It’s so hard to express your emotions sometimes.

And from a certain (admittedly naive) point of view, it can seem downright crazy. Why is it so hard to do? You’d think it would be as simple as deciding to do it. And sometimes it is that simple…. but simple isn’t the same as easy.

It’s both tragic and comic to think that there’s all these people in the world, myself strenuously included, walking around in pain and misery simply because they can’t get their emotions out. It’s like the whole world needs an enema.

Especially, I suspect, us Northern European types.

Of course, it’s not as simple as merely deciding to do it. And thank goodness for that. What we suppress by throwing that emotional cutoff switch becomes a part of us, and keeping those emotions suppressed becomes a major part of how we deal with the world.

To simply yank out these building blocks of the mind without thought as to consequence would be to yank a random card out of a house of cards. Odds are, the whole thing is going to come tumbling down, and that is catastrophic to the mind.

That’s what we mean when we say someone had an emotional breakdown. Their psyche simply could not take the strain any more. Despite poetic BS about the infinite vistas of the human mind, our mental resources are just as finite as everything else, and if you have a psyche that can’t vent the pressure in the system caused by a psyche at war with itself, sooner or later, you will pay the price.

I’ve never had an emotional breakdown myself. Or maybe I did, but it just didn’t matter because I was doing nothing with my life as well as going nowhere, so whatever emotional breakdowns I had were private and not all that different from any other day dealing with major depression and anxiety.

But I have never had the classic sort of nervous collapse you see in the media. And honestly, I kind of wish I had, It might actually have been good for me in the long run. Sure, it might have meant some time in an institution, but at least all my repressed emotion would be dumped into my psyche and I would be forced to deal with them.

It would be like rebooting your computer to get rid of a lot of background processes that are slowing your computer down so much that the most basic functions are breaking down. It wouldn’t cure the basic problems that led to the computer getting to such a state, but it would make it a whole lot easier to find them and fix them.

But no. Instead, I just keep going. No matter what.

Because I have no choice. I know that if I fall, there’s nobody to catch me. That has been true for my entire life, or at least, my life after my first day of school. Nobody was watching out for me, nobody was trying to keep me from getting hurt, nobody was there for me if I was sad, nobody was listening to me, and nobody was trying to guide me through life.

And no matter how hard I cried, nobody came.

I still can’t really wrap my mind around the consequences of growing up so completely alone. It’s too wrong to comprehend. And its wrongness is compounded by the fact that this neglect was invisible. I showed no outward signs of illness. At least, none that were severe enough to overcome people’s desperate need to make me go away.

I’m sure at least some of my childhood teachers must have had some idea that there was something wrong with me. That’s why I got a certain degree of official attention in my first three years of school. I was an unusual case, mentally gifted yet far far behind my peers in terms of coordination, fine muscle control, and balance.

But eventually, they stopped caring. I was too hard for them to deal with. So I was left all alone in a world full of people to whom I simply did not matter enough for them to pay attention to me at all.

Sometimes I think that the 1970’s were a terrible time to be a kid.

So you can see (he says, lamely trying to get back on topic), I have a lot of damage that I would love to be able to express. I had a terrible childhood for preventable reasons. That’s trauma heaped upon trauma. It is a terrible way to grow up.

Especially when you are too young and fragile to realize how wrong it all is. I spent a lot of my childhood in a state of utter submission. I was completely powerless and grateful for anything I got, and that was about it.

I knew, on some level, that my life wasn’t like the lives of the other kids in my class. Or like the lives of the people on TV who were my substitute family. But I was too timid to even imagine that there was a way to change that. That it was possible to make my life more like theirs.

I didn’t even grasp that complaining was an option. That’s how emotionally neutered I was. How profound a lack of agency I felt.

When I look back on it, it all seems so…. cold.  I suppose that is what you get when you end up dealing with the world almost entirely through your intellect. I feel like I was deep frozen by the kind of cold you get in interstellar space. Frozen so perfectly that I looked entirely lifelike from the outside, at least at a glance.

And I didn’t get much more than glances.

I was one messed up little kid. I really could have used someone who listened and cared and looked out for me.

But eventually, not even my mother wanted to listen to me any more.

Can you imagine what that does to a kid?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.