snark, v. : to lash out at something or someone with sarcasm and/or wit.

I have been feeling very snarky lately.

And while it’s not fun, I am choosing to look at it as a sign of progress. It means that my deeply suppressed anger and bitterness are surfacing and trying to find a way to express themselves. And by itself, that would not be a problem. Express away.

But of course, it’s not that simple. It wouldn’t be that simple even if I were an average person with average verbal skills. People can hurt one another plenty that way.

But I am heavily armed when it comes to verbal battle and my kind of sarcasm can do a lot more damage to people because it has all my frustration and irritation behind it, which is then being focused by my outsized verbal skills, emphatic insights, and incisive intellect.

So yeah. I pack lasers beams, y’all.

So I have to be extra careful. I don’t want to hurt people. I want them to respect me, not fear me. And I believe in never hurting anyone by accident. That’s my definition of manners. And I hold myself to a very high ideal on that front.

Perhaps too high. Don’t know what to do about that.

On the other hand, I don’t want to outright suppress this urge to be snarky to people. It’s a healthier form of dealing with my anger than burying it in an emotional hole and having it rot there and poison my mood. I might not have a healthy and non-destructive way to express this snarky rage yet, but I am still better off choking back the words than swallowing them and letting them damage me that way.

It’s like having the things Basil Fawlty says under his breath going on in my head.

I will find am acceptable focus, I am sure. Maybe I will start a political rant type vlog. It would help me to get a lot of things off my chest. Or maybe I will finally go through with my plan to join some major forum or find the right Reddit board and unleash my verbal might on some deserving douchebags with odious opinions.

Both would be ways to work out my anger with words. I don’t seem to have the capacity to do it physically. I have tried the whole “beat up a pillow” school of dealing with your anger and it did not help much, just made me feel absurd.

And all the time, I was thinking “But this doesn’t MEAN anything!”.

So apparently my rage requires a living target. Something deep and primal inside of me needs to lash out at the world that has hurt me so much, and that world, as far as I can tell, does not include pillows.

I’ve always gotten along fine with pillows and their kin.

And of course, I know who the villains are in this rage filled world inside me. They’re the bullies who abused me, the teachers who ignored it, the family that made me feel like an unwanted stranger in my own home and who were never there to support me at all, the random people who froze me out and made me feel like I could never belong anywhere, and the list goes on and on.

None of those elements are things I can address now. The teachers are all dead or retired (or both, I suppose). My siblings, I believe, now know how bad I had it back then and how I felt like I wasn’t welcome in my own home. The bullies are, quite frankly, meaningless to me. Of all the guilty parties, they are the ones who cannot justify their actions or deny what they did. I doubt any of them think what they did to me was A-OK. And the random people were just reacting to a very weird and sort of disturbingly pathetic kid who was as hard for them to relate to as they were to me.

I’ve had my own little planet like the Little Prince for a long time, and it sucks.

Much harder to address than my anger is my very deep nurturing deficit. Men are kind of not supposed to want or need nurturing, even gay men. When we do, people lose respect for us entirely.

Especially women, but that’s not exactly an issue for me. But why do you think women mock men for “turning into big babies” when they’re sick? You think they would say that about another woman? Of course not. But when men want someone to nurture them, they get mocked and rejected.

Anyhow, I don’t know what to do about this nurturing deficit of mine. I fear that it is one of my “thirsty dogs”, aka a deep need acquired young that can never be fully fulfilled. It might well be that I could find a person who was willing to look after me in the way I need and even retain the ability to respect and love me at the same time, and it would never be enough for me.

That could lead to a very dark place where people feel like I used them, and then discarded them when they ran out of love to give. And they would not be wrong.

But I have a lot of love to give too. I have a very strong desire to look after people. I would love to have a man in my life whom I could dote upon. I guess my ideal relationship would be two people spoiling the heck out of each other.

That could work with the right man. I am a very giving person. I would give of myself freely and happily to the right man. And all I ask for in return is someone strong to look after me and make me feel safe.

Wow, that is the textbook definition of daddy issues. I am obviously looking for a surrogate father figure. That could lead to… trouble.

Oh well. Better trouble than this endless pit of loneliness and isolation.

Something’s got to break down these walls.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.