Well, I have been taking a break lately from incessant soul-searching and other such hoopla, but tonight, I have no links crying out to be shared, and today was a therapy day so there is that to hash over, and tomorrow will be able about the science, so what the hell, let’s introspect today.

I just get really tired of myself sometimes. You know what I mean? Even we introverted intellectual types can get tired of navel gazing and want to turn away from our eternal quest for self-knowledge and get the hell out of ourselves for a while.

Pull out heads out of our asses the sand, and look around.

Let’s see. Well, today’s therapy session was all about the anger. In this, it was basically just picking up from where we left off last week. Like I said then, I have come to realize that I have a massive black hole of unresolved anger within me, and dealing with that will do a lot to free up my internal resources.

Right now, just keeping all that bad stuff suppressed is draining me. It may well be that the massive weight that keeps me down in the depths of depression is mostly anger.

Maybe anger is the dark matter of my personal universe.

Hard for me to deal with it, though. I don’t want to be an angry guy. Anger just does not fit into my self-image at all. Who, me, angry? I’m Mister Nice Guy. Always pleasant and funny, never mad, never demanding, never difficult, always agreeable, Mister Easy, that’s me.

And I think I know why. I grew up in a family environment where I felt like I was always just barely tolerated. I suppose that was literally true when I was very young and there was the three older siblings who got most of the attention from my parents, and then little old unplanned me.

So I grew up feeling unwanted, and that led me to adopting the role of the one who fades into the background, who is glad when anyone pays any attention to him at all, and who certainly cannot risk every being angry or demanding or needing anything at all because then people will just give up on him and he will lose whatever tiny bit of attention he is getting.

And then he will be fully abandoned within his own family, and that would be the worst thing possible.

And so instead of becoming angry about how I was treated, I just internalized it all and played my role as best as I could. I was a very lonely child. No friends at school, walking to and from alone, watching TV by myself when I got home because my mother would get home an hour after I did (latchkey kids, represent!) and then she would be watching her soaps, and then cooking supper.

Supper was the only time I was not alone. And that was fraught with danger because of my father’s volatile temper. And even when he was calm, we were still not allowed to talk. Only the grownups were allowed to talk at the dinner table.

Some fun, huh?

So while I had three siblings, I pretty much grew up alone. And I have known that for years, and if you asked me, I guess I would say that was very wrong and a terrible way to grow up.

I mean, where the hell was I supposed to get my necessary socialization? No wonder I am so god damned cold inside. Despite how warm a person I seem, inside it is just thousands of acres of permafrost tundra.

Again, I have acknowledged this for a long time, and clearly demarcated it as a major reason why I am such a wreck, and it did me some good to realize this and know that it was wrong and let myself feel some of the cold damp sadness that comes from that terrible time in my life.

But I think it is past time to take that further. Being depressed about it is one thing but letting myself get angry over it is another.

And I really don’t feel like going there. Voices in my head tell me not to bother. After all, it’s all in the past, right? So what good is getting angry over it now?

And there is so much potential anger there that it makes me feel like I would go crazy if I tapped into even a tiny percentage of it.

But I have no choice. It is clear to me now that just knowing went wrong is not enough. I am not helped any more by simply knowing what went wrong. All that does is give me something specific to be depressed about and that is just not cutting it any more.

What happened to me as a child was wrong. Horribly wrong. I was mistreated by my family, my classmates, and society in general. My parents and my siblings and my teachers failed me terribly and just left me in my isolated loneliness to grow up fragile and frozen and so very, very alone.

And that fucking sucks. I wish I had gotten angry at the time and demanded what I needed, but I lacked the courage and the understanding to do so.

I was a very good boy, according to my role in my family, and what did that get me? Profound neglect. Everybody was perfectly happy to just leave me to my misery.

And I was so obedient to my faithless parents that I was practically an adult before I even realized that there was anything wrong with all that. That things could have (and should have) been better.

That’s the hard part, feeling the anger now that I failed to feel then. That I deserved to feel then, but I was too much the good little boy to acknowledge.

Feeling this anger is not pleasant. I feel like I am burning up inside and it hurts like hell.

But it’s been a long time coming. Time to burn my sins.

And thus, set myself free.