That’s what I talked about today. Pain, and fear, and my relationship with each.
I am feeling emotionally raw and sore but also determined and stubborn today, and this is how I ended up expressing it.
Don’t judge me.
I think I might actually losing patience with and mercy for myself too. I am sick and tired of being such a god damned weakling and coward, with no structure to my personality and no grit to my character, and I am open to learning hard male lessons that hurt but make me stronger.
I need to be stronger.
Being a pathetic piece of puff pastry ain’t cutting it any more.
And that means standing up against my pain and my fears. I need to do less surrendering to the bullying forces inside me by letting them dictate what I can and cannot (mostly cannot) do and more defying it by doing what I want to do instead.
And I know that’s gonna hurt and be scary and all my old, bad instincts will be screaming at me to give up and run away and hide and do whatever is easiest like I normally do, but I am fed up with that bullshit and I am ready to walk through the fire so it can burn the weakness and disease out of my soul.
And I have finally learned to take all that rogue mental energy and use it against the depression instead of leaving it to rattle around in my noggin and become anxiety.
Or tension. Or just plain stress.
So when I am having one of my bad moments where I feel like leaping screaming from a window just to express the insane energies surging within me and making me feel like I am going insane, I stand a pretty good chance of remembering to take that crazy energy and focus it like a laser beam as I use it to blast away at the numbness and the deadness and the sheer frozen bloated carcass of my depression.
Now I am working on doing that in less dire moments.
One thing that has been on my mind lately is the deep, thick, implacable wall of ice that separates me from other people.
I feel like I am so far away from other people that it’s no wonder I feel so cold. All those lonely years made me retreat deeper and deeper into myself to escape the cold and ironically the deeper I withdrew, the number I became and the further from others I was, which only made my world even colder.
I guess there is only so long that you can leave the door open for others despite the bitter cold blowing in before you finally shut that damn door so you can at least feeling your own damned heat, paltry as it is.
It’s one way to adapt to being so god damned alone, both inside and out. I suppose a more extroverted type would have poured themselves into doing whatever it took to make friends, but I just gave up and withdrew.
And that let the ice creep in and take over. Like my own personal ice age.
So for a long time now, I have been struggling against my fears and my despair and my numbness to move my sad little planet a little closer to the sun.
But it’s a tough job because the version of me without those massive ice walls to protect me is so alien to the person I am right now that it’s very hard to argue with the voice that panics at the thought of losing my ice because it equates that with death.
Death and liberation as often mistaken for one another.
Now I need to lay down and nap before Denny’s.
More after the break.
Could be better
But then again, that’s true of everything.
Occurred to me that there is a lesson I know I need to learn but that clearly is not sinking in and that is there is a vast and extremely important difference between “could be better” and “not good enough”.
I have an extremely creative, incisive, and penetrating mind, and that means that at all times and in nearly all things, I can see a way something could be better.
And as it relates to the world, that’s okay. It sometimes leads to me being frustrated by things I think are stupidly designed, but other than that, fine.
But as it relates to myself and the things I do, it’s the depths of madness.
Because once my mental illness got hold of a tool like that, “good enough” vanished. “Could have been better” means “not good enough” means “failure”, and that means that I and the rest of the human race are constantly failing at everything.
But it only counts when it’s me.
This is, I think, the primary weapon of my self-destruction. If even the tiniest bit of suboptimal performance means humiliating and shameful failure, then obviously my self worth does not stand a chance of surviving.
And this is how my internalized rage is vented against me. It uses the very thin and brittle veneer of reason and logic offered by hiding itself in my highly analytical and intelligent mind to pursue its real agenda of giving me a very self destructive way to express some of that deep down dirty rage I keep buried deep inside.
This naturally leads back to where I always end up : the choice between taking it out on myself or taking it out on others.
Neither are acceptable but taking it out on myself is less unacceptable. So that is what happens until I come up with a third path.
Which might start with re-imagining it as finding someplace for that angry energy to go. Emotional sublimation is a real thing and perhaps it is even possible to transform that rage into a power source for something more positive, like productivity, or joy.
That’s hardly going to happen overnight. The gears and linkages involved in transforming the rage into something better are quite complex and need to be made of some pretty strong stuff given the load they’ll need to take.
But at least I am thinking in the right direction now.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.