Today was a Friday, and thus, a therapy day.

The session was not particularly productive, although my therapist did remind me that it is high time we got back to dealing with my anger and my family and my anger at my family.

It is the most difficult, and most productive, subject for me to deal with. I have successfully kept him distracted for nearly a year (I am a genius at smoke and mirrors and misdirection) but he is right, that is the really deep rich fertile pain and I should be trying to deal with it.

It hurts just to admit how angry I am at my family for how I was treated growing up. I was a fragile kid, and they crushed me with their indifference and their casual neglect and their lack of interest in me.

My family role was to disappear. Once my mother went back to work and my siblings were all in school, I went from being the wunderkind to being an irritation, like a once prized pet that has lost its novelty value and is now ignored, neglected, and even resented by the people who once loved it.

And the thing is, there is no one person to blame. It was the family culture as a whole. Everybody treated me like that. It was okay if we were just sitting around talking. I was allowed to speak. But there was no question of including me in things. I was useless, after all, and should be glad for anything I got.

So I was an isolated child despite being part of a household of six. Even if I was present, I was not truly included. I was an outsider in my own family, always feeling like I was on the verge of being left behind and had to tun to keep up, and try not to be noticed, because to be noticed was to remind them I was still there and they hated that.

And I made myself easy to ignore, that is the thing. Early on, I mastered giving them the appropriately reassuring responses when they happened to think to ask how I was. I knew the score. I knew they just wanted me to say everything was fine so they could go back to forgetting I exist. I knew that any other response, like for instance telling them about the nightmare that was the schoolyard for me. was out of the question.

If I had told them about my problems, they would have just blinked as though awakening from a dream, the dream where I did not exist, and looked confused and irritated about it to boot. Then they would have done whatever got them out of the conversation the fastest, and gone back to their happy fantasy land where I did not exist and did not matter again.

And I know that if I confronted them about it now, they would claim they do not remember doing that to me. And of course that is true. What is the point of ignoring me if they were going to remember they ignored me? The idea was to forget that I was even there. That means not paying any attention to me, and if you don’t pay attention to something, you don’t remember it.

You can’t have video of something if you never point your camera at it, after all.

And that was just not fair. It wasn’t right. I was a fragile, sensitive kid and I internalized this neglect completely. I still have a lot of trouble imagining that I matter. To the world, to others, to myself. Despite all evidence to the contrary, a part of me still feels like I am completely worthless, unworthy, illegitimate, and inconsequential.

It is very upsetting to realize that one cannot help but believe, or at least feel, something that one knows to be absiolutely untrue. Lots of people like and value me. I have loads of talent and wit to offer the world. I know damned well that I can be extremely likable and personable.

But somehow, that does not truly penetrate all the frost and filth caked around my heart. Not yet. I am doing my best to burn bright and hot so I can melt all that nasty dirty ice off of my poor broken heart, but it takes time.

And it is hard to be patient about one’s release from emotional jail. Part of me wants so badly to run free and wild that it drives me crazy, and that part of me is very impatient with this slow thawing process.

But I can’t just make it happen. This is not a riddle or a puzzle where once I know the answer, the door just magically opens. This is real emotional work, the processing and reprocessing of emotion, and that takes time, effort, energy, and above all, a lot of goddamned patience.

All I can do is convalesce. Like physical healing, when you are mentally ill, sometimes all you can do is do the things that make you feel healthier and wait for the mind to heal itself, without meddling from your manic monkey mind screwing things up.

And that is so hard for me. I am used to attacking problems with this big ole brain of mind and either just plain crushing them with its strength or prying it open via analysis, or if those don’t work, picking the lock with my cleverness.

Just plain leaving it alone is very hard. It is like not scratching an itch, or picking a scab. You know that it is what is needed in order to speed your healing, but it is so tempting to say screw that and choose instant relief instead.

I keep trying to zero out back to “all I have to do is be myself and try to make myself happy” but my deep intellectual restlessness makes that a tough sell.

With patience, I hope I will eventually redirect that restlessness into something productive, or at least interesting.

Wish me luck, folks. See you tomorrow!