Had therapy today, but we didn’t end up covering anything substantial.

And that bothers me. I feel like somehow I have ended up being responsible for keeping therapy on track and digging deep and really getting shit done. I don’t want to chat and I don’t want to end up pontificating either. What I want is more like digging shrapnel out of a carbombing victim than any sort of conversation. I need my therapist to be tough and to push me.

The problem being, of course, that due to this high-falutin’ brain of mine, even my slightest push back and I can blow people to the back wall. I have a very powerful mind and will and personality, and finding someone who can deal with all that and still be able to push back is, perhaps, asking too much of the world.

It underlines my deeper issue with not trusting authority. Not in the sense of being a rebel who can’t stand the idea of someone trying to control them – I mean, that’s true in some ways, but this isn’t that.

No, it’s about not being able to trust authority to do their job. To be there when I need them. To be able to help, like…. at all. To be even remotely reliable. To treat me with respect and to take my concerns seriously, as opposed to just brushing me off to be rid of me. To be able to protect me like it’s supposed to do.

To be worth a damn at all, really.

No secret as to why I have these issues. Authority was never there for me as a kid. Especially after I started school. The teachers did nothing to protect me from the bullying. The administration was equally disinterested (or even supportive) of the constant violence directed at me. I had older siblings but they weren’t around to protect me. Even when they were – like when I was in grade 1 and my brother Dave was in grade 5 – the rigid age/grade stratification kept us apart. I didn’t feel like I was part of their world at all.

And if not their world, and not my parents’ world, and not my friends’ world, what world was I in? Where did I fit in?

Answer : Nowhere at all. And so I wander between walls, seeing much, understanding much, feeling much…. but always as an outsider, not part of the world. Just an observer. Part of me will always be looking for a place where I fit in. Surely somewhere there is a social context for me.

Unless I really am too smart for my own good. And too unique. Too strange. A creature that does not fit into anyone’s taxonomy. A species of one. Things grow strange in the dark, and I have spent most of my life in the darkness.

I think that means I’m some kind of fungus.

I’ve been feeling those long dark cold corridors lately. Or perhaps they are icy canals, and I move through them quietly at the slow and steady pace of a Tunnel of Love ride. Maybe it’s the river Styx. That would be appropriate for pale shadows like myself. Only there is no Elysium or Hades waiting for me. My journey is endless, or at the very least, there’s no end in sight.

And it’s cold and it’s quiet and it’s slow and it’s dead, and I feel trapped there. And yet, I think part of me also finds it soothing. It might well be that these long dark corridors of mine are my depression’s heat sinks, the place my mind retreats into when enough life has seeped through the defenses to threaten my marrow deep frozen state.

And then I would thaw out and then I would wake up and be really alive, and everything would be loud and hot and intense and chaotic and I wouldn’t be able to handle it rationally, I would have to deal with emotionally, without knowing what the “right” answer is, and that’s just plain madness.

Or heaven. That honestly could be the key to my future mental health. Something that would force me to deal with things emotionally despite my hyper-muscular brain trying to reason things out all the time. I feel like that would make me feel very young and free, and yet it doesn’t seem like something I can initiate on my own.

I need the right kind of stimulus to get things moving. In the past, it’s been the right movie or other piece of media coming along when the ice was thin and I was ready to melt down a big chunk of that almighty iceberg inside myself. Sometimes it’s done that by connecting me with the idea of a whole and wholesome life full of good people and happy families.

But more often, it’s been something that has made me very depressed or very scared or super angry – the kind of anger that is categorically different from usual anger because it comes from someplace deeper – or otherwise disturbed my equilibrium so much that I had to find a new one.

The question now, then, is whether or not I have the courage to seek that kind of thing out deliberately. Assuming that’s possible. It’s not like I know what is going to have that effect on me beforehand.

Except that I sorta do. I don’t know what new things will have that effect, but I sure as heck know what things have had that kind of effect on me before. If I was really brave, I would put on my copy of Disney’s The Fox And The Hound and force myself to watch the whole thing in one sitting.

I’ve never done that before. The movie plugs right into my deepest emotional self and I have never watched the thing all in one sitting. So I have avoided watching it because it’s so intense for me.

But maybe that kind of emotional intensity is what I need to override my bad instincts and free up my true id.

Maybe I will do it, maybe not. But if I do… it might be able to do me a lot of good.

But it won’t be much fun getting there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.