Bleh. That’s how today has been, more or less : very bleh.

Having one of those days where I feel bored and restless and irritable. A day where I feel like staying in bed not because I am tired or depressed but simply because I do not feel like going back to my stupid pointless life in which nothing appeals to me.

So, bleh. Part of me wants to run screaming into the night, or jump out a window, or smash my monitor into a million pieces. I feel like I could jump out of my own skin.

In other words, I feel somewhat agitated.

I think this is the sort of thing I will have to endure as the process of adjusting to the Wellbutrin and resulting higher noradrenaline levels continues. My energy levels are climbing slowly, and eventually this will lead to my being more motivated and active and engaged with life.

But those mechanisms are mighty rusty, and so the energy has to build up to the point where it can overcome the resistance inside me before things begin to run smoothly.

And that means a period where the energy is straining against the resistance, and that, I think, comes out as this feeling of restless, frustrated emotion.

The accelerator is pressed down, but the brakes are still on. It is going to be a while before I learn to let up on the brake and let myself GO.

And even then, there will still be the emergency brake to contend with.

Basically, I am really, really good at stopping. It is the going that I find difficult. I have held myself back, held myself down, for so very long, without even realizing I was doing it.

And for what reason? Fear of flying off into the sky and never coming back? What the odds of that? Surely that is a poor reason for clinging to the ground so hard your fingers grow roots.

How often is our most extreme and irrational behaviour caused by an extreme and irrational fear of the the opposite extreme? Healthy behaviour is balanced.

You can spend so much time backing away from the edge of madness that you fall off the edge on the opposite side. And end up lost anyhow.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. It is at the center of the bell curve, not amongst the anomalous outliers.

That is a hard thing to wrap your head around when, like me, you have been an outlier your entire life, and have learned to take some comfort from being far out on the fringe of the herd, where the going might be lonely, but there is also nobody around to hurt you.

When that has been your life for a long time, it is very hard to talk yourself into truly coming in from the cold. You might look in through the windows of the good and healthy world and envy the people living their warm and wholesome lives, but you know that deep down, there is no place in that world for someone like you, with your… strangeness.

Or at least, that is how you have always felt. If you were in there with the whole and happy people, you would feel incredibly out of place, a rat amongst mice, a weed amongst the roses, a devil lost and confused at the convention for angels.

And maybe that is why the fringes attract you. They might be lonely and cold, but you feel comfortable there, like you belong.

Were you on the inside with the good and the strong, you would feel vulnerable, exposed. Any second, they will figure out how strange and unsettling you are and they will attack you and push you out.

Better to stay out where you belong than be cast out again. At least if you stay out, you get used to the cold and the dark, and the few people you meet are more like you.

But oh, how your heart aches to be able to live in the light, where it’s warm.

I suppose that the smart thing to do is to take whatever you can find out at the edges and try to make some kind of shelter of your own out of it.

You might never be able to have what the whole and pure have, but you might well be able to make something better for yourself. Something where you are out of the wind, anyhow, and able to share a little warmth with a few other lonely souls.

And at least out here, you can feel… normal. Calm. Safe.

You know that those inside the circle can never truly understand you. It is not that they are unwilling to try, mind you.

It is just that what is missing in you is something that has never been missing in them, and so they cannot conceive of it not being there. The strength and security of the stronghold of their souls has never been violated, and so they can’t even imagine it happening.

And so despite their best efforts, they cannot truly understand. At best, they can picture their own sadness and imagine it ten times as large.

But yours is a difference in kind, not just scale. Compared to them, you are the mere skeleton of a person, and the wind blows right through your bony chest.

There is a world of difference between being naked in the cold, and lacking even flesh to keep you warm.

So the best that you can hope for is to linger now and then at the edge of their circle, and soak up what little warmth and light makes it out that far, and for a little while at least, feel a little more alive.

But then it is back to the darkness and the depths of your bare and frozen existence, and the cold comfort of the company of your fellow spooks and skeletons.

You can never truly go inside.