(We will get back to Bear and his talking parasite tomorrow. )

After finishing the blog entry entitled Afraid Of My Own Shadow, I realized that I had wandered quite far afield of my original intention for that blog entry, and so I will take another crack at it now.

I got some of it, namely the fear of the dark and nearly sociopathic side of me that is always lurking beneath the surface of my consciousness. Everyone is a little afraid of their dark side, I suppose, but for me, it is accelerated by my general mental instability and lack of cohesive identity structure.

So the dark things seem more possible to me than to saner folk.

But the other half of the equation is the feeling of latent power in my mind. I have realized that I could do great harm to others with my powerful brain and its ease with understanding what makes other people tick, as well as my general charisma and power of personality.

There is a vision of a version of myself that haunts me. In it, I am a manipulative, smooth talking, capricious creep who hides his cold hard misanthropy under sunny smiles and charming words, and who goes through the world ripping people off for his own benefit, or just fucking with their heads for his own amusement.

The kind of person who is always on the move, so that he never has to face the consequences of his actions, and who gives the appearance of spreading sunshine and happiness wherever he goes, but in the cold light of day, everyone’s wallets are missing, as is the good silverware and all the jewelry, and two couples aren’t talking to each other any more because I seduced a member from each of them, and a person who was fine is now filled with doubt about existence, and everyone feels awful.

And I am somewhere far away, laughing at their misfortune and counting the money I got from selling their stuff.

This may seem ridiculous to those who know me as I am, a sweet, sensitive, funny fellow, but that version of me is very possible. If this vision of a possibility does me any good, it reminds me that the likes of me has to be ever vigilant of how they use their gifts, and to make sure that they, in essence, stay good.

This is, perhaps, why I have always been strongly drawn to stories about people coping with new-found power. I fear my own power, and so stories about people coping with theirs (often in the form of superpowers) are both cathartic and educational.

I really want to know how to deal with all this power. I think my fear of it is part of what keeps me so locked up within myself. I have had the feeling of being a gentle giant amongst very fragile people for as long as I can remember. As a kid way, way smarter than those around you, you get this feeling that in order to stay part of humanity at all, you have to be very, very, very careful with those around you, or you will end up hurting them.

Only recently has it occurred to me that these fears might well be wildly exaggerated. People are not, in fact, made of glass, and I can lower my harsh inhibitions and let more of my big, big personality out into the world without worrying that I will end up crushing people as I ascend.

And to be honest, in a very limited and defined way, fuck them. Fuck the people in my way. If the road to my sanity happens to travel over some people’s toes, I will not let that stop me. They will recover. I need to grow.

I will, like a good Utilitarian, minimize the harm to others whenever I can. The difference is that I now consider myself to have a utility value of more than zero, and therefore my happiness can, in some circumstances, justify harm to others.

Things that benefit me have real value. I have been living my life as though that were not true, as those I was a strange void in the world of the greatest good for the greatest number. Someone for whom absolutely everyone else came first.

Given the nature of my childhood, this is not surprising. That is exactly how the universe of my childhood worked. I was the unwanted guest who couldn’t leave, and I felt guilty just for being alive, and so I learned to self-minimize and try to make myself the lightest unwanted burden I could.

That is a terrible way to live. No wonder I have such an unhealthily low sense of self and why self-worth is so hard to acquire regardless of the evidence.

I have spent my entire life trying to disappear.

I have even daydreamed about how great it would be to be able to just disappear for a while. Just stop existing for a while and thus be free of this sense of total illegitimacy.

There, family. I finally disappeared completely. Happy now? The Mistake has been corrected. The unwanted child is gone forever. You can all heave a sigh of relief at not having that annoying stranger around any more. You can go back to what it was like before I showed up unexpected and unwanted.

Sure, you will pretend to be sad. But deep down, you will be glad I am gone. The unwanted pet ran away and died, and you can enjoy life without it now.

This is honestly how a very large and unhealthy part of me thinks. It is very hard for me to imagine that people actually want me around, that they value me and would miss me if I was not around.

The dark, diseased, depressed part of me insists that nobody likes me, they just humour me out of pity, and everyone would always be better off without me around.

In fact, they would be greatly relieved if I went away forever.

The sane part of my mind knows that this is not true, that all evidence points to the opposite conclusion, and that I have nothing to be ashamed of.

But that part is not the majority, not yet. It is in control, thank God, but it is not the majority.

And that is the shadow I fear.