Finally managed to get something like real sleep today. And by real sleep, I mean, of course, the super heavy mega sweaty REM crammed sleep that leaves me feeling like I went ten rounds with a Titan except not nearly as sexy.

And interestingly, I am also feeling sort of depressed and lonely. I am guessing that I am on the down slope of the hypomanic mountain I have been climbing lately, and that what I really need is a lot of rest and sleep to recharge my overtaxed brain.

When I first embarked upon this campaign of opening myself up emotionally, I knew that the most likely result would be mood destabilization. Higher highs, lower lows. Great mood amplitude. And that seems to be what is happening.

The secret, I think, is to simply accept that there will be highs and lows, and not try to cling to the high when it begins to fade and drive myself into despair because I can not hold onto it and it slips away like sand through my fingers no matter how hard I try to grip it.

Another wave will be along. And being on the way down is only as bad as you make it. If you refuse to accept the cyclical nature of things and insist on trying to stop the wheel in motion, you surrender all ability to paln for and work with the cycles, and just end up delaying your own renewal.

That is what we do when we shut off our feelings in an attempt to keep the bad feelings at bay. We end up living our lives moving in slow motion through a thick morass of unfelt emotions and interrupted thoughts, dragging ourselves through it every day, and wondering, as we continue to deny our emotions and hence thicken the medium even further till it is like frozen molasses, why everything seems so hard and we are tired all the time.

You have to take off the emergency brake of life and let those feelings in, good and bad. Only then can you unstick the wheel and get to the point where you are healed fresh again.

And yes, you will keep passing through light and darkness. You cannot eliminate negative emotions. They are as much a part of life as the positive ones. You have to open your arms and embrace the whole of life before you can fix the hole in your life.

And if you unstick the wheel and let is spin freely, and stop trying to jam your sword in the spokes to make it stop where you please, then the darkness and the light start to blend together into a color called Life, and the pain and the healing are close enough together that it is almost like the pain never happens in the first place.

I have a linear biased mind. A very male mind, in many ways. (In other ways, not at all!)

I am a goal and achievement oriented person. That imposes linearity on my outlook. Goals are all about linear motion, point A to point B, nothing cyclical about it.

I also have a conservative mindset, in that I am risk-averse and tend to want to conserve what I have much more strongly than I want to get more. I am quite greedy in many ways, but I am also very cautious and these vectors combine to create another sort of linearity.

Fundamentally, this makes for a controlling personality. It is very hard for me to accept that there are things entirely beyond my control, and that no matter how smart and thoughtful and practical and sensible I try to be, I will always, to a certain degree, be open to the winds of fate.

That means that there is no ultimate safety, and hence, I feel, I can never truly relax. There will never be a time when I can relax and feel safe and not have to worry about danger coming from every possible angle. I will never lose the curse of the eye that looks in all directions at once, the deep down anxiety that the moment I let my guard down, Fate will leap through that opening and make my life even worse than it is now.

And the thought of giving up on the dream of final safety drives me to despair. Some part of me, I suppose, has always though that at some point, I will feel safe. But the truth is, if the real cause of my paranoia and anxiety is a pain lodged deep in my soul like a splinter, then no amount of exterior manipulation of reality will solve it.

If the problem is that your leg is broken, it does not matter how soft the carpet is.

And perhaps ultimate safety comes from that most dreaded of things, relying on others. When you have been severely let down by others in your formative years, it is very hard to trust anyone with your safety. You are all too aware of people’s weaknesses, and the thought of leaving your safety to these fallible, unreliable, distracted, uncaring people seems like lunacy.

And as much as I know that learning to open up to others and trust them is the route to better mental health, I still cannot imagine actually doing it. Perhaps it is one of those things that come naturally out of other layers of recovery. I certainly hope so. I am dead cold frozen on a very deep level, and that cannot persist if I am to become a fully functional, healthy, whole, integrated human.

Perhaps, though, I simply need to redefine safety a little. Perhaps you cannot control the world, or even your world, enough to make it safe, but you can develop the internal faculties to deal with whatever happens anyhow.

And maybe that is all that separates the whole people from us broken people : the feeling that, no matter what happens, you will make it through.

Sounds like madness. But maybe it is a madness which works.