It’s bizarre how little I know about it.

I have led a very sheltered life. I have done very little. I have stayed out of life’s way and hid myself away from the world for almost my entire adult life, and that means that I have not tried a lot of things or done much.

I’m not mad at myself for this. I am very ill. My mentqal illness has limited my life and continues to do so.

But something’s got to change or I will go nuts.

I have these fantasies of being able to be a much much more social guy. The sort of guy who gets invted to parties and who goes on little day-trip adventures and did not feel limited by his fears or his poverty because he knows how to get the most out of life no matter what the circumstances.

And when he is out and havig fun, he would never, ever wish he was safe at home and never feel exposed and judged and want to run and hide from everything forever.

He would just take things as they come. The Dude abides, man

I wanna be that guy. It would be so awesome. And I can feel him in me in that vast vast expanse of unused potential inside me.

It woudl be another version of me, and somewbhere inside me there are thousands of those. People I could have been if life had been a little kinder to me, or if I had gotten a vastly different start in life, with a different kind of family.

I suppose most people don’t think like that. They can live in the moment and take life as it comes and not go anywhere near the bizarre confluence of creativity and identity fluidity that makes me think about that kind of thing.

Somewhere in my mind, possibilities are iterated and options explored and potentials tested and so forth and so on.

Back on topic. I could be that amazing guy I dream of being… I am positive about that. He lives within me, in a sense, and I can feel him struggling to be born.

And that is going to happen some day.

But first, I have a lot of shit I need to let go.

It’s the same psychological debris that I have talking about “getting rid of”  for forever now. And I have had a great deal of success in doing just that.

My psychological burden is far, far lighter now.

But I think it’s time to face the facts that it is not just garbage that needs to go. I also need to let go of things I hold dear.

I don’t know which things yet. All I have now is the feeling that my tortured psyche is formed around a great and terriblre knot of crushing tension, and everything else revolves around that knot,. like flotsam in a whirlpool.

And I am not exactly good at letting go. Oh, if it’s material objects, I can be quite clinical about getting rid of that which I no longer need. Same with files I collect, like mods.

The letting go I am talking about is far deeper than that. I am talking about letting go of that which I cling to the hardest. The things I haved held onto in order to keep from falling into the eternal abyss of insanity and completely losing my grip on reality

But these things are also killing me. Some of them, at least/. And I have a strong feeling that the precariousness of my position has been vastly exagerrated by my depression and that I could let go of everything and fall and nothing particularly tettible would happen as a result..

The abyss below might well be a quarter inch thick and when I pass through it and land on the other side, safe and sound, I will wonder what alll the fuss was about.

But I can’t do that. Not yet. There are muscles in my mind that I no longer know how to relax because they have been tightly clenched for so long. There are pains so central to the core of my psyche that I literally cannot imagine life without them.

And there deep traumae that my vast and powerful intellect can’t ever reach, because the problem is with the very thing that is doing the reaching.

Even my big powerful brain is sick, flawed, and incoherent.

As I continue to this journey called Recovery, I get ever closer to the source of my river of pain. Every day I fight the current to go upstream, upstream, always upstream. My ultimate goal is to cut the pain off at its source by healing that deep wound that causes all of my problems and making myself whole and clean and healthy again.

Maybe then I can get that little redhaired kid with the precocious mouth and the lack o fear of adults and the endless charm. Maybe I can rescue him from that place he took his mind to in order to escape being raped.

Maybe he can finally come home. A home where he feels loved, valued, respected, and safe. A place where things are happy and healthy and functional and robust.

Other people have that, or have had that. I’ve seen all the evidence, both on TV and in real life. Somewhere out there, people are whole and strong and feel good about themselves/. They like their lives, which are rich and full and entirely real. They have jobs and family and friends and everything else they need in order to thrive. They feel love, happiness, and even joy in their lives, and they never get addicted to anything because they do not have massive gaping holes in their psyche that have to be filled with something. even if it’s temporary.

Even if it only makes the hole bigger.

Even if it makes the whole problem worse.

Even if doing so is the reason your life sucks.

Something has ot fill that hole.

The hole inside of me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.