I’ve only been back to writing 1000 words a day for three days (including today), and already I’m getting restless.

I had a real moment earlier today that put it all in focus. I was lounging about, playing games on my tablet like I usually do, and I suddenly thought “This is it? Is this my life? Video games and a blog only read by my friends? That is my whole life now?”

And it’s just not enough. I feel now like I am coming back to life after being strangely dormant for around a month or so. I feel like I somehow fell off the edge of the world and only now have I found my way back.

The fog is still there, of course. It’s always there, patiently waiting for the next time I can’t handle reality any more and I fall back into its chill embrace to numb me out and shut out the world.

I have sacrificed my life to that fog, but an internal addiction is the hardest kind to kick. I don’t have to go to the liquor store or the dealer or even the grocery store in order to get my fix. I just have to… let go, and let myself dissolve into a tiny little me in a vast sea of fog.

This is what has kept me from making progress for all these years of wasted life. The longer I try to keep myself together, the greater the temptation to just let go becomes and I revert to the lifestyle and mindset of a child who has nothing to do but entertain themselves until it’s time for school.

But school never comes.

I often think of how amazing it is that someone can be extraordinarily intelligent and capable of astounding feats of cogitation and creativity, and yet still be profoundly immature and painfully childish on an emotional level. Common sense would seem to say that if a person is smart and wise enough to write beautifully or make profound statements about the nature of life or any other of a baker’s dozen of mental miracles, one would have to have grown up enough to really understand the world.

We tend to assume, in essence, that mental maturity and emotional maturity are either the same, or at least closely linked. But I can attest, brothers and sisters, that this is not the case.

Mentally speaking, I am freaking amazing. I am smart as hell and get smarter every day. There are times when I frighten myself with this feeling of mental power. Scares the hell out of me.

But emotionally speaking I am still a wounded and broken child scared of everything because to him, the world stop being a safe place very early in life.

And I can feel that inside me. I can feel that my heart is frozen and my soul too small for the mind it is supposed to inhabit. I can feel the pain and the weakness and the dead cold fear deep in the heart of my psyche. The kind of fear that freezes you in place, paralyzing you with terror too great to be pinned to any one source.

That fear lives within me in a place without light, without air, without sound, and without hope. IT floats in interstellar space, surrounded by stars whose light has traveled too far to provide warmth. It longs to thaw and be real once more, not suspended halfway through a primordial scream but alive and vital and filled with hope, faith, joy, and overflowing vigor.

But it can’t pay the price. As much as it long to melt and flow, it know that the coldness at its heart serves a purpose : to numb out enough of that deep deep pain to reduce it to a dull throbbing ache that can, with considerable sacrifice, be endured.

If it melted, it would have to feel all that pain frozen in its ice, and by now it feels like there is so much of it that to release it would mean total annihilation.

So it just floats there between the stars, surviving, but only just.

It frightens me sometimes to think about how deep the numbness goes and how little of the emotional world I can feel as a result. I get the feeling that the freeze happened when I was molested, and I wasn’t even school age yet then. And so for most of my life I have been extremely dead inside.

There could have been all kinds of people who would have helped me if I asked for it, but when you are cold inside you can’t connect with people and they can’t connect with you, and connection is the beginning of compassion.

Nobody wants to connect with the frozen fish, and no matter how badly that fish wants to connect to others, the frozen nature of its existence makes it nearly impossible.

I have been so cold for so long. So many people tried to connect with me, but I was just too emotionally distorted to connect back. I tried, but it was just not in the cards.

Big brains don’t help. Not with the stuff that really matters. I feel like all I have is tricks and illusions, impressive but ultimately just smoke and mirrors.

I’m not smart. I’m just clever. And cleverness is almost always futile.

That’s why the metaphor of the wizard keeps coming back to me. In D&D, the wizard is very powerful, but also very weak, and so they have to be supported and protected by the stronger and more capable characters.

Well I take it to the extreme in that I am not just physically weak but my vast powers are kind of hard to tap into because of my mental and physical issues.

So I am a wizard without spells, or at least, I have been for a long time.

For most of my life, all I have had to show the world was my vast potential.

God I hate that word.