But reaching for the stars!

Meh. Maybe not.

Feeling pretty crappy today, all bored and restless and irritable and impatient and brooding. Spent a great deal of today in bed not because I was sleepy but because I just did not want to face my stupid pointless life when it is easier to just sleep.

Sad, I know. But this too shall pass.

This is just one of my periodic low periods. I will bottom out and then begin to rise again. Right now I feel pent up and bottled up and frustrated and caged and grumpy.

But I know I will not feel like this forever. I feel like my energies are trying to rise, but my usual spiritual constipation is blocking the way. I want to rise up, but that big old block of cold dead weight that is depression is holding me down.

I usually think of it as fear. And not one specific fear, either, more like an enormous block of that which fear is made of (parasympathetic chemical activity?) that makes me fearful across the board of doing anything that takes me out of my stupid little tiny world.

It is like I am stuck on my own tiny lonely planet and I hate it here, and desperately want to escape, but I am too scared of floating off into space forever to try to leave.

After all, this little pathetic world of mine might not be much, but things can always get worse. It would be worse to be lost between worlds with no predictability or reliability or anything to hold on to.

Or would it? Maybe then I would learn to fire these jets of mine and get around on my own instead of just drifting through the cosmos never really getting anywhere while other people’s bigger, more colorful, more vibrantly alive planets form meaningful constellations far, far away from me.

I can see their lights but I cannot feel their warmth. I can barely feel the heat of my own feeble star. Truth be told, I can only feel it at all when it is reflected off another planet, and I don’t let those get close enough for that to provide much warmth.

I feel dumb and distracted and sort of toxic. I feel like if the people on Bones or CSI did a tox screen on me, besides them noticing just how many freaking drugs I am on, they would notice my tissues are suffused with a strange toxic made from my own tears.

Well, the only cure for that is to get that shit out of your system, and the only way to do that is to externalize the bad stuff.

I am still pondering how to do that. My therapist says the way to get rid of the depression is to get rid of the anger, and I think he is right. And I want to get rid of that anger and all the sadness and badness and radioactive milliradness locked up with it, but I don’t know how.

Or, alternatively, I know exactly how to do it but I am just afraid. It can be very hard to tell from inside this filthy little shell of mine.

I am telling you, dude… it’s a jungle in here. Crazy shit going on all the time. No wonder I cling to hyper-regularity. My internal life is so unstable.

Whatever regularity I have is imposed upon it by sheer force of will and a deadly determination not to pay attention to this unwholesome circus riot going on inside me at all times.

And that is probably the problem. I should be listening to it all and trying to understand what my emotions are trying to tell me instead of just clamping the lid down tight on the whole thing and pretending like nothing is going on.

If only I could just let go of this desire to impose order and regularity inside myself and just let the pieces fall where they may inside me, I might be freed of my burden.

But I am terrified of going into the unknown like that. I am so desperately dependent on the powerful light of my overbearing intellect that I have no idea who I am outside of it. A deep animal fear inside me insists, despite all probability, that if I let that light go out for even a second, it will never come back and I will be lost in the dark forever.

And I know that this is not true. Being intelligent like I am is not some juggling act I started at some point without understanding how it works and if the balls drop, I will never get them going again.

It is a deep part of who I am, and the light of my mind is not my mind. A lamp is still there even when it is turned off. The sun still shines even when we can’t see it. If I turn the light out to let the bulb cool down and maybe give my eyes a rest, it will come back on again when I need it.

And like I told myself as a child to get over a more literal fear of the dark, there is nothing there in the dark that was not there in the light.

So maybe it is possible to let go of all my old emotions like a million balloons released all at once.

Or maybe the best I can do is fill one balloon each day on this blog, and release it into the sky to disappear forever across the far horizon.

It might take a long time to get anywhere that way, but it is better than nothing. Barely. I think.

But am I bailing out faster than the water is leaking in? Or am I just sinking a little more slowly than if I did nothing at all?

One thing is absolutely sure in all of this :

I will never, ever run out of metaphors.