Wow, what a whiz bang title, eh?

Poor Bear. I am thinking that I will not get back to him and his new friend until I get into the habit of writing twice a day instead of just this once, and that is not going to happen until after the convention.

Right, the convention. That is what gave me the idea of somewhere to go with tonight’s blog entry. There is a conflict within me that I assume is not present in mentally healthy people, and I want to talk about it.

See, I am really looking forward to this convention. Conventions are always tons of fun, and I thrive there. Being in a world, however temporary, of fellow freaky nerdy types is amazing for soothing the soul and making me feel free.

And a furry convention, even more so. I don’t talk much about the furry community and my furry nature here on this blog because it is not exactly a subject of universal appeal and part of me wants to keep that side of me somewhat walled off so that it will not become some sort of absurd impediment to a future career in the non-furry world.

But furries are my people, in some ways even more so than the nerds at V-con. Of course, it helps that all furries are nerds, more or less. so it is not like I have to leave the nerd world behind in order to hang with the fuzzies.

Furry is its own weird little world, but that world is a subset of larger nerd-dom. We are just a specialized form of nerd, one that is pretty low on the totem pole due to our pro-sex attitudes and openness.

We are, therefore, the nerds of nerds. Someone for them to look down on. This must make them so happy.

“Sure, I had a full Klingon wedding, slip Elvish words into everyday conversation, and violently shat myself when I had a chance encounter with DeForest Kelly…. but at least I’m not one of those furries! ”

This means that when I am hanging with the fuzzies, I feel an order of magnitude less inhibited and guarded then when I am hanging with larger fandom, where in turn I feel another order of magnitude calmer than when I am in the mundane world.

I am just a delicate little hothouse flower, when you really look at it.

So to make a long story short (TOO LATE!), I am really looking forward to this convention.

I am also, at the same time, absolutely terrified of it and don’t want to go.

This always happens to me when I am going to leave the safety of the apartment and go into the big ol world. The degree of the effect is proportionate to the unfamiliarity of the destination.

For instance, when I was first going to see my therapist, my anxiety level was extremely high. Unfamiliar environment, authority figure, the feeling that everyone hated me, difficulty with relatively simple tasks due to overwhelming panic… I remember it well, even though it feels like it happened to someone else now.

What was I so scared of?

But now, I am completely comfortable there. I don’t get pre-departure jitters any more, or if I do, they are so minor that they can’t be detected against the baseline level of my mental disturbance.

Same with the restaurants we go to. Admittedly, being with my friends is a big help with anxiety period, but a new place would stimulate more anxiety than the two we alternate between.

But you take something very big like a convention, where I will be out of the house for four days, entirely divorced from my sustaining (and entrapping) hyper-predictable home life, and thrust into a situation absolutely jam packed with people I don’t know in an environment entirely uncontrolled and chaotic by the standards of my fears.

So while I am looking forward to it, I am not feeling excited about it. Instead, I have the usual enormous icy block of fear and reluctance to work through before I set out.

This happens to me all the time. Any time I am contemplating a move outside my comfort zone, my emotional state is overwhelmed by a powerful anti-action reaction and I have to work through it in order to get anywhere.

And it’s not easy. It takes a real effort of will to contain the panic and wait for it to fade, as it always does.

It takes very good metaconscious control to remember that your feelings will change if you give them a chance. If I simply did what my emotions told me, I would go nowhere. I would be the sort of person who is always standing people up or cancelling meetups at the last minute or otherwise being very wishy washy and flaky.

Luckily, I am not like that. I would find such behaviour unacceptable in myself. I believe too strongly in keeping my word and being responsible for the foreseeable consequences of my actions to be like that.

But that still leaves me with a burden to bear, a price to pay, for every step outside my bright tight little safety circle. I will always have to struggle through the icy sticky swamp of my mental illness to get anywhere.

It takes me more willpower to go to a convention than most people use all year.

No wonder I have become such a top-down kind of person, with the intellect firmly in control to the point where I smother all the feelings inside that would inspire and motivate me.

I have had to be that way just to get anything done. People say you should just do what you feel, but I think those people have some very naive blinkers on when they imagine things your feelings might want you to do.

Because I have some very dark feelings mixed in with the good ones, and if I acted on those, I would be a horrible person.

Plus, a lot of what I want to do costs money, and while that is more possible now than it has been before, I am still highly restricted in my options.

For the life of me, I can’t tell where I end and the cage begins.

See you at the convention, folks.