(Again, sorry Bear. I swear, I will get back to you on your bizarre alien planet soon. It is clear that some time soon, I will have to do two writing sessions a day, one for fiction and one for angst. I will start that on Monday. )

Been thinking about power lately, specifically my own.

The things is, sometimes I am very afraid of myself. There are times when I feel a great darkness welling up inside me, like a Stygian Cthulhuian Leviathan rising to the surface of a deep underground lake with malign intent.

It is this kind of darkness that frightens me. There is a part of me, a frightful cocktail of suppressed rage, fear, and the sheer madness of the cornered rat, and it is capable of anything.

I repeat, it is capable of anything.

It does not care about others. It is a massive ball of pure cold hate that just wants to take, take, take and fuck anyone who gets in the way. It is so cold as to be nearly sociopathic. I suppose it is my reptile brain.

Now I know why it is there and what part of me it represents. A long time ago, when I was a kid, a lot of bad things happened to me and I have never fully dealt with them so they have, in a sense, been preserved in the deep freeze of my deep psyche.

I have psychological wounds that closed but never healed, and most importantly, I was brutalized as a kid and I do not mean that merely in the sense of brutal things happening to me.

I mean that I was made brutal. I was de-civilized. Those painful experiences of bullying and abuse made me revert to a more primitive, animalistic mindset and even though I am, for the most part, a civilized human being with humane values and a deep respect for order and progress, there is a very deep part of me that is absolutely raving mad and ready to tear apart any motherfucker who dares to hurt me in any way ever again.

So far, I do not know how to communicate with that part of me. I can barely get in touch with my poor neglected inner child, let alone the savage crazed beast lurking within him. I have a lot of emotional growth to do before I am fully human, and capable of experiencing the rich mental and emotional tapestry of life.

I know, I know, I seem fully human to everyone who knows me and certainly all the scientific testing known to humanity would verify my status as a member of the species homo sapiens. Yet to me, it is clear that I am not fully human on the inside. I am too cold, too weak, too isolated, too spiritually and emotionally stunted to qualify. I am a place where a person could be, and hopefully will be.

But for now, I am just too dark and cold inside to feel like I am a real person. I do not feel connected to my other human beings on anything but an intellectual level. I do not feel like part of the human race.

It all comes down to trust, in a way. When you are brutalized as a child, you come to see other people as threats first, actual real human beings second. That crazed animal inside you makes trusting others incredibly difficult, and without trust there can be no emotional connection on a human level.

It is a little like being a sociopath, in a way. Even when it is there, I can’t feel the warmth of others. I can be very warm and caring to them, but that does not erase the distance between me and them, at least, not completely.

That distance is made of fear and mistrust. It is a way to protect yourself emotionally by taking a detached, purely intellectual approach to everything, like you are only here to observe and analyze, and so the emotional nature of something can be completely ignored as it is all “data”, and all so very “fascinating”.

And if it was possible to turn into a robot like Mister Data from TNG, that might be enough. But even the most impressively brilliant of us are still human beings. Despite the lies it tells you, your mind cannot actually transcend your humanity.

All it can do is shove it into a deep dark closet and leave it to rot while it plugs its ears and says “la la la, I can’t hear you in there. ”

Damn, I wandered away from the point again.

My own shadow, that’s what I was talking about. One of the true fears underneath its power is of having to deal with life directly, without that distancing. To deal with life in realtime, as it happens, sans intellectualization.

For someone who exerts power of the world via their intellect, the spiritual exhortation to “be here now” sounds like the worst thing that could possibly happen. Being in the moment scares the hell out of us and makes us feel naked and vulnerable, having to just be without being able to predict and control the outcomes via our mighty intellects.

Only by living in an intellectual time bubble where everything is processed to within an inch of its life by the intellect before it reaches the consciousness can we victims of the icy tower disease feel safe.

Without that delay, we would have to react to situations via emotions and instinct, and we associate that with, and I am not exaggerating here, annihilation. Oblivion. The madness of the void. The ultimate horror.

Because if you base your sense of identity almost entirely around your intellect, then who are you without it?

You would have to deal with life like others do, and that leads to loss of control and “mistakes”. That is clearly unacceptable. Better to stay in your spaceship and view the world from its protection.

Even if it means starving to death.

We are a complicated breed.