Here we are at New Year’s Eve, the traditional time for looking back over the year in order to think about everything that has happened so you can judge the year, and all I can say is, big freaking deal.

Not much has changed for me. I am still fat, sad, sick, stuck, bored, lonely, crazy, cramped, compressed, stressed, repressed, disordered, diseased, dull, disoriented, dizzied, and downright depressed.

At this moment, I feel like 2012 meant very little to me personally. Not a lot changed. I have once more demonstrated my facility for stasis and done next to nothing with another of my dwindling supply of years.

The fact that my rent went up $80/month did not help with the whole feeling good thing. It made 2012 way more of a drag than earlier years with the same income level. I have felt financial stress far more keenly and constantly over the year. That does not help things at all.

I have had a year’s worth of therapy once a week, and that does help some. At times, progress seems frustratingly slow, and I am tempted to lash out at my therapist in anger, just to shake things up. He can be so damned thick sometimes, and we get all tangled up in pointless semantic discussions that do nothing but make me despair at the prospect of real progress.

Once more, I must confront the specter of an old, depressing idea : what if in order to be a good therapist to someone, you have to be smarter than they are? Or at least, the same level?

If that is true, and I am not saying this to brag, but I am really smart, and I despair of finding a therapist who is intelligent enough to handle me. Despite my efforts to keep an open mind and be receptive to therapy, it might well be that things will always go slow and get stuck a lot because I am simply more than any but the sharpest therapists can handle.

And that has always been the case, even when I was a kid. I can see now that I was really hard to handle as a kid, both stubborn as hell and way too smart for my own good. And I think that damaged my relationships with others, especially adults.

I needed someone with a strong personality who was not intimidated by my precocious intelligence and who had the strength of will and wit to be my guardian. No wonder my favorite teacher in elementary school was an old battleaxe who scared most of the other kids.

I loved her, because she could handle me, and when you are a kid, you do not feel secure unless you have a parents or guardian who can control you.

It is the nature of childhood. You test the limits. Your guardian(s) impose the limits. Through that interplay of wills, you learn the limits and, more importantly, learn self-control.

I never had that. Nobody could really handle me except for that one teacher (Mrs. Rogers, you were awesome) and my babysitter Betty, who had more than enough personality to handle me.

No wonder I really respond to the image of the unbeatable champion who has grown despondent because nobody can come anywhere close to challenging him any more.

I have felt like that, deep down inside, for a long time. I have wanted someone who can handle me, someone who can truly challenge me and from whom I can therefore learn and grow, for my whole life, most of the time, without really knowing it.

But it just is not going to happen. I know, deep down, that I can easily out-think and overwhelm people if I use my mental muscle. God know what kind of an elitist prick I would be if I took the same challenging attitude towards the world I have seen in others.

But I don’t want to be like that. I want to get along with people. I want them to like me. So I have learned to be very cautious and careful with how much of that mighty mental muscle I flex.

Maybe if I had done the challenging thing when I was a teenager, I would have eventually found someone who could handle me, and I would have learned my limits at last, and gotten over myself.

No wonder I feel trapped and repressed so much of the time. I have been holding myself back my entire life. And I do not see a morally acceptable way to end that.

Well, to drag this back to the point, that is one thing I have accomplished this year. I figured out a big piece of my psychological puzzle. Can’t wait to talk to my therapist about this.

Plus, you know, I wrote another book. A decent book. Too different from my first book to really say which one is better. I would like to think I am improving with time. But I am not sure.

I am definitely interested in getting more done with my writing. Writing stuff for Text Broker (who just gave me a rating of 3 out of 5 stars, damn them. I will improve!) will be a start.

But I also will do a lot more promotion of my work. I have to get out there and get noticed, despite the part of me that wants to disappear and be invisible.

I am going to hammer out some sort of deal between the side of me that craves attention and the part of me that wants to fade into the woodwork, and I think it will necessitate developing some kind of big ego.

I have avoided that whole “swelled head” think my whole life. It has not worked out well for me.

And if I have to experiment with thinking I am fucking amazing in order to get out of this trap I am in, so be it.

Maybe it is time I finally get around to being a teenager.