Still not feeling all that great, although I do feel better than yesterday, which is something.

I guess I will just be eternally doomed to a light and dark cycle. Part of me thinks I just need to learn to accept that and that if I can just relax into the cycle and not try to fight it, I can reach a state where the ups and downs are not upsetting to me at all.

They are just the natural way of things, and the down periods will be soft quiet times and the up periods will be bright active times, and both are good.

That requires that “faith” stuff, though, and that is something I have yet to achieve. Faithlessness makes one a slave to the known and the knowable, and that is a far more profound limitation than us intellectual atheist types like to admit.

And I am not talking big F Faith in God or Jesus or any kind of established church. I am talking about the more simple faith of trust in the universe. Trust it not to be malign, and to even work out well sometimes.

Otherwise you will be crushed by the strain of the kind of pervasive paranoia that a view of the universe as malign and fraught with peril implies.

You have to at least believe that some kind of safety is at least possible before you can find the spirit and the strength to go forward in life.

You have to think that it is at least possible to move from your current position of relative safety (but not happiness) to another, even safer position, where you are not just surviving but truly happy.

I do not have such faith yet. Not deep down, where it counts. Even in my sad little life, I never feel truly safe. Even as I sit here and type, I am aware of a deep and terrible fear that lurks in my mind all the time and which could overwhelm me and make me feel like I want to run and hide in the deepest, darkest hole I can find and pull the hole in on top of me.

A fear which is so profound, it makes me want to disappear inside myself, hide like a turtle inside its shell, except inside that shell is another smaller shell, and so on till I am infinitely small inside.

And I suppose that is what I have done, metaphorically speaking. ^[1] A long time ago, I retreated deep deep withing myself, and now I am a bystander in life, watching it out the window and wishing I could be one of those real, valid people out there, but I am stuck inside this little fortress of mine and terrified of what will happen if I leave it.

I mean, will it even still be there if I need it again? What if the door locked behind me like in some sex farce and I am stuck outside my comfort zone, naked and exposed?

Since, my friend, you have revealed your deepest fears
I sentence you to be exposed before your peers!
TEAR DOWN THE WALL!
– Pink Floyd’s The Wall

I guess I would just have to get used to it somehow. Adjust. Adapt. Find a new way to live.

But I am nowhere near ready to tear down that wall of mine yet. I am barely ready to even imagine what it might be if it was gone.

Part of me wants to just throw myself into the pit, tear down the wall and throw away the bricks in a mad rush of spiritual ambition and sheer pent up insanity. Force myself to deal with it by burning all my bridges behind me, give myself no fallback position, and therefore no choice but to learn to deal with life exposed to the world.

But I am not sure if that is even possible. I would like to shed this suffocating layer of cold wet numbing cloth with which I have swaddled myself and stand naked and proud, finally able to dry out and feel the sun on my skin, and truly breathe free.

But it is hard to imagine. Truly imagine. I can imagine doing it, but then what? What do I do after the pleasure of freeing myself has worn off and I now have to deal with the world without my armor?

All I can think of is wanting very badly to go back to my deep dark hole. To put that suffocating suit right back on before I could even think of doing anything else. I just cannot conceive of life without it.

I mean, then I would have to actually learn to cope. Learn to deal with things in a way other than running away and hiding as quickly as I can.

I would have to face things head on, instead of sideways. Look my problems straight in the eye and deal with them, instead of only ever glimpsing them out of the corner of my eye as I try to sidle along without them noticing me.

So much fear inside me. And not just simple fear, but fear of fear, which tends towards maximal complexity as it self-references its away past the far horizon.

Who knows. maybe all this existential endoscopy does me more harm than good, and I would be best off if I just left all the higher questions on the side of the road and just tried to make a good life for myself somehow. Out of whatever I could get my hands on. Whatever came down the road.

But it is my nature to analyze and ponder and speculate. You cannot just give up on being deep. I already know too much to ever abandon it all for a happy-go-lucky life.

But it’s nice to think about.