Been feeling pretty crappy lately and it is triggering my depression like its signaling device on jeopardy!.

And it’s not fair,. god damn it. I was doing pretty good there for a while. had three gigs, was feeling fairly positive about life,. had actually earned a little cash.

But then came Vcon and con crud and I feel like I have been sick forever. It’s like I am carrying this enormous weight around. Like I have an aircraft carrier’s anchor tied around my neck.

Or around something even less well suited to the task.

The illness is still occupying my chest for the most part. my nose runs sometimes, and that doesn’t help at all. But for the most part, this is a purely ‘goo in the lung’ thing.

Every five minutes or so, I go into a spasm of coughing. Ususually quite brief, knock on wood. Occasionally ‘productive’.

Well at least something around here is productuve! Ba dum bump.

I want my goid damned vitality back. This sick-bed existence sucks so much. This is the sort of thing that drives invalids crazy.

Like I said yesterday (and possibly before that – if so, sorry!), it wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the chest goo and the snot. It’s the feeling of having the energy crushed out of me by this infection that really gets me.

I mean, I go to the kitchen for a glass of water and by the time I am sitting down again, I am sweaty and short of breath.

That’s bad even for an out of shape fat guy in his mid forties like me.

Even worse, I sweat when I eat. Yes, even doing the one thing a fat guy is supposed to be good at brings me pain. The effort of eating and digesting really takes it out of me.

Combine that with how the illness has suppressed my appetite, and you get a recipe for my having to fight myself over every meal.

Because skipping the meal will always be easier. And there will always be that evil voice of temptation in my head encouraging me to take that first step onto the slippery slide down into oblivion.

I have concluded that there is a part of me that really feels the need to suffer. I don’t think it has anything to do with guilt. Or. if so, it’s guilt over inaction, not actions.

I think it has a lot more to do with having so much unexpressed pain buried in the boneyard outside my back door. That pain wants to express itself and I am so emotionally closed off that the only way it can think of to do that is to make me suffer in the real world, the one outside my head, and get its catharsis that way.

Bow that I have discovered this need for pain, I can take it out, have a good look at it, and decide what to do about it. What happens next?

Well I am not going to bury it again. That’s for sure. This is valuable stuff. Instead, I am going to figure out how to give this need what it wants in a way that does not come with unpleasant long term consequences.

So, no cutting, or anything. I’ve always intuitively understood why some of my fellow victims of depression cut themselves as a coping mechanism. It makes perfect sense to me. Sure, it would hurt, but it also stimulates a powerful adrenal response and I can see that making the depression go away for a bit.

It’s also a gesture of control. I have the self-control to do this insane thing that goes against every instinct, and not only that. I can watch myself bleed calmly and dispassionately and then clean up after.

I am in control, said the bleeding girl.

But even more than that is the pleasure of externalizing pain. It feels really good to take the dark and nebulous feelings of pain and fear and uncertainly and transform it into something as pure and clean and understandable as physical pain.

Trust me, I have been there. Not with cutting. But still.

In fact, I have been developing that side of me lately. One day, around a month ago, I was feeling depressed and tense and anxious. It got worse and worse until, at the very peak. out of nowhere I slapped myself hard on the knee.

And instantly felt WAY better. Just from a harmless little slap. Amazing.

Well I’ve always had a masochistic streak.

So now I slap myself two or three times a day. It really does relieve the tension and calm the chaos within.

And having found this escape route for all the dirty steam inside me, I am damned curious to see how far I can take it. I have experimented with giving myself a whole lot of slaps, and that seemed highly effective. even though I chickened out because I was scared of how into smacking the crap out of myself I was getting.

I even tried giving myself a spanking. My first ever. My progressive parents did not believe in corporal punishment. And I must say, it was an interesting sensation. I can see why some people are into it.

Rather awkward to do it to yourself, though. My arm got sore pretty fast.

Perhaps I should invest in a flogger.

I loved that game as a kid. It was better than Plac-man!

Pain could do me a lot of good if I do it right. Physical pain doesn’t bother me too much when it is in controlled doses.

I guess I know why I used to stick my bare hand into snowbanks as a child. I thought it was just a test of will – and I love me a test of will.

But now I think I might havre been getting more out of that experience than entertainment. Maybe this was my mind’s way of convincing me, the conscious me, to give it the pain it craved.

I wonder how many of the bad decisions of my life were informed by this need to suffer.

I have got a lot to think about. Definitely bringing this up in therapy tomorrow.

Feel free to smack yourselves happy, folks!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.