I’m not okay.

I know I tell people that I am,. but I’m not. What I really mean when I tell people that I am okay is that I am not in danger of killing myself any time soon and that what I get out of life is enough to keep me going exactly as I am for the forseeable future, and besides, what good would it do me to tell you how I really feel?

That would only lead to the sort of brutally awkward momet that social phobics like myself fear the most, and you’d ask if there was anything you could do, and I would say no, and that would be that.

Another awkward pause, conversation death, and me feeling like I just took a dump on someone’s front lawn for absolutely no good reason.

I can’t poison people with my pain. Maybe I should… but I can’t. To feel it reflected in them and know that I am the source of that pain is more than I can bear.

So far, the onkly person I have ever really opened up to is my shrink. And that took years of therapy because I was not consciously aware that I was sheltering him as well.  I thought I was being open and honest about everything, but I can see now that I never truly opened up until recently because I never actually let him see me angry and bitter and full of pain and shame.

So even the really good sessions were really only intellectual discussions with a coupcon of emotional content experienced from the cool detached vantage point analysis. At all times, even when I was evincing some emotion, I was in control of myself and my reponses, and careful not to give him more than he can handle.

Such is my belief in the toxic radioactive nature of what I keep inside is that I was more worried about not hurting my therapist than about getting better.

I know it doesn’t make sense on paper. He’s a therapist, for crying out loud. He’s seen a lot of people in anger and pain and had a lot of people spill their guts about all kind of crazy weird stuff and survived it just fine.

What are th odds that I am so bad inside that I would hurt him, maybe permanently? What fucked up short circuit of the mind caused me to think that I am so special, so intense, and so powerful that my psyhcological emesis would be more harmful to others than anyone else’s?

But like I have said here before, to me, the worst possible thing would be to lose my self-control in public and act purely out of emotion and subject others to the eternally imploding darkness of my scarrred and broken psyche.

I mean seriously. Who am I to do such a thing?

When it’s your therapist, you’re a sumbass not to do it.

But like a lot of people, I was convinced that if anyone saw the real me, the emotional leper falling apart inside, they would recoil in horror and flee the scene screaming and holding their noses.

My only hope of social acceptability was to be as charming and funny and nice qas possible while keeping the leprous side of me locked away in a deep dark distant closet and hope to God nobody ever saw him.

Hence my sense of shame.

But as we all know, locking your emotions in the closet only leads to more problems in the future because those emotions will wreak havoc behind the scenes.

And without anywhere to go, those emotions build up and purify to the point where they really do seem toxic. And that makes them even more shameful and worthy of hiding and you bury them even deeper, and the cycle continues.

And you do such a good job of concealing the bad stuff that you almost forget that it is there, and go around believing you are the person you pretend to be.

And you are. That pretender is you just as much as anything else in your head. But it’s not the real you because it’s not the whole you.

That leper assassin is still trapped inside you and keeping it locked up costs more and more every day until the cost becomes so high that you can’t function any more and you feel awful all the time and want to die.

And that, at its heart, is what depression is. And that’s the hell I have lived in for my entire adult life. Stewing in my own juices, toxicity levels rising, wth only the self-medication of my distractions (and, thankfully, psych meds) to help me deal with the pain of being me.

And all because I couldn’t let the bad stuff out. It’s still very hard for me. I can try to put it into words when I blog to you wonderful people, and drain it very slowly.

And that helps immensely. Without this blog, I would be far, far sicker.

But it’s a controlled release. A metered response. I am still in control. Nothing goes into this blog that I do not intend to reveal. The very act of writing it down slows things down enough that I can remain in control of the process.

What I truly is the ability to lose control and still feel good about myself. I know it’s possible. I’ve seen others do it. And I am sure it is possible for me, too.

But I am not there. Not yet. I feel like I am a newborn baby when it comes to exposing my shameful painful ugly rotten side to the world.

And as you can see by how I phrased that, a big part of me still believes that what is inside me is bad like shit.

And maybe it is.

But mine’s no worse than yours, and trying to hold it in forever is a very bad idea.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.