Welcome back to Angstville. Wow, it’s like we never really left!

I have realized quite recently that I have been trying to force myself into a certain unrealistic and inhuman mold for a very long time. I can remember, in fact, deciding that I would brutally and mercilessly hold myself to a very strict (and unrealistic) standard of behaviour and otherwise force myself to be the way that my agile and domineering mind dictated I should be.

This was done without mercy, and was based on the assumption that if I forced myself into this mold and held myself there long enough and hard enough, I would have no choice but to become that person.

Call it foot binding of the soul.

And like foot binding, it technically works, but the cost is far too high. You get the shape you wanted, but at the cost of becoming hopelessly crippled. It is an obscenely unnatural thing to do to a person, and the result is a twisted and deformed person who cannot function in society any more.

Boy, does that sound familiar.

So that shell I keep trying to come out of is more like a suit of ill fitting armor (hey, that’s the name of this blog entry) that I have locked myself into assuming that I would just get used to it, but instead, it has left me bent and deformed and unable to function in a normal way.

And what happens if that armor is removed? Well, what happens to any invertebrate deprived of is exoskeleton? After so long in that armored shell, the creature inside is a weak, pink, shriveled worm who cannot function without the support of the armor any more.

And soon, it dies of what I fear the most : exposure.

And there is a word writ large across the bell of my carapace.

The word is : REASON.

I have been strangling myself and freezing myself to death by trying to force my living, breathing, complicated, and fundamentally illogical human self into a dead, sterile, simplistic, and unrealistically logical mold.

And of course, that mold can never truly fit. Like Procrustes, you always end up stretching one part of you or cutting off another in order to make it fit.

Life should be a great deal more ergonomic than that. You cannot live by the cold circuit of life alone. This is what people of Mediterranean and Equatorial cultures understand (finances, not so much).

They understand joy, celebration, passion, and living your emotions openly and fully, be they positive or negative. They celebrate, they grieve, they argue, they love, all with an understanding that all these things are needed in order to be human and that to deny them is to pretend you are a robot, not a human being.

And not a happy robot, either.

You need the inputs of both the hot and cold circuits in order to have a warm, rich, happy life. The cold circuit is the smart circuit, the one that figures things out, the one that restrains us and lets us control ourselves, and without it we would barely be human.

But self-control, as in all things, is good only in moderation. If the cold circuit dominates, you go past self-control, through self-denial, through self-loathing, and all the way into self-destruction.

And I mean that literally. Destruction of self. If your cold circuit goes out of control, it begins ruthlessly suppressing everything from the warm circuit and if that goes deep enough, it destroys the very foundation of identity, the feeling of who you really are, underneath the carapace.

A lot of people in that situation start feeling like they are so empty inside that they must be nobody at all. They are so disconnected from the person insider the armor that they conclude the armor is empty. Nobody home.

But that cannot be true. If you had no self, you would be effectively dead, a puppet with no strings and no puppeteer.If you are a live human being, there is someone in there, and if you feel empty inside, odds are that person is quite cold and lonely and could really use a friend.

“Stop making sense!” is a pop psychology motto that I remember from the pop psych heyday of the 1970s. And for most of my life, I have thought it was just about the dumbest thing I could remember, right up with “love means never having to say you’re sorry. ”

But I think I am starting to get it now. Why should every action be held to an impossible standard of sensibility? Why do you need to be able to explain and defend everything you do? Why impose this unreasonable standard of reason on yourself and make yourself miserable by trying to always be “right”?

And what about that poor abused person locked inside that fortress of logic and self-restraint? What must they think of the world in which they have been forced to live? A world that allows for no humanity, no freedom from judgment, no joy, no warmth, no simple, childlike happiness?

Of course that person is going to conclude that the world is a harsh, cold, unforgiving place. Theirs is, and it is all their own doing! By holding themselves to a harshly inhuman standard and then punishing themselves for the slightest deviation for it, they have become, in effect, their own police state.

Well it is high time for a revolution. The soul needs to be free, and it can only free itself if it casts off the shackles of overweaning reason and learns to just be itself, feathers and all, whatever it may be.

Be irrational sometimes. Be unreasonable when you need to. Forgive yourself your frailty, your imperfection, your inability to meet your unrealistic ideals.

Forgive yours for being human.

Dolly Parton once that said, as near as she could figure, the secret to life was to “discover who you really are and then do it on purpose. ”

And you know, I think she’s right.