Today has been a mixed day.

Nothing really big happened. Went to therapy in the morning. My therapist is convinced that all my problems stem from my vast well of untapped, inchoate rage that lurks in the darkness of my soul.

And I was not convinced, but then he pointed out that after he brought up my anger, I spent twenty minutes talking around the subject without addressing it directly, and for me, that is a clear sign of something that I have trouble dealing with, and hence, that is something I should be dealing with.

After all, in therapy, it is pretty much always the things that are hardest to deal with that are the things that most need it. The greatest treasures are all behind three foot thick doors covered in barbed wire with your scariest personal ghosts and demons there to frighten you away.

And I really do have trouble dealing with my anger. And I have a lot of it, buried down deep under the depression and the neurosis and the fear. I am not quite convinced that it is the one central thing like my therapist says, but it is clearly a really big deal and something I need to hash out somehow.

All that anger needs some kind of release. Something that expresses it without either shredding my sanity or leading to real world destruction and suffering, for me or the others.

My therapist suggests getting some big white blank paper and some big fat colorful markers, and just letting it all out onto the page. No skill needed, just try to draw my pain and get it out that way.

And I know I am not that kind of artist, but skill does not matter in art therapy. All that matters is expressing the emotions the best that you can. It would be a serious emotional hurdle for me to remember that when it comes time to put marker ink to paper, but I am not ruling it out either.

My skill is writing, and so in theory I could get it all out THAT way, but writing is too slow and controlled and higher order thinking based for real gut level emotional release.

The visual arts are more primal and raw in that sense. No thought needed, no structure, no plan, no lofty ideals, just color on paper to let the demons out.

Plus, honestly, if I put the rage into words, I will then show those words to people, and then, I feel, those people are likely to be frightened of and/or for me and I do not wish to scare people away.

That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? That deep down feeling that if the world could see the real you, they would run away screaming and you would be alone forever, hated for the monster you are?

But maybe that is just a lie we make up to justify our isolation, and that in reality, people would see the real you, shrug their shoulders, and say “So what else is new?”.

Or would that be even worse? To find out that all those things you have been holding back, all the radioactive, toxic horror you have built up inside you, is really no big deal and you are actually not all that special and you could have let that all go ages ago, and have suffered for nothing?

And you are just ordinary after all? Some of us would rather be damned that be ordinary. Our specialness is our most precious possession, and we would never, could never give it up for the comforts of the herd and the safety in numbers.

There must be a happy medium, though, between the sheep and the hermit. Some way of breaking the isolation and relaxing one’s guard without losing all that we hold dear about ourselves.

In fact, maybe viewing the two as the only two options, as a false binary, is just another way our minds trick us into staying exactly where we are.

I can’t even try getting down from my tree, because the only way down is to fall.

But what about climbing down slowly and carefully?

Nope. If I try to climb down, I will fall. The only safe route is to stay exactly where I am.

I have had dreams like that, where I am stuck in a precariously high place like up on a cliff which barely has enough room for me, so that if I move at all, I will fall to my death.

This is a nightmare, obviously. But perhaps my brain is trying to tell me something. It is trying to make me cope with the precarious isolation that comes from always retreating further up the mountain when you are scared of reality.

Maybe that is how you become a hermit by degrees. Fear.

But I don’t want to be a hermit. I want to come down from the mountaintop of my intellectualism and participate in a wider reality than my lonely peak could ever provide.

While I have been freezing my heart out up here on the summit, life has gone on without me in the valley below. I know, because the view is excellent from up here where the air is clear and where I am free from the workaday concerns of the quotidian world.

So I know all about how the lives of the little people below have gone. How they find love, lose love, get jobs, lose jobs, make life better for themselves, have families and friends and communities and associations and live their lives without ever looking up to wonder what is going on around them.

They know all they need to know to live the lives they lead, and are content with that.

And it would be easy to have contempt for them in their tiny little lives, and pretend it was contempt for them that put me up here.

But really, it was nothing but fear.

And oh, how I envy them.