Fair warning, I am going to be talking about the deep workings of my mind tonight and so things make get even more obscure and personal than usual.

Essentially, I have been developing my ability to take the sorts of terrible emotional tensions that plague me and redirect their energies into something more positive.

As patient readers know, I am a very pent up dude who finds it very hard to express his emotions because I hide behind my friendly, funny mask.

Wow, I just summarized months of blog posts.

All that unexpressed emotion build up inside me, and I go through periods where the tension involved in holding back all that emotion gets to be more than I can suppress, and it spills into my conscious mind and makes me feel like my body is trying to squeeze itself to death from the inside.

It’s very bad.

These attacks been happening to me recently, which is what brought the whole subject to mind. Luckily, this time through, I know exactly what is going on and I know that there is no point in trying to fight back because that just makes things even more tense.

It’s like, dude, it’s jammed. Trying to force it through just makes it jam harder. The only way out is to relax and find another outlet for the energy.

That’s the step I am on right now. And I am cautiously optimistic.

Because I can feel it now. This redirection. It’s not an abstract idea or an untestable conceit. It’s a real capacity that operates on my deepest emotional level.

I can feel emotional energy being allowed to build then being released  into some other, superficially unrelated thing in order to take the tension out of the jammed up emotional conduit so the jam can clear and things can run smoothly for a change.

I am pretty sure this must be how healthier people deal with life. They have the capacity to find expression for their emotions by the simple expedient of acting on them.

And not just on them, from them. They don’t feel like doing something for a purely emotional reason is inherently wrong, like emotionally constipated intellectuals like myself do. They don’t freeze emotions out of the equation entirely and try to make all decisions, even extremely personal ones,. from some kind of detached and impersonal point of view, like I do.

They don’t feel like doing something purely out of unrestrained emotion, without a single logical thought involved, would be the most embarrassing and shameful thing ever.

Well, what is more of nightmare to the emotionally constipated than its opposite, emotional incontinence?  The very idea of it happening around others fills me with a terrible sense of shame and failure and being bad.

This attitude is clearly untenable. I submit my entire life as evidence. Nothing human can survive that level of repression. Even just contemplating it in the abstract, as I am doing now, fills me with a feeling of wrongness and alienation.

So clearly, this redirection is desperately needed.

Hey, I found my way back to the point! (SFX : Ragged cheer)

And if suffering these attacks of tension are what it takes for me to learn this fundamental coping mechanism, so be it. Bring it on. Something has to clear out that emotional traffic jam blogging up my emotional coping resources.

And odds are, whatever does that is going to hurt. But fuck it. It’s only pain. Pain passes. It happens then it’s over and you are left with what it got you.

I will gladly suffer ten kinds of hell in order to be sane, and be able to have a normal adult life instead of being a brain in a diaper.

I mean, here I am, brain the size of a planet…

I keep having to pause the blogging in order to process the emotions that are coming up. This is a very good sign.

Now where was I? Oh right, competent adulthood. Dreams thereof.

As you know, I feel an enormous amount of very deep shame about how I have never had anything even remotely like an adult life. I have lived my entire life dependent on others. The biggest progress I ever made was to shift to being dependant on the govrernment of BC instead of my friends.

Kinda sad, ain’t it?

I’ve never supported myself financially. I have mever had a real jb with which to support myself financially. I have no employment history, which is kind of a big deal if you hope to ever, ever, ever get hired for anything, especially when you are 45.

You see why I can’t do job interviews? Why the very idea makes me feel like I am shriveling and shrinking down to the size of a peanut?

Shelled, of course.

And I have never been in an relationship. That is even weirder than the job thing. There are total losers out there who are even even worse staights than myself when it comes to almost anything yet they have been through five or six relationships by my age.

Possibly really bad ones. It’s hard to find love when you’re broken. But they had them.

The fact that I have not testifies to just how alienated from my instincts and drives I am. Other people seek mates because they are driven by very deep social instincts that override any caution or restraint the conscious logical mind tried to impose.

But not I. I must have my precious, precious safety and the comforting illusion of logic. I have to keep myself ridiculously understimulated on the physical level because God knows, I can’t let myself get “out of control”.

Sometimes I wih I lived in the world of the John Varley short story Overdrawn At The Memory Bank, where when you are overstressed, you can get your consciousness transferred into the body of an animal for a while.

I think spending a weekend as a ofx would do wonders for me.

Only problem is, I wouldn’t want to come back!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.