And not just in the sense of being a furry.

No, I am talking about something deeper and more emotional than that.I am talking about how, despite my efforts to be a warm and personable person, I can also be quite chilly and alienating and even downright severe I can be. I am talking about how there are times when I can feel myself trying to feel the right thing but the line is dead and so what I get instead is a the silent scream of the void within me that lies where my warmer and more human emotions should be.

I am talking about my broken antenna, and everything that comes with it.

There are parts of my soul that are simply… dead. Inert. Nothing but necrotic scar tissue where healthy flesh should be.

And as it is with the body when its signals aren’t getting through (like when your hand or foot falls asleep), the mind knows that there is a great wrongness to this condition and panics in order to drive to you rectify the situation.

But unlike when the damage is to the body, there is no straightforward approach to fixing a psychological injury.

Doctor : Can you tell me where it hurts? 
Me : ……………………..the space where my feelings should be? 

I think I have known about this deadness inside me for a long time, but never quite on a conscious level because when I came anywhere near recognizing it, my mind would bury it in aggressive distraction and deflection.

It’s easy to see why, because the knowledge of it is absolutely horrifying. It’s one thing to know you are damaged and crazy on an abstract and/or intellectual level, and quite another thing to feel said damage on about as intimate level as is possible.

But now I get it. I know how deeply injured I am on a deep psychological level. All that social isolation really did a number on me, as did my vast unmet need for nurturing. I did not get the right emotional nutrients at a very critical time, and that made me the cripple I am today.

And the first step to fixing the damage is becoming aware of it. After all, you can’t fix problems you deny exist. You have to look your demons in the eye and tell them that you know who they are and now, the fight is on.

I think it’s this damage that leads to some of my feelings of emotional coldness. A cold wind blows from the holes in my soul, and howls across the tundra within like the shrieks of a thousand lonely and frightened ghosts.

For me, poetry happens spontaneously as I try to put things into words.

This inner deadness is also the source of all my talk about wanting to be a real person some day. I don’t really feel like I am part of the human race on anything but the obvious physical and biological sense.

I have the body of a human being. But that’s about it.

And it’s because I can’t feel other people except as dim shadows, as if emotionally speaking I was mostly blind. The signals are out there but my busted antenna keeps most of them from getting through.

As a result, I can come across as quite cold in some situations. The lack of emotional context for my life leaves me with only the cold circuit of logic, calculation, and the pursuit of abstract ideals to motivate me.

For instance, a lot of people would find my at times ruthless pragmatism to be emotionally cold and alienating. Ditto for the moral equivalent of said pragmatism, my deep utilitarianism. What matters is results. Outcomes. That which actually happens.

Everything else is bullshit.

That sort of thing comes from a very deep part of me that seeks to focus in on what truly matters and tune out irrelevancies in order to arrive at solutions. And logically speaking, both positions are hard to argue with.

But that doesn’t mean they represent the entire truth, either. There are limits to language and logic, and sometimes the truth – the real, important, spiritual truth – lies beyond those limits.

I realize how these positions of pragmatism and utility can make me seem inhuman. And that’s not an entirely wrong impression, either. They come from that brutal truth machine part of my mind that relentlessly pursues the truth, and that part of me can be terrifying to behold, even to me.

So sometimes I end up feeling like I am a nice person with a Terminator inside him. And while the Terminator is extremely efficient and effective, it is also brutal and cold.

And yet I can’t simply remove or isolate that side of me. It’s too deeply ingrained on an emotional level, and too damned useful on a personal level. That’s the side of me that sees the truth within the lies and illusions and there is enormous power in that, especially when backed by a considerable intellect finely honed, like mine.

And honestly, I like the feeling of power it gives me. It makes me feel more safe. Like I am not, in fact, entirely abandoned and helpless and vulnerable. I have the Terminator to protect me. I have enormous intellectual power to use like a wizard uses his spells. I have the force of personality that comes from intellectual confidence combined with a certain degree of charisma. I have a mind that is swift and sure and potent.

That means I can fight back.

But none of that matters if the soul within the machine is weak and the connection to the power supply of the id can’t handle the voltage required.

So the temptation is always there to simply surrender all control to that terrifying android and become a ruthless and calculating monster.

At least I would get things done.

But I could never live in a world so cold.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Sorry there was no blog entry yesterday, Sunday, the 6th of August. There was a security issue with my web-hosting account and I did not leave myself enough time to deal with it and then blog. So I did neither. Everything’s hunky dory now, though.)