Still feeling more thinky than linky. Sorry.

At least I have finally gotten around to making a folder in my browser for links I might feel like sharing at some point. This is a very large efficiency improvement over just leaving their tabs open till I use them, which was the previous “system”.

It is something I had been meaning to do for a long long time but never got around to it. But when I decided I wanted to end the link stream and talk about myself instead, I really had no choice. It was that, or end up with a browser with so many tabs open that it crashes.

So now I just save the links. Next time I feel like doing a big link dump, I can take another look at them, same as I do with the science stories for the Friday Science Whatever.

My mood seems to be solidifying lately. The big negative emotion dump I wrote last night did its usual good job of making me feel a whole lot better. I still feel sort of sad and lost, but at least I don’t feel so overwhelmed and overburdened any more.

Every time I do one of those sessions of emotional emesis, afterwards I end up thinking “Man, why don’t I do this more often?” And I don’t have a wise or clever sounding answer for that.

I guess emotional retention is a habit which is hard to break. I sometimes wonder if I have been over-prioritizing being able to function at my admittedly minimal level when I should have been concentrating on whatever it is that makes me more functional in the long run, even if it means falling apart in some way in the short term.

But I just don’t do that kind of thing, or at least, I have never done it before. I am the poor sap who just keeps going and going, driving on four flat tires with the emergency brake on but never breaking down completely, oh no, not me.

In my childhood, I was supposed to be invisible. I was to never have problems, never ask for anything, never draw attention to myself, never need anything. I was not planned, I was not wanted, I was not valued, and I certainly wasn’t welcome.

But I was still, of course, expected to go to school and do well, and as it happened that was never a problem for me. But I had to learn to manage it all myself.

I had my own alarm clock. I got up on my own. I dressed myself in clothes I had washed myself and often bought myself with the Children’s Allowance money my parents gave me that was supposed to meet all my clothing needs.

Can you imagine making a kid who was still in elementary school buy his own clothes? Absurd on the faith of it. But my family operated on the principle that, of course, Michael will do whatever it takes to make himself less of a burden on others.

It’s not like he’s a person with his own desires, ambitions, and needs. He exists to not exist, and if he can’t manage that, at least to not remind us that he exists.

So I got myself up, dressed myself, groomed myself (poorly), walked to school alone, was alone (kind of by preference, because loneliness is better than torture) during recess and lunch, walked home alone, let myself in, and spent nearly all the time at home alone too.

If it hadn’t been for supper, I barely would have interacted with my family at all. And those were fraught with peril because of my father’s unstable mood.

On a good night, everyone ignored me. I certainly was not allowed to speak. When I did speak, my family looked at me like I had just beamed in from Mars.

Where did YOU come from and how did you get in here?

So I learned, in a minor way, to be very independent. I did it all myself. My existence was practically hermetically sealed. I could live in a house with five other people and barely interact with them at all.

I think it is the instincts that I developed then, the ones that let me handle myself and get through school despite a lot of things being very wrong in my life, that now propel me forward and make it impossible for me to fall apart, have a breakdown, or otherwise lose my shit.

That’s just…. not allowed. I have to be self-sufficient like that. I have to do it all myself and not ask anyone else for help. I have to keep it together enough to get through a day. I can’t just fall apart because there is nobody out there who will put me back together.

That is the stark reality I face now in my quest for healing and understanding. This profound feeling that there is nobody out there, absolutely nobody, and that means that I have to keep myself together and cope with every day alone, no matter what, because there is NOBODY ELSE.

I can feel this incredibly strong sense of their being nobody out there for me as a vast and deadly coldness within my soul. It’s not the coldness of a winter’s night or the coldness that lies in the heart of a snowbank in February.

It is the cold of space. A perfect vacuum. And it seems so vast. It cuts me off from others because, just in order to survive all that isolation and loneliness, I had to stop believing in others.

Unfortunately, that level of functioning, the kind that got me through school, is not nearly enough for dealing with the real world.

And so… I haven’t. I have instead clung to whatever let me avoid it.

I have never been strong enough to deal with the real world. I have always retreated from it into my safe little intellectual world.

But what do you expect from someone who had to raise themselves?