It’s not what I want to talk about. It’s what I have to talk about. Because this is where I am right now.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me, no matter how much I want to deny it, that my precious, precious niceness is not all there is to me.

I have a long suppressed side of myself that is as cranky and set in his ways as any other Taurus. This is the side of me that wants thing to be a certain way and who has little patience for fools who don’t know whjat they are talking about, or people who can’t tell the difference between ideology and realoity, or people who do not grasp the basic tenets of science, and so forth and so on.

This is a real part of me and it is one I cannot afford to ignore any more. If I am to become a whole and healthy person who can function in society and stop being a burden to others, I am going to need to face the true me, warts and all, and integrate every last but of myself into my self-image.

Now I am not saying that super nice Fruvous is/was some kind of lie. It may not have been the whole truth but it was, and continue to be, a very real part of me.

I really am a super nice guy. I truly beleive that… I have to.

But in order to move on I have to ask myself a question that I loathe even contemplating, let along asking myself, and the question is this :

How much of niceness is real, and how much of it is cowardice?

I feel dirty just typing it.

But it’s a legit question. There is a difference between being a nice bguy and being permanently stuck in a stance of trying to placate the mean old world so that I can trick it into being nice to me.

And I have to face it : some of my niceness is based on fear. Fear based on the feeling that nobody will ever like me for myself and that my only safety lies in using my various skills to make people like me.

That part of me feel like if the show ever stops and those curtains ever close, people will see the real me and I will be just some guy who is kind of gross and not that interesting and is honestly too weird and socially awkward to be worth dealing with.

It has been clear to me since my first days of being Fruvous online that I have an enormous need for affection and approval. My childhood of near-total emotional neglect left me with an insatiable need to be liked and treated kindly and above all, accepted.

Nobody accepted me as a kid.

Nobody wanted me around.

Nobodty even wanted to be reminded I existed.

And all this left me terribly, terribly cold inside. Like so much dead flesh. A world made of scar tissue and novocaine and dirty slushy snow.

This left me with the very deep feeling that I had to make the most of any attention that I did get, and try to extend it as much as possible, and therefore paying attention to me had to be as rewarding as I could make it.

And that was such a high priority that it precluded the expression of any kind of negative emotion for fear that if dealing with me was anything but totally pleasant, people would turn away from me and I would never get any attention again because now, everyone would know what a horribble, pathetic piece of toxic shit I am, and I would never get any love again till (and including) the day I die.

And so, unconciously. I began developing the rather small set of interpersonal skills I had. But the thing is, when your social antenna is broken., you really can;t do a real good job of teaching yourself social skills, let alone developing them.

That’s how the world ends up with freaks like me who have certain areas freakishly overdeveloped and the rest of them practically vestigial.

As I always say, thing grow strange in the dark.

To haul us, like a fishing boat crew hauling in a heavy catch, back to the point, I would say that it is this all-consuming fear of abandonment if I was not 100 percent pleasant to be around that led me to suppress everything inside myself that did not fit into that idealized and unrealistic picture of myself.

The picture in which I am, essentially, infinitely nice. As nice as I can be at all times, without any regard to my own emotional well-being or needs, forever.

That is clearly not sustainable. No real person can be infinitely anything and so for a long long time now I have not been a real person.

In this case, “real person” meaning someone who is being genuinely themselves.

I have been, at best, a lifelike facsimile.

Again, that does not mean that the person people know as Fruvous is not really me. It is totally the real me…. up to a point.

But I achieved this state of seeming spiritual loveliness by artificial means. Instead of transcending petty personal needs, I merely swept them under the rug. Painted them green so they would belnd in with the scenery and I could pretend to be someone who could never truly exist.

That’s why I have been saying that I am not a real person for all these years. It’s how I have felt like a long time but it has taken reaching this stage in my journey for me to truly understand why.

And it can’t go on. I have to learn to look after my own needs and my own emotional health. I can’t keep pretending I have no needs or wants or desires of my own any more. I am a real human being and real human beings are complex.

Accepting, embracing, and integrating all sides of myself, even the non-nice ones, is a huge and bewildering task and one which will no doubt alter how I see the world and therefore change my world completely.

But it has to be done. I have faith in my self-actualization now. I don’t have to know where the road ends to know what direction I should be going in any more.

I can follow this unreasoned voice inside me that only knows what it needs in order to continue to grow and emerge from the shadows withing my soul into the clean bright golden sunshine of the real world.

And when that day comes,. I will be a real person at last.

When that day comes. I will finally br an adult.

When that day comes, I will finally – truly – really – be alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.