Still trying to find some kind of foothold on the wet ice of my slick and slippery mind. I

It’s rough going. Even as I scramble to balance myself on this crazy topsy turvy terrain, another part of me is making that as hard as it possibly can because it is outright terrified of what will happen should I succeed.

But what is it afraid of? I think it’s exposure. I think the chaos in my mind is part of my camoflage and if it went away I would be exposed before my peers.

Warning : the following is disturbing as fuck.

Tear down the wall! Wait…. no, don’t! For god’s sake don’t!

Worse than exposure – which is bad enough for a scared little animal like me who, deep down, feels that only the hidden are safe – is the feeling that what comes after would be even worse – all my bad stuff would come out.

All the nastiness and horror and grotesque secretions I have been holding in for most of my life would rise to the surface and come out, and then I would not only be exposed but exposed while existentially shitting myself.

Now I know this is not rational. I mean, what would that even look like? Me babbling incoherently while soiling myself?

Bad. But survivable.

Would I lose my freaking mind and go on some sort of Mister Hyde crime spree?

Maybe. But probably not. Also survivable, though I would likely come down to find myself in the loony bin and unlikely to get out any time soon.

I probably would deserve it, too. I have a lot of dark impulses that I keep under control at a siginicant cognitive and psychological cost to myself on a daily bases.

If the cork popped out of that genie’s bottle,. I might well be overwhelmed by suppressed emotion to the point of psychosis. I could go on quite the rampage of unspeakable evil before I was done.

But reasonably speaking, probably nothing really bad would happen to me. Certainly nothing so bad that it would justify foregoing the benefits.

Which could be amazing. As patient readers know, I am a huge fan of catharsis, and that would be the mother of all cathartic moments.

It might even let me let go of the primary trauma of being raped at the age of 4. And that would be amazing. All the pain and trauma and horror of that incident have been locked up in my mind since it happened and that was 41 years ago.

I would love to be able to purge it all from my soul and find out who I am – and who I was meant to be – without that massive infected wound dominating my mind.

And that all sounds good on paper, but that does little to conquer my terrible fear and shame and guilt.

Yes, one of the evilest aspects of rape is that it causes the victim to feel shame and guilt for having been violated. The perpretrator, on the other hand, might not feel a thing. The event that shattered your mind and left you an emotional cripple for the rest of your life might have been just a pleasant diversion on a warm summer day to them.

People are very good at that kind of comparmentalization.

So for those 41 years, I have felt, deep down, that I was shit. Worse than shit. I was the most disgusting, horrible,. toxic, shameful, vivid nightmare of a person who ever violated people’s senses by letting himself be seen…. and smelled.

And why? Because that’s what being violated does to people. It’s the epitome of unfairness and injustice but it’s part of human nature and we can’t just turn it off like it’s an annoying error message.

Maybe there is a safer way for me to vent that vomitous bullshit, namely by writing about it like I have been doing here, but someplace with a much larger audience.

And probably in the form of poetry. Poetry might not be where the big bux lie (yet!) but to my mind, it’s the best form of writing for exploring and expressing deep, dark emotions in their rawest and least complicated form.

The very nature of the sort of freeform blank verse poety I write guarantees the maximum freedom of expression in the fewest words.

That’s kind of the point. There is a reason I write that way. For me, writing is all about expressing something inside me. That’s why I do it. The other reasons, for instance the ones involving money. are secondary.

In that sense, catharsis is my whole reason for being a writer. Writing helps me let some of that suppressed emotion out, and that makes me just that little bit more sane, and so over time, the craziness pressure in my head is reduced and I get a little closer to fine.

So the real question is, am I brave enough to take it to the next level and express myself to a deeper degree and to a wider audience?

It’s a super scary proposition. It’s one thing to express myself here, in my tiny little pond where only a few of my (most awesome) friends will see it.

It’s quite another to throw my soul into some larger forum, where I might actually get questions and comments and shit.

I don’t think I could just let it flow like I do here. Not without taking some kind of position, like say “fuck those who can’t take me raw”, or something similarly defiant.

Of course, that assumes that I have the power to attract attention to myself, and in general, I have lacked this power.

But then again, I know what the problem has been. It’s my urge to hide undermining the power and volume of my message.

And because I know what the problem is…. I can probably eliminate it.

And then, my friends…. watch the fuck out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.