Guess what? My  bus pass arrived!

It showed up in yesterday’s mail. That means it took around three weeks to arrive. I mailed my paperwork in at the very end of January, and it showed up on the 18th of February.

Take that, my therapist’s cynicism!

Now very alert fans of this blog will know where I am right now purely by the subject line of this entry.

That’s right, MJB fans. I am comfortably seated at my favorite White Spot, the one at 3 road and Ackroyd, with a chicken caesar wrap (a bit dry)  in front of me, having baptized my shiny new Compass card to get here.

I am quite pleased with myself. When I got the card yesterday, I immediately decided that I was going to “kick myself out of the house” today. Not tomorrow, not the weekend, and definitely not “whenever: TODAY.

It had to be ASAP because for the likes of me, it was quite possible that I would get the card, say “That’s nice”, stick it in my wallet, and never ever use it.

It would become yet another aversion, and so I had to act before the aversve scar tissue could start to form.

I plan to make sure that I do this at least once a week, in order to keep the channel open, so to speak, And I was quite strict with myself in order to get here. I told myself I was going to do it no matter what, no argument, no excuses, just goddamned do it and no back talk, mister!

Thus, I begin the process of becoming the right kind of parent for myself. I never had anyone to make me do things for my own good (not that that would have been easy), and so I could really use some loving strictness in order to counteract my diffuse laziness. Something to make me focus and DO intead of just lurking in the mist.

I have been thinking a lot about that mist lately. I have know for a long time that I generate it myself and use it as my primary defense against the world, like a smokescreen. The world seems less scary from my little cloud, ande its vapours are soothingly numbing.

Thus, I, like most depressives, am addicted to a drug I produce myself.

But while on the faithful 401 bus today, I was pondering my confusion about chaos versus order, how part of me craves order and part of me rebels against it.

As part of that, I was pondering my slobbish lifestyle, and I suddenly realized that I was not merely disinclined to the toil and fuss required in keeping things neat and tidy.

I am actually terrified, with a deep down primal terror way down in the toilet training layer of the brain, of a clean room,and it is totally a fear of what will come OUT of me.

It seems that I use clutter and mess as an externalized version of my numbing, blurring smokescreen, and I have a great and terrible fear of what will happen if I lose it.

But what is it that will COME OUT of me if I make things clean and tidy? I have no idea. Emotions, I presume, not that that narrows it done by much. The physical metaphor is apt : it is like I will vomit up all the bad things I have had to swallow in my life.

Which is an extremely horrifying (and disgusting) thought. I have spent a lifetime trying to keep that stuff in, and hide it (and myself) from the world so nobody would know.

But the more rational, objective, externalized part of my mind knows that what I am talking about is catharsis, MEGAcatharsis, and that is something I believe in. I have no moral obligation to carry all this poisonous garbage inside me, and if I could rid myself of it, I would be far better off in the long run.

So here I stand, on the queasy border between suppression and catharsis, wondering if I have the nerve to stop holding things in and start really letting them out,

The next step could be mighty messy.

But it might just be the only way to get clean,