There is a gorgeous “blushing peach” sunset out my window, I am full of passable microwave pizza (should have taken the time to bake them in the oven, they are SO much better that way), I have a comfortable seat and a connection to the Internet, and a thousand words of self-expression laid out in front of me, waiting to be filled up with whatever I wish.

And I am working hard to be content with that.

That is where I am in my personal therapy journey right now. It is not a new revelation that I need to focus more on the positive and less on the negative, or that I do not do myself a service when I get angry and disgusted with my life, but lately, these thoughts seem to have reached a stage of fruition inside me.

So right now, I am working on just plain squashing flat all this “I hate my life” bullshit. Those are the next kind of thoughts which I will firmly suppress any time they come up. No more “I hate my life”, “my life sucks”, “I am frustrated beyond belief with my life”, and so forth and so on.

Those are valid feelings and there is truth to all of them. But I will no longer let them express themselves in the old tired nonfunctional way, where all they do is make me more depressed and less willing to engage in reality and thus only perpetuate themselves.

Being angry with myself and my life simply does not work. The raging father inside me has has plenty of time (to say the least) to try his method of motivating and improving me, and clearly, his method of anger and pain is not working. In fact, it only makes things worse.

You cannot beat motivation into yourself. Not when your life long response to pain is withdrawal. All you can do is beat more withdrawal and isolation into yourself. May that is the idea. Maybe the real plan, the one you keep secret even from yourself, is to beat you to keep you exactly where you are, so you do not have to grow up and face the great unknown that is the real world.

You can grow used to anything, even Hell. Especially when it is your Hell, with all the players playing their parts in order to maintain the status quo and protect you from the world outside your cell.

So I am going to reverse my tactic and try to spur growth and recovery in myself by embracing the opposite pole, the all-accepting mother, the path where you learn to truly understand and appreciate what you have, and instead of trying to goad yourself forward with the whip of anger, instead to give yourself time to relax and accept where you are, then gently entice yourself forward with the carrots of kindness, warmth, and the wonder that leads a child to explore his or her world and see what there is to see.

I do feel that I suffer from a tragically interrupted childhood. All that golden sunshine wonder, all that feeling safe and protected and warm as a child… that was taken away from me at a very early age by sexual abuse and bullying.

I withdrew into myself, and that isolation kept me from practically all social development. I can see that, and more importantly feel that, very clearly now. So much coldness inside me from all those years spent so very alone, without even a mother to comfort me or be my rock.

Oh, she was present physically, just not emotionally.

And that is supposed to be your last line of defense, isn’t it? Your mother? No matter what else happens, Mom is always there with a hug and a glass of milk and emotional support?

Well, not for me. No emotional support, no milk, latchkey kid, mom watched her soap operas, then made dinner, then watched TV with my Dad for an hour or two, then went to bed.

Lather rinse repeat.

And the older I got, the less we did as a family too. We had separate lives. We might as well have just been roommates instead of an actual family, or at least that is how it seemed to me.

I know it may seem like I go over the same territory again and again in these posts, but digging up all the skeletons buries in your soul takes a lot of time and effort, and sometimes you just have to keep unburying the same old bones over and over again until their time in the light is enough to melt them and release them from their tombs and then you can slip them back into your skeleton at last.

And suddenly, you are just that much more whole and complete, and your meat sits a little easier now that it has a better framework to rest upon.

So…. wow, I wandered off into poetry again. The point I was trying to make before I fell down my own navel shaped opening was that I am going to try my best to be more positive and to love what I have, and accept my life and my situation.

If I spend a whole day sleeping, that is just fine. It was a relaxing day and I probably needed it.

If all I do of a day is sleep, write this blog, and fuck around on the Internet, that is fine too. It is my life, to be lived how I please, and I should not excoriate myself just because I am not doing what I cannot currently do, and what all this self-hatred is keeping me from doing anyhow.

They say it is never too late to have a happy childhood, and I sure hope that is true, because I am increasingly convinced that I desperately need a do-over.

So much went so wrong.

I need to start over from the day they decided I did not need kindergarten, please.