Well, once more I forgot that this tablet isn’t on Shaw Open yet, and so I am once more sans Internet. Life for the absentminded truly is a comedy of errors.

Ha ha…ha.

Oh well. It is a lovely day and I am feeling good. Tried waiting for the bus but I got too impatient (and, not unrelatedly, hungry) for that shit.

It’s only two blocks, for fuck’s sake.

And that is the kind of thinking I need to encourage and reinforce in myself if i am to grow. For far, FAR too long, I have been too small on the inside, so small that the smallest of things became insurmountable obstacles.

But i am a man, not a microbe! And my perspective, not to mention my entire table of values, needs to grow and change to accommodate that fact.

I need to push some fucking envelopes in my life. Or at least nudge them a little . There is great wisdom in pushing things as far as they can go.

Because then you know how far they can go, and can set your limits just a little inside it. This gives you a far freer and more open life, free of unnecessarily restrictive limitations.

Everyone lives in a cage, but some cages are far, far bigger. And nicer.

So I want to learn to wander. Explore. Have ideas and follow them to see where they go. I have been a barnacle for far too long, and it’s time I unstuck myself.

And I say this knowing I will get hurt.So what? It’s just pain. It comes, it goes, and when it is gone, you’ve learned something.

Something along the lines of “don’t do that again”, I suppose.

I have lived under the tyranny of anxiety for far too long.

And in a way, it is my adaptability which is to blame. Whenever I get scared of something, that jagoff in my mind says, “hey, no problem, there are lots of other things to do. We just won’t do the scary thing. Ever.”

Not hard to see how enough of that shit can turn one into an invalid. The “never ever” list gets longer and longer, and the items get bigger and bigger, until you might as well be chained to the fucking wall.

Since I was in my early teens, I have had this strange relationship with windows and doors. ( Don’t worry, this WILL connect.) I would stare at windows and imagine climbing out of them. I would stare at doors and imagine them exploding outwards. I don’t know how many times I stared at the front door of my childhood home and pictured it being blown away.

But the doors weren’t locked. The windows didn’t lead to some magical new realm where my life would be so much better.

It was the walls inside I wanted to escape. Where is my door to that escape? Where is the window to climb out of so I can escape the tiny stifling constricting cage within?

I keep hitting the ESC key, but I’m still here.

Was good to finish “The silence speaks” last night. Hard, but good. That last chapter is over 1500 words long, and I started crying at around word 200. I was bawling my eyes out by the time I was done. I had to stop a half dozen times to gather myself together before resuming writing. It was a hell of a trip.

As usual, I feel vaguely dirty and ashamed after writing tear-jerking tragedy. Like I just took a big dump on a sheet of paper then waved it around for all the world to see. Like I am making some kind of grotesque spectacle of myself and everyone feels embarrassed for me and wished I would just stop and go away.

Okay, that last bit happens to me a lot, actually. Tragedy or no.

Of course, there is no logical reason for me to be any more ashamed of writing tear-jerking tragedy than anyone else. The emotion is genuine. Those were not crocodile tears I cried. And tragedy is a powerful form of catharsis. Women get that.

That’s why women willingly go to movies that they know will be very, very sad. They know it will make them feel better in the long rung. They’re smart like that. Men, you have to trick.

So my feelings of guilt are not logical and have everything to do with my own emotions and my own process. To me, writing that sort of thing is (sorry if this grosses you out) an act of elimination. A lot of my own deep emotions end up on that page, and I guess it says a lot about me and my problems that I am then deeply ashamed of the result.

Like I am not supposed to have those kinds of emotions. Maybe some of that bad male programming sank in after all. I feel like tears and pain are something to be ashamed of and kept inside, in the dark.

Well that’s pretty fucking stupid. Crying is a vital part of our emotional coping mechanisms. It’s how we let emotions out. Without crying, things build up inside to the point where they squeeze you to death.

Then you explode like Mister Creosote. Well, not literally, thank goodness. But in some way. Anger, depression, anxiety, you name it. That emotional energy has to be burned, so burned it shall be.

Crying, to me, seems a lot better than the other options.

But it’s still hard. That’s why I need media to provide the stimulus. Ever since I was a boy with the unfortunate tendency to cry when he was angry (TOTALLY bully bait), the crying part of me has been deeply suppressed, no matter how sad I got.

Which is, in and of itself, extremely sad.

So I don’t know. Maybe I will learn and grow from my experience writing that last chapter and be able to access that part of myself more. Or maybe I will have to write a lot more tear-jerking tragedies before that pump is fully primed.

Or maybe I will cry on the page until I am all done.

It’s a lot easier to deal with rage than grief and sorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.