Today was therapy day for me.

And we hit on a lot of very important areas. Like, for instance,. my seemingly eternal bête noire, anger. The thing I least want to talk about.

Ergo, the thing I most need to talk about. That’s how it works, folks. I know that sucks, but it’s still the best way to find out where your real problems lay.

Right where you’re the most uncomfortable!

Anger is a huge issue for me because I don’t know to express it in a healthy, natural way. I don’t know how to let it out in a measured way and at the appropriate times. I don’t know how to stick up for myself without going totally pugilistic about it.

I blame my parents. Both in general, and in this specific case. They were my examples of how to deal with life, and one was angry all the god damned time and the other almost never ever expressed anger in any way.

Guess which one I take after.

I fear my own anger because I don’t want to hurt people. And I know I can hurt people really bad if I cut loose. My therapist says that I should not worry so much about my power to hurt people and that people can handle more than I think they can.

And that is truly excellent advice… for most people. But not for me.

I know that my razor-sharp verbal skills times my force of personality times my deep psychological insights equals a devastating combo that could seriously hurt someone – on a psychological level – if I did not hold myself back.

Especially in person, because then my large presence and just plain largeness also come into effect. Being big amplifies everything.

That’s why you get gentle giants. The giant has to be extremely gentle in order to be nonthreatening to people. He knows how easily he can scare people.

So I can’t just pull out all the stops and let the chips fall where they may. There is no way I am going to let my personal demons loose on the world. Nobody deserves my full wrath unless they are about to kill someone, and even then, only if it would work.

I mean, I gave one of my high school teachers a heart attack by telling him to go fuck himself with the full force of my personality powering its vehemence.

That was a real eye opener. Maybe it was a one-off thing. Maybe he had a bad heart. Maybe he would have had that heart attack no matter what happened to him.

But that’s one of the only times in my life that I have ever put all I had behind what I was saying, and it damn near killed someone. His brother had to substitute for him. I don’t think he ever went back to teaching.

So no. I can’t play by the same rules as everyone else. The stakes are too high. I doubt I would give another person a heart attack, but that incident illustrates the sheer amplitude of my effect on others when I do not control myself.

Now, you know why figuring out how to express my anger in a healthy way is such a delicate calibration for me. It’s like trying to teach an elephant to walk on its toes.

This leaves me with no acceptable outlet for my anger, however, and one definition of depression is anger expressed inward – in other words, taking it out on yourself.

So while I sometimes wonder what I can do to get this brutal and unforgiving self-judgement that looks down on me (with eyes made of suns whose light burns me) to lay off me for a while, deep down I already know.

Take its anger away by expressing it.

My therapist once suggested I try to put it into my writing. And that sounds good on paper (so to speak). I certainly have all the requisite skills, and a lot of repressed anger to express. I would not run out of fuel any time soon.

But the truth is, I am terrified of the places such writing would take me. I really don’t want to go there. I’m afraid that I wouldn’t know who I am any more because I would be lost in the rapture of catharsis and the pleasure of the unharnessed id given full expression.

Plus, any writing produced in such a way would be so goddamned dark and angry that it would make Clive Barker look like A..A. Milne. I don’t know what exactly it would be about, but there would be metaphorical and literal acts of cannibalism, acts of perfect sadism, people being destroyed by having their darkest dreams come true, and a lot of harsh, uncompromising moral interplay.

So, ya know, a real fun time for all.

Hmmm. Maybe good ol’ Clive isn’t a bad place to start. He sure was fuck worked out some really dark shit in print, especially before he came out of the closet. Writing that stuff down makes it seem a lot more doable to me. Very interesting.

Coming soon to this space : demons, serial killers, cannibals, rage monsters, and perfectly ordinary seeming people who one day snap.

Of course, that might get in the way of my career as a comedy writer. But I suppose being a rich and famous writer would be awesome regardless of genre.

But I want to make people happy! I want to make them laugh!

I suppose I could write really fucked up yet hilarious horror stories. There has to be a market for that. Even Pratchett has truly scary people as his villains, and he was successful. Maybe people are ready for comedy/horror done my style.

Hmmm. This idea has possibilities now that I have pulled myself through the cognitive roadblock in front of it. This idea actually has a lot of possibilities.

Thanks, folks, for helping me get through this.

After all, if no-one was reading this. I wouldn’t be doing it.

And if I wasn’t doing it…. I would probably still be hyper depressed.

So thank you all. Your readership keeps me going.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.