My lord, did I go off on a tangent yesterday. Let’s try this again.

Life as a liquid is hard because liquids have no inherent structure,. No skeleton. A liquid like me can take any shape but not for very long because maintaining a shape takes a constant input of energy and because the longer we stay in any one shape, the greater the fear that we will be caught in the wrong form and unable to shapeshift to adapt.

Thus, I feel safest when I am in my shapeless liquid state. That way, I am free to take whatever shape I need to take in order to handle what life throws at me.

As life strategies go, it has its setacks.

Like lack of agency. In its liquid state, water takes the shape of its container. No container, no shape. The water has little say in the matter. IF it wants to change shape without having to constantly input energy to maintain the new shape. it has to find a new container in the shape it desires.

And that’s hard to do when fear severely limits your capacity for exploration.

The hardest thing for a goo like me to do is to shape my own container, or as I tend to refer to it in this space, provide my own structure. I’d be a hell of a lot better off if I could do it, but that’s just not in the card for a guy like me.

Or at the very least, it’s something I will need to learn.

I don’t know why I am so scared of being caught in the wrong form. I can always just release my structure and shift to what’s needed. But that takes time and enery and mental effort and the crazed little animal in my head is convinced that means that we must therefore remain without form until the last possible moment.

To continue the animal metaphor, that scared little animal wants to maximize the number of ways it can escape at all times. Only full autonomy without form or commitment can make it feel safe.

And yet…. not.

Because it’s also too paranoid to relax when there are too many possibilities. Every escape route is also an avenue of attack that the mean old world could use to GET it at any second. So it also wants the security of structure.

So what it really wants is a container where it can revert to liquid form and relax because the container will provide the structure it needs to feel safe without the constant input of energy it finds so hard to keep up.

While at the same time haveing infinite escape routes.

And underneath it all, vigilance. Constant, painful, unblinking, paranoid vigilance. Always trying to be the eye that sees in all directions at the same time so that it can always see danger coming and flee in the right direction when it does.

I do a lot of fleeing. In fact, I do so much fleeing that I end up doing nothing at all. To flee in all directions at once is identical to standing stock still, scared of the world, afraid to go in any direction because that might take me closer to some horrible danger.

So instead, I hide from the world. My highly predictable life and constant, unchanging environment provide the container and my inability to hold my shape keeps me there. To change my life would be to change the shape of my container while I am still in it, and that feels incredibly weird and disturbing when I try.

Alternately,. I could build a new container then ooze my way into that. But that requires the confidence in my own ability to make that new container right, and that is a pretty tall order. And I would have to stop clinging to my current one in order to slide into the new one and that is quite the leap of faith.

Because the thing is, once a liquid like me finds a comfy container. we settle in hard. And the longer we stay in that comfy container, the more our will to search for a superior container fades away until escape seems impossible.

Or maybe I just want it to be impossible so I don’t have to face that harsh adult world that expects me to pick a form and stick with it.

Either way, it’s a pickle.

If only I could convince that scared little animal in me that it is safe to come out of its hidey hole now. That nothing but love and comfort and safety await it. In this metaphor, I’m like a domesticated cat that got abandoned and went feral and through painful and terrifying experience learned never to trust the hand of man again.

And at the same time, feels compelled to be cute and appealing and affectionate in order to convince people to take care of it.

No wonder I’m such a psycho.

How I wish I could just relax. For reals. All the way. I never totally relax as thigns are now. Even in my sleep, I am scared. The danger never truly goes away,

And this keeps me from true renewal. If I could fully relax, I could go all the way liquid and truly relax, rest, and renew.

Maybe even be reborn, fresh and new and free of the burdens of the past. Emerge from the fetid rancid stagnant dark into the clean bright beautiful light of dawn.

How I long to be free of my tainted self. To be truly clean. To be the person I was before the rape. The person I was meant to be. The person I was supposed to be.

But water does not know how to purify itself. So every day and in every moment, I am trying to balance my multitudinous toxicities against one another in order to simulate pure waters, at least in terms of pH balance.

I don’t know where to go to get purified.

And I don’t know what its like to be clean.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.