TMI and/or TRIGGER WARNING : Indirect reference to poop.

Waiting for the bus home. Not exactly well.

Not as bad as earlier, though. Earlier today, shortly after lunch, I felt this sudden wave of anxiety wash over me. It felt like I had built a wall around a lake of anxiety and that wall had suddenly collapsed. Along with that came some fairly bad bowel disturbance…. not painful but vety uncomfortable. And loud.

And…   something else.

Soon I realized I needed to use the toilet. As I got up, the need became more acute. At the same time, I felt this twisting sensation in my lower abdomen, like someone was wringing out my intestines with both hands.

Fearing the worst, I frantically looked all over the bed for signs of an accident. Nothing. Phew.

But after I was done in the bathroom, I discovered that the worst had, indeed, happened. It had just missed the bed and hit the floor.

Not an auspicious start to the day.

I thought about skipping class. But I was feeling somewhat better. So I went. Missed my bus by mere seconds, so
I was 20 mins late. Also not great.

But whatever. Class is over for the day. I will treat myself tenderly tonight and hope to get my system calmed down.

(—)

Back home now, and feeling a lot better since I got some solid zero-out time and a nice hearty meal into me. I still feel a little too squirmy inside, but it’s down to a nuisance level.

So, still on alert, but it’s a minimum alert.

Let’s tackle intellectualization again, shall we?

I understand what happens, and why. By reacting to things with analysis instead of emotion, I can get positive cold emotion (fascination, revelation, ego confirmation) instead of negative hot emotion (fear, helplessness, emotional damage) from any given situation. It’s a terribly clever way to hide from the world and not deal with my emotions at all because it does a very convincing job of convincing me I am dealing with things.

After all, I understand what has happened, I have examined it, filtered out the bullshit and gone straight for the truth at the heart of it, and fitted it into my highly detailed and insightful model of the world and how it works and such.

So much activity! But it’s like those Victorian gentlemen scientists who thought they really understood butterflies when all they had done is study dead ones preserved under glass. I understand so much, and I can congratulate myself on how perceptive and insightful I am, and how I see so much more of the big picture in both scope and detail than other people.

But my butterfly collection is still dead. Nothing in that process is warm or alive or life-affirming. None of it nurtures the soul. In fact, it doesn’t nurture anything at all except for a deep sense of being unreal, the world being unreal, and the nature of my existence being as fragile and temporary as a daydream.

Because the truth of it is, no matter how far my mind might roam, I am still living a very isolated and intellectual existence. School, for obvious reasons, has strict limits to how much it can change that. Especially given that I don’t do anything extracurricular at all. No clubs, no study groups, just class and home.

College is a very intellectual experience, at least for me. Still spending all day feeding my mind and very little else.

So I suppose it makes sense for it to be my first baby step out into the world. But at some point I am going to have to come in from the cold. I need to learn to live. Not how to exist…. how to truly be alive, in the world and in my heart.

Still waiting on Spring. But it’s coming.

So I know what I do and why. Intellectualism is a brilliant dodge for me. But it leaves me with a huge vault of frozen emotions from things I convinced myself I was dealing with, or convinced myself that I would deal with…. later.

You know…. in the Spring. That will be coming any day now. Or maybe it’s already here and I just haven’t felt it yet. I am deeply aware of my need for a stable and reliable source of renewal, but I haven’t found it yet.

But the fundamental cognitive question remains : how do I stop? Or rather, dial it back to a healthy level? It is such a deep and fundamental coping mechanism that I can’t even remember who I was before it was there.

Even before school trauma, I was a brilliant and curious child. Maybe a certain degree of intellectualization is natural for anyone of high IQ, I don’t know. For all I know, the opposite is also true.

But due to my total inability to socially integrate, I was left with no other path. No balancing influence. No foot in the world of healthy interaction. And by the time I could make friends (around grade 6), it was really evident that all the school damage, plus the intellectual gulf between me and my peers, had created a thick barrier between me and others. When I retreated into myself, I left a lot of people behind. My social antenna is broken. In a sea of signal, I receive nothing.

And I am still getting over that. I am all too aware of the barrier that still exists between me and others. I know that, despite how much I love my friends and my family, there are still miles of lunar surface (dark side, no less) that exist between me and them. And even though I know that this gulf is of my own designing, I feel helpless to cross it.

All I can do is continue this slow thaw of mine, and hope that maybe, someday, I won’t need to be numb any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.