And yet again, I feel a bit better today than I did yesterday.

Managed a bit of crying, which probably helped. Not much, just a few minutes of sobsat a time, but it is definite progress. If I keep trying, maybe I can stretch and massage that emotional aperture till it gets used to opening on demand.

Why yes, just like an anus! You’re so smart.

When I was younger, there were periods where I could do that. And I was somewhat proud of the fact, which I suppose is typically male of me.

Well, unless you pussies, I have the self-mastery and discipline to be able to cry when I need to, without any fear of judgment. Which means I’m BETTER than you!

Sadly, that is exactly how the male mind works.

Sadly, though, those waterworks need to be used and maintained or they rust up and seize on a fella. Or in my case, freeze up.

Depression can freeze anything if you let it.

I’ve been working on trying to disconnect my self-worth from concepts of productivity. I should not be judging myself so harshly on what I “get done”. All that leads to is even less productivity because now I am too depressed to do anything besides throw myself into my video games even harder to escape.

If artistic productivity, including the kind I get paid for, is truly my goal, then the method to achieve that is to be as kind and forgiving and loving to myself as possible.

After all, flowers bloom in the warmth of the sun, not the cold of night.

So once more, things circle back to being a hell of a lot nicer to myself. I have fallen back into hating myself after getting at least partly out of the habit for a little while, and I want to get back to loving myself again.

But it’s clearly a lot more complicated than just “hey, stop doing that!” can solve. I tried it that way and what ended up happening was that the negative self-judging emotions accumulated. And when they finally broke through and expressed themselves, it actually felt good to start hating myself again.

So clearly I have to deal with those emotions, not just suppress them. I have a lot of latent rage and, as a depressive, I am accustomed to taking it out on myself.

I truly am my own abuser.

Ergo, in order to save myself from myself, I would have to find a way to externalize all that goddamned anger, and that has been one of my large assortment of betes noir for a very long time now.

Seriously. Look it up. I have been talking about that same thing in this blog for ages.

It’s just so hard to let the anger out into the world when I am still so afraid of it. Afraid of what it might do, or rather, make me do. I can feel its urge to despoil and destroy seething in the back room of my consciousness and it frightens me. I don’t want to become the monster it wants me to be. I refuse to let that happen.

But there is a very good chance that this entire notion of Monster Mike is actually just a bullshit illusion my depression creates to protect itself. It knows that healthy expression of emotion will have the same effect on it that sunlight does on Dracula, and so it creates these nightmare visions of horrible behaviour to scare me out of trying it.

And that’s not even counting the fundamental truth that it is precisely the kind of emotional suppression that my depression thrives on that causes the kind of emotional imbalance that the depression then uses to justify more suppression.

It’s a nasty cycle and the only way out is to let that damned emotion out somehow.

And I have been getting better at it over time. I let at least some of the steam out now. I can vent from time to time, usually in this space. It is by no means proportional to the size of the job but it is still a hell of a lot better than no venting at all.

And the more I let that steam out, the less crazy I feel and the less dangerous letting more of it out seems.

It used to be that I couldn’t even imagine opening the floodgates without imagining myself exploding in an orgy of brutal bloody violence directed at total strangers that would only end when the police shot me dead.

Now, what I picture is merely me being a total prick to a lot of people as I vent a lot of anger verbally by striking out at all that offends or annoys me without restraint.

Still not good, but definitely way better than a massacre.

So who knows. Maybe if I keep working away on finding healthy and relatively non-destructive ways to release my rage, I will eventually get to the point where all I worry about are the same sort of attacks of irritibility that are considered normal in others.

That’s still the paradox to me. I know, in my head, that most of the world accepts that sometimes people are in cranky moods and doesn’t make a huge deal of it. Just finds ways of dealing with it without branding said person some kind of horrible social criminal because it’s understood that everyone feels that way sometimes.

And I understand that and accept it. I even admire it. It seems very sane to me.

But when I try to apply that thought to myself, everything falls apart. I am far too keenly aware of my emotional effect on others to let myself just be a prick sometimes.

My therapist thinks I don’t give people enough credit for being able to handle what I might dish out, and he is probably right. My sense of my power to harm people with my anger is probably vastly exaggerated.

But it might not be. I have a lot of power I don’t use. Verbal power, emotional insight, and so on. By those powers combined, I could really hurt people.

And that’s something I just can’t accept.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.