Therapy day, angst, blah.

I have been thinking about inner growth lately. I long for it. I am so very tired of being small and puny on the inside. I want to be big and strong and filled with vitality.

And I am growing up inside, albeit not as fast as my impatient soul would like. My therapist and I talked about how I am going to have to parent myself in order to grow, and give myself the involved and caring childhood I never had.

Part of me, a very primitive and childlike part, resists that idea purely out of spite. It thinks I am owed one childhood from somebody and if I finish raising myself, someone, my parents I guess, “got away with it”.

This is not exactly healthy thinking, and holding on to that attitude is a major growth blocker. So often it is this kind of think which gets in the way of healing. Unfinished arguments left hanging in the air for decades, even after one half of them is long dead and gone. I never thought of myself as that kind of person, but then again, who am I to blow against the wind?

Part of my recovery is the slow dissolution of any illusions I might have had of sainthood. I have had a pretense of being above petty human emotion for a long time, but I don’t believe in pretending not to be human (irony!) and so that bullshit has got to go. I am giving up being apart from humanity, inasmuch as that is possible at this stage in the game, and that means I can’t pretend to be above it all any more.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not abandoning my high ideals. I am just admitting to myself that there is a lot of other, less pleasant stuff in there too, and I am going to have to deal with it.

The path to spiritual perfect has always led right through the gutters and sewers of the soul. You do not become clean by merely pretending that you are. You have to get rid of all the ugly shit inside you first.

Yes, I am talking about taking a great big spiritual crap.

I’ve felt angry lately. Nothing in particular bothering me, just that part of the emotional digestion cycle I guess. Enough unexpressed anger and irritation built up in my system to boil up to the surface and be way, way too easy to access for comfort. I really feel like being snappish and snarky with people. I’m like a dog looking for someone to bite.

Clearly, the pro-social and responsible thing to do is to either stifle that shit (probably unhealthy in the long run) or find an appropriate target for it and express it in a constructive way.

To which a voice inside me says “Laaaaaaaame.” I will call this voice my inner teenager. As you all know, I didn’t really have an adolescence in anything but the strictly physical, biological sense. Lately though, I have been dreaming up what my teen years should have been like. Me all snarky with a huge ego and copping a major attitude. Sure, I would have been an asshole, but everyone is an asshole when they are a teenager, at least a little.

Trouble is, you can only get away with acting like a teenager when you are still a teenager. You have the solid support of your parents under you so you can experiment with attitude and such and see what fits you and what gets the results you want. People expect teenagers to be irritating and cut them some slack.

If I acted like that now, I would rapidly find myself friendless and alone, and I am too old to pretend that I don’t need anybody and I can do just fine on my own. I have been on my own before and it damn near destroyed my mind. I suppose if I had done it as a teen, I might have gotten some “bad boy” attention from the ladies (tough luck for them, I’m for the boys) and I guess I would have more or less gotten away with it with no friends to lose.

But now, it would just be sad.

Still, there is definitely a side of me that just wants to tell the whole world to go fuck itself. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck everyone we know, fuck everyone we don’t know. Fuck the world.

Where does this come from? I think I just want to evict all the voices in my head. All the complications, considerations, worries, empathic dangers, and all the other noise blogging up my precious intellectual staging grounds. I am sick and tired of it being so loud in here, and I just want to push it all away so I can find some peace and quiet for once.

Obviously, that is way more about my own fucked up issues than it is about what the things I would be pushing away are actually doing. Nobody besides me knows, or even could know, about all the complicated stuff always whizzing about this skull of mine, so it makes no sense to try to hold the world accountable for not being able to read my mind.

I do wonder about other people sometimes, though. Clearly, there are a lot of people in the world who act on and/or express all or most of their emotions immediately. There is no buffer zone where they decide what to do. They just go with whatever their dominant emotion is at any moment.

And that seems like a terrible way to live to me. Rational choice is kind of important in life. I can’t imagine living life with the brakes off like that.

But sometimes I wonder if, despite how it seems to me, those people are actually happier overall because they express everything in realtime and are able to live in the moment instead of getting twisted around by overintellectualizing repressed emotions and withdrawing from the moment into intellectualism.

Who knows. Perhaps past a certain point of intelligence, you no longer have a choice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.