Been really feeling the badness today.

I keep getting these brief but intense attacks of rage, frustration, fear, and self-loathing. My internal surge protectors deal with it in a heartbeat but it’s still harrowing.

And it really feels like my mind is trying to do something. Something important. It’s like my brain is trying to throw up but my vastly overdeveloped emotional suppression circuit keeps shoving everything back down again.

So I am thinking that I should just let whatever it is happen. My mind knows what it needs to do in order to heal, and I should probably get out of its way and let it do what it needs to do, even if that means experiencing a lot of negative emotions.

If you keep suppressing your negative emotions – you know, the ones that aren’t fun to feel – sooner or later, they are going to kill you.

They are going to accumulate in your bloodstream like heavy metal poisoning and things will get worse and worse until one day you have a massive toxic shock reaction and lose your freaking mind.

You end up feeling bad all the time, and all because you won’t endure the bad feelings that you are suppressing. People like me end up total emotional cripples because we picked up the emotional procrastination bug and now don’t even realize just how much of a tab we’ve run up.

And in those rare moments when we do realize it, all we do is suppress those motions even harder because they scare us shitless. It seems so massive that to open the floodgates even a little would totally obliterate us.

So it can seem like a total impasse. A problem that will only get worse if you don’t deal with it, but dealing with it would destroy you.

And it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s not that bad for as long as it takes to go back to ignoring the whole thing and burying yourself in your maladaptive coping mechanism once more and returning to your life of misery and denial.

That’s where I would be if I didn’t have therapy and this blog. Hell, that’s where I was before therapy and this blog. I spent twenty years of my life in that terrible pattern.

So if this sounds like your life, dear reader, please please consider doing whatever it takes to break the pattern. Find some way to let those emotions out. It is the only means of salvation until we invent a way to delete our suppressed emotions from our minds with drugs.

Actually, that’s a pretty interesting science fiction concept. And it is not that far fetched. These suppressed emotions must be stored in our minds and in our bloodstreams. In theory, a drug could destroy them.

But my guess would be that if you did that, the patient would rapidly go completely insane. These emotions are part of our psyches, after all, and not just excess fat we can safely liposuction away. If they simply disappeared, odds are that the patient’s mind would simply unravel, and they would end up in a vegetative state – if they are lucky.

The operation would have to be far more than a simple find and delete. We would need a picture of the entirety of the patient’s psyche. Only then could we consider removing the troublesome emotions with all the skill and care of one of those expert demolition jobs where they building falls in on itself.

Still, it might make for a decent science fiction story. Probably a mystery.

Anyhow, my point was and is that you need to let those emotions out. And that meas feeling them. There is no escaping that. You need to stop suppressing them, which I know can feel like utter madness because you have been ducking, dodging, and fleeing these emotions for so long that it seems normal and natural.

But it isn’t. Normal and natural people feel things. Pain, sorrow, frustration,, anger, and all the rest. They feeling them as they come and even (shock!) act on them in order to maintain their healthy emotional state regardless of what logic and reason dictate.

That’s one of the hardest things for me to come to grips with – the prospect of having to do things that are illogical or unwise by the standards of my icy isolating intellect in order to serve emotional needs that I cannot justify rationally.

The prospect of doing things without knowing why other than knowing it’s what my emotions are telling me to do chills me to the core and makes me feel like I am going insane. How can it be right to do things for purely emotional reasons that I could neither explain nor justify to another human being?

Luckily, I am fundamentally a pragmatist and that means I have to go with whatever works. If my goal is greater mental health, then I have to do what I feel to be whatever it takes to achieve that goal, even if that means occasionally abandoning the very sort of rational reasoning that led me to that conclusion.

It would be so much easier to do all this if I went someplace new so I could remake myself. With nobody around who knew the current me, I could be as emotional and irrational as I needed to be and in the process, I would find out who I really am.

If I tried that in my present life, it would end up hurting and confusing a lot of people I care deeply for and that is just plain not acceptable to me at this time.

Were I a classic individualist hero, I would do whatever is best for me and to hell with the consequences for others.

This is the new me and you will just have to deal with it!

But I can’t be that irresponsible. Not even for self-actualization and my mental health.

So I will continue to do it the hard way, one day at a time, little by little.

Oh well, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.