I felt fine. I was in a pretty good mood, actually. Life was proceeding in the usual way.

But then…. I see a certain image from a certain Disney movie and it all comes tumbling down.

I won’t link the image that was posted to my Facebook (quite innocently). I “hid” the post it was in (something about how this image is the real deal for making you cry at a movie) and that means I deleted it off of my own timeline.

And I definitely will not go look for it elsewhere. That would damn near kill me.

But I will describe it, and I hope you will understand it well enough to get why this one image is enough to bring on an attack of the blues in yours truly.

The image is from the Disney move The Fox And The Hound. The plot of the movie is that a fox named Tod (voiced by Keith Coogan) and a hound dog name Copper (voiced by Corey Feldman) become the best of friends when they are both too young to understand that in the human world, hounds are used to hunt foxes and kill them, so the two species are mortal enemies.

This already sounds damned sad, doesn’t it?

Tod is the pet of a sweet little old lady named Widow Tweed (voice of Jeanette Nolan), and so is a domesticated fox. Late in the movie due to complications I won’t get into (and barely remember, for reasons I shall explain), the Widow Tweed is forced to leave her home and leave Tod behind.

And so the screen shot that has had me crying for fifteen minutes now is Tod as seen by her through the back window of the car, looking at her all confused, frightened, and betrayed.

(In her defense, she does this to save his life. But he doesn’t know this. )

Many of you reading this will already know the main reason why this movie and that scene has such a powerful effect on little old me. I love foxes. I identify with them strongly, so much so that if something has a fox in it, I am that fox. I can’t help it. I just am.

And right now, with tears in my eyes, I am having trouble remembering the positive side of that. Right now, I can only see it as a bad thing that has only led me to be incredibly upset by things that other people take in stride.

Like fox hunting, for instance. Do not get me started.

But it’s a lot more than just the fact that Tod is a fox and I identify with foxes. That is the trigger but that is not all that is going on inside me.

My lonely childhood left me with a profound feeling of being left behind and abandoned. Nobody was there for me when I was a precocious child who was too smart for his own good and getting violently bullied nearly every fucking day.

My parent didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I was the mistake, the accident, the extra child who was left to fend for himself because I had three older siblings and they took all my parent’s time and attention, and I was just supposed to fade into the woodwork and disappear.

My teachers didn’t care and didn’t want to care. To them, I was a serious pain in the ass to them, at once too bright to need help and desperately emotionally dependent on them because I had no friends. I had a smug and dismissive attitude towards the schoolwork they gave me (it’s really hard to value something you find so easy), I tended to be somewhat slovenly in appearance, and I was very wimpy.

I think most of them wished I would go away too, and be someone else’s problem.

My siblings had their own world, too, one that did not include me. No malice intended. But I just fell off everybody’s radar as a kid.

Add in just how damned sensitive I am, and you can maybe see why the image of a fox being abandoned to fend for himself in the wild by the people he loves just might resonate me in a way that is completely, totally, and immensely devastating.

It’s like my entire sad childhood summed up in one image and that shakes loose a lot of very old, very bad stuff inside of me.

That’s why I don’t remember the movie that well : because I haven’t watched it in a long long time. I just can’t. The emotions are too damned intense. I identify with Tod way, way, way too much.

And the thing is, I know the movie has a happy (ish) ending and everything turns out fairly okay at the end. Nobody dies or anything. Tod is OK.

But that doesn’t matter. I don’t know, maybe a lot of things have been building up in me for a long time and this was just that one last push to make the dam break and the flood occur.

And I know that, after this is done, I will be better off. As unpleasant as it is to cry, it is also very important. It is one of our most profound sources of catharsis, and for someone like me who has suppressed so emotion over the years, catharsis is a blessed thing.

Only when we stop fighting our inner demons and instead let them have their say can there be peace within. When you let yourself experience the emotions, as painful and negative as they can be, and finally get around to processing them, you will find your feel more like yourself now than ever before.

It’s not something you can just “do”, though, or at least I can’t. Something needs to set it off.

And I guess for me, the key is foxes.

Note to self : do not read that entry again. That’s the last thing I need.

I am gong to go lay down now, and try to pull myself back together.

Being sensitive sucks sometimes.