Wandering through the forest
Afraid and alone
No fire for comfort
No place to call home

No path to follow
No place I can rest
Just wandering, wandering
On unending quest

I walk all alone
In the darkness so green
Don’t know where I’m going
Don’t know where I’ve been

I have no destination
Though the hour grows late
But I cannot stop searching
The tension’s too great

In this endless unwinding
Of spider-thing thread
While it lasts, I will wander
When it ends, I’ll be dead

---

Bout time I actually wrote a damned poem.

See, it’s not unusual for my head to be full of fragments of poetry that come spilling out of my hyperactive and ever so fertile imagination, and often poems (or songs) will spontaneously begin in my mind, and sometimes develop quite a ways purely inside my skull.

The unusual part is that this time, I actually did something about it. I was pondering what to write about tonight, and the first stanza came to me, and I thought “You know what? For once, I will just go for it.”

And it feels good to get it out there. Usually a hell of a lot of creativity is bouncing around inside my skull looking for a way out that it never finds.

I am not sure why this is, although my theory that I use all these ideas of mine as a kind of hoarder’s insulation against the world deserves a good look.

But more broadly, I think I just compulsively keep everything in. At some point in my life, I became obsessively retentive. I buried nearly every emotion I had, and very little ever passed through the door between the world inside and the world without.

That creates a terrible tension inside because all those repressed emotions are still in there, trying to express themselves in the world, and as this awful energy potential grows, it takes more and more of your energy just to hold everything inside.

Hence, depression. It drains your energy to the point where even the basic mood maintenance routines that healthy people have to keep them up and going and interacting with the world fail, and your mood spirals downward until all you can do is give up on everything but the absolutely minimum required for survival and the few activities you can still manage to do without waking the raging, screaming demons inside.

It’s no way to live, but sometimes, it is all you have left.

As you might have guessed, I have been feeling a little down today. Still pouring the positiveness into myself as fast as I can, and still determined to push myself upwards with every ounce of my strength for as long as I can, and to never ever give up on myself again.

But today, I was feeling restless, bored, irritable, and just crappy in general. I think I am reaching another peak in my feelings of frustration and boredom with my sad little life, and that means another period of emotional crisis as all these latent energies strain and push against the thick (but thinning) clog made of dirty ice between my emotions and actual action.

Not to be gross, but it is a lot like constipation. Emotional constipation. And catharsis is like relief.

And to delicately continue this potentially very disgusting metaphor, I am not sure what it would be like to be emotionally regular. A certain amount of repression of emotion is normal and healthy and even necessary in order to be a civilized adult.

But it has to be matched by expression. That emotional debt must be paid regularly in one way or another. Those emotions must be regularly expressed, or you become very ill inside… even toxic.

And to go to the previous metaphor for what I swear will be the last time, odds are that you can’t become healthy until the blockage is cleared, along with all that was blocked.

And as much as part of me wishes I could just blow up the dam and let loose the entire flood all at once, the irritating truth is that it can only really be done a little at a time, all the time, with the occasional uptick to speed along the process.

So no big dam burst. Just opening the sluice gate wider for a while.

And I know there will be ups and downs in this process. There will be days when I feel like crap and the old demons will start clearing their throats and offering me their fell services once again.

But I am determined to keep the upward pressure constant and relentless. No retreat. No surrender.

And if the upward pressure is constant and relentless, and the downward pressure intermittent and variable, then the upward pressure has to win, especially as more and more of my mental resources are recovered and added to the power of the upward pressure.

So from this point onward, the only way to go is up. I might not rise in a straight line like a rocket (or maybe I will!), but I will rise, reach for the stars, and grow.

I am sick and tired of this cramped little life of mine. I am not a small person on any level. I am a big guy with a big brain, a big heart, and a big personality, who thinks big and loves the big picture.

I deserve so much more than this sad little life of mine. I have so much to contribute to the world once I fully evict the unwanted guest of depression from the premises, that at times it feels like I am going to burst from the sheer potential of it all.

It’s that, more than anything else, that makes patience so difficult. I have so much eager enthusiasm bottled up inside me, waiting for me to figure out how to harness it, that sometimes it is like waiting for a sneeze to finally happen.

Soon, I tell myself. Soon.

I am so very eager to bloom.