Tonight’s entry will not be easy for me. I have a mighty big tooth to pull.

We’ll start with therapy. Yesterday, I had a therapy session with my therapist, Doctor Costin. (Yeah, I know those usually on Friday, but he has a thing. )

And in that session, with his help, I realized something very deep and important about myself. It’s painful, and it’s humiliating, and it’s definitely nothing to be proud of, but having it revealed to me (and now revealing it to you) is a very big step towards recovery for me, so I am very glad for it.

Basically, I never grew up. I am still a child inside. There is no adult side of me. At some point, my emotional and social development simply stopped, and I have been fumbling through life with a child’s soul trapped in an adult body ever since.

Which brings us to Peter Pan. Honestly, I’ve never been a fan. Even when I was very young, I loathed the idea of never growing up. That sounded like a terrible fate to me. Maybe that is part of the adult pressures I felt from being the tacked-on accident kid, always feeling like I had to be more mature and grow up as fast as I could.

But I never liked Peter Pan, Neverland, or the Wild Boys. If it wasn’t for Wendy, I would never have finished the book. As for the Disney movie, it has Tinkerbell, and that helps.

And yet here I am, a child in the body of a 41 year old man. Like a lot of us smarty types, my intellectual advancement masked my lack of development, or at least, it did so well enough to fool all the people in my life, who weren’t really paying attention anyhow. Everyone just assumed everything was fine because that was what was most convenient for them to believe, and I was far too timid (having been burned many times when I tried to get help) to ask for the help I needed myself.

No wonder I can’t stop thinking about my childhood. I’m still there. I never really escaped. Deep inside, I am still the same timid, neurotic, unpopular, abandoned, neglected, emotionally unstable kid that I was back in Parkside Elementary.

A child frozen in time in an orbit around a far too distant star.

No wonder I never really went through the psychosocial elements of puberty. How could I? I wasn’t done being a kid yet. And without friends, I had no social milieu to stimulate me to grow.

Instead, I just stayed locked up inside myself as always. Whatever instincts I had to go explore and grow and get some idea of who I am, like a normal teen, they were nowhere near strong enough to overcome my isolation and depression. Development of any sort other than the physical never stood a chance against that deep in the bone marrow level of cold.

And the thing is, nothing has changed since then. For the two years I went to college, I had at least a chance to develop a set of healthy, positive friends, and that did me a lot of good.

But then my parents pulled the plug on that, and I collapsed back into the depressive hole I had been in when I was in high school, and that is where I lay to this very day.

But enough delineating of the problem. What am I going to do about it? How do I grow up?

Well, the fact that I am writing all this down for the world (okay, like eight people) to see is good. The first step, as they say, is to admit you have a problem. I have brushed up against this truth in this space before, but I always dodged the real truth of it by qualifying it with things like “in some ways” or “it is almost as though” and other such bullshit.

Well it’s time to fess up. I am Peter Pan. I never grew up. My therapist correctly observed that I can’t give myself the love and caring I never got as a kid because that has to come from an adult and I have no inner adult to do it.

I can tell myself “well, it’s too late to get it now, I better pull myself together” all I want, but without healing the child within and somehow catching up on all that development I missed, it ain’t gonna do a goddamned bit of good.

Like I said before, maybe the love, nurturing, protection, attention, understanding, and acceptance I needed as a child and never got is like nutrition, and if you don’t get it when you need it, the damage is irreparable.

There’s some scientific evidence to back that up. Feral children cannot, as far as we know, ever become normal modern humans. Severely abused preschoolers develop things like reactive attachment disorder and have problems throughout their lives taming the savagery inside them.

Nut it can’t be totally hopeless. I’m alive, I’m aware, I can look at myself and try to make changes. I can maybe negotiate some way of gently guiding myself through the process of growing up.

I want to grow up. I really do. Bu even in that, I can tell that it is the desire of a child to embrace the adult world and be part of it. It’s not a mature way of thinking. It’s just a little boy’s dream.

A smart little boy, no doubt, with loads of charm and wit and talent, but deep down in the cellar of the soul where we all really live, underneath all the illusions and delusions and dreams and scenes and masks and tasks, I am just a little kid who never grew up on the inside, and that is a sad and bracing thing to realize about myself.

Hopefully tonight’s little confessional will help change that. Pull one more icicle out of this heart of mine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.