Turns out there’s more than one way.
You can be alone because there’s nobody around. You can be alone in a crowd because you don’t know anybody. You can be alone because everyone you know has moved on and you’re still here,wondering what the hell happened.
Or you can be alone like this :
It’s being alone because the damage in your head made you withdraw from the world so deeply that nobody can get close to you without having to someone bridge that protective gap between you and others and cross all that damn Midnight Tundra.
That airless void between me and others is the exact thickness of the walls I put up around myself when I was being raped. That’s when I withdrew from reality and became a person who only deals with the absolute minimum amount of the real world he can get away with and not get run over.
That’s when my world became books and video games and TV.
And those walls I put up to escape crippled me in ways that were not immediately obvious. They made it hard for anyone to get close to me and for me to get close with them, and I think that had a deadly effect on my social development because the people who did try to befriend or engage with me were met by a wall of invisible ice and me on the other side of it with no idea what the problem is.
Gee, how come I can’t connect with anybody? Why is it that when I interact with people, I always feel like they are expecting something from me that I don’t have and therefore cannot give them, no matter how much I want to? Why do I feel this horribly painful gap open up between me and normal people when I try to socialize?
Because your heart is under three miles of ice, kid. And that’s not good.
I wish I’d been able to get mad about stuff. I wish I had been able to recognize that I was being treated poorly, in school and at home, and gotten good and mad about it so that I could maybe get some fucking justice.
Even if I did not, in fact, get justice, it would at least have warmed up my frozen heart and led me in the direction of inspiration and action instead of just withdrawing deeper and deeper into myself in a vain attempt to escape the cold.
But the frost just kept following me. Because the only thing that defeats the frost is sunlight and I was getting further and further away from the light as I withdrew.
Like I said in the vid, I don’t know what to do about being so cut off from people. It’s easy to say, “Get closer to people and warm up!” but that’s a statement of intent, not a plan of action, and right now I don’t see a way forward.
And maybe that’s the problem. I am looking at things from a point of view of linear, contiguous logic – things “making sense” – and what I need is to take the needle off that record entirely so I can fit myself into a whole new groove, man.
This record is broken anyhow. That’s why it keeps playing the same thing over and over.
And the thing about expanding one’s true horizons is that you cannot see your destination from where you are right now.
All you can do is, like a child, go out there and explore.
But I’m scared.
More after the break.
Knife against skin
Don’t worry, all the cutting I am about to talk about is metaphorical.
One image that frequently pops into my poppin’ fresh brain to represent my current era of recovery is of myself with a scalpel pressed against the sort of Y-shaped juncture of blood vessels or nerves that is the stand in for the tenderest parts of my psyche, and my gingerly putting more pressure on the scalpel as I try to summon the nerve to just plunge the knife in and cut away the tumour already.
The problem is that the tumour, malignant though it may be, is still a part of me and so cutting it is going to really fucking hurt and my mind knows this and is making me keep putting it off like it’s a dentist appointment.
Think of it as a more visceral angle on the whole “leap of faith” thing I have talked about before. Only instead of learning to fly – to leave logic and reason behind in order to give myself permission to balance my emotions with whatever emotional input is needed – this more like, as I have also said before, performing surgery on myself.
But it’s not like I can get someone else to do it. This is one time in my life where just freaking out and giving up and running to someone competent (Joe) to do it for me is absolutely not an option.
I suppose Doctor Costin might be able to help if I could adequately explain the issue. But even with his intellectual and moral support, the scalpel will still be in my hand.
I suppose I will get around to it eventually. One of these days I will be lying in bed thinking about everything and nothing (I do that a lot) and my resolve will coalesce as will my frustration with myself and I will say to myself, “It is time. ”
It’s OK that Robert Guillaume did it, though.
Or who knows. Maybe this whole thing is yet another distracting schema cooked up by my diseased unconscious to keep me running in place while thing I am making progress until the day I finally drop fucking dead.
I have no idea.
And that means I have no choice but to more or less just… wing it. Improvise.
Oh well. I’ll just treat it as something new to adapt to.
Strangely enough, that makes it a lot less scary to me.
We shapeshifters are a strange breed indeed.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.