Well, I have been rocking the positive vibe pretty hard lately, but sadly, this is the part of the cycle where I switch polarities and talk about the negative things in order to exorcise them from my soul.

For instance… it has occurred to me recently that I do not know what it is like to be truly close to someone. Not to the degree I see in others. People talk about feeling really close to their family or their friends, feeling like the people they love will always be there for them and vice versa, and feeling a closeness that I just do not understand.

And I know that I can’t blame my isolated childhood for all of that. A lot of it was me. I dealt with my pain by erecting a huge, thick, but see-through wall around myself and locking myself away. It was a wall of analysis, intellect, and logic, and it gave me a way to deal with the world but it came at a terrible price : I was very hard to reach.

I mean, that was the whole point of the wall : to keep out the people who wanted to hurt me. It’s quite the trick to be able to pull back from life and observe it with the detachment and calm of a Vulcan sociology.

Really, it’s all quite fascinating.

But the wall had to be invisible. That way, I could fool myself into forgetting that it was there. Wall? What wall? I’m right here in front of you. I don’t see a wall. Do you?

So there I was, behind that wall, and it made me both distant and clumsy. The isolated nature of my childhood did not help, but how much of that isolation came from my inability to open my heart to people and let them in? I had a number of people try to make friends with me when I was in elementary school, but it never worked out. I used to think that meant there was something wrong with those people, but I know the truth now.

I was the problem. I had my rigid little inner world and I simply could not just relax and feel people. I was always just looking at them across my invisible moat, and the connection they sought with me was just not there.

I feel bad for those people now. They must have wondered what they were doing wrong, and I assume they felt like I had rejected them. And I had, without knowing it. Some of them put a fair amount of effort into trying to connect with me, but I was just not capable of picking up the receiver.

Even with the friends I did eventually get in junior high, there was always those high, high walls between me and them. I was strange and awkward and wimpy and distant. I could never really relax with them. I was on the inside looking out.

How much of the social awkwardness of nerds can be traced to simply being too intellectual to connect? And could we, knowing this, come up with some kind of bridge for us to cross so we can finally understand what we are doing?

I am not sure what it was like to be around me back then. As now, I am quite comfortable in intellectual discussions of all types. I enjoyed talking about comics, D&D, television, and so forth.

But I was too locked away in my ice fortress to see the point in a lot of the things that my friends wanted to do. I understand it all now, although it is, perforce, a cold intellectual understanding. They were just being normal teens who wanted to go where the other teenagers went, and do what their instincts told them to do : learn to integrate with society, develop a separate identity from their parents, and maybe even give sex and romance a try.

But nerds and other intellectual types interpret instincts as noise, and filter them out. Only the products of the intellect can be trusted because they can be fulled understood and verified, unlike those murky sourceless mysterious instincts and purely emotional responses.

So we build our own cages, we nerds, and stay in them for the rest of our lives. Our approach yields far too many legit awards in terms of the all the fertile potentials of abstract thought. This big brawny brain of mine had a lot of power, especially in this modern world where the products of intellect are increasingly more important that products of muscle and money.

It’s just that intellect and creativity are not enough. You need spiritual health before you can be happy, and that involves a lot of what we are most uncomfortable with, namely dealing directly with our own emotions.

We fear that dark forest of emotion and instinct more than we fear all the bullies and loud extroverts in the world combined. What we especially fear is going in there without the blazing light of intellectual analysis and the protective armor of detachment to protect them.

To step into the darkness, the true deep darkness, is the scariest thing imaginable to us, and it is quite easy for us to convince ourselves that there is nothing in there that we need and therefore there is no reason we would ever go in there.

And in time, we can fool ourselves into forgetting it is even there, leaving us thinking “something is wrong, but I can’t imagine what it might be”.

It’s easy to find. Just look into the corner of your mind that you fear the most, and see the beast that has grown fat and strong from your neglect. Feel how it’s hand on your head has kept you from turning to look at it until now. See how it has been bullying you and getting away with it because you refuse to face the problem.

And when you have taken full measure of the beast, when you truly know it as much as it knows you, grab your sword and swing for its heart, because it is YOUR beast, you own it, it is part of you, and you can kill it any time you want.

And once it is dead, you will be free, and you can finally find out who you truly are.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!