These thoughts are relatively new, so they are still wet ’round the ears from being birthed and not quite fully formed yet. 

Hey, you didn’t come out of your mama in your final shape either. 

And now, the origin story : 

Earlier, I was pondering the day ahead of me and going through my traditional paroxysism of anxiety and dread. 

During this inevitable struggle, the thought occurred to me that I was not feeling up to facing the day and that I would probably therefore end up spending a lot of time in bed. 

This is not an unusual thought for me. 

But this time, it came with one of those freeze-frame moments of clarity that mark the most productive of personal insights because they mark points where I catch myself in the middle of doing something that I had no previous knowledge of doing. 

Does that make sense? I will assume yes. 

This time, I realized I felt a great deal of shame for not being able to handle life. That specific shame was connected with a ginormous complex bolus of related shame, like a terrifying complex tumour, and so that kind of marked it as something I need to talk about. 

Sunshine is the best disinfectant and all that. Drag the bad stuff out into the light of the conscious mind where it can be dealt with. Get both your conscious and unconscious mind working on the job. 

And so on. 

So, shame. I have a great deal of it. Like I have said before, I went many years thinking I was not the sort of person to be riddled with shame because, after all, I was raised without religion, and my image of a person wracked by shame was some poor victim of a religion’s inability to deal with the physical truths of human life and therefore saddles people with a lot of guilt for being a live human being with natural needs and desires. 

God damn transcendentalist acesticism. Is there nothing it can’t ruin? 

But that’s just the most obvious kind of shame.  Mine is more personal. It had a lot to do with being ashamed of what I see as my massive inadequacies and inability to function in society. 

But I am a very ill man. As we’ve discussed, all society expects of me is that I do my best to get better. Self-care is a very big part of that. 

So why should I feel bad because my illness sometimes makes it very hard to cope with reality and so, in self-defense, I have to withdraw? 

I think the answer is ultimately it is unmanly. I feel like a pathetic wimpy creature because I cannot deal with things head on, like a man “should”. I “should” be strong and powerful enough to tackles my sea of sorrows and by opposing end them instead of just running and hiding like a cowardly child fleeing the sound of thunder. 

That’s clearly some self-defeating macho bullshit. Toxic masculinity indeed. But the issue runs very deep into the very taproots of my identity, so it is not easy to dismiss. 

Gonna have to dig that fucker out and blast it. 

As it turns out, I have the same deep and irrational self-reliance ethos that more traditionally male men do. The idea that I “should” be able to take care of everything myself and I “should” be able to cope with life and I 
“should”  be capable and competent and reliable and not only that, I 
“should”  be able to do it all myself witout anyone else’s help. 

There I go,  “should”ing all over myself again. 

In this schema, my failure to meet this standard means I am a total failure as an adult human being and should drown in shame till I die of it. 

Again, this is clearly irrational and insane, not to mention deeply unfair. 

But this is the bad stuff, and I have to draw it to the surface in order to defeat it, and I do that by writing about it. 

Your mileage, as always, may vary. 

Getting over this androgenic insanity means giving up a big part of myself. Knowing something in you is toxic and being ready to let it go are not quite the same thing. So right at this moment, I feel like grieving. 

So please indulge me in this bit of visualization : 

I place my misbegotten ideals of savage self-reliance on a Viking longboat. For a few moments, I sit looking at them, and weep. Weep for myself, weep for the part of me that has to go, weep for all the damage it did to me before I was able to cut it free and let it go. 

Then, with a firm shove of my foot, I set the boat floating out into the dark waters of the bay, and watch as it drifts unerringly into the center of the waters and awaits my next move. 

So I take up my bow, nock a gasoline-stinking arrow, light it off a nearby torch, and point the bow at a parabolic angle. 

Tears still in my eyes but body rigid with determination, I stare at the dark shadowed mass of the boat and its cargo, waiting for the moment. 

When the moment comes, I let my arrow fly, and it describes an elegant flaming arc across the sky before sinking deep into the foul flesh of my dead and defeated demon. 

Instantly, ship, cargo, and all are ferociously ablaze, the light from the fire so intense that it hurts the eyes. 

Yet I do not look away as I watch it all burn. The pain is good. The pain is clean. It purifies as it burns. It kills what is not clean. 

And as it burns, the boat floats away towards the horizon, taking the last stinking remnants of my misbegotten flesh with it. 

Gone, gone, far away, gone away forever, gone across the final horizon, gone for good, gone, gone gone. 

Then I turn away, and weep like a child until dawn. 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.