The language of slugs would be sluggish, and that’s how I feel right now.

I am going to stay calm about it, though, and remind myself that I know such things blow over eventually. It’s just a matter of waiting for it to blow over.

I will probably need more sleep before it does, though.

After a long but comfortable hiatus, I am back to putting together my portfolio. It’s impressive. I have forty short stories in it. And most of them are pretty damned good, if I say so myself.

It says something about depression that I keep having to remind myself that I might actually be good at this whole writing thing. If you asked me, I would say I was pretty good. But like I have said many times before, there’s a big difference between knowing the right answer and actually believing it.

And just like that, we are back to my problem with psychologically integrating my high IQ and whatnot. All I can say is that I am working on it. There are times when I feel like I am very smart and talented, and those periods are lasting a little longer every day.

The problem is that if I truly believed in myself like that, I would have to end up a great deal more egotistical. There’s just no way around it. Every bit of social and genetic programming I have tells me that if you are a highly intelligent and talented person, you should have a big ego. You should go around feeling like you are better than other people.

And I don’t like that. I am egalitarian to the core. So right now, I am trying to dream up a version of myself that is self-confident and who believes in himself, but also remembers that in many ways he is a goofy and clueless person and therefore should not get too carried away.

I am still in the unstable beginning of that process and it’s rough going. It makes me feel very unstable, and I hate that. But I have been a stable nothing for a long time.

There is no change without instability. To jump even the smallest of gaps, there has to be a moment when you don’t have both feet on the ground. And even that is a leap of faith.

Faith. That’s a whole kettle of fish itself. Maybe what people really get out of religion is the ability to have faith… to believe without need of proof. To believe first, before the question is even asked.

And sure, it’s easy for us intellectual atheist types to roll our eyes when that kind of belief causes people to bury their heads in the sand and deny evidence in order to preserve belief. But what else does that faith do for the person? What is it they are really protecting?

Maybe we atheists are secretly jealous of the meaning, purpose, and security the faithful draw from their ability to have faith in life and in themselves.

Maybe we wish we could do that too.

The thing is, I don’t know if it is possible for me to acquire faith at the age of 42. It certainly isn’t possible to get it via rational means. You can’t reason yourself into faith. Faith is a priori to reason. By its very nature, faith is deeply emotional and involves parts of the psyche far deeper than the glimmer on the surface of the water that is reason.

Yup. Water imagery.

For someone like me, the acquisition of faith would probably require some kind of emotional crisis, whether from without or from within, that melts down and breaks open the shiny bright structures of reason and lets the true self emerge, and rebuild things in a way that better suits it.

It seems absurd that it would take something that severe to truly heal me. But this exoskeleton built of logic and knowledge and powered by intellect has kept me going over the years, but it’s still a cage. It’s still too small a space to allow for any serious personal growth.

And lately I have become acutely aware of this. I long for escape. I wish I could just shed my skin like a snake so I could make room for the real, adult, fully realized version of me. I know that there is a strong and healthy version of me inside me, straining to get out, longing to be free.

But the path out goes directly into the dark heart of the forest, far away from the bright cold light of the known and the knowable. And that means a leap of faith is needed.

Reason and knowledge, at least how I practice it, is contiguous. It all fits together like nth-dimensional LEGO, and there is a great comfort to that. It makes you feel like you are in control and in command and that your mental armor has no chinks in it. You grow accustomed to that kind of inner life, and if you are wounded and unstable like me, you become highly dependent on it.

To go outside it seems impossible, or at least, unthinkable. You can even convince yourself that nothing exists outside this tight, fast, glittering world of yours.

But that just leaves you puzzled by how so much of your life just doesn’t make sense. The deep forest of emotion still exists even if you deny it completely.

so I have to take that leap out of the contiguous body of my internal model of the world and enter the realm of deep, primal emotion that lies beneath the surface of the waves.

Who would I be if I didn’t have this enormous intellect, I ask myself. Surely there is more to me than an outsized brain. What’s the rest of me like? Who am I really?

Exactly who am I as a human being, naked before the world without my armor?

I am determined to find out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.