The trend continues : I feel a little better than I did yesterday.
Even my unpleasant sleepy afternoon was less unpleasant and less sleepy than before. So there’s that, at least. Whatever the fuck it is I am going through, it’s going well.
I have a theory on that, actually. Of course. It’s a bit tricky to explain, so bear with me.
Basically, over the last year or so, the part of my mind where I store emotions I am trying to dodge has been slowly but inexorably shrinking. As this happens, my ability to avoid dealing with things shrinks with it. I no longer have these vast spaces within me in which to hide. I used to keep everything out of focus and blurry in order to keep from seeing things I didn’t want to see, but now everything is in HD and sharply focused.
The result is my current emotional state : depressed. Without the ability to sideline unpleasant emotions, I now have no choice but to actually process all my bad mojo and negative emotion and the result is my current state of depression.
I think that is why this particular depressive period is hanging around for so long. I have a hell of a lot of emotions to process that means feeling them.
And I definitely feel like something is happening within me. Something big. Every day of sadness and despair gets me that much closer to something and it is this sense of progress that helps me the most when the darkness is closing in.
In fact, on one level, I don’t even want to feel better. I am getting something important done with all this sadness. Leave me to it.
It gets awfully cold in his heart of mind, though. Also a part of the process : I have a lot of emotional coldness from decades of isolation to deal with.
That glacier sitting on my heart is going to make things very cold as I push iceberg after iceberg out of me and into the great big sea to float away forevermore.
I call it “birthing my ice”. Because I’m strange.
I have been so damned lonely in my icy prison for a very long time. When I was raped at the age of 4, a wall of ice descended between me and others, and I have been all alone on my side of the wall ever since.
And that’s kind of a big deal. I have been emotionally handicapped for most of my life. There could be all kinds of love and affirmation and validation on the other side of that wall an I would never feel it.
And I am forced to ask myself a brutally tough question : how much of my sense of being ignored and neglected is real and how much is an illusion created by this inability of emotional signals to make it across the vast void within?
I have heavily invested in the idea of myself as a victim of emotional mistreatment by others. And it’s true that I was not treated well by others, including people who were supposed to be there to look out for me and protect me.
But the day to day loneliness could, in part, be due to this emotional isolation caused by a reaction to a severe emotional trauma at an early age.
And it’s a hell of a thing to realize that your interpretation of your own past might be inaccurate. Perhaps I was unreachable. Adrift on an ice floe, there was no way for anyone except perhaps a highly trained child psychologist to reach me, and so those who tried soon gave up and got out of my cold sad world as soon as possible.
I had to lay down for a bit.
The word ‘incommunicado’ just popped into my head. That is what I have been for all these years. Not in the simple and straightforward sense of not being able to be reached for communication, of course. I am communicative as fuck.
No, I am incommunicado in the more complex sense of being there but not really there. Or not ALL there, as they used to say.
I can be sitting there in front of you, live and in the flesh in living Technicolor, and I am chatting in my usual lively way, and yet in a very real sense I am not there at all. I am a million miles away on my icy little planetoid and simulating being there with you via some kind of telepresence system.
Perhaps I would be better off if I was not so good as dissembling. I hide my problems from others so well that I never attract the sort of nurturing I need.
But I can’t stop hiding my problems from others until I stop hiding them from myself. I would much rather be the person I pretend to be than the person I really am, and while I am pretending, I can fool myself into thinking that’s true.
I have trouble even imagining being any other way. If I stopped pertending and simply expressed my emotional state all the time, I would be pretty goddamned unpleasant to be around. I would essentially be a lunatic, either hyper irritable or hysterical with fear nearly all the time and ten times dangerous because I would use all my verbal and emotional gifts to inject my madness into others, like Hamlet does to poor Ophelia.
Or is it Cordelia? I can never remember.
And my connection with others is slender enough with me doing my best to be as lovable as I know how to be. I do what I can to give people reasons to put up with me. If I didn’t do that, nobody would want me around at all.
I can’t afford to be unpleasant to be around. I have zero faith that anyone would stick with me through that kind of shit.
I know I wouldn’t.
So I am doomed to go through life wearing a mask of my own face. One so convincing that even I don’t know what is real and what is artifice.
And that’s exactly how I want it.
I will talk to you nice poeople again tomorrow,