lot closer with someone. And I know that it is not in my nature to hold back when connecting with someone – we connect deeply or not at all.
And that means that at some point, that little man may well have to abandon his little shark cage and at long last let someone actually touch him and let the layers of ice around his heart just melt away.
I don’t know what will happen then. I hope I can handle it. I’d like to think I would finally simply surrender to it all and become a more whole person and truly, truly love that person with all my heart and soul.
But given that I can’t seem to handle the intimacy of even falling asleep while I am in physical contact with someone else, I definitely cannot guarantee a good reaction.
Oh well, Everybody has to find out what they are like when they are in love at some point of their lives.
Granted, it’s usually in their teens, not when they are 51, but whatever.
Better latent than never!
That’s the thing. I’ve led such a strange life. For as long as I can remember, I can convincingly act like I am okay, and even pass for normal as long as people don’t look too closely, but it’s all just part of the duck blind.
Deep inside I am frozen in time and detached from everything and scared, and all I can really do is lurk in the shadows most of the time.
I’m doing whatever I can to push against this tendency in me and force myself out of my shell and into the world a little bit more.
And sometimes I can, and sometimes I can’t. And that’s okay.
It’s okay to get frustrated with myself over it sometimes too.
It’s okay to wish winter would end and the sun would visit my sky at last.
Even though I know I don’t really want that fog to burn away.
Because then I’d be exposed.
More after the break.
The place where it dies
I can feel it when motivation should be happening.
It’s like electricity trying to flow through a broken wire. I can feel a stimulation of my brain but it never makes it to my motivational complex at all.
I’d have more luck trying to pass current through a block of wood.
In fact, that’s more what it feels like : like the wire isn’t broken, it just leads to a large cold block of deadness and apathy and thus gets nowhere near its destination.
And all I can do is just watch and feel it happen from the sidelines. Like I am not even involved. I feel the spark and I feel it get smothered by the deadness and I can’t even feel bad about that.
Because for reasons that are obvious if you think about it, I just don’t care.
Part of it – maybe a big part – is that this is my normal now. Has been for 30 years. Actually being motivated to do things would be weird for me now.
I mean, out of nowhere, feeling like doing something… what’s up with that?
I guess it all leads back to “control”, just like everything else. Almost never acting on my impulses does create a lot of solemn predictability for me.
By treating my own goddamned impulses like alien invaders burst into the room and making irrational demands of me.
I would be far better off being a lot more like a normal, healthy, functional human being who puts the impulses and instincts at the core of their being and everything else gets piled on to that primal id foundation.
I guess this is what happens when the defining trauma of your entire life happens when you are only four year old, your connection to your id gets severed as part of your panicked retreat into the chilly depths of the mind.
I guess I should probably do something about that.
But meh. Whatever.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.