Still trying to clear that creative jam inside me, so here’s the next bucket of unprocess emotion for me to run through the smelter.

Full disclosure : Smelter is a cool word.

Been feeling kind of wretched lately. Feeling poisoned, which is a feeling I know well. I feel toxic and gross and like I need a good full body cleanse to full out all the old gunk and deadwood so I can breathe free for a change.

And I have plenty going on to make me sick. Like my sleep apnea, which is completely untreated, and mt diabetes, which is half (ass) treated.

And I feel so damned tired lately. That’s probably due to the apnea. Funny how smothering in your sleep and having your blood oxygen level plummet and having your lung capacity go down that really makes a fella feel run down.

Weird, but true.

I could go on and on about how bad I am at taking care of myself, but what’s the point? It’s not going to help. I just have to accept that I am a very ill person and the illnesses make it hard to look after myself and that makes the illnesses worse.

I think I underestimate just how fragile I am a lot of the time. I have talked before about how some things are very hard ro me to do and I can’t explain why, so I can’t justify it or make people understand it. I have no choice but to ask people to take my word for it, and show me some mercy as well as the understanding that mental illness makes my world very different than their world and so they should take that into consideration.

I mean, I’m disabled, for fuck’s sake.

But until just now, I have never pondered turning that level of forgiveness on myself. Of telling myself that I get by however I get by with what I have and that’s all I can ever do. Life has dealt me a pretty lousy hand and all I can do is play my cards the best that I can. And that means forgiving myself for being imperfect.

And it’s not like berating myself over my flaws is going to do any good. Quite the opposite, really. The more I do it,. the more I destroy myself inside and the harder it gets to do things right, which leads to still more excoriation of self, and so forth and so on till I have chewed myself down to my current pathetic state.

See, even in trying to talk myself out of my self-destructive patterns, I end up criticizing myself at the end of the paragraph. It’s like a kind of sick, sick addiction to self-destruction. Like I am addicted to the taste of my own flesh.

And to go even deeper, I think this self-destruction also serves the more sinister purpose of destroying any solid structure I try to construct inside me.  There is a side of me that wants order and structure in this flaming maelstrom of a mind, but it is overruled by the very deep and maniacal fear of being caught in the wrong “shape” when a crisis happens and not being able to shift to a form that is right for the situation. That side compels me to maximize flexibility at all times regardless of how much it costs me

I know that all sounds fairly crazy. But it’s how things work for me. My fear of being “trapped” is so strong that it demands I remain in a liquid state, as if Odo from Deep Space Nine got so frightened by something that he just stayed in his bucket most of the time, emerging only in a very fluid, shapeless form, ready to go back to the bucket at the slightest fright.

And the thing is, this formlessness inside me is what lets me be so creative. I can take numerous and splendiforous forms and make all kinds of connections that are a lot less than obvious to others. It serves my powerful intellect as well, because it lets me do my “open the lock by oozing into the lock and turning part of myself into the key” trick.

I know that’s not the easiest explanation to grasp, but the sad truth is, it’s the best one I have come up with yet.

But the second I have done one of my tricks, I go right back to being fluid. No structure remains because of that rabid animal fear of being committed to the wrong shape. The side of me that loves to build sandcastles is constantly having those sandcastles washed away by the crashing waves.

Clearly, the root of my problem is this deep and terrible fear of being in the wrong shape. I have to talk it down out of its tree and calm it down and tell it that because its so flexible. it can afford to let structure remain, because it can always pull it down when the time comes.

And, on the negative side of things, that personal growth is meaningless if it is impermanent. I am going to have to accept some inner structure if I want to be a stronger and more confident person. My soul is badly in need of some kind of skeleton to give it form and structure and support.

Being goo gets real fucking old after a while, know what I mean?

Besides, what about being trapped in formlessness? The very fact that I can’t hold any particular form for very long is a limitation in and of itself. What if a situation comes along that requires holding the same shape for a long time? What then?

I realize now that I tend to think of my formless nature as being my ultimate strength. I can handle anything by changing into the right form…. right? It’s like the ultimate superpower. I can be Superman, the Flash, or Wolverine whenever I like. Right?

No, not really. I can take on some of their attributes, but it’s still just a half-assed replica made of goo. It’s more illusion that reality and it might convince others of my amazingness, but it shouldn’t fool me.

And to be honest, most of the time it doesn’t fool them, either.

And yet, I can’t envision a more structured life. Or at least, I can’t envision one where all the structure has to be self-generated.

That’s just plain never going to work for me. The best I can hope for is to go somewhere that will give me the structure I need, like school did.

I really do dream of a life where someone says “Do this!” and I do that, and I am then told “Good work!! Here’s the next thing…. “.

And that seems really…. doable. right?

All I need to do is get a goddamned job.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.