OK, so here’s my basic problem :
I have great dreams and ambitions and loads of talent and capacity, but they are all strangled in the crib by this enormous weight of psychological damage that sits in the very center of my psyche.
Ambition versus damage. That’s the problem and that’s the fight. Everything else in my life is secondary. The main issue is this struggle.
And I am working on it.
Mostly by writing these blog entries and going to therapy once a week. And that is definitely having an effect. An effect I can feel.
But it takes so long. And there is no way to track my progress on a daily level. I can only feel said progress in terms of distance from a previous, worse mental state.
Kind of like trying to watch a tree grow. You know that it’s growing and it’s clear to see how it is now far taller and thicker than it was a long time ago.
But you can’t actually see it happening. And sometimes that makes you, against all reason and knowledge,. like nothing is happening. Or next to nothing.
And wow, does that suck.
My newly awoken id rails against the slowness of it all. It wants to tear into my problems like a lion tearing into a zebra and kill and kill and kill until there is not a single motherfucking shred of that big pile of damage left.
And boy, do I wish it worked that way. And maybe some day, it will.
But not now, because it’s not that kind of problem. You might as well be beating your fists bloody on the side of a glacier. Frontal attack is not going to work.
Instead of hot rage, then, the solution is one of my favorite things : grim determination. I use all that energy of my id as a battery to keep me going through the difficult process of trying to recover from all this bullshit.
Hot rage is flashy but it’s grim determination that gets shit done.
And that’s how I kinow that, no matter how slow the process of recovery is, I am confident that my victory is inevitable.
Because if there’s one thing I know, it is that I will NEVER stop fighting.
Right now, I am experiencing a very familiar feeling of coldness in my chest in patches on my forearms. It’s a highly unpleasant feeling. It feels like I swallowed an icicle.
I revel in it, though, because I know exactly what it is, now, and I want all of it I can possibly get. Bring it on, motherfuckers!
Because ya know what it is?
It’s the feeling of my pain dying. It’s the feeling of my glacier melting. It’s the feeling of my psychological immune system doing its goddamned job for once.
It’s the feeling of recovery.
And man, do I love it.
Think I will try to lean into it.
So where were we? Right, the damage is the enemy and whatever I can do to melt that glacier that sits on my heart is a good thing.
If I had a button that would melt the whole thing all at once, I would push it with no hesitation. Bring on the flood.
Has it been long enough since I linked to that song?
Fuck it. I don’t care.
I would happily trigger a total psychological meltdown in myself if I thought that I would come out of it with all my bullshit washed away. I am willing to trade temporary sanity for long term happiness. That sounds like a fair deal to me.
Though I recognize that it would be, to put it very mildly, not the choice most sane people would make.
But fuck it. I know I’m a lunatic.
I know that I have this kamikaze streak that contrasts sharply with my usual cautious and logical self. It is the side of me that would get a maniacal gleam in his eye then push the button, consequences be damned.
It’s also the side of me that might well be willing to do some pretty crazy shit in order to prove a point or exert maximum defiance or just to fuck with someone who has pissed me off enough for me to consider them my enemy.
And that takes a lot. I am not one for nursing grudges and I fundamentally refuse to devote the mental resources necessary to declare and maintain someone’s “enemy” status in my mind when it’s a person I can easily just forget about.
Usually, the worst that can happen is that I, metaphorically speaking, cast the person out of the light of my consideration and into the darkness of my no longer taking them into consideration except to route around them.
I don’t care whether I “get them back”. I don’t care if they “know they fucked with the wrong guy”. I don’t care if they think they “got away with something” or that they “won” and I “lost.
I just want them out of my life and out of my mind as smoothly and cleanly as possible. From that point onward, they are “off the list” of worthwhile people in my mind and they can have a ten day orgy for all I care, as long as they don’t do it around ME.
But I do not claim any degree of moral superiority based on that fact. It’s how I operate but I would never say it is somehow superior. It’s what works for me.
And I suppose if somehow these people could feel and understand just how thoroughly I have dismissed them as people, the sheer brutality and finality of it might serve as some kind of revenge.
But that would involve me having to continue to deal with them for that long, and if I have made it to that point, the person is disgusting to me and I don’t want to touch them for any reason ever again.
Unless, of course, they threaten people I care about.
In which case, watch the fuck out.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.