Therapy today. It helped me bring together a few of the strands of thought that I have been working on lately.

Yesterday, I was mad at the people in my film group for not noticing me and acting like I don’t exist and so forth and so on.

I’ve also discussed how good I am at hiding my problems from the world and how, in general, the message I send out to the world is “I’m fine!”.

It occurred to me in therapy today that these two things might be connected.

Due to my acute social anxiety, most of the time, I go around cloaked. I fade into the background terrified of being noticed and having my envelope of silent anonymity shattered. I even feel that way at home sometimes. Decloaking type events have to be planned well in advance so that I can be ready to let my guard down. It’s the sort of thing that takes a lot of emotional preparation on my part.

Having it happen suddenly is absolutely out of the question.

And the irony is that it’s not like I am bad at open social interaction. I can be quite dynamic and charming and witty in the right milieu.But the cringing and skulking habits run deep, and on a deep level I still feel like my only hope for safety is to pass unnoticed.

And then…. and then I sit there and bitterly complain that nobody notices me, people treat me like I don’t exist, and nobody cares about my deep pain, isolation, and loneliness.

Well they can’t care about what they don’t see! I do such a skillful job of hiding that I can’t very well fault people for not seeing through my brilliant disguise.

No, I’m not going to embed the video for that song. Google it yourself.

So in that sense, it’s my own fault that I got the shaft yesterday in film group. I hide most of the time. It’s a reflex, like a chameleon changing colors. If I want to really shine in the world, I am going to have to learn to come out of my shell and be emotionally present in the world instead of peering at it through a thick one way mirror.

So the question becomes : how to stop hiding.

It’s a tricky one because the answer is clearly not going to be some rational “this one weird trick will end your social isolation reflex forever” type thing. I do it because I don’t feel safe. And one of the reasons I don’t feel safe is because I am in so much pain from my freaking social isolation.

It’s not quite a Catch-22, but it’s close. A Catch-21. Or at least a Catch-20.

It almost makes me want to dabble in illegal drugs. If I could artificially lower my defenses in a controlled manner, I theoretically could get some of the positive social input I would need to feel safe and that might help me heal.

But that would be a tricky proposition, because whatever drug I used might also interfere with my ability to process the necessary emotions to make it stick, and so instead of becoming a saner person I would end up a “social drinker” or its equivalent.

And then I would slide right into addiction. I know this for a rock solid fact. Give me a way to escape my emotions and I will be using it all the fucking time.  So I don’t go there.

Besides, I wouldn’t need any illegal drugs, seeing as pot is practically legal here. I might try pot for that, seeing as it is not physically addictive and it doesn’t exactly produce euphoria, and has no depressant effect.

It just makes you feel pretty groovy for a while. That might be psychologically addictive, but it’s not like you can OD on pot. It’s not like pot destroys your liver or your lungs.

Worst case scenario, it just turns you into a giggly dumbass with no ambition. That’s not a desirable state – I have been useless and directionless and in the doldrums for too long.

But if it helped me cope… why the fuck not?

Anyhow, the point is, I have a bigger problem than my petty bitterness. I am the otter of my own fate, however unwittingly, and nothing is going to change until I resolve the conflict between wanting to be noticed and wanting to be invisible.

If I can get a hold of myself, calm my nerves, steady myself, and go out into the world with shields down and energy up, I might be able to bring some springtime sunshine and some rains to my cracked and craggy frostbitten heart.

That’s the solution. That’s the key to my ice fortress. That’s my route out of the labyrinth I generate specifically to stay lost in because it keeps the outside world at bay. It’s the map I need to step off the endless tundra within into the Southlands of my soul.

I know this now. And God willin’, I will not forget. That will not be easy. This is exactly the sort of thing my mind rejects, buries, and spins up a host of demons and complications and other diversions so I can distract myself long enough to forget where it lies. It does this because this knowledge threatens to upset the existing order.

But I have full conscious knowledge of what I need to do, and armed with that, I can fight. I can use my sledgehammer of rage to crush and destroy the machinery of my self-defeat. I can use the sword of my incisive intellect to cleave my demons in twain. And I can use the sunshine in my soul to melt the ice around my heart and bring a much-delayed spring to the Northlands of my heart.

The world’s really not such a bad place, you know. It’s full of bright, warm things that make your soul feel good. You just have to lower the drawbridge and let them in.

C’mon in, everybody. There’s food and drink and every kind of sex inside.

All I ask is that you don’t break anything.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.